Table of contents:
- As an epigraph, we will quote Anatoly Lunacharsky, if the reader still remembers this cultural comrade-in-arms of Vladimir Lenin. “Healthy epochs … do not need psychopathic spokesmen. If a mentally ill person speaks at such a time … he will even be sent to the clinic. In an era that is unbalanced culturally and in everyday life (this is exactly the period of the era that the film demonstrates to us! - A. Sh.) … history strikes with its virtuoso hand just on the pathological keys”
- The background of the plot contains the most important thing. What Vladimir Vysotsky sang about: "There are few real violent, so there are no leaders." And here - on you! Here it is - ready-made
- The film "Joker", like any outstanding work of art, is, in fact, a projective test, in which everyone sees what he wants and what is hidden in his subconscious
- The Joker is in the film that "pathological key", which was hit by the history of the American city, unwittingly making it a symbol of "riots". The name of the city "Gotham" (Goddamn) is translated, by the way, - the final touch! - as "Cursed by God"
As an epigraph, we will quote Anatoly Lunacharsky, if the reader still remembers this cultural comrade-in-arms of Vladimir Lenin. “Healthy epochs … do not need psychopathic spokesmen. If a mentally ill person speaks at such a time … he will even be sent to the clinic. In an era that is unbalanced culturally and in everyday life (this is exactly the period of the era that the film demonstrates to us! - A. Sh.) … history strikes with its virtuoso hand just on the pathological keys”
- Film: "Joker" (2019), USA, Canada
- Director: Todd Phillips
- Starring: Joaquin Phoenix
And now you can convey your impression of the film. I tried very hard to watch him as a psychiatrist, but by the end I was convinced that, if desired, American directors can clinically accurately show a real mentally ill person. They always knew how to do it better than Soviet and Russian directors (remember, for example, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or "Rain Man"). But there is no clinical (in the nosological sense) convincingness in the brilliant acting of the actor. Apparently, this was not the purpose of the film.
From my point of view, the character's “schizophrenic touch” is just a camouflage designed for a non-specialist viewer.
The background of the plot contains the most important thing. What Vladimir Vysotsky sang about: "There are few real violent, so there are no leaders." And here - on you! Here it is - ready-made
The film shows one of the historical paths of the emergence of various rebellions and uprisings in different countries, in which mentally unhealthy subjects played the leading role of a free or involuntary leader. I do not even consider it necessary to disassemble the plot according to the "psychopathological bones" to prove my alleged diagnosis.
Most likely, the Joker was a psychopathic personality with a hereditary burden (schizophrenia?) On the mother's side. All the murders he committed are psychologically understandable, although not entirely adequate, he has the plasticity of a dancer, emotionally the hero is completely preserved, which simply cannot be with a long-lasting schizophrenic process.
The filmmakers also bowed to the "antipsychiatric" movement: the hero declares that when he stopped taking medications, he recovered. And on the Murray Franklin show, he makes no less political speech.
The directors filled the storyline with "trickery" so that the audience could interpret the film in their own way. And in this they are right, they did not pursue simplicity, otherwise it would have turned out not a thriller, but a "revolutionary propaganda".
The film "Joker", like any outstanding work of art, is, in fact, a projective test, in which everyone sees what he wants and what is hidden in his subconscious
Disputes about the psychiatric diagnosis of a character or a historical person are often conditional in connection with the very relative concept of a mental norm, which changes both in time and in geographic space. For the sake of justice, let us give the definition of the World Health Organization, which since 1948 has interpreted health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being." If we proceed from this point of view, then it is hardly possible to find at least one healthy person on the planet.
