 Joker is the story of a man who desperately needed the enlightenment and love of a higher vibration, but never received it. Or did he? DC's Joker is one of those movies that's got a lot of people talking on both sides of the table, even now a year after its release. It's shaping up to be one of the most controversial movies to come out of the DCEU. For the most part, it's a powerful and unsettling allegory of contemporary neglect and violence, and in the words of Chancey Robinson, is ultimately an in-your-face examination of a broken system that creates its own monsters. Above all else though, the real monster that we're shown in Joker isn't a deranged crime boss or a battle-hardened criminal. It's a broken man, one who has tried and tried to love, but who has lied to, abused, and cast aside by everyone around him. It's a reflection of our own world and what happens when we live our lives detached and separated from love. And a reflection of how a lot of people are feeling around the world at this critical time of great change. Arthur's descent into madness is like a slow realization. It doesn't happen all at once. Instead, it's a gradual picking away of his humanity with every scene. Every time we see him, he loses a part of his soul until there's ultimately nothing left. Some critics have even pointed out that Arthur sheds a tear in the opening scene, and it's a tear that never really goes away. Even his involuntary laughs are cries. His first killings are an act of defense, after which he tries to maintain some semblance of a normal life. But the swings just continue, and he begins to see his whole life as an absurd joke. In this, there's an unsettling familiarity with our current system. Not only is his insanity a result of the system devoid of love, but he chooses that path because the sickness he has is the same as the sickness at the heart of society. Ultimately, a spiritual sickness. One that the government programs can't fix, and an overreliance on entertainment and technology only makes it worse. By the end of the movie, Arthur has no identity, no ego desires. He has no one, and literally nothing to lose. He's completely let go and becomes detached from reality. He demonstrates fully the chaos of life and ultimately unleashes it through his own actions. But I think this is the most interesting part about Joker. Depending on how you view it, Arthur's slow descent into his realization of chaos is still a revelation at its core. In his gradual awakening to what he perceives as the truth lies a kind of enlightenment. Think about it. In his final awakened state, he's completely detached from the world, has no sense of self anymore, and in a way, teaches others about his great revelation of chaos. He's like a dark Buddha. Comparatively to some other films, in The Dark Knight, one man attempts to make Gotham as ugly as him, but in Joker, Gotham succeeds in making one man as ugly as it. So what's the deal here? If his final scenes are anything to go by, Arthur really does experience an ego death, attaining a state of detachment. The problem is, his ego death takes his sanity and love for others along with it. In other words, Arthur's revelation is what enlightenment looks like when it doesn't come from a place of love. One of the most tragic parts of the film is that Arthur at the beginning genuinely is a nice guy. He's so filled with kindness, but he feels awful inside. He loves his mother like a good son and dresses up as a clown to make kids laugh. He's just a good, all-around human being, but no one in his life has ever returned that love to him. There's an idea here from Caroline Casey who explains that part of the challenge of the world is that humanity and our collective consciousness is kind of like a great collective membrane that is continually taking on more and more stresses. The more stress we take on, the more people buckle down, grow cold, disconnected, and lose their inner light. However, while the greater majority of the collective just grits their teeth and takes it, there are certain people who are more psychically sensitive to this collective stress and often these people have less ability to just grit and bear it because they feel things more fully. Joker is a good example of this because he is one of those who are more sensitive to the pain and feels it fully. Despite being so full of love, all Arthur's needs and desires for affection and safety are unfulfilled and he has become an empty shell where society has sapped his soul. In fact, Bhagavan Dasa's reflections on Joker highlight the root cause of Arthur's spiritual death that according to Vedic scriptures, every refuge and part of society that's supposed to support him actually fails. His mother doesn't give him a safe childhood, he had no true father figure in his life. His comedy idol ridicules him, he loses his job, troublemakers beat him on the street, his psychiatrist doesn't care, and the government cuts funds that would go to his therapy sessions and medicines. It's not hard to see how he becomes what he is and that's the real tragedy of this movie. It's more of a realistic psychological horror than a comic book origin story. As children we idolize Batman, but as adults we can truly understand Joker. Now all of the we live in a society memes aside, in 2020 Joker has resurfaced in the wake of the worldwide protests and it's not hard to see why. At its heart, yes I can see the irony of that statement, it shows what a toxic society can do to vulnerable people and that final riot scene is pretty on the nose right now. In fact, protesters around the world have painted murals and dressed up as the character during anti-government protests and even in more extreme cases in France during the Yellow Vest protests, firefighters decked themselves up in Joker makeup and then set themselves on fire as they fought in the streets against police. So this movie is revealing a lot about our society, showing us ourselves and bringing up a lot of things that need healing. So what about this whole dark enlightenment thing? The thing is, despite going through an ego death and losing his sense of self, Arthur's actions are still a reaction to the content that was stored up within him. What's that? I've done some bad shit. Ultimately, he's a reflection of the society that he lives in. Is this epiphany what we can expect of a modern enlightenment in our current society? Maybe there's even an argument that he's too empathetic, that he absorbs all of these aspects of the broken world around him, but without having his heart center active enough to act as a filter because of the lack of love in his life. Now, one of the most infamous scenes of the movie is where he's dancing down the stairs in Gotham in his full Joker makeup to rock music and shows us the effect of being pulled into the madness of a lost soul. Arthur has freely embraced the path of chaos in response to his suffering and is throwing himself headlong into spiritual destruction. But in that, he achieves a sense of detachment from his suffering and completely loses his sense of self. Instead of feeling all of the suffering within him, it now flows through him effortlessly. But the saddest part is, by losing everything, for the first time in his life, he actually feels like he exists, echoed in the haunting lines, no one's laughing now, and for the first time in the movie, he has a happy face. Arthur is a man who spent his life looking for an audience for people to love him because he couldn't love himself. And by the end, he finds this in the protesters. But by that point, Arthur is gone and the Joker's fully taken over. But just as we often think about spiritual rebirth being a good thing, this scene itself is a pure catharsis. It is a true rebirth. With the protesters shouting, Get up! We need you! Showing a distinct contrast to the people who beat him up earlier, telling him to stay down. Ultimately, Joker shows us the negative side of enlightenment and what can happen if you awaken too soon or without love. The point is twofold. Arthur chooses to become a monster, but monsters aren't simply born, they're molded. The evils of Gotham cascade down through generations and cut across the political spectrum to hurt those who are most vulnerable. It makes us question if we really truly are ready for the change that enlightenment could bring. A revelation like that, one that destroys the ego and shifts our entire worldview, can be destructive if we aren't ready to accept it. Perhaps we need to realize that enlightenment doesn't make you good or evil like we usually believe. It's simply knowledge and awareness of the truth that you acquire. What you do with that truth entirely depends on you. In closing, perhaps the most important lesson to take away from Joker is the relationship to epigenetics. Everything that we see take place in the movie is one very real potential outcome of having poor, soulless environments drip down from the top of society to its underbelly, causing chaos to explode out in the lack of fulfillment felt by the masses. In this, perhaps we can use this as a reminder that when we see someone in need, don't just brush past them. Take some time to be the change that you want to see in the world. Sometimes, all someone really needs is having another ear to listen to them as they share their story.