Once upon a time, there was a hungry wolf who was always on the lookout for food. However, the shepherds in the area were always watching over their sheep, making it difficult for the wolf to get his next meal.
One day, the wolf stumbled upon a discarded sheepskin and an idea formed in his mind. He ignored the sheepskin altogether and walked right into the pasture among the flock, taking zero pains to hide the fact that he was not at all like them.
As the wolf was mingling with the sheep, a little lamb started following him around, bafflingly unaware of his true identity. The wolf saw his opportunity and quickly led the lamb away to be slaughtered.
That evening, the wolf in no disguise whatsoever entered the sheepfold again along with the rest of the flock. However, little did he know that the shepherd had a craving for mutton broth that very evening. The shepherd picked up a knife and went to the sheepfold to select a sheep for his broth.
The shepherd walked up to the wolf and eyed him up and down. He shrugged his shoulders and the two of them grabbed a sheep and butchered it in front of all the others. They didn’t even bother to eat it. They just left its mangled carcass in the sheepfold and went to McDonald’s. The sheep, with all their cognitive capabilities intact, welcomed this as their new reality.
The Todd Phillips Joker-verse and HBO’s The Penguin create their respective monsters out of very similar clay. The world is unfair: society is heavily stratified, inequality is high, and the odds of transcending the hell of your poverty are grotesque – or laughable, depending on your rogue. These two pieces of entertainment understand the tragedy of modernity, and portray us with depressing accuracy. Our world is dying, and the thoughts of too many are perseverating only on how to profit off our deaths. We vulgar plebeians are damned, cogs in the machine generating our own demise. The West and its contradictions are primed for villainy, and there is no Batman to crash through the sky light. No one is coming to save us. How these two DC antagonists are manifested in their barely-fictional worlds is probably one of the better lenses to understand the monsters in our own.
And no Kevin Conroy to save us! RIP Best Batman…
The Joker begins his foray into villainy in a way that I’m fairly confident was not intended by the creators of the film. Arthur Fleck is a man struggling in poverty, loneliness, and despair. He has a shitty job and worse prospects. His arc culminates in violent anarchism, rebelling in fury against his condition. Arthur lashes out as The Joker against an elite that has only ever looked down on him, smug in the certainty of their position as arbiters of the structures of the world; banker bullies whose material success has come at Arthur’s expense, and Murray Franklin, the talk-show media figure who laughs at and degrades him.
In short, this is Trump’s story of America. The establishment has taken advantage of you; liberal elites look down their noses at you, laugh at you. Any kind of systemic reform is secondary to simply turning it all to ashes. As an Alfred once said, “Some men just want to see the world burn.” Arthur Fleck is representative of the so-called Basket of Deplorables who are judged by the mainstream, and this is their response to it: fuck you. The only reason that I’m confident that the creators didn’t intend to celebrate Trumpism’s bloody revolution is that Arthur is an unreliable narrator, and the scenes that consistently show his delusions are the ones in which he’s connected to others, where he’s loved. The devoted crowd cheering at Joker’s murderous performance is not real. I believe the original intention of Joker was not to valorize a Trumpian antihero, but to show and empathize with the unhinged mind of a school shooter. Joker is canonically a villain. The appropriate response to a broken world is to fix it, not to break with it. Somehow that villainy was missed, and my interpretation has not been the popular response to the film. A sequel was required.
Clearly a man to be emulated
Joker: Folie à Deux has been universally panned, and for good reason. It’s a bad movie! But also for very bad reasons because some people seem to think that it is a rejection of the first film, and that’s simply not true. Arthur as a character rejects the lessons of the first film, but it’s ambiguous if the film does so as well. The second film canonizes the celebratory mob at the end of the first film as real, and, fine. Sure. Arthur gets caught up in the fantasy of his own greatness in response, but ultimately rejects that fantasy because he recognizes that his homicidal approach was incredibly traumatizing to his only friend, Gary Puddles. Joker isn’t a revolutionary, he’s a bully too. His approach to the broken world is to embrace what broke it in the first place: cruelty, degradation, and all of it at the expense of vulnerable populations. It’s this insight that enlightens Arthur to the meaninglessness of his crusade, that he is reinforcing the harms of society rather than rebelling against them. But being the Joker is out of his hands now. His corruption had already infected the populace, and Joker’s revolution continues without him. Viewers are confused that perhaps the minor character Ricky was supposed to be the canonical Joker all along, but in truth, all of the clowns dressed in their makeup who blow up the court house are the Joker. His ideology has won, even if he himself now sees it as folly. The explosion at the court house is indicative of this new ideology’s rejection of establishment institutions, highlighting their dystopic vision of a new America. Trump parallels continue to abound.
