Joker makes great disability art by letting its hero bite back

I knew Joker was a film whose relationship to society today is a rich – and sometimes fraught – one. But until I saw it, I hadn’t realised just how pertinent a film it would be. Set in dystopian Gotham of the 1980s, it’s a world where the vulnerable of society, such as single mothers, the elderly and people with mental health issues are crammed into crumbling housing projects, while super-affluent bankers live it large. The villains in Joker are the filthy rich, such as the bullying, Trump-like Thomas Wayne who blames the poor for their own poverty as he campaigns to become mayor.

This is first-person cinema told from the point of view of someone with mental health issues. The character of Arthur Fleck is an authentic and well-researched depiction of a man with borderline personality disorder. At times, it felt less like watching a superhero movie and more like a social drama depicting a real-life horror story of austerity.

Played with corporeal commitment by Joaquin Phoenix, Arthur has a neurological condition called Pseudobulbar Affect, most straightforwardly explained as spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter at inappropriate moments. The scene where Arthur is confronted by a woman on a bus who becomes irritated by his laughter is a situation that will be all too familiar to anyone who has experienced firsthand the frustration, misunderstanding and sense of helplessness involuntary mental health conditions can cause. It’s not Arthur who has the problem, though – it’s an uncaring and misunderstanding society and that’s what this scene brilliantly conveys. Joker puts us in the shoes of the Other, a disabled man oppressed by the able-bodied.

People with mental health issues are feared in society – derogatory terms such as psycho or nutter are part of everyday conversation. We live in fear of “the insane” and avoid them on the street or move away from them on the train. The truth is that the vast majority of people with mental-health issues are the real victims. Those with non-visible disabilities face everyday hostility, persecution and lack of care. In her recent book Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People, Frances Ryan writes that the new fit for work tests can be linked to 590 extra suicides in England.

But Joker isn’t just the standard disability tragedy narrative that we’ve come to expect. It’s about someone with a disability biting back. Watching the hordes of Joker’s acolytes descend on Gotham in revenge for their degradation at the hands of the wealthy had the audience I watched it with cheering. Joker’s Network-style takedown of a talk show that seeks to ridicule him made me wonder what would have happened if the Block Telethon protest by disabled rights activists who stormed the live ITV Telethon broadcast in 1992 had gone further? At the time there was a sense of anarchy, mayhem and poking fun at the charity culture that oppresses the disabled. The actions of those disability rights activists contributed to the introduction of the disability discrimination act almost 25 years ago.

Joker might just be a classic of disability cinema, a film that takes the experience of the outsider and makes us root for them. I can’t think of a more subversive mainstream film, especially not in the sanitised, spandex-clad, wholesome worlds of the superhero genre. Unlike Heath Ledger’s Joker, Arthur Fleck’s violence isn’t chaotic, it has angry purpose, and he unwittingly creates a vent for the dispossessed. I think the film will divide the disabled community and I am sure some people will take issue with the depiction of mental health. Maybe though, we’ve seen enough of disabled people depicted as pious martyrs, and it’s time the victims fought back. Not by shooting people, but with smart, anarchic direct action.

Viola Davis set to play Michelle Obama in TV series

Viola Davis is set to play Michelle Obama in a new TV series called First Ladies.

The Oscar-winning actor will also executive produce the Showtime drama that will provide insight into the personal and political lives of first ladies throughout history. The first season will focus on Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Ford.

Written by novelist Aaron Cooley, the show will be set in the east rather than west wing and will show how many game-changing decisions were made hidden from view. The project is being fast-tracked.

Davis will executive produce with husband Julius Tennon under their company JuVee Productions. Speaking of her ambition for the company with the Guardian last year, she said she hoped it would “shift the pendulum because it’s changing the narrative for people of colour”.

The pair share a friendship having met on multiple occasions. In 2017, Davis paid tribute to Obama on Facebook with a picture of them together and the words: “May you continue to shine your light and impact future generations to come”.

