Ohmygherd… it suddenly all makes sense!
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Hence the worry that men will get the wrong impression from it. But Joker director Todd Phillips has said in an interview with the AP that he doesn’t believe that’s the case with his movie or others. Movies are “mirrors of society but they’re never molders” and that the violence depicted in his movie isn’t eroticized, he said.
That’s a steaming pile of horseshit if ever I heard one. I’m sorry, but the relationship between audiences and mass media is very much dialectical. To say that mass media has NO role in molding society is… to know nothing about history. It’s not the only factor, but to think such a powerful medium has no influence at all is breathtaking naivety.
Earlier this year, the Mary Sue, a feminist site that focuses on geek culture, got into a bit of trouble for a headline and tweet erroneously declaring that all the negative reviews of Captain Marvel were from men.
HEY, everybody, most = all now!!! /s
They can’t even fucking bother to use the correct word that makes a world of difference in what they are arguing… Because both sides?
But… both sides! Both the incels who go on shooting sprees and women who write articles on line are equally to blame!!! /s
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Filmmakers certainly don’t have any problem accepting that the medium has the power to create cultural change by spreading awareness of important issues or challenging prejudices. It’s only when the negative effects of media come to light that they insist movies never influence people.
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Pretty much. Obviously mass media isn’t the ONLY aspect of culture that influences society, but it does influence society, and to deny that is to deny reality. It’s not straightforward and easy to pinpoint, so it more often than not leaves enough plausible deniability to ignore its effects.
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A Dangerous Film That Will Incite Lonely White Men to Try Stand-Up Comedy
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Having read a few reviews of the film, I’ve no idea where the whole “incel revenge” idea comes from. Joaquin’s character sounds like a deeply damaged person with tourettes-esque fits of random laughter, someone who’s trying hard to make people laugh and failing – a King of Comedy tribute about someone losing their grip. Calling it an “incel fantasy” gets into issues of male supremacy, online hate culture, and violence as revenge against feminists, which – unless I’m missing something – is entirely not what this movie’s about.
Perhaps it’s less about how the director and writer interpreted, and how some people believe it will be interpreted by incels…
After all, plenty of things that are not meant to promote any of that have been used to promote those things - The Matrix being chief among them.
But none of us have seen it yet… so we’ll have to make our own judgements once we do.
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It sounds like i’m prejudging it but i do want it to be good because i like the actor and want to see what he does with the role and the king of comedy angle appeals to me but the things i’ve read about it aren’t really dissuading me from thinking it’s an incel revenge fantasy. Just to take an example, this review in indiewire…
It’s also a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels
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As @anon61221983 says, it sounds like some people are interpreting it in ways it may have not been intended. I’m sure I’ll end up seeing it, and it may be the “toxic rallying cry” that Indiewire says and not the Venice Film Festival award winning film I was hoping for (or both!).
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That’s very true, but I also think that any artist who has been around who believes that their work can’t possibly be interpreted in ways that do not intend is shockingly naive about how art works in the real world. I’m fairly certain that Martin Scorsese had no intention of influencing John Hinckely into shooting the president, but that was one outcome. He’s not responsible for that, obviously, but still. It was a fact of the outcome of the film. Or take Breaking Bad… I don’t think that Vince Gilligan wanted Walt to be seen as an anti-hero, but plenty of people view him that way.
So, whatever the intention of Phillips here was, that doesn’t preclude interpretations based on incel ideology that can lead to violence or at least can be seen by some as justifying violence. Whatever that means, I don’t know.
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That’s absolutely true. What concerns me is that, with the incel subculture being so new, and with public shootings being blamed on the media so often, that any film that depicts a lonely man being trodden down by society who responds with violence (Taxi Driver comes to mind) will be tagged as an “incel fantasy” that could inspire copycat violence. Maybe right now’s not the right time for a movie like this.
The correct word would have been “idiots”, as in: “most of the negative reviews are written by idiots”.
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Taxi Driver’s a good example, there, since it did get in the heads of people in unfortunate ways.
I’m really not looking forward to this, since I have long hoped people would stop romanticizing Joker (specifically as an alienated mass murderer) after all those people were killed in a movie theater by a monster inspired by the Joker.
It also feels to me like what happened to Jack the Ripper, where people started weaving a fancy myth of supernaturality around a serial killer instead of talking about why so many people were just vulnerable to killers at the time.
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This is true across culture, too. Artists can not control how the audience is going to perceive their work. It’s a hazard of creation.
I guess you could say that Alan Moore’s From Hell does that a bit. It’s still a good work. That doesn’t mean that people can’t get different, dangerous messages out of it… should Alan Moore stop making comics?
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A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Scarface, there are all kinds of movies that have been bad influences on bad people doing bad things before and after watching the movie
well, here’s a another one, maybe, though personally I suspect it will bomb and be forgotten
I guess we’re lucky The Silence of the Lambs didn’t inspire a whole generation of hipster cannibals
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(If I’m responding at length, please know that I’m not assuming you don’t know anything I’m saying, I’m mostly only putting what I say in context so I’m more sure about what I’m saying. I’m no expert and I’m not demanding your time or energy, the post got away from me. I’m just open-endedly sharing what your comment made me think about.)
I definitely don’t put it all on the shoulders of person creating. Pre-existing social conditions play their part, and conditions forming in the unknown future take place too. Thinking about the life of any cultural work, I’m giving it in different “shares” of blame or praise, in context.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales weren’t really or solely intended to define gender roles at the point of creation, but they did over time and a part of that was the society that chose those stories as fitting morality tales, and another part was the fact that they weren’t written with enough examples of what gender roles could be.
Jumping metaphors, Fox News, as a network, is horrible “society” of people. They recruit other people into the fold who are already horrible. Most of the time, they don’t have to train the people to be horrible. Fox isn’t responsible for creating those people, and the horrible people aren’t responsible for creating the network, but there’s shares of responsibility for the co-emergent result.
When I look at Taxi Driver, I know they didn’t intend to inspire anything like John Hinckley. He was in trouble long before the movie, and latched on to it. Same with people that latch on to the Joker. It sets up a back-and-forth ecology that rewards the worst impulses of both creator and consumer (especially when either creator or consumer have unfairly weighted power relationships over others). I don’t blame one part of an ecology, but I still think you can define when an ecology seems to be in effect.
I guess you could say that Alan Moore’s From Hell does that a bit. It’s still a good work. That doesn’t mean that people can’t get different, dangerous messages out of it… should Alan Moore stop making comics?
First, I don’t think he should stop (if he stops being so retired), but I do think he made some cultural work that just happened to be the kind of particular nutritional make-up that it was deemed tasty by some awful consumers. Like a baker that makes a cake that is equally sought by gourmands and kitchen mites. Still tasty, but different than a cake that happens to be tasty only to humans.
I’m not saying he could have predicted the reception of a single work ahead of time, but he also repeated some themes in his work that attracted bad customers across projects and some that he really should have known would feed grossness in the world. Artistically framing a paper-thin “left to the imagination” scenario about whether Joker raped Batgirl, was a choice that was more predictably latched on to by the sort of people who didn’t need reinforcement.
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I think that an award-winning Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and Robert de Niro will probably do just fine.
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Well, it wouldn’t be the first film that was critical acclaimed with a stellar cast that bombed at the box office. Whether it does remains to be seen.
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But in this case, the Venn Diagram of said idiots resided almost entirely within the circle labelled “men.”
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If it did, it would probably improve the quality of cuisine at restaurants in gentrified neighborhoods everywhere. 
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