Joker/ Watchmen Script (Patreon)

Note: Hey guys, I knew this has taken so long, but I hope in seeing this script you can see that it's because I put a lot of work into it. <3 It is coming soon and boy is it long. It is subject to change, of course, but rn it's pretty set.

Ahh, Joker and Watchmen two of the most politically charged adaptations of comics that have come out in 2019 ... besides Captain Marvel, but that’s ... yeah we aren’t doing that. 

What is interesting about examining these two stories is the framing of them both in a certain section of the media. How Joker has become this darling in a certain section of film society, and applauded, but super controversial due to it’s subject matter. Watchman has also been very highly praised in television circles, but also super controversial use to it’s subject matter. Both of these stories had to deal with bad faith criticism, accusations of “agendas,” but one got review bombed and the other is an Oscar nominated film. 

So lets break down the elements of each that are interesting, frustration, and whose trauma actual gets to be seen as valid in a superhero story 

JOKER:

The 2019 “psychologyical thriller” directed, produced and written by Todd Phillips (co written by Scott Silver) it tells the story of Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Flick a cliche-riddled mentally ill man who ends up staring a class war and creates clown antifa. But the film is not political account to Philips, mkay.  

Now here’s the thing, Joker is, to me, not a good movie. I think that it is so aesthetically resonate and well acted that it elevates what is basically Scorsese fan fiction + Batman mythology into a hodgepodge of fanboy interpretation of Joker. As a fan of Batman comics, I just feel like giving Joker an origin story is already pretty boring of an idea, even the guy who did the best one finds his iconic work pretty boring and pedantic right now. 

Everything about Arthur Flick’s character is frustrating to watch because the big fear that people had was that Flick would be emblematic of the narrative going on today about white male mentally ill disenfranches men who become school shooters. And that’s exactly what he is. 

Was the whole “this movie is the incel anthem” angle blown way out of proportion? However, just as a movie, it’s a dull version of Scorsese’s best and doesn’t add anything interesting or special to the Batman universe. Heath Ledger’s Joker was more interesting and scary than anything that Phoenix does in this film. Period. 

WATCHMEN:

Watchmen is the HBO “remix” based on the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic from 1987 aka one of the best things to ever be put to page. (Yeah, I’m a basic bitch sometimes whatever). 

It was created for television by Damon Lindelof who was inspired by “The Case for Reparations" written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014, the research he did following reading the piece, and wanting to take the ideas of how Watchmen OG focused on the Cold War anxiety, but use it as a way to discuss current racial tensions, because "to not tell a story about race in the context of a political text in 2019 almost felt borderline irresponsible". 

Watchmen takes place 34 years after the comic series in an alternative future dealing with the aftermath of 11/2 aka the squid alien attack orchestrated Adrian Veidt, Ozymandias, that killed 3 million people. 

The show takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma where a white supremist group inspired by Rorschach’s writing becomes the Seventh Kavalry due to reparations (Redfordations) and cause race based terror. Cops wear masks and our heroine, Detective Angela Abar (Regina King) is “retired” on paper, but secretly is the masked cop “Sister Night.”

Despite some little issues I have with pacing and wishing we saw more of certain characters, I loved this series, I thought it was ambitious, and it tried to bring issues of Black trauma and mental health to screen ... something we don’t see a lot of. 

TRAUMA AND RACE: THE TRIAD OF DISCORSE:

(Trauma/Mental Illness)

          *(Joker)

We find out in the film that when he was a baby his mother allowed him to be abused and it was implied that the abuse also consisted with sexual violence. His mother was mentally ill, lied about his father being Thomas Wayne, etc. 

One of the “tropes” you pick up if you listen to enough true crime is the overbearing mentally ill mother and an absent or abusive father figure, which combines with an already existing mental illness or a trauma based condition.

In Joker, Arthur suffers from pathological laughter, he is unable to control it leading him to laugh in situations that are otherwise serious. 

From the people who I’ve spoken to who like this movie, especially if they are white men one of the things they talk about is how the movie “shines a light on mental illness.” 

I’m going to respectfully disagree and say that what is troubling about the depiction of Flick is that there is a one-to-one correlation between him being mentally ill and becoming the joker. 

According to Mental Heath statistics: 

• One in 25 Americans lived with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression
  

• The vast majority of people with mental health problems are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3%–5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.  
  

All of these things are reality for most mental ill people. Many live in extreme poverty with statistics saying that “the consensus estimate as of 2014 was that, at minimum, 25 percent of the American homeless—140,000 individuals—were seriously mentally ill at any given point in time. Forty-five percent of the homeless—250,000 individuals—had any mental illness. More would be labeled homeless if these were annual counts rather than point-in-time counts. 

