A friend and I watched the widely-reviled Joker sequel (the one with Lady Gaga) last night. For the most part, my conclusion is that the negative critical and audience reactions were justified. It does not work as a film. Whereas the first movie in the series succeeded in establishing a tragic arc, with rising tension that culminates in a foreseeable catastrophe—this second film never really manages to generate suspense or tension. It is outrageously padded—with bad musical numbers, featuring half-forgotten pop songs from the '70s—and trial scenes that mostly recount in onerous verbal detail scenes we all remember from the first movie (and it was more interesting to see them the first time, than to be told about them the second).
Watching the film, I begin to see why tragedies do not often lend themselves to sequels. After the moment of tragic "discovery," when the protagonist realizes they have doomed themselves through their own actions, and that it is too late to do anything about it—the story really is over. Watching them suffer even more for what they already know is not particularly meaningful, and it cannot ennoble them further. It's like if someone produced a sequel to Macbeth, in which the Scottish king is still alive, but is even more depressed than before—and simply goes on being depressed and victimized for the rest of the play.
That said—the movie did fulfill one criterion of a good film: namely, I am still thinking about it. It got under my skin and unsettled me to the extent I still feel faintly queasy this morning. Part of the reason it works at least this much is simply that its overall story undoubtedly touches a nerve in our contemporary culture—as did the first film. As you may recall, Arthur Fleck's first crime spree in the original film involves a series of vigilante killings on the subway—all of which are highly reminiscent (probably intentionally so) of Bernhard Goetz, albeit with more of a populist class war angle. At the end of the first film, and in this sequel, he becomes a folk hero to the people of Gotham, who applaud his violence.
The parallels to our own cultural moment are not hard to spot. We are living through a similar time of mass panic over crime and of public enthusiasm for vigilante violence and political assassination. The right has found its contemporary Bernhard Goetz equivalent in the accused (and subsequently acquitted) subway vigilante Daniel Penny. And the left is meanwhile busy lionizing Luigi Mangione, the suspected assassin in the killing of United Health CEO Brian Thompson. We are clearly very much in a populist moment, then, in which seemingly ordinary people are disclosing to us all an unsettling degree of admiration and affinity for unjustifiable violence.
One of the most impactful aspects of the arc in the second Joker movie is the way in which Arthur Fleck ultimately disavows his role as folk hero—and is punished for it. The public is happy to applaud his crimes so long as he remains defiant and trollish. They egg on his excesses in the same way we encourage every latest travesty from Trump or Elon Musk on social media. It is only when Fleck does the right thing that the public turns on him. It is after he publicly takes responsibility for his actions, confesses his crimes, and expresses remorse—that the people of Gotham disavow and destroy him.
And what is most unsettling about this is that I can imagine the same thing happening today. If Luigi Mangione or Daniel Penny apologized and expressed regret, they might well lose their public followings. They would quickly cease to be folk heroes to the right or the left. In our current cultural moment, it would seem, we too demand that our outlaw demigods of the moment be swaggering and remorseless.
In other words, we are rewarding and incentivizing all the wrong behavior.
It is obviously a very worrying sign for the state of our culture that so many people's first response to the death by strangulation of a homeless and mentally ill man on a subway, or to the death in broad daylight of a husband and father by an unprovoked act of political violence, is to applaud it. The social media reactions from right and left respectively, to these two killings, suggest that we are indeed very much living in Joker's world.
All I can think in extenuation is that people must not really be following through the implications of what they are saying. Because the discourse is all happening online, it doesn't seem quite real to people. They aren't thinking about the fact that there are human lives on the other end.
People also aren't following out the categorial imperative in their minds, to try to test whether what they are applauding is any kind of generalizable principle. Do people really want to live in a world where anytime people disagree with a corporate policy, they can kill the CEO with impunity? Does everyone feel so perfectly confident in their own moral purity, that they would not hesitate to live in a world in which vigilantes are at liberty to kill anyone involved in a dubious and oft-criticized industry? In short, do they really think they can play with these forces of violence, and delight themselves with the fantasies of power and revenge that they inspire—without any of that violence coming back upon their own head? Do they truly feel confident that arousing the forces of social disorder and political violence could only possibly play to their own advantage?
This was of course D.H. Lawrence's point—in a poem I've quoted many times before, but which remains ever-relevant. "The worst of the younger generation," he wrote, "is that they calmly assert: We only thrill to perversity, murder, suicide, rape—/ bragging a little, really,/ and at the same time expect to go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years."
In other words, they expect that they can log onto their social media accounts and praise violence and disorder and mayhem and murder—and none of it will ever make their own lives less stable or comfortable as a result. They can praise assassination and vigilante killing, then sign off of X and go enjoy a home-cooked meal. They think they can dabble in moral nihilism without having to fear that the forces of nihil might someday swallow them up as well. But what happens, "my dears," Lawrence asks, when "nihil come[s] and hit[s] you on the head[?]"
I certainly don't feel like I can awaken these forces and remain confident for long that they would not come for me. I'm not so assured that a generalized policy of "kill all the businessmen who work for morally dubious companies" would not someday include me, by someone's definition of the various terms. Long-time readers of the blog will know that I am fond of the Robert Lowell line "pity the monsters—and one of the reasons I respond to it so much is that part of me is always half-aware that I could be the monster myself, at least in someone else's mind. And if we never entertain the suspicion that we could be the monsters—not the other guy—then that is the shortest path, in my view, to actually becoming monsters.
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