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darkshadow90 · 4 years

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A Rant about people judging others for finding Penny’s death upsetting.

Hey, guys. This post is gonna be a little different than the ones I’ve made in the past. This one is more of a rant. I really need to get something off my chest. It’s bothered me, and it bothers me even more that people are okay with what Arthur did, and then judge people like me who find it upsetting. Even if it has nothing to do with the context of the situation. Before I get into it, I want to clarify that this has nothing to do with the Joker fandom, nor is it directed toward anyone specifically. Y’all are cool, and I think you’ll understand where I’m coming from. This is more about the reactions I’ve read about and seen from random people in general. Also there will be swears in this post, so just a heads up.

Okay, so, obviously there are a lot of unsettling scenes in Joker. One of them that really got me was the scene when Arthur kills Penny. It still bothers me, but I can handle it better than I did the first time I saw it. Just so you all know, I’m a really sensitive person. I don’t like scenes in movies that involve violence against animals, or scenes where defenseless people are hurt or killed. If movies have scenes like that, I skip them. I don’t care about the context involved. That shit fucks me up. Unfortunately, because it was in the theater, I couldn’t skip it. Also, I didn’t think Arthur was gonna kill Penny. I thought he was gonna confront her about everything. But then the movie was like “LOL, no.” So here’s what happened the first time I saw it.

I’m sitting there, processing everything Arthur just found out. I was so heartbroken for him. I wanted to hug him so badly. The scene where he’s in Penny’s hospital room comes up. I’m thinking “This must be where Arthur confronts her about everything he found out. What will she say to him when he asks her about the abuse, and the fact that he was adopted?” Well, none of that happened. Arthur doesn’t say a word to Penny about the abuse he suffered. He never mentions she adopted him, that Thomas Wayne isn’t his father. He’s just angry at her. He says he always hated the last name “Fleck” that his laugh was never a condition, it was the real him. When he gets up and says, “You know what’s funny? You wanna know what really makes me laugh?” I knew some bad shit was about to happen. Then he snatches the pillow out from under her neck. I was upset. As dumb as it sounds, I was internally hoping Arthur wouldn’t do it. And then he proceeds to smother her, I was silently pleading for him to stop. He pins her down under his weight brutally smothering her with a pillow without displaying emotion. Penny is literally defenseless against him. He has no problem killing a defenseless person. The whole scene upset me. It was so hard to watch. I was so upset Arthur did that.

Now, I’m not making excuses for Penny. I know Arthur was abused. Yes, I know Penny wasn’t the best mother ever. But here’s the thing. We don’t know what actually happened. There are two headlines in the news papers. One says “House of Horrors for Mother and Son.” The other says, “Mother Allowed Her Son’s Abuse.” I believe both Arthur and Penny were abused by her boyfriend. Maybe the reason Penny said she never heard him crying and Arthur always seemed like such a happy little boy really was because Penny never saw him sad. Maybe her boyfriend threatened Arthur with worse abuse if he cried in front of Penny. Maybe Penny tried to get help for both of them, but was dismissed because of her mental health issues, which makes me wonder. I get things were different in those times, but how was a mentally ill woman able to adopt a child in the first place? Adoption wasn’t easy for many people back then, and I would think it would be especially difficult for someone with mental health issues to adopt a child. I don’t know if Penny completely allowed the abuse to happen or not. The truth could be somewhere in the middle. Now, about Penny Lying to Arthur about her relationship with Thomas Wayne. I don’t think she was intentionally lying to Arthur. She was delusional. She thinks her relationship with Thomas Wayne was real. She thinks she was telling the truth. I don’t get the impression she was deliberately lying or trying to trick Arthur into believing he’s Thomas Wayne’s son. I think she genuinely believes it’s the truth. And there are some things that could suggest the relationship between her and Thomas Wayne was real. Thomas Wayne isn’t exactly the nicest guy. We know that for sure. We also know he’s a very wealthy man. It’s very possible that he covered up the relationship with Penny, and had her locked up in Arkham. Due to his wealth, he has been a highly prolific figure in Gotham, probably even before he ran for Mayor. He probably always had plans to run for Mayor and he knew if word got out that he was in a relationship and had a son with an employee, it would be a scandal, so he probably used connections he had in Arkham to help him cover it up. After all, who would believe a woman with a history of mental illness? Also, it’s likely Thomas did get Penny’s letters, and he ignored Penny’s requests for help. That could explain why she never heard from him. I looked at the handwriting on the back of the picture of her and a man, probably Thomas together. It said, “Love your smile. T.W.” I’m not entirely sure, but the handwriting on the back of the picture looked different from the handwriting in Penny’s letter to Thomas. I don’t think it was Penny’s handwriting. She could’ve written that, but I don’t think so. I doubt Penny would have different handwriting for just one picture. I also don’t think she would write that to herself. It’s definitely suspicious.

