We're gonna get Joker x Harley "I want what they have" memes again. It's gonna happen again, people are going to romanticize abuse. I hate it. I hope Margot Robbie says something mean to Stephanie at an awards party.
This is the bad timeline because it's fucking 2024 and we're getting an edgelord jonkler Joker and Harley movie instead of a spiritual sequel to Thelma and Louise with Margot Robbie's Harley and idk I can't do a fan cast right now as Harley Quinn and they're on a road trip to... idk... blow up Texas.
I would love to see the chuds go mad at Harlivy's relationship being brought to a live action movie.
The cartoon is great, but a live action movie would be way higher profile.
I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet, it would practically print money. You don't even need to make a trailer, just say "Margot Robbie kisses a woman in this movie" and it will make $200 million opening weekend, guaranteed.
people are going to romanticize abuse
I'm curious about the degree to which their relationship will be portrayed as an abusive one in this movie. I don't think it will be one where Joker is controlling Harley like in the animated series, it'll be more about Harley becoming unhealthily obsessed with Joker. He's a mentally ill prisoner and she's a therapist at the prison who's supposed to help him, so pursuing a relationship is obviously a major ethical violation on her part. So maybe she will be the more controlling manipulative one in the relationship, or perhaps it will be mutually abusive - but definitely not healthy regardless.
I was really hoping it was gonna be a total stylistic 180 from the first one and be a lavish jukebox musical that would then be adapted to Broadway
In my ideal socialist state, kids are banned from entering their parents industry.
I feel like the fact that it's a jukebox musical costarring Lady Gaga only bolsters your case.
rejecting diegetic essentialism gave me the gift of eternal media literacy
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Whatever it is, I'm positive it's going to be nonsensical slop, because there's no The King of Comedy 2 to remake.
since it's a musical maybe Todd Phillips will rip off New York, New York instead
[this is not meant in a contentious way. Just my musing]
Wasn't the first movie also reactionary?
Or rather... It shone a sympathetic light on reactionaries. A sort of "this is why they are how they are" thing. Putting aside Joker/Arthur's mental illness, any person tormented long enough with no hope of a better future could "snap" and go down a route like he did. The mental illness almost seems irrelevant or just an additional angle for society to attack him and drive him faster off the cliff.
But even though we see the movie through his eyes, and we are made to feel sympathy for him or others like him, in the real world we still (should?) know that "yeah, everyone who does shitty things has a reason. We don't have to accept their reasons."
But all of that said, I still enjoyed the first movie. It has a satisfying ending because while Arthur turns into objectively a "bad guy" and a murderer... the people he murders that we see make you go "meh 🤷♂️ let them fight."
Pretty sure the movie has been compared to Taxi Driver . It gave me that vibe anyway. Guy with clearly untreated or not treated enough mental illness, a loner, rejected by society, loses his mind to a degree and hyper fixates on a popular person as a target for assassination. Obviously the stories are not the same. The vibes and overall arcs are similar. And both lend sympathy, or an explanation?, for reactionary mindset and violent behaviors.
I just don't think any of this matters ultimately. "Culture is downstream of politics." US politics are extremely reactionary across the board and it's represented in our media. Libs/dumbasses (same thing) latch onto the media and hugely wrongly think the media influences the culture. Sometimes, rarely, maybe. But it's almost always the other way around. This is something right wingers obsess over too. They think people are gay because, I dunno, a gay character was in Beauty and the Beast. They can't comprehend that gay people always existed and there was a gay character because only at that point in time had the US culture, broadly, become accepting enough to allow a gay character to be depicted in a children's show.
Of course the reverse argument for media changing politics would be propaganda, but that's a bit of a different, although adjacent subject. I'm more speaking to clearly non-propagandistic pieces (like Taxi Driver, Joker, Beauty and the Beast). Right wingers would make the (wrong, objectively, imo) argument that like "all of Hollywood, etc. movies are propaganda meant to warp the minds of the youth to make them gay libbed up..." blah blah blah. That's the weird cope conspiracy theory they have come up with, and stuck with, for decades to explain why gay people are more accepted in society, women have (well... until recently... yikes...) more and more autonomy, non-white people are represented, you know, insert whatever pisses off the WASP-types. They said it's because of the woke movies and shows from (depending how far gone their brains are...) Hollywood (or "the Jews!" in Hollywood if they're fully gone down the Nazi hole).
