Thread by @DavidNeiwert

I haven't seen the new Joker movie yet, but what I've been reading about it so far is somewhat troubling. Certainly the connection to incel culture should raise some flags.

theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/…

I don't really believe that these films actually cause the violence that attaches to them, but they can become vessels for psychopathic personalities, and at the very least transmitters of some very toxic ideas. They DO take on lives of their own.

newrepublic.com/article/154928…

TNR's piece focuses on the Aurora theater shooting in 2012 as an instance of Joker-inspired real-world violence. But I recall an even more vivid, and relevant, case: Jared Miller, the Bundy Ranch "Patriot" who killed two cops in a Las Vegas rampage.

nytimes.com/2014/06/10/us/…

Jerad Miller was obsessed with The Joker. That was his call sign at the Bundy Ranch.

He and his wife Amanda, who accompanied him on the rampage and died during it, dressed up as the Joker and Harley Quinn for Halloween.

Jerad even made a video in which he did his best Heath Ledger imitation in the service of basic Patriot conspiracy theories, including FEMA camps.

But watch that video and you can see how the dynamic actually works: The only thing Miller draws from the Joker’s original character is his nihilism. The rest is what Jerad pours into his vessel.

I think suggestions that these films actually cause the violence that attaches itself to it miss the whole point. The films aren’t the cause: A society that breeds violent people is. The films at worst can magnify it, but they don’t cause it.

Psychopathic personalities seek out vessels for their twisted hate. The perpetrators of mass killings are always looking for models.

dailykos.com/stories/2019/4…

If it isn’t a real-life ‘antihero’ like Anders Breivik, it can be any number of fictional characters who serve the role: Punisher. Taylor Durden and his Fight Club. There’s a long list.

They all become vessels for the hate they already bring to the table. But they would find these vessels and hijack them anyway. Pepe the frog is a vivid example of this.

The Joker is especially inviting because he’s like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Endlessly intriguing and even sympathetic in his nimble and inexorable logic. His character resonates because it taps into our own dysfunctional veins.

Remember, it was the Joker who Michael Caine’s Alfred described in a now-iconic turn of phrase: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” That was the ethos Jerad Miller embraced.

That is, in fact, the ethos of “black-pilling,” the sort of endgame result of what happens to young nihilistic white men who get red-pilled and tumble into the deepest far-right rabbit holes, especially the misogynist ones.

knowyourmeme.com/memes/black-pi…

None of this can be laid at the feet of the filmmakers—who, if anything should be praised for recognizing the presence of these toxic strains. It would be one thing if they were exploiting them cheaply, but I really haven’t seen that yet. Marvel movies mostly ignore them.

Heath Ledger’s Joker, after all, borrowed from his comic-book iterations, particularly the Joker of the Miller Dark Knight books and of “The Killing Joke.” They’re all straight out of this same Miltonian vein.

I do think artists have some responsibility not to deliberately make the world a worse place by normalizing or romanticizing hateful nihilism. But I can think of a whole lot of artists, both in film as well as music and literature, who we can bring into that discussion.

So I will go into ‘Joker’ with an open mind and hope that I actually enjoy it. Many artists do fail to recognize, or are blithe about the fact, that sometimes the shape of their art becomes a vessel for hate. Hopefully, that won’t be the case here.

Given the film’s looming prominence, it probably is inevitable that someone will decide to relate to this iteration of the Joker and commit some imitative act of horrific violence. And then we’ll have another round of chasing the missed cause for this effect.

I will always, however, find it strange that people never want to have the conversations about WHY we have so many young white men drawn to these toxic characters and their nihilism in the first place. I guess it’s human nature to blame it on the fiction and not the reality.

@threadreaderapp please unroll