Life is sadder and darker than fiction

By Rong Xiaoqing Source:Global Times Published: 2019/10/17 21:48:40

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT



On the night of October 4, when Todd Phillips' new movie Joker was released in theaters, police officers across the US were on heightened alert. In New York, more cops were dispatched to theatres, including some undercover officers who merged with the audience. They were there to watch the moviegoers.

The precautions were reasonable. In 2012, when the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises came out, a mass shooting took place in a theatre in Aurora, Colorado. 12 people were killed and 70 others injured. The assailant, a mentally unstable 24-year-old PhD dropout named James Eagan Holmes, is now serving life in prison. Joker is about Batman's arch enemy and seeks to show how and why he becomes a serial killer. It's all enough to make the authorities, and frankly many ordinary people, fear what watching the movie might do to the unhinged in society, especially given the ease with which they can obtain guns.

Fortunately, other than a few false alarms, nothing untoward happened during the first screenings that night. The real horror came a few hours later. At about 1 am, a 24-year-old homeless man named Randy Rodriguez-Santos appeared in New York's Chinatown, holding a metal pipe, bludgeoned to death four other homeless men sleeping on the street, and seriously injured a fifth one.

No one blamed Joker for having triggered this bloodshed. Rodriguez-Santos almost certainly hadn't seen the movie. Nevertheless, reality and fiction can be unsettlingly close. Like Arthur Fleck, the clown protagonist in Joker, Rodriguez-Santos had lost his job, his life was messed up, he became mentally unstable, and he had lived with his mother (though he had been kicked out because she was frightened of him). And like Fleck, Rodriguez-Santos can be seen by some as a victim of a failed system.  

Gotham City, the fictional place Batman calls home, bears an undeniable resemblance to 1970s and 1980s New York City, although some elements from Chicago were certainly fused into it. Gotham itself has been a nickname for New York since the early 19th century, thanks largely to Washington Irving who in his writing adopted the name from English folklore, referring to a place full of fools. 

Back then, New York deserved such a description. A financial crisis almost drove the city to bankruptcy. Severe reductions in social services funding and a freeze on the hiring of police officers were the last thing the city needed as crime rates soared. In 1981, the year in which Joker is set, the homicide rate in the city reached a record high of 25.82 per 100,000 people. The movie caught the despair accurately by indicating that the shutdown of the mental health services Arthur benefited from had played a role in his eventual breakdown. 

The city has long passed those dark times. With a healthily balanced budget, it has reduced the homicide rate to a record low of 3.31 per 100,000 in 2018. At the end of 2015, the city launched ThriveNYC, a sweeping program led by the mayor's wife Chirlane McCray, aiming to upgrade mental health services. But the program has been criticized for missing its goals and squandering money. So far, $560 million has been spent but the achievement seems to be miniscule.

Family members and old neighbors of Rodriguez-Santos had detected something was going particularly wrong before the atrocity took place. According to media reports, his aunt had brought him to a drug rehabilitation program but he wasn't accepted because he didn't want to attend and they didn't have the right to force him to. 

When Fleck was locked up in a mental illness facility and kept laughing, the psychiatrist asked, "What's so funny?" Arthur said, "I was just thinking of a joke." "Do you want to tell it to me?" asked the psychiatrist. And the answer was, "You wouldn't get it." 

A former neighbor of Rodriguez-Santos told the media that her husband found him stressed out a few days before the murders and tried to persuade him to go to the emergency room but the would-be killer responded, "They are not going to take care of me." 

People living on the edge of society show great distrust in the system. 

But fiction and real life are also very different in some critical ways. In the movie, Fleck vented some of his rage on people who were part of the system that failed him. So in the end, he was hailed as a hero by the populist mob on the street. Such an ending, although criticized by commentators as justifying violence, is at least logical in the fictional world. 

But in reality, the victims of Rodriguez-Santos were people who were failed by the system and struggling at the bottom of society just like him. And this is true in most such blindly revengeful attacks. Life is, after all, sadder and darker than fiction. 

The author is a New York-based journalist and Alicia Patterson fellow. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com

Posted in: VIEWPOINT

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