In brief
- Keanu Reeves appears fleetingly in Joker (2019) via a Kellogg’s advert filmed in 1987.
- The film’s plot takes place in 1981, creating a 6-year temporal inconsistency with the commercial spot.
- In total, 7 notable anachronisms spanning from the 1980s to the 2010s pepper Todd Phillips’ feature film.
The Singular Aesthetic of a Popular Success
Upon its theatrical release in 2019, Joker immediately established itself as a major work of contemporary cinema. Driven by a masterful performance from Joaquin Phoenix, rewarded with the Oscar for Best Actor, the feature film directed by Todd Phillips captivated audiences and critics alike with its grimy aesthetic and psychological realism. The film forms part of a dark reimagining of the character from the DC Comics universe, offering a clinical dive into the downfall of a marginalised man, Arthur Fleck, within a metropolis in full social decay. Yet, behind the meticulous recreation of Gotham City, designed to evoke the grimy New York of the early 1980s, several anachronistic details slipped onto the screen, escaping the control of the art department during shooting or final editing.
The Historical and Visual Context of 1981 Gotham
To better understand the presence of these temporal missteps, it is worth recalling the aesthetic approach of director Todd Phillips and his cinematographer Lawrence Sher. The primary ambition of the feature film was to move away from traditional blockbusters with omnipresent visual effects in favour of film grain and raw realism, directly inspired by American cinema of the 1970s and very early 1980s. The works of Martin Scorsese, such as Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy, served as a visual and thematic compass for the production team.
The story is explicitly set in the year 1981, a period marked by economic crisis, the bin men’s strike paralyzing the streets, rising crime, and pervasive social tension in major American megacities. To recreate this suffocating atmosphere, filming took place largely on location throughout the streets of New York, particularly in the Bronx and Manhattan, as well as in Jersey City and Newark in the neighbouring state of New Jersey. Filming in the heart of modern, active urban infrastructure represents a colossal logistical challenge. Despite the monumental work of transforming shopfronts, street furniture, and extras’ clothing, capturing modern public space inevitably allowed contemporary elements to filter through that escaped the production team’s vigilance.
Detailed Analysis of the Film’s Anachronisms
Seven Anachronisms Slipped into the Heart of Gotham City
Meticulous observation of the shots in Joker reveals several temporal discrepancies scattered throughout the narrative. While the vast majority of cinema-goers do not notice these details during a screening, a careful frame-by-frame examination highlights objects, media figures, and technologies from later decades.
Keanu Reeves Invites Himself into a 1987 Advert
The Fleeting Appearance of Keanu Reeves
To catch a glimpse of the Matrix actor, one must pause the viewing at precisely 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 9 seconds. In a scene featuring several televisions lined up broadcasting continuous programming, the screen located in the top left shows a commercial spot for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The young starring actor in this advert is none other than Keanu Reeves, hired for the shoot in 1987, when he was just starting his acting career on North American television. His appearance, extremely brief, precedes the arrival of a dramatic news bulletin. As the action of Joker takes place in 1981, this sequence creates a chronological gap of six years between the story’s timeline and the actual creation of the television archive reused by the editor.
The Energizer Bunny Precedes Its Creation
In the same sequence bringing together several televisions within the frame, another advertising element disrupts the historical consistency established by the script. Observing closely the various video feeds projected on the monitors, one can make out the Energizer Bunny, the famous pink mascot of the consumer battery brand. However, this promotional character, which became an icon of American popular culture, was only created and broadcast on US television screens from 1988 onwards. Its inclusion in the film’s audiovisual landscape creates a seven-year temporal leap compared to the events supposed to take place in Gotham in 1981.
Premature Mobile Phone Services
Visual exploration of the urban setting reveals a third temporal inconsistency directly linked to the evolution of communication technologies. In one of the streets taken by Arthur Fleck during his daily wanderings, a shopfront offering mobile phone repairs can be seen in the background. Such a commercial service was absolutely impossible at the time the action is set. Indeed, the very first mobile phone sold on a commercial scale was only launched in 1983 by Motorola, before shops dedicated to their maintenance and sale multiplied and truly emerged during the 1990s and 2000s.
A Contemporary Urban Bike-Share Station
A fourth major anachronism slipped in during exterior shooting in the streets of New York, which lent its real settings to the imaginary city of Gotham. In the background of a dynamic street scene, a Citi Bike station, the official bicycle-sharing system of the New York metropolis, is briefly visible. This shared transport network and its distinctive docking stations were only inaugurated and installed in the public space in 2013, more than three decades after the period recreated in the feature film’s diegesis.
A 1990s Ford Ambulance
The fifth detail concerns the emergency vehicles used by the production to populate the city’s arteries. During an action and chaos sequence in the city centre, an ambulance clearly appears on screen in the middle of traffic. It is a fourth-generation Ford Econoline model. Industrial production of this specific vehicle by the American manufacturer did not begin until 1992, thus creating an eleven-year gap with the historical framework of the story, which is supposed to take place at the very beginning of the previous decade.
Street Props from the Present
A sixth point of divergence lies in the street furniture and props scattered along the pavements during exterior sequences. Certain electronic parking meters and several road signage elements visible during the protagonist’s travels belong to urban planning standards deployed long after the early 1980s. These contemporary elements bear witness to the technical difficulty of completely isolating a film set in a modern urban environment without resorting to systematic computer erasure.
The Composite Architecture of Gotham City
Finally, the seventh anachronism stems from the background infrastructure and the overall architectural composition of the set. The presence of modern signposts and recent architectural structures punctuates the urban landscape. Far from harming the whole, these details reinforce the timeless atmosphere of Gotham, a mythical city whose visual style deliberately borrows from several eras of American cinema and urban history.
The Impact of Anachronisms on the Perception of the Work
Filming Errors in the Service of the Narrative
In the history of cinema, the presence of anachronisms is a frequent phenomenon, including within major Hollywood productions. Major historical films or award-winning sagas sometimes feature errors in props, costumes, or backgrounds. In the specific case of Todd Phillips’ film, these seven temporal continuity errors constitute filming curiosities particularly sought after by film enthusiasts and video analysts.
However, a question arises regarding the nature of these missteps: are they merely simple logistical oversights, or do they contribute to the singular narration of the feature film? Gotham City is a fictional metropolis, an imaginary creation that corresponds to no real city on the map of the United States, even if New York serves as the primary inspiration. Furthermore, the story is told entirely through the altered and subjective perspective of Arthur Fleck, an unreliable narrator whose perception of reality is clouded by hallucinations and psychological distortions. This hybrid nature of the setting allows the film to retain all its dramatic power, transforming these slight historical discrepancies into elements of a composite and timeless urban mythology.
