The leftist review of Joker which you’ve been waiting for

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy did the movie Joker win prizes in Europe yet get so much hate from so many top US film critics?

Certainly, Joker is loved by the people. It was a huge hit, and was the “must-see” movie of 2019.

There are now tours of locations of the movie, including the steps where Joker famously danced. “What Rocky is to Philadelphia, Joker is to the Bronx now,” AP quoted a beaming with pride black man as saying.

Wait - a black guy said that?

I thought Joker was a white segregationist movie which empowered pro-Trump whites to commit mass shootings?

That is not any exaggeration of how the film was discussed in US media, but why didn’t this black guy get - or accept - that message from the US liberal and conservative intelligentsia? He was supposed to be offended and enraged, as the movie was - like many explicitly political movies in the US - subject to a pre-release libel campaign order to deaden its political impact. The best compilation of these many stupid slanders was compiled by “riot if Trump wins” website Vox.

Moviegoers love Joker because lower class people are right to love themselves

The most overreaching anti-Joker propaganda was how the movie was widely called a call-to-arms for “incels” (involuntary celibates), essentially the Japanese version of hikkomori shut-ins (the difference is that no family member in atomised US culture is going to bring food to a relative’s bedroom door, so incels actually have to go out to work, or work at home). The whole “incel” analysis turned out to be quite obviously a diversionary tactic: the Joker character proudly cares for his sick mother, has normal and non-violent romantic fantasies about women, and never displays misogyny.

The movie was so politically fearful to the US elite that cops were actually stationed in New York City and Los Angeles at random theaters - they believed mass shootings could result. They claimed US hikkomori would pull the trigger, but how could the US ever openly state that they fear revolutionary political sentiment in artistic form?

Joker was adored in Europe - it won the top prize in Venice and the European critics, no strangers to austerity, gave it an 8-minute ovation. It was given 11 British BAFTA nominations, the most of any movie. And yet on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which compiles almost exclusively US reviewers, a majority of their “Top Critics” panned the film - 28 bad reviews and 24 ripe tomatoes.

How can we explain this difference between the intelligentsia on the old continent and those in the US?

It’s certain that English-speakers loved it - the movie took in over a billion dollars worldwide, and was essentially the biggest political/“I deny this movie is political” hit since American Sniper. That piece of American war propaganda was the biggest grossing war movie of all time - it raked in just $500 million.

So the real question is, then: why did everyone love Joker except so many in the US intelligentsia?

The elitist takedown of 2019’s most popular and most political movie

“A movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.” The New Yorker, a magazine whose famed cartoons are so un-inspirational that they are effectively an anti-Prozac pill, and whose culture articles are a paean to empty Hamptons-wealthy culture, is here deeply opposed to (alleged) cynicism and emptiness.

White trash know they are on tv for only one reason - to be humiliated, just like Joker.

When their review came out Slate’s masthead motto was the elitist half-French “Positively exuding bonhomie”, and so their critic’s lede sentence shows that Slate is indeed full of upper-class aping elitists who search for possible “deplorables” with every breath: “I hope my death will make more cents than my life,” reads one of the plaintive misspelled scrawlings in the diary of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the mentally ill clown on his way to becoming Batman’s green-haired nemesis, in Todd Phillips’ superhero-adjacent psychological thriller Joker.” For the reviewer misspelling “sense” is more important than the human sadness of what the diary’s writer was trying to convey; misspelling, and perhaps also the inability to exude bonhomie, is enough to distance herself from the “deplorable in one very desperate basket” Joker. She continues her put-down, insisting with Slate’s typical “We’re with Hillary (no matter how much dirt they dig up on her)” desire to incite collective delusion and status quo-ism that, in fact, nobody at all likes Joker: “Meanwhile, plenty of other reviewers suggested that, incitement to mass revolt aside, the movie was bombastic, unoriginal, and just plain bad.”

