The Witch — They Believed in God, but Not in Their Daughter

This review contains spoilers and reflects my personal interpretation of the film.

“The most suffering animal on earth invented laughter.”

Whether or not that familiar line can be securely attributed to Nietzsche, it feels almost purpose-built for Arthur Fleck.

Todd Phillips’s Joker begins not with a comic-book logo or a confrontation between heroes and villains, but with a lonely clown forcing his mouth into a smile. His fingers pull the corners upward, yet tears run down his painted face. Comedy and tragedy already occupy the same expression.

This Gotham resembles New York around 1981: garbage fills the streets, public services are collapsing, inequality is impossible to ignore, and anger has become the city’s common language. Production designer Mark Friedberg and Phillips drew on the distressed New York imagery of films such as Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, and Network, constructing a Gotham that feels less like a fantasy metropolis than a memory of an American city in decay.

The influence of Martin Scorsese is unmistakable. Arthur carries the alienation and violent self-mythology of Travis Bickle, while his obsession with television host Murray Franklin reverses the celebrity fantasy of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Robert De Niro’s presence makes that connection impossible to overlook.

Yet Joker does more than place a comic-book villain inside old Scorsese imagery.

It turns the birth of the Joker into the story of a failed performer who finally discovers an audience.

A Man Nobody Believes

Arthur Fleck works as a hired clown while dreaming of becoming a stand-up comedian.

Early in the film, a group of boys steals his promotional sign and beats him in an alley. When Arthur attempts to explain what happened, his employer does not ask whether he is injured. He asks why the sign was never returned.

Why would Arthur steal it?

His boss does not know.

He simply assumes that Arthur must be lying.

The scene is quietly funny because the misunderstanding revolves around something so insignificant. It is also cruel. Arthur’s pain does not merely go unnoticed; it is treated as an administrative inconvenience.

That pattern defines his life.

He speaks to a social worker who appears to hear only enough to complete the appointment. He lives with a mother who calls him “Happy” while remaining largely absorbed in her own fantasies. He dreams of comedy, but even the people closest to him question whether he is funny enough to become a comedian.

Arthur does not initially demand power.

He wants acknowledgment.

“Is it just me,” he asks, “or is it getting crazier out there?”

No one gives him a meaningful answer.

Fantasy as a Private Theater

Arthur survives partly by transforming imagination into shelter.

Murray Franklin is more than a professional idol. In Arthur’s fantasy, Murray becomes the approving father he never had, pulling him from the audience and telling him that he would gladly exchange all his fame for a son like Arthur.

Sophie, his neighbor, serves a similar function. In Arthur’s imagined relationship, she responds to his unsettling behavior with warmth, humor, and acceptance. The fantasy converts actions that would frighten a real person into signs of eccentric charm.

Arthur’s imagination therefore operates like a private theater.

Inside it, he is loved, understood, and applauded.

But fantasy is not simply an escape from reality. It gradually replaces reality. The film allows the audience to inhabit Arthur’s perspective long enough that his delusions can initially appear plausible. When that illusion collapses, Arthur does not merely lose a romantic relationship.

He loses one of the last places in which he was not alone.

The same betrayal occurs with Murray. Arthur believes television has invited him into a shared world. Instead, Murray broadcasts his failed performance to mock him.

The fantasy father does not recognize his son.

He turns him into material.

The First Performance That Works

Arthur repeatedly treats violence as performance before he fully understands what he is doing.

When he first receives a gun, he dances with it in his apartment, speaking to an imaginary audience. The weapon becomes a theatrical prop—part pistol, part microphone, part dance partner.

That detail matters when Arthur later kills three Wayne Enterprises employees on the subway.

The violence begins in panic and self-defense, but it does not end there. Arthur follows the third man onto the platform and executes him. At that point, the incident becomes a choice.

The film does not show this as a clean political awakening or as the inevitable consequence of mental illness. Arthur’s condition, his history of abuse, the collapse of public care, and Gotham’s everyday cruelty all shape him. But none of them removes his agency.

He chooses to continue.

After the murders, Arthur enters a public restroom and dances.

The scene was originally conceived differently, but Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix, and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir developed the dance around the film’s score. The result transforms what might have been a frantic hiding scene into something ritualistic: the moment Arthur begins creating a new self through movement.

Visually, the dance expresses release.

