Is the episode spoiler-free? I've dodged the spoilers in this thread, and want to see the movie now.
Definitely not spoiler free. See the movie first if you haven’t yet.
Is the episode spoiler-free? I've dodged the spoilers in this thread, and want to see the movie now.
Alejo, what you point out makes a lot of sense tome in relation to the chaos that is happening here in Chile. It's no accident that this movie here has a box office record never seen in chilean movie theaters, and coincides with the behavior that people are having... the whole people here comments on how "extraordinary" the movie is!
I watched it today, very good movie.
Watching it I kept thinking about the quote "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being", which I didn't know was from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. In other words, what would it take for someone to live Arthur Fleck's life and not become a murderer/criminal?
As Adrian Raine says in Approaching Infinity's quote: "[The film] was a surprisingly accurate prediction of the kind of background and circumstances which, when combined together, make a murderer". That was pretty much my impression, that Fleck's life is a funnel leading him towards degenerating into the Joker. One cannot say he is not a victim, that's what he is until he kills the "wall street" men that are beating him in the subway.
Mental illness aside, I understand that the answer to the question above revolves around choice and free will, but my point is that that's no easy task. Life burdens us in many ways and the path to resentment and vengeance is well-trodden. I suppose it takes not only mental fortitude but also a certain nobility of heart to withstand the pressure and act appropriately. I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's exhortation: "Pick up the cross of your tragedy and betrayal. Accept its terrible weight. Hoist it onto your shoulders and struggle impossibly upward toward the Kingdom of God on the hill. The alternative is Death and Hell."
I guess you could interpret it that way (there was a similar comment on the SOTT article). There's nothing in the film to suggest that's what the filmmakers were going for, but who knows, maybe it's a good portrayal of how possession actually manifests in 'real life'? As in, all the situational influences preparing the person for a hostile takeover, so to speak.Maybe because I recently read Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil", but could this movie show Authur Flecks complete possession by a demonic entity called the Joker?
Courageous Inmate Sort said:Mental illness aside, I understand that the answer to the question above revolves around choice and free will, but my point is that that's no easy task. Life burdens us in many ways and the path to resentment and vengeance is well-trodden. I suppose it takes not only mental fortitude but also a certain nobility of heart to withstand the pressure and act appropriately. I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's exhortation: "Pick up the cross of your tragedy and betrayal. Accept its terrible weight. Hoist it onto your shoulders and struggle impossibly upward toward the Kingdom of God on the hill. The alternative is Death and Hell."
It's great you brought up Jordan Peterson—he'd have so much to say about the film.
He goes into integration of the shadow where he speaks about his experiences talking to a serial killer in prison and the horrors written in The Gulag Archipelago on YouTube. The interesting part is, is that the same tendencies that drive a person to murder he finds in himself as well. To know that truly means knowing the deep layers that bridge the conscious and unconscious and the underlying programs. To really know these layers where these tendencies reside means being able to have the responsibility to bear the cross to not commit them knowing fully well that they may very well exist within.
Jordan Peterson and Joker
Andrew Sweeny
Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:01 UTC
I don't go to the movies much these days, partly because everything is on Netflix or can be procured elsewhere. But also because movie theaters have lost their appeal: they are like empty temples to a deity who has long departed.
And then there is a general sense of movie fatigue: of what has been called 'superhero fatigue', but also romantic comedy fatigue, and action movie fatigue, and fatigue of just about every genre that Hollywood produces. Hollywood movies don't have the communal appeal that they used to, and the creative spirit has moved to TV. Television today is more expansive, daring, darker, and has richer, broader narratives.
That is not to say that cinema is dead. It is just sleeping. Certainly there are some diamonds in the trash heap of modern movies. Like Joker.
I don't know if Joker is the best film I have seen in a while, but it is the one that made me feel the most.
Director Todd Phillip has dared to paint broad strokes, to be dark and emotional, to be physical, to go to the extreme of the cultural gestalt. And he avoids the emotion that plagues American cinema and American culture in general: that is, sentimentality.
This is not a superhero movie by any means. There are no superheroes in sight.
Arthur Fleck's transformation
Even critics who hate the film have to acknowledge that Joaquin Phoenix does a masterful job at embodying the torments, the ecstasies, and the painful descent of Arthur Fleck and his crowning as the king of hell. His Joker comes off as the cross between Charlie Chaplin and the antichrist, a truly terrifying apparition.
