In early October, Joker hit theaters to both critic and audience acclaim, smashing box office expectations worldwide, and even earning itself a few Oscar nods despite it’s dark (and often uncomfortable) exploration of violence and madness. 

But, in the wake of the controversies ignited by the film regarding copycat violence, yet another debate has emerged. This one surrounding comments made by Joker’s director, Todd Phillips (The Hangover trilogy, Old School, War Dogs).  

In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Phillips was questioned about his departure from comedic filmmaking in favour of more serious projects like Joker. To this, he replied: 

Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture. There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore — I’ll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’ 

Phillips further clarified his journey into dramatic cinema by adding: 

It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, ‘I’m out.’ I’m out, and you know what? With all my comedies — I think that what comedies, in general, all have in common — is they’re irreverent. So I go, ‘How do I do something irreverent, but fuck comedy? Oh I know, let’s take the comic book movie universe and turn it on its head with this.’ And so that’s really where that came from.

The Opposition Weighs In 

On the heels of these comments Marc Maron, who flexed his acting chops in a supporting role in Joker, was first to give his two cents. On his WTF podcast, Maron said:

If you like to ride a line, you can still ride a line. If you want to take chances, you can still take chances. Really, the only thing that’s off the table, culturally, at this juncture—and not even entirely—is shamelessly punching down for the sheer joy of hurting people. For the sheer excitement and laughter that some people get from causing people pain, from making people uncomfortable, from making people feel excluded.

Maron, a prolific stand-up comic with a career spanning three decades, went on to say:

No one’s telling you that you can’t say things or do things. It’s just that it’s going to be received a certain way by certain people, and you’re going to have to shoulder that. And if you’re isolated, or marginalized or pushed into a corner because of your point of view or what you have to say, yet you still have a crew of people that enjoy it, there you go. Those are your people.

The debate set in motion by Phillips v. Maron has become a call-to-arms for other celebrities to weigh in. Comedian Nick Kroll (The League, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks & Rec.) sided with Maron’s camp when he stated in a recent interview, “I think you can still make big crazy hard jokes of all sorts. And I think you have to be maybe more thoughtful in how you make them and who the targets of those jokes are.” 

Director Taika Watiti (What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok) re-tweeted Phillips’ Vanity Fair interview, captioning the post simply, “LOL he funny.” The tweet comes in the wake of Watiti’s latest work, Jojo Rabbit, which premiered early last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film is described as a coming-of-age satire with a heart. It follows a German boy who wrestles with an existential conflict after discovering a Jewish girl in his attic. Once a devout Nazi Youth, the boy is now forced to question his beliefs, assisted only by his imaginary friend—Adolf Hitler. That’s right. Hitler. A clumsy, pep-talking, lovable Hitler, played by Watiti himself. The film won the coveted People’s Choice Award at TIFF. 

Clearly, Watiti knows a thing or two about doing irreverence the right way.

Paris, who himself is no stranger to life’s grittier side, went on to talk about the catharsis that comes from irreverence, stating:

I have a brother with special needs and I’ve watched somebody struggle their entire life to just do every day things that anybody else would be able to do. He loves when I make fun of him. I have so many jokes about him and in a lot of ways, it’s healing. I’m a firm believer that if you can talk about something and make a joke about it you can get through it. It makes you stronger than whatever you’re going through.

By Paris’ estimation, comedy is not just an acceptable way to deal with the shittier shades of existence—it’s necessary. In fact, laughter itself may be the best lubricant to open a discussion between opposing sides. It’s certainly easier to keep an open mind when we don’t take ourselves so seriously.

So has the tide of ‘woke culture’ really cleared the comedic table of anything that risks being offensive? Or is Phillips simply overreacting to a mild and well-intentioned cultural phenomenon? Well, the first question to ask is: what exactly is woke culture? 

Scottsboro Boys

The earliest recorded instance of the term comes from a song by American blues artist, Lead Belly. On his 1938 track, Scottsboro Boys, Lead Belly describes a series of true and horrific events that occurred beginning in 1931. Nine African-American boys, between 13 and 20 years old, were falsely accused or raping two white women while riding a train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tenneessee. 

The trial was held in Scottsboro, Alabama, where the case was immediately marked by anti-black sentiments: A lynch mob was organized even before the boys had been indicted and an all-white jury was selected for the hearings. Three trials were held and each was rushed; the jury readily found eight of the nine boys guity of raping the two woman, and sentenced them to death. 

After a series of interventions from all manner of organizations (ranging from the Communist Party and the NAACP, to the United States Supreme Court), the case was appealed—to varying degrees of success. Even today, nearly a century later, the case still stands as a particularly glaring miscarriage of justice in the U.S. legal system. At the end of the eponymous track, Lead Belly warns listeners, “I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go along through there, stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

The term re-emerged in black activist circles in 1962 following an article penned by William Melvin Kelley for the New York Times entitled, ‘If You’re Woke You Dig It.’ In 2010, it was adopted into mainstream speak through memes (yes, memes), before ultimately being politically repurposed by Black Lives Matter in 2014. Today, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines it as, “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

At its most fundamental, then, the term is a credo to stay vigilant of the injustices happening all around you, though not necessarily to you; to be aware that not everyone’s life comes prepackaged with the same privileges as your own; to try and level the playing field for everyone. 

