ABSTRACT
At the climax of Joker, as a guest on the Murray Franklin talk-show show, Arthur Fleck looks out at the studio cameras and the audience and says: “This is exactly how I imagined it.” Earlier scenes show Fleck rehearsing this TV appearance, including how he will draw his pistol and blow his own brains out. But Fleck changes his mind and instead improvises a different type of broadcast violence. Invoking King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, the film also recalls Network and real-life televised violence such as the on-screen suicide of news anchor Christine Chubbick. Moreover, the scene powerfully problematises the concept of “performance crime,” such as that embodied by the Christchurch shooter’s livestream video. This chapter reads Joker through two frameworks: (1) the generic conventions of vigilante films, and (2) the real-life genre of performance crime murder videos. These two frameworks become a way of making sense of important scenes in the film, such as the climax and Fleck’s early imitative rehearsal scenes. But the uneasy friction of revenge film pleasures with the unquestionably horrific nature of (real) performance crime videos enables a way of understanding the hysterical discourse around Joker in the weeks leading up to its release.
