“Adorno: But Marx did not have the aura of someone who was godforsaken.
Horkheimer: There was nothing sectarian about him. We must not write a single word that might fail to acknowledge that we live in this particular society and are a part of it.
Adorno: We live on the culture we criticize.
Horkheimer: I meant the society.”
– Towards a New Manifesto
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Man goes to doctor. Says he’s trapped in manic euphoria. Says life seems absurd and arbitrary. Says he feels unable to feign humanity in a pointless world where what lies ahead is unintelligible and inconsequential. Doctor says, ‘Treatment is simple. Great melodramatist Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should sombre you up.’ Man bursts into tears of laughter. Says, ‘But doctor…I am Pagliacci.’
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Joker is an incel power fantasy about killing your mum and some strangers cos of your inability to relate to others. It’s not important that you can clearly articulate what’s wrong, or what you would like to see be different, or demonstrating solidarity with those in the same struggle: All that matters is killing the women who slighted you, the men more high functioning and sexually competent than you, making sure that they “get what they deserved”. Even if you cannot change the system, you can lash out against it. Through indiscriminate violence, you become a “cause”; no longer reacting to the tribulations and abuses thrust upon you, you become the source of tribulations and abuse for others. You place yourself outside the messy, uncomfortable and embarrassing struggle for recognition from others; simplifying and hollowing the interplay of vulnerability into a one-way demand, backed by violence. Yet this assertion of a will to power remains a structurally impotent one: Even if you become a “cause”, you do not reach the level of an agency directable under its own terms: It is a freedom than remains strictly the freedom to lash out against anything that inhibits your freedom; a freedom which remains a dependant, contingent reaction to the forces that deny it. But you know all that. You know that this is a doomed politic, never to become a positive project: A politic of resentment against those that fail to provide you your inarticulable entitlements. But you don’t care. You have the silent incontestability of immanent violence. No-one can deny you that, and that’s enough.
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Joker is a cultural-marxist propaganda piece. It’s a film valorizing the NYC crime-waves and riots of the 1970’s that were tearing the city apart, before Reagan used his quick fist to restore law and order, get us out of the stagflation crisis, and get the country ticking again. Thomas Wayne, a self made billionaire and philanthropist, finances his political campaign to fix the city out of his own pocket. Like a certain current president, Wayne’s character meets with conspiratorial, trumped up charges of sexual abuse and gaslighting from unhinged psychotic nobodies. It’s a film about killing rich kids, because you suck too much to make something of yourself. The film uses the “Joker” – an icon for young conservatives – as a lure, to get upright young men to watch 2 hours of a gangly and androgynous Joaquin Phoenix’s long, slow, erotic dances. These dances are enticing, hypnotic, inspired by the expressionist dances of Mary Wigman, a cultural icon of the Weimar republic; the same Weimar republic that funded the Frankfurt School, the cabal of Marxists social-theorists that invented feminism to spearhead the degeneration of Western society through the Culture Industry. This movie is a straight-up attempt to hypnotise disaffected youths into killing the rich.
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Joker is a cultural commentary on neoliberalism, precarious work conditions, and the psychological toll of emotional labour. Don’t Forget to Smile, Arthur Fleck is reminded, while he struggles with rocketing rents, labouring under a zero-hour contract, with wages arbitrarily deducted by his boss when his workplace equipment is destroyed by vandals. But Arthur cannot complain. In a casualised service industry, your only asset is your unconditional enthusiasm. Don’t forget to smile.
The Joker’s character was initially inspired by Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, the story of a boy whose face is mutilated into an eerie, perpetual smile, in a cruel political punishment from King James II. Phillips’ iteration of the Joker translates this premise into the present political context, and gives it a materialist twist: in a cut-throat service economy, a mask of pliable, willing enjoyment is not an exceptional political punishment, but the baseline requirement for entry into economic participation at all. Smile or die is the unspoken law of every job interview: Write “I am an enthusiastic, driven, self motivated worker” on your CV for an unpaid internship even when you know you are none of those things. Mutilate your face and body and soul into a perpetual, uneasy smile, in the hope some employer will recognise your effort, even though you know they won’t, because your broken face is just one among the desperate million others, all doing the same.
In the film, Fleck’s forced positivity is connected to a childhood trauma: a defensive response to his mother’s demand for a happy child. Laugh and smile and be happy is an imperative enforced by a capricious parental rage; an obscene superego, internalised by the helpless child. As far as Freudian tropes goes, Fleck is alongside any other neurotic, living in a society, compelled to conform, yet unable to fully comprehend the uneasy sense of terror compelling him to do so. Yet Joker is thankfully not using crude psychoanalytic devices as a replacement for character motivation and progression. The film does not give primacy to a psychoanalytic truth over a social-historical or political-economic one, rather, the tragic force of Joker lies in the sheer relentlessness with which these factors dovetail together.
The device of Arthur Fleck’s pathological laughter is used to draw attention to the gap between the subjects ego ideal and their subjective reality: In adult life, Fleck’s laughter-without-mirth does not enable him to placate the Other, the way the child clings to the mechanism as a safeguard from mother’s blows: Rather, it comes across as deeply uncomfortable, desperate, off-putting. As a defensive reaction, it fails completely: It annoys the woman on the bus, Thomas “Daddy” Wayne punches him in the face. His misplaced and inappropriate over-performance of enjoyment ends up being more damning than if he hadn’t tried at all. This becomes a downward spiral: The more you fail to perform at being functional, the more shunned, isolated, unemployable you become, and the higher the stakes and more unassailable being “baseline human” becomes.
This is what the adage “fake it till you make it” fails to capture: some fakes are more real than others. Or perhaps rather, that it is a requisite that the fake be worn more comfortably than the truth it masks. Every employer knows your “enthusiasm” is a crock of shit. Your claims of relentless positivity on your CV are not truth claims; they are about demonstrating a sufficient wilful devotion to an obvious lie, to demonstrate an ability to operate with sufficient cynicism to get the job done. Earnestly and consciously fake faking it till you make-it at faking-it. What you are really compelled to perform is a second-order fakery: A deft mastery over the duplicity of the fake/truth binary. Being able to successfully perform both the mask of unconditional enthusiasm, and the implication of a baseline humanity, that endures uncorrupted, beneath the requisite cynicism.
One of the key elements of Joker is that the character does not resolve to reveal the “truth” of his miserable subjectivity, beneath his all-too-obvious mask of humour. He does not move from laughter to dour lamentation: Rather, at the pivotal moment of resolution, he declares all the pointless miseries of his life were not tragic in nature, but “a comedy”: He does not abandon the mask, but the pretence of the affected human subject beneath. It’s no coincidence that this moment coincides – qua matricide – with Fleck’s movement from victimised protagonist to a more sinister anti-hero. How is the audience to empathise with a character that declares he is through with the shell-game of empathising with himself? Or perhaps the scary thing is that we can; are we not also all as weary with wakefulness as we are weary with being weary? weary of the inexorable weight of the indelible duty of remaining ourselves?
Politically, however, this “over-identification” with the double-bind of neoliberal subjectivity remains necessarily ambivalent: Any parodic “hyper-performance” remains trapped within the logic it tests the limits of. While Fleck defaces the “don’t forget to smile” sign, to read “don’t smile”, doesn’t he continue to wear that forced smile, reified into a death-mask? Is Joker not just another example of the typical Hollywood hero, the American myth of the self-made man, who comes into his own through his indefatigable individualism, his relentless aspirationalism in the face of any adversity (given perfect anthem in Sinatra’s That’s Life, closing the film)? The typical Oedipal mono-myth hero who is set back, defeats his father figures, so as to finally become himself? Who proves, through mindless slaughter, that he is, in fact, a better comedian than Murray?
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Joker is a critique of the cinematic mode of identification. The key moment comes when Fleck asks Murray to introduce him as “Joker” because “that’s what you called me on your show”. Except this supposed moment never happened earlier in the film. Why such a glaring discontinuity?
There are several hints throughout the film, easter eggs leading the focused viewer to a possible “alternative take”: That Arthur Fleck was locked away in the asylum from the very beginning. Perhaps he heard the riots on the radio, and constructed a narrative where he is the central agent of them. A difficulty disentangling personal and external events is not uncommon in delusional patients.
This still leaves the question: Where, then, does Arthur Fleck take his nom de plume “Joker” from? The title emerges from nowhere within the film’s diegesis. The answer, is, of course, obvious: It emerges from the simple fact that – in-spite all the distancing art cinema pretensions – Fleck remains the titular character to a DC superhero movie. Arthur takes his Joker identifier from the same place as every other incel: From the fact that our society’s collective mythology is the cultural hegemony of shitty comic-book reboots. Rather than being a fantasmatic icon for the incel viewer, Flecks journey parallels said viewer’s much more directly: Taking cues and inserting himself into an already given dominant cultural discourse, he fantasizes a heroic backstory for himself – a self-justifying narrative where he is the victimized protagonist, where other people are just obstacles along his journey – but really, like the viewer, for all the emotional contortions, he exists in an inert passive state; living in a cell, consuming whatever prefabricated narratives happen to by lying around for him to latch onto. Or not. The cinematic apparatus, which he remains totally beholden to, does not altogether care if he engages either way.
The cinematic mode of identification is a highly narcissistic one – precisely in the mythical sense. Contrary to the term’s dominant connotation, Narcissus was not some aloof, conceited egoist. Rather, it is from a fundamental lack of self certainty that he becomes transfixed by the flickering reflection of himself in the pool: He is self-enraptured because he is afraid. It is the fragile, ephemeral quality of the image on the water’s surface that leaves him captivated, unable to break away.1
I liked Joker. I enjoyed the fantasy of militant juggalos taking up arms against billionaires. I enjoyed how Arthur Fleck does not overcome being an awkward, embarrassing subject so as to become the empowered hero-man by the end, as per typical macho-Hollywood flair: Rather than overcome his condition, he reconciles with its awkwardness. He comes to wear his symptom with pride. Despite it being coded long before birth as an alt-right film, the identifier could easily be made a queer one (à la, say, Lauren Berlant or Mari Ruti): When Fleck is atop the burning police car, finally finding acceptance among the rioting multitude, his posture is not that of the rigid phallic hero: It is an effeminate, awkward, self embrace. It is downright cute. Rather than the empowerment fantasy of dominating and punching through all obstacles (the dominant mode of every other superhero film), we see something more immanent and intimate: a queer flourishing, a seeking of avenues towards clumsy grasping in the precarious diaspora of the here and now.
As someone who has never felt comfortable being themselves, I found Joker empowering. Whatever your fucked up symptom, you are part of the world: a fortiori, the world is at least as fucked up and absurd as you. Your shame and guilt-complex is just yet another facet of the unending cosmic anti-joke’s endlessly deferred punchline. Leaving the cinema, I felt a giddy elation; that mind-racing, excited, emotion-swirl a good film leaves you with. Yet it wasn’t really a feeling I could discuss, reach out with. I ruminated for a while, skipped the bus, walked home the long way. By the next day, I’d returned to more immediate concerns; get up, make lunch, etc. For whatever flickering affect-validation-through-identification the cinema offers, it does not offer anything to do with that sentiment: It is just a commodity, after all, what you do with it is your business.
But in the spectacle’s orbit, something of an emergent public sphere takes place. You get to be part of the dialogue, the discussion, that you would have been left outside of, had you not consumed said film. Make sure you are consuming the same transient images as those around you, and that you paid enough attention to have a stockpile of feeling to discuss at a later date. While technically impressive, I found the white-male-shooter-enabling-batman-franchise-tie-in-movie disturbing and uncomfortable: I feel the liberal media has overreacted, I quite liked the white-male-shooter-enabling-batman-franchise-tie-in-movie: I did not like the portrayal of women of colour in the white-male-shooter-enabling-batman-franchise-tie-in-movie: After so many obnoxious and quirky MCU films, I enjoyed the slow atmosphere of white-male-shooter-enabling-batman-franchise-tie-in-movie: I found the white-male-shooter-enabling-batman-franchise-tie-in-movie was a bit derivative of Taxi-Driver.
A few weeks later, the swirling glares, controversy, intrigue and suspicion die down; the desperate need to have a take, to place your subjectivity among the all the other subjectivities reacting to this particular happening dies down. It has given you something to argue about, butt heads over, differentiate yourself from others over, or come together in secret solidarity over. But the things to say have been said; to trot it out again would be forced and wearisome. The wind ripples, and your image in the pool is in danger of disappearing. I better consume something else, so as to have something else to say, the next time I see my friends. I better make sure I have friends, so I have people to list my cultural items consumed and my feelings about them to.
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Hollywood – and the culture industry more generally – is about developing saleable and consumable items that fulfil a subjective and social lack: it is about feeding alienation and discontent away from political expression, into spectacular commodities, where all empowerment is a narcissistic feeling of identification-in-consumption. (“This film gets me!”).
What Joker achieves is to brilliantly reflect this process in the narrative itself: the film tracks Arthur’s descent from class consciousness into an incoherent, nihilist individualism2, the can only lash out but cannot challenge.
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Joker is a film about a sad clown that laughs. I identify with the sad clown that laughs.
1 While my direction is somewhat distinct, I owe this point to a discussion in Chapter 7 of Geert Lovink’s Sad by Design.
The Wake of Nonsense 