(Merging my media and society talks again this week. Spoilers for Taxi Driver. This is definitely one of my least favourite pieces I’ve ever written for the blog - it’s unfocused and somewhat negative - but I am committed to getting out one weekly defrost a week, and there’s only one way to get more comfortable in taking on topics outside the wheelhouse.)
Joker 2 bombed. I don’t care about its fate, and I refuse to type out that French subtitle. What’s interesting is that, from what I hear, the movie specifically picked a fight with the subset of nerds we’d most easily describe as “incels”, which has become an evocative catch-all for lonely and hateful men who demand others prioritise meeting their wants and needs. The film obviously didn’t bomb because of this - nobody else cared about it, either, or showed up to engage with its quarter-baked courtroom musical - but the choice to turn a film into a prolonged and expensive lashing out at incels reflects on its predecessor.
Joker made its mark by attracting so much attention and success in 2019. That was a great year for films. I don’t catch a ton of movies - I never saw Joker! - but I love Knives Out and Jojo Rabbit (Taiki’s alleged recent fall off really shouldn’t overshadow the banger after banger he was putting up), and Marriage Story, 1917 and El Camino are all great too. Of the others I haven’t seen, Parasite won an excellent reception for any film, never mind a non-English film, and even cut through at the Oscars, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Far From Home, the Lego Movie 2 and Uncut Gems all did well. (There was also The Rise of Skywalker. We don’t, uh…we don’t talk about that one.)
So how did Joker - yet another comic book movie right before the fatigue started to set in, featuring very little of the actual comic book material - cut through the competition? By hitting the dead centre of the Venn diagram.
In the first circle, we have the everyday movie audience looking for a flick to chuck on. Remember, these are pre-pandemic, pre-COVID days - theatre numbers were already in decline, but successful advertising, a star, and being the first film to feature the beloved villain since The Dark Knight not called Suicide Squad could get you off to a running start.
In the second circle, you have the ultra-online audience, the nerds, the cutting edge of the zeitgeist from a certain point of view. Part of this was memes, a word that stopped being satisfying to say a decade ago. Pithy diagnoses of how we live in a society were a pretty good bit. Part of this was the incels who thought these pithy diagnoses amounted to something.
And the third circle was the critics and reviewers and media outlets who thought so too. Some gravitated to a viewing experience that featured surface level arty traits - the long, slow process of a person changing, without conventional Hollywood action or traditional heroes and villains. The film spoke, to their ears. Others recoiled at their interpretation - not a condemnation of incels, but a celebration of them. All of this ginned up awareness and attention: Joker was a film to go and see to see what it was all about, in the US and abroad.
Joker is the latest in a long line of entries on the subject. The film notoriously owes much of a creative debt to Scorcese’s 1982 The King of Comedy and 1976’s Taxi Driver. You could see this as plagiarism from a director who is such a hack, he made Joker 2; you could see this as homage from a director who is such a fan, he chose to cast Scorcese’s star, Robert De Niro, in a leading role. And even those entries are just partway down the road to sooner stories on similar subjects, from Albert Camus’s writings to Catcher in the Rye.
Lonely and disenfranchised people didn’t pop into existence with the internet. The internet has perhaps exacerbated some of these traits, like connecting these individuals to reinforce their views with one another, but this is one of the most obvious sense checks I’ve ever seen for object permanence. Lonely and struggling people definitionally were in an uphill battle to be heard or noticed. As helpful as it is to writers like me to pretend all modern social trends began when Tim Apple invented the Nokia on January 1st, 2000, concern about social disenfranchisement and the destruction of community already began to mount through the 60s and 70s, exploding into the 80s. (And this is mainly just talking about the incel demographic. We’re not even starting on everybody else, from the worldwide stifling of women in the home to the costly mass urbanisation of Māori iwi and hapu well through the 1900s.)
I may not have seen Joker, but besides having had that spoiled plenty over the years, I did watch Taxi Driver the other night. I didn’t like the movie. It’s well made, looks and sounds great, and having recently started to watch Scorsese films, I still really enjoy his direction. (If you ever wanted to watch the definition of a generic good film, Casino is yours, while GoodFellas and especially The Departed are some
of the best movies I’ve ever seen!)
But Taxi Driver is one long meditation on incels, and while it’s easier than ever to recognise the film as condemnation rather than praise, I was never going to enjoy a movie like this either way. My skin crawls at self-referential spirals of either justification or obliviousness, and watching Travis Bickle fill out details of his morning coffee in his diary as he plots murder just makes me look over my shoulder as I fill out details of my morning tea in my diary and plot not murder. The process of familiarising us with his experience induces sympathy in some, but for many more, it only makes us recoil, desperate to get away.
In that sentence, you find a summation of the entire social issue of weakening communities creating loneliness and isolation. The sympathetics - not just incel men, but also a surprising number of women who either relate in their less-discussed isolation or simply feel concern for those afflicted. Point to the circumstances out of Travis Bickle’s control: he was scarred by a draft into a war he never asked for. The politicians don’t really care about him. Nobody will be his friend, will explain to him why you shouldn’t take your date there.
Above all, the most compelling reason for sympathy is growing awareness amongst both neurodivergent and neurotypical people of neurodivergence. We know, better than ever before, that some people have one understanding of and approach to the world, and other people have another. Why condescend with a superiority complex over others because you lack their understanding? Many classic fictional characters have been reexamined through this lens. (You could also say the same for mental illness, but that’s a very distinct and different category and one that was at least understood to exist several decades ago.)
