Fear of a White Joker: When Did the Left Stop Caring About Crime's Root Causes?


Samuel Forster
Samuel Forster
5 min read

Todd Phillips’s Joker is one of the most culturally significant films in recent memory. It has been praised and attacked with a fervency that is rarely inspired by the mainstream fruits of Hollywood. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a modern blockbuster that has generated such attention and concern. Virtually every major media outlet has published some extended commentary on the work, whether it be a film review of the standard format (which are now rare) or an impassioned op-ed delineating how the film is either the cause or consequence of some terrible social phenomenon. Inevitably, the word “Trump” appears early and often.

The film tells the origin story of the Joker, a prominent supervillain in the Batman fictional universe. It traces the tale of a failed comedian named Arthur Fleck who, afflicted by bullying and mental instability, turns to a life of crime and sadism. To progressive members of the literati, the phenomenon of interest is the omnipresent sociopathy of the white male, in all its sexual repression, social ostracization and malignant cruelty. Though nearly identical attitudes are easily found at Vice, CNN and numerous other outlets, Richard Lawson’s take in Vanity Fair exemplifies the perspective most forcefully:




Lawson goes on:


Of course, some of the people interested in this sort of “woebegone mythos” include lifelong students of psychology, neuroscience and criminology—subjects that (don’t tell Lawson!) they still teach in schools. Yet even so, Lawson is a gifted writer. And it is worth understanding why Joker makes him feel uncomfortable. The spectacle of so many prominent writers demanding that we suppress our understanding of criminal violence, rather than nourish it, represents, at the very least, a terrible waste of journalistic talent.

Imagine if a different attitude were taken. Joker forces the viewer to undergo a rare inversion of perspective—an uneasy blurring of lines between hero and villain that seriously threatens to subvert popular notions of responsibility. Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix) demands sympathy. (This is the fact that upsets Lawson.) As his backstory is developed, and as he is revealed to be the unlucky inheritor of an absolutely terrible deck of cards—genetically, environmentally and socioeconomically—Fleck’s descent into erratic, violent behaviour becomes easier to understand and accept. He is somebody who, through no real fault of his own, is pushed to the breaking point. This is the sort of instructive lesson in “root causes” that progressive advocates of criminal-justice reform have properly emphasized for generations.

To view the Joker’s behaviour as evil, full stop, is natural: From early in life, fairy tales teach us to divide the world into good and bad. But Lawson is not a child, and Vanity Fair isn’t a book of fairy tales. A grown adult should be able to denounce criminal violence while recognizing that the personal characteristics that cause antisocial behaviour are not elected at birth, nor (typically) elected at any point thereafter. In a tale for children, such as the Harry Potter stories, we instinctively view the perpetrator of evil (Voldemort) as depraved rather than despairing. But again, Joker is a movie for adults. And so it is incumbent on adult viewers—especially those who present as professional critics—to push their reflex beyond the level of pointing at the screen and saying “bad man.”

Many books and movies with action themes provide at least some glancing reference to the villain’s back story. But Joker goes much further: It portrays Fleck’s background in painstaking detail. The film chronicles the life of a man pushed by the cold, heartless universe to do things that any normal person would see as unequivocally evil. When the totality of his experiences is presented, it becomes more difficult to authoritatively condemn him. At root, our conflicted response gets to the heart of the age-old philosophical question of whether free will, good and evil can even exist in a deterministic universe. None of this has anything to do with race, except in the mind of a person who walks into a movie theater already obsessed with the question of skin colour.

None of this is entirely new. Fyodor Dostoyevsky challenged Christian morality with his nuanced presentation of such themes in Crime and Punishment over 150 years ago. But film, especially good film, is a more accessible, intense and haunting medium, and therefore its impact on the world is much more decisive. Moreover, the Lawsons of the world know it to be more accessible, intense and haunting, and so tend to become fearful and agitated at the thought that a popular movie might further the spread of heterodox thinking. It is the same sort of moral panic that inflamed Christian culture critics who found themselves horrified by the contents of heavy-metal music lyrics.

Fifty years ago, the place of Lawson would have been taken up by a conservative who worried that a sympathetic portrayal of a black man who lapsed into criminality might subvert the public appetite for law-and-order policies. Both types of moralists—progressive and conservative alike—hinder our pursuit of policies that are utilitarian, and which encourage us to supplant our instinct for retribution and cosmic justice with a concern for public safety and a commitment to address the roots of criminality (including poverty, trauma, addiction and mental health). This is the path toward a more humane and safe society. And writers such as Lawson would realize that if their moral understanding of the world ever escapes the Manichean universe of black and white.

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