The Moral Panic Over the Joker Movie

Remembering how everyone freaked out for a brief moment, then forgot all about it.

This post is another Areo Magazine blast-from-the-past. I wrote this about 5 years ago just as Joker was released. It’s probably hard to remember now but, at the time, it provoked a wave of panic over presumed incel mass shootings. Once nothing happened, everyone just kind of melted into the bushes…no acknowledgement of the false panic, no mea culpas. I’m rereleasing this just as Joker’s sequel appears to be dying in cinemas. I admit, once I heard it was a musical, I became skeptical…

On October 4, an event transpired that, in some circles at least, seemed to provoke as much anxiety as the impending eruption of a volcano near a population center: The Joker movie was released.  The Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, presents the Batman villain’s origin story as a critique of society that ignores the pain of those suffering.  This moral ambiguity…that we might, on some level, sympathize with the Joker’s sad life, even if repulsed by his reaction to it is a new twist on the iconic evil bad guy.  It’s also left a lot of people, particularly on the political left, uncomfortable.

Predictably, many American reviewers couldn’t resist referencing incels (a term used for men who have trouble getting dates…involuntary celibates who then become angry at women) or mass shootings to try to make their reviews relevant as cultural pieces for the moment.  In a sneering review for Time, Stephanie Zacharek refers to the Joker’s Arthur Fleck as “the patron saint of incels.”  Slate’s Sam Adams likewise indulges the apparently inevitable incel theme saying “the movie plays right into advance fears that it could act as a kind of incel manifesto, offering not just comfort or understanding to disaffected young men angry at the world but a playbook for striking back at it.”  Adams also added, with unselfconscious drama, “it feels like a risk to feel too much for him, not knowing who might be sitting next to you in the theater using his resentments to justify their own.”  The idea that Joker is some kind of anthem for incels or mass shooters popped up in other reviews as well.  Unlike the right’s knee-jerk efforts to (falsely) blame video games for mass homicides, most of these critiques seem to come from the left.  Given that ultra-violent R-rated movies are released almost every weak (The Joker contains far fewer on screen deaths than other recent releases like Rambo or Angel Has Fallen) to little fanfare, concern, or anything remotely like imitative crime, why are so many movie critics decrying the supposed moral vacuity of the Joker?

Let’s dispense with the obvious veneer of practical worry.  Underlying many of the negative reviews is the insidious suggestion that some unhappy sucker might decide to imitate The Joker.  However, just as with video game violence, there’s not evidence that movie violence causes real-life violence.  In fact, crime tends to drop on weekends on which violent R-rated movies are released.  These kinds of claims are just moral panic, pure and simple.  To be fair, criminals do sometimes take stylistic elements from fictional media when they decide to commit crimes.  They might try a technique for removing evidence they saw on a TV show, for instance.  But evidence suggests these elements are purely style, and don’t actually cause motivations to commit crimes.  So, might someone who commits a crime dye their hair green?  Sure, but they would have committed a horrible crime anyway, even had there been no Joker movie, just without the green hair.  Some folks have made bizarre references to the Aurora shooting from 2012 at a theater showing another Batman movie, despite that claims the shooter was inspired by the Joker have been debunked.   

Some of the reviews seem to almost approach the line of rooting for a horrible imitative crime as if to provide an I told you so moment.  It’s probably human nature to want to be right in forecasting tragedy in pursuit of one’s own moral stature.  These folks seem blissfully unconcerned that, if anything, all the hype predicting violence might be more of a key motivation for violence than the movie itself.  Contrary to popular belief, most mass homicide perpetrators don’t particularly seek fame, but a subset do.  And these criticisms of the Joker inspiring violence almost willfully seem to put a target on the movie.  Granted, were something bad to happen (and I hope it does not!) even the hype wouldn’t cause someone to commit a crime they wouldn’t have committed anyway, but rather simply influence the timing. 

I suspect though that all the pearl-clutching over imitative violence is a smokescreen for the real problem: the movie’s moral ambiguity and its subtle hints that society, on both left and right, are making things worse when it comes to people in pain.  Moral righteousness has historically been the purview of the right, but in recent years the left have been catching up in the realm of moral entrepreneurship.  Much of the recent progressive movement has begun to adopt simplistic narratives of good and evil, often based in identity politics, such that some elements of the left are bordering on their own prejudicial statements on race and gender, just of a different variety from the alt-right. 

