Joker: Is the Joke on Us?

The bird population may be severely diminished, but there is hope: a Parrot has been spotted outside the box office of a famous Brooklyn cinema. What this means for biodiversity I'm not sure, but it at least means a new view from the Lamppost.

What is Todd Phillips up to, anyway, in this latest epistle from the Batcave? I sat through about two thirds of the film thinking it was a genuine art house piece which was going to take me somewhere new. I ended up feeling like I had been treated to a remake of The Dark Knight, with references to the urban decay of the 1970's and a Fellini-esque ending thrown in to top off a really unworkable stew of moral, political and psychological themes.

The problem with this film is that it starts out by providing motivations for Arthur Fleck's anger that suggest a serious psychodrama, but the plan is realized amidst a confusing muck of thematic impulses that never really get sorted out. First we get the idea that Arthur is a just a bit off, then almost immediately we find that he has a medical condition that causes him to laugh inappropriately - presumably Pseudobulbar affect, or PBA, though the film never puts a name on it. This condition can have a range of emotional effects, but Phillips never makes it clear whether Arthur's bizarre behavior all stems from this or whether he is also subject to schizophrenia or some other condition. For example, he is also strongly delusional, but that is not obviously related to PBA. We learn that he is on medication, but we are never sure what the medication is for, since he seems to have more than one mental disorder. At some point he apparently loses access to his medication, but yet another loose knot is what direct effect this has on his later actions or mental condition, if any.

Into this already complex picture Phillips adds a history of severe child abuse. That makes probably three different psychological motivations for the murderous spree that ensues. Hey, let's also make him an orphan with a deranged adoptive mother who he still lives with - why stint on emotional issues? The method here seems to be to pile it on rather than carefully work out any single theme.

Well, we are not done. Arthur is also placed in New York City at its nadir, the street violence, racial animosity, riots, graffiti, declining social services and infrastructure decay of the 1970's. (In a piece of ahistoric but playful nonsense, the film opens with Arthur dressed in his clown suit, holding a sign advertising the closing of "Kenny's Music" - presumably a dual reference to Manny's Music on 48th Street and Kenny's Castaways, which closed in 2009 and 2012 respectively - but hey, we get the idea.) The urban decay forms a backdrop of general hostility, insensitivity and paranoia that stokes the flames of Arthur's already inflamed psychosis.

Believe it or not, Phillips is still not quite finished motivating Fleck's violence. Arthur is also trying to hold down a job as a clown, where labor issues and a co-worker who is a bit of a lummox add to his worries. Yes, he is going down, down, down...

But he's not quite at the bottom yet. You see, amidst all his tsuris, Arthur still wants to make something of himself. Although the film makes clear (sometimes in surprising ways) that Arthur is delusional, it is not clear that he is incapable of surmounting this to the point of being able to do standup. He even wants to appear as a guest on a t.v. talk show with host Murray Franklin, who seems to be modeled on Merv Griffin, the iconic talk show host of the 70's. And in a plot twist that is such a stretch I can't even count this as a spoiler, Murray gets hold of a clip of Arthur being foiled in an attempt at standup due to his laughing disease, and makes fun of him on the air. So add public humiliation to Arthur's worries. This is almost like a second film spliced onto at least one, if not two or three others, for the sake of adding another opportunity for Arthur to spill blood. It's also a cheap way of getting off, though I don't want to say anything that would spoil the unsurprising ending. But I'm jumping the gun a bit - let's go back.

The first two encounters that set Arthur off are both with black people - a group of violent youths who steal the "Going Out of Business" sign he is carrying in front of Kenny's and beat him up, and a woman on a bus who shows remarkable insensitivity. But Arthur is not going to seek revenge on these people, which would immediately put in question the moral assets he needs to attract our sympathies by pitting him against other down and out individuals. Instead, the appropriate opportunity presents itself when he is, rather dubiously, attacked on a subway by three Wall Street dudes who have turned from harrassing a woman to pummeling Arthur. He has been given a pistol by the aforementioned lummox at the agency he works for, and the one-percenters and sexist jerks get their bloody comeuppance in an act that could be called self-defense.

