[COLUMN] The People's Joker is a Triumph of Outsider Pop Art | by Darren Mooney

Note: The People’s Joker is screening in the United Kingdom and Ireland from Friday. It is currently available on MUBI in the United States.

Next week sees the release of the first comic book movie of the year, Captain America: Brave New World. It also sees, in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the theatrical release of Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, starring the co-writer and director as the Clown Prince of Crime.

The People’s Joker is not sanctioned by Warner Bros. Indeed, Drew has been careful to stress throughout press and promotion that she never received a cease-and-desist order She did, however, receive a letter the day before the film’s premiere at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival that communicated the studio’s concern over her use of the character. “This letter was actually kind of complimentary, but it expressed their concern that the film infringed on their brand,” Drew recalls.

The People’s Joker is a remarkable accomplishment. It is a piece of genuine outsider art that uses one of the most recognizable brands in the world to tell a deeply personal story. The project was prompted by Todd Phillips’ Joker, which Drew acknowledges as “inspiring” to her. Taking her cues from that film’s unconventional imagining of the Harlequin of Hate, Drew thought it was a worthwhile experiment to put her own distinct stamp of the iconic supervillain.

The People’s Joker was made over the course of the pandemic. Drew pulled together an eccentric team of alternative comedians and outsider legends to stitch together a feature film using techniques like green screen and animation. The results are delightfully surreal, a more ambitious take on a concept like Shrek Retold. It is also a flashpoint for debates over the ownership and purpose of these sorts of intellectual properties. Who are they for? What purpose do they serve?

Despite drawing very heavily from various imaginings and reimaginings of the Batman brand, The People’s Joker is a deeply personal story for Drew. It is the tale of her coming to terms with her trans identity, finding her place in outsider comedy and escaping a deeply toxic romantic relationship. It just happens to be set in Gotham City, casting the clown comedienne (Drew) against such establishment figures as Batman (Phil Braun) and Lorne Michaels (Maria Bamford).

The metaphor works remarkably well. As a young child struggling with her identity, she is dosed by psychiatrist Jonathan Crane (Christian Calloway) with the experimental antidepressant “Smylex”, which puts the subject in a grinning dopey haze. Adopting the comic persona of Joker the Harlequin, the lead character finds herself in an abusive relationship with Mr. J (Kane Distler). All this is drawn from Batman comics and films, but filtered through the prism of Drew’s own life.

“It is my life, and embarrassingly so,” Drew has confessed. At one point, the lead character undergoes an awakening while watching a film that is obviously Batman Forever. “That memory of mine only resurfaced as I was making the film,” Drew explains. “I was taken to see Batman Forever when I was seven, and I identified with Nicole Kidman’s character rather than Batman. I felt represented by this very expensive gay art film. It was as if I was seeing the rest of my life.”

Although Drew has talked about how she is only “legally allowed to explore this material because [she’s] exploring it from the lens of [her] own personal experience”, this is undeniably a movie about Batman. In particular, about the queer subtext of Batman that is often suppressed and overlooked. The People’s Joker is in large part a reclamation of the queer reading of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.

Schumacher was candid that he never set out to make a queer Batman movie. “If I wasn’t gay, they would never say those things,” he opined of the queer readings of his Batman films. Still, he was also proud of what his work meant to a queer audience, quipping, “I never thought it was an important moment in gay cinema, but hey, I’ll take it.” There has always a queer reading of superheroes in general and Batman in particular that is largely overlooked in mainstream superhero cinema.

In this sense, there is a debate about who these characters should belong to. There is a tendency to talk about superheroes as “a modern mythology”, but the truth is that intellectual property laws make it more like a corporate-owned religion. While myths and legend exist as part of the communal consciousness, a public resource that can grow and change as needed, these intellectual properties maintain a “canon” policed by gigantic conglomerates. What is and is not allowed to exist within that canon is tightly regulated.

Theoretically, these companies cannot hold on to their creations forever. Assuming that the period of ownership is not extended, Superman and Batman will enter the public domain in 2034 and 2035 respectively. There is a question about what will happen when those icons are released from corporate ownership. When anybody has the freedom to tell a Superman or a Batman story, what happens to the public conception of Superman and Batman?