Davis was most recently seen on the big screen in Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed thriller Widows and continues to star in the small screen drama How to Get Away with Murder. She is currently filming Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with Chadwick Boseman and is set to take on the role of Shirley Chisholm in an Amazon biopic of the first woman and first person of colour to run for president.

The Obamas also signed a production deal with Netflix in 2018, announcing a slate earlier this year which includes documentaries and narrative dramas. “Touching on issues of race and class, democracy and civil rights, and much more, we believe each of these productions won’t just entertain, but will educate, connect, and inspire us all,” Barack Obama said.

Cindy Sherman #untitled review – love, death, ageing and parrots

Cindy Sherman does not want to appear on camera. “Why not?” asks the director, Clare Beavan. “People,” says Sherman, “are just so curious to see what I really look like. So there is this intrigue.” Can you make a film about someone without seeing their face as they talk about their life and work? I’m one of those desperate to see Sherman, to reconcile the person with the roles she creates for her art, but perhaps I’m just prying. In the Arena documentary Cindy Sherman #untitled (BBC Four), we get her voice in a new interview, and Beavan has filleted previous filmed interviews, the last from 2009. Peel away the layers in her portraits and you can see the traces of Sherman’s eyebrows and the wrinkles in her skin. “You can see the cracks in the armour,” says her old photography teacher. She’s in there somewhere, despite her best efforts to vanish.

This film is a great look at one of the most important artists working today, told through the interviews with Sherman and through insightful offerings from those who have known and worked with her. I could have done without the inclusion of a group of Instagram influencers – used to make the point about how relevant Sherman’s work is in our selfie-obsessed, digitally artificial world – and had more from Sherman on the big issues: love, death, ageing and parrot-keeping. Her parrot, Mister Frieda, is the only being allowed in the studio with Sherman while she works – it’s a pity he only says “hello”.

I love Sherman’s filing cabinets of props – fake eyeballs in one drawer, teeth in another, noses in another. People say she is really trying to do self-portraits or reveal a hidden side to her, but that’s not right, says Sherman: “It’s more that I’m trying to lose myself, to really totally disappear.” In footage from previous interviews, Sherman reveals more of her working practice – she has a mirror next to the camera and concentrates on “trying to transform that reflection that I see into this other person”. She edits out the pictures where she recognises herself until “finally, I see the one that looks like somebody else”. These somebody elses are a huge cast of characters, from clowns and Renaissance Madonnas and pig-nosed horrors to Hitchcockian heroines and pink-cheeked teenagers and ageing society dames. Even if we weren’t allowed to see Sherman’s process of transformation, it would have been great to have more on where these people came from.

Like most children, Sherman loved dressing up. “I think the whole reason I developed this into an art form,” says Sherman in an older interview, “was that I would get dressed up whenever I was depressed or confused about things, I would go off into my room and turn into somebody else.” An early series shows Sherman transforming herself, shot by shot, from an unremarkable young woman to “this total vamp”. “She shows you,” says Barbara Jo Revelle, her teacher from 44 years ago, “that it’s a decision … how you create your own identity.”

So much of this is wrapped up in Sherman’s experience of being a woman, from the anxiety she feels walking down a dark street to the memories of sleeping with curlers in her hair as a teenager “and how uncomfortable women would make themselves in the name of being beautiful, but beauty at that time was really how men wanted women to look”. Her Centerfolds series, created for the magazine Artforum (but never run, possibly because some of her women looked vulnerable and victimised), “were meant to resemble in format a centrefold, but in content I wanted a man opening up a magazine to look at it in expectation of something lascivious, and then feel like the violator they would be.”

Her stepdaughters (she says she was “lucky” not to have her own children) remember, wonderfully, playing in the scenes Sherman created for her grotesque Fairytales and Disasters period in the 80s, complete with fake bums and boobs and homemade vomit. “She would let us put on all the makeup,” remembers one. This work was a rally, remembers her old boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, against the male artists who were being feted at the time when, he says, it was the women “who were making the most aggressive, toughest art possible”.

