The politics of... the politics of Joker

I like math.  I like science fiction.  The probability that such a person would also like comic books is quite high.  And you know what?  If you made a bet based on that, regarding yours truly, you'd do fine.  Comic books are awesome.

Yes, I can like Shakespeare, pretentious modern authors such as Jemisin and Stephenson, and comic books.  There's no contradiction.  Comic books are cool.  Obviously, that means I am following this whole Joker thing.

Art and politics.  Art within the realm of the abstract, such as instrumental music, can exist divorced from politics.  Can instrumental music be political?  Certainly!  But instrumental music can also avoid politics entirely.  The less abstract an art form becomes, though, well... what does it take to have any real importance?  Literature can have meaning by connecting at a personal level, but it gets harder to say something at a broader social level without at least touching on politics.  There'll be something, if indirect, much of the time, if only in the tone.

Now... so what?  Does it matter to you if the politics of any particular book/comic/show/movie/whatever align with your own?  Can you appreciate, or at least be enticed to think about a work of art if it doesn't?  Let's be blunt about the fact that most artists are lefties, for a variety of reasons that can't be the subject of this post, but the result is that those whose preferences lean right must either confine themselves to a narrow segment of the entertainment world, or learn to deal with pieces of entertainment and art that conflict, at least somewhat, with their preferences.  Lefties generally get the better deal when it comes to tradeoffs between the quality of art and the intensity of cognitive dissonance.  Anyone who disagrees with me on this needs to find me the conservative equivalent of Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun."  Got anything?  No?  That's what I thought.  Case closed.  Hendrix wins.

Anyway, the funny thing-- very comical-- is that lots of people have a difficult time when any artistic endeavor challenges any aspect of their politics.  Art, plenty of people seem to think, is for confirming what you believe, not challenging what you believe.  BOR-RING!

With respect to violence in movies, during the 1996 election, Bob Dole and various Republicans tried to make the case that the big villain in the world was... Quentin Tarantino.  According to their interpretation, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and two scripts that Tarantino wrote but didn't direct-- Natural Born Killers and True Romance, glorified violence, and in so doing, spread violence.  I found that interpretation to be, shall we say, a stretch.  There is a famous scene in Reservoir Dogs, involving the song, "Stuck In The Middle With You."  If you know the scene, you are cringing as you read.  It doesn't in any way glorify violence, nor does anything in these movies.  These movies have brutal scenes that are intended to make the audience uncomfortable by showing, not the violence itself, but the pain and the consequences of the violence.  That's the opposite of glorifying the violence.  That's de-glorifying the violence, and the whole point of Natural Born Killers was to critique society's obsession with violence in the news.  Ironically, a movie that Dole put in opposition to Tarantino was a movie that actually did glorify violence by treating it as cartoonish and without emphasizing the pain or consequences.  It was a Schwarzenegger movie:  True Lies.  In other words, in 1996, it was the right that was reacting to a set of movies by claiming, inappropriately, that they glorified violence and should be shunned.

And now... Joker.  The reactions to Joker, of course, set in before anyone had seen the movie, because that's how the world works now.  I haven't seen the movie yet.  So, I can't comment on it.  I can only comment on the comments.  Yeah, I'll get around to it.  As of now, I have no opinion of the movie.  I have no opinion on whether or not it does anything that may encourage violence, to the questionable degree that a movie can, I have no opinion on whether or not the movie sympathizes with violence, or anything like that.  Why not?  'Cuz I haven't seen it.  Yet.  And I don't formulate such opinions without actually seeing the movie.  Imagine that...

But the reactions, which proliferated before the release of the movie, were interesting enough that they give me room for commentary.  So...

At a basic level, what do you want from a villain?  Personally, I find villains who are the personification of evil, and simply one-dimensional mustache-twirlers... boring.  Ledger's Joker was an impressive performance, but one thing to keep in mind is that a movie is a short story, not a novel.  Novels allow character development, whereas a short story is an idea.  A concept.  Ledger's Joker was a concept, and the performance was, to some degree, stunt.  Extremely well done, but... stunt.

The best villain in all of comic book-ery?  In my opinion, Magneto.  Why?  He's basically right.  Mutants get oppressed, and for all of Professor Xavier's "can't we all just get along" schtick, at every point in the story where their conflicting beliefs about the world are tested, Magneto's belief about the situation mutants face is validated by events.  That doesn't mean his actions in response to that situation are morally justified, but at a basic level, his assessment of the world is right, and he has a perspective that cannot just be brushed aside.

That's why I'll go further and say that Magneto is one of the best villains in all of fiction.

If you like villains all mustache-y, so that they can put a bunch of wax on that facial hair for twirling purposes, Magneto ain't your guy.  If you need everything all neat and tidy, in moral terms, there's plenty in X-Men that'll make you uncomfortable.  Of course, since that's mostly in comics (except for movies that range in quality, and an old cartoon from the '90s), it just never drew enough attention to raise anybody's hackles.

But there's also something different about the presentation of the title character in Joker and how it relates to those raising objections.  Magneto's inspiration came from Malcolm X, with the idea that Xavier was more of a Martin Luther King character.  The whole point of the social commentary in X-Men was that mutants were treated as a metaphor for any oppressed minority.  Magneto was a holocaust survivor fighting on behalf of the oppressed minority.

