Todd Phillips is out there blaming “the far left” and outrage culture for criticisms of Joker (and also being generally a smug, pretentious dick with statements like “look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film”), and this means here I go back to talking about this fucking movie.
While this article focuses on concerns that the film could provoke real-world violence, my focus always has been that Joker’s contribution to “these discussions … about violence” is to blame a sad, pathetic, mediocre white man’s violence on his being mentally ill, when statistics instead show that the mentally ill are more likely by far to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators. Already people are calling the movie an “exploration” of or a “commentary” on mental illness, which should scare the shit out of people.
Forgive me if I don’t trust Phillips’ statement that the movie is about empathy when, to get a shot for a previous film of an actor pretending to masturbate his character’s six-month-old baby he contrived to exclude the child’s mother from set.
That’s a manipulation of which the Joker himself no doubt would be proud, making me wonder if Joker, in fact, actually is about Todd Phillips himself: a sad, pathetic, mediocre white man who feels society has not given him his rightful due.