6:00

get made. What was the point? We really

6:02

have to talk about what a musical is,

6:04

Glenn. Yes, we do. Those are my thoughts.

6:06

Those are my opening statements. I like that

6:08

opening statement. That makes me feel sane. Thank

6:10

you, Joelle. You know, we critics don't

6:12

get to bust out terms like

6:14

joyless slog very often, but if

6:17

the clown shoe fits, you know, listeners,

6:20

if you take nothing away from this

6:22

discussion today, take this. I

6:24

am a middle-aged gay man, and I

6:26

am telling you, Gaga does not make

6:28

this film better. I

6:30

kept thinking over and over again, well,

6:33

we've been waiting for it for years, and it's finally

6:35

here, but this sequel to the telephone video is very

6:37

disappointing. Where is Beyonce? I kept

6:40

asking myself, where is Beyonce? I'm not the audience

6:42

for this movie. I'll say that up front. I

6:45

found the other one, miserable-ist nonsense and

6:47

a kind of preening,

6:49

self-consciously edgy, self-consciously provocative, but it wasn't

6:51

provocative. It was just boring because it

6:53

was just biting the style of Taxi

6:55

Driver and King of Comedy, but

6:58

those movies challenged us. They implicated us. They made

7:00

us feel weird for empathizing with sociopaths and let

7:02

us sit in it. Joker, that first movie and

7:04

this movie, both kind of depict him as a

7:06

victim of what? Society, it

7:08

turns out, and it wants us to root

7:11

for him. It's like this whole

7:13

movie is those bros who watch Breaking Bad

7:15

and think Walter White's the hero. This movie

7:17

is just more of the same, except incessant

7:19

musical numbers, which are there ostensibly to contrast

7:22

with ours, you know, miserable

7:24

existence, but Phillips, and he's

7:26

doing this incredibly deliberately, he is making

7:28

them just as dour, these musical numbers,

7:30

as everything else. So instead of ripping

7:32

off Taxi Driver, and now we're ripping

7:34

off the singing detective and Penny's from

7:36

Heaven and Dancer in the Dark, and

7:38

we're adding nothing. We heard

7:40

Gaga sing That's Entertainment earlier. That's from the

7:42

album Harlequin. It's not from the movie, because

7:44

in the movie when she sings, most of

7:47

the time she's singing in this kind of

7:49

scratchy whisper that doesn't do

7:51

a very good job of hiding

7:53

her great voice, and it's just

7:55

intentionally denying payoff, denying catharsis. This

7:57

movie wants you to suffer mission.

8:00

Yeah. Can I bust out a theory here?

8:02

Please. Please. I feel like

8:04

35 years of Batman films have been engaged

8:07

in this sort of miserableism and grit arms

8:09

race. I mean, I managed to

8:11

convince myself watching the Burton 89 Batman,

8:13

like, oh yeah, this

8:16

is the adaptation of The

8:18

Dark Knight Returns that I had into. What? I

8:20

mean, that movie is just as campy as the

8:22

66 out of West. It's just

8:24

sort of campy in a different way. In

8:26

a different way, but yeah. The Dark Knight came out in 2008,

8:28

which I still love. I mean, that to me is still the

8:31

most successful screen translation of

8:33

this character. But even

8:35

that, like, has so many cartoony elements, which are

8:37

not what leap out at you at first. But

8:40

all of the, like, his masked henchmen and their

8:42

clown masks, they're speaking to each other in these,

8:44

these like silly voices like that.

8:46

Oh, I know why they call them the

8:48

joker. You know? And it's like that's, you

8:50

watch that film a second time and you're

8:52

like, wait a minute, you know, the only

8:54

accused Nolan of humorlessness must have, have missed

8:57

this, you know? So it's like each iteration, we're

8:59

like, oh, at last, this is, you know, we've

9:01

finally gotten to the, the gritty, miserableist core. And

9:03

it's like, nope, wait 10 years. There

9:05

will be a sadder, more

9:09

dejected Batman movie coming. I think

9:11

even in all that grit though,

9:13

there was a core

9:16

of beauty of like Batman's a hero

9:18

who is literally fighting his

9:20

childhood bullies. And so when

9:22

he's in the muck in the muck, you're

9:24

like, come on, Batman, get up. Like you've

9:27

got this. It's going to be great. And

9:29

so there's a threat of hope through all

9:31

of that, which sort of allows for like

9:33

the depressive bleakness of Gotham. The

9:36

Joker without Batman is a boring character

9:38

in general. And this is a series

9:41

that doesn't really understand the Joker as a

9:43

character. I think what makes the

9:45

Joker interesting is the fact that he fell in

9:47

love with Batman and was like, I can be

9:49

a chaos agent to this guy. Like this guy

9:51

is out here. If he's going to solve all

9:53

the problems, I'm going to just outdo him in

9:55

the chaos department so that he can always stay

9:57

around. I love this guy. He's crazy. That's amazing.

