It was two years and a few months ago – only a few months before lockdowns – that I dragged myself to see The Joker, a movie I dreaded but ended up respecting.
“It’s a movie about one man’s descent into madness,” said the ticket taker. “Nothing else.”
Why was the ticket seller pre-reviewing this movie for me? The line seemed overly rehearsed, a cautionary note to viewers as a way to prevent what has concerned people, namely that the movie’s fictional mayhem would generate real-world copycats. This was the great worry at the time.
Still, his mini-review did give me some reassurance. The previews alone were too creepy. Life is tough enough without movies introducing more sadness, which is precisely why I like to stick with uplifting fare. Still, I marshaled my way through this one.
There is a superficial way in which the man was correct. This was just about one guy. Even after leaving, I kept telling myself that. And yet after it was over, I experienced precisely what so many others reported at the time. The movie imparts an aura that you can’t shake. You take it home with you. You sleep with it. You wake up in the morning and see that damned face again. You think through scenes. Then you remember things. Then more starts to make sense – not moral sense but narrative sense.
It was also tremendously unpleasant viewing, the most difficult two-plus hours of movie watching I can remember. It was also brilliant and gripping in every frame. The score is perfect. And the acting didn’t seem like acting.
As for the “just one man” interpretation, that’s hard to sustain. The street scenes. The subways packed with people wearing clown masks, headed to the protest. The rich, established businessman running for mayor and the protests that engenders. The strange way in which this unsettling and violent figure becomes a folk hero on the streets. There was surely a larger point here.
Yes, I had seen the usual tug-of-war on Twitter about what it meant. It’s pro-Antifa! It’s a conservative warning against extremist politics! It’s a right-wing smear against the leftward drift of the Democrats! It’s a left-wing apologia for the rise of the workers against the elites, so of course eggs need to be broken!
The trouble is that none of those narratives explained the various twists and turns, and the unease and ambiguity that the film created within the viewer.
It took me a full day to come up with an alternative theory. The thesis probably pertains to all renderings of The Joker in print or film but this one is particularly prescient because its sole focus is on the one character, with the most elaborate backstory yet given.
The trouble begins with personal life failures. While this man is troubled, you sometimes think that perhaps he is not so far gone as to be irredeemable. He might function well. He can get through this, just like everyone else deals with their own demons. Joaquin Phoenix does a great job of slipping in and out of crazy. He seems to behave fine around his mother, and his brief girlfriend. He has interactions that are not totally wrecked by his eccentricity.
Yet there are life circumstances that keep driving him more and more to the point that he loses love for life as it is. He gives up hope and fully embraces despair as a way of thinking and living. And then he does evil and discovers something that empowers him: his conscience does not provide a corrective. On the contrary, the evil he does makes him feel empowered and valued.
To review: his life was not working; he found something that worked for him finally. Then he embraced it.
What is that thing he embraced? It has a particular name in the history of ideas: Destructionism. It’s not just a penchant; it’s an ideology, an ideology that purports to give shape to history and meaning to life. That ideology says that the sole purpose of action in one’s life should be to tear down what others have created, including the liberties and lives of others.
This ideology becomes necessary because doing good seems practically impossible, because one still needs to make some difference in the world to feel that your life has some direction, and because doing evil is easy. The ideology of destructionism enables a person to rationalize that evil is at least somehow preparing the ground for some better state of society in the future.
What is that better state? It could be anything. Maybe it’s a world in which everyone owns everything equally. Maybe it is a world without happiness or a world with universal happiness. Maybe it is a world without faith. Maybe it is national production with no international trade. It’s a dictatorship – society conforming to One Will. It’s the absence of patriarchy, a world without fossil fuels, an economy without private property and technology, production without the division of labor. A society of perfect morality. The ascendance of one religion. A germ-free world!
Whatever it is, it is illiberal and therefore unworkable and unachievable, so the advocate must eventually find solace not in creating but in destroying the existing order.
The first time I read of the concept was in Ludwig von Mises’s 1922 book Socialism. He brings it up toward the end after having proven that classical socialism itself is conceptually impossible. If there is nothing positive to do, no real plan to achieve anything socially beneficial; because the whole idea is cockamamie to begin with, the proponents must either abandon the theory or find satisfaction in the demolition of society as it currently exists.
Destructionism becomes a psychology of wreckage imparted by an ideology that is a failure by necessity of theory and practice. The Joker failed at life and so sets out to destroy it for others. So too are those consumed by an ideological vision to which the world stubbornly refuses to conform.
This is why any left/right interpretation of The Joker is too limited.
The movie came out only a few months before virus lockdowns. Was it a premonition? Probably in some way. In those days, we were gorged by media and politics with insane visions of how society should work. It should not surprise us when these visionaries ultimately turn to anger, then dehumanization of opponents, and then plot plans for tearing down what exists just for the heck of it.
That “what is” could be world trade, energy consumption, diversity, human choice generally, the freedom of association, the chaos of enterprise the existence of the rich, a degenerate race, the frustration of one man with his absence of effective power. Hardly anyone imagined what would become the ideological basis of destructionism: pathogenic control.
Destructionism is stage two of any unachievable vision of what society should be like against a reality that refuses to conform. Destructionism also proves to be strangely compelling to populist movements that are anxious to externalize their enemies (the infected, the unvaccinated) and smite the forces that stand in the way of their reassertion of power.
