You Get What You F*cking Deserve! How the Blockbuster Joker Diagnoses Our Current Predicament

In Todd Phillips’ film Joker (2019) when Arthur Fleck is humiliated, he blames himself. His mother calls him “Happy,” but that’s a tough act in the face of gig-work precarity, welfare cuts, and media that mocks him as a loser. By the movie’s end, though, Fleck stops busting his own block, and morphs into a literal blockbuster, a Joker who rouses Gothamites to riot, to bust up city blocks. In this lecture, we’ll grip the visual vocabulary of Joker—the trash bags, the porn marquee, the feather dusters and spinning signs—to ask how late capitalism undercuts democratic and meritocratic ideals, only to unleash conspiracism, toxic masculinity, carnival violence, and authoritarian attraction. We’ll also ask: what can the clowns do about it?

Bio: James McNaughton is Professor of English at the University of Alabama. His nonfiction has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Southern Cultures, and elsewhere. He’s the author of Samuel Beckett and…