October, 2024. I’m on a train, Amtrak, headed home from New York City. This is the Vermonter 56, originating in D.C., making stops in Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, New York, Trenton, New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Northampton, Brattleboro, White River Junction, and Montpelier, and other towns, before terminating in St. Albans City. I’m in an east-facing window seat. I have a large coffee, light and sweet, and a chocolate chip cookie, both from Vesuvio Bakery in Moynihan Train Hall. The time is 12pm, noon. Last night I stayed up till after 2am at the Alamo Drafthouse watching Joker: Folie À Deux. Yesterday, I spent the train ride to New York watching the first Joker movie from 2019, also directed by Todd Phillips. I told myself that I’d use this train ride home to write up my critique of the two films—the gist of which is that the celebrity-worship-fantasy aspect of the Phillips Joker sub-franchise is too much, too harsh for my taste—and but across the aisle and three rows ahead sits a World Famous Playwright and all I want to do is talk to her, get her to notice me.

About 13 minutes into Joker, Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, fantasizes about meeting his hero, a Jay Leno-type talk show host called Murry Franklin, played by Robert DeNiro. In the fantasy, Arthur is in the audience of the live show, and Murry recognizes him as a special person, deserving of love.

I text my friend, also a fan of this Famous Playwright.

Me: XXXXX is on my train.

Friend: What are you waiting for?

Me: It’s a really crowded train. People are all in the aisles.

Friend: Let me know how it goes.

I sip my coffee, take another bit of chocolate chip cookie. It’s hot in this train car, and the chocolate chips have mostly liquified. I haven’t a napkin.

Twenty minutes into the movie, Arthur Fleck, aka Joker but not yet, meets his neighbor Sophie, played by Zazie Beetz. He follows her to work one day, to a bank, and the camera lingers while he decides not to go inside to speak to her. One thing that happens in this movie, often: the camera lingers, which is another way of saying the movie is s l o w. A few scenes later, Sophie appears at Arthur’s door, smiling, flirting, too cute for words, and it’s just so obvious that she isn’t really there. The movie establishes its title character so well that we don’t believe for a moment that this neighbor would come to see him, plus we also already know that he has an active fantasy life. Plenty of movies feature characters who only exist in minds. In, say, A Beautiful Mind (2001), we really do believe that the imaginary characters are there, until we don’t. The protagonist, John Nash (Russell Crowe), also believes that they are real. The viewer’s realization of the truth happens simultaneously with Nash’s, and the effect is heartbreaking.[1] Any complexity in Joker is illusory. Arthur never believes that Sophie has come to see him, and neither do we, but the movie pretends that we do, and the pretense is frustrating.

I’ve seen two-and-a-half of Famous Playwright’s plays, plus a film she made last year. Some artists, you just trust them, no matter what. They make two or three things that move you and you’re with them for life, through the ups and downs.

In his 2023 Netflix Comedy Special The Dreamer, Dave Chapelle claims that being “a very powerful dreamer,” is part of what made him successful. He is often recognized by fans, and when that happens, “I’m in that guy’s dream.”

By 12:30 the train aisles have cleared as travelers have found empty seats. Famous Playwright stands up and starts walking towards me. Of course she isn’t walking towards me, of course she’s walking to the bathroom. I sneak glimpses of her. In case it isn’t totally obvious, she is beautiful, equipped with eyes that burrow deep into your soul, when she wants them to. I want them to. But she doesn’t look at me.

Joker, 27:00: Arthur, a party clown by trade, dances to “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” at a children’s hospital. Arthur’s dance is terrible, and but the children’ hairless heads show us that he is the least of their worries. Arthur is happy, and he knows it, and he stomps his feet, and a gun falls through his trousers onto the floor. It’s a shocking moment, the one truly emotional beat in the film, and I gasp, out loud, because I really feel for Arthur.

It occurs to me that Famous Playwright grew up in the town just over the river from where I live–I know this from reading about her film—and that we’re probably both getting off at the same stop. I could speak to her there, on the platform, when we exit the train together. Maybe she needs help with her suitcase. Maybe she needs a ride. I start to run through opening lines. Hi, sorry, are you…? Oh, um, you look like… Oh, wow, XXXXX, it’s really you, hello, I loved your film!

(I didn’t love her film. I expected to, and then I didn’t.)

There was so much smoking in Folie À Deux. Arthur and Lee (Lady Gaga) both smoke more or less constantly throughout the movie. We often see closeup shots of his cigarette, and we often hear the burning sound when he takes a drag. Smoke swims around the screen. Much of the lighting is stylized to resemble stage lights, and the dramatic effect of stage lighting often relies on smoke, or “fog,” as it’s called. Joker’s cigarette smoke provides the fog for dramatic lighting. The smoking itself is repulsive. I was a heavy smoker for many years, and some movies make smoking look glamorous, romantic, desirable; not this one.

I bet Famous Playwright is one of those people who can smoke one or two cigarettes at a party and then forget about smoking for six or eighteen months.

