On what makes Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) formally interesting regardless of whether it's good.

Joker is a deliberately provocative film that uses the visual language of 1970s New Hollywood — Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy in particular — to tell a story that the source material (a comic book villain) would not conventionally support.

The film is being made in dialogue with films it is not. It invites you to compare Arthur Fleck to Travis Bickle and finds the comparison both valid and insufficient: where Travis was opaque in a way that left his psychology available for projection, Arthur is explicit in a way that forecloses projection.

The formal argument of the film — whether it makes this argument intentionally or accidentally is a separate question — is about the aesthetics of failure: how the visual language of great films about male isolation and violence can be borrowed to give weight to a story that may not deserve that weight.

The response to the film, which was enormously polarizing, is itself formally interesting: it revealed that audiences are not sure what to do with a film that is technically accomplished, emotionally extreme, and ideologically underdetermined.