The repulsed - a broad coalition ranging from feminist women bothered by male entitlement, to macho men sick of other men expressing feelings. Setting aside the latter, the reasonable point is that most people have some struggle or another in the world. Other characters in Taxi Driver organise to attempt to make a difference, or just get on with their lives. Bickle stokes the fires of his disgust for urban decay around him, a vision that blurs dangerously close to a hostility to black people living in his city’s neighbourhoods. He leans into his power fantasy of getting noticed by killing anybody, a loose cannon as likely to destabilise society like Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray as he is to inadvertently blunder into doing some good by whacking the right people. In his eyes, he is entitled to be judge, jury and executioner.
Translated to the real world, at its most extreme this takes on the form of mass shooters and serial killers like Bickle, but that’s beyond the pale of what I’m talking about today. Taking the mundane and everyday, we see insecurity: a precarious economic situation, a sense of purposelessness in the world, and an inferiority to others placed on a pedestal. And we see coping mechanisms for insecurity: fantasies of violence, commiserating with other down and outs, yelling at people, stockpiling weapons. Plain old boredom and the human desire simply to do something or entertain the self leads to fetishisation of and creeping on women. About the only positive things Bickle do up until he shoots some awful people is...drive a taxi and get in his pushups. And it’s not hard to notice that the last social institution he ever participated in - the army - is likely behind the latter.
I could go back and forth all day about the ins and outs of this stuff, but I think the further you get in, the more you lose sight of any perspective. Compared to almost any other demographic or any other issue, questions of personal initiative or of community fall out of the equation. This is the crux of why I feel so little sympathy or interest in the ins and outs here - because these debates invite us into a selfish worldview that doesn’t understand how many other people also have to assess difficulties in life, and do so with a much healthier mentality. The conversation misses two main things.
One, incels rarely seem to construct genuinely positive communities with each other, instead of whiling away the time venting their grievances and blaming women for not spending more time with them. In short, there’s an untrustworthy undercurrent there in people who can’t appreciate other people without feeling there’s an angle to exploit something additional. And the great irony is, of course, incels aren’t obliged to spend time with other incels if they find them unbearable.
One of the most common refrains to challenge these people to dig themselves out of their holes is that nobody wants to spend time around somebody self-obsessed with a chip on their shoulder. That is, of course, true. Yet that also seems to me to itself be a painful appeal to self-obsession - to continue to frame how you treat other people in terms of getting their attention. I think it’s unhelpful all around not to expect people to be thoughtful and kind to other people just because it’s the right thing to do.
But it’s also wildly patronising! There is, to me, an incredibly strange condescension in writing anybody off as a weirdo who can’t be expected to do right by anybody else. You can talk about nice ideas of redemption arcs, if you like. More plainly, there’s a denial of the other human being’s capacity for choice and change. And anybody lonely or with a chip on their shoulder mistreating others, and getting a pass for that, just heightens the stigma more well-meaning people in their shoes feel: that they’re not a fully equal participant in society, but somebody who can’t be expected to do better because they wouldn’t know how, or right from wrong.
Two, what gives me the most pause about the whole range of the subject, from broad loneliness and community breakdown to incels specifically, is the inability to comprehend a pathway without people. Human contact is, of course, an important need we should be striving to meet and facilitate as much as possible through both policies and attitudes. Yet the simple reality we must engage with is that rates of loneliness and isolation are rising and communities are in decline.
Hopefully we can reverse that, or at least slow the decline, but we could say the same of climate change. And when it comes to the climate, fighting change is great and the most important thing, but not enough; we must mitigate the impacts of ongoing change, too. By which I mean, in this analogy, I feel like “society”, from intellectual thinkers to policy analysts to celebrities and influencers, are not doing enough to think out: how can people on their own live satisfying lives?
There is, of course, a very obvious disincentive to pursuing that: it’s hard to build profitable links with others through teaching them how they don’t need you, and harder still to share this information with people who aren’t connected to you. But it still seems like we should surely be hitting a critical mass where a wide enough range of people are in this boat both to attract the interest of creatives and analysts, and also simply to get a diverse range of takes shared from individual experiences.
Instead, discourse on loneliness continues to be dominated by what we see from Taxi Driver to Joker: angry men, society’s fault, lashing out. The closest to an alternative narrative we get is articles about “girl rotting”, and you can see the fundamental difference in mentality here: a perception of isolation as a voluntary choice, a respite from a full life to be resumed, rather than an indefinite and involuntary state of being. Isolation for women, outside its older form in the context of patriarchal marriage, continues to be erased and poorly understood.
So I’d like to read and hear more about all the lonely people. Where those who once had community and no longer, or never at all, go from here. Partly through the lens of pathways to reconnecting, but also partly the everything in the meantime, not as a grim end condition, but something to make the most out of. And above all, I’m just so tired of being fed, again and again, that isolation is something to feel angry about, that you must blame somebody for. That may, on some level, be an understandable emotion, but it is and always will be the poison in the well unless and until we wake up and realise that, as usual, condemning an undesirable attitude is not enough to wish it away. We must paint a picture of the better alternative that people can see and understand and believe in.
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