Arthur Fleck's name is significant, as Jonathan Pageau has pointed out in his brilliant commentary. He is the the 'fleck' or the refuse of our culture, the monster bred in apartment towers of neglect and abuse. But also he is the bastard king, as the name Arthur indicates. There is peculiar and kingly beauty to him — a foil to his ugliness and deformity.
Arthur Fleck's lack of talent is Joker's artistic genius, his ugliness is Joker's strange beauty — we cannot avert our eyes from this super-freak. In fact, we cannot help suspect that Arthur Fleck represents our own freakishness, resentment, and self-pity — a wish fulfillment of our desire to just not give a -flick- anymore. The Joker card is seductive because it frees us from all responsibility. (A point which Jordan Peterson relentlessly makes — and which I will return to shortly.)
Arthur Fleck, above all, wants to be seen and noticed: he is therefore the anti-hero of the social media age, suicidally depressed because no one gives him the 'likes' or happy emoji faces he craves so deeply. He is an overgrown man-child, who still lives with his mother, believing that his mission is 'to bring joy and laughter into the world'. But the joy and laughter turn out to be a big cosmic joke at his expense.
Beyond politics
There has been much resistance to the film Joker, which is understandable. After all, Joker, doesn't give us any any ideological comfort, any exit. Joker's catharsis is not moral but demonic — he has no other aim but chaos — which is irritating to people in search of a clear ideological message. The Joker tears the curtain off all of our sentimental notions of mental illness, of poverty and crime, of social justice, of the artist, of entertainment.
Joker, in contrast to Arthur Fleck, is not trying to save the planet but wants to be an agent of its destruction. He represents the shadow of a self-help movement that tells us we can be anything we want to be, that our deepest desires can magically come true. But what if our deepest desires happen to be chaos and revenge?
Joker has no idealism, no dream of self-improvement like his previous incarnation Arthur Fleck. There is no story of redemption for Joker, only a negative 'will to power'. Arthur Fleck will not be saved — but he will be spiritually reborn as the Joker, or the ultimate nihilist, the Nietzschean antichrist.
Joker is beyond politics — he doesn't believe in any of that stuff. His dark satori or enlightenment is the realization of 'selfhood', that only his own desires matter. Joker sees only reflection of himself in the world, people walking around with clown masks — their words and ideals are empty reflections too. But beneath the clown mask of idealism is the body in the mad contortions of loneliness and atomization. The mind spins all kinds of dreams and fabrications — but the body never lies.
All the narratives of Arthur Fleck's life are lies. He is the unfunny comedian — what could be worse than that? He laughs when he wants to cry, discovers he is not the illegitimate child of a billionaire; the affair he is having with the beautiful neighbour is a fantasy; his mother is not an innocent victim but his abuser. And finally — the icing on the cake — he finds out that he was adopted. Arthur Fleck finds out that he is not the savior of children he wants to be, but the dancing freak show at the heart of a decadent society. On the other hand, Joker is somebody else.
'Everything must go' is the sign Arthur Fleck twirls around at the beginning of the movie. The father and mother must go first, and then the structure of society will be unravelled. But actually the father and mother were also lies: he has no father or mother, no God or Goddess. The discovery that he is an orphan, that he belongs to nobody, is all the permission he needs to be free, to get his revenge against a false God and a demented Mother nature. Ritual matricide and patricide leave him free from the demands of rationality or compassion.
As a portrayal of evil, Joker is sophisticated because there is a logic to his murders, like the complex villains in a Dostoevsky novel. Arthur Fleck is a genuine victim, and we feel a deep empathy for him. Who is to say that we wouldn't do the same thing if we were dealt such an awful hand? Moreover, there is something attractive about Arthur Fleck's anarchism, his transfiguration, and his glee. This is the glee of the terrorist, who has finally found a reason for living and a reason for dying in a landscape of nihilism. Joker's dance and his bow to the crowd, his bloody demonic smile, are totally chilling for this reason. He lives somewhere deep in all of us.
Jordan Peterson
In Jordan Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning, he describes a couple of early experiences which marked him. The first was meeting a serial killer in prison. Peterson describes his shock at how absolutely ordinary this man appeared to be, the literal face of the 'banality of evil'. The second realization was much worse: that he also had the same homicidal urges.
The point Peterson makes is: there isn't much separating ourselves from the chaos of Joker's world, if we are truly honest about it. How do we know we wouldn't fall into the same homicidal glee, if the walls of civilization would suddenly collapse? A study of Nazi German and Stalinist Russia indicates that most of us wouldn't be very heroic, to understate the case.
