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| Spoiler alert: the Joker wears face paint. |
The movie Joker has been causing quite a stir, provoking plenty of responses from across the metapolitical spectrum.
My own response to the movie, which I saw soon after it came out in a movie theatre in Japan, has been positive―I really liked it―but somewhat nebulous. Instead of having a clear narrative on the movie and its “meaning,” I felt a kind of fragmented response to it. This also allowed me to see how a lot of the discordant views on the movie were valid, although often to very small and compartmentalised degrees.
Even divorced Alt-Right wife-beater Richard Spencer’s crappy view―that liking the movie is an expression of “loser nationalism” and that it was actually a "Leftist" film because it was supposedly decrying mental health care cuts―has a few grains of truth in it. Although the meeting with the Black female counsellor, where she tells Arthur Fleck (the Joker) that the funding for their meetings has ended, is more memorable for his view that this kind of healthcare is a complete waste of time anyway:
Troublingly, gay White nationalist Greg Johnson put a lot of emphasis on the scene where Joker climbs inside a fridge and possibly locks himself in. While donations-hungry Alt-Liter Stefan Molyneux clearly saw his own horrific childhood in the relationship between Arthur and his mother, although to most other observers this relationship would have appeared rather innocuous until―possibly destabilised by his vision of being an unrecognised scion of the wealthy Wayne family―Joker ends up killing her.
In many ways the film is badly made in the sense that there is a lot of ambiguity in it, but this might actually be part of its intended craft. Yes, even Greg Johnson may have a point about the fridge scene―although clearly it's an extremely shitty point:
Yes, one of the problems with this Joker phenomenon is that many of the reviews seem to get bogged down in this kind of detail-focused, petty logicalistic trivia, as if we were talking about actual reality instead a Hollywood movie about a comic book character.
This leads me to my own approach, which borrows a lot from the Zen attitude of not becoming too snagged on "worldly details" but instead maintaining a wider and more flexible awareness of things. The Zen approach of not grasping at things too prematurely is the exact opposite to the cultural Rorschach test we see all around us today, with so many reviewers just lunging at details that confirm their own biases or identity issues.
The real strength of the movie is not that it confounds its critics so easily by throwing hints, clues, and red herrings aplenty for them to snap after, revealing their own crooked claws in the process, but in its overall tonality as an artistic product and the essentially spiritual message that emanates from that. Indeed, by approaching the film in these terms, “wisdom is sure to flourish, enlightenment to dawn” as I once said in an earlier much misunderstood and rather Jokerish article.
The Zen attitude is to maintain the flow of perception until such a point that the essence appears and then to seize that and only that. Think of it like a heron fishing in a river, aware of everything around it―the movement of the air, the rustle of the leaves, the glittering of the sunshine, the speed of the water―until it strikes, seizing the fish in its mouth. The entire scene is thus given its emblem, the survival of the heron through successful hunting. Such emblematic moments also occur in the cinematic river of Joker.
One is the slightly cringey joke where Arthur says the kids at school used to laugh at his ambition to be a comedian, but that nobody is laughing now, which is heavy with several layers of brutal irony that drill all the way down into the story.
Another is at the end of the movie, where Arthur, after being arrested and institutionalised, is being interviewed once again by our civilisation’s fake "avatar of empathy," a 'caring' Black woman. At this point he starts to laugh, prompting her to disinterestedly ask what’s so funny. He looks up at her and says: “You wouldn’t get it.”
Maybe a little of my own cultural Rorschach test is creeping in here, as the racial and gender dichotomy in this scene instantly reminded me of such phrases as “mansplaining” and “It’s a Black thing” reversed. These phrases and their associated concepts have been used to denigrate the thoughts and words of White males, and are all part of the great “shut up White male” strand in our culture that has been growing in strength in the last few decades.