An undercurrent of all the “is this the right time for this movie” chatter seems to be the popularized myth that mass homicides are mainly perpetrated by white men with racist or misogynistic motives.  In fact, the ethnic composition of mass homicide perpetrators is about equivalent to the US population.  Although males greatly outnumber females, some perpetrators are female.  White nationalists and radical Islamists are both common among perpetrators, but most hold no particular ideology at all.  Worrying over the movie is a distraction from real issues related to mass homicides.

The very fact that The Joker rather well nails it in regards to the origins of mass homicide may be what makes people uncomfortable.  Most mass homicide perpetrators have histories of mental illness.  Contrary to some claims, mental illness increases violence risk several-fold.  Some advocacy groups, including most recently the American Psychological Association, seem intent on downplaying this.  I feel their intentions are good, but it’s no more accurate than claims on the right that easily accessible guns are unrelated to the problem.   

Central to the Joker’s narrative is an individual in obvious pain, that pain slowly devolving into hate.  Arthur Fleck is an individual with serious neurological and mental health problems.  Despite all the laughter, he states he has never experienced happiness, thinks often of death, and claims to have been most at peace during a prior psychiatric hospital stay.  Despite this, society ignores every red flag, discontinues his psychiatric care, and treats him as an object to vilify and humiliate.  He’s assaulted several times in the film (his first act of violence is self-defense, though it obviously makes him feel powerful), but the real villains are societal elites who hoard resources while heaping scorn on the lower classes.

This, in fact, is the movie’s compelling message.  Too often today, elites on both left and right set the lower classes upon each other by whipping up xenophobia on one hand and identity politics on the other.  All the while, the elite on both sides stay elite, while the rest stay riled up over the wrong things.  The right has had The Purge to satirize the lack of compassion from that side and while Joker is not kind to Republican-like indifference, it also hints that the left-wing sniggering over incels and other identity issues reveals an underlying cruelty rather than virtuousness that is adding to the problem, not detracting from it.

We needn’t accept or sympathize with the decisions of a few men and women who turn their pain to hate and inflict violence on others.  But neither should we mock those in pain, those who lack social skills to form friendships or relationships, who may be isolated from or even bullied by mainstream society.  Politicians on both the left and right talk a big game about mental health reform when it suits them, but nothing much ever changes.  Those suffering are left mainly on their own, unless they have excellent insurance. 

The Joker casts a glare on this indifference in our society and suggests that, even if evil people bear the ultimate responsibility for their choice to turn to hate, societal elites bear some responsibility for doing next to nothing to reach down to help those who are struggling.  This has been a criticism of the right for decades, but it must sting to have it implied that all the tittering about incels, toxic masculinity and other unhelpful terms coming from the left is only adding to hate rather than developing a sense of shared community.

The Joker is a morally nuanced story that calls upon us to understand how the Joker became who he is, and how society contributed to this, even as we are horrified by his actions.  Writing for the New York Times, Dan Brooks has it right when he notes that critics’ hand-wringing over the impact on the masses (to which critics themselves are apparently morally immune) is its own kind of condescension.  As he notes “Critics, after all, are the ones warning us that millions of undersexed morons are about to watch a movie they won’t understand. And it’s critics telling us, in a tone of concern for their fellow man, that these losers are total misanthropes.”  He’s right…this kind of movie criticism isn’t much better than Robert DeNiro’s cruel mockery of Arthur Fleck’s failed attempts at stand-up comedy. 

Director Todd Phillips said, in response to the criticism, “I think it’s because outrage is a commodity, I think it’s something that has been a commodity for a while…What’s outstanding to me in this discourse in this movie is how easily the far left can sound like the far right when it suits their agenda.”  True, although I think the issue is not just outrage as commodity, but that the movie subtly holds the far left as well as the right accountable for the hatefulness of their messaging and how it might contribute to, rather than detract from, anger in the world. 

So, the Joker isn’t going to cause violence in real life.  But the attitude of elites on both left and right continues to leave too many suffering people to fend for their own.  We’ve lost our ability for compassion.  Too often we look for ways to be virtuous at others’ expense.  That may be fair game when taking on elites themselves, but increasingly it feels like we’re punching down.  To be clear, we should never express sympathy for those who chose to turn their pain to hate and inflict violence on others.  But the Joker suggests we could do better to identify people before they get to that point and get them effective, evidence-based help.  That would take determined effort on our part and tax money.  But perhaps, like too many characters in the film, it’s just easier to point and laugh.