Musically, it sounds like mourning.

Arthur has crossed a boundary, but instead of horror, he experiences coherence. For perhaps the first time, his body and emotions appear to move together.

His stand-up performance fails because he cannot control his laughter or understand the rhythm of an audience.

His first act of violence succeeds because it gives him rhythm.

The failed comedian finally finds a form of expression that feels natural.

That is the film’s ugliest joke.

Arthur Fails, the Joker Succeeds

Arthur wants to be seen as an individual, but the subway murders turn him into a symbol.

Protesters in clown masks know nothing about him. They do not know his illness, his childhood, his mother, or his failed comedy career. They project their own anger onto an anonymous killer.

Arthur mistakes that projection for recognition.

This is the dark inversion at the center of the film.

As Arthur Fleck, he cannot hold an audience.

As an image, he inspires a movement.

His comedy-club routine becomes a source of public humiliation, but his murders become political theater. The joke that nobody understood as comedy becomes a performance the entire city interprets.

Arthur has finally succeeded.

The tragedy is that the success no longer belongs to Arthur.

The Joker is not simply Arthur without restraint. He is a character Arthur constructs after the identities supporting his old life begin to collapse. The obedient son, the struggling worker, the patient, the aspiring comedian, and the imagined lover all disappear.

When Arthur says that he once believed his life was a tragedy but now realizes it is a comedy, he is changing genres.

Tragedy requires suffering to have meaning.

Comedy allows him to turn suffering into a punchline.

The Final Stage

Arthur’s appearance on Live with Murray Franklin completes that transformation.

He arrives dressed not as the defeated man whose comedy clip was mocked, but as the character he has rehearsed through dance, makeup, costume, and violence.

The studio is his final stage.

Arthur seems to have prepared for death. His rehearsals suggest that he may intend to end the performance by shooting himself on live television. Such an ending would transform his ignored life into a spectacle no one could dismiss.

But Arthur remains emotionally unstable. Murray’s criticism draws him into an argument, and the planned performance gives way to an impulsive execution.

“How about another joke, Murray?”

The line announces the murder as entertainment, but it also reveals Arthur’s failure to distinguish between being heard and being justified.

Murray has exploited him.

Gotham has abandoned him.

Neither fact makes the killing righteous.

This is where the film’s social argument becomes deliberately—or perhaps frustratingly—unstable. Joker asks viewers to inhabit Arthur’s humiliation with extraordinary intimacy, yet surrounds his violence with music, movement, and images of liberation. Some critics regarded that ambiguity as powerful; others argued that the film aestheticized violence while offering only a shallow account of mental illness and social neglect.

That discomfort is part of the movie’s force, but also one of its limitations. Gotham’s other people frequently exist only as tormentors, victims, or pieces of Arthur’s fantasy. The city is complex as an atmosphere but simple as a moral argument.

Arthur is seen in extraordinary detail.

Almost everyone else becomes part of his act.

A Terrible Joke in Full Bloom

By the end, Arthur is lifted onto a police car as the crowd cheers.

He does not issue political demands or lead the movement. He simply stands above it, draws a smile in his own blood, and accepts the applause.

This is his curtain call.

As a human being, Arthur Fleck has collapsed.

As the Joker, he has finally become a successful performer.

That reversal explains much of the film’s cultural power. Joker contains surprisingly little of the traditional comic-book villain’s mythology. Batman barely exists. There are no elaborate criminal schemes, poisoned playing cards, or theatrical battles with a masked hero.

Instead, the film presents a recognizable story about loneliness, humiliation, class resentment, broken institutions, and the seductive fantasy of making the world pay attention.

Its enormous commercial success confirmed how powerfully that fantasy traveled. Made for a reported production budget in the range of roughly $55 million—not $7,000—the R-rated film earned about $1.08 billion worldwide without a theatrical release in mainland China. It also won the Golden Lion, the Venice Film Festival’s highest prize, an unusual achievement for a studio film based on a comic-book character.

But box-office numbers are not the best way to conclude Arthur’s story.

Arthur spent his life trying to make people laugh.

They ignored his jokes, mocked his performance, and spoke over his pain.

Only when the comedy became violent did the world finally look at him.

Arthur Fleck failed as a comedian.

The Joker received a standing ovation.

And that may be the cruelest joke of all.

Good night and Always remember, That's LIFE