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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?
Joker was a remake of Scorsese's The King of Comedy, more than it was referencing Taxi Driver.
You are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to Arthur. With scant exception, you are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to any protagonist, good or bad, but they spend considerable time rationalising him as a character in Joker. The text as written does center typical anti-capitalist grievances more than it does incel ones. The intended message is more proximate to "the Joker is a product of underfunded social services", than sexlessness. The closest analogue to the film's denouement isn't found in Taxi Driver or Fight Club, it's in the (insufferable, imo) Sorry to Bother You.
I find this assumed audience in the quote a bit odd, accordingly: is the media wrong about the movie being a paean to downtrodden inceldom or does the audience for the film in fact consist of power-fantacising incels. I'd assumed a degree of consensus around the former, though I've been seeing some partisan inversion lately on the idea of stochastic terrorism more generally, so who knows.
I think the media is deliberately wrong. You aren't supposed to talk about class conflict in the US, it has to be gender, or race, or sexual orientation, or immigration status, or religion, or the color of your tribe.
These issues only take front and center stage in nations that are so incredibly well off and affluent, they'll bring conflict to areas where there is none so they can take up some righteous cause they think they'll find some sense of misplaced meaning in. And they'll get wound up over the most insignificant matters to feel a sense of superiority and self-importance. Case in point...
Before my Reddit accounts got banned for wrong think, I used to occasionally watch a guy with quite a large following on YouTube who became something of an activist for the industry he was in; and also had a Reddit account that was fairly widely known. One day he posts a video of a topic that quoted a Reddit user who was a big player in a different industry, and who I followed for a long time, independently of my knowing that this channel ever knew who he was. So I wrote to the channel saying "hey, I saw you followed Reddit user X on a video you made the other day, he has also posted a great deal about this newer topic you are now covering in other comments; you may want to check him out." He thanked me back, and then the same night, posted a video full of links I had sent to him (his video is still up last I looked) and gave his perspective on things. A bunch of users in the YouTube comment section immediately started replying with all sorts of conspiracy remarks, because they said some 'different' Reddit user, unknown to either of us, had posted the same verbatim series of comments in a different subreddit. The channel then immediately put out a quick video the same night, saying he made the other video private, asking what the hell happened, inviting his subscribers to help him figure it out and said he'd look further into it tomorrow.
So the following day, I hop on the channel's Discord. A bunch of users are gathered there in a fervor, and I immediately grew wide eyed and wondered what the hell I walked into. A bunch of enraged morons who are fans of said channel, were trying to piece information together, essentially that had the effect of doxxing this guy. I announced who I was and said "hey, I'm the man who broke the news to X the other day, I think this is what happened..." First, one of the Discord users tried putting the walls up, pumping me for information and not wanting me to explain the matter to everyone else. Then he tried taking my information and giving it to others, announcing before them that 'he' personally found the 'secrets' or background information explaining what happened. I then basically sidelined this guy and dropped the full explanation of things before everyone, and people then kept asking me questions, but I refused to provide any further information, because I could see an online mob was allowing themselves to get whipped up into a frenzy, probably to go and harass this Reddit user, accusing him of some sort of conspiracy, and bringing out the torches to make his life difficult. Not to mention this self-appointed idiot 'leader' of the group who saw his 15 minutes of fame opportunity arrive, to become 'important' to some group of idiots and make a name for himself. The channel then saw this Discord chat, and made the video public again and moved on from the matter.
All that happened was there was some random Reddit user plagiarized the comments of this other Reddit user, and went around posting his comments in other subreddits, probably because he had low self-esteem online and this was his way to feel good, copying the comments of a very intelligent Reddit user so people would 'admire' him, or get some misplaced sense of meaning or purpose in what he was doing. And yet this official Discord group was turning itself into a base of operations to antagonize the shit out of this other innocent person. And the worst part about it was, this Discord group was sad and pissed off that there 'wasn't' a conspiracy. They really wanted to go to war, probably with the idea that their righteous investigative work would win them social brownie points and approval and get them a pat on the forehead. The point of all this being that people will radically attach themselves to all kinds of moronic causes, for all kinds of reasons. In some of those, there is a real culture war that is going on. In others, it's more revealing of the individuals involved, what they're lacking in life, that they'll involve themselves in things that make no sense to the average person.
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It's simpler than that. The director (Todd Philips) is only capable of creating mediocre slop. He debuted with a sex-comedy starring Tom Green and peaked through his Hangover series. Joker was the exception to the rule. Joker 2 was a return to his low-brow shock -value roots.
Phillips said in 2019, in the aftermath of his dark drama Joker release, that he had stopped making comedy films because of the backlash of "woke culture", saying: "Go try to be funny nowadays... There were articles written about why comedies don't work anymore – I'll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, 'Fuck this shit, because I don't want to offend you'. It's hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter.
He isn't a woke shill. He's just your run of the mill creatively bankrupt Hollywood director.
The first movie hid behind some iconic moments and Phoenix's powerful performance. Strip those away, and what remains is a bit nonsensical. He produced a star is born : a successful musical with Lady Gaga. Looks like he tried to cash in with the same combination, and the appetite for it wasn't there.
My theory:
James Gunn told Todd that this Joker series is a dead end. He won't use it in Gunn's DC cinematic universe and wants Joker dead. DC comics gives Todd a carte blanche to do what he wants. Dude goes full whack by throwing every trick in his book at it. Musical, rape, police brutality, Lady Gaga, Harley Quinn & death. That's how you get this mess.
This is by far the simplest explanation for me. A director and screenwriting team that don't really know what they're doing.
The problem with applying Hanlon's razor to Hollywood is that they are now so consistently stupid in one direction that it's functionally indistinguishable from malice.
I've now watched, in so many contexts, reputable critics repudiate more low brow anti-woke content mills for making conspiratorial claims that seem absurd to them, only to be proven wrong months if not days in the future.
I understand how it boggles the mind that people would waste millions of dollars on silly attempts at propaganda that's not even good at being propaganda in the first place. You have to imagine such profound levels of both incompetence and spite to model the behavior of some of these creative leads.
From what I could gather of how Hollywood actually works, it is all out of stupidity, because most everybody there is a hack that owes their position to nepotism and politicking. Talent is one in a million even in the upper strata of management, and those precious few are the least likely to care about politics in the naive lesser sense.
