Kim Wexler is the Joker but for Women Lawyers (Hear me Out)

One time a few years ago, I saw a tweet that called Lana Del Rey "the Joker but for women".

(and then someone replied "Chemtrails? Over the country club????" lol)

Anyway, I have absolutely no outside source to verify that 1) "the joker but for women" is even a term or idea that has existed, or 2) what the hell that term even means.

Maybe you're reading this and saying---- isn't the Joker just the Joker for everyone, men, women, non-binary folks, everyone? And to this I say absolutely not.

Think about every Halloween within the last decade. Now think about how so many dudes dress up as the Joker very year. Think about how after the Nolan movies, guys started getting Joker tattoos. Guys from my hometown post unironic Joker memes the same way that girls from my hometown post unironic, insipid "inspirational quotes". Think about how Jared Leto had a meltdown when he didn't get asked to be the Joker again in a movie. I mean Jared Leto, a man who lives most people's dream by fronting an actual rock band, had a meltdown because he wouldn't get to realize his dream of being a franchise Joker.

Men saw the Joker, and on the whole, ate that shit up.

But why? As someone who took one semester of a sociology course one time, let me tell you why.

Men (on the whole, please don't "not all men" me in my blog, bro) identify with aspects of the Joker's origin story. Even though the Joker's origin story is never canonically consistent (by nature of being a character in a classic DC work, the Joker gets several totally different origin stories), it usually has the same universal elements. The Joker is always just some guy, usually a victim of circumstance, who has been repeatedly shit on at every turn by a wicked and cruel society. He is a man with no power in that society. He's alienated. Maybe he falls in a vault of acid, maybe he kills 3 finance bros in self-defense on the Gotham metro. Either way, he stops being an ordinary guy and starts lashing out at society with mass terroristic acts of morbid violence. He hurts people because he's been so profoundly hurt. And he grows powerful. The society that once rejected him comes to live in fear of him. He represents more than just nihilism. He represents one the many forms of masculine hurt/rage/ennui (see also the Jackass series, I am being so serious).

I learned the term "female gaze" in college when I signed up for a film course one semester. Oxford Reference defines it as

A term coined by feminists in response to the claims made by Mulvey that the conventions established in classical Hollywood films required all spectators, regardless of their sex, to identify with the male protagonist and to adopt the controlling male gaze around which such films were held to be structured. ‘The female gaze’ thus marked out neglected territory. For many, the term alludes to the right of women to adopt the active and objectifying gaze that has traditionally and stereotypically been associated with males, undermining the dominant cultural alignment of masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity. Despite the label, this need not involve replacing one form of gender essentialism with another: the objects of the gaze need not be confined to males.

This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I don't think I really understood the female gaze until I watched the Bridgerton show on Netflix. I don't even know why I'm embarrassed to admit that, like if you're a steady friend of the blog then you saw me post a deep dive on whether Taylor Swift's hair is really curly or not- I'm sure we've all appropriately lowered our intellectual expectations here.

(Look she either used to curl it like every day for years or straighten it like every day for years, I just want answers because neither seem plausible.)

Anyway, back to Kim Wexler being the Joker but for women. I started watching Better Call Saul because just like all of the main characters in the show, I am a trial attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And even though I was initially drawn in because I love that they actually shoot in downtown Albuquerque, and actually pretty solidly represent the practice of law, the show was/is OUTSTANDING. Incredible. Moving. I have my favorite shows that I have on all the time as background noise in my house, but if I'm watching an episode of Saul, then it's live and I'm actually sitting down and watching it.

Jimmy's deep, nuanced rivalry with his brother Chuck--- OUTSTANDING! Jimmy scamming people---- FUN! Nacho doing cartel subterfuge--- THRILLING! 

And I mean the entire show is great, but the best part of the entire show is Kim Wexler the character. When we first meet Kim, she's an associate at Chuck's fancy law firm. The same fancy law firm that rejected Jimmy over and over and over. Kim is mysterious and cool. She only pops out in the beginning to smoke cigarettes in parking lots and stand in shadows and say cool shit. 

She's driven. She's ambitious. She's very smart. She's supremely talented. She's hard working. Her ponytail is immaculate.

