Sitting Next to Arthur Fleck

When Arthur Fleck begins to laugh uncontrollably on a crowded Gotham City bus, it’s easy to understand why people recoil at the awkwardness of this moment. I’m talking, of course, about the new Joker movie, which depicts Arthur’s disintegration from would-be stand-up comic and clown into the villain we’ve met in the Batman story.

We come to know that Arthur’s loud and misplaced laughter is a symptom of his mental illness. He even has a beat-up business card he can hand to onlookers with that explanation. It doesn’t really help. No one understands. We probably wouldn’t, either.

What if it happened in church? What if that person down the row from us started laughing, out of the blue, like Arthur does in Joker?

Arthur’s specific condition is rare, but we’ve had experiences with people like him, haven’t we? They’ve sat next to us in church and elsewhere. The person who’s weeping and we don’t know why. The person with early-stage dementia who bursts out with a random comment that we don’t know what to do with. The one who coughs or sniffs every ten seconds, or whose phone is chirping, or whose presence in some other way offends us.

Our discomfort is natural. It is a survival tactic for us to pay attention to our environment and to shun those things—including people—that might threaten us. Our fight-or-flight response is tuned to just such moments. Joker illustrates both of those responses among people who meet Arthur. But since the film has shown us something of the man behind the uncontrollable laughter, we viewers are able to recognize how counterproductive those responses are.

What if we could be the rare person on that bus who responds to Arthur Fleck with equanimity and friendliness? Could we imagine examining our discomfort long enough to imagine what this malady must be like for him? Would it have made a difference if someone nearby had read his explanatory card, looked him in the eye, and said something that acknowledged Arthur’s humanity? “Wow, that must be hard.” “I can’t even imagine how that is for you.”

Don’t underestimate the power of a simple, human interaction. Brief, kind words, spoken sincerely. Looking that other human being in the eye, not with contempt but in a way that says I see you. Suddenly our common humanity becomes manifest, in a moment that could so easily have gone the other way.

When that moment happens in a crowd, all of us learn something. We grasp that there are possibilities beyond fight-or-flight. It’s part of what’s remarkable in the healing stories in the Bible. Of course the healings are important. But there’s more to it. Jesus doesn’t fight or flee. “What is your name?” he asks the troubled man we call (ungraciously) the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8.30, Mark 5.9). He eats with tax collectors and “sinners,” and endures the criticism of holy people who say he shouldn’t. As we imagine sitting with Jesus in these moments, we can picture all of us laughing together, in a good way.

Arthur’s fate was sealed by the very imagining of his story, of course—he had to become Joker—but that’s not true in real life. It’s not too much to believe that our open-hearted response to another human being might change their trajectory, in a good way.

It won’t always. But what if we believed there could be kingdom consequences to our response to that seemingly awkward person down the pew from us, or across the waiting room?  Trajectories might hang in the balance that would otherwise head toward relapse, suicide, angry outbursts, even enraged shootings.

It’s the nature of #Foolish Church to make some effort to bend those trajectories toward hope.