Many of Peterson's insights are of this nature and have been disturbing to people for the same reason that the recent Joker movie is disturbing; it cuts a little too close to the bone. Who really wants to see, in viceral form, the darkest aspect of our own nature that Joker embodies, and which Peterson constantly points us towards?
Some of Peterson's most interesting articulations have been in describing how somebody like Arthur Fleck, the failed artist, becomes Adolf Hitler, the clown dictator, through failure and resentment. And Peterson has written and taught extensively about how 'ideological possession' has caused whole populations to descend into murderous genocide. The shadow, says Carl Jung, reaches right down to hell.
But Arthur Fleck has no ideology, nor principle to guide him. He is not animated by Marxism or Fascism or any other kind of ideology. In a way, this is all more terrifying: Joker is one without any grand narrative or promise land to believe in. Such a person can only smash things; he cannot create anything but chaos.
Perhaps Jordan Peterson, in his political fury, has conflated the pathologies of the idealistic protester with the pathologies of pure nihilism — which are antisocial and 'beyond good and evil'. Not that he isn't correct to show how idealism leads to nihilism, which is actually the lesson of Joker.
But today it is not dogmatic marxism or fascism that we have to contend with, but something much worse: the one who is invisible, but who screeches with laughter and wants to drown the world in blood. He has no name. And his name is Arthur Fleck.
Jordan Peterson and Joker
I don't go to the movies much these days, partly because everything is on Netflix or can be procured elsewhere. But also because movie theaters have lost their appeal: they are like empty temples to a deity who has long departed. And then there...www.sott.net
Yes, terrifyingly true. I just read an article on SOTT that touches on that exact point, it's in bold near the end.
Niall said:Yes, let the record show that there was an explosion in mass demonstrations/open rebellions around the world the week Joker opened in the US!
Just a coincidence I guess, but still...
Days after the global cinema release of the film 'Joker', the distinctive face of the titular comic-book villain began appearing in political demonstrations all over the world. It's still an underground phenomenon, but does this represent a new form of protest like the wearing of the ‘V for Vendetta’ mask?
From Chile to Lebanon, via Hong Kong and Iraq, a number of people have taken to wearing the recognisable exaggerated smile of the Joker currently portrayed in the cinema by Joaquin Phoenix in the international hit film by Todd Philipps. The face of the Joker, Batman's ultimate nemesis, has now been seen in masks, face paint and graffiti tags in global demonstrations protesting against governments.
“Todd Philipps’ film about the Joker has a real evocative power,” explained William Blanc, historian and author of the book ‘Super Heroes: A Political History’, to FRANCE24. “It echoes a form of protest against a political system that people believe is inflexible and not listening to the people.”
In the weeks since this film came out in the cinema, this Joker symbol of protest has already been visible on the streets, particularly in Lebanon, where a group of graffiti artists called Ashekm has painted a mural of the grimacing clown holding a Molotov cocktail. Other inscriptions elsewhere also allude to Todd Philipps’ film, such as in the Chilean city of Los Angeles, where someone has written at the foot of a statue “We are all clowns”.
Political references to comic strip characters are numerous and the Joker is not the only mask being worn in processions at the moment. In Hong Kong, for example, demonstrators are challenging an emergency law that prohibits the wearing of masks by wearing those of Winnie the Pooh or Pepe the Frog, as noted by the Associated Press.
We are all Guy Fawkes
However, the most commonly used mask globally in protest marches remains the singular face of Guy Fawkes. In the 17th century, Fawkes was the instigator of a failed coup when he attempted to blow up the English Parliament on November 5, 1605. A mask of his face was worn by the character V, an anarchist revolutionary hero in the 2006 cult film ‘V for Vendetta’.
The faceless hacking collective Anonymous (which was established in 2003) adopted Fawkes’ mask as their distinctive signature look and it has since appeared all over the world. This representation has more in common than you might think with the Joker.
“The central theme of these two films is social fragmentation, the fact of finding yourself alone to cope with your own misery,” explains Blanc. “At the end of Todd Philipps’ film, a bit like at the end of ‘V for Vendetta’, everyone putting on the same mask is their way of coming together as a group, to create a collective, to not feel alone with your struggle.”
There is another key link between the two characters: Alan Moore.