Beyond the stilted and divisive political framework it now inhabits, wokeness is a call for empathy. But not just any empathy, wokeness beckons for a very particular form of it. An empathy that is both cognitive and action-oriented, with unerring focus on the underdog’s plight. Is that something the world could use more of? Yes. Does that come with its own set of problems? Equally yes.

Jesus, Take the Wheel

If you’ve driven a car before, you know what it’s like: That split second of inattention and you start to drift into oncoming traffic… What did you do? Well, if you’re reading this now, you took notice before anything fatal happened, swore a few times, and reflexively jerked the wheel back. In fact, you likely jerked the wheel a bit too hard, overshooting your lane and almost swerving into the guardrail. It’s called an over-corrective movement and requires a series of smaller movements back and forth to steady the vehicle. 

Culturally, we’re witnessing a similar phenomenon. Unquestioned powers are now being challenged, and mostly for the good. But, in the process of course correcting our mores and norms, it’s only natural we’ve gone a bit too far. 

As philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcaster Sam Harris has frequently pointed out: forgiveness is nearly impossible in our call-out culture (think: Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart and Louis C.K). Maybe a little less wokeness and a little more empathy if we’re going to steer clear of the guardrail.

Where Phillips and Paris get it right is in calling out the more radical purveyors of the wokeness movement, many of whom seem more bent on being outraged than on opening a productive dialogue. As is usually the case, the most opinionated voices tend to be the loudest, and the social media ecosystem has given these advocates a platform with unchecked (and often undeserved) reach. The result is an over-representation of certain ideologies not reflected in the general population. 

Why? Because moderates prefer to bite their tongue than challenge the zealous, with whom it’s clear no compromise can be made. For better or for worse, that is simply the price of democratizing thought. Maybe a little less wokeness and a little more empathy is in order if we’re going to steer clear of the guardrail.

Individuals Are Smart, People Are Stupid

But the opposition is also correct. You really can still say irreverent things, so long as you’ve got the nerve for it and can execute it tastefully. As Maron points out, “If you’re too intimidated to try to do comedy that is deep or provocative, or even a little controversial, without hurting people, then you’re not good at what you do. Or maybe you’re just insensitive.” 

And look around! We still have our Joe Rogans. We still have our Dave Chapelles. And we still have our Bill Burrs, who himself recently took aim at the #metoo movement, feminism, and Michelle Obama in his recent Netflix special, Paper Tiger. If that’s not irreverent, I don’t know what is. 

But Burr gets away with it despite his crude delivery because he still manages to make himself the butt of the joke. The same formula applies to South Park and Family Guy. The trick isn’t not to ‘punch down.’ It’s to punch everybody. Hard. Isn’t that real equality?

By making fun of everyone, you signal to audiences that your goal isn’t to take sides or to score points. It isn’t about calling attention to how stupid a movement or an idea or a group is, but to call attention to how stupid people can be. 

I think Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Men in Black said it best: Individuals are smart, people are stupid. And while we still have a long road ahead of us, it doesn’t hurt to laugh along the way. In fact, it might even help.

For many of us, Rotten Tomatoes is our go-to when deciding whether or not to see a particular movie. As a frequent and shameless user myself, I recently looked up the Joker to see if my own estimation of the film jived with what people were saying. And I discovered something strange.

As of today, Joker holds an 89% rating on RT, which pretty much reflects my own opinion of the film. But that’s just the audience score. Next to that is the critic consensus, which carries a dismal meta-rating of 68%—a 21% difference. 

By itself, such a wide discrepancy between audience and critics is not unusual; critics tend to score artistically unoriginal films lower, while viewers typically base their judgment on sheer entertainment value. Basically, critics are more cerebral, while viewers are more visceral. Take, for instance, the first installment of The Fast and The Furious. It received a flopping 53% critic score, but still earned itself a respectable 74% from audiences, also a 21% difference. 

So what gives here? For a film like Joker to earn the same critic-audience split as The Fast and The Furious, either Rotten Tomatoes is badly broken or something else is at play. Thankfully, it turns out to be the latter (rest easy, Rotten Tomatoes user). 

Social Responsibility Versus Professional Responsibility

Even before Joker premiered in October, fears of copycat violence were widespread. Well-intentioned critics, whose sense of social responsibility outweighed their sense of professional responsibility, had already made up their minds: they would not endorse this kind of movie.

But maybe the movie just isn’t that good? Consider that when Joker first premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, it received an eight-minute standing ovation and took home first prize—enough said. What we are left with, then, is a general sense of fear and uncertainty amongst critics: What am I saying if I endorse this film? What will happen? Will I be responsible if something does happen?

This reluctance is rooted in an understandable desire to keep one’s hands clean in the event of copycat violence—a self-protective measure more than anything else. In fact, I’m not even sure what else the motive could be. Do critics need to feel comfortable endorsing the main character’s behaviour before endorsing the film as a whole? Have these two things somehow become one? 

