JOKER

Stefan Bolea meditates on madness at the movies.

- Stefan Bolea

Most of us possess a sense of reality, but what if our senses deceive us? Would I still know what was real if, for instance, I had a microscopic brain tumor that made me hallucinate that the people around me were devils, or that a beautiful sunny day was a dark nightmare? What if I then felt the urge to start shooting people?

Joker, a psychological thriller directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, is a meditation on this disassociative sort of madness. It emphasizes the philosophical problem of the ‘liquid’ divide between perception and reality: if my perception is biased, then my reality transforms as well. A second, connected, problem of madness, is the dissolution of the distinction between inside and outside. I can project my inner being onto the world, changing its color and tone. If I can’t tell that I’m doing this then I’ll live in a labyrinthine inferno, a prison of my own projections. No one can reach out to somebody with this kind of insanity. No one really exists for them, and after a while their own broken mirror reflects no one. The subject devours the world, also disintegrating in the process.