At first glance, Warner Bros’ decision to pitch a Joker origins movie starring somebody other than Jared Leto looks crazier than the clown prince of Gotham at his most psychopathically nutty. Leto was popular in the role in the otherwise wasteful Suicide Squad, and the studio is currently trying to convince audiences to buy into its grand DC Extended Universe of linked comic book movies. Indeed, Variety reports today that Leto is now set to return alongside Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn in an entirely separate adventure for the psychopathic lovers, so why undermine the razzamatazz of the main event with a sideshow starring a different actor in the role?
Fortunately for Warner, studio big cheeses have already identified and located the trump card in this scenario, for The Joker has always been the most unreliable of narrators. In Christopher Nolan’s modern classic The Dark Knight, the supervillain offers up varying stories to explain how he picked up the hideous scars around his mouth. And in the controversial 1988 Alan Moore graphic novel The Killing Joke, the best we have in terms of a detailed back story for the character, he admits the story we’ve been reading may not be true at all: “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.”
If we must have the cinematic equivalent of a comic book one-shot or “what if” entry in the DC big screen canon, The Joker therefore makes the perfect candidate. And who could turn their nose up at the prospect of an early 1980s period piece produced by (and apparently heavily influenced by the work of) one Martin Scorsese? Deadline reports the origins story is being pitched as a “gritty and grounded hard-boiled crime film set in early-80s Gotham City that isn’t meant to feel like a DC movie as much as one of Scorsese’s films from that era, like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or The King Of Comedy”.
How much influence the Oscar-winning director of The Departed really has on the movie remains to be seen, especially as the director attached is not Scorsese at all, but The Hangover’s rather less-garlanded Todd Phillips. But let’s lay that narrative to one side for a moment, because the synergy of a Scorsese-led Joker movie is just too perfect not to comment on.
Batman’s leering nemesis has always felt a little like a Scorsese bad guy. Perhaps it’s the memory of Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s Batman – it’s not too hard to imagine an older, less ostentatious version of The Joker bidding farewell to Gotham and laying low among the mobsters of South Boston for a while, before re-emerging as The Departed’s Frank Costello and embarking on a new reign of terror. In fact, there’s a little of The Joker in many of Scorsese’s most memorable miscreants: the single-minded desperation for the spotlight and love of bombast that supercharges Robert DeNiro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy; the psychopathic self-obsession and doubt that festers within Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle; the penchant for sudden unhinged outbursts of extreme violence that defines Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas.
There is an argument, of course, that the prospect of seeing The Joker reimagined through Scorsese’s lens might end up being no laughing matter. In The Killing Joke, which was recently made into a poorly received animated movie, we see the torrid tale of Depression-era poverty and tragedy that led to an ordinary man being transformed into an evil, cackling sociopath. The Joker, it is revealed, was once a Pupkin-like failed comic who got in too deep with the wrong crowd, and in his desperation for money to support a pregnant wife ended up the patsy in a clumsy, doomed criminal enterprise. There is something of Scorsese’s fascination with troubled 20th century masculinity here, but even Moore could not quite bring himself to make this The Joker’s definitive origin – hence the “multiple choice” line.
Perhaps the comic book icon realised that The Joker’s only real superpower is his sphinx-like menace, the grinning, sociopathic poker-face that means it is utterly impossible to predict his next nefarious move. Does that icy-white mask conceal a lingering humanity? If so it’s one most Batman fans won’t be entirely sure they want to see exposed, for it’s just possible The Joker might not really be The Joker if we see the tears beneath the venomous one-liners.
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