Did You Have Sympathy for the Joker? Psychoanalyzing Arthur Fleck - Video

Have you watched the new Joker film? In today’s video, we’ll explore why we feel sympathy for Arthur Fleck, the Joker, and we’ll try to break the character down from a psychoanalytical perspective.

Joaquin Phoenix got the Oscar for playing the Joker and the movie also won another Oscar for Best Music. It was nominated for Best Adaptive Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Make Up and HairStyling, Best Sound Editing… Don’t forget Best Director! Sorry but you forgot to say Best Director. Here have some water. Thanks… So no matter whether you liked it or not, THAT is a movie you cannot ignore.

I believe that liking or not liking a movie is irrelevant. The question about a movie is “How did it make you feel?” A movie that makes us feel, whether good or bad, has done its job. Perhaps you found Joker difficult to watch, or maybe you found yourself having sympathy for the Joker.

Hi, I’m Dimitris. And welcome back to another video of Design Thyself.

So let’s try to break down the film and the character.

Empathy

Empathy is the cornerstone of psychotherapy. Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. When watching the life of Arthur Fleck, you are surprised as you find yourself feeling empathy for a character that never experienced empathy from anyone.

You start feeling empathy for Arthur from the very first scene. You see a guy that has faced an injustice while he’s just trying to do his job. He gets ridiculed and beaten up by those kids. That’s his whole life over there from the very first scene. And let me ask you this.. how many times have YOU faced an injustice in your working environment? The movie is playing really well with feelings we have all faced. Later on, when he is reflecting on the incident we hear him say that those who beat him up “were just kids”.

That’s the second time you might feel empathy for him. Because he shows empathy towards a situation that was clearly unfair.

From a psychoanalytical point of view, this is where it all begins. When Arthur is going through a mental distress but then says “they’re just kids” this in Psychotherapy we call it Minimisation. In a nutshell what this means is that when we are going through a traumatic experience that we cannot escape from, we tend to minimize it in order to deal with it. We tend to laugh about it even though it hurts and the wound might still open, or we try to make it sound insignificant despite the fact that it caused so much pain. We think that it’s gone but it never really is.

We see him show extreme empathy towards his mother. The type of kindness that he shows his mother, when he’s helping her to have a bath, or even the way his voice sounds when he speaks to her, helps us to connect to the childlike, immature boy that just wanted to show love and receive some love back. We see his human side in his need to connect to others when he makes a child laugh on the bus and then we feel more empathy for him when the boys mother tells him off. We also see him show empathy for his colleague Gary when the other guys tease him.

He showed humor and a desire to connect with young Bruce when he gives him the flowers and trying to make him smile.
Adding these instances together starts to develop our empathy for him and provides background enough for us to care about him, —-even when he starts to carry out horrific acts of violence.

Connection

Arthur says, “The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t,” which many sufferers of mental health issues may resonate with.

Arthur clearly felt that he wasn’t seen or understood at some key points in the film. His boss told him off for losing the sign and he cries, “Did you not hear? I got mugged”. This was an authority figure who believed the worst in him and I’ll be surprised if you watched the movie and you didn’t feel you wanted to jump to his side and defend him at that point. But again, the brilliance in that scene was that even when he hears his boss telling him he’ll get fired if he doesn’t return the sign, Arthur is looking at him frozen… with a painful smile on his face.

And that is the point in the movie where a psychoanalyst begins to understand the depth of Arthur’s trauma. This is where we start to go deep into his psyche.

Here’s what I mean. Every time we are facing a threat we tend to respond with a fight or fly mechanism. If the trauma goes really deep, what tends to happen is that we get in a Freeze mode when we face a threat. A genuinely overwhelming and paralysing freeze response occurs when neither fight or flight is available to us. It’s when we have been so overpowered, so overwhelmed and so trapped, that there is no option to either flee or fight. So we do what a number of animals do in situation of extreme threat and no escape, we “play dead”. To the point that even our mind goes blank.

