The Joker debuted in Batman #1 (April 1940) as the eponymous character's first villain, about a year after Batman's debut in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939). ... lose any and all empathy they had built up for Arthur during the previous hour and change if he snapped and murdered a woman and her child. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, Arthur Fleck struggles with society and his own mental health as he lashes out at those around him. Maybe the entire film is his fantasy, and the only reality is that he’s been locked up in Arkham all along. . Arthur tries to contain his trademark laugh, and when the psychiatrist asks for the cause of his laughter, he says she would not understand the joke.Arthur is resigned to being misunderstood: He struggles to be seen, but is always painfully aware that he’s invisible to most. Most women who interact with the white male lead happen to be black, and none are stereotypes or historically stock characters (maids, mammies, sex workers, etc). Arthur, secured in a chair within brightly lit and claustrophobic environs, is seated across from another nameless black woman, this one a psychiatrist (“Arkham Psychiatrist,” played by April Grace; she’s the same actress who beautifully dressed down Tom Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey in “Magnolia”). This is revealed after he has a particularly "bad day" and walks into Sophie's apartment looking for her to comfort him. (Except in the long run it really is.) "So, there ya have it! Sophie is terrified by his presence, and it quickly becomes clear that she only knows him in a passing sense, and not in the intimate way we believed.They have a short-but-incredibly tense interaction with Sophie begging Arthur to leave and not hurt her or her young daughter and then...it cuts to Arthur storming down the apartment building hallway while VERY frightening music BLARES, and it is left up to the audience to interpret what the heck happened.And, TBH, people were pretty much right down the middle with their guesses:But, wonder no longer because this week the film's cinematographer, Lawrence Sher, revealed in an interview with “We wanted to make the interpretation of what's real versus what’s not real a part of the viewer’s experience,” Sher "Some people have asked me, ‘Was she killed?’ but Todd [Phillips] makes it clear she WASN'T killed," Sher "We leave hints [at what is real and not real] using imagery, or the way we covered scenes similarly between scenes," Sher said. What does someone get when they click on a spoiler-filled post with a SPOILER WARNING right at the beginning, but they read it anyway? Other characters in the film berate, ridicule, or even assault him when faced with his affliction, but it could be that the mother simply sees no reason to further escalate the situation. In fact, based on how black women engage with Arthur, one can infer that the director sees them as collective representatives of a basic humanity that’s otherwise absent in the characters who inhabit his very small world. "Outside of that, I like that people can...come to their own conclusions. “Joker” at least deserves some credit on this front: It bucks that trend. Deprived of individuality, they become a contrived device.Phillips’ placement of black women throughout the film appears deliberate and therefore impossible to ignore, although maybe less so for anyone who isn’t a black woman. Whatever the truth, the lack of attention to this side of “Joker” speaks to a diversity problem that extends beyond the industry; it involves the people tasked with assessing its quality as well. . At the same time, they’re largely nameless and exhibit a uniformity that creates a disturbing sense that they’re being used in service of another kind of cliche.Early on, Arthur encounters a black mother (Mandela Bellamy) and her young son (Demetrius Dotson II) on a packed city bus. 12:13 AM - 15 Oct 2019. The Joker is a master criminal with a clown-like appearance,and a violent sociopath who murders people for his own amusement, a vicious, calculating and psychopathic killer. If you live to see Joaquin Phoenix go to performing extremes like nobody’s business, this movie really is the apotheosis of that. In their final meeting, she tells Arthur that the system doesn’t care about people like him, nor does it care about people like her. But as a nameless black figure, the audience is left to make assumptions based on her race and gender. Also, someone please nominate Sher for an Oscar because, WOW, that cinematography, though. It’s clear from the expression on Arthur’s face that she is not that person.