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[COLUMN] The People's Joker is a Triumph of Outsider Pop Art | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2025-02-10 15:00:13 +0000 UTC
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.
Comments
Darren Mooney
Thank you! This means a lot to me. I wasn't sure what the third slot this week would be, and I was wary of writing about "The People's Joker" because it's been covered a great deal and had been done by much better writers. So I'm delighted people got something from it.
Darren Mooney
Yep. And I do think "Blood and Honey" is an "as above, so below" thing. Where that's what our culture has been conditioned to expect an IP play to look like, so naturally it's the first thing that is done with an out-of-term IP.
Dan McAlister
I’m a big believer in more limited IP regulations than what we have now, and love seeing this kind of remix/re-interpretive work get recognition. However, I also forget that, as you point out, works like “Blood and Honey” can be just as guilty of cultural fracking as corporate owners. Thank you for spotlighting work that takes IP in more enriching directions.
William Alexander
Even when a topic has been covered before by authors I like, DM manages to find an interesting or new take. I appreciate that!
Darren Mooney
Thank you. I also think, while that is the most important thing, it’s not the only thing. I hate to center the cis experience here, but it was also - like “I Saw the TV Glow” - just really interesting in terms of shared that experience (or a version) of that experience with somebody who has been lucky enough to always feel at home in the body that I was born to. I feel like I have a better emotional understanding than I did before watching either, if that makes sense? It’s just interesting to have somebody share their perspective and their experiences. We are very limited creatures in some respects - our lives are our own, others are unknowable to us by their nature - but I feel like art is one of the small ways we get to broaden that perspective, even a little bit.
Darren Mooney
I was surprised at how much I chuckled at it.
Darren Mooney
Oh, it is absolutely is fan fiction. But most licensed media is fan fiction! It just happens to be rubber stamped by the corporate owners. (“The Rise of Skywalker”, for example, is fan fiction in ways that are pejorative. It is, to me, indistinguishable from the worst impulses of fan fiction. But, say, Tom King’s “Mister Miracle”, which is about his own marriage and his own psychological issues, is also fan fiction, but to a much better end.) Most comics since the seventies are fan fiction, the work of ascended fans interpreting/homaging/reimagining classic characters. That does not diminish them, to be clear.
Mastrix
Thank you for writing this Darren, it gives a very insightful context that I think helps broaden the exposure of the important use of art and cinema, to an audience that may be less familiar with trans people and the (often uniquely singular and personal) experience of the recognition and awakening of queer identity. Right now, especially. <3
Tim Wilson
This is really interesting, especially for a character which more and more has been flattened into a series of symbols that twists into whatever the plot needs at the time. I think everyone has some characters that they relate to on a formative level and it’s frankly shocking that Warner have been somewhat on board with this. There’s a lot of jokes to make that this is fancy self-insert fanfiction but people have long used such things as a method of self-expression through a lens that means something to them. If it does well, this may be a space to watch.
Samantha Yost
I adore this film; I wish more people would go see it. It is also far funnier than I expected it to be.
Michael McCarthy
"What is and is not allowed to exist within that canon is tightly regulated." Not sure I agree with this or we have perhaps a different understanding of the term. I think DC have been quite vague about what is canon with regards to the DCU/ Gunnverse which allowed for flexibility when stuff (often) didn't land. The MCU has been a bit more regulated perhaps but they've changed paths multiple times (Agents of Shield, Daredevil). They are corporate owned but it doesn't feel like something like Star Wars where a whole slate of expanded universe was wiped off the board to make room for new material and even some of that is being rolled back. And to be honest, the fans gatekeeping of the canon tends to be much more offensive than the conglomerates. At the end of the day, they want to make money and trans money is just as green as any other. It's the old guard fan and grifter influencers backlash to any kind of progressivism that prevents more alternative 'official' interpretations. Would we have had more official queer Batman interpretations if the media and fanbase didn't crap all over Schumaker's films even 28 years after release? The studios can make the movies but people have to show up to them and make them profitable.