‘V for Vendetta’, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, began in 1982 as a strip in British comic monthly 'Warrior' before gaining a far larger audience when it was compiled as a graphic novel by DC Comics in 1988.
The Joker first appeared in the debut issue of DC's 'Batman' comic in 1940. However, the version of the character that Todd Philipps has directly credited as his inspiration is actually from a 1988 graphic novel, ‘The Killing Joke’, written by the very same Alan Moore.
In ‘V for Vendetta’, “Moore targets fascism and he wrote this at a time of the emergence of a hard and ultraliberal right – Margaret Thatcher in England, Ronald Reagan in the United States. This ideology continues with the Joker,” explains Blanc.
In ‘The Killing Joke’, the character of the Joker takes on a social dimension that is reflected in the film released in 2019. According to the historian, the clown then becomes “a product of a systemic social neglect”.
Deformed by social violence
The parallels between the two characters do not stop there. These masks adopted by today’s protestors display a twisted smile that Blanc describes as “mocking” and “terrifying”.
V and the Joker “are both victims of power and are determined to get their revenge,” he explains. “They share the fact that their bodies have been deformed by social violence. They smile while in so much pain as their way of saying ‘You may have hurt me, but I am strong enough to respond with a smile, I am in control’.
“It’s also a morbid smile. These characters want to terrify powerful people, to make them feel helpless in front of someone for whom exacting revenge is all that matters and they will do whatever it takes to achieve it.”
The question remains, though, as to whether the Joker is intended to embody a political stance. According to Blanc, “the Joker is a plastic character and is not representative of the right or the left”.
He believes that Todd Philipps’ film has inspired demonstrators because “it speaks mainly of being alone, separated from any sense of a collective. This isolation is a real contemporary evil.”
Well, I must see it now. After reading the horrible reviews followed by a plot synopsis with spoilers, I went, "Huh?! They doth protesteth too mucheth."
Of course, Joker was lambasted by the entertainment press! I can understand how folks in the real world with real things to do other than obsess over sci-fi and fantasy stories may not have realized, but There's a Culture War going on! A CULTURE War! What could be more culturally wired to the hindebrain of the West than Pop Culture? And since it's being fought largely on social media, and since sci-fi/fantasy geeks live on-line...
Syria and the Mexican border and Ukraine may be the physical battle fronts, but the psychological/spiritual battle front has Spiderman and Ice Princess Elsa presiding.
And people are picking sides! It's the Feminists, LGBTQ+ and Social Marxists versus the whole goddamned world! -And the whole world doesn't have any power in Hollywood or entertainment media, or in the case of Joker, the Good Guys don't have any power in the larger news media where the conflict has spilled to.
The communist weirdo Leftists have been on a war path, trying to turn cultural mythological archetypes into gays, women, non-whites and disabled people. Every G.I. Joe emasculated and every female Thor is a victory flag planted on the mountain of Post Modernism. Did you know the latest Batman TV show features a lesbian woman as the titular character? For real! This is actually happening.
This thread has really been quite thought provoking especially in regards to current world turmoil.Then I came across a number of interesting articles comparing the protesters in Joker to those currently protesting worldwide. Many of those protesters have been photographed wearing the Joker makeup. No wonder the media bash the Joker given the similarities between the political climate in the movie and that of today's Chile, France or Catalonia.
[...]
I can't help but think that those that support violence under the disguise of fighting for a genuine cause are protesters paid and encouraged by the West.
And after everyone's comments here, it's pretty clear that the mainstream REALLY doesn't like something - or several things - about the movie.
The PTB WANT to create as much chaos as possible and so, are really OK that the movie may be setting off "an explosion in mass demonstrations/open rebellions around the world"! The more monkeywrenches they can throw into the machinery to diminish/destroy any life energy antennae, the better! OSIT.A: We once pointed out that mass human behavior was a reflection of cosmic conditions. Now is the time when all must be extra vigilant. We also pointed out that STS forces are fully aware of prophetic patterns and will change and twist in order to discourage and put those to sleep who are slack in vigilance. Note the human environment and try to imagine what it represents above!!!
Q: (Joe) Well, what's the human environment doing?
(L) It's just going nuts!
(Joe) And what does that represent above?
(Pierre) Chaos.
[...]
Q: (L) So, you're saying that we should be concerned about our antennae and stuff now because that is our present frequency, and that is what determines our future. We should be aligning that present frequency with cosmic purposes in order for that future outcome to be desirable?
A: Yes