Sherman claims not to be political, at least in her personal life, but it’s all there in her work. She made her 2008 portraits of ageing socialites so big “because male artists do it all the time, even when they’re not even well-known”. She is grappling, points out the curator Eve Respini, “with what it means to get older as a woman in a really youth-obsessed culture”.

And now, she’s on Instagram where she plays with filters – not to make herself look pretty, as everyone else does, but to transform herself not just into someone else, but something barely human. “I see them as sketches,” says Sherman, “and maybe some of them will work their way into being real art pieces.” A group of schoolgirls sit outside Sherman’s current London show, scrolling through her Instagram pictures. One wants to know what she really looks like. “Oh wow, she looks quite normal,” says another, finding an undisguised picture, and she sounds almost disappointed.

Toy Story 4 review – new characters but the same old Story

Having done so many things unimaginably better than so many other movie franchises, it’s fitting that the Toy Story series now gives us a classier, superior kind of anticlimax.

Compared to many fourquels we’ve had in the past – Jaws IV: The Revenge; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace; Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol – Toy Story 4 is in a different league. And if you’d never seen any other of the Toy Stories, you’d probably think this one – written by Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton with Stephany Folsom and directed by Josh Cooley – was a gem. It is sprightly, sweet-natured and gorgeous to look at (and how blase we’ve all become about animation standards that 10 years ago had us hyperventilating with astonishment). There are some nice lines and a nifty allusion to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. But this movie is fundamentally repeating itself: repeating characters, ideas and plotlines – even if it does it with buoyancy and charm.

The last two Toy Stories heartwrenchingly tackled the idea of obsolescence. How do toys feel when they are not wanted, and get thrown away? Before I became a father myself, I naively thought these themes reflected the child’s fear of abandonment by the parents. After my son was born, the truth hit me like a blinding light: it is the opposite way around. It is the parents who fear that moment when their child doesn’t want to play with them any more. In Toy Story 3, Woody, Buzz and the gang are shipped off to a community centre that is chillingly like an old folks home and is run by abusive inmates; there is redemption when they are given to a new kid called Bonnie.

And basically Toy Story 4 starts the same story all over again. Same deal, new kid, though a flashback adroitly stitches a new backstory into the drama: there is some history between Woody and a certain other member of the cast. And we also meet a new toy: when Bonnie has to go off for her first day in nursery school, Woody sneaks into her backpack to keep an eye on her, and witnesses little Bonnie make a crude toy out of a plastic fork that she calls “Forky” and brings home. Inevitably, poor Forky (voiced by Tony Hale) gets lost in a certain antique store when the family goes on a road trip, and Woody and the gang have to rescue him. They encounter new characters: a creepy doll called Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) with sinister assistants and shades of the terrifying Lots-o’-Huggin Bear in Toy Story 3. There is a funny new duo, Bunny and Duckie (Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) and a very amusing Canadian stunt motorbike rider, Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves).

Forky is potentially a very interesting character. All the other toys are created by corporations, but what happens when a toy is actually made by the kid? Is there a primeval, even incestuous link between creator and created? Well, no, not really. However unevolved, Forky plays by the same rules as everyone else.

It is absurd to start complaining about implausibility in a film about magic toys, but for the first time I sensed a kind of evasion or even dishonesty in the Toy Story franchise. For this fourth film, they have decided to hit the reset button and simply restart the situation with a new kid – not Andy but Bonnie. Fine. But after more than a decade’s worth of use, these toys should be grimy and falling to pieces. Their actual demise as objects would be a real issue. Yet Woody et al look as fresh as daisies; as fresh as new toys. It is ridiculous to worry about this, of course, and yet Toy Story 2 was specifically about how toys might want to achieve immortality as collectables, the Faustian bargain of preserving their pristine quality under cellophane at the cost of not getting real, hands-on love from kids. Their mortality as objects was a real issue that has been sidestepped here.