Salon, which along with Slate is another top elitist-intellectual website of culture in the US, also gave it a bad review because it dared to not consider the individual needs of the Salon movie critic: “Finally there is its handling of mental illness. When I first saw trailers for the movie I was concerned that it would stigmatize people in this community, of which I am a member.” The intellectuals who have somehow become elite in the US, despite their endless self-regard and self-promotion, truly believe one reads a movie review to learn about the bozo journalist who wrote it? We should care about this critic’s mental illness, and yet he tells us not to sympathise with the Joker character, who is on 7 medications despite not weighing 300+ pounds and also being under 65 years old? We should care about the critic’s mental illness, and not the Joker’s, who says, “I have never been happy for one minute of my life”? 

The New York Times tried to kill it with their biggest missile possible - boredom: “To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting.” “Nothing to see here, move along,” is exactly what coastal cops said to moviegoers when the credits started, I’m sure.

What’s interesting is that the top public media in the US, National Public Radio, inadvertently got to the core of Joker’s appeal… and they immediately found it too hot to handle: “They want us to see Arthur (Arthur Fleck, who becomes Joker) as a victim, pushed into becoming a monster by his mental illness and a broken government. You may or may not find that prospect irresponsible, even dangerous. Let's leave that to social scientists.” For the author, film criticism is not social science, which makes me wonder what it is, then? Is it only “entertainment science”, perhaps? Many quite serious people - farmers, housewives, Joe the plumber, etc. - might say that “entertainment science” is a rather “irresponsible” way to spend one’s day, but I will continue with this article nonetheless.

The popular leftist site, with plenty of film criticism, the World Socialist Web Site, showed that about Joker even Trotskyites failed to detect “good propaganda”/“entertainment science”: “Nevertheless, it must be said that the filmmakers here have fallen short of a genuine examination of the social crisis in the United States. When one strips away Joker’s pseudo-artistic pretensions, one is ultimately left with a deeply confused work that is more a symptom of a rotten social order than a coherent commentary on it.” Well, Joker didn’t rake in $1 billion for the great special effects, that is for certain, but the WSWS didn’t get it either. They did however agree with the premise of this article in that, “The film has clearly touched a nerve in the liberal press.”

I have found that Variety, the trade mag of Hollywood, usually gets it right in their reviews - they know movies, after all. We can now move away from self-aggrandizing, hysterical, “the masses are stupid and wrong yet again” and resolutely non-intellectual/scientific analyses: “Of course, a rebellion against the ruling elite — which is what Arthur’s vigilante action comes to symbolize — is more plausible now than it was a decade ago…. Many have asked, and with good reason: Do we need another Joker movie? Yet what we do need — badly — are comic-book films that have a verité gravitas, that unfold in the real world, so that there’s something more dramatic at stake than whether the film in question is going to rack up a billion-and-a-half dollars worldwide.”

Who says everyone in LA is shallow?

News flash: De Niro is not God, and facile comparisons make for lazy criticism

Seemingly all the top critics compared Joker with Taxi Driver, but the protagonists of the two movies are fundamentally opposed.

They also preferred to bring up the more-similar King of Comedy rather then delve into the meaning of the movie and its huge popularity despite having zero CGI, no small feat these days.

It is rather worrying that there is more sympathy by “top US critics” for Travis Bickle than there is for Joker, even though Joker is so fragile that he appears to be on the edge of tears for 90% of the movie. Joker has zero menace. Contrarily, Bickle is amassing an arms cache, sporting a mohawk in an army jacket, and burning his arm over a stove in his campaign to make himself inhumanly disciplined and strong (or something).

Bickle is so out of touch with real humanity - and if either are two characters are misogynistic it is Bickle - that he makes Cybil Shephard feel uncomfortable by taking her to a porn movie on their first date. Fleck, however, sincerely says, “I’m not trying to make anyone feel uncomfortable”, even though he clearly should prioritize spending his near-zero inner resources on trying to grant himself just a modicum of personal peace.

