The FADER: The People’s Joker first came about as a response to the 2019 Joker. How did you feel when you first saw that movie?
Honestly, I was so excited to see Joker ahead of the release just because of how people were talking about it [as if] the bombs were going to start dropping or something. There was a whole panic. Maybe it was manufactured or something by Warner Brothers because I’m sure it got butts in the seats. I always loved these characters. I feel like anytime that kind of reaction is brewing around a movie, it’s exciting because it’s usually bullshit, or it means that the movie is going to be something really crazy and revolutionary. I really enjoyed it when I watched it. I was actually surprised how much it worked just as a Batman movie for me.
I get why I think people associate that movie with toxic perpetually-online cis boys. But for me, I watched it and I saw this movie about a person who was struggling to get the mental health care they needed, struggling inside their family system and the class system. The government was failing them, their city was failing them, and all they wanted to do was just make people laugh and be a comedian. That resonated with me just as a trans woman. I constantly feel like my government’s left me behind and I don’t have really good access to mental healthcare; I have a complicated relationship with my mother. I felt like it was specific enough to just where America was at that time, but general enough to where I could see myself in that character.
Going into the project, how familiar were you with copyright law side of things? Were you shooting and thinking, this is never going to be released, we can’t do this, but we’ll try anyway?
I armed myself with as much as I could, familiarizing myself with the law and working with lawyers throughout the entire process. I was pretty familiar with fair use laws just because as an editor it was very useful for me to know all that stuff. I had done a lot of parody work while I was working as an editor on Comedy Bang! Bang! on IFC. So I knew there was probably some pathway to do this. The way that seemed clearest was making all the art and stuff in it entirely original. All these versions of the characters are versions that I came up with with other artists. We had character designers for all of the main characters, and that was to remix the trademark a little bit and sort of bring my own perspective and commentary to it, and going out of my way to overtly queer the characters, too. It was putting them into these roles of people that I had seen in my life, whether it was sort of straight cis, comedy boys who don’t really understand transness, but are still supportive and show up for their friends. I put that into Penguin. We modeled him on a Judd Apatow character or something.
Parody, much like porn, it’s a “you know it when you see it” situation. The reason I really needed to bring in a lawyer was just to really go over parodizing a trademark rather than just a few characters. It’s a Joker parody, but it’s really about my relationship to these characters and my relationship to the DC canon.
The other legal guideline that I got very early on in the process was that it needs to be very autobiographical. It needs to be 100% my life, but told using these characters. We’re able to use Jared Leto’s Joker because that’s an iconic version of that character. He represents this symbol of toxic masculinity and codependent relationships. He’s based on an ex who was a super toxic boy, toxic dirtbag left comedy boy. It made sense to use the Jared Leto archetype as a way to explore that.
Was there anything in the film that you had to cut or lose because a lawyer said, no, that’s not going to work?
We couldn’t just put Christopher Nolan’s Bane in there. One thing I liked about having these legal signposts to follow was they became lines to color inside. Every single character I wanted to explore ended up in the movie because I was able to find analogs to my life to them. I just leaned into him [Bane] being a dumb sort of gym rat comedian just because there’s a ton of those now.
One thing my lawyers told me not to do… This was a lawyer who isn’t in our credits and has asked to remain anonymous. He said, “I am telling you this, not as your lawyer, but just as your friend, I think you shouldn’t make Batman and Robin gay because that will upset Warner Brothers. They don’t like it when people do that, whether it’s in porn or in parodies. And I double checked. I’m said, “You’re not saying that from a legal standpoint, right? You’re just saying that they’re a conservative media conglomerate that doesn’t want to talk about the fact that it’s weird that this adult is hanging out with a little boy all day?” My lawyer was like, “Yeah, correct. That’s what it is.” I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to do that.”
These are characters that are sometimes overtly queer in the comics, like Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. Why can’t we see movies about these characters that also look like that?