The enterprise of watching every Joaquin Phoenix film begs the obvious question ‘why watch every Joaquin Phoenix film?’
I could think of various immediate answers to this question, all true, but with varying degrees of honesty, such as: ‘he’s simply a great actor,’ ‘he is beautiful and fascinating to look at,’ or ‘his best roles embody great suffering and mental anguish but also chaos, absurdism and resistance in the Foucauldian sense, which speaks deeply to me’. I don’t think any of these quite get to the answer of ‘why watch every Joaquin Phoenix film over the entire body of work of another actor or filmmaker?’ though, which is most straightforwardly and wholly honestly answered by: ‘he made I’m Still Here’.
I’m Still Here is a masterwork. At a surface level it is simply great to watch, both wildly, hysterically funny and absolutely excruciating to witness and often both at once. It is testament at once to Phoenix’s strength as an actor and the strength of his convictions that he pulled off and kept up the deception, despite the volume of bad blood-letting required to do so. At the same time it lays bare the impossibility of me, the viewer, or indeed the critic or large swathes of Phoenix’s own Hollywood celebri-sphere saying anything with certainty about Joaquin Phoenix besides appraising his performances in each of his films. Hence: watching every Joaquin Phoenix film.
We live in bad times for privacy, even if you are not a celeb. A cursory ‘haveibeenpwned’ visit tells me my data has been breached 22 times, with sites from Dropbox to Neopets responsible for the failures of data guardianship. ‘The ‘Me Too’ movement advocated that the key to confronting rape culture is for victims to disclose the harm they had suffered, en masse, for others to share, and it stuck. Although the World Health Organization’s stated theme for World Mental Health Day 2020 was ‘increased investment in mental health services’, public figures’ and particularly corporate messages focused instead on the importance of ‘talking’ or ‘opening up’ about one’s own mental health problems.
All of this is intensified for the ‘celebrity’, because people in a sphere outside of those you actually know care about knowing any of this. In Phoenix’s case there was never even the option to cultivate the pedestrian ‘stars — they’re just like us!’ facade that figures like Tom Hanks enjoy; pursuing a career as an actor (or any field that attracts even fleeting Z-list public interest) came with a guaranteed vulture-like tabloid interest in the ghost of his brother. It does not come across remotely ‘eccentric’ to me, considering all of this, that he rarely gives interviews or does not have a blue-ticked Twitter account to embarrass himself upon.
I’m Still Here came out at the end of the 2000s, which were something of a low point for culture in general due to a suffocating post-9/11 reactionary wave and also a notably low point for pop culture as cruel and invasive spectator sport, characterised by the public breakdowns of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, the ghosts of Anna Nicole Smith and Brittany Murphy. It resists both of these things brilliantly: it confronts instead of comforts, it forcefully asserts the right to privacy, and not only calls the tabloids’ bluff but from the very start drives home that Phoenix was always calling their bluff.
The decade that followed it broke from the noughties model of celebsploitation but didn’t quite live up to the film’s radicalism: here we are in an epoch of celebrity vulnerability and self-disclosure, but I’m Still Here still stands up and still unsettles. Particularly in the pandemic era of celebrities broadcasting their home lives (mansion lives?) in an attempt to appear ‘relatable’, it stands as a reminder of how absurd the parasocial ‘knowing’ of a celebrity is, that public vulnerability and struggle can be every bit as constructed as public glamour and success. We still haven’t gotten there a decade on but I’m Still Here hints at a healthier, radical alternative to the culture of celebrity, a way of untethering mass culture from neoliberal culture industry.
Or maybe I’m falling for the bit here and he was just purely doing it for a laff. What do I know! I am just a fool who has watched 31 Joaquin Phoenix movies, after all.