Universally among the MSM, De Niro’s performance was lauded. However, it is in fact totally unexceptional for two undeniable reasons: firstly, he is not given much to work with - despite being a talk show host the mass majority of his screen time is as a straight man. Secondly, De Niro himself is not at all capable of being funny, yet is tasked with doing some stand up comedy. De Niro is never funny - that is out of his range as an actor. I would pay $0 to watch De Niro play Falstaff or Puck, and I doubt he would ever even try.

Yet so many column inches were gushingly spent on De Niro because America’s royalty have become socially-useless actors, therefore unwritten laws of lèse-majesté mean he cannot be openly criticized. I repeat - an unexceptional performance, and he was only chosen to connect in a meta sense Joker with Taxi Driver and King of Comedy for the viewer, and not at all because of De Niro’s acting suitability/ability for this particular role. Phoenix is a pretty good box-office draw on his own - a different actor might have been able to bring something to this role more than just meta.

But movies need box office draws: a conceit of this movie is that it could serve as an origin story - impossible, that this incredibly damaged Joker could become a hardened criminal mastermind. But by couching a political work in the safety of superhero cinema, the movie increased its chances of getting made. Criminal mastermind? I imagine that Phoenix would find it hard to believe that his Joker could even be romanticised, as many hysterically feared - he is a trembling leaf the entire movie. It is not at all surprising that he becomes a suicide case, which becomes his long-running final plan.

But Fleck winds up being almost goaded into committing murder by a smug celebrity (De Niro) who admits he looks down on him. You mean celebrities are only acting when they appear to be humble on talk shows? Bickle, contrarily, plans only murder - his attempt at suicide, after he has run out of bullets used against society’s lowest class, appears entirely unplanned in Taxi Driver. Bickle is a racist - Fleck’s romantic fantasy is a black woman. Bickle has spent years estranged from his parents in order to deceive them that he is a super-powerful secret agent for the US government - Arthur Fleck “just doesn’t want to feel bad anymore” and feeds his mom in bed.

To hell with De Niro.

Moviegoers love Joker because lower class people are right to love themselves

What Bickle and Joker have in common is social class - they are white people at the bottom of the social order, but in an urban context.

The US has great difficulty understanding this class of society - they are only able to deal with dirt-poor whites who live among dirt., i.e. rural people. Fleck’s bathing his naked mother humanises Fleck on one level, but it also reminds me of the way Hollywood seemingly always talks about poor whites: there is always an implication of incest for whites at the bottom of the social pyramid. Deliverance and August: Osage County are but two examples of this. At its root, the “incest insult” hurled at poor whites is a code for the longtime US support for eugenics and “American Aryan” ideas of supremacy; whites are poor in the US because of their shoddy DNA, not because of the class war against poor whites which has always been constant in US history.

What is certain is that such insults are not lost on the average American moviegoer, who is far closer in a class sense to being part of the white poor than of the white rich. Beyond the accusations against his or her “shoddy” DNA, it is easy to see why the average American moviegoer identifies with Fleck: he has bad teeth and smokes constantly, two more signifiers of lower class status for whites in American culture.

They also surely identify with his work problems, and it is crucial to note the exact unveiling of the famous “Joker grin” - it first appears, replete with scary music, when he is being unfairly berated and belittled by his boss. That the Joker’s wild menace first appears in the form of labor relations is something US elite intelligentsia either cannot, or will not comment upon.

Joker immediately takes out his worker frustrations by kicking garbage, since he cannot kick his human garbage boss. 

There is a later scene which drives this point home, but which I never saw properly critiqued: upon quitting, Fleck destroys something every normal American hates - the time clock. The symbolism is not subtle like with the appearance of the Joker grin, but I have punched many a time clock and yet I, sadly, never punched it the way I wanted to. Stupid time clock… begrudging me every minute of pay or break time. Of course, to the average American the hourly wage is an abomination and a curse - the guaranteed contract is something which (increasingly less often) exists in austerity Europe, but which Americans have only heard about in Mad Men and only in reference to Don Draper, who has “good” DNA. I wonder how many top MSM critics punched a clock? I am certain none are currently carrying anger about it into movie theaters, but Joker should be appreciated for realising that the average American moviegoer certainly does.