So why did I go on a tangent about Penny, you may ask? Because I want to look at things in a different perspective. There are usually multiple sides to a story. The person I was with told me I shouldn’t be upset about what Arthur did, that Penny is no angel. And yeah, I agree. Penny wasn’t mother of the year. But I don’t know if I believe everything Arthur/Joker is showing us without question. This is the fucking Joker. We will only see what he wants us to see, even if it turns out parts of the story are twisted around. I wasn’t the only one who found the scene upsetting. I saw a comment thread of people talking about how the scene made them cry. Other people left the theater because it was too much for them. And the replies they got pissed me off. Things like “Lol what a bunch of babies. Why are they upset?” “She deserved it. She lied to him and let him be abused. I was happy when he killed her.” People could’ve been trolling. I don’t care. It’s more about the fact that there are people out there who were trying to justify Arthur killing the woman who raised him, and even worse someone who was defenseless against him. It’s not entirely clear what really happened. Also, while I may understand why Arthur killed Penny, and I may have both empathy and sympathy for him, it doesn’t make it right. I’m not talking about people who sympathize with Arthur and can understand his actions. We all feel bad for Arthur, what he’s been through, how he’s been treated. We just want good things for him. I’m talking about the people who are totally fine with him killing Penny, and are dicks to the people who find it upsetting and are like “Why are you upset? He was abused so it’s fine.” Those people exist. It’s scary as fuck. Thankfully, I haven’t seen any of them in the Joker fam.

I’ll go ahead and talk about what bothers me so much about this scene. Regardless of the context, of wether or not Penny allowed Arthur to be abused or not, of wether her relationship with Thomas Wayne was real or not, Arthur ruthlessly smothers a defenseless person to death. Arthur loved Penny up until that point. He looked after her, did everything to make sure she was cared for. But then, after finding out some heartbreaking information about her, and her past, and things about his past, he was able to just cut any of those feelings he had for her entirely? I get that he would be angry, but as I said earlier he never asks her about anything he found out. He never says, “Hey, Penny/Mom. I went by Arkham and found out you adopted me. I’m not really Thomas Wayne’s son. I also found out you had an abusive boyfriend and I was horribly abused by him. How could you let that happen? Why did you lie to me about everything?” I know that’s not the best thing to say when confronting someone about delicate information, but he still could’ve mentioned those things to her. It’s like Arthur assumes Penny knows why he’s upset. But she doesn’t. She just sees that he came to visit her one day and is upset. She has no idea. And as he’s smothering her, she’s probably terrified and confused. Arthur was emotionless the whole time. He killed the woman who raised him like it was no big deal. Doesn’t it seem weird that he wasn’t reacting at all? He wasn’t crying no guilt, nothing. And that, in spite of how interesting I find Arthur, in spite of the sympathy I have for him, and just want him to find love and be happy is one of the things that scares the shit out of me about him the most. It scares me about Joker even more. This touches a bit on my post about what a relationship with them would actually be like, and I want to reiterate the potential danger a girl could find herself in.

No one is safe from Arthur or Joker. I believe he would be capable of loving someone, and wouldn’t intentionally hurt them. The scary thing to consider is, if Arthur thinks the girl he’s with wronged him in any way, her life would be in danger. If he can kill the woman who raised him like it’s no big deal, if he can kill his own mother, he can do the same to her. There might be a slim chance she’d be okay. If she can show that he’s misinterpreted a situation, he’ll see that he overreacted and feel terrible about it. And if she found out about him killing people he would try to console her and try to make her understand why he did it. He would promise he would never hurt her. He might not be able to keep that promise. With Joker, it would be even worse. If he thinks she wronged him, he wouldn’t give her a chance to explain everything. He would be convinced what she did happened and that would be it. If Joker killed someone in front of her, he wouldn’t give a shit about how she felt about it. He would ask her why she’s upset about it and then tell her they deserved it. God help her if Joker thinks she wronged him. Talk about waking up every morning constantly afraid Joker will lose his shit. She would be walking on eggshells every day. So yeah, just wanted to touch on that point real quick.

