This Movie Could Have Been An Email

On Sunday, December 22nd, I watched Joker: Folie à Deux. I didn't enjoy it. I thought I would after roughly the first third, but it descends quickly into grimness after that.

It's a movie that could have been an email. That email would go approximately like this:

From: Todd Phillips

To: Joker Fanboys

Some of you undersocialized incels* took the completely wrong message from the first Joker film. In response, here are three pumps and an apology. Now fuck off forever, weirdos.

With all due respect, which is none,

Todd

*For a nuanced discussion of the so-called manosphere and its relationship to misogyny and male supremacy, please listen to Jamie Loftus's manosphere series on her Sixteenth Minute (Of Fame) podcast.

Todd Phillips, you directed Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born; you know she deserves better than to play the audience stand-in in your fan disservice film. You owe her another movie in which her character is a  well-developed and fully rounded human being with complex emotions.

Which is not to say that Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga played their roles badly. I feel they did the best the could with the material they were given. Their dance sequences were lovely. The material simply wasn't very interested in their characters as much as it was interested in pathologizing (certain members of) the audience of the first movie.

Given the recent folk heroization of the 27-year-old man accused of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare, this movie was badly timed as well as uninterestingly written. Americans aren't very much in the mood for a lecture about how the televised murder of a wealthy elite is the worst thing that could happen, more punishable than the daily degradation and abuse visited upon the poor and disenfranchised.

Wasn't one of the intended messages embedded in the first film that Arthur, an abused 7-year-old boy failed by the social safety net, unable as an adult to access the medicine (health care) that would help keep him emotionally stable, deserved real help with his problems? Wasn't Joker in part about institutional failure?

A movie about how individual responses to institutional failure are pathetic, useless, wasted efforts performed by doomed sociopaths is a bit bleak for the moment, Todd Phillips. Sure, no one wants to watch a movie where people from Arthur's neighborhood run for the local housing commission seats and work together to provide more low-income housing for Gotham City's poor.

Still, Lady Gaga was there when Vice President Kamala Harris was inaugurated. She needs a less grim, more hopeful project.

"Lady Gaga enters the inauguration platform as she prepares to sing a rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at the 59th Presidential Inauguration ceremony in Washington, Jan. 20, 2021. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. (DOD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II)." Carlos M. Vazquez II, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Arthur Fleck's defense attorney is played by Catherine Keener. She was in Hamlet 2, a goofy comedy about high school musicals. The actor who played her character's romantic partner in Hamlet 2 was Steve Coogan, and Steve Coogan also appeared in Folie à Deux as a smarmy tv journalist. That appears to be a coincidence; I didn't see anything that said Keener and Coogan were both friends with Phillips or that Phillips had anything to do with Hamlet 2.

Keener, of course, also played Ms. Nelle Harper Lee in Capote. Always and forever fascinated by Harper Lee and Truman Capote, I happen to be reading Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century by Roseanne Montillo. 

Everything always comes back to Capote, even the other movie I watched on the 22nd, Dear Santa, in which a middle school English teacher referenced To Kill a Mockingbird. And if that happens to pull once again at my Lucifer thread, then so mote it be.

___

A dream: Yesterday (April 25, 2016) I saw a screen capture from the "Book Job" episode of The Simpsons. In that drawing, a shelf of books about Southern vampires has one called Tru Blood. On the cover, Truman Capote is enjoying a blood martini.

Perhaps because of that cartoon doodle, I dreamed about Capote. In my brain's wacky scenario, I was in a 1960s prison with movie-Dick Hickok, as played by Mark Pellegrino.

I assume Perry Smith was also there, but I didn't see him.

Now, in theory, the male and female prisoners were supposed to be kept separate. In actuality, the prison looked a lot less like a prison and more like a coed dorm. My work detail involved cleaning rooms that women had vacated.

Ordinarily I was very scrupulous in my work. I didn't take any belongings left behind by the other women. But I take a small pink plastic bird and stick it in my pocket. I gave it to Dick because he told me he was saving up to buy a pigeon. He wanted to raise birds, like the Birdman of Alcatraz.