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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.
In 2024, there are still those dismissing conspiratorial nonsense?
You are a much nicer and kinder person than I. I think Phillips is a hack, and the media had to collectively go to bat for and masturbate furiously over the idea that someone would shoot up the Joker movie. Because it was about them. They knew it was about them. The idea of the Joker being someone sympathetic, someone driven to the state he was in and acting out - there is a legit fear in the back of every bully's mind that the nerd they shove in the locker one day will show up at school with his crazy aunt's SKS and just go to town. If someone actually did it, they could go "see, we told you that the movie would inspire violence, that's why nobody should ever make anything like this!"
The first movie is extremely explicit; it is a tragedy that condemns the world for its lack of empathy. Joker is a monster of circumstance, and the reason why it resonated with so many is that people understood that feeling - that people only give a shit when you shoot someone you're not supposed to. For a brief moment, they hit on something raw, something real, and it scared them.
What the audience wants, after the arc that Joker goes through in the first movie, is 100 minutes of Joker murdering, torturing, and butchering his way through people. It's social status revenge fantasy. People want a John Wick for their era, not someone who kills over a dog, but someone who murders all those fuckers who don't give a shit. Studio doesn't want to do this because it opens them up to much more scrutiny and potential crazy lawsuits than whatever corporate trouble WB are already dealing with; it's one thing to make a slash/gore horror film if the reach is expected to be 50 million bucks worth of asses in seats, it's entirely another if it makes a billion dollars and teenagers are talking about how much they want to use it as inspiration.
Several explanations seem likely to me for Folie a Deux:
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