To wrap things up, I’ve been holding my feelings about Penny’s death and the people who justify what Arthur did back for awhile. Again, this isn’t directed to anyone specifically. Just random people who got a kick out of it and made excuses for why it was okay, and then are assholes to people who found it upsetting. I’ve seen a GIF online of a guy that has a shocked expression on his face, then as it zooms out he’s clapping. There are captions on it that say, “My reaction when Arthur kills *insert people here*” There was one for each person he killed, including Penny. It was probably just a joke and that’s fine. But I’m also sure there are people who got a kick out of watching that scene. And for those people, I sincerely hope they seek professional help. Just a quick side note: I still love the movie. Penny’s death scene doesn’t make me love it any less. I’m actually very glad I was able get through rest of the movie the first time I saw it lol What can I say maybe I am a weak person. Okay, rant over. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

#arthur fleck #joker fandom #joker movie #joaquin phoenix joker #joker 2019

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britesparc · 5 years

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Weekend Top Ten #388

Top Ten Things Tim Burton’s Batman Films Did Right

Thirty years ago, give or take, the first Tim Burton Batman movie was released in cinemas (according to Google, its UK release date was 11th August 1989). Everyone knows the story; it was a phenomenon, a marketing juggernaut, a hit probably beyond what anyone was reasonably expecting. I was too young to understand or appreciate what was going on, but for twenty years or more the image of Batman in the public consciousness was intertwined with Adam West and pop-art frivolity. Suddenly superheroes were “dark” and “grown-up”; suddenly we had multi-million-dollar-grossing properties, franchises, and studios rummaging through their back catalogues of acquired IPs to land the next four-quadrant hit. Throughout the rest of the nineties we got a slew of pulp comic adaptations – The Spirit, The Phantom, Dick Tracy – before the tangled web of Marvel licenses became slightly easier to unpick, and we segued into the millennium on the backs of Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Flash-forward to a super-successful Batman reboot, then we hit the MCU with Iron Man, and we all know where that goes. And it all began with Batman!

Except, of course, that’s not quite the whole story. Studios were trying to adapt superheroes and comic books for a number of years, not least because Richard Donner’s Superman had been such a huge hit a decade before Batman. And the Batman films themselves began to deteriorate in quality pretty rapidly. Plus, when viewed from the distance of a couple of decades or more, the supposed dark, gritty, adult storytelling in Burton’s films quickly evaporates. They’re just as camp, silly, and nonsensical as the 1960s show, they’re just visually darker and with more dry ice. Characters strut around in PVC bodysuits; the plots make little to no sense; characterisation is secondary to archetype; and Batman himself is quite divorced from his comic incarnation, killing enemies often capriciously and being much less of a martial artist or detective than he appeared on the page (in fact, Adam West’s Batman does a lot more old-school deducing than any of the cinematic Batmen).

I think a lot of people of my generation, who grew up with Adam West, went through a period of disowning the series because it was light, bright, campy and, essentially, for children; then we grow up and appreciate it all the more for being those things, and also for being a pure and delightful distillation of one aspect of the comics (seriously, there’s nothing in the series that’s not plausibly from a 1950s Batman comic). And I think the same is true of Burton’s films. for all their importance in terms of “legitimising” superhero movies, they have come in for a lot of legitimate criticism, and in the aftermath of Christopher Nolan’s superlative trilogy they began to look very old-fashioned and a much poorer representation of the character. But then, again, we all grow up a little bit and can look back on them as a version of Batman that’s just as valid; they don’t have to be perfect, they don’t have to be definitive, but we can enjoy them for what they are: macabre delights, camp gothic comedies, delightfully stylised adventure stories. They might lack the visual pizazz of a Nolan fight scene or, well, anything in any MCU movie, but they’re very much of a type, even if that type was aped, imitated, and parodied for a full decade following Batman’s release. There’s much to love about Burton’s two bites of the Bat-cherry, and here – at last – I will list my ten favourite aspects of the films (that’s both films, Batman and Batman Returns).

Tim Burton’s Batman isn’t quite my Batman (but, for the record, neither is Christopher Nolan’s), but whatever other criticisms I may have of the films, here are ten things that Burton and his collaborators got absolutely right.

Great Design: seriously, from an aesthetic point of view, they’re gorgeous. The beautiful Anton Furst Gotham, all gothic towers and industrial pipework, is a thing of beauty, and in terms of live-action the design of all of Batman’s vehicles and gadgets has never been bettered. It gives Batman, and his world, a gorgeously distinctive style all its own.

Wonderful Toys: it’s not just the design of the Batmobile and Batwing that impresses (big, bulbous round bits, sweeping curves, spiky wings); its how they’re used. Burton really revels in the gadgets, making Batman a serious tech-head with all manner of grappling hooks, hidden bombs, and secret doo-dahs to give him an upper hand in a fight. It makes up for the wooden combat (a ninja Michael Keaton is not), suggesting this Batman is a smarter fighter than a physical one. Plus all those gadgets could get turned into literal wonderful toys. Ker-ching.