Recent exploitation films like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey offer one grim model, as cynical grifters just emulate cheaper models of the cultural fracking employed by the current owners, trying ruthlessly to extract the maximum value for minimum expenditure. The People’s Joker proposes an alternative. It is liberating to see these recognizable characters and archetypes reconstructed by an artist with a very strong and personal attachment to the material.

Drew is not simply telling her own story with a Batman aesthetic on top of it. The People’s Joker is instead about what these stories mean and how they can be reinterpreted and reimagined. “I really do think it’s true that comic books are kind of the closest thing we have to myths,” Drew has stated. Joking that she wanted to treat Batman like it was The Iliad, Drew explained, “I think about stuff, even just basic fairy tales as being these lessons and stuff that we’re imparting on kids, trying to return these characters to a place where they’re not just corporate IP fodder.” It’s a lofty goal.

The People’s Joker is very clearly the work of somebody who loves the source material. Drew obviously knows the Batman mythology backwards and forwards. In interviews, the co-writer and director can wax lyrical about cult characters like Jason Todd and Carrie Kelly, and what they represent in terms of conversations about larger Batman continuity. Drew frequently and casually references “the Grant Morrison super sanity Joker”, demonstrating a strong awareness of the comics.

However, Drew is not referencing Grant Morrison’s incredible seven-year run on Batman to make in-jokes or to tease fans or even to assert her own creative bona fides. Drew is referencing Morrison’s work because Morrison’s work spoke to her on a deeply personal level. “I connected it with it as somebody who is a trauma survivor and is very much coming at it from this trans experience,” she explained. Drew has a deeply personal relationship to the work, and that shines through.

To put it simply: these characters and images mean something to Drew beyond the generic. They aren’t just lists of trivia or factoids. This is not the empty surface-level literalism that defines so much of the discourse over the “comic book accuracy” of these sorts of adaptations. It is actual engagement with the work on a personal level, and using the work as a mode of personal expression. In a world where these properties are more often fodder for vacuous nonsense like The Flash or Kraven, that has real value.

There is an ongoing argument about the extent to which comic books and comic book movies deserve more artistic recognition and credibility than they receive. Certainly, there can be a certain snobbishness in how these projects are discussed and debated. However, at a point where major studios work to flatten more and more of their big releases into bland “content soup”, it is more important than ever that these works retain a distinct personality and identity.

This is what art is. It is a personal expression of the artist’s relationship to the world. Comic books and comic book movies are capable of this. To return to Drew’s influences, Morrison’s run on Batman is magnificent, but it is also deeply personal. It is inspired by their own parents’ divorce. Morrison is far from the only writer to pour their heart and soul into a monthly Batman comic. Tom King acknowledges that his own Batman run is about expressing how important his marriage is to him “through panels and words and ink.”

This has always been the way. Much has been written about how the Thing, the iconic member of the Fantastic Four, was clearly modelled by artist Jack Kirby on himself. His biographer Mark Evanier argues that the character Big Barda was “pretty much” Kirby’s wife, Roz. Although the artist himself denied it, it has frequently been noted that artist Steve Ditko drew Peter Parker in a way that was “visually modeled on [his] profile photograph in his High School Yearbook.”

However, The People’s Joker is a comic book adaptation with a strong authorial voice arriving at a moment when these sorts of movies are becoming less and less common. Batman adaptations have always benefited from directors with strong personalities, like Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan. However, studios have become less willing to trust artists to put themselves in these projects. Nia DaCosta famously had to clarify that The Marvels was not her film. “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie.” Something is lost in that.

These characters are archetypes. They can be reimagined and reinterpreted in any number of ways. They can mean multiple things to multiple people. That has always been their strength – particularly the strength of the Batman brand. The People’s Joker is a rejection of the tyranny of “the canon”, a genuine attempt to break free of the bland boundaries and boxes that corporations try to impose on these stories and characters in order to keep them as generic as possible.

The People’s Joker is a strange little object, a deeply personal tale of a woman coming to terms with her identity filtered through the lens of recognizable intellectual property. It is also about the power of these sorts of stories, and what it means to be able to find one’s self through these grand operatic allegories. The People’s Joker is as compelling an argument as one can imagine for superheroes as art and pop mythology. It’s enough to put a smile on one’s face.