**SPOILER ALERT**
In Todd Phillips’ highly stylized psychological movie-thriller, “JOKER”, we see the anti-hero, Arthur Fleck, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, pass through a series of personal epiphanies about his own identity & life experiences.
To say the guy’s life—up until the movie’s time sequence begins …has been terrible, is a true kindergarten euphemism.
Fleck is just barely hanging on to reality. He has no past, and no future. His internal dialog is largely about his own existential suffering, while trying to make ends meet on a daily basis as he cares for his invalid mother.
All of this is set in Gotham, the gritty urban nihilism reeking of a Sartrean nightmare about humanity’s worse impulses. No wonder they needed Batman. Scott Silver’s screenplay perfectly matches the backdrop of cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s Gotham.
It’s a Hobbesian world that resonates with today’s uber-sensitive, perpetually outraged millennials, who’ve decided to eschew mental toughness because Mommy & Daddy said it wasn’t necessary.
Except Fleck doesn’t have that spoiled middle-class luxury; his time is rapidly running out. But circumstances conspire to allow Arthur that one last epiphany, and it’s a doozie. It’s also why the American Demshevik Hard-Left has come out so strongly against this outstanding movie.
What Fleck realizes (and how he realizes), is his victimhood is a construct of some awful parenting. By this time it’s too late to start over, so he has to go forward making it up as he goes. And that’s where the thread takes us into the genesis of the Batman story.
The American Hard-Left was absolutely certain “JOKER” would spur on rogue shootings and mass riots around the country, galvanizing youth into a formidable, violent anti-Trump kind of response. Boy, did they blow that call.
If anything, “JOKER” unveils the true source of millennials’ misplaced anger against a whole litany of amorphous villains, from racism, Wall Street, sexism, homophobia, national sovereignty, global warming, et al. It’s the entire cast of Demshevik victimology baddies, and why your life sucks.
But Arthur Fleck discovers the truth: it was terrible parenting all along.
It’s probably too much to ask that MSM-brainwashed millennials will have this realization about their own lives, and strive to turn it around before it’s too late…but one can hope.
I see a tremendous opportunity here for those of us who know how difficult it is to raise successful & happy children to finally redirect this scurrilous faux victimology where it belongs.
And woe be unto the lazy, indulgent & supercilious people who raised children that have Arthur Fleck’s final insight.
Sellers is a South Park Republican who lives in Oro Valley. His background is federal tech-transfer commercialization.