Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I just re-watched the Todd Phillips' Joker movie last night and was pondering how "easy" it is to get the audience to root for a schizophrenic murderer. I say "easy" because I think it is a masterful film, but still, shouldn't the audience be insurmountably revolted by the Joker?

Taken solely by their on camera presentations, Thomas Wayne, Murray, and the police seem pretty reasonable people. However, this is overshadowed by the screen time and depth given to the joker.[1] The audience might briefly wonder if they deserve to die, but before that question can sink in, the plot advances, and the question is forgotten. It is easy to see how time, perspective, speed, and narrative saturation drive emotion.

I think our modern political environment has a lot of parallels. It is all thinking fast and no thinking slow.

[1] Aside, I think it is a great example of cinematic dissonance, where multiple meanings are intentionally or unintentionally layered. Eneaz Brodski had a great article about that introduced me to the term: https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/cinemanarrative-dissonance...

I think you can convince just about anyone to hate given time and the right circumstances, but it's even easier IMO when it is prescribed to groups. Then in-group dynamics reinforce the behavior.

Yeah, that’s the beauty of it. within two hours, the movie has convinced the audience that a delusional murderer is their ingroup, society at large is their outgroup, and we should rejoice as the world burns and innocents are killed.

They're not rooting for a schizophrenic murderer, they're rooting for an agent of chaos and antihero who represents their own alienation, frustration and hatred of "the system," a need for catharsis in a world that won't allow them praxis. That interpretation of the Joker has been around for a long time.

I mean, America was founded by people who thought the government should be risen up against and torn down with violence every other decade, just to keep things spicy. And that was the rich, white, Christian gentry that the American political system was created to empower and protect. Just imagine how women, non-Christians, non-white immigrants and black people, indigenous people, gay and transgendered people, and everyone else for whom that system has been at best callous and indifferent and at worse actively malicious feels.

A misanthropic hatred of society and its constructs is hard-coded into the American zeitgeist, by way of the sanctifying of revolutionary violence as a virtue by the Second Amendment and the ideals of the founders. "Hatred" in this sense has been the primary engine by which America has been forced, incrementally and often against its own instincts, to live up to its own ideals, and the more "free" America becomes, the more the hatred of America and its own hypocrisy and self-contradiction spreads. This is nothing new, it's always been there.

> America was founded by people who thought the government should be risen up against and torn down with violence every other decade

What? Source?

Constant violent transfers of power was a very minority view.

Read the letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Smith about Shay's rebellion, where we get the prosaic notion of watering the Tree of Liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots.

He thought the rebellion was an act of ignorance and failure of society to properly educate and inform the populace, but also felt that regular rebellion itself was necessary for any democracy, and shouldn't even be a crime. Essentially, he wanted to normalize the French Revolution as a regular facet of civil society.

Obviously that point of view didn't make it into the framework of the state (apart from, arguably, the Second Amendment) and the same government that created the Second Amendment put Shay's rebellion down, but the ideal has become a foundational part of American culture and beliefs about the nature of liberty and government as inherently hostile to liberty.

> the letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Smith about Shay's rebellion

Nothing in Jefferson’s letter suggests a revolution every other decade, he simply states a preference for insurrection more frequently than “every century and a half” [1]. He also refers to insurrection in general, not French Revolutions; Jefferson supported executing Robespierre for his brutality [2].

In short, one founder believed in insurrection more frequently than every 15 decades. He decried brutal violence in even revolutions he supported. And he joined a government that rejected the notion of violent insurrection.

America was not “founded by people who thought the government should be risen up against and torn down with violence every other decade.”

[1] https://shaysrebellion.stcc.edu/shaysapp/person.do?shortName...

[2] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-28-02-0...

I’m not particularly looking for a debate, and think most of what we are picking up on is compatible. I agree that their frustration is the key, but find it fascinating that they will accept the delusion and murder in their agent of change. That their cynicism and frustration is enough to overlook the mayhem rape and murder, and it's consequences for their future.

I don’t think I’m as cynical about the innate American spirit, or its exceptionalism. I think these are common human sentiments that wax and wane in different cultures at different times. I think it often be attenuated by factors and narratives outside one’s own hardships, or lack theirof.

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