Indeed here’s something I wrote to the now defunct but then highly influential music paper Melody Maker in 1993, when I saw this kind of devoicing of White males first starting to creep in. They even made it "Letter of the week," which means Kurt Cobain probably read it, as he didn’t blow his brains out until the next year:
Like Joker, Aldo is in unlikable thug who becomes a rallying point for an uprising.
Here’s his personality breakdown from the site Fandom:
Joker is a warning and one that our leaders will miss, as they grasp Rorschach-like at some minor point that allows them to dismiss the movie and reinforce their own cosy but doomed worldviews.
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.
My own response to the movie, which I saw soon after it came out in a movie theatre in Japan, has been positive―I really liked it―but somewhat nebulous. Instead of having a clear narrative on the movie and its “meaning,” I felt a kind of fragmented response to it. This also allowed me to see how a lot of the discordant views on the movie were valid, although often to very small and compartmentalised degrees.
Even divorced Alt-Right wife-beater Richard Spencer’s crappy view―that liking the movie is an expression of “loser nationalism” and that it was actually a "Leftist" film because it was supposedly decrying mental health care cuts―has a few grains of truth in it. Although the meeting with the Black female counsellor, where she tells Arthur Fleck (the Joker) that the funding for their meetings has ended, is more memorable for his view that this kind of healthcare is a complete waste of time anyway:
"You don't listen, do you? You just ask the same questions every week. How's your job? Are you having any negative thoughts? All I have are negative thoughts."What we see with the many responses to the movie is what Andy Nowicki would probably call a cultural Rorschach test, with different people seeing different things that reflect their own personalities and experiences more than what the movie is really about.
Troublingly, gay White nationalist Greg Johnson put a lot of emphasis on the scene where Joker climbs inside a fridge and possibly locks himself in. While donations-hungry Alt-Liter Stefan Molyneux clearly saw his own horrific childhood in the relationship between Arthur and his mother, although to most other observers this relationship would have appeared rather innocuous until―possibly destabilised by his vision of being an unrecognised scion of the wealthy Wayne family―Joker ends up killing her.
In many ways the film is badly made in the sense that there is a lot of ambiguity in it, but this might actually be part of its intended craft. Yes, even Greg Johnson may have a point about the fridge scene―although clearly it's an extremely shitty point:
But the last half of the movie might actually be one of Arthur [The Joker]’s fantasies, because at one point, Arthur empties out his mother’s refrigerator, climbs inside, and closes the door. Can people open refrigerators from the inside? Is the whole latter half of the movie a dying man’s fantasy? Is this another giant jerk-job like Lost? Is the joke on us, the audience?Also, I was left unsure whether Arthur is actually the son of Thomas Wayne, and therefore a brother of Bruce Wayne, the future Batman, or whether this was simply the delusion of his mother. Layered on top of that, there was a further layer of mild confusion about whether that delusion narrative was just something cooked up by Thomas Wayne and his lawyers to avoid an inconvenient sex scandal, etc.
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| The question is not "Who are you? it is "What is the Joker?" |
This leads me to my own approach, which borrows a lot from the Zen attitude of not becoming too snagged on "worldly details" but instead maintaining a wider and more flexible awareness of things. The Zen approach of not grasping at things too prematurely is the exact opposite to the cultural Rorschach test we see all around us today, with so many reviewers just lunging at details that confirm their own biases or identity issues.
The real strength of the movie is not that it confounds its critics so easily by throwing hints, clues, and red herrings aplenty for them to snap after, revealing their own crooked claws in the process, but in its overall tonality as an artistic product and the essentially spiritual message that emanates from that. Indeed, by approaching the film in these terms, “wisdom is sure to flourish, enlightenment to dawn” as I once said in an earlier much misunderstood and rather Jokerish article.
The Zen attitude is to maintain the flow of perception until such a point that the essence appears and then to seize that and only that. Think of it like a heron fishing in a river, aware of everything around it―the movement of the air, the rustle of the leaves, the glittering of the sunshine, the speed of the water―until it strikes, seizing the fish in its mouth. The entire scene is thus given its emblem, the survival of the heron through successful hunting. Such emblematic moments also occur in the cinematic river of Joker.