This happens for a number of reasons. One of them is that our body subconsciously saves energy for when the danger passes. Another one is that we want to look as if we’re not a threat while we are at the mercy of the danger in front of us. Another one is that freezing shuts down our attentional systems, so that we don’t process what is happening to us. The event is so shocking, so overwhelming, so unbelievable, that we experience a blank-point, where intense emotions prevent us from encoding information about the trauma we are experiencing. That is also the reason why Arthur does not remember his childhood traumas. They were so intense, so painful that his brain had to freeze as they were happening. His brain had to create a blank spot in his memory, in order for Arthur not to remember. This is why that frozen smile is such an important moment in the movie. Because it tells us how deep his trauma is.

When he visits his social worker, he’s frustrated at not being heard. He says, “No one hears me, you never listen, you always ask me the same questions.” He feels no connection with anyone.
He meets Wayne in the toilets who he thinks is his father, because he just needs a little warmth. -clip- He longed for a hug, instead of ridicule, from the talk show host, and even has a delusion where he imagines Murray Franklin telling him, “I wish I had a son like you.” He fantasizes about having a back rub from his female neighbor while his mother is hospitalized.

We can see that he’s yearning to be heard, understood, empathized with and feels that no-one can see his suffering. How many of you have felt the same way?

A Sad Boy in Chaos

In Arthur, we can see a boy who is deeply sad and confused. His job contradicts his feelings, so he hides behind the makeup. All his life, he has been beaten by others, physically and emotionally. He returns home day by day to look after a mother who couldn’t care for him when he was a child. A mother who had raised him in a distorted reality: How many of us say that things are good although they’re terrible?
We see that Arthur is deeply confused about his place in the world and about what’s real and what’s fantasy.
Arthur is naked most of the time that he’s alone, which is a great contrast to his daily life where he hides behind a mask. There is no sense of identity – only emptiness. He brightens this emptiness by adding color with make-up, and his deep inner agony with a fake smile painted on his face. The mask is emphasized even more by the untimely, and agonizing outbursts of laughter.

 
Agony + Fake Smiles = Defense Mechanism (Joker’s Laughter)

We see deep agony as we are invited into the chaos of Arthur’s shattering mind. Some people have found the movie painful to watch. Every time we see Arthur attempt to step outside of his agonizing inner world and connect with others, even with his clown mask on, his unpredictable laughter attacks drag him back into the pain within.

People perceive his laughter as a disease, or condition of the brain. From a psychoanalytical point of view though, this could be a defense mechanism. We know that Arthur was severely neglected and abused as a child, but he has always been told by his mother, the main source of his pain, that he is a happy child and that he was born to bring laughter to this world. His brain has hardwired suffering and sadness with agonizing laughter attacks.

In the hospital scene, we see flashbacks of Arthur’s delusional mother. She says to the psychologists who was interviewing her that Arthur was a very happy child. But we know she had completely ignored his pain. This pattern repeated out in Arthur’s reality as he got older and felt that the world did not see or hear him. This is because parents play a huge role not only in our perception of the world but also in our perception about who we are.

We can see how terribly confused anyone at that age would be. I am sad, I’m suffering physically I’m emotionally, but mum tells me I’m happy and expects me to be happy. This causes the dichotomy in Arthur’s character and the duality of his personality – what’s inside and what’s outside does not align.

So little Arthur goes on to choose a job that aligns with this vision of the world, where he looks happy and tries to make others happy, while inside of him there’s a great deal of suffering.

The crazy laughter is a defense mechanism on over-drive. His body is giving an outburst of fake happiness to satisfy his mum, while at the same time is a cry that says “ Im doing what you expect me to do but there’s something wrong in this. Please help. I don’t want this” and that’s the kind of laughter that pushes away his mother and other people. It also protects Arthur from the outside world and keeps him from it, forcing him back into his inner chaos. The child within perceives the world as deceitful and brutal, so he protects himself by pushing it all away with a laughter.

