Louise Roberts: Can the woke feminists leave Joker alone? It’s just a movie
He’s a performer with mental health issues and the victim of abuse. So why isn’t the Joker a pin up for the woke brigade? Oh, that’s right — he’s a man. Cue the toxic masculinity rants, writes Louise Roberts.
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Nothing gets our cultural warriors in a self-righteous lather like a Hollywood blockbuster starring a white male hellbent on revenge.
This week it’s Joker, a polarising and, yes, murderous romp through the nightmarish world of Gotham City with Joaquin Phoenix playing the lead of Arthur Fleck.
Fleck is the classic trope of the nondescript middle aged man who lives with his mother but fantasises about success, in this case as a comedian. So, he hires himself out as a clown.
His narrative is, you would think, right at home in the woke playbook.
Fleck’s got what should be rolled gold victim status because he has disdainful parents, ineffectual mental health counsellors, a condition that makes him laugh maniacally at inappropriate moments and is the victim of endless street brutality including at the hands of Wall Street scions and a Latin gang that steals his sign and bashes him with it.
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So he fights back — graphically, with knives and guns, and eventually his sympathetic fellow citizens, faces obscured by clown masks, rise up to support him.
After all, his overpowering mother always warned him to put on a happy face.
Fleck’s emboldened antihero has resonated with young men in cinemas, including my own son.
White men in Australia feel disenfranchised as they wade through demands to apologise for their inherent privilege, toxic masculinity and skin colour.
But the allure of victimhood in Joker has confusingly been pushed aside by the self-righteous left, with a number of critics complaining bitterly that the themes of Joker are — wait for it — the very reason why Trump swept to power.
One reporter wrote: “While many reviewers have focused on Fleck as an “incel” hero — his status as a sexless loner who turns to violence — the true nature of the movie’s appeal is actually broader: It’s an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring President Donald Trump to power.
“Joker, at its core, is the story of the “forgotten man,” the metaphoric displaced and disenfranchised white man whose goodwill has been abused and whose status has been reduced,” says CNN’s Jeff Yang.
“A man who has been crushed underfoot by the elite, dragged down by equality-demanding feminists and climbed over by upstart non-white and immigrant masses.”
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But where does the bigger resentment lie in Aussie society? Surely not among men but among those who must endlessly rehashing “toxic masculinity” and beating it up as a modern day epidemic.
But, if art is designed to be challenging, then surely Joker services the brief.
Those hyper progressives stomping through modern society hell bent on deciding what we should read, hear or watch seem to have missed the point.
A movie can be escapism, not an terrorist training manual. A song can be soothing and poetic, not a bunch of misogynistic lyrics inciting rape and mayhem.
But now where there is creativity, there is offence rising like a cake in the oven.
And it’s permeating our schools and our children’s cognitive maturity.
At some point we decided: we must tell them what to think rather than how to think.
Art, the very thing the Left used to patronise the rest of us dumb-dumbs about is now the woke nemesis because our organic reaction to it cannot be controlled.
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Hell, we might even identify with the themes.
My son watched Joker with a bunch of friends last week and didn’t stop talking about it for days, such was the impact on him of Phoenix’s masterful and unsettling performance.
He didn’t see it as an endorsement of violence, although the point blank shootings, maternal suffocation, neck stabbing and endless bashing were confronting.
Instead he and his friends drilled beneath the movie’s pathological and narcissistic overtones to see the message of despair and what happens if we antagonise society’s vulnerable. In this case, men.
And wouldn’t you argue that’s art job done: making the viewer walk, if only for a moment, a mile in another man’s shoes?
Sydney sociologist Dr Zuleyka Zevallos, after watching Joker in Newtown this week, seemed annoyed by her cheering fellow cinemagoers and tweeted, among other things, that the film “re legitimises White male anger as a political tool, which it always has been. Arthur kills White affluent dudebros, an obnoxious White male talk show host & mean White male colleague. This inspires a revolution in Gotham, where MEN in clown masks riot. The film pitches this as social commentary, when in fact, it’s just White male ‘aggrieved entitlement’.”
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I beg to differ, doctor. The film is a refreshing social commentary because what men worldwide are aggrieved at is accusations that they are entitled simply for being male.
Even the director has poked fun at woke infestation of entertainment in a marvellous spray.
Todd Phillips has previously made such classics as The Hangover but explains that he has since abandoned comedy.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” said Phillips. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore. I’ll tell you why — because all the f-----g funny guys are like, ‘F — k this shit because I don’t want to offend you.
“It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter.”
It’s the reason he broke away from making comedies to tackling dramatic films instead.
“You can’t blame movies for a world that is so f----d up that anything can trigger it. That’s kind of what the movie is about. It’s not a call to action,” he added. “If anything it’s a call to self-reflection to society.”
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Absorbing yourself in a movie or standing well back from an oil masterpiece to intellectualise the brushstrokes used to be a rite of passage when you were young.
Now the benefits are ruined by second rate philosophising.
And that is far worse for our children than a few shocking movie scenes.