The Brooklyn Rail

The People’s Joker is a 2022 transfemme coming of age story passion project co-written, directed, edited by, and starring Vera Drew that is now getting a North American theatrical release. I feel like it’s important to say that because that is about the only thing I feel qualified to say about it with any authority, and I think that’s kind of the point. I could spend the next month picking over every corner of every frame of this film, ascribing a convention or a cultural reference to each detail, but I feel like that would be missing the point. It’s also a film that made me want to try to get away with saying “fuck” in print. We’ll see what the editors say. I’ll try again if this one doesn’t make it though. Now that that’s out of the way, on to the review.

Vera Drew’s film has a foot in so many camps: drama, melodrama, animation, absurdity, tragedy, comedy, dark comedy, satire, bildungsroman. And it does them all well… kind of. Maybe a better way to say this is that it’s a piece of each of those categories and a piece of many more, but that the film somehow does not read as piecemeal. Instead, Drew conducts a discordant orchestral collage of genres, styles, and tones that is almost, but not quite, anything but itself.

Let me explain to you what it is like to begin watching this film. If you want to go into this film blind, which I would recommend if you can manage to do so, skip this paragraph. Before the film even begins, we are greeted with a legal statement legitimizing and drawing attention to the film’s legal protections and loopholes which allow Drew to use DC properties in the manner they appear. The setting introduces itself as a parody of the world of Batman: a consumerist authoritarian hellscape where Batman is a TV personality and comedy is controlled by the government. We meet Drew’s Joker the Harlequin, the protagonist who narrates us through this disorienting world and then immediately into a childhood flashback—which she constantly interrupts, contextualizes, and censors. Not even fifteen minutes in have we had a chance to settle. What is this? Where is it going? People are going to hate this thing. We don’t know the answers to any of the questions we’re supposed to by this point, so it has to be a bad movie. Right?

But something nags at us: it isn’t a bad movie, at least not in the sense that it would need to be for us to distance ourselves from it. We can’t stop watching—it’s all just too intentional, the discordant notes just a bit too precisely cacophonous, and the whole thing is just too sincere. For instance, the film is funny. It is disarmingly, personally funny from beginning to end, and most of the humor relies on timing, delivery, context, callbacks—all things you need an extreme knowledge of convention to do well. The characters are also heartbreakingly compelling. Nathan Faustyn’s The Penguin is an intentional and supportive ally to Joker, even though it is clear he has no idea how he is supposed to care for her. Kane Distler’s Mr. J is a nuanced portrayal of an irredeemably abusive partner who is nonetheless debilitatingly and believably traumatized. And then it clicks: the badness is precisely the point, because badness is the primary aesthetic The People’s Joker picks up and runs with, because this particular kind of aesthetic badness is decidedly trans.

Let’s be careful and unpack this a bit. In his work, cultural theorist Cáel M. Keegan studies the aesthetics of transgender media and literature. He often talks about the pervasive rhetoric that trans people specifically, and trans culture more broadly, are bad copies of cisnormative people and cultures. In his article “On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects,” he uses badness as a provocation, arguing that so-called “good” trans representation often has more to do with cisnormative comfort and marketability than actual affirmation of trans experiences. He suggests instead that we resist creating a hierarchy of transness and instead turn our attention to “the dated, awkward, inauthentic archive of bad trans media, for the trans people who love the bad object that the transgender body is” as a form of trans care.

Therefore, I am not suggesting that watching The People’s Joker teaches you what being trans is like—that would be horribly reductive; nor am I suggesting that the film perfectly exemplifies Keegan’s aesthetic move. Instead, I am arguing that the film deploys the tension between neat, palatable representation and disruptive, unruly representation to tell a story in a way that feels true to the film’s creator and all the messy emotions that come with doing that. In Vera Drew’s own words on Letterboxd:

I feel naked and odd a lot of the time I won’t lie. You make something super personal like this …. Watching artists get inspired. Younger trans women hugging me, unable to find words over what they just saw …. It’s impossible to actually process all this now but I guess I have the rest of my life to process this stuff so it’s no sweat. The tour has just begun.

The People’s Joker is an unabashedly polarizing film, not just amongst audiences, but internally within single viewers, because of its clashing components and the unrelentingly clashing emotions it stirs. But it’s also a film about sitting with that polarization, about the always-changing turmoil of being a person in a piecemeal world and the things that remain true in spite of that. I don’t know if the people reading this review will like this film. I hope they do. I really did.