Most mentally ill people are not terrorists or killers, yet when looking for inspiration for Joker, Phoenix read a book about political assassinations. He told Variety, “I also wanted the freedom to create something that wasn’t identifiable. This is a fictional character. I didn’t want a psychiatrist to be able to identify the kind of person he was….Let’s step away from that, and we want to have the room to create what we want.” 

It can’t be a film about highlighting mental illness, when it isn’t concerned about doing any exploration on mental illness. It’s interested in the aesthetic of what it means to be mentally ill to craft a dark nihilistic character. 

          *(Watchmen)

Mental health and trauma play a big role in Watchmen, mostly in the form of generational trauma and PTSD. With Angela and her grandfather character, William Reeves, you are exploring the Black American trauma of post-slavery Jim Crow through the Tulsa Riots up to now. The other trauma is the aftermath of 11/2. 3 million people died and countless others were left with PTSD. During a group meeting for anxiety, a young man expresses that his mother was hit with a full psychic blast and despite being born several years later, he feels her pain. 

Wade, the masked cop known as Looking Glass, was in New Jersey during the attack and walked out to sea of dead bodies and lives in perpetual fear of the next big attack. Creating a whole alternative persona out of his fear.

While one is based on fictional events and the other is based on historical facts, both of these stories show how men (and women) who are not able to heal in healthy ways, devolve into worst versions of themselves. William ends up pushing away his family by trying to punch away his rage, Wade has a failed marriage and several failed relationships because he keeps thinking something is going to happen to him.

Both of these men are seen to be in pain, troubled, and deeply imperfect, but Wade tries to help other survivors despite not fulling having a handle on his issues. William is a good man and doesn’t revel in undo violence, and is trying to bring justice to Black people who will not get in anywhere else. 

This is how you have a nuanced and compelling depiction of mental health and trauma. Not by turning into voyeristic pornography, but by allowing it to be based in truth.

*(Race)

Alright, lets get DANGEROUS. 

The three non-white characters in Joker are (1) nameless mean black woman on the bus, (2) his case worker that can’t help him, and (3) Zazie Beetz character who isn’t even named in the film, but is Arthur’s “love interest” in what amounts to a gloried cameo. In this story that crafted around urban trauma and living there is a severe absence of representation of mental illness when it comes to people of color. 

The podcast Still Processing by NYT culture writers Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris,had an episode titled “Psychobros” which talked about the portrayal of masculinity as mental illness in works like Joker and Fight Club. 

Wesley Morris makes the following point: 

Wesley Morris: "Society’s collapse affects him. And part of his illness is that he doesn’t think that anybody can see him and that he doesn’t matter. Which for any non-white person in the audience, you just kind of want to have a little chuckle."

This “chuckle” is because when it comes to how mental health and illness is shown in media it overwhelming is looking at white people despite the fact that “Ethnic/racial minorities often bear a disproportionately high burden of disability resulting from mental disorders.“ And “people from racial/ethnic minority groups are less likely to receive mental health care. 48% of whites received mental health services, compared with 31% of blacks and Hispanics, and 22% of Asians.” According to the American Psychiatric Association. 

Part of what is so un-groundbreaking about Joker is how it really just reinforces a narrative that has already been examined. We rarely see stories about mentally ill women that aren’t just sexual thrillers or revenge films. We rarely see nuance to mentally ill people. We are just now getting to a point where we see Black and Latinx people in therapy. Joker is sadly not breaking the wheel, but we still keep paying more attention to it. 

I’d highly recommend if you haven’t to read “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It highlights the financial realities of what was actively stolen from Black American people, specifically in the South. 

Watchmen opens with the Black Wall Street massacre  a scene, that for many, was the first time they’d ever heard of this event: Black or white. We see a young William Reeves in 1921 being orphaned by the violence and witnessing the deaths of his parents and countless number of people who he probably saw everyday. That trauma was embedded into the very fabric of his personhood. As an adult, in NYS he was nearly lynching by his fellow officers and attempted to reclaim his power by becoming Hooded Justice. 

While the show is specifically dealing with the Black American experience, as an American born Black person, I see this as the history of people who look like me. All of us who are descendants of African heritage have some form of this trauma in us. Weather it be the chattel slavery that took place in South American or the Caribbean, or the colonization and slaughter that took place across the content. I’m sure Native and PI peoples as well can relate to the trauma. The show also touches on that with Vietnam, where even in a future where we “won” that war, the toll that was paid to the Vietnamese people was still very high. 

All of this, is a way to speak truth to the pain that often goes unsaid and ignored. How do you quantify generations of disenfranchisement? How do you explain how your parents passed down love, but also trauma in the way they raised us? How many of us talk about how we won’t be as violent as our parents, but still have been taught to see the benefit of being violent in teaching our children? 

