Joker movie review: sad clown, bad clown, not at all a rad clown

And you are blocked. Utterly unhinged.

Humorless too? Ah MaryAnn, God love you :-)

I was 10 years old in Dundee in 1981 and it had quite as many ghettos, misery and sanitation issues as the 1981 NYC portrayed here.

In terms of identification, if you have never experienced any episodes of acute loneliness, isolation or mental illness in your life then I guess well done and congratulations.

I was referring to the fact that you got riled about the constant comparisons between this movie and Scorsese’s oeuvre as you clearly do not feel that Joker is worthy of the comparison. I felt that this was obvious but am happy to clarify.

You will note that I managed to answer your questions with some manners, with no need to swear for cheap emphasis and without generally acting like a crazy person.

The video’s main points are:

1) The mainstream media wants Joker to fail financially or to inspire a violent event so that it fails

2) When a person breaks down and embraces anarchy and violence, a lack of compassion in their social environment is just as responsible as the choices of the individual.

3) The mainstream media are responsible for creating this social environment, and the movie portrays them as the true villain.

4) The mainstream media see themselves being blamed for the creation of violent individuals in the film, so they want Joker to fail or inspire a violent event.

This is a circular way to structure an argument. At its emotional core, the video is identical to most internet comments (including this one): “People don’t like something I like, so I will find a way to rationalize why they are acting irrationally.” By attacking the purportedly irrational Mainstream Media, he’s doing a some mirror destroying of his own. Let’s look at each point:

1) The video acknowledges briefly, then glosses over the fact that there are exceptions to its characterization of the mainstream media’s response to the film. They are not a monolithic, unified entity – even the headlines he cherrypicks have a broad range of takes.

Rather than a coordinated assault, a simpler explanation is that the clickbait driven film press took the path of least resistance by tying the film to hotbutton issues like sex, violence, and race. Given the content of the film (or lack thereof), there weren’t many other angles to choose from.

The only thing we can say for certain about the mainstream media as a whole is that they want something interesting, relatable, and tragic to happen at regular intervals, period. Fear, tragedy, spectacle, and violence are how CNN and Fox News make their money. Most of them are not evil, they just need eyeballs to make money, and humans are naturally curious about horrible things happening to other humans. The mainstream media wants nothing more than for people to endlessly hop from one schadenfreudaliscious news nugget to the next like a kid eating free samples at Cosco trapped in a boundless maze of brands and slogans.

2) This vague assertion is a truism that no one but solipsists and the NRA would deny – everyone understands that almost all crimes are due in part to social pressures and the lack of a social safety net, and are not purely spur of the moment actions performed by disconnected psychopaths. The important question is, how does the movie go about revealing this truth?

3) For the most part, big money likes the status quo because the status quo is what allowed them to amass power and wealth. To the extent that large media outlets are tools of big money, they would prefer a movie that does not incite social unrest or genuine political revolution. However, Parasite, a movie that addresses class issues more boldly has received high praise from mainstream outlets. Get Out, a movie that was fairly blunt in its handling of race also received glowing mainstream praise, and if the status quo wasn’t worried about those films or shows like Black Mirror or The Handmaid’s Tale, it has little to fear from one more angry white antihero in a film that has very little to say on issues of class or race (I did notice an adversarial relationship to black women in the trailers, but if that pattern holds in the rest of the movie, it would reinforce the status quo)

4) This is the Jungian crux of his argument – the mainstream media has seen their own dark reflection in the movie and have chosen to destroy it for revealing a truth that they don’t want to acknowledge. I’m not saying it’s completely false – there may be a grain of truth to it for a few reviewers, but a simpler and more reasonable explanation is that media outlets needed a way to get eyeballs and cursors on articles about a rated R comic book movie, so they went with what works – fear, sex, violence. tragedy.

When the movie was a success, they saw more dollar signs, and did everything they could to maintain controversy to generate clicks, as the maker of this video is doing. Large companies want to sell merch and family friendly Marvel movies are a broadly appealing gravy train, so they tend to get more favorable treatment on average than a one and done rated R flick. I see no evidence of a broad media conspiracy, just people trying to grab some eyeballs, make a buck, and maintain their death grip on the top rung of the ladder – just business as usual, this video included.

In terms of identification, if you have never experienced any episodes of acute loneliness, isolation or mental illness in your life then I guess well done and congratulations.

Almost everyone experiences, at some point, loneliness and isolation, if not also mental illness. That still does not mean we can identify with Arthur.

You are making the same mistake as Hollywood: the experience of white men is NOT universal. The rest of us have to ignore enormous elements of our own experiences in order to suspend our disbelief and identify with a white male protagonist for at least the length of a movie. This movie asks too much of us, and I, at least, cannot go there with this movie.