WATCHING JOKER IN A PLANE CRASH

TOKYO DIARY: PART ONE

Nov 17, 2024

This the first in a series of short diary entries from my recent trip to Japan. Last month I was in Tokyo leading a writers room for a Japanese-English comedy drama, alongside the fantastic Itaru Mizuno. The idea is currently being pitched internationally, and you can read more about the project in Deadline.

TOKYO DIARY PART ONE: WATCHING JOKER IN A PLANE CRASH

I’m picking what to watch on the plane’s entertainment system. This is an important decision, because I am about to die. The plane drops another 50 metres and a businessman screams. The Japanese woman next to me hands her daughter two sick bags then, wordlessly, offers one to me. I politely tell her “it’s ok” in Japanese, because I don’t have enough vocabulary to ask why she has so many sick bags. She looks back at me doubtfully, then tucks the bag into my seat pocket anyway.

The plane bounces up and down capriciously. The turbulence started two minutes ago, but it’s bad enough that I’m already worrying about which picture they are going to use of me on the news. Please be my nice headshot.

This is all very unfair. I don’t deserve to die in a plane crash. I might deserve to die, but not in a plane crash. Sure, right now I’m on a 15-hour long-haul flight to Tokyo, but otherwise I’m very climate conscious. Before this trip, I have been on a plane once in the last 11 years. I recycle my jam jars. I’m mostly vegetarian, sort of. In terms of carbon karma, other people on the plane must be tipping us in a downward direction. I scan the other passengers. The businessman who yelped at the last drop looks like he flies long-haul all the time. And he got the meat option for dinner. He’s gripping the armrests, breathing raggedly. I roll my eyes. This is your fault, mate. At least face it like a man!

I look back at my screen. I’m halfway through watching Joker. Joker is a humorless film about a man who, shunned by society, decides he won’t take it any more. It’s like having Taxi Driver explained to you by someone who hasn’t watched Taxi Driver, and doesn’t know what a taxi is. I have to find something else to die to.

The plane tilts on a new axis, and I involuntarily gasp. My neighbour looks nervously from my green face to the sick bag. I smile weakly and repeat “it’s ok” in Japanese, because I don’t have the vocabulary to say: “I actually have a phobia of vomiting so I’ve only been sick twice in the last 20 years, and to be honest your interest in sick bags is more frightening to me than the plane crash.”

I panic-scroll through the other films on the system. I’ve been told Inside Out is good, but I’m not dying in front of a kids movie. They’ve also got Challengers. For a moment I think this is a good choice. Then I imagine my charred corpse in front of the tennis threesome movie. “Nobody else in history has ever worried about exactly this,” I think, proudly.

I’m partly so invested in my final film choice because my aunt is, genuinely, an air crash investigator. I don’t want to embarrass her at the crash site. I imagine her picking over the wreckage and finding my body, which is miraculously intact, along with the screen in front of my seat. My aunt is a professional so she doesn’t show any sign of emotion. She simply traces the headphone cable from my ear to the screen. She sees it’s playing the incel-movie Joker. A single tear of shame runs down her cheek. She checks her superiors aren’t watching then, to preserve my dignity, silently switches it to Challengers.

BA’s film selection has now made me picture my own dead body twice. Maybe I should listen to something calming on my phone instead. I open an audiobook of J.G. Ballard’s short stories. “The Air Disaster,” says the narrator. I shut the audiobook.

The plane rocks. A baby howls. There’s no other option. I resume Joker. Maybe this is a funny way to go. Wry. Ironic. I imagine the carnivore businessman being sucked out of the emergency exit and in his final moments of consciousness thinking: “Is that woman…. watching Joker?” Everyone will be screaming, but I’ll just be in my headphones, calmly going: “Please keep it down, I need to understand the Joker’s struggle.” God I’m cool. I’m kind of a Joker myself.

The plane shudders and drops again. For some reason, while imagining my multiple deaths, I have started hyperventilating. Silently, the sick bag woman lifts the bag to my mouth. I shake my head and tell her “it’s ok” in Japanese. She looks at me, says in English, “yes, it’s ok”, and tells me to breathe into the bag.

Five minutes later the turbulence stops. “Damn,” I think. “Now I have to watch the end of Joker.”

Next time: I land in Tokyo and accidentally go to a sewage museum for children.

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