Well, it is self-defense, but it is also feels like a reference to the Bernard Goetz shootings of 1984. This is the first instance of how the film is not just psychologically murky but politically questionable. The stage for Fleck's killing spree is set with incidents perpetrated by minorities, but to make it acceptable at first Phillips engineers an unlikely subway assault by white guys in business suits. Of course, neither the actions of a Goetz nor the shooting to death of three white guys really is morally defensible, though some use of the gun might have been in that situation. But Phillips also needs this incident to incite a grander theme of epic violence by people who worship the clown as something like the leader of an Occupy Wall Street movement. So the film is now involved with yet another, almost contradictory, theme: what begins as a parable of urban decay (the outer representation of Arthur's psychological decay) turns into an Occupy story, only grafted onto scenes of violence reminiscent not of the Occupy encampment or marches but of New York during the blackout, of Chicago or Paris in 1968, of Watts and Newark and other scenes of resistance by the poor, minorities and students to the mess that their cities had become and the power structures that kept them that way. All of which is carried out by demonstrators in clown masks, which both hides their racial identity and tacks on an urban legend about violent clowns, a sort of visceral mockery of a movement that was subjected to violence by the police, not the other way around.

Cinema can be great entertainment even when its content is highly questionable. Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Arthur is so brilliant it shouts "Academy Award" and keeps you riveted even as the film's endless multiplication of strands leaves you wondering what meanings it is trying to put across. Comparison with Heath Ledger's Joker is inevitable, and if Ledger has anything on Phoenix it is just that he played this kind of character first. But in Christopher Nolan's film one thing the Joker clearly lacks is any justifying motivation; it is his embodiment of pure malevolence that marks his character. Phoenix's ability to enter the overly complex psyche of this mentally fragile Joker is remarkable, even if there is ultimately no way to reconcile all the disorders it encompasses. The cinematography is also terrific; Lawrence Sher depicts bleakness both indoors and out with a vividness that recalls not only Scorcese's 1970's films but Blade Runner, Repulsion and others that disturb visually as much as they do psychologically.

The moral shape of the film runs like this: we are initially somewhat sympathetic to Fleck in defending himself, and willing to at least understand as he takes revenge for his child abuse. Arthur, as the lingo of narrative fiction goes, now has "agency"; he is not going to simply disappear down the tubes of abuse, illness and depression. But at this point we are led to believe that Arthur has exorcised his demons and is on the way up - the expectation, for me, was that he would be healed but then have to face the consequences of the way he got there. Instead, we are treated to additional, quite gruesome, murders with a pretense of justification so thin that it is all but irrelevant. We are left in a kind of moral limbo, where Arthur's "recovery" turns into the lame idea - supported by extraordinarily lame speeches that are presumably supposed to have an effect on the audience - that whoever hurts you in any way whatsoever should be blown away.

This sorry outcome is then appended to a mythos of a city upended by clown-suited protesters who sanctify Arthur and his violent spree, so that not only Arthur but the Occupy-like critique of social inequality is compromised by the descent into random violence. That is a mythos that does not really resonate. The egalitarianism of the moment, from the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter to the Democratic primary debates, is a potentially transformative development that needs to be taken seriously, and has nothing to do with violent clown myths. Ultimately, the joke is on us: the film sucks you in to Arthur's mission of righting every wrong done to him only to invite you to a clownishly violent form of opposition to social injustice. I have to pass on the invitation. Feel the Bern, if you are so inclined, but not the burn.

The Arnautoff Mural and the San Francisco School Board Taliban

In March 2001, six months before the destruction of two much larger (and heavily populated) twin structures, the Buddhas of Bamyan were destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Having first attacked the Buddhas with mortars and failed to do much damage, they declared all out war on these 1500 year old statues carved into a mountainside and obliterated them with dynamite.

The Buddhas may have been "false idols" according to Islamic law, but that was not the initial reason the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, gave for blowing them up:

"I did not want to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings - the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddha's destruction."

So said Omar the Humanitarian, in a flawless piece of logic. He was angry that someone offered money to preserve cultural artifiacts instead of for famine relief, so he blew them up. Mullah Omar did not discuss whether the Taliban's imposition of a Neanderthal form of Islamic law, or the enormous refugee situation caused by the civil war being fought against it, had anything to do with the famine. But the appeal to the plight of the oppressed must have seemed like a fine diversion for an act of cultural barbarism by the reactionary, mysoginist, Taliban, who were only following Sharia law in stoning the stone staues.

