[written on 11/7/19]

A reader who hosted me in Richmond, Virginia, for this week mentioned that she had recently been quite upset, angry even, a little despondent, from viewing Joker. She is a fan of superhero, comic book movies, those movies which have replaced the western in the American mind as the morality play which crafts our moral narrative one passive thrill at a time.

Off to the movies we went, me knowing full-well that the American cinema experience is the avowed enemy of the American Mind, that movies are generally, or not always, written to uphold a self-negating image of the man, particularly the man of European descent, in other words, the American, for there is only one brand of American who does not qualify his identity as a hyphenated son of tragic inequity.

I was interested in media and police criticisms of the movie as promoting riots and crime. Also, how many elements would be directly opposed to the real experiences of the viewers, as this is the most powerful media tool, to constantly negate the viewer by preventing the context of his life in reverse, as an isolated, atomized lie. The postmodern movie experience is genius-level, big-budget gaslighting.

Briefly, the deeply wounded and emasculated character, Arthur, a child of orphaned rape and unnaturally extended mothering, works as a clown in Gotham, a scummy 1970s style New York somehow missing the people who have defined and who run the actual New York. The action storyline is essentially that of the 1970s Charles Bronson movie Death Wish re-written for fatherless sissies, and comic book nerds. I declared the ending of the movie and the fate of the talk show host at 38 minutes in. There were no surprises. This was like the movie The Crow if he had been raped rather than his wife.

-Latinos are depicted accurately as violent teenage street actors but not psychopath, just bullies.

-The race of people who run the real Gotham are replaced by those they rule from the shadows.

-The race of folk who routinely act psychopathically upon strangers in a mass transit setting, doing such things as sadistic group-bonding torment of adults, are replaced by the very race and gender of folk that are actually the victims of all this. So, we have three rich, suited, ivory apes, beating up a working class ivory ape for laughing at their attempted rape of a woman.

-The people who riot and burn the city are all of the ivory race who have vacated over 50 American cities because some other race of apes burned those cities in similar riots.

-The people in charge of health care are ebony women, rather than the ivory women who dominate the field.

-The people who demonstrate empathy for strangers are all ebony, rather than ivory, a perfect reverse of actuality.

So, we have a perfect fictional lie, a negation of the viewer’s actual experience, whoever he or she is, as a vehicle for the insertion of false news and historical narrative when the need arises. Yet, in the belly of the lie, sits truth:

The target of state wrath, of corporate malevolence, of collective corrosion of morality, of the toxic will of denatured women maimed in the mind to fear and coddle their feral, fatherless sons, is, in actual fact Arthur, a poor, pale, disenfranchised man left to shoulder the sins of his oppressors, to take the blame for the evil perpetrated upon him and upon others in his name.

In the end, the truth that only one kind of man has been targeted for alienation, ostracism and death by our faceless stage handlers beams through all of the dancing puppets of the untrue marshalled by the Engine of Lies. Arthur, by definition a loser, exacts a kind of revenge upon the cruel collective which it so richly deserves. For the egotistic need of the Lie Machine to find approval from its subjects insures that it will blunder into the truth even as it dresses it in lies.