The People’s Joker, Vera Drew’s loose re-imaging of the Batman’s nemesis origin tale and a trans coming-of-age story premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival recently and even more recently (the morning after) had been withdrawn from the festival due to “rights issues.” The movie opened with a disclaimer: “This film is a parody and is at the present time completely unauthorized by DC Comics, Warner Brothers, or anyone claiming ownership of the trademarks therein …”
Look, ideas and stories are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are humanity’s means of interacting with each other and the world around them. Nobody should be able to own an idea. A painting, a script or a book are not an idea. They are the product of an idea. Products can be bought and sold. Ideas cannot, but corporations have convinced everyone they can. Ideas are not products for sale. They don’t belong to anyone.
Our culture as a whole is benefitted when artists are able to make a living from their art. But our culture is also benefited by giving everyone legal access to play with the stories and ideas which have shaped us. Any legal protections for copyright are implicitly a balancing of these two competing ideas. Unfortunately, in the era where massive corporations have amassed huge stockpiles of IP they have been able to use their resources and political access to push the scale out of whack. They’ve also fostered this era of fandom in which they’ve convinced people that fictional characters need to be protected, and only they can do it, so the internet is filled with people carrying water for companies.
The movie’s author certainly claims that The People’s Joker is a parody. And sure, if it were, it would be protected under copyright. But from what I’ve seen and heard about The People’s Joker, it might not be a parody. It might be satire. And that’s a whole ‘nother legal kettle of fish.
Short, oversimplified version: parodies are protected because they are commenting on the original work by making fun of it. Satires are not protected because they are using the original work to talk about something else and aren’t really about the original work. (Google Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music for more info. The case will give you the gory details, and there are plenty of folks discussing it more understandably online.)
Obviously, almost no one has seen The People’s Joker, so it’s difficult to make any reasoned conclusions one way or the other. But based on the trailer and what’s been said about it, my suspicions are that it’s closer to satire than parody because it’s more about Vera Drew/trans identity than it is about Batman/Joker. Certainly, if I were the lawyer for Warner Brothers in a court case, that’s what I’d be arguing.
None of that is to say that what WB is doing is right, or that creatives aren’t getting their nads stomped on by corporations abusing intellectual property law for their own financial benefit. Because it isn’t, and they are. But we should be careful not to misdescribe the world because it aligns with the outcomes we want. I feel like it would have been really easy to just name the character something like ‘The Jester’ and have them fight ‘The Flying Fox.’ It would have steered more easily into parody territory and everyone would absolutely know what it was a deconstruction of. Whether or not this film is parody and falls under fair use is valid but doesn’t go far enough. What we need is to overhaul the very notion of “intellectual property”, because it’s nonsense.