10:00

Without the antithesis of that, and I thought that

10:03

Harley Quinn was sort of going to come

10:05

in and fill that role of like, here's an

10:07

alt to the Joker personality so we can

10:09

like really play and have a good time. We just never

10:12

get there. And this movie proposes a

10:14

question of is the Joker

10:16

the persona of a disturbed person?

10:18

Or is this a man

10:21

who's found a way to bring chaos

10:23

through a persona? Right? Is he saying

10:25

and the Joker is a mask? Or

10:27

is this a mental health issue? Right.

10:29

And it doesn't seek to ever answer

10:31

that question. The whole film

10:34

is just so chaotic. You can't tell like

10:36

the performance Joaquin is doing is good, but

10:38

it's like, I don't understand

10:41

any of the choices ever. And the film doesn't try

10:43

to make any of the choices clear to me. And

10:46

so you just get lost in everything. It's found a

10:48

bit very confusing. Yeah, well, it's confusing because as far

10:50

as I know that question about whether or not the

10:52

Arthur and the Joker are true. Or Arthur and the

10:54

Joker are two different personas that's introduced in this film,

10:56

because that's what his defense attorney argues to try to

10:59

keep him from being executed. It's introduced

11:01

at the very beginning of the film in

11:03

an opening animated sequence by the guy who

11:05

did triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chommet. It's

11:07

kind of riffing on Looney Tunes and that becomes

11:09

what the movie is about in a very strange

11:11

way. The puzzle it wants to solve. But every

11:13

time it felt to me like that

11:16

question was stealing focus from the

11:18

Gaga of it all and putting

11:21

the narrative and facets on the wrong syllable.

11:24

So news flash, gay

11:26

guy wanted more Gaga. But that said,

11:28

gay guy wanted more Gaga. I will say

11:30

I think Lady Gaga, I mean, I've

11:32

seen her in House of Gucci and A

11:35

Star is Born prior to this. You

11:37

know, I think she can more convincingly inhabit

11:39

an ordinary person than Joaquin Phoenix can.

11:42

I mean, even in films where

11:44

Joaquin Phoenix is not playing a

11:46

sort of psychopathic Caesar and waiting

11:49

or like even when he's, I don't know,

11:51

in the master or something, where he's a

11:53

guy who's haunted by his World War II

11:55

experiences and susceptible to the influence of this

11:57

sort of charismatic cult leader. Joaquin. Phoenix

12:00

still seems like a movie star, you

12:02

know, and he could probably bury

12:04

that if he wanted to. I don't think he

12:06

ever does for one second in either of the

12:08

Joker films, but Gaga, and I

12:11

do think this is a compliment to her

12:13

performance. I feel like she can bring it

12:15

down to where she can convincingly inhabit someone

12:17

who you would pass on the street without

12:19

noticing. Joel, talk

12:21

to me about the use of songs and music

12:24

in general in this movie. Okay. So hear me

12:26

out. This film doesn't know who it is. And

12:28

you can tell by the music because the bar

12:30

for music was Joker, Jester, Smile.

12:32

If you have one of those words and it's

12:34

kind of a classic tune, a song many for

12:36

many generations would know. They're like, yeah, let's get

12:38

the rights and throw it in there. Why are

12:40

we singing this song at this time? It couldn't

12:42

have possibly been a question post. I don't want

12:44

to say that people care when they make movies.

12:46

I just don't understand why we

12:49

had, or why some songs got full performances

12:52

and some were just kind of hummed

12:54

to me, the best moment of the film. And

12:56

it has nothing to do with anything other than

12:58

production. And I love hearing Gaga sing is when

13:01

they open up their own like night show sort

13:03

of situation. A lot of the music is dreamscapes.

13:05

I don't think that's giving anything away. The trailer

13:07

sort of makes it apparent that these, they're happening

13:09

in a black space. When

13:11

Joker and Harley come out, they're sort of

13:14

introducing and you start to get the psychosis

13:16

of their relationship and what they're playing at

13:18

and what her goals are. You don't spend

13:20

enough time with Harley Quinn to get a

13:22

full accurate picture of who this character is.

13:25

It's done in this little conversation. The two

13:27

of them together are really funny. It's hitting.

13:29

You kind of see the chemistry of them

13:31

as a potential couple. They're both in a

13:34

space of power and position. And

13:36

so they're on like this even keel, which makes

13:38

you kind of okay with the relationship that is

13:40

constantly being thrown out the window when you enter

13:42

back into reality and you don't spend enough time

13:44

in the dreamscape to understand why either person

13:47

is this attached to one another. And I

13:50

think if you're going to explore this type

13:52

of relationship within an institution

13:54

like prison in America right

13:56

now, you have to have some

13:58

knowledge about how and actually works, you

14:00

have to have some knowledge of like how psychiatry

14:03

works. That psychiatry questioning that they first

14:05

had, you're like, this is in bananas

14:08

conversation that a therapist would ever have with

14:10

a patient. This would immediately be thrown out

14:12

of a courtroom. Like for something that's trying

14:14

to be grounded in reality, it's completely not.