Delusions

Because both he and his mother are having delusions, Arthur cannot tell what’s fantasy and what’s reality. His mother tells the story that he’s the son of a the most powerful and famous man in the city and the outcome of a romantic, secret afair. This vision comes crashing down at the hospital where he learns the truth – that his mother is psychotic, he was adopted and has been physically abused by her boyfriend and emotionally neglected by her. The destruction of the world that he had believed in leads to confusion about what he can and can’t rely on, and what might hurt him, which creates extreme sadness and then extreme anger.

Murders

By a sad twist of fate, self-defense propels Arthur into his first two murders. A young girl is being harassed by three men who are being sexually provocative to her on the train. When you watch the movie you can’t help but feel angry towards them and worried for what is going to happen to her. Empathy kicks in again. Arthur’s laughter comes to her defense… Arthur’s laughter.. the mechanism his brain has created for defense whenever a situation is painful and he’s called to act… now the three men have a new target… and they start to tease him and then beat him. His gun goes off in self-defense and he kills two of the men. That is the point where we see something switching inside him. He then shoots the third man as he runs away. Revenge. The first time in his whole life where he feels he has the power to stand for himself.

When Arthur discovers his mother’s past, that’s a heart-breaking scene. His mother has lied to him for his whole life and on top of that, she’s not the angel he thought she was. She was incredibly abusive to him as a child, and he kills her. There is another interesting point here where before killing her he says “I thought my life was a tragedy, now I realize it’s a joke”

As the story goes on, we see, more killings. He kills Randall, his ex-colleague, the one who lied to their boss about the gun. That was the most brutal scene of the whole film. The last killing happens on live TV, after he establishes himself in the eyes of society as the Joker. He expresses his views about how awful society has become and how everyone treats everybody unfairly. After being humiliated on television by Murray Franklin, he kills him too. One point I want to focus on here is Joker’s body language after he kills Murray. He sits looking at him, breathing fast, moving his leg up and down. There’s a lot of energy in his body. There’s no more freeze response. There’s a fight response. Fight against everything and everyone. I want to stay in the movement of his leg for a bit.

We explored earlier how and why we go into freeze mode when we are facing a traumatic event. And we said that one of the reasons is to save energy. We have to pause here and talk about anger for a bit. Anger is a healthy feeling to have when we express it at the right time and with the appropriate intensity. For example if I were to come close to your face you’d probably feel uncomfortable. Now imagine there’s a wall behind you and you cannot escape and Im right there in front of your face. In other words there’s no option for a flee response. What would you then do? An instinctive reaction would be to push me away. The act of pushing someone away is an act of anger. I am not respecting you, I have crossed the line of your boundaries therefore anger is released to re-establish the lost balance. Anger in that case, is protecting you. It is being expressed in the present moment and with appropriate intensity for your survival.

Now if we think the times when we are angry about things that happened in the past.. or when we get angry about scenarios that we make in our head about how future events might unfold.. That is unhealthy anger. It’s not about the present and it cannot act as a protective mechanism. All it does is that it keep you charged with energy that needs some kind of release. Let’s go back to when I was close to your face. If I ask you what was the feeling you had when I was that close to your face, you might say fear. As we know, Fear promotes anger and we also know that sadness counteracts anger. This is the gridlock that Arthur is carrying. His sadness counteracted anger for his entire life but when he looses all the anchors that made him feel grounded, his worst fears kick in. That is what promotes extreme anger.

There’s an area in your brain which is called Posterior Insula. One of its roles appears to be in the recognition, intensity encoding, localization, learning, and memory of somatically painful events. And near this area there’s another one called Anterior Insula.

Anterior Insula provides an emotional context for physiological experiences. In other words, it gives meaning to bodily states, for example by helping you experience pain as unpleasant. It also gives signals to your sensorimotor network. So when something traumatic is happening to you, the Posterior Insula encodes it as traumatic, the Anterior Insula gives it emotional context, and it then sends signals to your sensorimotor network to fight or fly.

