JOKER (2019)
Rating: 5/5
Rating: 5/5
Joker seems to be all things to all people. Tyler Cowen believes it is “the most anti-Leftist movie I have seen, ever.” The Leninist Komsomol of Sverdlov oblast hailed it as a masterpiece showcasing the “problems of a capitalist society.” It upset
the more genteel Alt Right boomers such as Trevor Lynch, who called it a
“boring movie about a disgusting loser”, while The Daily Stormer gave
it 10/10 and praised
its justification of violence “as an appropriate response of abused
white men to what society has done to them.” The New York Times was enraged
it didn’t signal hard enough against problematic whiteness,
highlighting trivial issues like mental illness and class war instead.
This because Joker is an unreliable narrator.
That is the single most important observation about the film – the main
character’s mental problems means we can’t know which of the scenes are
real, and which are hallucinations or flights of fancy.
The only thing
we really know for sure is there is a mentally disturbed man called
Arthur Fleck who lives in a rundown apartment with his no less crazed
mother, scraping by and trying to ends meet as best he can with his
limited abilities in a metropolis that seems to be going down the dumps.
He has a dreams of connecting with a neighboring single mother,
whom he imagines going out with, only to be told to leave the one time
he finds himself in her apartment. This narrative device leaves the
audience free to interpret the film anyway they like. Judging from Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes,
ordinary people enjoyed the creative ambiguity, while the official
reviewers were much less enamored. This makes it very different from
Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which was a straightforward paeon to
conservative values of law and order and the dangers of populist
anarchy.
Two
scenes in particular set the stage for Arthur Fleck’s transition into a Joker. In the first scene, he gets jumped while working as a human
billboard by a band of diverse youths, who run away with his sign. They lure him into an alley and beat him up.
In the second scene, a band of drunk Wall Street Frat Boys
beat him up for his weirdo mannerisms, which he can’t help on account
of his mental illness. The Frat Boys work for Thomas Wayne, an oligarch
with political aspirations who is supposed to be a stand-in for [insert
generic tough on crime conservative oligarch]. Only this time, he fought
back, and lethally so – and became a folk hero of the masses in the
process. These two scenes can be considered to be a composite of a real
event in New York in 1984, in which a white man called Bernhard Goetz shot four black muggers and was acquitted by a jury.
However,
it strikes me that the following question is basically a short
Political Compass test: Did any of these two assaults actually happen,
at least in the way they were portrayed?
- Youths N / Frat Boys N – You think the Joker really is just a low-IQ loser with mental problems. [sort of centrist/rationalist?]
- Youths Y / Frat Boys N – You are a crypto-racist conservative like Charles Murray. [bottom right]
- Youths N / Frat Boys Y – Youths dindu nuffin, Frat Boys exercised their toxic white male privilege. You are an SJW and want the Joker to go on Chapo. [left]
- Youths Y / Frat Boys Y – You think the FBI is correct on the color of crime, as well as skeptical about the elites and cuckservative establishment. You are Alt Right. [top right]
Personally,
I lean towards (1), though I don’t exclude (2) – aside from statistical
priors, there’s also actually less circumstantial evidence showing the
Fray Bot assault happened than the Youth assault (e.g. visible physical
damage, the missing sign). Though in theory, any of these combinations
are possible – even (3), which I consider to be the least likely. But
the key point to emphasize here is that people with different biases and
priors from me will come up with different probability rankings.
This
gives scope to interpret the causes of the Joker’s descent (or
ascension?) from the Underground Man to a Raskolnikov character who is
beyond good and evil any way one wishes. In this sense, it is a very
nihilistic, postmodernist film. There are no unalloyed goodies or
baddies. It is neither anti-capitalist, nor anti-antifa.
This
“all viewpoints are equally valid” theme seeps into every niche and
crevice. The oligarch Wayne is an unsympathetic, cold-hearted
conservative, but one will improve things through broken windows
policies. Joker is held in adulation by the proles (or
lumpenproles?), but can he really be a hero of the working class when he
openly declares he has no political positions? He certainly doesn’t
read theory – he’s not interested, and probably doesn’t have the
intelligence for it anyway; dependent on whether Wayne is lying or not
about being his father, Arthur Fleck is either an orphan, or
the son of a mentally ill woman who claims the father was Wayne, but
who I suspect was actually the abusive boyfriend who tormented the young
Arthur and then left her.
However,
importantly, it is also the mental illness that humanizes this Joker –
can one really blame him for going haywire when Reaganesque oligarchs
such as Wayne are shuttering the free mental health clinics that people
like him need to cope with his severe problems? However, contra Bronze Age Pervert’s take,
the movie hardly endorses the liberal view on mental health
provisioning either – note that the Joker’s affirmative action therapist
only punches in at work, and doesn’t even listen to what he has to
say; her only function is to rubber-stamp his medications. Once again,
the movie teases people of all ideological stripes while delivering to
no-one.
It
is this ideological malleability that is making Joker a cult classic
amongst people of very different ideological persuasions, be they
leftist anti-capitalist critics or rightist pessimists. Not
surprisingly, the only major class that are taking exception to this are
the NYT bugmen, the Blue Checkmarks, the NPCs – for them, there is one
correct answer: Toxic masculinity and white privilege as the root cause
of all evil, anything else being distraction at best.
PS.
I survived the screening of Joker without getting shot or any other
major incident in a Boson theater – except at the end, when clapping
broke out and spread to the entire audience. Not the reaction I expected
to see. However, on checking up a closed Boson Workers chat, I
saw that one of its participants said he had started clapping at the end
of the movie, inciting the rest to join in; furthermore, I was pretty
sure it was that same theater, as the guy was also in Boson and the
time he posted it at correlated perfectly with when the movie I was at
ended. Globalization in action in our clown world: Leftwing spitlord
adopts Alt Right meme, gets normies to unwittingly partake in an Hollywood movie about a killer clown, I experience it IRL and then get
to hear the full story via a Boson Workers chat.
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