The movie grasps fully the current state and atmosphere of labor relations under neoliberal capitalism - everyone is a predator, yet inside everyone feels like prey. Even co-workers aren’t comrades in the neoliberal system, unlike in socialism - without workers’ rights, collective bargaining, and stable contracts how can they ever be? Joker’s colleague sets him up with the authorities; he is later killed by Joker in an escapist fantasy some cubicle drones might be trying to sublimate right now by reading this article on the job (if so, please comment and pass around - wasting time is how slaves have always stuck it to the Man!). Significantly, Joker allows his other co-worker - a kind midget - to go free.

Just as the fellow worker is rendered untrustworthy due to maximum competition and state withdrawal of protection, so Joker grasps what a boss is today: Batman’s billionaire father sums up the essence of the US bosses’ rejection of criticism of American capitalism by workers: They are merely, “Someone who is envious of those who made something with their lives. Those who have will always look at those who haven’t as clowns.” Joker is, of course, a clown, and the average moviegoer no doubt is reminded by the movie that his boss likely views him as merely a loser clown as well.

The movie is set in 1981, but 1979 would have been more accurate.

Another subtle source of rebellion against the established US elite comes when the aspiring comic Fleck is listening to a comic fleshing out a perverted joke’s premise: “So I’ll tell you how I operate: I’m a professor at a prestigious New England university,” and Joker immediately cackles at the thought of a such an absurd person.

Joker has a mental tic which unwantedly produces hysterical laughter, but the subtext is clear: know-it-all Northeastern intellectualism is as hilarious and unworthy of respect to middle America as it was when Mark Twain wrote the mocking A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889. Fleck, too, rejects the US intellectual elite, as all wage-slaves do (or should). There he is, taking notes, a dutiful student, but finding what the professor is saying to be laugh-out-loud absurd.

This is the clear subtext of this scene, but went completely uncommented upon by the “elite” reviewers. They probably got their top job simply because they went to a prestigious New England university, therefore they cannot imagine that such a figure could be the butt of a joke or that many dismiss the alleged hyper-value of such degrees.

The red-brown conundrums of Joker are the same as in Europe, but not quite the US

Joker is not a leftist call-to-arms, necessarily, and this is suggested by its negative portrayal of government workers.

To the average US moviegoer - white - it will not go unnoticed that all three government worker characters are black, and two of them are female. This reinforces how affirmative action and privileging minority businesses for government contracts has (finally) created some disadvantages for whites.

The movie is not pro-central government, but it also realises that everyday civil servants are indeed part of the proletariat (who just want a stable job). Fleck says to his state mental case worker: “You just ask the same questions. You don’t really listen”. This is typical of poor people’s interactions with welfare, unemployment, etc. - government workers are forced to purposely make acquiring government services as difficult as possible for poor people. Given that Europe has more class mobility than the US now, it’s not likely that elite American journalists or intellectuals would appreciate that. However, the civil servant agrees and states her case for solidarity with Joker by saying, “They don’t give a shit about people like you. And they don’t really give a shit about people like me.”

It is these types of austerity cutbacks which are newer and so shocking to Europe - which is not as rabidly capitalist as the US - and which explains the reason why Joker was so accepted among their intellectual elite. Italy, after all, has elected the Five Star movement - a unity of red (socialism) and brown (fascism) - because they ran on ending the destruction of everything for the 1%’s benefit, which is the ideology of neoliberal capitalism.

Contrarily, at top US media their intellectuals repeatedly did not understand nor would not sympathise with the austerity-related, neoliberalism-inspired downfall of the average Fleck ever since the start of the US high finance-created Great Recession.

