Ursula Muñoz Schaefer/Assistant Opinion Director
Todd Phillips’ “Joker” movie won’t be released until October and the discourse around it has already become exhausting.
What opened with a fresh Rotten Tomatoes score and won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival is now getting flack for reasons more real and sinister than anything the gritty comic book movie universe could cook up. But while many of these critiques feel urgent, they’re also problematic.
Part of the reason this film is being panned by certain crowds lies in the fandom of the character itself. For better or worse, the appeal of the titular supervillain has already been tied to a particular kind of demographic.
You know the kind: the guy who hides behind a Joker profile picture on social media, who blames his frustrations with women on “SJW”s, who worships films like “Fight Club” and “American Psycho” despite missing their explicit theses on toxic masculinity.
What started as a joke about the character’s cancerous fanbase on film Twitter quickly turned into unease that certain people would miss the point of the movie upon release. This morphed into fear that incels, or men who are involuntarily celibate, on Reddit forums would feel validated in following the supervillain’s footsteps.
In a country undergoing an epidemic of mass shootings and domestic terrorism, fears of a 21st century Travis Bickle resonating with the wrong crowds are definitely warranted.
We are a nation that’s constantly on the alert. Our own university doesn’t allow students to take bags to football games for fear of students carrying concealed weapons. This constant fear of potential mass shootings is something people living in other first-world countries don’t always relate to.
Still reeling from the El Paso and Dayton shootings last month, FIU faced a scare of its own on August 28 when a student threatened to bring an assault rifle to the Graham Center.
However, by placing the blame on films like “Joker” and “Taxi Driver,” all the discussion is doing is oversimplifying the issue of gun violence and hate crimes in the United States.
The notion that movies would be responsible for giving potentially violent incels “ideas” has the same energy as the much ridiculed debate about video games causing gun violence. These assumptions are dangerous and, above all, counterproductive.
Attributing the root of violence to art distracts from the reality of our country’s flimsy gun laws — which allow people to purchase a firearm before they’re even allowed to drink — rather than placing restrictions on those who are mentally ill or have violent criminal records. It also distracts from our country’s insufficient mental health services and people’s lack of access to them.
Let’s remember that in 2012, James Eagan Holmes shot up a movie theatre in Colorado during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” and that was long before we ever even got a DC supervillain origin story.
Featured photo from Flickr.
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