But her origins are so humble. She started off working in the firm's mail room and she went to UNM Law. And she's so relatable. She gets fired by an unreasonable client and his unhinged wife even though she's providing competent and diligent representation simply because the client and his wife do not like that the facts in his case are bad (because the client was bad at doing crime like come on!). There's one scene where Kim is working late in her office on a motion or something and she starts crying from anxiety because she can't decide which sentence punctuation is the most grammatically correct. There's a season finale where Kim gets super burned out and exhausted from her high caliber daily routine and falls asleep and crashes her car. Even though she practices in multiple areas of the law, throughout the show it becomes evident that Kim's real legal passion is public defense work.

Kim is the foil for the main character, Jimmy. Jimmy's a con man, but Kim is by the book. Jimmy cuts corners, but Kim just works her ass off. Throughout the series, they orbit within the gravitational pull of the other, and through a shared love of the thrill of pulling cons and sticking it to the man, Kim and Jimmy fall in love. And they become so entwined, they open up their own firm together, they move in together. Kim absorbs Jimmy's moral greyness. The show amps up their greyness so slowly that it's fun to watch at first, but eventually it becomes evident that the entire thing is amping up too much, flying off the rails, hurtling toward something awful faster and faster and it's already too fast to stop.

The series has one more episode left, but we've already seen the horrible thing that Kim crashed into. Kim and Jimmy got roped in with Mexican drug cartels and it led to the murder of their colleague/nemesis/old boss Howard right in front of their eyes in their own home. They were also kidnapped and outfoxing death, but really the murder was pretty terrible. Kim, realizing fully what has happened, abruptly quits the practice of law, divorces Jimmy, moves to Florida, and proceeds to live a painfully banal life.

I used to think that Kim Wexler pre-banal life in Florida was the Joker for women lawyers. I mean she started out by the book, hard working, ordinary. And slowly, through her love of the thrill of the con, and her love for the conman, she transforms into a version of herself that's dishonest and breaks brightline rules. But through cons, she bests her enemies and wins big. She flips the script on the men and institutions that reaped the benefits of her hard work. Kim's feminine rage against the machine is expressed in her cons.

Last night's episode of the show, and the penultimate episode of the series, was the first time that Kim's banal life in Florida is revealed. The show has always had this specific timeline in black and white (instead of in color), but of course it's pretty apt for Kim's new life. She wears denim jean skirts with t-shirts and has an awful wig and dates some dude who has an opinion on mayo brands :( She works in an office that's more banal than the paper company in the tv show The Office. She doesn't have any real friends, just the girlfriends of her boyfriend's friends. My God, it was bleak.

Seeing Kim living on a canal in Florida, and having to pretend to liker her bland boyfriend and her bland sales job and her bland friends hurt. It hurt. It hurt because Rhea Seehorn is a superb actor so even though Kim is fronting to those around her that she's ordinary and happy there, she's not. She doesn't belong and she's not happy, not really, and it hurts. I think that in the same way that the Joker took all of his pain and turned it outward on the society who hurt him, Kim took all of her pain and internalized it. Take the chips on her shoulder already, the trauma of pulling herself up from her own bootstraps the way that people who actually say that term have never actually had to, working in a field, in a society, that has historically been hostile to people like her (women). Throw in her boundless fury and disappointment in herself and the choices that she made, the never waning guilt of indirectly causing the death of Howard and psychologically menacing Howard's widow. Kim hurts herself because Kim hurt people.

Anyway, I used to chuckle at the memes about the Joker fan boys. I didn't get it and I thought it was kinda cringey. Maybe it's hard to understand cringey fandoms until you've seen flickers of your deepest, most primal reflection in a fictional character. I think what I'm trying to say is that if art in its most basic concept is expression, and if the entire point of the consumption of art if to feel as a result of that expression, then isn't the best art the kind that moves us deeply with that expression?

The series finale of the show is next week, in solidarity, please manifest the below with me.

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Post-script: I always write out the blogs before I go through and add in pics/memes/videos/asides. So I wrote this entire thing out and then started looking for visuals to add in and found the below tweet (bottom of screen grab; after I took the screen grab I went back and retweeted obvi I'm not a sociopath), which basically said succinctly in one sentence what I spent countless words trying to express. Here I thought I had an actual original idea and it turns out someone else invented it months ago!