Accountability for crimes!? I thought this was America!!
Folie à Deux is a psychiatric condition where two people with mental illness are enmeshed together who begin to share the same psychotic delusions about the world. While it is assumed that Harley Quinn is the second ill person in this dyad, she is only an individualized symbol of the broader delusional support for Joker’s Robespierrean justice; the delusion that this savagery is a worthwhile response to systemic oppression. They are all of them enmeshed into this cult of vengeful destruction.
This is why the second film is not a rejection of the first. It does what any sequel is supposed to do and expands on the themes of the first one. Joker’s Trumpian philosophy has broadened in appeal, and regardless of its instigator’s opinions, it will continue without him. Trump’s chaos is here to stay. The film is also just as ambiguous of its support for this ideology as the first one. The singing in the film is an obvious metaphor for the mania that drives Joker’s methods. In the end when Arthur confronts Harley (I refuse to call her Lee), he asks her to stop singing, to come back to earth, and she refuses. Whether the singing was any good or not is irrelevant; singing is always more fun! Joker’s revolution, however violent, however cruel, has a mischievous joy to it. The memes about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio are fun, and who cares about any school children who receive bomb threats along the way?
It’s just a joke! Don’t get so triggered, liberals! Why so serious?
The Penguin begins his own journey along more antiheroic tropes. He is an underdog, and while it’s clear that his lies are ubiquitous and sociopathic from the beginning, we root for him because he comes from a similar background to Arthur. He’s easy to applaud as the antithesis to the opulence of the Falcone family. He’s dirty in a way that poverty dirties everyone it touches; his grimier aspects are not something our modernity rejects, but something it connects to and empathizes with as we too scrounge in the dirt in envy of the wealthy. Oswald also loves his mother and takes as his ward the young Victor, allegedly sharing a journey to transcend their lot as all of us yearn to. He could easily have been a nuanced hero.
But Oswald Cobb(lepot) is a villain. He murders his brothers. He murders his ward. He feels nothing for other people, even the ones he’s convinced us he does. He keeps his mother alive in her vegetative state despite her wishes in order to fulfill the dream that he has projected onto her. It’s always been his dream, not hers. The Penguin does not understand how to connect to other people, only how to fake it well enough for the cameras. We are comfortingly assured otherwise because he is a very convincing grifter, and the pathway to power that he sees as the most efficient is the one where he aligns himself with the working class. There is not a single revolutionary bone in his body, only frigid calculus. His populist deed to restore power to Crown Point was done only for his own ends and adjacent benefits toward others were not considered; Victor’s enthusiastic gratitude appears to genuinely confuse him before he catches himself and finds a way to take advantage of that edge. There is no ambiguity to The Penguin. He is clearly an unapologetic monster, and Sophia Falcone’s sarcastic scoff at him being a Man of the People is illuminating in how obvious it is in its falsehood.
The kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with!
Where Joker is a representation of Trumpism and its followers, The Penguin is emblematic of the man himself. Trump was certainly never working class, nor has he had to work hard to elevate himself above his station, but the sociopathic exploitation of working class consciousness to raise himself to grotesque power is clear. Oswald Cobblepot in the comics is an established elite, as wealthy as Bruce Wayne, but he doesn’t need to be in the show to be comparable to the president-elect because his methods are identical, regardless of his background. A grifter by any other pedigree would sound as sweet. In a broken world, the Penguin takes advantage in a way that people are desperate for. They want him to be what he’s pretending to be because they see his elevation as their own. If Oswald wins, then Victor wins – the grift only becoming obvious when the life is strangled out of him. Trump’s own escalating lies put Penguin’s to shame, but despite their obvious contradiction to reality, people cling to them as a life preserver on a sinking ship. The delusion of his proffered transcendence is a siren’s song. But they are villains; they’re both only in it for themselves.
What’s not to trust?