And yet, for some reason, which possibly only amounts to the cultural selection of California, they all behave as if they really are part of a cabal whose whole goal is to spite white heterosexual men at any cost to others or to themselves.
California's 2 economic capitals don't talk too much. SoCal and Bay Area might as well be in 2 different states. There really isn't much of 'California-wide' anything. NYC <-> LA have more cultural exchanged than SF <-> LA.
Hollywood has always been stupid. What's changed is competition. Their stupidity is now an existential risk. So you're seeing frantic & ill-considered moves that 'securely stupid' industry could hide away. Hollywood accounting & incestuous cartels used to be able to hide a lot of terrible movies. Not so much anymore.
The last decade has put Hollywood in crisis mode. It comes from 3 sources:
Nothing about this is surprising. We've seen it before with News Media.
Google & Facebook destroyed all except a couple of news organizations. Outside of NYT, WSJ & Co, traditional news media is a shell of its former self. Yes, we all suddenly observed their stupidity for a whole decade as they were dying. But, they too were always stupid. But, stupidity only reveals itself in face of genuine competition.
You are absolutely right. And non-nepo talents (think Gen-Z Tarantino) are finding an outlet in social media. Traditional media just doesn't make money anymore.
The best talents in News Media either went to the few bastions that pay well (NYT), started sub-stacks or became social media influencers.
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I don't think being "white" has anything to do with it, at least not in the conventionionally understood sense. As Jordan (aka The Drinker) himself has observed an increasingly prominent feature of the culture is its' misandry.
The way you signal your status as person of intellect and culture is by sneering at "the normies" and describing anything and everything that a normal guy might be expected to like, be it football, cars, red meat, or conventionally attractive women as problematic.
I remember liberal journalists, academics and activists doing this during the Bush years. I'm not old enough to have first hand knowledge of what things were like before then, but what media I've consumed from the 80s and 90s paints a more tits and beer style liberalism that wasn't afraid of earthly pleasures that weren't 'queer coded'.
It's a kind of hatred of everything that isn't a part of their bubble of prestige colleges and media companies. A desire to make sure no one could ever think they could vote Republican or even think any thought that could be found in the head of someone who worked at Fox News.
Yes, and it's ebbed since that decade as well. See swift/kelce, cringe-coding of 'sportsball', and the post-hipster, post-r-slash-atheism, cultural turn in general.
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I just want to defend the Lady Gaga musical thing.
I think that would fit the sort of nihilistic “clown world” perspective the first movie was dipping into. Basically the world has gone crazy, and a movie where a psychopathic Joker character is maybe but maybe not signing absolutely over the top showtimes with Lady Gaga while enacting some ultra violence would have been perfect. That, to me, captures the spirit of Joker as a supervillain. He’s the answer to the question of what would happen if the crazy schitzophrenic homeless man you see on the street screaming got pushed just a little bit further.
That’s a terrifying villain. I was actually really looking forward to this movie and was totally bought into the musical/gaga thing. From what I’ve read they just didn’t commit to it hard enough.
Yeah, Sweeny Todding it up would have had a lot of potential.
It's kinda been an undertone for the Harley Quinn stuff, most overly by way of Marilyn Monroe with the Diamonds are A Girl's Best Friend scene in Birds of Prey. And while that series has its ups and downs -- most overtly, the writers keep writing checks for melee combat that the fight choreographers can't cash; more subtly, Quinn herself often dives from 'funny' to 'obnoxious' by an hour in -- the dichotomy between someone who treating life like a video game and the actually-gorey violence in something like Suicide Squad does work and make her disquieting even when on the side of the 'heroes'.
But apparently not what they were aiming for here.
Agreed, an updated Sweeny Todd set in a Taxi-Driver-esque, legally distinct New York, starring Joaquin Pheonix and Lady Gaga actually sounds like a lot of fun. Somone should totally make that movie.
Unfortunately that's not the movie that got made.
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It kind of reminds of Cop Rock. I actually watched this when it aired.
It was awful. So hilariously bad no one could believe they actually produced this. But at the time, I had to give them credit for at least trying something original. Hollywood so rarely comes up with an original idea, I can't blame them too hard when they fail.
So yeah, when I heard about a Joker musical with Lady Gaga, I thought it sounded insane, but also maybe crazy in a good way?
Unfortunately not, but I still think the idea that they did this to punish fans who liked the first movie is even more crazy. "We made a blockbuster hit, but the wrong people liked it, so let's make a terrible movie that says fuck you to all the people who made the first movie profitable" is a thought that only makes sense in a dark fetid place.
Even when people are hostile to the original work and its fans, they aren't trying to tank its success or being indifferent to it. Take Paul Verhoeven, who made the original Starship Troopers movie and famously despised the book, thought Heinlein was a fascist, and probably would have been quite happy to say "fuck you" to Heinlein fans. He still made a movie that he thought would appeal to an audience that didn't care about fidelity to the book. The movie was hilariously bad* but not because he was trying to make sure Heinlein fans wouldn't like it.
* Actually I liked it and thought for all Verhoeven's blinkered misunderstanding of the book, he did capture some of its essence, even if unintentionally. It was bad in a campy, so-bad-it's-good way. Ironically it's now kind of a cult classic, spawned multiple sequels, and has been criticized for being too pro-military. All of which I bring up by way of saying, a simple black and white model of reality in which the entire creative team says "Hey kids, let's put on a show - and say fuck you to any bad people who might like it!" is an example of how conflict theory can degenerate to a childish understanding of the world.
Killing off successful and profitable media because the wrong audience is enjoying it is far from historically unprecedented. The rural purge of the 1970s that killed off a dominant genre of broadcasting basically on the grounds that TV executives who didn't like rural TV wanted a different audience.
True, but there is a difference between killing something because you don't care that the (wrong) audience likes it, and funding something you expect to fail just so you can stick a thumb in the audience's eye. The equivalent here would be just... not making a sequel, despite the obvious potential, rather than making a sequel that's deliberately shitty because you're angry at the people who liked the first one.
I also doubt that the Joker became a hit on the strength of angry disaffected young white men, even if some movie critics think so. Thus, I am very skeptical of the narrative that the studios said, "Whoa! We'd better fix this!" when they saw who bought tickets the first time.