Finally such people discover satisfaction in destruction – as an end in itself – because it makes them feel alive and gives their life meaning.
The Joker, then, is not just one man, not just a crazy person, but the instantiation of the insane and morbid dangers associated with persistent personal failure backed by a conviction that when there is a fundamental conflict between a vision and reality, it can only be solved by the creation of chaos and suffering. As unpleasant as it is, The Joker is the movie we needed to see to understand and then prepare for the horrors that this unchecked mentality can and did unleash on the world.
The idea of lockdowns was literally unthinkable until it was suddenly mainstreamed in late February 2020. Only a few weeks later, it became a reality. We were told that it was all to stop a virus. It completely failed on the front but it achieved something else. Lockdowns and now mandates have empowered a ruling elite to try out a new theory of how life can work. The failure of their efforts is everywhere in evidence.
Do they now stop? Or find new ways to destroy that create more chaos, more distractions, more instability, more randomness, more experiments with the unthinkable?
The Joker did create copycats.
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The Nihilists from 1920s Germany called and they want their Joker back. Nothing new here. As Ayn Rand predicted for 4 decades, the absence of morality leads to this. Here we are.
Ayn Rand warned of the absence of morality?
Please point to an example (as I cannot remember such in Atlas Shrugged.)
Objectivism. There is more to her than ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ Rand had an entire philosophy based on…
In Rand’s morality, this evidence-based truth gives rise to the principle of individual rights: In order for people to live fully as human beings, they must be fully free to act in accordance with their judgment—so long as they do not initiate physical force against other human beings.
Because Rand’s theory of rights is evidence-based, it is rationally understandable and defensible. It grounds America’s original founding principle in perceptual reality—facts we can see. And it enables us to explain the basis of rights to others who are willing to think.
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2021/08/ayn-rands-american-morality/
That’s not a morality, in the true sense of the word.
That’s what Augusto Del Noce deciphered as Marx’s main underlying thesis:
“To become completely free, man needs to be entirely self-created.”
I.e nothing he depends on, and kind-of implied nothing he looks up to.
In other words Ayn proposed unbridled Individualism – which is indistinguishable from Marxism.
Wrong.
I saw it with my two older children. I said then that it was an important film that was worth watching, but one that I didn’t care to see a second time. And it was prescient in the way that all art reflects the present reality whether it is self-aware of that fact or not.
Humans are interesting creatures in that they have hungers and desires like all animals, but are unique in their ability to manifest an outcome to satisfy that itch on way or another. They won’t be thwarted. People may appear powerless to achieve their dreams, but that doesn’t prevent them from wreaking havoc if they don’t.
Great review and if you haven’t seen it, you should.
I plan on seeing it. My takeaway is what my mother always told me ‘two wrongs don’t make a right.’ Every thought of getting even in this world only makes things worse. Live your life as productive as you can, practice forgiveness, and understand that you are not alone!
Allowing the evil to prosper unpunished only encourages more to become evil. THIS is what the current “defund the police” movement fails to see: if there is no punishment for crime, crime becomes more appealing. Which is easier: to work a 40-hour week for $1000, or to steal at gunpoint $1000 from a worker? And once the worker sees no punishment for the thief, why work?
If two wrongs don’t make a right, what does an unpunished wrong make? societal chaos, over time. And societies are tough things to construct from un-principled thieves …
Evil will always be with us, unpunished wrongs will always be with us. If, heaven forbid, we took the law in our own hands for every injustice would outcomes actually be better? Be careful what you wish for. The dark side is more visible then it has ever been, anarchy is ascendant. What happens after that? It will be up to individuals to sort it out, but in the mean time, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’!
Compare the Joker with Albert Camus’ Absurdity, Nietzsche’s Nihilism and Schopenhauer’s comedy through tragedy. You either laugh or you despair. You seek meaning in a seemingly meaningless world…
There is a gaping expanse that separates our desire for life to have meaning, and the chaotic unfairness we actually experience. French philosopher Albert Camus called this feeling ‘The Absurd’; bad things happen for no reason, we work repetitive and probably meaningless jobs, and eventually die, and we spend a lot of that life suspecting that there is supposed to be some master plan or purpose. Camus encapsulates in his concept of the absurd the awareness that these expectations are simply unfounded, which he outlined eloquently in his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’.
You ponder deeply, you stare into the stars, you rankle at the evil and the banality of evil and then, if you’re wise…you say fuck it and go fishing.
Having read a few reviews, I expected The Joker to be the usual post-moral Hollywood sack of shit.
I was pleasantly surprised, however, and think it was perhaps the best film of that year, at least the best one out of Hollywood.
Excellent review.
I watched about 15 minutes of the movie and it seemed like 2 hours, so I gave up and do not plan on revisiting it.
It’s not an enjoyable watch, but it is wired to the zeitgeist.
I saw it as the dispossession of the White race. Poor old hapless Arthur Fleck, trudging drearily through the Hellscape his forefathers had built as a glittering metropolis. Surrounded on all sides by POCs who sneered and slighted him. Obediently working the treadmill of dead end jobs as affirmative action hires, placed into positions for which they are completely unfit by virtue of their un-Whiteness, administer the soulless State which crushes him.
Arthur Fleck is inevitable.
I do not believe this is what the filmmakers intended, but that was my interpretation of Joker.
Here was my take on the film back in October, 2019 where Destructionism and cancel culture were also addressed: