https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/youre ... 1838770612Quote:
Every single day, a few odd hundred thousand people stare into poisonous blue light rays and feel debilitating rage at some things that understandably prompt it and some things that do not. In any event, they will respond with a generic style of online sarcasm that’s been culled from the greatest perma-banned posters of the last decade and sanitized into nothingness. You spew out their words while you react to every macro and micro Trump scandal, watching him mostly weather each cycle not so much unscathed, but ready for a new one that will make you forget about the last one. Everyone is always having a normal one in the normal world, as we clench our teeth so hard we begin to bleed.
People aren’t complete idiots, and know that consuming and reacting to every bit of political media input in and of itself won’t change anything. But I think for some, they’re in a paralyzed state. It’s like a hangover, where any light or movement causes unfathomable pain and you’ve just got to lie in a dehydrated heap until those vapors leave your brain. You know the boring, inconclusive future, and so you have no use in imagining a better life. You just sit around reacting until the next thing.
If you’ve got into the habit of taking and spitting out everything, it’s easy to apply the same rubric to culture. That is how you get the reaction you got to Todd Phillips’s 2019 Joker. In goes a shockingly average movie that I’d probably rate under Four Brothers, out goes more fear-mongering and vociferous defense than for any movie from the past couple of years.
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But all of this comes together to make Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck the perfect Joker for our era; something that produces a whirlwind or reaction and counter-reaction, to the point that people are absolutely positive every theater will produce one mass shooting or that Joker will replace all western canon, and after all that, we get a positively unremarkable expedition that will be forgotten by Thanksgiving, a product of a media economy where three companies who make everything keep it as efficient as possible by just making a few types of media properties and hoping people will tear each other apart in the cramped space to increase every product’s Q rating. It is an endless debate over a social phenomenon it’s not actually about, a boring culture war that will have no resolution, and a million jokes people on either side of it don’t actually have fun telling. It’s a bunch of clenched, gritting smiles that made Warner Brothers millions of dollars, and then you go home, more likely to die from boring yet equally evil indignities than getting killed at a culturally relevant event.
For a bonus, it’s in the superhero genre, one of three genres of film we are allowed now outside Noah Baumbach excursions about architects learning to accept their freewheeling stepbrothers and comedies that are made with an algorithm so every scene will be usable in GIF form. And you’ll probably be experiencing moral panics/emotional defenses of every single one of them for the rest of your life.
Todd Phillips may have performed the greatest Joker’s trick of all time, however. He may have made a movie that is more “5.5 out of 10” than any movie before it, and tricked us all into either arguing about how it would cause an army of incels to murder everyone, or get us so annoyed at the constant state of fear we’re supposed to live in that we start arguing with those voices, creating an endless feedback loop of people that are now working 40 hours a week on a volunteer basis to raise Joker awareness. If Phillips is aware of both his limitations as an artist and the current, sick condition of the highest volume consumers of media, he is more twisted than Mr J. himself. But to that end, he should just make another Hangover movie. Our culture that wishes it were the mid 2000s is far more ripe for that.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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