The Joke(r)'s On Me

(This post is only partly about Joker or jokes of any kind and mostly I'm bad at puns.)

Happy New Year to anyone reading this!

I’m sorry it’s been a long time coming; turns out that moving kind of ruins everything for a while. We’re established now, though; Jenna has a new job that didn’t threaten to kill her right out of the gate. (Also, the amount of “dominant-aggressive masturbatory behavior” among disturbed patients is at precisely zero right now, thank God. We will hopefully never have to update that count.)

When she’s not doing that, and when I’m not caught up writing copy for clients, we’re stomping through on-sale houses and talking about where we’d like to spend the next five years, whether we’re willing for it to be ten, and how we’re going to pay for it. There’s always something, of course; new carpet, new counter tops, new paint in the kitchen, new driveway, new roof, new industrial deodorizer for who knows how many goddamn cats lived in this place before we took a look at it.

Somewhere between all this and figuring out my taxes as a freelancer, I’m finding myself thinking about money a lot more lately… And not just money, but matter—the material conditions of possibility for just doing things and being alive.

Of course equating money with matter isn’t a given; one of my favorite philosophers has a lot of really cool things to say about how money in the 21st Century is as immaterial as you can get, having achieved the status of a religion in the developed world. Still, money makes things happen. It converts potentiality into actuality. It gives me breathing room to write poems and stories without wondering where my next meal is going to come from. It lets me think about the future, and about traveling and seeing new things. It lets me think about being generous, about what it might be like to return to teaching in a much more free and secure way. On a broader level, enough of it might help a certain wispy-haired Vermonter reform an entire national economy.

I’ve never been one for economic philosophy. I steered right away from specializing in Marxism during my time at Loyola and have actively avoided learning how to do my taxes. Any kind of financial literacy is downright horrifying to me and listening to podcasts like The $100 MBA or Think Bigger, Think Better leaves me in a constant state of vertigo. My boss had my watch a Tai Lopez rant that taught me quite a bit and made me take a good hard look at myself while throwing up in my mouth a little. (Incidentally, while insisting that people who don’t interrogate everything are stupid, Tai gave me the perfect chance to do just that when he baldly—and wrongly—claimed that Helen Keller invented Braille).

It definitely feels weird to be leveling-up my business acumen as part of my job when, at the same time, I am becoming increasingly convinced that our economy of one of modernity’s biggest problems. I regret that my distaste (read: fear and trembling) kept me from building such realities more deeply into my teaching. I think I (and most of you) may have lost out on a great deal of practical value there; but I’m making up for lost time in some cool ways. (Seriously, go listen to The Magnificast, I am still a teacher and can still give you homework and that’s what this is I mean it.)

And this is basically my long, jerky segue into saying I still think a lot about Joker and the fact that I’m still not sure I saw the same film many of my students saw. Spoilers ensue.

Todd Phillips’s Joker was, as might be expected, a hot topic in my classrooms when it came out last year (!). Like a good academic, I attempted to enter into meaningful conversations about something I had no first-hand knowledge of and tried to infer my way to an informed opinion by reading reviews and listening to conversations. After several of my students called bullshit, I finally saw the film with a friend of mine, motivated almost entirely by the fact that I didn’t want to be outed as a flagrant hypocrite anymore.

Sam and I were similarly floored; the movie wasn’t even over yet and we were turning to each other looking for some affirmation that we’d both had a very different experience from what we’d expected. Before we even got back in the car, we were discussing how the entire conversation surrounding the film—from mental health, to “incels” and society’s tendency to make its own monsters—was all a red herring. Watching Joaquin Phoenix portray Arthur Fleck, a man progressively enshrouded by the mythology of his villainous comic book alter-ego, I was fascinated neither by the quality of Phoenix’s acting nor the intensity of Phillips’s character study. I was fascinated precisely by how Fleck’s terrifying and narcissistic coming-to-pieces served as a necessary distraction from all the other interesting things the film was doing with money and materialism.

I was happy to see I wasn’t the only one thinking this; in an October 11 article for The Guardian, Micah Uetricht asked, “How have mainstream commentators missed the most obvious takeaway of the film?” Concluding that Joker is primarily a condemnation of American austerity and income inequality, Uetricht opines that the message “is so blunt that even I, a Marxist and philistine, found its message a bit too clobbering. How mainstream commentators have missed it and drawn the exact opposite conclusion is baffling.”

The “exact opposite conclusion,” of course, being that the film is about mentally unstable white men and the pressures under which they crack. Most of the public conversation has centered around whether or not Joker presents us with the anatomy of a mass shooter. Meanwhile, Uetricht asks us whether we somehow missed the signs and newspapers reading “KILL THE RICH,” zoned out as people on a packed subway discussed organizing protests at city hall, or even fell asleep during the rioting that closes the film. 

And of course we did. We were too busy paying attention to the ill man off his meds to think they mattered. And that seems to be the point. Fundamentally, historical materialism is a reminder that every idealistic look at the “history of ideas” has an enormous apparatus of material and economic concerns behind it that are probably more important for explaining things than the ideals and justifications that people provide. Ideas, after all, are seeded by real-world needs, circumstances, and resentments. If Christopher Nolan’s Joker from 2008’s The Dark Knight was a criminal genius, a force of nature and a pure ideal, Arthur Fleck is a bumbling solipsistic possessing neither agency nor the mental and emotional resources to really understand why the mob pulls him from a crumpled police car after he murders a man on national television, or why they cheer him as he smiles and dances his way through what is most certainly a severe concussion. Phillips answers Nolan with an edge of Marxist suspicion: all ideals are accidents, produced and even determined by a substrata of material causes. And just as idealism tends to distract from those material realities throughout most of history, Fleck captures our attention and makes us pay attention to him rather than the pre-existing economic antagonisms that define Gotham from its sewers to its skyscrapers. 

For these reasons, I was surprised when Uetricht didn’t take the chance to delve further into the film’s Marxist registers. He takes an opportunity to endorse Bernie Sanders, a rhetorical move that makes perfect sense but also somewhat elides Joker’s intense and lingering darkness: “In the real world,” he says, “we aren’t yet at [the] breaking point. And unlike Gotham, we have alternative paths on offer.” Sure, maybe, but saying this also tempts us to stop thinking about this fictional world prematurely. In this world, Gotham doesn’t have any “alternative paths”; in fact, amid fervent cries for a sequel, the self-contained narrative of Joker brilliantly predicts what will happen in the future, and it’s worth taking some time to suss that out.

… But that will have to come in another newsletter. I still have my requisite novel-writing to do tonight, and I want to leave things open for feedback and steering by my audience. I’ve told you about how and what I’m doing; what about the rest of you? If you want me to keep going with my thoughts on Joker, please leave me a comment and let me know—or tell me if there’s something more pressing on your mind; is there a book or a film you’re dying to talk about and analyze? Is there dense material in one of your courses you’d love some cliff notes on? Hell, do you need life coaching of some kind (because apparently I do that now!)? The more you all set an agenda, the more inspired I’ll be.

And hey.

It feels really good to finally be doing this.