The People’s Joker | 2024
Vera Drew as Joker the Harlequin in The People's Joker. Courtesy of Altered Innocence.
When I was younger, growing up the 1990s, Batman movies were some of my earliest inklings of my trans awakening. I distinctly remember seeing Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman (I wasn't allowed to see Batman Returns at the time, but I was obsessed nevertheless) and thinking "I want to be just like her." While the other little boys wanted to be Batman on the playground, I was always Catwoman.
The same thing happened with the release of Batman and Robin a few years later - Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy felt like another revelation. I told people at the time that I had a crush on her, but it was more than that. It was...admiration? Gender envy? What I saw wasn't something I was attracted to so much as something I wanted to embody. I don't know what it is about Batman villains that spoke to me as a child - perhaps it was their heightened femininity, a melodramatic sense of flair that felt attainable to someone living as a boy because it felt so larger than life. Their appeal was a gateway into discovering my own femininity.
Watching Vera Drew's The People’s Joker, I was delighted to discover that this experience was not unique. Drew's semi-autobiographical comic book Fantasia casts the filmmaker herself as a transgender Joker known as Joker the Harlequin, a wannabe comedian living in Gotham City where comedy is illegal and a tyrannical Bruce Wayne rules the city using Batman as his violent enforcer. Drew takes us from her childhood (where her deadname is bleeped out) in Smallville to her budding career in Gotham, where she and Oswald Cobblepot (Nathan Faustyn) are trying to make it as "anti-comedy" comedians, until she meets a charismatic trans man named Mr. J (Kane Distler), falls in love, and begins to realize her true identity as a trans woman. But the relationship is rocky, as two traumatized individuals try to navigate each other's trauma and define themselves both together and apart.
Vera Drew as Joker the Harlequin in The People's Joker. Courtesy of Altered Innocence.
The People’s Joker has a distinctly DIY feel that feels almost like a diary, a series of sketches using familiar characters to tell a deeply personal story. It's like a pop-punk scrapbook filled with self-deprecating humor, irreverent social commentary, and some incredibly raw, soul-baring stuff thrown in for good measure. Its edgy, low-rent aesthetic springs both from budget constraints and stylistic choices that add to its aura of mad scribblings in a journal - a messy, funny, strangely beautiful, and sometimes painful window into the heart of a trans woman trying to find herself in a world that's often just as chaotic.
It seems like something of a minor miracle that 2024 has given us not one but two deeply personal reflections on the trans experience made by trans filmmakers. While it is more explicitly trans than Jane Schoenbrun's more abstract I Saw the TV Glow, it is no less effective in its unique exploration of transgender awakening. Even more miraculous is that The People’s Joker got released at all, following threats of legal action due to its use of copyrighted characters after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022. In the face of that, the film's reclamation of historically cisgender characters for a transgender narrative feels especially transgressive. It’s not difficult to see why those of us who are queer gravitate toward the villains - the outcasts, the ones shunned to the outskirts of society; but in Drew’s Gotham we have a chance to reclaim our power. This isn't just sticking it to the man, it's a middle finger to the entire cis-tem with Drew as our puckish master of ceremonies, confidently asserting herself as a thrilling and vital new voice.