Villainy has certainly evolved over time. Nowadays, damsels can manage their own distress, and devils only exist in fantasy. But monsters still exist, and understanding our world means understanding the monsters that it creates. We live under the exploitation of the elites. We are, as individuals, powerless to stop them. How will we choose to respond to this? Will we gaze too long into the abyss and become monsters ourselves? Or will we settle into passive reverence at the feet of the devil, spellbound by his honeyed lies?
On its face, the maxim of never giving up is fairly straight forward and positive. Life is hard, and quitting doesn’t move you forward. Simple. Easy. No notes. However, being pointlessly analytical is what we do here, so there will be notes regardless.
This maxim has undergone some helpful iterations for our purposes here: comedian W.C. Fields cleverly rephrased it as, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” This approach offers further practicality; what’s the point in carrying on when there are very likely better things to do with your time? One who only ever tilts at windmills will never slay a real giant. However, there is a tragic, quixotic romance to a life spent fixated on a single task but never quite achieving it. This begs the question, is it the effort or the success being championed by this arbitrary New Year’s adage?
I don’t think I remember this boss in Elden Ring
If you make a pass at someone that you’ve got a crush on and they reject you, there is a clear failure and an opportunity to try, try again. However, is this an opportunity for further clichés about fishes and the sea, or do you continue to try to woo that same individual? In most other instances, further attempts are dedicated to the same task until one achieves success, but with dating, the obvious alternative is bringing your courtship to the feet of another. Tasks are often amorphous and don’t always intuitively direct where efforts ought to go irrespective of how we might have perceived their conclusion. If we attempt a hobby like playing guitar and can’t get the hang of it, is it quitting if we pick up another instrument? Another hobby? Even if we wanted to quit to avoid the embarrassment of being a damn fool, how do we know what that quitting looks like?
Or perhaps we fail, and in that failure, we succeed in alternative terms. Perhaps the one that got away ends up murdering their spouse in a jealous rage, or after abandoning the guitar, we pick up badminton and find an ecstasy unknown in any other pursuit. We have further cheap platitudes about blessings in disguise, and these remind us that our expectation and understanding of failure are often incomplete.
Better than sex!
Or say we succeed in traditional terms: we successfully woo the loved one, or we nail the guitar. But then the relationship doesn’t work out because they cheat on us, or we don’t keep up the effort and lose the guitar in the attic. At what point does success bleed into failure? Is Rudy a success because he participated in a single play for Notre Dame? Would it have been an equal success if he played more games at a different university? Or if he dedicated his life to a longer-term goal beyond a single game of football? If a Rudy-esque success story never accomplished anything else in their life because of a massive concussion obtained from a late tackle, would it still be considered a ‘success’?
We attribute failure and success to an end, with varying degrees of effort as the means to achieve that end. But the thing about life is that nothing ever ends. Even after death our actions continue to have ripple effects on the lives of those we’ve touched. Both success and failure become nearly impossible to define if you zoom out to any meaningful degree. Quitting too loses some of its gravitas when you realize that it invariably leads to yet another task. Our lives are not a series of distinct instances, each with their own measurable quality, but a churning river in constant flow. Success and failure are fluid, and intermingle together almost harmoniously as we evolve and grow in ways that are often outside of our control.
Maybe he should have just stuck to football
As much as he is a fool, we would still admire the tenacity of our single-minded Don Quixote, just as we would still admire Rudy if he never got to play for Notre Dame. What distinction is there really between Sisyphus rolling one boulder up a mountain or rolling several different boulders up a mountain? Does it matter if he makes it to the top, or do we imagine Sisyphus happy in the effort?
Camus’s absurd hero only loses credibility if the heart isn’t in it. A child making a play at trying a new food after having predetermined it to be gross is the antithesis to effort, and some never grow out of this. Whether in success or in failure, the try, try again requires intention. All told, the outcome is irrelevant if we approach our effort in good faith.
If The Myth of Sisyphus seems horribly outdated, remember there are still people today who only find real meaning in lifting up heavy things only to drop them back down again
Our original maxim, despite its superficial benignancy, is itself a quixotic drive at damming the river of life into a forced end. There are no ends; there is only trying. If you fail, continue to try. If you succeed, continue to try. Try to date whomever you please. Try the guitar or badminton. Try to joust a literal windmill. Do so with intention, or quit and find something where the intention is strongest. The ends will never matter so long as you find value in the effort.
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