He is the Night: Adam West’s Batman ran around during the day, in light grey spandex with a bright blue cape. Michael Keaton’s Batman only ever came out at night, dressed entirely in thick black body armour, and usually managed to be enveloped in smoke. From his first appearance, beating up two muggers on a Gotham rooftop, he is a threatening, scary, sinister presence. It totally sold the idea of Batman as part-urban legend, part-monster. Burton is fascinated with freaks, and in making his Batman freaky, he made him iconic.

You Wanna Get Nuts?: added to this was Michael Keaton’s performance as Bruce Wayne. Controversial casting due to his comedy background and, frankly, lack of an intimidating physique, he nevertheless utterly convinced. Grimly robotic as Batman, he presented a charming but secretive Bruce Wayne, one who was kind and heartfelt in private, but also serious, determined, and very, very smart. But he also excellently portrayed a dark anger beneath the surface, a mania that Bruce clearly had under control, but which he used to fuel his campaign, and which he allowed out in the divisive but (in my opinion) utterly brilliant “Let’s get nuts!” scene. To this date, the definitive screen Bruce Wayne.

Dance with the Devil: The counterpoint to this was Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Cashing a phenomenal cheque for his troubles, he nevertheless delivered; his Joker is wild, over-the-top, cartoonish but also terrifying. In my late teens I was turned off by the performance, feeling it a pantomime and not reflective of the quiet menace and casual cruelty of, say, Mark Hamill’s Joker; but now I see the majesty of it. You need someone this big to be a believable threat to Batman. No wonder that, with Joker dead, they essentially had to have three villains to replace him in the sequel.

Family: Bruce’s relationship with Alfred is one of the cornerstones of the comic, but really only existed in that capacity since the mid-80s and Year One (which established Alfred as having raised Bruce following his parents’ deaths). So in many ways the very close familial relationship in Batman is a watershed, and certainly the first time many people would have seen that depicted. Michael Gough’s Alfred is benign, charming, very witty, and utterly capable as a co-conspirator. One of the few people to stick around through the Schumacher years, he maintained stability even when everything else was going (rubber) tits up.

Meow: I’ve mostly focussed on Batman here, but by jeebies Batman Returns has a lot going for it too. Max Shreck, the Penguin, “mistletoe is deadly if you eat it”… but pride of place goes to Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. An utterly bonkers origin but a perfectly pitched character, she was a credible threat, a believable love interest, and an anti-hero worth rooting for, in a tour-de-force performance. Also came along at just the right time for me to experience puberty. If you’re interested. Plus – and this can’t be overstated – she put a live bird into her mouth. For real. I mean, Christ.

Believably Unreal: I used to criticise Batman for being unrealistic, just as campy in its own way as the ‘60s show. But that’s missing the point. It’s a stylised world, clearly not our own thanks to the Furst-stylings. And Burton uses that to his advantage. The gothic stylings help sell the idea of a retro-futuristic rocket-car barrelling through city streets; the mishmash of 80s technology and 40s aesthetics gives us carte blanche for a zoot-suited Joker and his tracksuited henchmen to tear up a museum to a Prince soundtrack. It’s a world where Max Shreck, looking like Christopher Walken was electrocuted in a flour factory, can believably run a campaign to get Penguin elected mayor, even after he nearly bites someone’s nose off. It’s crazy but it works.

Believably Corrupt: despite the craziness and unreality, the first Batman at least does have a strong dose of realism running through it. The gangsters may be straight out of the 40s but they’ve adopted the gritty grimness of the intervening decades, with slobby cop Eckhart representing corrupt law enforcement. Basically, despite the surrealism on display, the sense of Gotham as a criminal cesspool is very well realised, and extends to such a high level that the only realistic way to combat any of it is for a sad rich man to dress up as Dracula and drive a rocket-car at a clown.

The Score: I’ve saved this for last because, despite everything, Danny Elfman’s Batman theme is clearly the greatest and strongest legacy of the Burton era. Don’t come at me with your “dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner-Batman” nonsense. Elfman’s Batman score is sublime. Like John Williams’ Superman theme, it’s iconic, it’s distinctive, and as far as I’m concerned it’s what the character should sound like. I have absolutely no time for directors who think you should ever make a Batman film with different music. It’s as intrinsically linked with the character as the Star Wars theme is with, well, Star Wars. It’s perfect and beautiful and the love-love-love the fact that they stuck it in the Animated Series too.

Whelp, there we are. The ten best things about Burton’s two Batman movies. I barely spoke about the subsequent films because, well, they’re both crap. No, seriously, they’re bad films. Even Batman Forever. Don’t start.

#top ten #batman #1989 #tim burton #Michael Keaton #batman returns #comics #movies

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