In the book “Wench” by Dolen Perkins-Valdez there is a passage that has always stuck out to me from the first time I read it: “She also took to hitting her children more, especially Nate. She didn’t want a white man to be the first to beat her son. When he received his first beating, he would take it with the knowledge that a beating couldn’t hurt him. He would have to learn to be a slave now.” 

That is blueprint of a lot of black children’s trauma and Watchmen managed to plug into the trauma of an entire group of people, by just acknowledging it and treated it like it matters. 

JOKER/WATCHMEN AS COMIC BOOK ADAPTATIONS:

We live in an era of multiple comic book adaptations, regardless of if we need them or not so it matters what is being adapted and which characters get all of this illustrious attention. So it is important to ask what is gained by having these adaptation come to life? 

Before I get started, I feel like I need to tell everyone out there something really, really important: Alan Moore doesn’t like you. Hold onto that, because it will be important later on. 

In the lifetimes of many we have seen several amazing, good, and one bad versions of the Joker. He is one of the most consistently adapted villains and has mostly been used well. Mostly. So why pick to adapt a literal Oscar winning character? 

Clout. 

When looking up how Phillips and Silver came up with their version of the Joker they “pushed each other every day to come up with something totally insane” and drew upon “Elements from the 1988 graphic novel “Batman: The Killing Joke,” which depicted the Joker as a failed stand-up comedian, and a handful of other sources, Phillips and Silver dispensed with the most common take on the character’s roots — in which the Joker was disfigured after falling into a vat of chemicals — and concocted their own original storyline.” 

“I don’t believe that in the real world if you fell into a vat of acid you would turn white and have a smile and your hair would be green. So you start backwards-engineering these things and it becomes really interesting. ‘How about if he’s a clown at one of these places where you rent out entertainment?’ It was one of the most fun scripts to write because you were only breaking rules.”

Imagine you are working on one of the most prolific comic book characters of all time ... and you only read one book, with a handful of sources. Cool. 

Y’all really just be letting white men make these movies even though they don’t know shit about comics. Wooh Chile. 

Mind you this is not about comic book purism to me, although I do think it’s funny that this man basically don’t care and he got this nerd Oscar, but you know ... go off, but that the intention was just to be crazy and no sense of what you are adding to the mythology of Batman. 

It’s fine to want to do something different, obviously we need that, but also, let’s be real, if you really really wanted to do something fire like this you would have picked a less adapted Batman villain. You could have done Clayface or Riddler or Mad Hatter, but you picked the Joker because “don’t you wanna know how the Joker became the Joker? 

No. No. We don’t. It doesn’t matter. 

And if you knew Batman ... you’d know that it doesn’t matter. 

Throughout the entire mini-series Watchmen attempts to weave a story that is interwoven with the original story, while stating true to the realities of what Watchmen was always trying to do. Watchmen was created to reflect contemporary anxieties and deconstruct the superhero concept. Which is exactly what Watchmen is doing, but it does it by centering Black American issues first. 

Watchmen endeavors to “unearth...that part of our collective history that has been neglected, or omitted, like Tulsa 1921, in the pilot.... These are all parts of African American history, and obviously, by extension, therefore straight-up American history that have been given short shrift.” 

And that is what gets everyone so shook. 

Black stories are denied universality. Black stories are denied the opportunity to just be normal stories and to be accepted as a truth for some people. Yet, we are expected to see the universality in something like Joker. 

What’s more is that it is clear that the writers of Watchmen really love the comic and wanted to work within what it created. Including the giant squid. However, by creating a version of Watchmen that understands the politics of Moore you end up dealing with people who ... don’t realize that 

ALAN MOORE DOESN’T LIKE YOU

Since I feel like people forget this, here is a quick refreshing on some important Watchmen details. The graphic novel is trying to deal with several different moral viewpoints and characters to be a vehicle for those viewpoints and having them be based in the realities and fears of then contemporary America. 

Certain characters were drawn inspiration from mostly Charlotte Comics characters. Daniel Drelberg/Night Owl II is Blue Beetle, The Comedian is Peacemaker with a smidge of white Nick Fury, Doctor Manhattan was Captain Atom, Silk Spectre II was Black Canary, Ozymandias was Thurderbolt and ya boy, Rorschach was based on Steve Ditko’s “Mr. A” with a touch of The Question as well. 

Let’s take a small Ditko detour shall we: 

Ditko is a super important person in, comics and helped created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. He was an Ayn Rand fan and an objectivist an created Mr. A to reflect that political ideology. He is the architect of a lot of the characters that Moore would use In Watchmen. 

Alan Moore, in comparison is an occultist, magician, anarchist. Which means 

ALAN MOORE DOESN’T LIKE YOU

To use his own words: 

CBA: When you read some of Ditko's diatribes in "The Question" and in some issues of Blue Beetle, did you read it with bemusement or disgust?