14:16

It doesn't veer far enough into the fantasy.

14:18

And the music has no purpose for being.

14:20

And I love a musical. Why are we

14:22

doing this? Yeah. The, uh, the use

14:25

of the musical numbers does not really advance

14:27

any farther than Alex and his droogs singing,

14:29

singing in the rain while they're beating up

14:31

the old man in a clockwork orange, you

14:33

know, 50 plus years ago,

14:35

even the way some of the musical numbers

14:37

are shot, like there's a shot where they're

14:40

walk out in the rain joker surrounded by

14:42

guards with umbrellas. It's the first

14:44

time you're kind of veering into a dream

14:46

esque sequence. You pop into an overhead and

14:48

Oh, the colors are of the set

14:51

where he killed the comedian in the first film.

14:53

And so it's all of these iconic colors to

14:55

the film. He's getting rained on because

14:57

he doesn't have an umbrella. I'm like,

14:59

Oh, maybe we're, we're getting into something.

15:02

Is he going back? Does he regret

15:04

the decisions he made? Is he like,

15:07

no, they just, they just walk into the building.

15:09

There's, they never move into a musical number. Like

15:11

there, there's no twirling of the umbrellas. There's not

15:13

a hint to any other icon

15:15

musical with umbrellas that change college. I

15:17

was like, what, why are we, you

15:19

think it's going to be an umbrellas of shareboard riff and

15:22

it's not, that's where I thought it was going. And then

15:24

it just went nowhere. It was very, I was like, did,

15:26

wait, did we, is there a deleted scene? Yeah. Yeah.

15:29

I was at one point, the guard is

15:31

like, Oh, I love singing and he has

15:33

a lovely voice and he's, he's singing and

15:35

you're like, okay, is he entering into the

15:37

dream schedule? No, nothing. He just sings diagetically.

15:40

Like within the moment, Oh, all of this

15:42

is real. Maybe yes. I have no idea.

15:44

And I, it's so infuriating because it's like,

15:46

I love the Joker as a chaos machine

15:48

to that man. And I don't

15:51

understand why you wanted to play with the

15:53

Joker in this way. To me, this is

15:55

not deep in the character or more. Does

15:58

it push him into a future? idea

16:00

of being, it doesn't really morph him. It

16:03

just stunts him. I mean,

16:05

I think to the extent this film

16:07

is about anything, and this kind of

16:09

reminds me of the debate around The

16:11

Dark Knight, where everybody was like, oh,

16:14

is this Nolan's commentary on surveillance post-9-11?

16:16

Because there's a plot where we turned

16:18

out that Batman has the ability

16:20

to surveil electronically all of Gotham City,

16:22

and he realizes this is wrong, but

16:25

he built the thing anyway. So that

16:27

gave the movie some topicality. And

16:29

this movie and the prior one, but I

16:31

think more this one is trying to say

16:33

something about the followings that false prophets will

16:36

generate. And that also, I don't know, it reminded

16:38

me of, again, since all of these

16:40

two Joker films are in conversation with these

16:42

classic films from the 70s and early 80s,

16:44

like network was one I thought of, just

16:47

the fact that the guy says I'm mad

16:49

as hell and I'm not going to take

16:51

it anymore, and that's enough to inspire this

16:53

loyal new set of viewers. I wondered if

16:55

this movie is Todd Phillips, whose filmography prior

16:57

to Joker is not really my speed, right?

17:00

Like the hangover in old school, like I'm

17:02

not real big on movies like that. I

17:05

wonder if this is him reckoning with

17:07

the incredible outsized success of the first

17:10

Joker and maybe some of

17:12

the more toxic aspects of fandom

17:14

that really coalesced around

17:17

that film. He's like, okay, I'm going to give you a

17:19

little more of this, and then

17:21

I am slamming the booksheth. Well, thanks.

