We’ve heard the line many times before: “This is a movie that will make people do bad things.” It’s the modern equivalent of the old “the Devil made me do it” claim. People do violent things because of movies, video games, rap lyrics … Choose your demon. The most unexpected target of such finger-pointing, though, is a film with a decidedly progressive message: “Joker”.
A sizeable group of liberally-inclined critics are treating “Joker” as if it all but supported mass shooters and white nationalists. Robbie Collin of Telegraph tweeted, “I’m worried someone’s going to get killed,” while Vanity Fair and The New Yorker joined in the chorus. David Edelstein wrote, “I see in Joker an attempt to elevate nerdy revenge to the plane of myth.” Alan Zilberman claimed that viewers were “supposed to sympathize with a mediocre white man radicalized into deranged violence,” while IndieWire described it as “Incel-Friendly.”
Sounds like a pretty dangerous movie. It also sounds like an entirely different movie from the one I saw.
Joaquin Phoenix’s depiction of the disturbed and marginalized Arthur Fleck was both heartbreaking and horrifying, a clown imago and an uncontrollable laughter that make one’s blood run cold. “Joker” is a wonderful character study, a captivating tale of one man’s descent into madness and chaos. It artfully shows how such villains are created by a cruel and indifferent society, the bastard children of neoliberalism. While humanizing its eponymous central character, at no time does it justify his actions—the Joker is, at the end of the day, a cartoon villain.
As I left the theater, I felt compelled to respond to the baffling critiques in a systematic way.
CRITIQUE #1: “The film glorifies the Joker and his violence”
Critics of “Joker” seem unable to tell the difference between humanizing a villainous character and justifying their actions. The 2003 film “Monster” offers a close analogy. While playing a female prostitute-turned-serial-killer, Charlize Theron showed all of the antihero’s humanity, brokenness, and spiritual struggle. Was anybody worried that the movie had “glorified” serial killers? That scores of young women would go become sex workers and start killing their Johns as a result?
CRITIQUE #2: “On-screen violence causes real-life violence”
For starters, “Joker “isn’t even that violent, not by Hollywood standards. Still, one must admit, the US has a disproportionate number of unstable white men with guns. Some of them commit terrorist acts, and some claim that a movie inspired them. This goes all the way back to John Hinckley Jr., who blamed his attempted assassination of President Reagan on the film “Taxi Driver”.
Are filmmakers to blame, though? Should we ban series like “Narcos” and “Breaking Bad,” just because a viewer might be tempted to join the drug trade? Is “Jurassic Park” off limits, because some unhinged scientist might try to clone dinosaurs?
CRITIQUE #3: “It discriminates against the mentally ill”
True, Arthur Fleck struggles with mental illness. In fact, his character is meticulously crafted to reflect the profile of real-life shooters: young, white, male, socially isolated, history of abuse, and yes, mentally ill. At no point, though, does the film suggest that all these groups are predestined for domestic terrorism.
CRITIQUE #4: “It propagates the ‘white victim’ myth”
Richard Brody of The New Yorker pushes this argument, based on the ubiquitous black and Latino characters in Arthur Fleck’s world. It’s true, the white protagonist is surrounded by non-white people. However, isn’t Gotham City just a fictionalized version of New York, a city with no ethnic majority? A far worse cinematic sin, one would think, would be to depict a whitewashed version of the metropolis.
The actual targets of the Joker’s violence, meanwhile, are all white and privileged: Wall Street frat boys; a popular talk show host; the billionaire Thomas Wayne. If any violence were glorified by the film, it would be violence of the left-leaning, Occupy-variety.
So where is all the liberal anger coming from?
This bizarre trend brings out one’s conspiracy-theorist side. Could this all be one big right-wing plot to smear progressives? Are these “liberal” complaints just a false flag operation designed to depict us as snowflakes, parodying the culture of “PC overreach”?
Unfortunately, we can’t chalk all the complaints up to sinister right-wing bots—after all, many come from mainstream critics. Still, a more plausible explanation—albeit one much more insidious—may be at stake. As it turns out, the “Joker controversy” was already an online trend long before the movie even hit theaters.
Alex Abad-Santosalex of Vox covered the matter back in September (“The fight over Joker and the new movie’s “dangerous” message, explained”). At the time, the aforementioned complaints were already circulating Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, long before Joker had ever hit theaters. As the author explains: “[...] most of the conversation surrounding Joker is among those who haven’t seen it.”
The fact is, bots and algorithms naturally favor negative content. Our social media automatically promote controversy. Like the eponymous, murderous clown himself, this cloud of anger is a monster of our own creation. One can imagine a crowd of villainous, artificially-intelligent bots gathered in a virtual cave somewhere, laughing maniacally at the discord they’ve sown.
There is an even more horrific result of the hoopla, though: these misplaced progressive complaints have emboldened right-wing voices, much more than any violent movie ever could.
And that is no laughing matter.
David J. Schmidt is an author and multilingual translator who splits his time between Mexico City and San Diego, Calif. He is a proponent of immigrants’ rights and fair trade, and works with worker-owned coops in Mexico to help them develop alternative, fair sources of income. Schmidt has written several books in English and Spanish, published in the US and Mexico. His series “Into the Serpent’s Head,” recounts his journey to a coffee-farming community in the mountains Oaxaca, Mexico. He also co-hosts the podcast To Russia With Love. See www.holyghoststories.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2019
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us