You are assuming not only that the expectation is that it would fail, but that this expectations is excused by a particular reasoning. Neither end of that has to apply, especially if you get into internal political dynamics over competition for resources and future developments. Poison pill strategies and setting projects up to fail or flounder as a means to a separate end are banal workplace dynamics.
Setting up something you don't like to fail, and publicly so, is a classic way to delegitimize something you don't like. It places an onus and responsibility on the nominal lead advocates both for it to succeed and if/when it fails, whereas complaints that failure is the fault of insufficient support is a classically and generally dismissed claim of the loser of a bureacratic fight. Since executive meddling is an extremely normal and non-controversial practice at the executive level, the advocates trying to problematize execute handling are implicitly casting accusations at more than just the interested meddler, which in turn draws a bandwagon effect by others because if executive meddling is a censorable act, it means those other executives would be acknowledging grounds for their own censoring.
I’ll also point out that there aren’t a lot of alternatives right now with the reach and scale of Hollywood and as such it’s a lot like pro sports. Yes there are minor leagues, or maybe college sports but most often people only choose them when they don’t have easy access to the big leagues and almost no one would deliberately choose the small leagues when given the option to see major league teams.
In movies, a lot of this is based around intellectual property— there are very few space stories that you can do without tripping over something owned by a big studio somewhere. Most superhero types have something like them in either the Marvel or DC catalog. And on it goes. So you either go with small movie houses — either indies or Christian, or possibly foreign, made by people who didn’t quite make it, or you go see a blockbuster made by the usual suspects who will own all the rights to those kinds of films and shows until the end of time. If this iteration of Joker fails, who cares, we own the rights and in five or ten years we make a different Joker movie. Not like anyone else owns the right to make movies about evil clowns like this.
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I agree it could have worked brilliantly. But instead of leaning into the madness, they chose to deconstruct it.
Expectations subverted, I guess.
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The Joker was a surprise hit. And a surprise controversy. Todd Philips likely didn't think it would ever be this big or get attacked so much for being liked by the wrong people.
The solution to this would be to just live with it. But a) the movie made a lot of money, of course it would get a sequel. And b) some artists are arrogant hacks who actually think that the audience's behavior hangs on their word. If they didn't take the right message then I guess they just communicated wrong.
Truth is most people get when a character is supposed to be bad. They just also see it as a fantasy and so don't care as much about realistic standards.
But you listen to the media and its self-aggrandizing delusion that everyone is hanging on the teachings of wordcels and you want to go back and fix it. And because Todd Philips already had a bad track record with sequels going in and Joker never needed one you get...something that is apparently not good at pushing its message.
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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.
It doesn't have to be that sinister. Rather than explicitly forgoing profits in an effort to "punish" incels, it could be that the screenwriters felt upset or embarrassed about creating a movie that was alleged to appeal to incels or to legitimise their frustrations, even if unintentionally. So they made a push to move as far away from that as possible in the sequel to refute those allegations, and didn't see this as conflicting with their pursuit of profits.
Incidentally is there any reason to believe incels even particularly liked the first film or ever identified with the Joker? I feel as if that association was entirely made up by people parodying them, unless maybe it was a riff off the "clown world" idea that was popular in right-wing circles for a while.
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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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Knowing what we do about how good people are at rationalizing, wouldn't it be fairly trivial for studio execs to talk themselves (or let themselves be talked by motivated outsiders) into a perspective that deconstructing "incels" like this would, in fact, be a money-maker?
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My mind says to me what you are saying is making total sense. But my eyes witness the major culture producers doing exactly that for years now. So I have no choice other than to believe the evidence in front of my eyes - yes, they would sacrifice making a profit to the ideas of xe/xir writer about what the audience really should be liking. Or, alternatively, they think their marketing power is so great the can just force anything through - but enough failures by now happened that should have made it evident to them it's not the case. Yet, they persist - so, however illogical it sounds, there's no other way but to accept that's what they are doing.
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Then why "Put a chick in it and make it gay" and some other related tropes have such big predictive power about what we will see in the sequel/reboot. And predictive power in the box office bombing.
Why does studios imitate one another in failure (launching even insanely stupid things like the monsterverse could be explained by trying to imitate success), but deconstructing the heroes of days of yore and losing money is hardly worth imitating. But at some point the people that are creating those things are more activists than businessmen/craftsmen or are part of a hive mind. Thousand activists acting in the same way even if no central coordination is present is close enough to conspiracy for me. The way the left leaning media can switch their talking points overnight is a good example. Probably what we see should be called oligospiracy and it is to conspiracy the same thing as oligopoly is to monopoly.
Because Hollywood is subject to epistemic closure and a lot of moralistic rent-seeking.
Because predicting what movies will make money is hard even under optimal circumstances, and right now the entertainment market is both fragmented and oversaturated thanks to the internet, and Hollywood's epistemic bubble is out of joint with major audiences.
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I think the money-men are basically being held hostage at this point. There are too many damning and obvious failures that can only be interpreted as striving to alienate the core audience (but marketed as attempts to expand the audience). It's just all too much at this point. They doubledown every time. There are people behind the scenes decrying this, but they don't feel as though they can say anything publicly.
Capitalism creates its own complex ecosystem. Perhaps we should not be suprised that pathogens have evolved to exploit this niche. These entertainment companies have contracted a disease, and it is repurporsing its host's resources to support and spread the pathogen. The host may survive, but its immune system has never encountered this pathogen before.
Just as communists managed to infiltrate capitalist countries governments and corporations in the 1920s - 50s, so too the bioleninists have infiltrated basically every major corporation, especially those with influence like Hollywood. No surprise they would try to force their memetic viruses into everything they produce
I think there’s also some competency crisis factors at play here. Hollywood Communists of the 50s weren’t a bunch of nepo-baby hacks, they were actually good writers. So they could deftly weave subversive themes into an otherwise money-making crowd pleaser. Most modern writers rooms aren’t competent enough to do that, all they can manage is clunky obvious diatribes.
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If you look at Disney getting into a pointless fight with DeSantis it's clear that many of the elites in this company just buy into this stuff themselves and so leaders have to tread carefully.
I wouldn't say it's just "capitalism". If you believe wokeness is government-enhanced or government-coerced, then this is just what happens when the market is distorted by people who know better. The push for "diversity" turns the company's personnel into the sorts of people who can't help but act this way.
