Put on an incel face

Joker (d. Todd Phillips)

Only Joaquin Phoenix could have played this role in a movie that exhibits a kind of sensibility very much of the present rooted in doublings. Joaquin has his dead brother’s career, River, for those who can still remember the deceased’s short-lived stardom. The film itself is the twin other of Phillip’s Deadpool movies: too much and non-stop yucks—because laughter can also be estranging, thus the cacklings of the Joker and the belabored plot point of why he laughs the way he does. The film wants to cater to prevailing sentiments: populist and anti-establishment and sympathy for the civilizational burdens of the white straight male.

Let’s begin with the cityscape. Why an adaptation of Taxi Driver-era NYC, complete with De Niro doing a version of King of Comedy? Our major cities no longer look like this; in fact, the white flight that turned cities into crumbling dystopias has reversed course and cities are now gentrified AF, segregated racially and by class. Well, because the movie wants its hero to be a byproduct of a crime-ridden city that is (insert drum roll here) visibly non-white. Note the opening: It’s a gang of brown teenagers that mug him, followed by the appearance of two strong black women who are pointedly shown as misunderstanding him. The joke here is that these women appear to be in a socially more advantageous position than he is—the straight white dude. This is also where we first encounter his laughter where it functions as lack of intimacy or his inability to find community with these figures. It’s the same laughter one hears when demeaning jokes are made targeting minorities passing off as hipster, un-PC, or South Park-style humor. This plot choice of setting the birth of rage in a distant and imaginary past (because it’s not real but more like a cinematic rendering of the past) seems like a cop-out to me. It’s easier and creatively lazier to make social ills as the cause of resentment. How can a Joker figure emerge from an urban space full of gleaming high rise condos, vegan bistros, and overpriced coffee shops?

The film is as incel-y as expected, especially the misogynistic reasons for Joker’s madness. (Why does the film insists on multiple causes?) Mother dear has not been such a dear, after all; (the casting of Frances Conroy, playing another iteration of the psycho mom in Six Feet Under, is already a sign); he also discovers his virility after murdering three white Wall Street bros by fucking his exoticized black neighbor right after, or so it would seem. Sexuality, violence, and humor (for him but insult and tragedy for the rest of us) all jostle together in his notebook, which is what the movie essentially is, a manifesto/notebook/pageant for the incel-inclined. So how does race come in, aside from the strategic racialized opening mentioned above? “You don’t mean shit to them,” the black caseworker says regarding the budget cuts that would stop his medications, “and I don’t mean shit to them” (paraphrased). This might be the case, even in our shared world of austerity, but the whole point of the movie is that they (white male anti-hero and those who self-identify with the plight of that subject) will not let this happen passively. They will fight back, like the protestors in the movie and out in the streets, even if that means killing people who are in the same boat, the black caseworker, the stand-in for minorities who are and may seem slightly above them socially and economically. The bloody footprints tell us so. (Fuck inter-class solidarity, their whiteness and manliness is more important than anything else.)

The economic factor is also time-warped. The class resentment is against the old American oligarchy represented by Thomas Wayne. (Yup, Bruce’s pop.) He could easily be a Carnegie or a Ford or a Rockefeller—instead of the Bezoses or Musks of the world. The economic system, because the film is set somewhere in the late 70s and early 80s, does not match with current realities, which has the effect of vacating more realistic economic and political reasons for the diminishment of the American white middle class. It’s the wrong bogeyman as is usually the case with Hollywood product. The reason we get a Thomas Wayne is to make yet another laborious reason for Joker’s existence: he could possibly be (MAJOR SPOILER) Bruce’s half-brother. Since it is a movie about doublings, their brotherhood occurs twice in the film. There’s a shot of the birth of Batman cut to Joker’s laughter as if he knows even though it is diegetically impossible. It is meant to be creepy and prophetic, but this is where the major gap in the movie is: how can the white nationalist incel types know for sure the veracity of their racist, sexist, and politically regressive beliefs? They don’t, that’s why they resort to crude laughter and violence. They are the negation of intimacy: they, like the Joker, dance alone.

#2019 #133