In the US Bernie Sanders is incorrectly called a socialist, but it is this same red-brown conundrum which is the “it’s the best we can do” politics taking root in the US. Or more likely it is not - likely Joe Biden will win and will make Hillary his Secretary of State again - meet the new boss, same as the old boss? In Italy and Brexitland they have decided - they are with Joker - but massive ruling class opposition to such a political compromise still reigns supreme in the US, where austerity ideology is a four-decade established fact and not a new development.

Fundamentally, Europe does not agree as strongly with the hyper-individualism and Ayn Rand “big man-ism” of the US: Batman’s billionaire pops expresses this explicitly with, “They may not realize it, but I’m their only hope.” This superiority is exactly what Sanders or Biden or whoever the Democrats’ phony candidate will say regarding the Trump voters they have lost via decades of Democrat support for neoliberalism. Millions of know-nothing, impressionable Democrats will cheer wildly in response, and they probably scared their kids into not-seeing Joker with fears of an incel shooting.

We must not forget that Europe has a much greater anger towards high finance than in the US - their governments are saying austerity is necessary in order to bail out New York criminals, after all. So while Batman’s father, and the real-life MSM critics of Joker, may lament the murder of three high-finance types by Joker, others will point out: two were killed in self-defense, and only the third was shot in the back.

Immediately before changing his plan and killing De Niro Joker questions society: “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him?” This is the movie’s thesis and fundamental question. Perhaps because they actually still have public health care as well as necessary gun control, European intellectual elites are actually interested in this answer. 

Joker is indeed political, but it is mostly critical - of 2019 neoliberal US society

Fleck talks about “how hard it is to be happy all the time”. This is an essential feature of American life, and one which does not really exist in any other nation. This idea is exactly the source of Slate’s nauseating “Positively exuding bonhomie” motto. (Their motto now is, “Of interest to extraterrestrial recipients” - always stressing their uniqueness and superiority… just more divisive “identity politics” from them.) The English merely have to “keep calm and carry on”, but Americans must be the hyper-energetic cheerleader for US capitalism-imperialism… and why should a lower class person like Fleck do that anymore? They have more social mobility in Europe, where the proletariat is not additionally tasked with the burden of needing to play the role of cheerleader for a losing football team full of rich rapists and thugs.

Fleck, as physically insignificant as his name and concentration camp build, only goes crazy because he stops taking his medication. He then “feels much better”, which is what crazy people who need medication say, but instead of being lauded as an anti-austerity message this is considered unpersuasive politics to US film critics.

Fleck kills his mom after he finds out/unrepresses the memories of how she made the news by raising him in a “house of terror”, which turned him into a hysterical clown/comic. In the #MeToo era the US intelligentsia wants movies about women who have been raped yet raise presidents, not evil moms. Evil dads - they can still exist in spades, but not evil moms. Fleck’s mom had “delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder”, and if I joked “So did half of my American ex-girlfriends!” I’d be socially lynched in 2019, but Joker reflects this broad criticism of white American females which many white American males make in the locker room. As Joker says, for those who have their back up over this paragraph, “Comedy is subjective”.

Fleck’s history and current life represents something which many “white Trash” secretly fear: that they will only get famous, or just in the local paper, in order to be humiliated. They or their loved ones will wind up on the TV show Cops. This is the reason why De Niro invites Joker on his show to perform his comedy - to laugh at him, not with him. When De Niro essentially calls Joker a loser - surely the secret judgment of celebrities for you and me - is when Joker’s plan morphs from on-air suicide to on-air murder. These are all significant psychological subtexts which the MSM ignored, but which resonate with the lower classes of the US.

Just prior to his murder of De Niro - because Fleck has finally realised that MSM-promoted celebrity worship is a most unsatisfying religious practice - Fleck is attacked for making a joke which is not politically correct (like I just did). An old Jewish doctor lady - an obvious stand in for the sex-obsessed media darling Dr. Ruth Westheimer - scolds, “No, no - you cannot joke about that (drunk driving)” even though drunk driving is a common activity in rural America due to the unjust, expensive non-existence of public transportation for rural citizens. Drunk driving is indeed a common joke made in locker rooms and bars in rural, non-Islamic America, like it or not.