One is the slightly cringey joke where Arthur says the kids at school used to laugh at his ambition to be a comedian, but that nobody is laughing now, which is heavy with several layers of brutal irony that drill all the way down into the story.
Another is at the end of the movie, where Arthur, after being arrested and institutionalised, is being interviewed once again by our civilisation’s fake "avatar of empathy," a 'caring' Black woman. At this point he starts to laugh, prompting her to disinterestedly ask what’s so funny. He looks up at her and says: “You wouldn’t get it.”
Maybe a little of my own cultural Rorschach test is creeping in here, as the racial and gender dichotomy in this scene instantly reminded me of such phrases as “mansplaining” and “It’s a Black thing” reversed. These phrases and their associated concepts have been used to denigrate the thoughts and words of White males, and are all part of the great “shut up White male” strand in our culture that has been growing in strength in the last few decades.
Indeed here’s something I wrote to the now defunct but then highly influential music paper Melody Maker in 1993, when I saw this kind of devoicing of White males first starting to creep in. They even made it "Letter of the week," which means Kurt Cobain probably read it, as he didn’t blow his brains out until the next year:
There's a horrible Balkanization creeping into your organ. It goes something like this:Yes, I only countered the point, but the Joker inverts it all the way, hitting back at the female Black counsellor (and obvious normie) with the phrase and its implied add-on:
"As for gender politics―well Billy's just as entitled to comment on femininity as Kurt Cobain - both of them have dicks, after all" (Cathi Unsworth, Smashing Pumpkins review, 2/10/93).
"I tend to think that men discussing feminism always has something of a Black And White Minstrel Show feel to it” (Taylor Parkes, Backlash, 2/10/93).
The logic of this is that all comments about girls should be made by girls, and all comments about men by men, and so on ad infinitum, breaking down into race, region, age, animal, vegetable, mineral. What right has Peter Paphides to comment on the music scene north of the border? Surely he can't be Scottish with a name like that!!! Etc., etc..
This attitude forgets one big thing thing―intelligence! An intelligent comment about femininity or blackness by a white male is worth much more than a stupid comment by someone who supposedly really knows because they live it. "You wouldn't understand it's a black thing," goes the T-shirt slogan.
All this produces is ghettoism and alienation. Political Correctness creates more bigotry than it solves…
“You wouldn’t get it" (because you’re a not an alienated White man).”This said in "the current year" by a White man to a Black woman is as revolutionary in its resonance as the word “No” said by the ape Aldo to a human in the Planet of the Apes franchise and fictional reality. In fact, there are tempting parallels between Aldo and Arthur Fleck.
"On an historic day, which is commemorated by my species and fully documented in the Sacred Scrolls, there came Aldo. He did not grunt. He articulated. He spoke a word which had been spoken to him time without number by humans. He said, 'No'."
―Cornelius
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| Aldo, our guy? |
Here’s his personality breakdown from the site Fandom:
Aldo is a complicated character. He is barely likable at all, prone to aggression and disobedience. Aldo prefers learning practical skills such as riding horses to any sort of book learning, and, as such, appears to be poorly educated (stated at one point because he does not wish to learn). Despite his lack of education, (shown by his short, broken sentences), Aldo is very arrogant, who overestimates his strength and leadership skills.As a gorilla in the chimp-orangutan-gorilla ape society of Planet of the Apes, Aldo clearly represents the rebellious masculine principle. This is exactly what the Arthur Fleck character represents in Joker―an uprising of the downtrodden. The only difference is that gorillas don’t watch movies, but young alienated White men do. They have plenty of time for that and for what is to follow.
Joker is a warning and one that our leaders will miss, as they grasp Rorschach-like at some minor point that allows them to dismiss the movie and reinforce their own cosy but doomed worldviews.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.