No one would find tribalism or religious parochialism to be particularly odd in a Third World corporation, especially if you were getting slight "encouragements"' from the people in power.
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I'm with you on the last sentence but this
fails to take the principal-agent problem into account. People making decisions for institutions can be subject to incentive structures that lead them towards decisions that are bad for the institution. A lot of the decisions that have been made within the entertainment industry over the past decade or so, including the galaxy-brained "this product is not for you, white male chuds" marketing ploy, cannot be explained by a profit motive. They just can't.
Prolly worth pointing out that the people involved in the making of a movie gets paid regardless of how well the movie does. If it loses "the studio" money people who are paid up front could care less, financially. Same goes of anyone who isn't fired or docked after going on live TV and telling people not to watch their studio's film.
It is true that in theory this does not account for residuals, however. But I've heard some things indicating that residuals have been gutted relatively recently - if that's true it makes all the more sense that the people actually making the movie would be indifferent to the success of the film (or possibly even actively hostile to it).
Residuals are dead and have been since the Harry Potter franchise.
There are child extras that date from the Philosopher's Stone who collected thousands of dollars every year for 2 minutes of screentime, buoyed by the massive DVD (and VCR tapes!!!) sales, and licensing deals struck since then. Four or five movies in WB realized this was untenable, as they had to pay dozens upon dozens of extras since those contracts were still in effect (some collected from multiple movies and got to triple or even quadruple dip).
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Given the plot summary, anyone could have predicted it would be a box office failure. Why they went ahead with it anyway is anyone's guess, surely there was a variety of motivations, but repudiating/disavowing their unsought, deplorable fanbase was probably among them.
Actually, not only was the failure predictable from the plot, the plot was predictable from the existence of a sequel. Can you imagine a world where the lesson they took from Incel 1 was that there's an untapped audience of very online white male social rejects desperate to be shown in an, if not positive, at least "nuanced" light, and the sequel delivered even more on the power fantasy and/or sympathetic hearing aspects? Why does that sound so much less believable than their decision to have their core audience raped in
Minecrafteffigy?See, I know people say this all the time about movies that should have been obvious bombs in retrospect. And yet it has always happened, throughout the history of Hollywood. "How could anyone have thought this piece of crap wasn't going to bomb?"
People just overestimate how good studios are at predicting winners, and underestimate the egos of the people involved. Also, projects often sound very different on paper from the finished product, and the development process, especially nowadays, can radically transform a movie into something unlike what the money originally expected.
Does it really make sense to you that someone says "Yes, let's waste hundreds of millions of dollars just to say fuck you to incels"? And that everyone involved in writing that check nods their heads?
Individuals involved in the project, maybe. Though even there, I think that is pretty rare. Do you think Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix knew as they were making this movie that it would bomb? Or knew as soon as they read the script? And they were okay with it? Actors will sometimes sign onto a crap project just to collect a paycheck, but usually they don't want to be associated with a bomb.
That's not how that pitch would have went. It would have been more like "Let's build on our prior success and open up this IP to an even broader audience. 2024 is not 2019, times have changed. We must cater to the tastes of modern consumers."
Sure, but that's a miscalculation and a bad bet, not a nefarious scheme to deliberately lose money just to piss off people you hate.
They never seem to make the mistake of over-appealing to young males and thereby losing lots of money. So its pretty deliberate.
What's the counterfactual here? Michael Bay still makes four-quadrant films. Top Gun: Maverick is a four-quadrant film. The original Star Wars trilogy were four-quadrant films. I can think of far fewer big films that tried to go hard on the two female quadrants (e.g. Twilight) than went hard on the two male ones, especially now that we're out of the romcom era. Joker is a two-quadrant film on the other axis because of its rating, not deliberate alienation of women, where it hit broadly the same 60-40 splits as the typical comic-book movie (e.g. Captain Marvel, Spider-man Homecoming).
The counterfactual is some org taking an IP like Barbie and basically cutting the ending. The movie Barbie is accidentally based. Ken learns about the patriarchy, brings it to Barbieland and creates a utopia where everyone is happy except the weird Barbie. This is then destroyed by the MC and her new friend by a contrivance, but if you just left it at that and added some American flags and explosions, you'd have the counter.
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Michael Bay kept trying, but it turns out that it's REALLY HARD to lose money that way. Burr Steers finally managed by adapting a Jane Austen parody, zombie horror flick "Pride + Prejudice + Zombies".
When I think of teenage boys, I certainly always think slipping in a Jane Austen reference will get their juices flowing.
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You combine two things "lose money just to piss off people you hate" but this is wrong. Their intent wasn't to lose money. Their intent was to piss of the deplorables. Logically, they should have known by now it'll lose them money, because it already happened many times, but that's me trying to model what they should be thinking and not actually their thinking. They might have thought it'll be ok or that the "modern audience" will finally show up with piles of cash, or that their marketing is all-powerful, or they just didn't care and lived in denial. The point is they didn't have to have explicit intent to lose the money in order for their actions to lead to that. You can call it "bad bet", sure, but I think it's clear their primary motivations can be found elsewhere.
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What do you call a person who continues to double down on bad bets?
You can argue that the people really in charge are primarily driven by profit. But then you need to explain why these same people are continuing to make the same money-losing mistake over and over and over and over.
Ya know, you're not wrong, but this is a thing that happens constantly, and it's not because of a dumb woke conspiracy to force humiliation rituals on us.
My comparison is the government: why do government officials and politicians make so many empirically bad decisions? Why do many of them seem to be very bad at their jobs? Most of them are not stupid, and at least some of them actually want to be successful in managing the government and the economy. You can say some of them really are ideologues and just want to hurt their enemies (probably more true in government than in Hollywood), but most don't actually set out to be villains or incompetent.
The simple answer is that there are no adults in charge, and most people are just... not good at what they do. Ego and ideology do get in the way, but I believe in both Hanlon's Razor and Clark's Law.
Principal-agent problem. It's not their money they're wasting and there are preciously little consequences for failing the public.
Their job is to get the job and keep the job. Sometimes that requires being good at their nominal duties. But especially in politics, that connection is often rather loose.
