Why so serious? The 'Joker' was never on our side

The "Joker" movies were always a trap for the left’s untouchable castes.

When I saw trailers for the first film back in 2019, I was immediately turned off. While so many were hyping its praises, I was still burnt out from "The Last Jedi." By that point, I was spiraling away from the mainstream, and nowadays, I only go to the movie theater when my family wants to go on an outing.

But I have to wonder whether the romanticization of these villains is a product of cultural rot. Why don’t we have an unabashed love of heroes and a hatred of our villains?

Now, I didn’t ignore "Joker" to make a stand or whatnot — I think I was still in high school at the time. I just didn’t like the idea of exploring the Joker as a loser with mental illness.

Joker's wild

For me, the character was never just some rando who had a bad day and decided to put on clown makeup. Although he would do everything to assure you otherwise, I always saw that as an illusion, even if the writers believed in it.

When regular people snap, they don’t become criminal masterminds who can rob banks with impunity and contend with billionaire detectives. No, the Joker I knew was a whirlwind, a catastrophic force of nature that appeared from nowhere and wrecked utter bedlam. He was a demon, literal or not, summoned by the excesses of a corrupt culture. His claim of being an ordinary man was only to mess the characters’ heads, to break them.

But the face of evil isn’t so readily understood. He was always more than that, an almost supernatural presence that our materialist culture could only explain away with a vat of weird chemicals.

To see him on-screen as a regular, beaten-down guy instead of a trickster devil was enough to dissuade me from watching entirely.

Stop me if you've heard this

But that turned out to be a good thing, because that meant I wasn’t invested for when "Joker: Folie à Deux" came around.

The backlash to this movie is part of a fomenting undercurrent that I’ve noticed for some time.

First, we all knew since its announcement that it was an intentionally bad movie. The idea to make it a musical was alone a dead giveaway that the creators were not making this for the fans. It’s a film downright hostile to its audience.

But that’s not what I’m interested in.

Die a villain

Tell me, what does it matter if the Joker gets raped or humiliated? Tell me honestly. The man’s a psychopath, and furthermore, why is anyone invested in a character study about a villain? Are there any heroic qualities to him that would make you want to relate to him, understand him?

People don’t get this attached to genuine dissections of evil. And looking beyond that, I’m certain I can find plenty of worse things that have happened to him in the comics. I think at one point he got his face flayed off or something. Why is this any different?

But we all know it’s different. Everyone knows instinctively that this is an attack on fans, and more importantly, everyone on the right who thought they saw something in the character. After all, this particular incarnation was supposed to be the most relatable. And I think it was meant to tap into this fascination Western culture has with psychopaths — especially psychopaths with a “code.”

Why are people so fascinated with these villains? You would think they would inspire a visceral sense of disgust, or at least dislike. They are thoroughly immoral people who do horrendous things, and yet, we can’t get enough of them. We can’t get enough of villains who have a point, who deep down have a critique of the West that lands true.

Cultural rot

The Joker is fascinating in part because he makes you question what a good person truly is. Patrick Bateman is trying to find something that’s real underneath the shallowness of his life. Anton Chigurh is a bit more tricky, but there’s a component of him bringing savagery and primal violence back into a tamed West. And we can go on and on. This is not an uncommon trope in the slightest.

But I have to wonder whether the romanticization of these villains is a product of cultural rot. Why don’t we have an unabashed love of heroes and a hatred of our villains? Why is the bad guy so often more charismatic, more primal than our protagonist? Why has the good become associated with the lame and the bad associated with vitality?

I would wager that the right tends to attach itself to these figures because we intuitively sense that something has gone awfully wrong. The heroes in mainstream stories are not actual heroes, and while the villains are horrendous, they at least point to something that’s truer.

Deep down, the Joker is absolutely right that people aren’t the moral paragons they like to think themselves, and they have no foundation to prevent utter chaos when their hypocrisy is brought to the surface.

So ought we take the frame of the Joker? Was he the right-wing paragon all along? Is he the man we should get behind?

Absolutely not.

'How about a magic trick?'

One of the left’s favorite tricks is to invest psychopaths and demented crazy people with right-wing ideas and aesthetics. If the right concedes that the character has a point, they also associate themselves with that character's evil. This prevents a noble vision of the right from ever fully manifesting, distracting people in digital clown games.

No matter what the Joker has to tell us about the plight of incels or the corruption of society or whatever, his flaws outweigh any message. It’s not just his mental instability. He’s a pathetic loser with no moral compass, and his solution to decline is to accelerate it.

In other words, he’s a villain. He’s an actual bad guy.

And should the ironic take prevail, should the mainstream ever receive a different message from what the writers intended, they have one final trump card they can play.

Controlled op

The Joker is entirely fictional. That means they can do whatever they want to him, and more importantly, make him do anything they want. He’s controlled opposition, and leftists will happily lose hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure he stays that way.

The left does not play for money. It plays for the message. And that message is:

You’re the bad guy. And also, lol, you got gang raped.

The lesson to take away is to never invest yourself in modern media. Memes and edgy takes are one thing, but they are nothing to attach yourself to.

The left will never make a true right-wing hero, only right-wing villains. Never embrace imagery unless it’s genuinely worthy of emulation. And most importantly, never attach yourself to a caricature your enemies control.

Again, I’m not saying don’t engage in meme wars or ironic takes. Just don’t get attached to them insofar as the left can turn them into a weapon against you.

The proper response is to just shrug and let it go. The culture is completely hostile to you, and your ability to remain indifferent is the ultimate weapon against people who slovenly desire your outrage.