Sorry, I’m not yet quite done with Joker. In my first post I went off a bit about the irresponsibility of making a movie which reinforces the false belief of a link between mental illness and violence, especially “[g]iven the moment we are in where the President of the United States, the National Rifle Association, and the Republican Party are trying to scapegoat the mentally ill”.
As the early reviews of the movie came in from Venice this weekend, yet another mass shooting happened here in the United States, perpetrated by another yet sad, pathetic, mediocre white man with a gun. In response, Senator Rick Scott of Florida went on national television and said, “I want to focus on the people that have mental illness.” President Trump went on national television and said, “It’s a mental problem.”
What I’m saying is: fuck your movie.
Addenda
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Half the premise of Dan Casey’s review for Nerdist, paraphrased, is, “See, this is what happens when you don’t care for the mentally ill.”
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Richard Lawson, writing for Vanity Fair at least manages to mention “the many elements of the movie that could be seen as stigmatizing neuroatypicality, coding it as a symbol of off-ness and malevolence”.