Or is a bad review actually a strategic move? A sort of preemptive strike to deter people from watching the film, one of whom might be the next sleeper-cell shooter, just waiting to have their hazy ideologies clarified by Joker’s descent into madness. 

But perhaps, more than anything else, bad reviews are simply a show of solidarity.

Shortly after Kelly’s press conference, Colorado district attorney George Brauchler publicly stated, “It never happened.” Regarding the persistence of the rumor, Brauchler added, “Of course the crazy-hair-colored guy who shot up the Batman premiere thought he was the Joker, of course! And yet it has no connection to reality.”

 Dr. William Reid, the psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Holmes’ mental health during the trial, said, “When I asked Holmes about him dying his hair red, he said, ‘Well, my friend dyed his blue, so I said I’d dye mine too and I just picked red.’” As if that weren’t enough to dispel the copycat theory, Dr. Reid went on to say, “[Holmes] said that the first he heard of the Joker idea was [from] somebody in another cell. He heard calling back and forth, ‘Hey, you’re the Joker,’ or something like that.”

Dr. Reid, who later published a book on the subject entitled, A Dark Night in Aurora, explains how Holmes simply chose this particular film screening because it was almost certain to be packed full of people: “He was just looking for a blockbuster, right? Had this been Jurassic World, he’d have been there. Had it been Avengers: Endgame, he’d have been there. He picked that movie simply because it was guaranteed to be full.” 

And yet the myth persists, and solidarity follows.

Strap Ideas to Your Chest & Load Your Pistols with Words

In a recent interview with Joaquin Phoenix, Popcorn host Peter Travers asked, “Is this movie too violent? Can it make other people violent?” To which Joaquin replied, “According to my research, talking about it is irresponsible […]. There was a vast increase in these particular types of crimes after 1963. And that year, there started an unprecedented amount of news coverage about these crimes. And so, people that commit these crimes—this personality type—they seek personal notoriety, they seek personal recognition. That is what they thrive on.”

Regarding the film’s media controversy, Phoenix added, “I don’t think that that’s helpful, and I understand people feel like they’re being the responsible ones, but I don’t think that’s true. And I think the evidence is to the contrary.”  

He concluded by saying, “I don’t think movies influence people that way. I don’t think they cause homicidal ideation […]. The conversation around them can be dangerous.”

Similarly, when Marilyn Manson appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly confronted the artist, challenging him about his possible influence leading up to the Columbine massacre. O’Reilly wondered whether it was possible that “disturbed kids” might interpret his lyrics to mean, “when I’m dead everybody’s going to know me.” To this, Manson responded:

Well, I think that’s a very valid point and I think that it’s a reflection of, not necessarily this programme but of television in general, that if you die and enough people are watching you become a martyr, you become a hero, you become well-known. So when you have these things like Columbine, and you have these kids who are angry and they have something to say and no one’s listening, the media sends a message that says if you do something loud enough and it gets our attention then you will be famous for it. Those kids ended up on the cover of Time magazine twice, the media gave them exactly what they wanted. That’s why I never did any interviews around that time when I was being blamed for it because I didn’t want to contribute to something that I found to be reprehensible.

This flips the discussion on its head: Could talking about the potential ‘danger’ the film (or Manson’s music) poses actually be the real danger? Could it be the lust for fame and recognition and martyrdom, and not a simple case of monkey-see-monkey-do, that inspires these acts of violence? Are all those well-meaning critics unwittingly contributing to the potential for copycats?  

Blame the Video Games (It’s Easier!)

For those old enough to remember the Columbine shooting, the media’s reaction to the Holmes incident was an eerie deja-vu. Simply swap Marilyn Manson’s music for Ledger’s Joker and presto! you’ve got yourself a motive. Right? 

Wrong.

In the aftermath of such horrible events, it’s only natural to look for reasons, to search for the why behind the what. It’s symptomatic of our need to restore order where there has been chaos. If we can elucidate the complex personalities of these mentally unstable killers; if we can find the root cause for their destructive ambitions; if we can pin it on something real and tangible and blame-able in the world—then maybe we can prevent it from happening again. 

We are quick to sacrifice nuance at the feet of closure. When it comes to trying to understand something so foreign and disturbing, we prefer black-and-white explanations. Scapegoats like angry music, violent video games and, now, gritty dramas provide us with all the fodder necessary, even though classic studies like Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment have been discredited.

What’s baffling is that most days we can hardly understand ourselves: Why did I just do/say that? Why am I acting like this? Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I be happy? And yet, we so easily dismiss mass shooters as nothing more than the product of violent entertainment. How foolish can we be?

Of course, the alternative—to admit that it’s impossible to ever really know someone else’s mind—is an express train to existential angst. Unfortunately, that may be the only viable option we have. Unless we can learn to confront the complexity of human psychology head on, our understanding will never mature past hard-and-fast fallacies. 

For now, perhaps the best place to start is by simply treating a movie as a movie.