[this is not meant in a contentious way. Just my musing]

Wasn’t the first movie also reactionary?

Or rather… It shone a sympathetic light on reactionaries. A sort of “this is why they are how they are” thing. Putting aside Joker/Arthur’s mental illness, any person tormented long enough with no hope of a better future could “snap” and go down a route like he did. The mental illness almost seems irrelevant or just an additional angle for society to attack him and drive him faster off the cliff.

But even though we see the movie through his eyes, and we are made to feel sympathy for him or others like him, in the real world we still (should?) know that “yeah, everyone who does shitty things has a reason. We don’t have to accept their reasons.”

But all of that said, I still enjoyed the first movie. It has a satisfying ending because while Arthur turns into objectively a “bad guy” and a murderer… the people he murders that we see make you go “meh 🤷‍♂️ let them fight.”

Pretty sure the movie has been compared to Taxi Driver . It gave me that vibe anyway. Guy with clearly untreated or not treated enough mental illness, a loner, rejected by society, loses his mind to a degree and hyper fixates on a popular person as a target for assassination. Obviously the stories are not the same. The vibes and overall arcs are similar. And both lend sympathy, or an explanation?, for reactionary mindset and violent behaviors.

I just don’t think any of this matters ultimately. “Culture is downstream of politics.” US politics are extremely reactionary across the board and it’s represented in our media. Libs/dumbasses (same thing) latch onto the media and hugely wrongly think the media influences the culture. Sometimes, rarely, maybe. But it’s almost always the other way around. This is something right wingers obsess over too. They think people are gay because, I dunno, a gay character was in Beauty and the Beast. They can’t comprehend that gay people always existed and there was a gay character because only at that point in time had the US culture, broadly, become accepting enough to allow a gay character to be depicted in a children’s show.

Of course the reverse argument for media changing politics would be propaganda, but that’s a bit of a different, although adjacent subject. I’m more speaking to clearly non-propagandistic pieces (like Taxi Driver, Joker, Beauty and the Beast). Right wingers would make the (wrong, objectively, imo) argument that like “all of Hollywood, etc. movies are propaganda meant to warp the minds of the youth to make them gay libbed up…” blah blah blah. That’s the weird cope conspiracy theory they have come up with, and stuck with, for decades to explain why gay people are more accepted in society, women have (well… until recently… yikes…) more and more autonomy, non-white people are represented, you know, insert whatever pisses off the WASP-types. They said it’s because of the woke movies and shows from (depending how far gone their brains are…) Hollywood (or “the Jews!” in Hollywood if they’re fully gone down the Nazi hole).

The libs already are fully ok to actively encourage or aid in shooting activists. The pro-Palestine movements in the US have shown that. If it means they can go back to sipping extra sugary lattes in peace, they’ll happily plug their ears for a moment while cops unload “less than lethal” shotgun rounds into college students and arrest all of them. I don’t think even 100 reactionary movies with Lady Gah-Gah! (trump voice) would matter. It sucks, but, I dunno. It just sucks.