Alan: Well...

CBA: A mix of both?

Alan: Well, no. I can look at Salvador Dali's work and marvel at it, despite the fact that I believe that Dali was probably a completely disgusting human being [laughter] and borderline fascist, but that doesn't detract from the genius of his artwork. With Steve Ditko, I at least felt that though Steve Ditko's political agenda was very different to mine, Steve Ditko had a political agenda, and that in some ways set him above most of his contemporaries. During the '60s, I learned pretty quickly about the sources of Steve Ditko's ideas, and I realized very early on that he was very fond of the writing of Ayn Rand.

CBA: Did you explore her philosophy?

Alan: I had to look at The Fountainhead. I have to say I found Ayn Rand's philosophy laughable. It was a "white supremacist dreams of the master race," burnt in an early-20th century form. Her ideas didn't really appeal to me, but they seemed to be the kind of ideas that people would espouse, people who might secretly believe themselves to be part of the elite, and not part of the excluded majority. I would basically disagree with all of Ditko's ideas, but he has to be given credit for expressing these political ideas. […] So I've got respect for Ditko.

But you know who does also like Ayn Rand: Zack Snyder. Now you understand that fucking movie. 

Does this mean that you can’t like Rorschach or that Rorschach isn’t a good character? No. Just because Moore is on a differently political sphere doesn’t mean that he didn’t make Rorschach a dynamic fleshed out character. He was writing a book about several different flawed moral ideologies, so there is no true “right” one. That’s the point. 

Plus, Ditko was still an important influence to Moore, he’s not doing his deconstruction out of malice, but because both are political writers their ability to communicate their ideas through the medium of comics is what makes them both so prolific and important, regardless of what side you are on. 

What’s most important is that this Watchmen understands Moore today, more so than it holds on to Moore in the 80s. Alan Moore has expressed dismay that "[t]he gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen [...] became a genre" 

Which is why the optimistic ending of Watchmen is the best tribute to the original comic and the original creator, it understands that Watchmen is not just a deconstruction, it is a celebration of what superheroes can be. And you have to love comics to be able to create content like that. 

IS THIS FOR YOU?:

One of the things that is frustrating as we are trying to bring more diverse people into professional criticism is that when marginalized people attempt to highlight how something doesn’t move the needle the phrase “this isn’t for you” comes up. 

This concept of certain media not being “for you” comes from, at least in the modern era, Black Women responded to non-Black, most white, women attempting to injecting the criticism of Black art, while not understand the intricate realities of Black art. Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” and Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” being the two I remember being focal parts of this discussions. 

This phrase doesn’t mean “Black women universally love this thing and it’s above critic” it means “sometimes you are not equip as a reviewer to understand the cultural nuances of something like this because ... you aren’t familiar.” 

I saw someone write this on my review of Joker someone suggested that maybe Joker isn’t for me and made a note that review Chris Stuckman liked the film. 

First of all, there is nothing in joker that is “above” my cultural knowledge. I have mental illness, most of my life was untreated which led to several suicide attempts, I also have nothing but negative thoughts all the time aka severe anxiety. I grew up in a working-class environment in “Gotham” aka New York City. I know what it’s like to see the failures of the mental health system ravage the people you love. 

Also, I read comics. I know Joker. 

The Chris Stuckman comparison was extra funny because while Chris Stuckmann is a couple years older than me and much more successful than I am: we are both nerds, we are both you tubers, we both love those bad Lara Croft movies, we both have anime tattoos, and, most importantly, we are both Aries. But he’s a straight (?) white man from Ohio and I’m a black queer woman from Brooklyn. We intersect on enough issues that where we deviate is more often a matter of taste and preference. He is not more inclined to like Joker because he is white and I’m not included to hate it because I’m Black. 

Black people love the joker, he’s like the other Goku. 

I just think the movie is bad, and the people behind it couldn’t answer basic topical questions about it. Period. 

I don’t have an agenda. I just have thoughts. 

Also, who follows movie reviewers they agree with 100% of the time? I certainly don’t. 

IN CONCLUSION:

When it comes down to it, why I love Watchmen and find Joker exhausting actually doesn’t have much to do with race. It mostly has to do with the fact that Joker is so painfully stuck in the past and Watchmen feels like the future. 

Phillips said that Joker is not political and to me, that just feels like a bunch of BS and a fear of being truly divisive. Watchmen isn’t for everyone because it actually is weird and different and trying to tell a different story. Watchmen is taking risks. 

Joker as a concept and a story, as much as it wants to be “insane” and “crazy” is fundamentally safe. It adds no nuance to the thriller genre, it does’t add anything of value to Batman, imo, and it is just the perfect combination of political negligent and boring. 

Watchmen isn’t perfect, but it was ambitious and that makes it the better adaptation by far.