If Andy Warhol had been raised on Minecraft, he might have made something like The People’s Joker. A tech-art treatise inspired by an enduring pop myth, then filtered through an anti-corporate queer lens, this is a movie to rally around and reckon with.
Early on in the film, the main character—a trans woman who finds her identity as “Joker the Harlequin” in a dystopian Gotham City—describes her life as a “blurry, cracked mosaic” of gender revelations. That’s also the perfect way to characterize the aesthetics of the movie. The People’s Joker looks and feels like a warehouse’s worth of art installations—all influenced by Batman mythology and queer identity—that have been piled on top of each other, then jolted with an electric current. Although co-written, directed, and edited by star Vera Drew, this is less the auteurist grand gesture those credits would suggest and more of an artistically inclusive free-for-all, made from many hands. Along with co-writer Bri LeRose, the film’s credits list more than 100 creative contributors, whose unique skills formed everything from the character designs to the background imagery to the costumes.
Not that The People’s Joker is a frivolous hodgepodge. Communally made but deeply personal, with a coherent narrative drive and committed vision, the movie employs green-screen gimmickry, animation of all kinds, and lickety-split editing to repurpose a story we’ve been told a million times into a batty bildungsroman. How so? As a child, after telling her mother that she feels as if she was born in the wrong body, Joker is prescribed Smylex, a green gas that forces her face into a garish grin. The hallucinatory, partly animated depiction of this from the young Joker’s perspective feels like experiencing A Clockwork Orange’s infamous deprogramming screening from behind Alex’s eyelids.
Eventually free of her family and pursuing a career in comedy in Gotham City (while still on Smylex), Joker finds herself in a vaguely familiar hellscape. Drew’s background is as an editor and director for alt-comedy projects like Tim Heidecker’s On Cinema at the Cinema and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America?, so the world-building here is both bizarre and biting, with references to “President Lex Luthor,” clips from a wildly popular television series called Suicide Cop, and the omnipresence of Batman’s drones, which buzz over the city like fascist wasps. Then there are hilarious little bits of dialogue like this: “I know drag was also forced underground back after RuPaul’s ranch exploded and killed 1,000 people, but. . .”
If this sounds like a copyright nightmare, you’re right. Despite direct references to Warner Bros.’ material of all kinds, Drew has managed to stave off corporate censorship by claiming fair use. And that’s as it should be. If we’re going to have a Batman or Joker movie shoved down our throats every year or so (and, for the record, I’ve liked many of those—including 2019’s Joker, which is parodied aplenty here), then it’s only right that we should also get one that came from the ground up. This is what Vera Drew has given us. The People’s Joker feels less like the work of someone who wants to watch the Batman burn and more like a refashioning of a modern myth for personal purposes. It’s the ultimate kill-the-author gesture, one that ironically gives birth to another author. No, even better: a community of authors, working together to create something wholly new and true.
(4/25/2024)