So when Arthur was a little boy. Chained and abused by his mother’s boyfriend, he didn’t have the option to fight or fly. He didn’t have the option to push back and define his boundaries. His anger got locked inside. The only option he had was to freeze. And that made sense because it’s what saved his life at the time. So the part of his brain that is designed to react to traumatic events got locked down and there was no reaction. No motion. Just a frozen state. But the part that is designed to encode the somatically painful event was working like crazy. There was a tremendous amount of energy trapped in his system and there was no chance to release it because of the frozen state.

Let me ask you this. Have you been in situation where you start moving your leg up and down? Bitting your fingernails? Fidgeting with your fingers? Maybe you have a meeting in the office and you move your leg up and down because you just don’t want to be there. Maybe you’re on a date and you feel uncomfortable and you want to leave. Maybe you’re being told off by your spouse and you bite your lips or clench your teeth. I’m sure you’ve been there. It’s trapped energy wanting to be expressed.

Joker does the same thing the moment before and after he kills Murray Franklin. Moving his leg up and down furiously. But his anger is not about the present. It’s about his past. The present situation, the humiliation just triggers it. The thing that makes him express his anger disproportionally is not the trigger, but all the explosive ammunition that is hidden within for so many years.

He Who Was Raised To Be

Boys usually learn how to be men from the male figures in their life, normally their father. Here, the male figure in the house. Mom’s boyfriend, was brutal and abusive, and that is what Arthur becomes. When Thomas Wayne is no longer an option, he identifies with the only option that’s left. The option of the aggressor. 
So, he takes on the form of the male figure he knows – the violent and the ruthless– while at the same time trying to make his mother happy by wearing the mask of the smiling clown. When he kills his mother, he loses his only grounding force in the unreal world that he had known.

This catapults him into a string of murders where he kills all other anchors of hope in the real world – his neighbor that he likes, any fantasy of a loving relationship and family, Murray Franklin (who has been another father figure to him). He starts to become the Joker and kill what he cannot have, and cannot be, so that he can truly disconnect from the pain.

In the end, Arthur becomes who he was raised to be, rather than who he was born to be. A victim of his parents’ actions, emotionally numb and tormented, with a huge fake smile painted on for his mother and the outside world. He believes the world to be an evil lie, and so it is only natural for him to hurt and kill.
The closing scene, where after he dances on top of the police car in front of the rebellious crowd, he notices the blood on his face, takes it in his fingers and draws a big bloody smile on his face with tears in his eyes.. That scene says it all.

How many times you were feeling so sad inside and people where telling you: “Stop being so soft and Snap out of it”
“Others have it worse than you”
“Don’t be so dramatic”
“Grow up and stop feeling sorry for yourself”
“Suck it up and carry on”

How many times someone asked you “Hey how are you?” And you replied “Im fine you?” While deep inside you were so sad.

That’s what the smile made of blood and the tears in the eyes are about. We’ve all had it one way or another. That’s why we sympathize with Joker. And that’s why this movie is difficult to watch.

To The Arthurs Who Watch This

If you found yourself having sympathy for the Joker on a personal level, and perhaps saw similarities between you and the Joker, know that you are not alone. If you feel alone, lonely, beaten, bullied, disconnected, but have a longing for connection, know that it does not end there. This is exactly how many of my clients feel.

Therapy is here to help you challenge the beliefs you might have about you, about this world. If Arthur had the proper support he could have challenged his beliefs at several points.
When we experience hardships in life, we tell ourselves a story to make sense of the pain. But that story is based on the defense mechanisms that were formed by the experiences through which we were raised. And those same defense mechanisms we later call our personality. You have to remember that is not who you really are. It’s who you were raised to be. And you have the power to change that story.
  
Recovering from trauma is challenging, and to work through it, you are going to have to remember the trauma and understand it. Knowing that you are not alone is incredibly powerful in keeping you going on the tough days. Feeling that you are understood, heard and have your emotions validated is the way forward to not to get caught into unhealthy beliefs about yourself and the society in which you live. The world changes when you change.

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Im Dimitris Thanks for watching this and remember.. there’s no need to put a smile on when your eyes want to cry. Talk about it.