No Joke
Saw Joker with my teenage son. I took him to the film as a teaching opportunity. There are powerful lessons in this work of cinematic art.
It is all there. Nihilism filling the God-Shaped-Hole, the failure of anti-depressants, the toxic power of mainstream media and a society of learned self-loathing and helplessness.
Joachim is stunning. The film darkly and perfectly illustrates how humiliation is at the heart of all terror. You step on a man enough, and he will either pull the trigger on himself or someone else. Most choose suicide-in-slow-motion via drugs and alcohol. Some go out with a bang. The Joker has every father figure in his life turn his back on him, forcing him further into isolation and self-hatred.
Now that the media has given lost souls a path to super-antihero stardom by becoming a mass shooter, there is a model. The more they promote these crimes, the more killers they make. The mainstream media is a factory of death and terror.
The Incels are an unsurprising outcome of our society. They have come to be defined by their ideology as “involuntary celibates” and by the actions of at least two individuals who received massive attention from a media that seeks to manufacture a narrative of the dangerous, lonely white man. The reality is that these incels have found in the gaming community and niches online the only places where they can commiserate their sense of shared victimhood. Rather than isolate them further, the responsible thing to do would be to pull them back from the edges of society, back into the mainstream. A new poll out of the UK reveals that a staggering 89 per cent of young people aged 18–29 feel their lives are meaningless and without purpose. While by no means the only reason, many have argued that the emergence of mass shootings in the west by young men can partly be attributed to the nihilistic malaise that many teenagers grow up experiencing. Immersed in pornography, psych meds, violent, first-person-shooter videos games and a culture where nothing is sacred and nothing is profane, how do we expect our young people to become well adjusted members of society?
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