Sure, but in a non-dysfunctional ecosystem, that just means that these people will eventually be replaced by people who are. The question is: why is the entertainment ecosystem so dysfunctional?
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I absolutely think that. Because these people have been on a conveyer belt their entire lives where they have never organically encountered a normal person. They think isolated, downtrodden white males who feel like society has turned on them are a tiny minority. It's inconceivable to them that they represent enough of their audience to make or break a film. They thought they were picking on a tiny minority nobody cares about to the delight of all their neoliberal woke peers who are obviously the majority. Right? Right?!
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If at this point "studios don't care about making profit" is something that strikes you as ridiculous and conspiratorial, you're basically saying no amount of evidence will convince you. There is absolutely no way Hollywood looks the way it looks like right now, if their primary motivation is profit.
Their primary motivation is profit and status, and for the money people behind the scenes, it's profit. They care a lot less about culture war than you do.
Hollywood looks the way it does because Hollywood has always been full of both "creatives" and studio execs who are actually very bad at their jobs and make bombs regularly. (And, in fairness, sometimes they just genuinely mistime or miscalculate the appeal of a film.) It's a very Current Year thing for you to read every box office failure as an intentional devious scheme by the studios to set money on fire just because they hate you.
Sometimes it seems pretty obvious from the outside that a given production is going to fail miserably: Borderlands, as another example. This conversation has me wondering if it always looks like a train wreck on the inside (reshoots, recutting, extra VFX) in ways that we just don't see as outsiders. Was the set of a great movie, say Jurassic Park, less chaotic in these ways than Waterworld? It's conceivably sampling bias to see the trainwrecks from the outside.
I recall hearing that the production of Aliens was a complete shitshow, with James Cameron allowing issues with his personal life to interfere with production in negative ways. Also, some of the best Mission Impossible films, including 4, 5, and 6, apparently had 3-page long scripts at beginning of filming, with just an overarching narrative and various ideas of scenes in Tom Cruise's head, requiring the scripts to be written the night before the actual filming of the individual scenes, along with a ton of work by the editors to actually piece together a coherent narrative (Chris McQuarrie, the current director of the movies, got that role in a large part due to being an uncredited script doctor for 4 who was apparently brought in to fix it up during shooting).
So certainly having the productions be trainwrecks from the inside doesn't guarantee that the film won't be one of the greatest films ever made, rather than a historical megaflop like Waterworld.
But I think with something like Borderlands or Joker 2 or any number of other recent flops like Madame Web, The Marvels, or on TV The Acolyte or Rings of Power is that the trainwrecks aren't on the production, but rather on the fundamental artwork that's being expressed, mainly the script and also perhaps the cast. E.g. for Borderlands, it should be obvious to any layman, and certainly to any studio exec, that it's not a winning move to cast 50+ year old dramatic actor Cate Blanchett as an action lead and famously short comedian Kevin Hart as a no-nonsense serious big tough-guy soldier in a movie based on a video game aimed at teenage boys and young men. Even if the production had gone completely smoothly, it was just fundamentally doomed from the start, unless they relied on some other gimmick, such as having outrageously good action scenes (this is sorta what the Mission Impossible films rely on, which has worked for films 4-6, but not so much for 7, IMHO). Likewise, any layman could've read the outline for the story of most of these films and immediately pointed out major problems that would lose the audience.
It seems to me that, to be blind to these glaring issues and obvious red flags - so blind that you're willing to place hundreds of millions of your company's dollars on a losing bet - requires a lot of motivated reasoning which results from elevating one's own ideological biases over one's love of profit.
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No, it's not some intentional devious scheme to set money on fire. And yes, Hollywood has always been full of decisionmakers who are very bad at their jobs. And setting money on fire in an effort to humiliate the audience they hate - and being surprised that that's the result - is how they're being bad in this instance and other recent instances. Holding onto the false, but genuine belief that they can make profit through releasing these awful products that overtly shit on things the audience is known to like is how they don't care about making profit. Instead of analyzing what the market wants in a way designed to make accurate predictions, they analyze it in a way filtered by their own biases shaped by their ideological bubbles, which leads them to believing that they can release these "humiliation rituals" or whatever and still make money. I can't honestly say that someone who behaves like that is someone who cares about profit more than they do about their ideology; part of caring about making profit - or about accomplishing anything, really - is making sure you get an accurate-enough lay of the land so as to navigate it in a way that allows you to accomplish your goal. If you allow your biases to get in the way of getting that accurate lay of the land, then you clearly care about your biases more than you care about profit.
And, of course, there's no need to posit any sort of conspiracy. You just need enough decisionmakers with enough power all being part of the same echo chambers and lacking enough self-awareness and love of money to overcome their own biases.
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The problem for your theory is that a lot of the creatives gain status by parroting or reproducing the tenets of their side of the culture war. Look at things like Amandla Stenberg's victimhood complex because she's -half - black, or how entire works like Eternals are marketed on "diversity", or the asinine changes made to Snow White because Peter Dinklage decided other dwarves getting jobs was problematic.
If you're a mediocre creative on a mediocre show that was hired because of inclusion standards to a work that far predates you and is frankly beyond your competence, what do you have to sell but The Message^(tm)? You have to dance with the one that brung ya.
Sure. The odd bit is that what's happening now is that Hollywood is incredibly IP-heavy compared to the past and even IPs with a track record are suddenly bombing despite us knowing they can appeal to their audience.
Nobody spends time on theories about why Sony comic book movies suck. They suck cause Sony sucks. Nobody wonders why Coppola took a huge shot and failed with Megalopolis. It happens.
It is worth wondering why successful franchises like MCU and Star Wars seem to be going against their audience desires (and outright being hostile to their fans) and suffering though.
I wouldn't say that they're burning money just to Subvert Expectations cause they hate people. In fact, it's probably because they've been successful with these franchises that they think they can experiment with drawing in new audiences without their contempt for the legacy fanbase costing them.
The theory is that they don't have to choose. They can serve their diversity goals (both in front of and behind the camera) while also making more money because there's an untapped market of female nerds who want to push the MCU as far as it's gone with the male cast.
It's a weird sort of incumbent's arrogance that they can have it all, made worse by their ideological commitments.
