Thoughts on ‘The People’s Joker’

I haven’t seen The People’s Joker, which recently showed at the Toronto International Film Festival, and for now, it might have to stay that way. The film has reportedly been pulled from TIFF following “rights issues”, and as such, the future of The People’s Joker is in jeopardy.

The People’s Joker is writer-director-star Vera Drew’s “illegal queer coming of age comic book movie”, in the words of the film’s tagline: a reimagining of the iconic Batman villain Joker as a transgender comedian. Despite careful legal planning, the film’s fair-use riff on the DC comic book universe was probably always going to draw the ire of rightsholders. Drew stated that despite “an angry letter … pressuring to not screen”, the filmmakers and TIFF went ahead with the initial screening “while scaling back our later screenings to mitigate potential blowback”. In other words, the “pull” from Toronto was strategic.

It’s difficult to stress the extent to which I want to see this film, not just as a scholar of transgender cinema but as a trans woman with precious few chances to see herself represented on screen. Meanwhile, as someone with a complex relationship with many big-name IPs, I can appreciate both the desire to play with them and maybe, just maybe, strike a blow against their hegemony.

“We are in a strange era of cinema where IPs are dominant and seemingly inescapable”, writes Alyssa Miller at No Film School, suggesting that “The People’s Joker is a unique and valuable point of view that isn’t trying to be anything other than original while playing with pop culture.” There is something twisted about the logic of DC and Warner Bros. here: like all media conglomerates, they saturate the societal landscape with this imagery and then cries foul when they actually do become the foundational texts of people’s life experiences. As Will Sloan said over at Cinema Scope, “For Batman and Co. to really qualify as a shared mythology, everyone should actually be able to tell their stories, not just dream them privately.”

Sloan also points out the connections between media landscapes and the real-world stakes of embodiment: “In the cultural sphere, one powerful company keeps tight control over how a fictional character can be represented. In the political sphere, powerful forces seek to dictate how we live in our own bodies. The People’s Joker treats both as interconnected, and defiance as a moral imperative.” That fictional characters can come to mean so much to our lives is something that these companies understand; the control exercised over “intellectual property” is deliberate.

More than that, though, the decision to lodge a rights complaint about The People’s Joker strikes out not only at fair use and the ability of artists to rethink existing art but at trans cinema more broadly. In an era when trans cinema can still be seen in rigid terms like The Danish Girl or the occasional inclusion of trans characters in television, the creation of newer trans aesthetics threatens conservative hierarchies in which trans and gender non-conforming people still rank below cisgender people.

I’ve often maintained that trans cinema is more than just the inclusion of characters that might identify or live outside gender binaries. Transgender cinema means something more, something beyond. The People’s Joker is the trans film I’ve dreamt about for years, and I hope I can see it one day. With any luck the rights-holders in this case have pulled something of a Streisand Effect on themselves, ensuring the film not only continues to exist but remains in the public consciousness. Vera Drew has stated that the film “will screen again very soon”.