I’ve met plenty of famous people, more you than you, probably. I used to work at a Famous cable news channel, and it was famous people every day all day, no big deal. I was an audio technician–my job was to fit talent and guests with microphones. I worked this job for ten years, and I paid very close attention to what people said, how they said it. I learned the rhythm and cadence of how people speak on TV. The recurring fantasy was that I might somehow be on TV myself, that I might somehow be in the right place at the right time to move from behind to out in front of the camera, that the attention I paid might be noticed. Oh wow, someone would say. The audio guy’s really good, put him on, give him a spot what’s his name? This is, essentially, the same fantasy that Arthur has. He lives his life more or less invisible, and he wants to be noticed. But then what?

Near the beginning of Famous Playwright’s movie, the protagonist, a small girl, convinces her mother to pick her up early from summer sleepaway camp. Just as she’s about to leave, another camper gives the girl a gift. Now, realizing she has a friend, the girl doesn’t want to leave, but it’s too late. She’s committed herself to a course of action.

Every time Warner Brothers releases a new Batman or Batman-adjacent movie, someone complains that, essentially, the movie doesn’t live up to his expectations. This isn’t how the story is supposed to go, he says. That’s not how these characters are supposed to act.

2013ish, I’m in the NewsCorp building in Manhattan, in an elevator with Shepard Smith, Neil Cavuto, and someone else, a famous Fox News anchor, I’ve forgotten who, might’ve been a producer. Shep quips, “well this [elevator car] would be a bad one to crash.” The other people chuckle, yes, aren’t we important. I say nothing, but spend the next eleven years searching for the perfect comeback, a string of five words to indicate that any elevator car that I’m on is, for me, a bad one [to crash], that my life is also worth noticing.

Near the end of 2008’s The Dark Night, Heath Ledger’s Joker visits the horribly disfigured Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in the hospital, tries to convince Harvey that he isn’t responsible for his injuries. “Your men, your plan,” Harvey says.

“Do I really look like a guy with a plan?”

Joker does not.

“You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know? I just do things.”

What on earth would I do with Famous Playwright?

I text my wife.

Me: XXXXX is on my train.

Wife: Did you tell her you didn’t like her movie?

Me: What should I say?

Wife: Don’t wait too long.

Arthur Fleck never gets the kind of attention a human needs, and it destroys him. He kills Murry Franklin. He would prefer to kill his father—because it’s that initial absence that harms him the most—but he can’t get to his real father,[2] so he makes do with the next best thing, Murry.

I finish my coffee and decide that I’m going to say hi. My plan is, when the train stops in Northampton, I’m going to say “hi, sorry, are you XXXXX? I thought I recognized you on the train. My name is Michael, I’m a big fan. I’ve seen a few of your plays, ZZZZ and YYYYY, and the one about the writer’s room, well, half of it, I can’t recall the title—I didn’t walk out, I was kicked out, asked to leave, escorted—and also my wife and I saw your film at Amherst Cinema a few weeks ago, and that was just so cool, so cool to see all these local places we recognize in the movie.” We will banter a bit, just as long as it takes to lug suitcases from platform to car, less than three minutes. I’ll close with something like “Thanks for putting such cool art into the world.” Reader, of course you know that this is not how the story went.

The trick to life, Dave Chapelle says, is “to be wise enough to know when you are living in your dream. And you have to be humble enough to accept when you’re in someone else’s.”

Two stops from my own destination, Famous Playwright puts on her jacket, retrieves her suitcase from the overhead shelf, clutches the hand of the small child she’s had with her the whole time but who I never saw, never bothered to notice, and exits the train.

Famous Playwright is a very powerful dreamer. I adore her work, even when it isn’t rendered exactly the way I want it to be—I still love it. Her plays move me, sometimes merely for existing, and but not only for existing. Half a year later, I’m still nervous about speaking to her, even though I didn’t, even though I won’t, even though, the truth is, I don’t want to.

I leave half of my chocolate chip cookie in the seat pocket, melted, ruined. Remembering, I feel bad knowing that someone else cleaned up my mess.

[1] There should be a term for this, when character and audience realize something at the exact same time. It happens in The Sixth Sense, the Doctor Who episode called “The Empty Child,” Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and a few others. These moments are rare, and difficult to do well. They make a rewatch more interesting and fun. They complicate a text.

[2] Of course his father isn’t Thomas Wayne. The moment the movie introduced that ridiculous idea is the moment it lost me, and if I hadn’t already purchased tickets to the sequel I would’ve given up right there. No one was ever going to fall for that. No one was ever going to believe that Zazie Beetz was Arthur’s girlfriend, and no one was ever going to believe that Batman and Joker are brothers. This movie thinks we are stupid, that just because it’s dressed up in terrific actors and beautiful lighting and perfect photography that it can fool us, and it can’t. The sequel, Joker: Folie À Deux, at least, tries somethings unexpected and new. It utterly fails, but at least it tries. I’ve never seen a franchise sequel as technically, thematically, or structurally ambitious as Folie À Deux, and the fact that it’s both a critical and box office calamity means that filmmakers and studios will be even more risk-hesitant than they already are, and that’s a shame.

Stupid movie. Stupid sub-franchise gets what it deserves.

Thanks for enjoying this reprint of a previously published essay. If you like this kind of pop culture memoir essay, and would like to read and support more of it, please consider a free or paid subscription. There is no difference between paid and free content—a paid subscription, which you can have for $2.50 a month, is a gesture of financial support. If you like what you see, please share widely.

Thanks for spending some of your time here. Time is life.

Share

Leave a comment

Buy Me a Coffee