Actually, let me push back on that: the MCU was not destined to print money forever if only the writers could keep from going off the rails. Every trend, no matter how hot and moneymaking, fades eventually. There is a parallel in their source material: comics in the late 80s and 90s were extremely hot for a hot minute, and everyone was opening a comic book shop, every publisher was printing sixteen variant Collector's Item #1 covers of each new Spiderman/Superman/Spawn reboot, and Wolverine was guest-starring in cross-over stories in every damn title in the Marvel Universe.
That ended. It ended partly because of burnout, partly because of boring economic reasons, and partly because you just can't keep people excited about Wolverine forever.
Hollywood is of course a deeply and ironically uncreative industry (but then so are comic books, and book publishers, and gaming). When they see a cash cow, they will try to milk it until it's dead and they are trying to squeeze milk out of leather.
Your mention of Coppola actually speaks to my point: people think Joker 2 failed because it is an anti-profit go-woke-go-broke studio project to insult white men. If Megalopolis failed because Coppola is a megalomaniac who made a bad movie, presumably they don't think Coppola knew it was bad and didn't care, or never wanted to make money from it (though he probably would have been willing to make it anyway even if he knew it would lose money, because this was a passion project). But Coppola used his own money. I guess a very woke Coppola might have made a passion project to say fuck you to white men, but most people are not that crazy. I think it's much more likely the studios thought Joker 2 would be successful, and if it pissed off a few incels that would be an added bonus.
I agree with your post, but I want to add:
Hollywood is a deeply uncreative industry in decline. Inflation adjusted, domestic US box office peaked in 2002. They're selling about as many tickets today as in 1995, despite an additional 70 million Americans. Some more stats: 61% of Americans saw zero movies in theaters, the average American who did see a movie saw just three and change, down from 30% of Americans seeing zero movies and an average close to seven in 2007.
2007 is seventeen years ago. That's, you know, a while, but Todd Phillips was already a working director then. Bob Iger was already CEO of Disney in 2007. A lot of these guys came up in a totally different industry than the one they're working in now. It's rare for dominant industries to disappear gracefully.
This decline has little to do with the movies being made, and more to do with changes to the media environment. The rise of streaming, the rise of the $500 70" TV has made going to the theater a less interesting thing to do.
There's a great scene from Mad Men where Don Draper, thinking about the rise of rock music and how kids are tying bands into their identities, asks "When did music become so important?" In the 60s, music suddenly mattered as part of identity formation and politics in a way it hadn't been for Don growing up. Now, I'm not sure Music does matter, music mattering may have been a brief period.
Movies have mattered from just after their invention to now. I'm not sure they really do anymore. And the industry is coming to terms with it.
I think the rise of streaming certainly hurt movies, but I submit that it’s the poor quality of the films themselves that are killing the industry off completely. The writing is often boring and predictable, and the plots of most movies can be easily discernible by watching the trailers. The superhero movie is boring, nothing interesting happens in them, and so nobody gets excited to go see New Marvel or New DC because everyone knows the Brand and they know what the experience will be like long before they buy their (relatively expensive) tickets, popcorn and soda. The same can be true of other genres there’s just nothing interesting going on as movies converge on the same Save the Cat beat sheet with the same progressive philosophy and the same Joss Weaten “take nothing seriously” sensibility.
This comes about because of the insular nature of Hollywood. You want in, you have to attend film schools in one of maybe a dozen Big Name schools. You need a patron. You need to go to Hollywood where you get invited to the right parties. The expense and time sink necessary to make it pretty much precludes anyone who doesn’t come from money, and the constant need to network often accidentally on purpose weeds out anyone who isn’t on the liberal side of Woke Progressive. But since everyone involved comes from the same background with the same or similar life experiences, they cannot be creative. There’s nothing new brought in. You won’t ever hear the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one. You won’t hear anything authentic to a religious person. These writers have likely never had a ten minute conversation with someone like that.
It's a process, though I haven't seen a single comic book movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman and the last Star Wars content I consumed was The Force Awakens so I'm hopelessly behind on the question of what exactly is so bad about modern Hollywood, I've checked out.
The decline of the industry begins with the technology. No one can reasonably argue that if only we got "the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one, [or] anything authentic to a religious person" that the film industry would be doing a-ok.
The shitty things we all hate about the movie industry in this thread are mostly a response to the decline of the American box office. They're hemorrhaging ticket sales, in a model built on ticket sales that still considered home-viewing an afterthought. They still haven't yet totally figured out how to make home-viewing profitable without the box office ticket sales. They settled on the big franchises and comic book movies because they thought they would still bring people out to the theaters. For the most part, the non-franchise films do even worse in theaters! Because the technology only supports the spectacle comic book films: the gap between theater and home has narrowed to the point where there's almost zero value in seeing a comedy or romance in theaters, only the big spectacle benefits from the big screen.
The preening morality plays are a natural result of a culture of retreat and failure in the industry: "I'm producing this film in a way that I can explain in job interviews next fall". They know that the industry is sinking and a lot of the films they make will be, by any reasonable metric, failures; so they become more insular, more focused on getting one of the limited number of seats before the music stops. If you fail progressively, you have a narrative to latch onto as to why it wasn't your fault. If you fail boldly, trying something new, it's just on you.
How do you fix the streaming-old-movies-on-a-75-inch-TV problem for the film industry? The answer isn't going to be thoughtful Christian values films, if the people to make those even existed. But without a good answer, the film industry isn't going to suddenly change. That's what will alter the calculus.
My point is that a lot of what we're arguing about in the movie industry is this play. It's a terrible play that went horribly wrong immediately, but the odds of winning the game were already effectively zero, so criticizing the play design is kind of pointless.
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I think that there are different failure modes - conceptual and execution. To me it seems that Megalopolis fails as execution whereas Joker 2 was doomed as conception - if they instead have decided to just make it Natural Born Killers: the musical with Harley and the Joker amplifying each other's descent into madness it would have worked.
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I would buy that the MCU is just suffering from a natural reversion if they hadn't also changed the recipe. Sure, a lot of it was Disney+ (and, in the case of Star Wars, pure mismanagement even before that). But I don't think it was purely that. They tried to grab a new audience and fell into similar behavior as other culture war fodder IPs (including battling and haranguing their own fanbase for not liking the change). Something like Rings of Power was based on an IP in hibernation since 2003 on the film side. There was no fatigue. Yet they did the same diversity stuff.
