Director Todd Phillips has not been shy about the fact that Martin Scorsese had a significant, inspirational role in his production of Joker, but where exactly does that influence show? The movie injects an original origin story onto Batman’s infamous foe, one that pits mental illness, shunning, and passive government action alongside chaos. This iteration of the Clown Prince of Crime is brought to the screen by Joaquin Phoenix, the headliner of a cast which also includes Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy and Brett Cullen.
The Gotham City of Joker is a grizzly, forlorn place. Plagued by copious, unmanageable amounts of trash, bags of garbage line the city’s poorer streets where Phoenix’s character, Arthur Fleck, tries to make ends meet. Arthur, an aspiring stand-up comedian, simply wants to make the world smile; and while he tries desperately to get his comedy career off the ground, he works as a clown for hire, sent on several odd jobs where he hopes he can make a difference. During this time, however, Arthur always feels like he’s the butt of someone else’s joke. Pushed around by Ivy League corporate workers, his favorite talk show host Murray Franklin (De Niro), and even political candidate Thomas Wayne (Cullen), Arthur’s dark transformation into the Joker in the film is seemingly more than just a product of his own doing.
Even from that short synopsis, similar themes and events from some of Martin Scorsese’s most important works are clearly present in Joker. Interestingly enough, The Irishman and Wolf of Wall Street director spent four years pondering over whether or not he would direct Joker himself. Ultimately, scheduling and personal reasons distanced Scorsese from the production, though that didn’t stop Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver (The Fighter), from incorporating elements of both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy into the film anyway. Throughout Joker, there are several tie-ins that relate to those Scorsese greats, many of which take place during the best scenes of the 2019 awards-contender.
Taxi Driver
Like Gotham, the New York City in Taxi Driver is riddled with garbage. Just as Travis longs for the day the rain will come and “wash all [the] scum off the streets,” there’s a similar feeling of unrest among Gotham’s citizens; the stark separation between the lives of the rich and the poor is quickly becoming too much for the repressed to bear. And while Bickle, on the one hand, loathes the poor and wishes that the criminality and harshness of the city would go away, it is Arthur who conversely and unintentionally becomes their symbol; as it was Arthur’s rebellion against the three Wayne Enterprise bullies that finally sparked Gotham’s upheaval into action.
While Travis’ and Arthur’s motivations may be different - Arthur, in perfect Joker fashion, claims his deeds have no political affiliation - this does not mean that their characters are totally different. In fact, the way their respective directors illustrate their anti-social personalities bear a striking resemblance to one another. Not only do the two character’s simple, homely outfits look similar, but both can be spotted coursing through their streets rather drearily; as Arthur trudges up that looming set of stairs at the beginning of Joker, Travis glides his cab around Manhattan baffled, constantly pummeled by the sorts of things and people he sees. That being said, while both men feel a strong distaste for the majority of the people around them, both have insipid interactions with women which start off well, but end much, much differently. Arthur’s first date with his neighbor, Sophie (Beetz) is even shot in the same way Travis’ first date was with political volunteer Betsy (Cybill Shepherd).
The King Of Comedy
Of course, while Travis and Arthur mostly share atmospheric similarities, Arthur’s face-value actions and desires can be easily traced to The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin. Both men, as aspiring comedians, obsess over the accomplishment of fame and celebrity, each taking criminal action to get there: Rupert literally hijacks Jerry’s show by kidnapping the host, and Arthur makes his presence officially known to the world by assassinating TV personality Murray Franklin (De Niro) on the air.
Phillips even incorporates a blatant connection to The King of Comedy to personify how the two characters, though they took different avenues, each arrived at roughly the same destination: Joker’s final shot, which takes place after Arthur murders an Arkham doctor, sees the deranged man run back and forth along a hallway trying to escape facility officers. Fans with a strong memory will be able to recall that Rupert used the same escape tactic himself when he infiltrated Jerry Langford’s office.
A defining characteristic of both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy is the idea of solitude; Scorsese’s loner-lunatic films orbited around characters on the outskirts of their respective societies. The former focused on a bitter Vietnam vet whose disappointment in the city he comes back to boils over into murderous, disguised-as-heroic acts, while the latter showcased another struggling comedian whose obsessions with fame and one specific talk show host (a loose variation on star Jerry Lewis) tossed both of them over the edge. Arthur himself can easily be read as a hybrid of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin, the similarities of which bleed through the screen.
Constructing the bridge between all of these films is Robert De Niro, who brought both Bickle and Pupkin to life on the big screen. Playing Murray Franklin in the 2019 film, Arthur’s comic idol and Gotham’s prime-time late night talk show host, De Niro almost gives audiences a glimpse of what Rupert’s career might have evolved into later in his older age. But the fact that De Niro is simply in Joker all but confirms these unsubtle call backs not only to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
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