The San Francisco Board of Education has recently voted to paint over Victor Arnautoff's Life of Washington, a 1936 mural in George Washington High School,  because it depicts history as it really was, with the Father of Our Country (and largest slaveholder in the nation at the time) in proximity to the dead bodies of Native Americans and black slaves being sold and picking cotton on his plantation. Inspired by his socialist view of U.S. history, Arnautoff wanted to shock people who were used to seeing the whitewashed view of history in which the only thing going on in the Revolution is a victory of brave white men over their British oppressors. The SFBE is duly planning to respond by whitewashing Arnautoff's mural.

If you have not heard about the controversy you are probably thinking, "What a bunch of conservative idiots. Another right-wing attack on an artwork that depicts unpleasant truths." It does indeed remind us of the efforts by conservatives like Jesse Helms and Al D'Amato's to defund the National Endowment for the Arts because they helped pay for Andre Serrano's photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) – a protest against the denigration of Christian icons which was taken as its exact opposite, a denial of Jesus. Life of Washington is SFBE's Piss Christ, and signals open season on works that depict the uncomfortable truths of life in America.

But the SFBE, at least according to their rhetoric, are not reactionaries but progressives. They say that the mural "glorifies" slavery, genocide... white supremacy" etc. Not being art critics they do not appear to have given much thought to what difference there might be between depicting and glorifying. Such nice distinctions do seem to be too much to ask of ideologues on either the right or the left.

Worse yet, the mural upsets students, they say. Erasing artwork is apparently their idea of teaching freedom of expression: the art upsets some people, so get rid of it. Yet the Times reported evidence that few students thought the murals should be removed. I have not seen a study or poll of these students by racial category, but the Times article says, "Of the 2,004 students at Washington High, most are Asian-American; 89 are African-American and four are Native American." It wouldn't matter if there were only one African-American student, or none – if the message of the murals were clearly racist, and they had no redeeming artistic content, then one would have a case for obliterating them. If they did have artistic merit there would be a case for finding a new school building and using the old one as a museum, letting in people who wanted to view the artwork - just as I can, if I wish, open up a copy of slavery apologist George Fitzhugh's Cannibal's all! but I don't think it should be required reading for high school students. But Life of Washington is not racist but anti-racist and does, by most accounts, have considerable artistic merit. There's no case here.

Someone should inform the SFBE that high school students are frequently endowed with brains. And those brains can surely comprehend this "trigger warning" if it were conveyed to students in  general assembly on their first day in the school: "Our school is lucky to have some of the greatest artworks of the Works Progress Administration, a project of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that created public art works during the Great Depression. But these murals depict scenes that might be upsetting to some, scenes of slavery and the murder of Native Americans. When you see these scenes keep in mind that the artist was drawing people's attention to the darker facts of U.S. history, injustices which others tried to hide by making the Founding Fathers heroes without talking about some of the evil things they did. Victor Arnautoff was a socialist who didn't think the reality of American slavery or genocide should be painted out of history, any more than the Holocaust should be denied. So keep that in mind and appreciate the historic nature of the school you are attending."

But they don't have to stop there. They could also add: "And for those who feel that there should be more positive images of people of color we have those too. In the 1960's African-American artist Dewey Crumpler was asked to create a new mural, which he dubbed Multi-Ethnic Heritage, and it positively depicts the struggles of people whose rights were denied in George Washington's day."

Obliterating murals for political reasons is nothing new. One of the most famous cases was Nelson Rockefeller's destruction of Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads at the RCA building (30 Rockefeller Center) because the painter refused to remove a portrait of Vladimir Lenin from the mural. In May 1934, in spite of protests from many of the most famous artists of the day, the petroleum heir ordered that the mural be plastered over.

Rivera's Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park was also initially removed by its owner because it contained a portrait of a Mexican atheist holding a banner that read "Dios no existe" (God does not exist). Rivera was finally forced to remove the "offending" words, which happened to be true. Apparently facts are not acceptable on murals when they offend people. The fact that Washington was a slaveholder apparently makes no difference to the SFSB Taliban.

The statements from the SFBE defending their vote are, in the vernacular, a pile of sanctimonious, self-serving bullshit, and it is hard to even give them the time of day. "This is reparations," SFBE Vice President Mark Sanchez is quotedas saying. This and undocumented references to the sensitivities of students make up the sum total of their argument. Going from the banal to the absurd, at least if it is supposed to be an argument to obliterate an artwork, we have this:

"Native American Barbara Mumby-Huerta, who staffs the San Francisco Art Commission, challenged statements on historical accuracy, saying that the mural is ignorant of indigenous people. 'To portray a Native person face down, dead, you are trapping their soul so that they can not move on,' she said, per KQED."