Yes, which means less oversight. Which means we wonder less why he was allowed to go up his own ass. It's easier to imagine one autocratic artist being fooled than a whole host of overseers with a track record.
These franchises are notorious for over-management.
Sure. I'm not one of those arguing it was purely spiteful behavior. I did say the theory was that they'd make more money. I guess I just give more weight to ideology/spite than you.
I think it's a convergence of self interest and ideology. But that doesn't mean that the ideology doesn't encourage somewhat contemptuous behavior towards the legacy audience as well. Or that it is a purely rational decision on profit. If you proved to them that catering to a whitebread or stereotypical "Real American" audience would play better I think it'd take them vastly longer to flip than it would if you argued that "diversity" really does pay more. Even if this is recognized, the personnel they have may not be able to help themselves because this is now SOP (there is some evidence this is changing)
A good example of this is NPR's ill-fated push for diversity which led to a bunch of cancelled progressive shows
There clearly seem to be principal-agent problems here and echochamber issues. It shouldn't be a surprise to NPR that catering to middle of the road white folx would play better than trying to explain who Saucy Santana is to grab a black audience. But staff and leadership seem to buy in (we saw this at Disney itself, when Chapek was forced by a revolt of some execs, aided by Iger, into an utterly irrational battle with DeSantis) so they have to waste a lot of the company's money before they come to their senses.
EDIT: And everyone has made every point in this post six times over, down to the same wording, by now lol.
Sorry, kind of hijacking your post to talk about LOTR.
It was in hibernation since 2014, if you consider The Hobbit part of the IP (and I would). I don't remember them doing the diversity stuff with that trilogy, and they did make money, despite making definitely lesser cultural artefacts than the LOTR movie trilogy and pissing off core fans. I could see them being worried about not being able to please the core fans no matter what they did with Rings of Power and so are trying to reach for new audiences and I wouldn't blame them.
Core LOTR fans (me included) would have gotten annoyed at any invention of the adaptation that's not from the books. Tolkien is hard to adapt, the 2000s movies were little miracles. The Hobbit could have been adapted properly, if it had been done BEFORE the LOTR, but then it was stuck and couldn't both please the studios and the fans because they couldn't possibly release something less hype-worthy than the previous trilogy, it had to at least match the spectacle of the LOTR, or exceed it. So they had to do the neat, short and sweet children's story great violence to turn it into something that was meant to feel like a step up from the LOTR. After that though, anything new would have to work off much less in-depth material than LOTR. Outside of a few short stories that don't really fit within the context of the existing material (and as such less interesting to adapt for producers that want to build on top of the popular IP they paid dearly for) the rest is written mostly like historical records than narrated fiction. That requires much more extrapolating to adapt.
For what it's worth, I've been watching RoP. It's not terribly woke the way it's been made out to be; it's got errr... multiracial fantasy races and girlboss warrior Galadriel, but other than that, it doesn't shove any woke messaging into its story. Its failings are more mundane. A paucity of likeable characters, not knowing what to do with some storylines. Season 2 just ended and it's remarkable how little happened in it compared to season 1, it felt like there's one story thread they wanted to advance and just juggled with all the others to keep them in place.
I guarantee that if I was given the same budget I'd be able to create something which pleases the core fans. Hell, I'd be able to do it on a quarter of the budget. It isn't exactly hard to do either - mostly you just have to avoid purposefully and deliberately insulting the people who liked the property you're working on, and treat it respectfully. Even Disney is capable of doing this - X-Men '97 didn't have many of these issues to the best of my knowledge.
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I'm more suspicious of Hollywood's activities lately than you are, but I'll grant that the money men are likely signing off on wokeness and subversion under the hilarously wrong belief that there is a Modern Audience waiting to be tapped like a goldmine. It's what looks like doubling down in the face of failures that raises my eyebrow. But we'll see how that shakes out soon enough given the time delays inherently baked into producing a work.
I'll also throw in that it looks like there is a schism/rebellion between the bean-counting side and the creatives - or even creative Leads and their subordinates. From another sphere: If the CEO of Ubisoft really wants to assuage concerns about political messaging in his products and deny that's their intent, he will reliably face mini-revolts and public shaming from his very own employees that are dead set on 'doing the right thing'. I very much believe that the latter does not care about profit (at least as much) and is comfortable failing sideways out of the company's carcass to other dev houses where they can repeat it all again while barely losing any skin, if at all. And to boot, they do very much hate me from what I can tell.
If those people largely comprise the tools we have to work with, it may not actually matter what an executive's intentions are.
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If you're going to say that there are (at least) two primary motivations, I don't think you should get to act like people claiming one of them has greater primacy than the other are being ridiculous.
I'd expect far more people figuratively flying out office windows, if that was the case.
I don't think I care about it enough to lose hundreds of millions of dollars over it, they do.
Is it ok if I just read the ones explicitly advertised as "this movie wasn't made for chuds like you!" as it? (Not sure if Joker 2 would qualify, since I checked out from Hollyeood a while ago).
I think money is the greater motivator, and when I say status, I mean the status that comes from producing a moneymaker and award winner. If you think the "status" they seek is the status of winning the approval of their woke friends who think it's great that they produced a massively expensive disaster just to raised a middle finger to their enemies, yes, I will act like the people claiming that are being ridiculous.
A lot of actors, directors, and producers have had their careers crippled with a massive failure. Comebacks happen, but so does being consigned to the wilderness of low budget direct-to-video releases.
Yes, but an actor or writer throwing a fit on Twitter over criticism and saying things like that is not the same as explicitly advertising a movie as "Not for you."
A lot of people point at things like Amandla Stenberg saying "White people crying was the goal." Obviously a bad look and a shitty thing to say, and Amandla Stenberg probably would be happy to burn millions of dollars of (someone else's) money to make white people cry. But she's just an actress whose career will probably last five minutes after Star Wars, and she was being snarky on the Daily Show. She is not a studio spokeswoman and I am very confident that the producers of The Acolyte did not have "Make white people cry (and lose money)" as their goal.
That's fine, it's dismissing other possibilities as ridiculous that I'm taking an issue with (also pretty sure it's in violation of a rule or two, but whatever).
As others pointed out, awards are handed out internally by the industry itself.
Cool, so tell me how would the world look different if you were wrong about this?
