I recently watched The Joker for the first time and almost turned it off 20 minutes in. My decision to grit my teeth and bear it out was not rewarded.

The film is not original — everything it tries to do has been done before, and better. An unreliable and mentally unstable narrator goes on a killing spree he believes is heroic? Taxi Driver. A dismantling of the fascistic, elitist themes in superhero movies? Watchman is such a trope that Alan Moore got tired of it.  If it added interesting nuance to these prior plots that would be one thing, but the entire movie is unbearably on the nose.

“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society who abandons him?” the main character asks at the climax of the film. If you have not realized that that is what the movie is about at that point, you have probably — and mercifully — fallen asleep.

The Joker lays on the darkness so thick that it slips into self-parody. The bleakness has no relenting moments — not one gesture of kindness, not one actual joke told between friends. It mistakes edginess for tragedy. Hamlet is a very funny play. The Joker tries scrupulously to avoid humor. The political commentary feels at once too blatant — the rich and powerful openly mock the poor — and also remarkably thin — the underclass just starts destroying things, in what is supposed to be the sympathetic movement inspired by the main character. There is no organizing, there is no community, there is capitalism and there is nihilistic destruction. Nothing else is possible; certainly nothing better. 

Even more recently I saw the new Suicide Squad, which I genuinely enjoyed. It embraces its own absurdism — a polka dot wielding supervillain with mommy issues, a man shark, and a teenager who controls rats take down a Godzilla scale cartoon starfish. Harley Quinn is there too, and a mercenary character whose only memorable feature is being played by Idris Elba.

But Suicide Squad is a good movie only because it’s not trying to be a good movie — it promises lots of quality CGI, some great fight scenes, and your favorite actors wisecracking, and by golly, it delivers that.

Otherwise the whole movie feels low stakes. It is, after all, a story of anti-heroes on a suicide mission, the audience has no reason to mourn them when they die. The plot is sketched out in two to five minutes of screen time and leans heavily into American’s internalized narratives about third-world coups to fill in the rest. There is perfunctory nod to America’s historical misdeeds abroad — the United States is complicit in terrible crimes involving the aforementioned cartoon starfish — but the whole narrative is so familiar that even the critique is a cliché. Even the threat the anti-heroes face seems only moderately existential. Americans have known how to deal with city-destroying monsters since the 1930’s stop-motion King Kong, the starfish could have been dispatched by a few attack planes if our protagonists fail.

While Joker drags each moment of existential angst, Suicide Squad takes its que from Marvel, which has perfected the art of undercutting any genuine emotion with a joke.[1] But it doesn’t try that hard to actually convince you of any emotional weight in the first place — no one expects it to last anyway.

I genuinely enjoy superhero stories, which I’ve mostly consumed them in the form of movies. But it feels like Joker and Suicide Squad are two logical ends of the same push to keep making these films.

The Joker is an attempt to make an art film out of the absurd premise of a clown who fights a detective dressed as a bat, and fails to either make anything of artistic merit or, really explain the Joker as a character (in an effort to make him sympathetic enough to watch for a feature length film, the Joker is given plenty of motivation but little competence, it’s hard to imagine him continuing as a supervillain once the credits roll).

The Suicide Squad takes nothing seriously because it knows you’re just there for the gory slapstick. Like its main characters, it’s disposable — watch once and discard. The Joker is even worse, a self conscious attempt to make a classic — don’t watch at all.

It may be that the genre is, after miles of cellophane, wearing out its possibilities, but I have to believe these extremes are not the inevitable end of the premise. Superhero stories are inherently a little absurd, but it is possible to use them to tell compelling stories — look at HBO’s recent Watchmen series, which uses the premise of superheroes to ask genuinely interesting questions about what kind of world such people would live in.

There has to be a balance between the self-serious attempt to turn comics into highbrow entertainment and the absolute refusal to do anything more interesting than one long running fight scene.

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[1] This is not an original observation, it was highlighted by a Tik-Tok I saw but could not retrace the provenience of