Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard, Diahnne Abbott
Have I Seen It Before?: Yes, but so much of it had disappeared from my memory, like some kind of dream that didn’t mean all that much. If you had asked me what I remembered from the film when Joker (2019) quite aptly put it back in our collective consciousness, I would have only been able to reach for long sequences of Robert De Niro waiting in Jerry Lewis’ reception area.
Did I like it?: I’m thrilled to report that my failure to remember much of the movie owes more to my fleshy, insignificant brain than to any problem with the film itself.
It’s hard to deny this film’s influence on Joker. I mean, look at that poster. The structure is almost totally aped from it. The thing that the new film changes is how it ends. In films today (and TV shows, now that I’m thinking about shows like Breaking Bad, and to a much lesser extent Dexter), people who do bad things need to suffer some kind of comeuppance, even if their descent into depravity is the closest these characters come to self actualization.
Here, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) is just as ruthless as Walter White, just as mentally unmoored as Arthur Fleck, and just as oblivious to the world as Dexter Morgan. And yet, as this film ends, Pupkin is on top. He goes to prison for a flash, but the world loves him. It turns out he’s far funnier than we were led to believe. The world was actually keeping him down, as it turns out.
How the hell am I supposed to feel at the end of the film?
After John Hinckley cited Taxi Driver (1976) as the muse for his violence, it’s sort of a marvel that Scorsese would continue to tell stories about disaffected madmen in the few years immediately after the Reagan assassination attempt. It wasn’t like Salinger started writing the ongoing adventures of Holden Caulfield (or anything) after Catcher in the Rye.