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Notes -
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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