If you read the negative reactions to Joker, though, they are not just about violent crime in general.  If you are paying any attention to politics and rhetoric, you will notice a discrepancy between how Democrats and Republicans speak about violent crime.  Republicans use the word, "crime."  Democrats never do, anymore.  Instead, they use the phrase, "gun violence."  Why?  It is a rhetorical device which does several things.  The obvious point is that Democrats want to talk about the guns as physical, inanimate objects, not the people, but there is a second element to the rhetorical distinction.  To the news-consuming public, "gun violence" conjures the image of a "mass shooter," who is, more often than not, white (DC sniper and other cases notwithstanding), whereas to that same audience, the word, "crime," conjures the image of someone who is not white, with all of the fraught politics of that.  There's a reason that Willie Horton ad was a political touchstone.  The rhetorical battle is a battle over the racial image of who is committing the act.  Even when it isn't obviously about race, so much of American politics is really about race...

[I'm trying to write about Joker, and I'm getting sucked back into race and American politics.  Grumble...]

Quick reminder:  There is a little thing I like to call "the paradox of news."  When you see something on the news, that's because it is a deviation from the norm.  If it weren't, it wouldn't get covered.  That tricks your statistically-disinclined brain into thinking it is normal, so you overestimate its occurrence, when the whole point is that you are seeing/reading about it because it is abnormal.  The paradox of news.

Arther Fleck is a troubled white male whose life includes external torments for a variety of reasons.  Because of a combination of his own predispositions and the events of his life, he becomes The Joker.  One set of objections here is to the humanization of a character who was originally the embodiment of unknowable chaos, and to that... OK, sure, fine, whatever.  Be a purist in your comic book lair.  I was one of you, once upon a time, so it's hard for me to judge.  However, there is another common objection here, which is that by showing the process by which Fleck becomes Joker, the movie shifts blame away from Fleck, towards society, while simultaneously-- and perhaps because of that-- granting some level of permission or forgiveness to Fleck.

That objection is the one that interests me.  Essentially, it is an objection to the humanization of the villain.  Like I said, I prefer my villains humanized.  I think that inhumanely, one-dimensionally evil villains are boring.  I have no idea whether or not Fleck comes across as human in Joker because I haven't seen it, but if the movie does succeed in humanizing him, then how you evaluate that, should you do so consistently, should have something to do with the extent to which you prefer humanized villains.

And here... OK, Return of the Jedi had its problems.  {cough, cough... Ewoks...}  However, it humanized Vader.  Did you like that?  Did you prefer the badass appearance of Vader in Star Wars?  (Yeah, I'm just going to call the first movie "Star Wars," and ignore all of the title changes 'n stuff.)

Or, are your preferences conditional?

That's part of what's going on here.  There is something about Fleck, specifically, that some of the audience, or, pre-audience didn't want humanized.

If there is a particular person or group that you have built up as the ultimate enemy in politics today, the last thing you want is for that person or group to be humanized in any way.  The last thing you want is to suggest that circumstances-- maybe even things related to you-- contributed to their actions.  They must be the ultimate evil, pure, and down to the core.  Always and forever, unfixable, with no motivation beyond that of Ledger's Joker.  Some "men" just want to watch the world burn, because if they were more complicated than that, you might have to rethink things.  You might even be complicit, and that's the last thing you want.

Are there cold-blooded sociopaths out there?  Sure.  Is every violent criminal a sociopath, though?  Nope.  Is Fleck?  I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know.  But, so what if he's not?

Why did al Qaeda launch the 9/11 attacks?  Remember that line from the George W. Bush era about how "they hate our freedom?"  Yeah, um... that wasn't even remotely true.  Mainly, al Qaeda was a reaction to what Bin Laden and members saw as a bunch of infidels in the islamic holy land, with one of the biggest touchstones being the first Gulf War, when the US set up bases in Saudi Arabia.  What was that "they hate our freedom" stuff?  A rhetorical device to demonize the enemy who attacked us.  But... then what happened?  The ideological left started putting together their version of terrorism and how it was a response to poverty and lack of economic opportunity in the Middle East, and maybe we had something to do with that, and blah, blah, blah.  OK, several problems there.  First, that wasn't empirically true either.  If you actually looked at the economic backgrounds of the people who joined al Qaeda, they tended towards wealthier and more educated backgrounds.  Poverty leads to terrorism?  Nope!  It was the rich kids!  But, what was going on, amongst the left?  An attempt to humanize.  And to say that the attacks are the result of pressures-- external social pressures, for which we have some culpability.

With a backlash manifested sillily by Mitt Romney's No Apologies thing, falsely accusing Barack Obama of going on an apology tour.

Who gets humanized?  Whom do you want to humanize, and who would you prefer to remain a faceless embodiment of pure evil, thereby allowing you to tell yourself that nobody else, least of all you, could possibly have any responsibility?

Just some questions to ponder.  Nothin' big.  No pressure.

And a few more tidbits for thought.  Can you distinguish between moral responsibility, legal culpability, and social scientific causal determinants?  Me?  I can separate those in my head.  Yes, it's hard, but the world is a complicated place.