Joker is born into a mad world. The film’s opening scenes show us Arthur Fleck (aka “Joker”) hitting his head on the glass window of a seclusion room in Arkham Asylum

Arkham Asylum. The outside world is just as crazy, with rubbish piling up on the streets due to a strike by dustmen and a feeling that Gotham is on the edge of collapse. Rather like Arthur who appears only moments away from a collapse back into psychosis.

At one point Fleck comments that he felt safer in the asylum than outside. It’s a view I heard and saw expressed frequently during my career as a Psychiatric nurse.And why not? Three meals a day. A warm ward. A safe seclusion room if things got too bad. Regular medication and, hopefully, a sympathetic nurse to talk with about your life. Along with clear rules and an established code of conduct. All psychiatric units have two codes of conduct. the official one and the unspoken unofficial one. Both shape daily life in a hospital ward.

We see Arthur post discharge, being “supported” by an overworked therapist who is approaching burn out. How many Arthurs does she have on her list? And what is she supposed to do with them or for them? In the end even this tenuous help line proves unreliable as she tells Arthur that this service is being withdrawn. Arthur’s only reaction is to ask “Where will I get my prescription now?” As if there was no therapeutic alliance between him and his therapist. She was simply a way of getting his seven different medications.

In their book “Joker. A serious study of the Clown Prince of Crime” , Peaslee and Weiner observe that “The Joker is a force looking to inflict pain and suffering on others in order to understand something about himself.” A fascinating idea which the writers don’t entirely explain. What is it about himself that he is hoping to understand. (If he even knows.)

I suggest it’s about power and potency. In the film “Network” Sidney Lumay gives his impassioned call “We’re mad as Hell and we’re not going to take it any more.” This might have been said by Joker who, in the 2019 film is more a victim than a perpetrator – at least initially. He is mugged snd beaten up by a group of teenagers, threatened and bullied at work and assaulted on a train when he tries to protect a woman being harassed by some business men. (This is one of the trigger points when Arthur Fleck begins to morph into Joker and showing how potent a disaffected and disenfranchised clown can become. This clown’s gun shoots real bullets that kill real people. His is not a toy gun that shoots out a flag saying “Bang!)

The origin of the word “Potent” is intriguing. As well as links to “power” and “might” it has links to the idea of a bridegroom. We might see Joker as the groom of Chaos and the riots that he triggers in Gotham City as his wedding feast. As Charlie Chaplin said “To truly laugh you must be able to take your pain and play with it.” Joker certainly takes his pain and plays with it. And invites Gotham to join his dance. Jack Nicholson’s Joker asks Bruce Wayne “You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?” In the clown riot in Todd Phillips’ version there is certainly a demonic dance as huge numbers of masked clowns rampage through the city. Looting, burning shops, assaulting fellow Gothamites. and generally expressing a certain kind of potency. Albeit of a thoroughly destructive kind. (But we might wonder how the Wayne Empire made its money. We might assume they engaged in a certain amount of destruction – although “white collar” destruction on the Stock Market rather than Gotham’s streets)

So, how to finish this blog with still so much I want to say? But it’s a blog and not a scholarly paper nor a (possible) best seller. So, I’ll end with one of the pieces of music from Joker, which sums up his life so well.