Toy Story 4 also joins the X-Men and the Men In Black in trying to achieve a bit more gender balance, and this is something it does with artless persuasiveness and an implication that it isn’t just the kids who are growing up, it’s the toys themselves. I’m happy to see it happen. Toy Story 4 isn’t at all bad. But it’s time to let go.

Feminists with a bullet: how the ageing heroine became screen gold

The trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate hinges on the return of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor to the franchise. Halfway into it, she steps from an SUV with not one but two guns so big that the trailer slips into slow-mo in sheer awe. “Who are you?” another character gasps.

Sixty-two-year-old women don’t usually get to be action stars. It’s common for guys like Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger to tote firearms and perform stunts into their 50s, 60s, even 70s. But women in action films are typically younger than their co-stars, often by decades. In last year’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Tom Cruise was 55; female lead Rebecca Ferguson was 35.

Hamilton’s star turn in Dark Fate is the latest sign, though, that things may be starting to change. Jamie Lee Curtis, who is 60, starred in a reboot of Halloween last year. Sandra Bullock, who played the lead in the Netflix hit Bird Box, is 54. Trevante Rhodes, who played her boyfriend, is only 29.

Older female stars are finally getting big action roles because younger women started to get them 30 or 40 years ago. Halloween in 1978 and Terminator in 1984 were part of a wave of movies in which women heroes got to do what male heroes had so often done before: pick up guns and blast away.

Yet those early films came out of a tradition that was not exactly feminist in intention. Halloween and Terminator were variations on the slasher genre made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. Part of Psycho’s horror was based in a misogynist fear of gender confusion: the villain in the movie is a mentally disturbed man who dresses up as his own mother. Picking up on those themes, the suspense film Deliverance (1972) – a huge influence on later slashers – depicted a male rape. The slasher was a genre in which horror cut people loose from gender; much of the disgust, the terror, and the enjoyment was in the way that fear made men into women and women into men.

John Carpenter’s Halloween extended the gender play by making its protagonist, Laurie Strode, a tomboyish high-school student. Laurie is first pursued by killer Michael Myers in typical stalking fashion, but eventually she turns the tables, picking up the phallic knife and becoming the attacker. Laurie is the protoype of what Carol Clover called the “final girl”: the last character alive in a slasher – almost always a woman – who claims the role of violent victor.

The final girl gradually moved into the mainstream with characters like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (1979) and Sarah Connor in Terminator (1984), two sci-fi-inflected slashers. That helped pave the way for more straightforward action movie heroines, often with more explicit feminist messaging, as in the recent Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel films.

The success of those early slashers also created the opportunity for their stars to take up their roles again for sequels. Hamilton returning to play Connor again, or Curtis playing Laurie, is an event, just like Schwarzenegger reprising his turn as the Terminator or Harrison Ford coming back as Han Solo. The success of the earlier films mean their stars are still beloved and bankable.

As the Halloween reboot showed, slasher tropes work just as well with older actresses in the main role – if not better. The Final Girl is all about reversing power dynamics. The horror of the pursuit is greater because women are figured as weak and helpless, and the conclusion is more exciting because of the rush of the power reversal. Older women set up an even more visceral victory. Laurie by the end of the 2018 Halloween becomes more mythic even than Michael Myers. The seesaw excitement of disempowerment/empowerment is part of why Bird Box, a movie about a mature who has to blindfold herself to fight mysterious assailants, captured the imagination.
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The creators of the early slasher films certainly weren’t trying to expand roles for older women in Hollywood. But pushing against stereotypes can have unexpected benefits. Because of choices some film-makers and actors made three decades ago, it now seems natural to watch a 60-year-old woman lock horns with a killer robot. When you start telling different stories with different heroes, you don’t know where you’ll end up, or who will get to hold the rocket launcher.