The Joker and why mental illness is not the biggest issue.
First off, give Joaquin Phoenix all the awards. Also, make sure he has a professional counselor and a supportive network of friends watching him for a while.
Joker was disturbing and he killed it.
It created tangible anxiety in the room not because it was unbelievable fiction but because it was too real. As a disclaimer, I believe that a movie is only as good as it moves you. Whether it’s a coming of age film that makes you relive your awkward phases of puberty or a thriller that takes you on a roller coaster or an epic that draws up chivalry and thoughts of grandeur… the best movies move you from where you and teleport you to a different destination. A piece of art that does not move you has either not done its job or you have failed to pay adequate attention. No artist makes something hoping you will easily forget it.
Simply put: comedies should make you laugh, tragedies should make you cry.
(Small print: Legends of the Fall is one of my favorite movies for this very reason)
The best creators understand that the best art merely reflects reality. You can go to Middle Earth or a Galaxy far, far away but the reflections must mirror something close to home, something real you swim in every day. Their job is to teleport you to reality and away from the fantasy you are living in your head. You have to feel as though you are living the story. You have to see yourself in the characters and plot as though someone is reading your mail. I would argue in some ways the best artwork lends you a lens to evaluate the real world. It can make you walk away questioning an existence you live largely unconscious to and the people you share the story with.
Joker has undoubtedly raised the question of the impact of mental illness on our society. It makes us wonder about those around us. Now having seen the movie, I understand now why people were scared someone was going to perform a theatrical mass shooting at its showing. It surely resonates with many who feel marginalized or bullied by those who they perceive largely ignore them. It dives into everything from the importance of family in our development to the role of psychotropic drugs in the mentally unstable. You find yourself simultaneously feeling sympathy, embarrassment, anger, frustration, and guilt. It makes you wonder what people who live with such things must do just to tread water and not drown in their own thoughts and emotions.
It should not surprise us then that so many hurt people, hurt people.
Psychologists, and at times the movie, seem to want to make the conversation mostly about “mental illness.” (Side note: it’s a tragedy we pump so many people full of drugs that often minimally help and lose their effect the longer you use them… and think we are helping people without addressing the real issues).
I digress.
The “psyche” in Psychologist comes from the Greek for ‘soul’ or ‘life.’ This gets into very quickly about what you believe about the nature and composition of man. Is he nothing more than chemical reactions? The Scriptures teach that we are mind, body, and soul. It seems very obvious to the believer that we can have sickness in all three, but maybe not to everyone. Most therapists, it could be argued, are more concerned with the head rather than the heart. We feel like we can explain that better.
The evil we see people commit is because of their upbringing or environment so says Oprah. Yet, we know that Adam and Eve had the perfect environment and still chose sin and evil. We can remedy the environment all we want but it does not change the heart issue. Millionaires with seemingly utopian environments would never commit suicide if it were only a matter of environment.
We try desperately to prove that if we removed the stigma that things would be drastically different. I always wonder what is this stigma about mental illness they refer to? That everyone doesn’t have bad thoughts? Is there is a special class of mentally ill whose destructive patterns of thinking are being systematically oppressed? Is it just unhelpful comments from relatives you already don’t like? How is this the same or different from physical illness? Am I being bigoted towards those with the flu if I point them towards a doctor and refuse to shake hands? If I don’t agree that your mental health is incurable, worth spreading, or even the root cause am I wronging you? Stigmas are not voted on by politicians and are not fabricated in a lab.
They exist because disapproval exists.
Now, we can create stigmas out of love or hate, but it is impossible for us to not create them because we do not approve of everything everyone does or believes. If I love someone, I disapprove of habits that destroy them and thus create a stigma around that activity. It is means to help them get better. It’s going to get weird (stigma) if you drink until you blackout at Thanksgiving. That is me not approving of your action. If I hate a person, I create a stigma for reasons of destroying them and often that is accompanied by other sins I commit against them.
All of this to say, that the Joker isn’t really about merely mental health or its stigmas, but evil. Evil we can understand. Evil we can logically justify. Evil we can feel. Evil like the kind that lives in each one of us. He kills because he enjoys it. Every sin you have ever done has involved pleasure. The narcotic of pride, the gratification of the flesh in sexual sin, and the feeling of superiority when you gossip are all pleasure based.
Evil, like mental illness, is hard to have sympathy towards in others because all of us have had desires we chose not to follow and thoughts we chose not to entertain. This is how Pharisees are created: those that desire evil in their hearts but mask it with their religiosity. Jesus came to change our desires not mask them.
The Joker is not alone. Everyone has a problem with evil. Everyone has a problem with mental illness. All the self-help in the world will not change this, because if we are the ones that are broken then how can we fix ourselves? We have an evil sickness that poisons our minds and minds that feed poison back into our hearts. To say that it is one at the exclusion of the other is grossly narrow-minded and does not get to the heart of the Joker film. The same hard environment that brought me to Christ could have made me a villain. The same mental habits I broke by G-d’s grace could have broken me. The same evil I see people serve in the world could have been my master if not for my rescue from slavery.
All this to say, it’s not just a problem with mental illness in the brain but spiritual illness in the heart. It makes us uncomfortable to admit that we desire evil and darkness. It seems like a safe out to attack the symptoms in our minds rather than the disease in our hearts. I am not saying this about a special class of people, but about all of us. There are none that are righteous, no not one. We are born sinners with a proclivity toward wickedness. This is why we must be born again and rewired from our core. Mental illness is a problem, just not our worst problem.
We must be rescued not from something simple like our environment, but we must be rescued from ourselves.
Do you remember the first time you discovered that it might be possible that your worst enemy is you? If so, do you remember the process you had to go through in order to own that reality, to let it sink in to the depths of who you are? That is messy and that is why we stuff the dirty laundry deep down in a closet hid within us. It’s often only when we see G-d and His reality in art that it sneaks out through the back door of imagination. When we see ourselves as capable of the same evil we see in others. When we realize that we have thought the same things that the Joker has thought and we have felt the same desires for evil that he has felt. The beauty of the Gospel is that it changes us from the inside out. It transforms our hearts to hate sin and love the Savior. It transforms the will to desire righteousness, the mind to think of that, which is noble, and the body to serve the Lord.
In other words, it moves us.