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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) ahead

Time for some low-stakes culture war. The sequel to Joaquin Phoenix's Joker movie is out. The first movie was essentially a remake of Scorsese's Taxi Driver with a little bit of supervillain flavour that resulted in a moral panic about how its empathetic portrayal of a mentally ill loner might spark an incel shooting. In the end, no shooting happened and the movie made bank.

The sequel now takes a different approach and turned out to be a musical featuring gay icon Lady Gaga. A bold choice that critics describe as

Moviegoers, particularly the comic-book inclined, loved “Joker,” although I do wonder what they’ll make of the sequel, which seems to extend a middle finger to anyone who reveled in the title character’s anarchy the first time around.

The Critical Drinker, a, uh, heterodox critic went a step further and had the following to say

[The protagonist] reverted to the same weak, timid Arthur that he was at the start of the first movie. And I can't shake the feeling that there is something almost mean-spirited in that kind of deconstruction. As if they're taking a swipe at the audience themselves for liking someone they weren't supposed to.

Internet randos floated memes to the same effect. First, a plot summary:

joker kisses a dude, gets raped in the ass by the cops and then he gets stabbed and dies at the end of the movie. not even a joke.

And now for some red hot culture war schizophrenia:

JOKER 2 is a humiliation ritual. You reacted to the first movie WRONG, and they're punishing you for that. You weren't supposed to sympathize with him. He was supposed to be a WHITE INCEL LOSER. Hence this 2hr snuff film. They thought doing this to Joel Miller, Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Willow, Picard, and John Connor was enough for you to GET THE MESSAGE.

And while I think the above conspiracy theory gets the motivations and machinations of the ominous they hilariously wrong, there is something to be said about a Zeitgeist that sees anything enjoyed by (white) men as something in dire need of female supervision.

A small kink in that explanation: The second movie was written and directed by the same people. So, what happened?

I can believe the writers thought the audience "didn't get the point" the first time and wanted to write a new movie with the "correct" message.

I think the more sinister conspiratorial nonsense - that the studios literally don't care about making a profit (!!) and deliberately did this as a "humiliation ritual" just to punish the audience, whom they hate - is ridiculous and a sign of how far down a rabbithole this sort of "THEY are out to get you" thinking can take you. Maybe there is a screenwriter somewhere chortling as xe/xir thinks "This will show those white incel losers!" but I am pretty sure there is no studio that will deliberately put out a money-loser because all the money-men are on board with a "punish incels" program.

I think the more sinister conspiratorial nonsense - that the studios literally don't care about making a profit (!!) and deliberately did this as a "humiliation ritual" just to punish the audience, whom they hate - is ridiculous and a sign of how far down a rabbithole this sort of "THEY are out to get you" thinking can take you.

If at this point "studios don't care about making profit" is something that strikes you as ridiculous and conspiratorial, you're basically saying no amount of evidence will convince you. There is absolutely no way Hollywood looks the way it looks like right now, if their primary motivation is profit.

There is absolutely no way Hollywood looks the way it looks like right now, if their primary motivation is profit.

Their primary motivation is profit and status, and for the money people behind the scenes, it's profit. They care a lot less about culture war than you do.

Hollywood looks the way it does because Hollywood has always been full of both "creatives" and studio execs who are actually very bad at their jobs and make bombs regularly. (And, in fairness, sometimes they just genuinely mistime or miscalculate the appeal of a film.) It's a very Current Year thing for you to read every box office failure as an intentional devious scheme by the studios to set money on fire just because they hate you.

I'm more suspicious of Hollywood's activities lately than you are, but I'll grant that the money men are likely signing off on wokeness and subversion under the hilarously wrong belief that there is a Modern Audience waiting to be tapped like a goldmine. It's what looks like doubling down in the face of failures that raises my eyebrow. But we'll see how that shakes out soon enough given the time delays inherently baked into producing a work.

I'll also throw in that it looks like there is a schism/rebellion between the bean-counting side and the creatives - or even creative Leads and their subordinates. From another sphere: If the CEO of Ubisoft really wants to assuage concerns about political messaging in his products and deny that's their intent, he will reliably face mini-revolts and public shaming from his very own employees that are dead set on 'doing the right thing'. I very much believe that the latter does not care about profit (at least as much) and is comfortable failing sideways out of the company's carcass to other dev houses where they can repeat it all again while barely losing any skin, if at all. And to boot, they do very much hate me from what I can tell.

If those people largely comprise the tools we have to work with, it may not actually matter what an executive's intentions are.