I'm saying we'd be seeing even more of that. We'd also be seeing very different types of it. For example it would take a lot more to fire someone like Gina Carano, and a lot less to fire someone like Kathleen Kennedy.
I don't think these sort of declarations tend to be made after the movie has bombed.
Based on what? Why do you get to be "very confident" on absolutely no evidence, while declaring anybody who disagrees with you is ridiculous?
If I were wrong about this, we'd see nothing but woke replacements and writers and directors being overt about their intentions, no retrenchments or cancellations by studios when a property fails to earn, and massively budgeted productions like "Captain America: Gay As You Want To Be." I am saying you are not wrong that wokeness is a pervasive influence in Hollywood; I am saying you are hyperbolic and irrational about the degree to which every single person top-down prioritizes petty vengeance against their ideological enemies over profits or even production quality. I suspect this is projection, because it's what a lot of the people being so shrill about this would do if they were in charge: fuck money, let's rub the hottest culture war we can in our enemies' faces. It's not a rational way to view the world, but it's emotionally satisfying.
When you get to the level of big Hollywood moneymaking, you care more about money than whether you pissed off some incels on Twitter.
They replaced Captain America with a black man. I don't think he's supposed to be gay, but surely it counts as a woke replacement.
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I'd say that if you think that "throwing all their money into a bonfire and basking at the flames as it all burns" is not only a reasonable standard, but apparently the bare minimum, for the claim "they are not primarily motivated by profit", I think you are the one being hyperbolic and irrational, which makes your claims of projection extra-ironic.
Is there any field where you hold yourself to this standard? To me it looks like the same type of argument as "trans women aren't winning at every competition, so it's not a problem they're competing with women" that Darwin used on you once.
This claim is trotted out regularly as if it's evidence in itself, but it has literally no backing.
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Awards are dolled out by movie creator's peers, there is no external oversight evaluating movies, and with Holywood is heavily skewed towards the left (so much so, that there are several movies decrying the Red Scare, but 0 about the Roosevelt (D)'s camps, despite the former affecting much less people much less severely), members of AMPAS will naturally identify with and understand leftist messaging.
You know, it is surprising that, say, Farewell to Manzanar doesn't have a movie adaptation. Are there really none? I certainly can't think of any.
There was a made-for-TV movie in 1976
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It’s possible that the director/screenwriters/producers believed that the 2019 film produced a moral panic and they didn’t want blood on their hands. Perhaps they believed that they might be perceived as responsible for some incel-inspired shooting or violence against the state? So, they had to make a sequel to defang Phoenix’s Joker and make his character weak and pathetic. “Look at your ‘hero’ now, you filthy incels!”
The production studio, believing this same ridiculous notion, merely did a cost-benefit analysis. “Which will lose us less money: a box office bomb or a lawsuit and reputational damage of aggrieved families of the Great Incel Shooting of 2024?”
Ah but remember, January 6 happened between Joker 1 and Joker 2. And while I don’t recall anyone in clown makeup sprinting into the Capitol Building (huff huff) from the liberal perspective the insurrection did kind of rise out of the same mileu that Joker 1 was accidentally pandering to.
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So let's say you're Todd Phillips in 2019. The movie you made makes a ton of money but it's liked by the wrong people. You are afraid you may inspire a shooter. I suppose "Quick! Let's make a sequel that will take 5 years to produce!" is one way to try and address that fear but it is not a very prudent one.
Not wanting to be known as that incel movie guy is perhaps a better explanation for that kind of behaviour.
If a shooting were to happen, it would have happened in between the first and second movie coming out, at which point the second movie would have been cancelled anyway. Just not making a sequel would have been cheaper.
I suppose that sounds right. Maybe they always wanted to produce a sequel sooner but were delayed due to COVID/production hell, etc.
Also, maybe they legitimately wanted to make a good sequel? Just one that fundamentally alters the Joker’s character, and it took time to arrive at something satisfactory to all parties concerned. (Except, of course, to the audience.)
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Posted this in the Friday Fun Thread, but seeing as how you've made a post about it here, I'll paste it here as well.
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[Referring to the first film,] I feel like they could have gone a different route with the talk show character Murray. They made him too much like Johnny Carson. A show and character resembling Dick Cavett would have been able to navigate the complex emotional aspects of what Arthur did on the subway. I thought that was the weakest point of the film. Murray didn't give Arthur what he wanted, IMO, which was understanding. Instead he got ridicule.
Joker (the 2019 film) always reminds me of Christine (2016), which is about the on-air suicide of Christine Chubbuck, and anecdotally, I heard that she is somewhat of a martyr for the incel community, as well. I sympathize with her more than I do Arthur from Joker because she wrestled with her interpersonal and intrapersonal struggles for as long as she could before they became too burdensome.
From the Wiki page for the film, in the Themes and Analysis section:
Admittedly this entire section could be edited differently within the hour.
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Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.
Reminds me of something i read, i think it was by Ernst Junger, about how it is hard to make a truly honest anti-war film because any honest depiction of war will inevitably include a hint of what men love about it.
Interestingly I’ve heard the same thing from the other direction, that honest portrayals, the best portrayals, are inherently anti-war.
Probably both are true. As Robert E. Lee said, "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."
I listened to an interview with I think a psychologist a few years back who argued what we diagnose as PTSD in soldiers is often really the loss of the close relationships and the intense bonds that develop. The feeling of having someone’s life in your hands and willingly putting yours in theirs.
Returning to the world involves a grieving process, he argued.
That's something Bret Deveraux touched upon in his blog. Why didn't premodern soldiers have PTSD? While my take is that premodern warfare was more immediate and cathartic, he thinks it's three things:
He thinks that while bringing the first two back would be a regression, bringing back the third one might be a sensible option. Maybe he's right? Beatify some American soldier, build a shrine to him in the Black Hills, establish a pilgrimage to the shrine.
see https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/ starting from
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This maybe isn't too surprising: the process of turning an average joe into a soldier is often a psychologically-grueling process that we don't give much attention to undoing when that person's time as a soldier is done. Soldiers often have trouble readjusting to civilian life, and often find solace in civilian organizations run by fellow veterans.
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That would work except that I don't think it fits the first movie. The villain protagonist received too much empathy and the ending was too triumphant for that.
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