17:23

That was a really good discussion about

17:25

this movie. Tell us what you think

17:27

about Joker Folly Ado. Find us at

17:29

Facebook at facebook.com/P-C-H-H. Up next, what's making

17:32

us happy this week? This

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18:16

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18:19

message comes from Travel Nevada. Need a

18:21

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18:23

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18:25

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50% off. Learn

19:04

more at rosettastone.com/NPR. Now it

19:06

is time for

19:08

our favorite segment of this week and every week. What

19:11

is making us happy this week? Chris, what

19:13

is making you happy this week, sir? Well,

19:15

this would have been more appropriate for our

19:17

megalopolis episode, but as I

19:19

have been sorting through and enjoying the

19:21

ongoing and probably soon abbreviated critical discourse

19:24

on megalopolis, I have gone back

19:26

to the fantastic 1991 documentary, Hearts

19:30

of Darkness, a filmmaker's apocalypse, which

19:32

of course I had seen many

19:34

times before, but this goes back

19:36

to the time when Coppola was

19:38

making apocalypse now and had already

19:40

started to conceive of megalopolis and

19:43

really the connections between these two runaway

19:46

productions abound. This is

19:48

as good a film as has ever been

19:50

made about the chaos of making a film,

19:53

of making an ambitious film of the

19:55

sort that no one has ever

19:57

made before and of the fallacies of ego. that

20:00

accompany being an artist of this stature.

20:02

I mean, it is rich, it is

20:04

complex, it is unvarnished, it doesn't try

20:07

to like rehabilitate anyone's reputation or forgive

20:09

them for their excesses of the time.

20:12

It's just a really, really fantastic thorough

20:14

documentary that is Hearts of Darkness, a

20:16

filmmaker's apocalypse. That's a great pick. Thank

20:19

you very much, Chris. Juelle, what is

20:21

making you happy this week? Oh

20:23

my gosh. Have you heard of a TV series that's

20:25

gay as hell? It's called Interview with the Vampire. Might

20:28

have recommended it. If

20:32

I've recommended it in the past, I apologize, but not really

20:34

because not enough of you are watching it. I should never

20:37

have to stop talking about this show and how good it

20:39

is. It is an adaptation

20:41

of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, but

20:43

what makes it sensational is that instead of

20:45

the lead character being a slave owner who

20:48

spends a lot of time on his plantation,

20:50

disgusting, eating his slaves, it's

20:52

really like a vile part of the

20:54

book to try to get through. They're

20:56

like, what if we made him black

20:58

and it's New Orleans and

21:01

he's trying to get a nice place for

21:04

his family, but also he's closeted and dealing with

21:06

that. Brilliant, beautiful, excellently

21:08

portrayed in everything. The writing is

21:10

gorgeous. It's so beautiful. You will

21:13

love spending time in New Orleans

21:15

in this show. They shoot it

21:17

so wonderfully. The drama and also

21:19

no queerness

21:22

is hinted at. It is not subtle in any

21:24

way, shape, or form. Louie and Lestat

21:26

are together. What more do you want romance

21:28

readers? There are so many of you. Please

21:30

watch the show. The first season is on

21:32

Netflix. AMC also has an app. They said

21:35

if you'd like to watch season two, you

21:37

may visit that app. You'll binge it in

21:39

like two nights. Spectacular show,

21:41

Interview with the Vampire. Go watch it. Thank

21:43

you very much, Joan Laniek. What is

21:45

making me happy this week? The British

21:48

actor, writer, comedian David Mitchell is half

21:50

of the comedy team, Michelin Webb, who

21:52

did Peep Show and that Michelin Webb

21:54

look. Mitchell is also a staple of

21:56

UK panel shows like What I Lie

21:58

to You. And his

22:01

whole vibe is uptight,

22:03

repressed, self-conscious snob who

22:06

worries very much about being perceived as

22:09

an uptight, repressed, self-conscious snob.

22:13

It may not shock you to learn he speaks to me. I

22:16

understand him, he understands me. I've been listening

22:19

to his audio books lately. Unruly

22:21

is about British monarchs through the ages,

22:23

about which he is very savagely funny.

22:26

And Backstory, two words, is a memoir from

22:28

2012 in which

22:30

he kind of roams around London

22:32

and tells stories of his life

22:34

and career that are sparked by

22:36

the places he passes along his

22:38

walk. He's funny, he's witty, he's

22:40

very, very fussy. And he is

22:42

so consumed, racked, I would say,

22:45

by the very British fear of any kind

22:47

of social embarrassment that as I'm

22:50

listening to him, he makes me feel

22:52

like I'm doing okay in comparison. So

22:54

those are the audio books of the

22:56

very, very British David Mitchell. And

22:58

that is what's making me happy this weekend. If

23:00

you want links for what we recommended, plus some

23:02

more recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org

23:05

slash pop culture newsletter. That brings

23:07

us to the end of our show, Chris Klimick,

23:09

Joelle Monique. Thank you so much for being here.

23:11

Thank you, Ben. Thank you, I wish I could

23:13

do a maniacal cackle on command, but I just

23:16

can't. Oh well, performance anxiety. This episode was produced

23:18

by Mike Katziff and Hafsah Fathema and edited by

23:20

Jessica Reedy, and Halokkamin provides our theme music. Thanks

23:22

for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

23:25

I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next

23:27

week. Thank you. Thanks

23:58

for watching. We'll see you next

24:00

week. Bye. at ixl.com/ NPR.