Can't you take a joke?
Not everything is funny, especially things that aren't true
What does it mean when a Hollywood hit has way too much in common with a violent parody inciting violence against the media?
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Watch: Gary Gulman disprove Todd Phillips’ thesis on HBO
Listen: to the podcast of the 1619 Project.
But first: Todd Phillips needs a hug.
Chuck Knox, the late football coach, wrote a memoir, and because I was a trusting child I dutifully read a review of this memoir, thinking somehow I would be less a football fan if I didn’t pay attention to the ghost-written ramblings of an old man. Still, I remember one observation that made it into the book review: The closer you get to a mountain, the harder it is to see. We think that if we don’t see something for ourselves that can’t truly behold it, but try to tell that to the accomplished board members of WeWork and Teranos. They were so many George W.’s meeting their own personal Putin. They saw the thing close up and believed they saw what was not there.
All of which is a long way around to say that I haven’t seen Joker and don’t plan to, but I have some thoughts, actually just one, which is: Todd Phillips made a political choice in presenting the Joker as an avatar of violent white male resentment—and then making him a leftist.
Caveat one: If you liked Joker, cool. I’ll admit that I’ve had my fill of comic book movies, but if you like them then I am happy for you. Not here to start a fight unless you are here to come at Superman, in which case sit over there in your wrongness until I get to you.
Caveat two: There are other reasons not to like Joker. Ann Hornaday did a great job unmasking the movie as more derivative than referential, and the crowd at Pop Culture Happy Hour eventually talked themselves into a similar opinion that this is a deeply unoriginal movie. And if canon is your thing, no less than Glen Weldon (who wrote a funny book about the Batman) says Joker gets the Joker wrong, and also it’s boring.
Now, to the diatribe, and I’ll be quick: There’s a guy, not terribly impressive in any way. His career ambition is a delusion, but he thinks he’s entitled to the pinnacle of success. He’s beaten up by a group of teenagers whom Weldon described as “undifferentiated brown,” so someone gives him a gun. This leads to him becoming a Bernard Goetz anti-hero after he murders some bigger, stronger men who were attacking him on the subway.
For anyone my age (and director Todd Phillips is right in my Gen X cohort), it’s impossible to see Goetz’s vigilantism as non-racial. Goetz, a white guy, killed some black men whom he said were bothering him, or about to, or might have. This is the basic construct of what happened to the Joker, except Phillips turned his attackers into white finance bros.
“Is something funny a**hole?” asks one they beat the Joker. “Is something funny? What’s so f**king funny?” asks another.
Other insults come his way. A black lady, who is so far out of his league as to be playing an entirely different sport, fails to return his affections. A black woman fails to help him when he needs mental health care. All these bad things happen to him. He doesn’t get what he feels entitled to: women, fame, a government that prioritizes him. So he becomes a murderous sociopath. Because society.
Todd Phillips should be the happiest guy in the world. Certainly, he doesn’t have any evident reason to complain. Not yet 50, he has written and directed hugely successful movies, including Old School and the Hangover movies. He got an Oscar nomination for co-writing Borat. If he had a genre, it would be white men behaving badly.
But it appears Mr. Phillips doesn’t think he can be funny anymore, because you just can’t take a joke anymore: “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture. There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’ It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, ‘I’m out.'”
All the fucking funny guys…
It’s no surprise that people were concerned that Joker would inspire violence, or that the studio felt the need to say that they didn’t intend “to hold this character up as a hero.” But by all accounts the movie sympathized with the protagonist, infusing his transformation with a logic by blaming his violence on society. Phillip’s Joker is the very model of a modern major incel.
Except for one thing: Phillips gives him a “hero’s journey,” if you will, through a swamp of racism and sexism, but purposefully changes an inherently racial construct (the Bernie Goetz episode on the subway) to give the Joker an antifa patina. They movie gives the Joker a white supremacist backstory but blames his violence on leftists. And as annoying as antifa is to me, they’re not the ones going on murderous rampages at Walmart, at synagogues, at schools.
