Have you ever watched a movie that felt like it was so specific to your tastes and lived experiences, that you start growing concerned that your thoughts and emotions were harvested to make the film? Though some people will watch Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker and feel themselves wondering what the fuck they’re watching, other people — trans people, Batman supernerds, different kinds of trans people, comedy nerds, a secret third type of trans people, irony-poisoned millennials who live online and can recognize a Mr. Boop joke — will wonder if they were captured like a baby sandworm and drained of their essence by a Bene Gesserit Sister in Dune: Part 2.
Those of us who are receptive to the uniquely batshit energy and style of The People’s Joker are lucky to even get to see the film. Though it’s a clear parody of all of the characters depicted, when the film made its debut at TIFF back in 2022, its use of the broad spectrum of Batman characters — Joker, Harley Quinn, Penguin, Ra’s al Ghul, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Catwoman, and Jason Todd all play solid roles in the film — caught the notice of Warner Bros. Nothing came of it, of course; the film is pretty firmly protected as a transformative work. Thankfully, though, Drew made good use of the time afforded to her by the minor fear brought on by the wrath of the Warner siblings to tighten and refine the film and turn it into the magnum opus it is. Now, at long last, it’s getting the theatrical release it richly deserves.
Why make a coming-of-age quasi-autobiography through the lens of Joker? “I very consciously did not want to make something that was like, ‘I’m just like every woman — this is my story,’” Drew told The Daily Beast. “No. I identify my transness with the Joker because I literally live in a society that fucking villainizes me and people that look like me. So why wouldn’t I make my art about that?” And so, The People’s Joker exudes a heady blend of queerness influenced by John Waters and Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the edgelord-iest corners of the internet from its every greasepainted pore. It’s a singular experience that feels destined to be hated by about as many people as those who see it and have their lives completely changed by it. Really, this is the movie your hyper-conservative uncle imagines the queer, Leftist Hollywood elite would make, only it’s actually fucking awesome.
Those changed by it will be those who see themselves in the story Drew is telling about herself, through the lens of Joker. We watch as she spends adolescence suppressing her transness solely to make her narcissistic mother (Lynn Downey of Daisy Jones & the Six happy, only to dive headlong into the experience of exploring her gender once given the safety and freedom to do so. In one scene, recounting a night spent with her first boyfriend, fellow alt-comic Mr. J (played by Kane Distler doing a transmasc version of Suicide Squad Joker), she asks, “Were you the first person who ever really saw me?” The People’s Joker doesn’t pull its punches in its depiction of Mr. J as an abusive manipulator, but it also doesn’t shy away from the positive impact of the relationship. Much about this film is so cartoonish and big, but the nuance and subtlety Drew put into depicting the relationship between Joker and Mr. J is where the film truly shows its stripes.
There’s more to The People’s Joker than its transness, even though the film is probably the most trans movie that’s been made since The Matrix Resurrections. Where the film sets itself apart is in its feverish multimedia approach to filmmaking. Trying to describe the aesthetic of The People’s Joker feels impossible; it would be like if Katie Mitchell from The Mitchells vs. the Machines was a misunderstood trans girl and used the money from selling the rights to Dog Cop to make something real for a change. Shot entirely on a green screen and developed by hundreds of largely queer/trans artists, this film is a kaleidoscope of art styles, to the point where it makes Across the Spider-Verse look like an xkcd comic. Lovingly rendered bad CGI! Traditional animation of many different styles! Action figures! Papercraft! And so much drag! At first, the mishmash of everything all at once can be a little off-putting, in the same way any movie that makes you feel like you’re on heavy hallucinogens can be a little off-putting. If you have the wherewithal to understand it, you’ll begin to wish for another eight hours of the movie.
Above all other mediums elevated by The People’s Joker, none is given more credit than the art of comedy. For starters, the film’s cast is an embarrassment of comedy riches, giving us everything from Scott Auckerman as Mr. Freeze and Bob Odenkirk as Bob the Goon to Tim Heidecker as Perry White and David Liebe Hart as R’as Al Ghul. Joker spends her adolescence in Smallville, Kansas watching the clown-packed Saturday Night Live rip-off UCB Live (that’s the United Clown Bureau, by the way), and has two revelations: that she wants to do stand-up comedy, and that she was born in the wrong body. After years of antidepressants, she does what many comics from the Midwest do: moves to Gotham, starts an anti-comedy troupe, develops a substance abuse habit and starts dating a damaged asshole who teaches her the ins and outs of abusive relationships.
Here, the real and fictional worlds of comedy intersect: UCB Live isn’t an Upright Citizens Brigade production, but the showrunner is Lorne Michaels (represented by a mostly formless CGI figure voiced by Maria Bamford — yes, really). Comedy is illegal and most comedians take the form of clowns, but references to actual comedians abound. Even aside from all that, this film is just funny, constantly funny. Beyond the queerness, the jokes about pop-Marxism and being into Woody Allen “before all the daughter-schtupping,” there’s a radical love of the sacred art of making people laugh that comes through in every scene.
In the way Brian Eno once said The Velvet Underground & Nico sold approximately 30,000 copies in its first five years, but “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band,” there’s a chance that not enough people will see The People’s Joker, but many who did will start HRT and/or stand-up comedy. This is the cinematic equivalent of a secret handshake, and the epitome of a film that you love so much, you don’t want to tell just anybody else to watch it because you want to jealously guard it like Smaug in the Lonely Mountains. Movies this daring in their vision don’t come along very often, and the fact that it was made by a first-time director working with a shoestring budget during the pandemic makes it easy to imagine Vera Drew becoming one of the most beloved creators of a generation. She may not be an actual comic book villain, but with a bigger budget and studio backing, she could take over the world.
Photo courtesy of Altered Innocence
The post The People’s Joker appeared first on Spectrum Culture.