Joker Director Believes Guns Made People Lose Their Minds

In the interview, the Joker director highlighted how nobody seems to have a problem with gun violence in more mainstream films. “In most movies, they’re pulling out 42 different guns and killing hundreds of people,” he said.

Philips went on to note that only “six people die” in his own movie but that people were uncomfortable because “what I was doing felt too real.”

While discussing his Joker film and the public reaction to its gun violence, Phillips grew both heated and intense, rhetorically asking “Isn’t that the point? Isn’t it a good thing to show the real-world implications of what a gun does?”

The great irony of this interview is Phillips’ insistence that the movie is a criticism of gun violence rather than a valorization.

Joker uses a gun to kill people, including a TV talk show host, but these actions weren’t meant to make him look like a hero—instead, the director wanted to highlight the systematic failures of our society and how the lack of a social safety net turned Arthur Fleck from a harmless clown to a deranged monster.

And hearing Philips passionately set the record straight on this matter, it’s hard not to observe that he is channeling the earlier Joker character played by Heath Ledger.

In The Dark Knight, Ledger’s Joker discussed how people can dismiss things like horrific gun violence in the right context, saying “nobody panics” if he says that “a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up” because it’s “all part of the plan.”

However, as he points out, the instant result of telling everyone that “one little old mayor will die” is that “everyone loses their minds!”

Joker’s big point in that speech is that the average person doesn’t truly hate gun violence or even murder as they might claim—instead, it’s acceptable in an abstract context they are more comfortable with (like soldiers dying overseas).

Phillips’ comments on his Joker movie seem like an echo of that as he points out that nobody cares about the endless gun violence and death in an action movie because that’s what we expect from the genre. But realistically showing how a man at the end of his rope could snap hits way too close to home for many critics and fans.

In his own way, the Joker director is truly getting the last laugh: before the movie came out, people collectively freaked out that it would glorify an angry loser picking up a gun and taking his frustrations out on the world. Instead, the director pointed out that gun violence is often the result of the system failing countless people just like Arthur Fleck.

And if we want our own cities and communities to be safer, it might be time to invest in social safety nets rather than wringing our hands about fictional violence in a Batman spinoff.

Source: Variety