Here’s where someone is thinking, “Jason, it’s just a movie.” Yes, but no. People think Americans spat upon troops returning from Vietnam because Rambo said so in a movie. There’s a reason why Vladimir Lenin called film the most important art. It can create a memory out of imagination. And making the Joker a leftist vigilante is a political choice. You can’t make political choices and then hide behind, “It’s just a movie!” Besides, the only artistic choices Phillips made in this movie were what to steal from which movies. His real, original choice—to blame antifa for the sins of incels—was political.
There’s a bit too much ironic violence going around these days, whether we’re talking about the parodic video of Trump massacring the news media shown to guests at Trump National Doral Miami or the Christchurch murderer’s manifesto, which one New York Times writer wrote was “produced entirely within the irony-soaked discourse of modern extremism.” Slap clown makeup on a racist meme and you can’t take it literally either as a racist attack or as a joke. Make enough slight adjustments to the political meaning of enough moving pictures, and pretty soon you’re blaming genocide in Syria on Democrats, hurricanes on lesbians, and Dylan Roof on Bernie Sanders.
Joker is the first blockbuster inspired by a subreddit. Phillips has said often that he didn’t want to make a comic book movie. He also didn’t make any of the movies he lifted beats, plots, and scenes from. In complaining he can’t tell jokes anymore, he sounds like every middle-aged guy out there terrified of the #metoo movement. If you’re looking for meaning in The Joker, maybe it’s that Phillips filmed an allegory of his own resentment that audiences have moved on from mediocre bromedies.
What I’m reading
This veteran of three GOP administrations writes smartly about why Republicans are sticking by the President.
My friend wrote this, and oh, the first sentence: “Last month, for the first time in her life, my 3-year-old daughter watched me being racially profiled.”
China is addressing its pork shortage with polar bear-sized pigs.
Indian companies are recruiting on Twitter and Instagram.
An old clip, but Mike Godwin—AKA, the guy who came up with the eponymous axiom about the longer a discussion goes on, the higher the likelihood of someone being called a Nazi—says it’s OK to compare today’s white supremacists to Nazis.
This $695 graphene jacket sounds like a terribly fashionable science experiment.
Being bad at recognizing faces might be a cause and not an effect of introversion.
Almost one in five CEOs has been fired or laid off on their way up, and most of them relatively late in their careers.
I read this piece by my friend R.H. last year about how Hitler almost killed the great American novel and think about it often.
Male tarantulas are getting randy in San Francisco, creating a version of Hell that Satan himself never imagined.
There is a psychological explanation for why people tend to stop listening to new music as they age.
The history of kangaroo courts is only intermittently racist.
Pigs infected with African swine flu are migrating from North Korea into South Korea.
Dave Weigel on the “coming homelessness primary.”
Most job-seekers make their social media profiles private.
The world is getting louder.
Here’s how to fast-track your path to the C-suite.
Buried in this Vox explainer is the fascinating origin of the word “boycott.”
Recent Studies Indicate: Startups with at least one female founder raised more venture capital than companies founded by only men. It’s getting harder for straight women to find suitable men, whereas attractiveness is more evenly distributed among women. Women are six times as likely to have an orgasm in a long-term relationship than on a first-time hookup. Bullying has been linked to “significantly steeper decreases in the volume of two regions [of the brain] involved in movement and learning—the left putamen and left caudate—with the former showing the stronger effect.”
News Nerds: Grocery stores are doing away with their newspaper and magazine racks. This one is going to hurt. There is a Yelp for journalism now. The more media literate someone is, the better able they are to protect themselves from disinformation.
Last Word: David Byrne is doing the most hopepunk thing ever. He’s publishing an online “self help magazine for people who hate self help magazines” called Reasons to be Cheerful.
What I’m watching
My friend S.P. and I saw Gary Gulman at the Comedy Cellar when we both happened to be in New York at the same time. He killed, and many of the jokes we loved are in his new HBO comedy special, which you should totally see. The New York Times gave it a great review. Todd Phillips is an idiot. You can still be funny.
What I’m listening to
The New York Times did a great job on its 1619 series that examined how the introduction of slavery onto this continent created patterns we still see today in surprising ways. The podcast series is great and well worth a listen.
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