Let's just say this: there is intelligence as well as ignorance in artistic traditions in every culture and every nation, and if we are going to sort through our entire cultural legacy and start trashing everything that offends modern sensibilities then we will have nothing left pretty soon. But sorting and selecting is not even what the SFBE is about – get this: "School district spokeswoman Laura Dudnick confirmed that although only two mural pieces stand out as offensive to members of the community, the board’s decision would apply to all 13 panels of the mural." I guess they made an aesthetic judgment that painting over just the allegedly offensive images would offend more people than leaving them as is!

Recently, Sanchez and SFBE President Stevon Cook responded to an op-ed piece in the Times by Bari Weiss, whose credentials mainly seem to be a series of critiques of student activism. The mural bashers' response is of a piece with the rest of their self-serving logic: like the Taliban, the Rockefellers and others they are putative knights in white armor serving the interests of offended minority students. But Weiss is hardly the only one who has responsed to their intended desecration of Arnautoff's work: over 400 artists signed a letter asking them to reverse the decision, a fact they have not addressed and are not capable of addressing because they have nothing of any intellectual merit to say. Pity the students of the San Francisco school syste, whose education is being directed by misguided, self-appointed curators.

Among the points made about the mural by the artists is: "Its meaning and commitments are not in dispute. It exposes and denounces in pictorial form the US history of racism and colonialism. The only viewers who should feel unsafe before this mural are racists." Artists 1, "Educators" 0.

Other heavy hitters of the art world are starting to weigh in. Rocco Landesman, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote a letter that was printed in the NY Times on July 3. On July 26 art critic Roberta Smith also weighed in. (Go to this link for pictures of the murals.) Both of them mentioned the similarity of the SFBE's planned action to the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and Smith also mentioned Rivera's Man at the Crossroads. But what they missed is the terrifying similarity in the logic of these acts: let's destroy this artwork because it makes decent people uncomfortable. Let's make the world a better place by removing this unpleasant reminded of the past.

Which makes me wonder: has the school board also banned the reading of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom used the "N-word" in some of their stories – although it is perfectly plausible that they put the "N-word" in the mouths of characters who would have used it, while neither endorsing such use nor intending to demean people of color? 

Leni Riefenstal was an ardent Nazi who made the film Triumph of the Will as a promotional Nazi video. As a Jew, not to mention the son of a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, my discomfort at watching it is mitigated only slightly by the passage of time since those horrid events. But watch it I did, not just to remind myself that evil can at least temporarily triumph, but because its deplorable effectiveness makes it one of the greatest early examples of documentary film. True, it is not shown daily in my school, but suppose I went to a film school where it was required viewing - should I object and refuse to watch it? Why? It may have been intended as a picture of an Aryan future, but there could not be a better portrait now of national insanity.

Explicit sexuality makes some people uncomfortable. We do have a responsibility not to show young children certain things that would upset them, for the simple reason that they are not capable of understanding enough to put those things in context. But when someone wants to cover up a painting or sculpture because people capable of adult forms of reasoning (am I giving everyone too much credit?) might be offended seeing David's naked penis or whatever, it is not a matter of being sensitive to the feelings of a certain social group but of pandering to a lowest common denominator that it is the job of cultural institutions to educate.

Oh, did I say a bad word? Yes, perhaps the next thing the SFBE Taliban should do after they've spent over half a million dollars to destroy art is to obliterate the word "education" from the entrance to their offices. Apparently it offends some people. Them, in particular. After all, if the geniuses of the SFBE are capable of raising the $600,000 it is estimated to cost to remove the mural, why haven't they raised it to buy textbooks and technology, raise staff salaries, improve infrastructure, or even – I can't believe I thought of this – build a new building where the still anonymous offended students can conduct their education in blissful isolation from unsettling images? (Maybe that would take a little more money, but there are plenty of supposedly progressive Silicon Valley billionaires who should be more than happy to help with such an admirable cause.)

