You're Joking.

[The following contains numerous spoilers.]

Film   Todd Philips's Joker has been a perplexing success. Well reviewed all round and with a huge box office, it seems like DC's decision to produce a narrative set outside of the moribund DCU was correct and might just set be the guide to how they develop their properties going forward.

I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it.  The film clearly has some excellent formal elements: it's well shot, Joaquin Phoenix's performance is a tour de force and I'd be lying if I said I didn't gasp in a couple of places.

Nevertheless, I took against it pretty early on and after about an hour I considered walking out and on leaving gave it a whole half a star on Letterboxd.  It would have been 0 where it not for for Zazie Beetz.

Numerous reasons.  As someone who suffers from mental health problems, I'm tired of films which use such things as a crutch or explanation for why people do terrible things and especially as part of the backstory for villains.

Plus, I thought did we really need to see yet another representation of Batman's origin story?  With the slow motion pearls and tiny Bruce amid the lifeless bodies of his parents in the alleyway.

Well, cleaning my teeth this morning, it occured to me that on this score I might have misjudged the film.

That in fact this isn't an origin film about a Joker.  It's the origin film for the Joker. Or maybe.

In this LA Times piece, Philips left the interpretation deliberately vague, that the Fleck could be the actual Joker or just someone who inspires the figure who fights Batman:

"Even if everything in the film did happen pretty much as we see it and Fleck did unwittingly spark Gotham’s descent into mayhem and violence, is he the actual Joker that we have come to know? Or, as some fans have theorized, could one of his followers – perhaps the clown-mask-wearing thug who kills Bruce Wayne’s parents – or another disturbed, angry loner who comes along in his wake be the one who eventually becomes Batman’s ultimate nemesis?

“Maybe Joaquin’s character inspired the Joker,” Phillips said. “You don’t really know. His last line in the movie is, ‘You wouldn’t get it.’ There’s a lot going on in there that’s interesting.”

Although I don't entirely take back everything I said, this has made me vaguely interested about watching the film again with this new information. Plus if the DCU ever wanted to connect this film to one of their versions of Batman and his nemesis, this would be the way to do it.

Of course there's the other theory that none of the film actually happened and it's all in Fleck's imagination as he rots in Arkham, perhaps having seen the real Joker on TV ...