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From Fleck to Joker

Isha Nagpal

The movie Joker(2019) deals with the life story of one of the most famous villains of our times, The Joker himself. The movie begins with describing how Arthur Fleck, a person with a neurological laughing disorder, tries to navigate his life among a distraught and politically unstable New York City. He is seen struggling with various situations and trying to make his career in comedy. However, in the end, we see him turning into the famous villain that he is in the later films. He displays characters and symptoms of what we call a psychopathic personality. In this blog post I will explain how there are, not one, but various different factors that can lead to psychopathy and criminal behaviour in a person and how the movie Joker has tried to portray that. 

One of the many popular notions about psychopathy has been that Psychopaths are born as psychopaths and that there is something wrong with the wiring of their brains. This also gives rise to another notion that a psychopath can’t be treated or cured. Some researches have successfully have linked psychopathy to deficits in many brain regions such as the hippocampus and amygdala which governs stimulus-reinforcement associations, fear responses, and emotional understanding. (Anderson and Kiehl, 2014) However, just the biological etiology of psychopathy has been an insufficient indicator of telling who develops psychopathic tendencies and who does not. Coming to Arthur Fleck’s case, there had been brain injuries which had been vaguely mentioned when he comes across his mother’s medical history and realised that he had been abused as a child. But, the movie did a great job of portraying a number of factors along with this together worked towards transforming Fleck into the famous Joker. 

These other social factors that the movie displays comprise of isolation, alienation, discontent towards authorities, deprivation in terms of financial support, lack of parental support and a disorganised and dimly lit city. One of the most important social factors has to do with childhood trauma. A study on the ‘Effects of early experience on children's recognition of facial displays of emotion’ by Pollak and Sinha suggests that “physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger.” (2002) This proves how Childhood trauma alters the way we perceive and understand emotions, which is one of the main symptoms of psychopathy and clarifies how circumstances can give rise to psychopathy. Although we never see Arthur being diagnosed as a clinical Psychopath we can see many symptoms arising in his personality that compels us to classify his criminal behaviour towards the later part of the movie as psychopathic. The movie showed this journey by carefully contemplating every challenge that he is facing on a daily basis and his struggles with other issues such as hallucinations. It displays the Joker's character as someone who happened to become a villain only because everything that he endured in his lifetime. 

The movie seems to be working towards sensitizing people about mental health issues. It aims to demonstrate the kind of impact that people’s mindless actions can have on somebody’s mental health. However, the movie can be criticized in the way that it portrays mental illness in the first place. There is a clear connection between mental illness and violence that has been shown in the film. This feeds into the stigma of mentally ill people being insane and dangerous to others, which is absolutely not the case and has been carelessly woven into the narrative. We, as audience, need to remember that such movies, while creating a lot of awareness about mental health, are not the gold standard of how people with certain illnesses behave. While being a criticism of the way our society functions, the story tries to base its plot on understanding the unintended consequences of social and political deprivation that people are facing today in many parts of the world. 

Psychopathy is still an ongoing field of research and has many controversial and opposing views regarding its acceptance. However, we can clearly see that there is no one cause that might lead to psychopathic tendencies. The movie Joker has been one of the better attempts at understanding this issue. While it fails to show a realistic image of psychopathy, there is a satisfaction that the makers and actors of the film try to bridge the gap between people’s understanding of this issue. 

References
Anderson, N. E., & Kiehl, K. A. (2014). Psychopathy: developmental perspectives and their implications for treatment. Restorative neurology and neuroscience, 32(1), 103–117. doi:10.3233/RNN-139001
McLaughlin, K. A., & Lambert, H. K. (2017). Child Trauma Exposure and Psychopathology: Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience. Current opinion in psychology, 14, 29–34. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.10.004

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