A critical and unsettling moment in the film Joker showed the slowly crazing clown-for-hire Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who had just discovered a connection between his family and Gotham City's most powerful industrialist, reaching through the gates at stately Wayne Manor and using his thumbs to push a smile into young Bruce Wayne's face. It's sad and creepy and for this viewer a foreshadowing of the masked misery that lay ahead for both characters in the universe of Batman lore. But it also struck me as a larger statement from director / writer Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver about the lack of authenticity in human interactions. We smile but aren't happy. Ask "how are you" but don't actually care. We clap, stand, kneel, march, weep as the crowd dictates and attack those who don't do as directed. Fleck / Joker laughed when he was nervous or upset because of faulty wiring and his condition brought on several beat downs because he was off-script and the world could not handle it. The madness that eventually led to societal chaos was not of Joker's making. It and he were products of society's relentless despair. The last scene of a "city on fire" was a metaphor for our current condition of deepening dysphoria.
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