Joker — The Train & the Staircase

by Marco Escalante, tr. Dan Hanrahan

From beginning to end, two spaces define the film “Joker”: the train and the staircase. The train, as the setting for the class war. And the staircase, as the symbol of social striving contorted into the Myth of Sisyphus.

Two decades ago, overcoming poverty in the United States and reaching the coveted middle class was still possible. Today it is a pointless fight and the hill you scale one day, the following day you descend. And for reasons that are ever more obvious: cuts to the budget of the social safety net, the precarity of the labor market, the political class’ abandonment of the working class and the growth of stress to pandemic levels, with its concomitant effect on mental health.

Each time one sees Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker painfully climb the stairs that lead up to his impoverished neighborhood, one feels the crushing weight of personal and social need as if he were carrying it upon his shoulders. This is why his final descent down the staircase, enacted as a dance to the rhythm of a glam anthem, can be seen as his liberation by the only means he sees available: evil. As a modern hero, like Frankenstein’s monster, the Joker’s evil is not metaphysical. It is the product of Reagan, of Giuliani, of the neoliberal New York of the 1980s. The Joker’s explosive liberation reads not as revolution, but as revolt — spontaneous and unconscious. In a certain way, “Joker” depicts the transformation of political violence into an unknowable force — the modern version of medieval Jaquerie rebellion in France, in which political acts against the rich and their classist deity were believed to come from diabolical forces deep within the forests of the Oise Valley.

Our current moment seems to resemble the New York City of “Joker” or 14th century France: a moment not of revolution — but of riots, spontaneous and ephemeral uprisings, of destruction devoid of a common political vision and unity. But within the chaos, something greater must be coalescing… or so it feels to our stubborn hopes and longings.