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Psychiatry Case Files: The "Joker" (2019) character analysis.
Overview:
Vejvoda, Hammond, and The Guardian's Christina Newland interpreted the film as a cautionary tale—society's ignorance of those who are less fortunate will create a person like the Joker.[144][148][162] Stephen Kent, writing for The Washington Examiner, described Arthur Fleck as blending shared aspects of mass shooters, and interpreted its message as a reminder that society is riddled with men like the Joker.[160] Writing in People's World, Chauncey K. Robinson said the film[...] is "ultimately an in-your-face examination of a broken system that creates its own monsters."[163]
[...]British neurocriminologist Adrian Raine commented on Joker's depiction, "For 42 years, I’ve studied the cause of crime and violence. And while watching this film, I thought, Wow, what a revelation this was. I need to buy this movie down the road, make excerpt clips of it to illustrate […] It is a great educational tool about the making of the murderer. That threw me[.] [The film] was a surprisingly accurate prediction of the kind of background and circumstances which, when combined together, make a murderer,” said Raine, who was already considering integrating Joker into a forthcoming course at the University of Pennsylvania.”[169]
The factors:
- “Physical abuse is on the list, as is neglect and malnutrition as a kid,”
- “Being brought up in poverty is a risk factor. He’s adopted, and kids who are adopted are two to three times more likely to become criminal…certainly twice the rate of violence is well established."
- “[T]he link between mental health problems and violence is, of course, controversial." He clarified, “Mentally ill people don’t go around serial-killing people—plotting a homicide or a bank robbery or a burglary. No, they react on impulse emotionally. It’s impulsive and emotion-driven.” And in the film, Raine pointed out, all of Arthur’s violence seemed authentic to him because it was “reactive aggression.”
• After Arthur discovers, for example, that his mother lied to him his entire life—she maintained that she gave birth to him, but he discovers he was adopted (and also abused) as a child—he suffocates her. “She totally misled him,” Raine explained. “The carpet has been ripped out from underneath his feet with this shocking revelation. He’s reacting to this very upsetting, insulting discovery. His whole life has been reversed. His whole identity is gone.”
• On another occasion, in another example of reactive aggression, Arthur stabs a former coworker to death after discovering that the coworker contributed to him being fired from his job. Reactive aggression, said Raine, stipulates that, “when you get beat up, you beat other people up. Fascinatingly, the work we have done on mental health problems and people becoming aggressive, it’s all reactive aggression.”
• “I don’t think the Joker had free will, given his life. He was a walking time bomb waiting to explode—all it took was some significant life stress, beatings up, losing a job. You’ve got nothing left.… The well-documented risk factors—this was [the character’s] destiny. No one is born into that kind of violence.”
#1 diagnosis (lazy): Antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.
#2 diagnosis (Raine's): Schizotypal personality disorder, reactive aggression, depression, etc.
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Originally Posted by The Blade
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