The libs already are fully ok to actively encourage or aid in shooting activists. The pro-Palestine movements in the US have shown that. If it means they can go back to sipping extra sugary lattes in peace, they'll happily plug their ears for a moment while cops unload "less than lethal" shotgun rounds into college students and arrest all of them. I don't think even 100 reactionary movies with Lady Gah-Gah! (trump voice) would matter. It sucks, but, I dunno. It just sucks.
But even though we see the movie through his eyes, and we are made to feel sympathy for him or others like him, in the real world we still (should?) know that "yeah, everyone who does shitty things has a reason. We don't have to accept their reasons."
On it’s face value in the movie universe, nothing Joker did was for a shitty reason. He killed a shitty person and instigated a rebellion against a bourgeois politician. Anyone who does that, mentally ill or not, is a hero as long as their stated motivation wasn’t reactionary.
The vibes and overall arcs are similar. And both lend sympathy, or an explanation?, for reactionary mindset and violent behaviors.
I’m pretty 98% of the people here want to see their politician’s brains blown all over the wall during a live broadcast speech. Is it reactionary to chuckle when I see a bunch of zionists get blown up or conservatives getting left out in the dark cold by their saviors or getting killed by the cops they salute? Sure. I don’t care. It’s funny, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
People will view it in their own ideological lens regardless of how it was intended. The left reading is obviously “this is the natural conclusion of an isolated society stemmed with expensive and nonexistent healthcare and businessmen as politicians.” The “centrist” reading is “wow society bad. Media bad. Politicians bad. Wow.” The conservative reading is “mental illness is the only thing wrong with society, and liberal politicians don’t want to treat it” or “only white men are mistreated in society.” Both Taxi Driver and Joker are individualistic, but the former shows that one man’s action is futile in changing anything, if it even happened at all, whereas Joker portrays one man’s action as world changing.
what did Joker do that was reactionary? What he did would have been adventurism if he had any political intent, but instead it was just him killing shitheads. He killed a bunch of chuds who deserved it and instigated a class riot. What's the major rightwing thing he did?
Wait, they’re making a sequel?
I really liked the movie as a standalone cautionary tale: stories that American media is infamously lacking. It would be ruined if we have to see a bunch of capeshit shoehorned in the sequel…(I’m saying that as I’m praising a movie about a literal DC comics character, but I digress.)
a bunch of capeshit shoehorned in the sequel
this isn't really the case, the new movie is a musical about Arthur Fleck's criminal trial
I liked it because I could almost entirely ignore any superhero bullshit in it. It was a great and tragic movie about a vicious system abusing someone who just needed proper medical help and social support, that happened to be ever so lightly shoehorned into some batman thing that wasn't really relevant to the central story. It felt like someone wanted to tell that kind of story, but couldn't get it picked up, and so pitched it to the superhero shit execs who are so desperate for some way to tell some sort of innovative and powerful story with their characters loosely slapped on that they'd snap up anything that comes there way.
And then I was really confused why so many progressives and liberals said it was a bad film that glamorizes alt-right men's violence and inceldom. I guess if you really squint you can read it that way but that's not what I took from it.
They're making a sequel? No way it does the first one justice, and if they lean into anything to do with superheros or supervillains any more than they did in the first one they'll ruin it entirely. Probably not going to bother watching it.
Joker 2019 perfectly captured the cultural moment because it perfectly understood the vibe of the country, viz, that we all wanted to go crazy and kill ourselves and everyone around us, however precise or imprecise our understanding of why SOCIETY made us feel that way. The cultural moment of 2024 is so much different because the Biden era has seemingly foreclosed all possibility of that kind of antisocial rebellion. The national mood is not one of unfocused violent passions, but rather of being asleep at the wheel as we drift into inevitable crisis. When we fantasize of adventurism, we cannot bring ourselves to imagine a crowd of Sickos cheering us on, as at the end of the first Joker - instead there is only the crowd of mindless sheep, as at the end of Nashville. Capturing that vibe shift would be an incredibly difficult pivot for the coming second Joker film to make, even putting aside the creative exhaustion that almost invariably accompanies sequel films. So as much as I loved the first film, I will enter the second with low expectations.
that we all wanted to go crazy and kill ourselves and everyone around us
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Yellow jackets sound like they suck as roommates, meanwhile me and the mud dauber wasp who's apartment is on my balcony have an understanding