Victor Arnautoff, whose politically progressive mural is to be whitewashed, was an assistant to Diego Rivera. Apparently the destruction of socially critical ideas on walls is a great source of agreement between the alleged Bay Area reformers and the man who is mainly remembered for the violent death of dozens of Attica inmates and corrections officers. Arnautoff was a prolific painter who did quite a few murals in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Most of them raised controversies due to his left wing views. Maybe they should all be painted over? That would eliminate much of the legacy of a major American immigrant artist, who brought a critical perspective to U.S. culture and history. Could the SFBE possibly see that that is something to be preserved and supported today, rather than attacked?

Arnautoff taught numerous future artists during his career as a professor at the California School of Fine Arts and, for 25 years, at Standford University. After a 1955 series of lithographs in which he criticized Richard Nixon and McCarthyism there were calls for his removal, and he was hauled before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. He survived this assault and remained on the faculty. But his work may not survive the assault of putative liberal educators in an atmosphere where the desecration of left-wing art counts as "reparations". "Intentions don't matter" said one official. Yes they do, say almost every art, literary or cultural critic I've ever read.

While writing this piece, entirely by coincidence, I discovered a form of personal connection with Arnautoff. My uncle, the photographer Harold Roth, was stationed in the Bay Area when he was training as a paratrooper during World War II. (He was never deployed as far as I know.) There was a competition for army artists in his service division, and he entered a photograph entitled "Vermont Landscape". Among 475 works submitted, his photograph was selected as one of 180 to be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and one of only 30 to be sent on to a national competition. There were photography and fine arts juries of four persons each, and presumably both had to vote on works sent to the national competition. The photography jury included two outstanding photographers, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham. The most well known name in the fine arts jury was Victor Arnautoff.

But this distant personal connection to Arnautoff, through my uncle (another progressive artist, who made a major contribution to a community program in the Bronx called The Point, which helps poor children learn photography) has little to do with my sentiments about the planned actions of the SFBE. Those sentiments are a reaction to the perversion of progressive politics by the senseless actions of a gang of ideologues. If anyone needs further confirmation of Arnautoff's anti-racist sentiments they can read this. What a grave-roller it would be if he were to find that his mural is to be destroyed by administrators who call themselves defenders of oppressed minorities.

Rockefeller got away with his acts of vandalism, not to mention wanton killing, but the SFBE Taliban may not fare as well. The destruction of public visual art is now prohibited by law, specifically by the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. Among its provisions are:

Grants such an author [i.e., the artist] the right to prevent any destruction, distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would harm his or her reputation or honor

Extends such rights 50 years beyond the author's death (or co-author's, in the case of a joint work) with respect to visual art works created as of the effective date of this Act.

Arnautoff died in 1979, so the SFBE Taliban may need another 10 years before they can legally proceed with their white paint assault; maybe by that time some actual educators will be in charge. Being in a public institution, George Washington High School is ultimately owned by the people of San Francisco, so any citizen may have standing to sue for the destruction of a common cultural heritage. And there is reason to think they might win, too, given this recent decision:

Ruling that graffiti — a typically transient form of art — was of sufficient stature to be protected by the law, a federal judge in Brooklyn awarded a judgment of $6.7 million on Monday to 21 graffiti artists whose works were destroyed in 2013 at the 5Pointz complex in Long Island City, Queens.

In November, a landmark trial came to a close in Federal District Court in Brooklyn when a civil jury decided that Jerry Wolkoff, a real estate developer who owned 5Pointz, broke the law when he whitewashed dozens of swirling murals at the complex, obliterating what a lawyer for the artists had called “the world’s largest open-air aerosol museum.” (from The New York Times)

San Franciscans might have standing, but so might Arnautoff's heirs – he died in 1979, and perhaps there are living descendents who care enough about his legacy to stop the West Coast Taliban from protecting students in the wrong way.

So, finally, you are no doubt wondering what African-American artist Dewey Crumpler thinks about destroying the mural that he was brought in to "respond" to? He was interviewed by artnet news, and I couldn't imagine a better way to end this discussion than by quoting him. You really need to read the whole interview, about his own mural and his views on art and society. But the following will do for here:

"I thought 50 years ago that it should not be destroyed—because there are elements that are just waiting in the wings to take down other art, and they will use this argument to do exactly that."

"If you run away from history, you’ll never change history. You have to confront history. Art is a teaching tool. That’s why every culture in the world uses it.

All the conversations and emotions stirred up by a work of art are part of what that work of art means. My mural is part of the Arnautoff mural, part of its meaning, and its meaning is part of mine. If you destroy his work of art, you are destroying mine as well."

And those words may be worth a thousand paintings.