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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 don't think being "white" has anything to do with it, at least not in the conventionionally understood sense. As Jordan (aka The Drinker) himself has observed an increasingly prominent feature of the culture is its' misandry.
The way you signal your status as person of intellect and culture is by sneering at "the normies" and describing anything and everything that a normal guy might be expected to like, be it football, cars, red meat, or conventionally attractive women as problematic.
I remember liberal journalists, academics and activists doing this during the Bush years. I'm not old enough to have first hand knowledge of what things were like before then, but what media I've consumed from the 80s and 90s paints a more tits and beer style liberalism that wasn't afraid of earthly pleasures that weren't 'queer coded'.
It's a kind of hatred of everything that isn't a part of their bubble of prestige colleges and media companies. A desire to make sure no one could ever think they could vote Republican or even think any thought that could be found in the head of someone who worked at Fox News.
Yes, and it's ebbed since that decade as well. See swift/kelce, cringe-coding of 'sportsball', and the post-hipster, post-r-slash-atheism, cultural turn in general.
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