Our Rating

★★★★★

In October this year, two things happened.

The first. The Australian Productivity Commission released a report showing the “devastating” impact mental illness is having “on people’s lives and the quality/productivity of our society.” The second. Todd Phillips’ movie Joker hit our screens.

According to Professor Patrick McGorry, Executive Director of Orgyen (Australia’s first and only youth mental health think tank), the Commission’s report highlighted the extreme disconnect that exists between our “unprecedented awareness” of mental health issues, and “the poor access and quality of care actually being provided”.

In a similar way, Phillips’ version of the time-honoured “origin story” draws our attention to the truth behind mental illness. Telling the story of those who are forced even further into the shadows.

With Hollywood in recent years seemingly being stuck on repeat, squeezing every last drop out of a story by rewriting and rebooting storylines, origin or creation stories prove a “handy narrative tool for kicking off a franchise”, argues film critic Adam Markovitz. Not only that, but they do so by tapping into audiences’ deep-seated desire for escapism, providing a “bridge between the relatable and aspirational” by showing us instances in which “a normal guy (or girl) goes from being just like us to being somehow better, faster, stronger.”

Into this mix, comes Joker, the latest addition to the evolving Batman mythology, and let me tell you, this is an origin story of an entirely different order. Unlike a traditional superhero movie which charts the rise of our hero and tells the story of how they acquire their superpowers, Joker paints a picture of a bruised and battered man with a neurological condition (a consequence of severe childhood trauma) and one in need of psychiatric help. In a word, a man who needs rescuing.

But there proves to be no intervention for Arthur Fleck, no magical spider bite or scientific-experiment-gone-wrong to lift him out of his plight. Instead, he becomes increasingly helpless and isolated in a world that continues to kick him while he’s down.

In a world already darkened by crime and corruption, those with mental illness and/or disability are shown in Joker to be forced deeper into the shadows, ending up at best the butt of a joke and at worst locked away in an asylum. 

Of course, that is not to say that I approve of the way Phillips (and Hollywood in general) tend to equate mental illness with “madness” or suffering with sensationatinalism, but beneath all of the controversy this film has caused, Joker’s greatest power lies in its ability and willingness to shine a spotlight on the very “disconnect” that Australia’s Productivity Commission report revealed.  Despite countless awareness campaigns and sloganeering, our society still continues to fail those with a mental illness by being unable to provide the necessary support and access to treatment they so desperately need. 

In the recent blog entitled I Struggle with Mental Illness and RUOK Day Makes My Skin Crawl, Patrick Marlbrough argues that “People aren’t equipped to respond…we’re all surface skimmers, and unfortunately this is one of the things where skimming the surface hurts people in a very immediate sense.”

It’s films like Joker then, I argue, that help us expand our conversations and delve just that little bit deeper. That allow us to pull back the mask, and see the darkness that lurks beneath. To realise that not everything is okay, and that more, much more, still needs to be done.