Meg Downey:
I think the danger, if you could really call it that–maybe “irresponsibility” is better–here isn’t in the content itself but the way the content is presented. Joker, to me, reads and feels exactly like a very deliberately bad faith argument. It’s presenting this thesis on violence in society that is simultaneously about the dangers of plutocracy and about the dangers of inspiring the unwashed masses to rise up, and in doing both it creates this ultimately muddled message that doesn’t really say anything or mean anything, but can be very, very easily co-opted by either side, which is where the risk comes in. You can use this as a text to say that protesting the rich and rallying against establishment is a slippery slope into public executions and riots in the streets. You can use this as a text to say that it’s our god given responsibility to inspire the revolution, no matter how bloody it may be, because the plutocracy will never help us. Movies like John Wick or say, Mission Impossible, or anything in the MCU, no matter how high a body count they rack up, don’t live in that proverbial no man’s land. Every movie has a message and sure, I don’t agree with every message put forth in every Marvel movie or whatever, but at least they don’t try and have their cake while eating it too so nakedly.
You can have violence and incredibly politicized messages in movies, absolutely, but they just need to be handled in a responsible way with a clear perspective. Joker doesn’t have that. Joker has the same sort of smarmy self-congratulatory sensibilities of a reply guy on Twitter–or, worse, the old school 4chan troll logic that says upsetting people is the greatest and most powerful thing you can do. It doesn’t matter how you do it, or if you have any sort of real conviction in the things you’re saying–the fact that you got a strong reaction means more than anything else. If you don’t like it, you just didn’t “get it,” nevermind that there really isn’t anything to get.
I don’t think this movie is going to cause some giant apocalypse of radicalized incels or anything like that, but I do think that it’s going to occupy a really horrible space in the annals of pop culture now, which in and of itself isn’t that big of a deal–but I think now, in 2019, when people are looking to pop culture more than ever as a sort of lexicon to talk about and relate to the world around them, that’s a specifically bad call.
