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Notes -
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
The Critical Drinker, a, uh, heterodox critic went a step further and had the following to say
Internet randos floated memes to the same effect. First, a plot summary:
And now for some red hot culture war schizophrenia:
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.
Then why "Put a chick in it and make it gay" and some other related tropes have such big predictive power about what we will see in the sequel/reboot. And predictive power in the box office bombing.
Why does studios imitate one another in failure (launching even insanely stupid things like the monsterverse could be explained by trying to imitate success), but deconstructing the heroes of days of yore and losing money is hardly worth imitating. But at some point the people that are creating those things are more activists than businessmen/craftsmen or are part of a hive mind. Thousand activists acting in the same way even if no central coordination is present is close enough to conspiracy for me. The way the left leaning media can switch their talking points overnight is a good example. Probably what we see should be called oligospiracy and it is to conspiracy the same thing as oligopoly is to monopoly.
Because Hollywood is subject to epistemic closure and a lot of moralistic rent-seeking.
Because predicting what movies will make money is hard even under optimal circumstances, and right now the entertainment market is both fragmented and oversaturated thanks to the internet, and Hollywood's epistemic bubble is out of joint with major audiences.
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