But Joker grasps that Fleck’s sense of humour is another necessary social defense mechanism which has been taken out of the average person’s control in 2019: “All of you, the system that knows so much - you decide what’s right or wrong, they same way you decide what’s funny or not,” in a clear indictment of the shallowness of US intellectuals and their obsession with merely superficial improvements on racism and sexism such as political correctness. Criticise political correctness and make off-colour jokes? Then you are no longer working as a top US movie critic, and you are also not “real” to the average American.

The on-screen depiction of ever-present US police brutality, and how they are beaten by a vengeful mob, is obviously unacceptable to “the Man”, which is not just cops but also includes Slate, the boss who scrutinises the time clock’s tallies, and Northeastern professors.

If Joker truly smokes 50 times on screen he must have danced 20 times - both endear him to the American masses. Dancing to Americans is the closest thing they can get to jazz, i.e. improvisation. Joker jokes with De Niro that he killed the three Wall Streeters, “Because they couldn’t carry a tune to save their lives,” but it underscores the vital importance of music in US culture (and in US worship - significantly, the only part of the US social establishment which is not insulted is religion, which is totally absent in Joker). Music is truly America’s most significant and historically impactful art form, and the one for which the rest of the world is the most appreciative - I can attest. The dancing of the Joker and what it means - a desire for physical freedom amid the mental, cultural and wage prisons of US society? - went totally uncommented upon in the MSM.

The use of music in Joker is similar to its right-wing/libertarian distrust of the government in that it is distinctly tailored to white tastes: Sinatra plays perhaps a half-dozen times, including over the final credits. Sinatra is the whitest of all US music - he harkens back to a golden era for whites. I will be glad when the elder generation is gone and takes Sinatra with them, because he simply does not translate to the modern era and will be a musical footnote in a century.

Even the best song in the movie is white: “White Room” by Cream. However, this song simply rocks, has true poetry for lyrics, and harkens back to when US music was culturally impactful in a way which psychically freed the average person, as opposed to materialist/misogynist/violent/musically-pathetic hip-hop. It came amid the rebellion and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s, the last time there was real leftism in the US - in the movie it plays as a rebellion is taking place, a rebellion which frees Joker from the cops/establishment. Please do not compare Sinatra’s boring, corny, less than 2-octave range vocal stylings to Clapton, Baker and Bruce’s ecstatic jamming - Jack Bruce had more artistic avant-gardism in his right index fingernail than Sinatra had in his whole body. This is the point of view of the average American, certainly in rural areas - only the Italian-Americans of the northeast still listen to Sinatra, but only out of nostalgia.

The movie is indeed nihilist, as the US MSM accused, but only in its conclusion and not in its analysis and method - this is significant to appreciate.

Sinatra’s “If nothing is shaking come this here July, I’m gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die. My my,” is what plays over the “The End” title card. This nihilism is because an openly pro-socialist stance is forbidden in Hollywood, just as teaching such a stance is forbidden in the MSM and by Northeastern professor “experts”.

However, such nihilism is not inaccurate - what else can the average American wage/debt slave feel in 2019? Even when somebody makes a political movie about urban white poverty and nationwide distress the US intellectual elite trips over each other to destroy it before it even opens, while cops are sent to police the theaters?

However, only those who believe in the Catholic “deathbed conversion” could focus solely on Joker’s inability to provide a political solution. Nothing will indeed be shaking come July (4th) 2020, but the recurrent newspaper headline in the movie of “Kill the Rich” is the definition of armed socialist revolution. Calling Joker “nihilist” is entirely false. Have you figured out the solution to all of the social problems in the US? Trust me - we are all waiting to hear when you do.

The movie does not and - due to ideological brainwashing - cannot openly espouse socialist revolution, but it is a critic’s duty to explain that its massive popularity stems from its excellent political diagnosis of 2019 US society, and that this diagnosis is fundamentally leftist.