The People's Joker

dir: Vera Drew

2024

That this exists… is something of a miracle. It feels like a production that, had Warner Brothers known about it, would have sued all the people involved out of existence.

Let me put this into a tiny bit in context. I had a Scottish friend from back in the day, and she worked in film production in the UK. She worked for a company run by a number of sisters, whose literal surname was Warner. Naturally, in a cheeky fashion, they called their production company The Warner Sisters.

No-one with half a brain, or even most of the Americans that would vote for their bilious orange emperor, would confuse Warner Brothers with Warner Sisters. First of all, the words ‘Sisters’ and ‘Brothers’ are different words. As such, it is unlikely that anyone would confuse the Sisters with the movie production company started by Sam, Harry, Albert and the notorious Jack Warner in 1923.

But they sued them anyway. And the sisters, being a small film production company mostly doing corporate stuff and documentaries, couldn’t afford to compete legally with a billion dollar company, even one as incompetent and self-defeating as WB, so they capitulated and changed the name.

That’s how petty WB is. So when I watch a flick like this, where liberal usage of WB’s intellectual property occurs, in ways you know WB corporate or legal would never, ever agree to, I just feel like Vera Drew, in struggling so hard to make this flick, and eventually get it released in 2024, is like one of the bravest people in the world.

Sure, there are some ‘famous’ people in it, or at least known people, to people into comedy, but they’re not the ones that will probably be banned for life from working on anything anywhere near any of the stuff Warner Brothers owns. Vera Drew is the one that has burned all bridges to light her way, and tell her life story (through her unauthorised appropriation of so, so many characters and elements of DC’s back catalogue).

This is, admittedly, a fairly niche kind of film, with a very small budget and a very deliberately janky look. It would be hard not to have a janky look with no budget, but that’s both the point and part of its charm. It’s not really comparable to anything but if it was I’d say it was like a cross between a personal experimental doco like Tarnation from back in the early 2000s, and some of the kinds of things you would see on Adult Swim, like Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

What I will describe will sound like insane fanfic, but you have to consider that it’s somehow in the service of telling a personal story about becoming one’s true self through transitioning, told within the context of both the DC universe of characters, and the ‘real’ world context of contemporary comedy / the Saturday Night Live military / industrial complex, something portrayed as being even more insidious and destructive than all of Lex Luthor’s schemes put together.

A kid growing up in Smallville, Kansas wonders out loud to their mother as to whether they might have been born in the wrong body. This realisation comes to the kid while watching Batman Forever, the one with Val Kilmer as Batman, and Nicole Kidman as, I dunno, the love interest. When the kid sees Nicole Kidman stroking Batman’s chest and kissing him, they identify not with the arrested development goon in the bat suit, but with Nicole Kidman.

The mum (Lynn Downey), upon hearing their kid express dysphoric thoughts, immediately takes them to a psychiatrist who prescribes Smylex in order to stop those thoughts. The kid’s father is never present.

When that kid, whose name keeps getting bleeped out, grows to adulthood and decides to leave Smallville for the big city, being Gotham, they are assigned a role at the entity that controls Comedy in that city. People are classified solely as Jokers or Harlequins, based solely on their genitalia. But our hero doesn’t want to be a Joker, paid more just for what’s downstairs. They want to be a combination of the two, Joker the Harlequin.

The (evil) comedy establishment doesn’t tolerate that, so with the help of the Penguin (Nathan Faustyn, who is very, very funny in very cheap makeup), they set up an Anti-Comedy club to defy the authorities.

That’s when Joker the Harlequin meets Jason, or Mr J (Kane Distler), who will become the love of her life, despite looking like Jared Leto’s take on the Joker from Suicide Squad: a film nothing should be taken from. At the very least, at first, it gives Joker the Harlequin the inspiration to prove her love and start transitioning by launching herself from a great height into a vat of chemicals (estrogen, naturally).

But that’s when Batman shows up to wreck the joint, and to punish Jason for getting away. You see, this film, that has already crossed all sorts of lines, then follows down the path that Batman abused his former Robin only once that Robin transitioned from female to male, and while they were still a child.

And it’s after this that their relationship turns way toxic, but instead of it being the usual way Joker abuses Harley, (murderous violence) it’s mean comments, gaslighting and narcissistic competition for who is the more traumatised and who has the more lurid or tragic backstory.

I can’t even begin to unravel all the levels upon which all of this is supposed to work, or is meant to work. But let me assure you (without much evidence) that it’s not meant to be seen as a satire of all these characters and properties, even when elements of their conception or backstory are mocked.

This is a trans person telling the story of their journey towards self-acceptance, told through the filter of characters and wonky plot setups that we’re familiar with if we’ve watched a single second of genre tv shows made in the last 50 years.

But it’s also a take on comedy itself, how appalling comedians are (the best advice it gives is never to date male comedians), how tired and cowardly Saturday Night Live is (and specifically Lorne Michaels), and how all the anti-depressants in the world won't change how you should feel about yourself if the people around you can't accept who you really are.

It has moments of being funny, but it’s wry, droll humour, for me, less flat out funny and more conceptually funny. The personal aspects of Vera’s story work, mostly when she’s being vulnerable or honest, though sometimes some of those scenes tip over into earnestness, which involuntarily makes my eyes roll a bit. This is kitchen sink creativity, throwing everything in, every memory, all your formative moments, personal stuff that maybe only makes sense to you, but audiences might connect with. It always feels, despite the jankiness of how some scenes are realised with their very low budget effects and animation, like Vera is being honest about the more difficult parts of her life and her transition, even down to a sequence where Vera admits that they called a suicide help-line, not always in despair, but sometimes just to hear what the weather was like in her home town, just to feel grounded.

Life is fucking hard, in case you didn’t already know, gentle reader. Art gives many of us more than just an outlet for our hopes, dreams and desperation; it also gives gifted people a medium within which to tell their story in a way that other people can connect with, be moved by, or be entertained for a while, at the very least. This is how Vera Drew chose to articulate her life story, and I applaud that level of gall and temerity, because, goddamn, you know how much Warner Brothers must hate that this exists.

But I admire brave people. This took more bravery than fighting crime in a rubber suit.

7 times this looks like it was made in Minecraft and Roblox occasionally, yet is still classy out of 10

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“Gotham City is nothing but neon biker gangs, leather freaks and crossdressers. Is that what you want?” – doesn’t sound so bad to me - The People’s Joker