‘In pain, we want to change’

Joaquin Phoenix-starrer Joker has been receiving much praise from around the world and it is reflecting in box office collections too. While moviegoers have been heaping praise on the actor, some fans feel the violence shown can influence society negatively. Now, Marvel star Josh Brolin aka Thanos, who played the main evil in Avengers Endgame and Avengers Infinity War, also took out time to reflect on his stand on the film. In his lengthy social media post, Josh wrote that the Todd Philips-directorial emphasizes on problems of the society and makes you contemplate on a lot of things. He wrote, “To appreciate Joker, I believe you have to have either gone through something traumatic in your lifetime (and I believe most of us have) or understand somewhere in your psyche what true compassion is (which usually comes from having gone through something traumatic, unfortunately).”

He further wrote, “An example of dangerous compassion would be to, say, make a film made about the fragility of the human psyche, and make it so raw, so brutal, so balletic that by the time you leave the theatre you not only don’t want to hurt anything but you desperately want an answer and a solution to the violence and mental health issues that have spun out of control around us. This film makes you hurt and only in pain do we ever want to change. It’s all in the irony of trauma — a fine line between the resentment of wanting to hurt society back for raping you of a decent life, for not protecting you, and accepting what feels like alien feelings with softening to those others who seem freakish in our era of judgment, and digital damnation.”