Yep, he’s pretty spot on. Fincher gave us a couple quotes yesterday, and this is by far the most accurate of the two.
But first let’s just define exactly what he said.
"I don't think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, 'Yeah, let's take [Taxi Driver's'] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy's'] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars,”
So he’s actually saying a couple things. The first is that the film conflates Rupert Pupkin and Travis Bickle into a character that makes absolutely no sense, because Pupkin and Bickle are two sides of the same coin.
There’s actually a fascinating piece of criticism from Vox on Joker which I will cite liberally here as it is what personally made me agree with this statement long before it left Fincher’s mouth.
It makes an argument I imagine would have been just as obvious to contemporary audiences, that Bickle and Pupkin are two sides of the same coin. They are two different ways of looking at the existential hero who loses sight of reality.
Their differences start to emerge in what they want to accomplish and how they go about doing that. Remember, King of Comedy is rated PG, so Pupkin doesn’t go on a spree of vigilantism. Instead he goes on a talk show.
This presents one character (Bickle) whose main goal is to be loved by helping society, but he’s so deranged he thinks that ‘helping society’ is perpetuating more violence. Pupkin is a character without that false altruism, he just wants to be “King for a night”.
But, what Joker does, is mash both these archetypes together. Arthur Fleck has the self-destructive, violent, me-against-the-world tendencies of Bickle and the single-minded desire for fame through making people laugh of Pupkin. So, it begs the question, what the fuck does he want?
Because Joker mashes up two existing characters, and fundamentally misunderstands those two characters are to some extent opposites, the entire film becomes muddied by inconsistent motivation.
As far as why Fincher said its a betrayal of the mentally ill, that can also extend to the brokenness of Joker’s script.
The thing with Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, is they are not heroes (or even antiheroes). They are “madman posing as heroes”. No matter what the college dudebros may say, neither of these men are supposed to be empathetic characters.
They are supposed to be sympathetic, you’re supposed to feel bad for them, but if when Bickle shoots up the brothel at the end you’re cheering for him, I’m afraid you’ve watched the movie wrong. The intention, which was brilliantly accomplished by Scorsese/Schrader, is to think “well shit. he finally cracked”.
But Joker’s mistake, and the manner in which it betrays the mentally ill, is making him empathetic. The film beats its protagonist down into a pulp, and shows every one of the characters killed being, well, “awful”. It makes its world so overly depraved you want to see society fall as well.
When Fleck kills people in Joker, it comes off as cathartic. When Bickle kills people in Taxi Driver, it’s terrifying. After sitting through the first 2 hours of Joker, you feel nothing for Fleck but pity. When Joker stands on the car, what are you supposed to think besides “about time they’ve started the revolution”?
And that’s how it betrayed the mentally ill. Because it’s not a good message to send that mentally ill people are murderers if you push them hard enough, and that we should feel really bad for them if they go that far.
That we should say “It doesn’t matter because they live in a society.”
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