Serenading the Losers
If 2016 was a kitschy kind of year, it at least taught us one thing.
The dead are only slightly dead.
There is a moment in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return that on its incandescent surface could have been lifted, weightless, from the great post-war dream of materialist deliverance: The top on the convertible is down, the radio on; The Paris Sisters are singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within the tapestry of this early Phil Spector production — his trademark wall of schlock eternally associated with AM Romance and Death (conditions Spector knew all too well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know. Amanda Seyfried’s Becky, scanning the sky with her enormous blue eyes, belongs to a more layered and mysterious realm since her director passed into that self-same whispering gallery — not to mention a decade pregnant with global grief.
If Lynch’s Return means going back home, then home is that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America’s music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to be truly devastating, be it the existential kind that inspires the malevolence everyone paid to have vicarious transit with, or the mere victimization of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in American popular culture when innocence of any variety was so lavishly examined, then toyed with, and finally killed. The free-floating chord that opens The Everly Brothers song, All I Have To Do is Dream, remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart.
A three-year death lurch oozed nostalgia between two forms of biblical pestilence:
Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and Covid-19.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood keeps us guessing with its elusive murmur that “Sharon Tate shall never die,” granting her — and us — a gaudy and wondrous L.A. to cavort in where it’s 1969 forever and movie stars still matter. We find ourselves in Tarantino’s vision of paradise (complete with flame throwers to the face of all who violate its immaculate caricature). In this oneiric echo chamber, momentarily shared by Lynch and Tarantino, Surrealism smiles down upon American blondness and muscle cars soaked in sunlight; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion, made possible by America’s industrial might; a bitter candy for romantics indeed, given that our home-grown auteur has declared his enthusiasm for the Gaza genocide — a more impassioned enthusiasm than he seems to have for producing what he claims will be his tenth and final film.
And yet, American cinema gave us evidence of an impending rupture that threatens the delicate membrane insulating the mythic Tate from her murderers; an ominous reminder of the gathering storm ahead. For transcendence took another route in 2019 when the mad catharsis of a deeply disturbed schnook in hideous clown makeup transformed him into an equally disturbed icon, lying unconscious atop a smashed police car. More emaciated than the Bible’s Nazarene, he rises from the dead as Nihilism’s glittering superstar, a murderous demigod of failure and inchoate class resentment, ready for his terrible fifteen minutes of closeup.
Now, what would such an unholy transfiguration be without a little music to help it along?
Stephen Sondheim wrote Send in the Clowns because the actress for whom it was written, Glynis Johns, couldn’t sing. Not to say that she was utterly without talent, of course. She just didn’t have much in the way of range or vocal firepower. “A lovely, sweet, bell-like voice,” he called it, that was nevertheless “breathy, and short-winded.” So the song that all but accidentally became, perhaps, his most enduring was deliberately composed in short phrases which enabled the singer, literally any singer in the world, to meet its demands with more authority than they could bring to the average show-stopper.
Send in the Clowns is a song of regret, and not one that those below a certain age are wisely advised to attempt; its structural simplicity notwithstanding. The wrong singer can, rightly or wrongly, seem to mock the thing, render it without the delicacy of emotional balance it requires. But coming from the right voice — Frank Sinatra, for example; one of the first to record it — it is a near majestic reflection on the end of love, free of bitterness and self-pity (a miracle in itself). Unfortunately, however, its ubiquity in the nearly five decades since its composition has cast it, helplessly, into that graveyard of popular culture, the Great American Songbook, where only a truly arresting rendition, one the ears cannot deny, could bring it back into life.
Musical irony, sad as this may be to contemplate, would seem the sole way American cinema can confront a world of horrors. Irony, after all, delivers to movie audiences the same thrilling reverb of shock and, yes, comfort as Lynch’s Return and its brightly-lit seance channeling whimsy straight from its source in Poe, who bequeaths to cinema a texture whose particular nap or weave is never granted names. The same unnamable textures apparently survive on television, a case of Poe resonating inside our minds, a collective consciousness replaced by cathode rays.
Admittedly it is the context in which Sondheim’s song is used in Joker which causes it to resonate in a wholly unexpected manner and not, strictly, the quality of its performance. As one of a trio of drunken Wall Street scumbags – princes of Capital (or at least servants to same); the residue of Wharton carrying on like they’re the cast of A Clockwork Orange as they enter a subway car and with all the impunity, real or imagined, of their class, begin to fuck with the passengers; finally zeroing in on poor Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), sitting there in full makeup after getting the heave-ho from his gig as a professional clown, all for dropping a .38 in front of a ward full of sick kids; sitting there laughing uproariously, uncontrollably, through an aggregation of despair that seemingly no one, least of all he, could begin to penetrate — Ben Warheit delivers Sondheim’s chestnut in the most literal sense of that word; carrying every line of it down the long subway car to its target; word by word, step by step, wielding the song not simply as a taunt (though it is surely that), but as something far more devastating before the three of them administer a savage beating to this wanton failure of a man.
The employment of music that is, on its face, contrary to the putative spirit of a scene or an image has been a regular occurrence in film since the 1960s. Its origins can be traced, with some precision, to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, with its Tab Hunter Fan Club biker gang decking themselves out in all their leather and chains finery to the strains of Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet. It was, on reflection, inspired — if somewhat less ironic than Anger had perhaps intended. Since then the technique has invariably been utilized for the purposes of either a cheap laugh, a cheaper irony or, sometimes, both (Singin’ in the Rain appearing in the course of a pivotal rape scene in Clockwork Orange doing yeoman’s service in this regard and, more than anything, contributing to that film’s everlasting moral dubiousness).
What is startling about Send in the Clowns, as it surfaces in this film, is that it is not in the least bit ironic, or funny, or even counter-textual. As the life of Arthur Fleck and that of the cesspool of a New York he lives in is about to change forever, Sondheim’s song is at once menacing and deeply haunting. It is as if this upper-class trash, in the last minute of his time on earth, were serenading this loser, telling him, ‘This is your life, peasant. You are this song: the unwanted shadow of regret; of everything that remains when love vanishes from existence.’ The sheer judgement of the moment is so merciless, such an existential death sentence, that Arthur pulling his piece just like Charles Bronson would, and blasting one, two, then three of them becomes as inescapable in its physical logic as one of Newton’s laws of motion; except this time that which has been down is about to go way up.
For it is here, when the victim strikes back, that something more than late 20th century American catharsis offered by the Death Wish franchise’s urban vigilante fantasia, or even Martin Scorsese’s more critically digestible chronicles of existential revenge (Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy) takes place. A fundamental disruption in the order of the film’s universe follows hard on the heels of this desperate act, and both Hollywood traditions are at once abandoned, like corpses left to rot in sanitary isolation, for an ironic deadpan that flirts with lending morality to the specter of mass violence.
Joaquin Phoenix’s richly deserved Oscar notwithstanding, there exists no known aesthetic enclave or canonical order that can fully comprehend the nihilism of Joker; discarding, as it does, the cinematic models which instantly informed the film’s almost terminally blinkered public reception.
Arthur Fleck’s execution of his tormentors has more obvious, and no doubt deliberate, parallels in the 1984 case of Bernhard Goetz, the man New York tabloids (always licking their depraved chops for the opportunity) dubbed The Subway Vigilante after shooting four fellow passengers, all Black, one a screwdriver wielding would-be mugger — that is, if you believe Goetz (not generally advisable). After being taken into custody, Goetz was catapulted to a species of fame and infamy that, particularly in New York, was very much of its time yet in some respects heralded, weirdly, our now-prevailing paradigm of 21st century media stardom.
by Tom Sutpen and Daniel Riccuito