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Oct. 9, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:21
JOKER Revealed: Crazier Than You Think!
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Let us take to the woods the darkening light and speak of madness, my friends.
Because the Close Encounters monoburn of perhaps justified internet criticism has landed upon my visage regarding my review of the movie The Joker.
And I want to make a little bit of a case for this and have you understand that the movie...
It's crazier than you think.
So, in the review that I did, there's going to be some spoilers to this, but in the review that I did...
Oh, by the way, just look at this lovely sunset.
Ah, nature is a treasure to be enjoyed, I hope for you every day.
So, this was my case.
In the movie, Arthur Fleck, the Joker to be...
He's brutalized as a child by the boyfriends that his mother brings home.
He's beaten half to death, he's given permanent neurological damage, he's chained to radiators, he's starved, he's whipped, you name it, right?
And so my argument was that one of the reasons why he's stuck in this More true force loneliness than incel, but while he's stuck in this sexless life, it's because he doesn't want to be a bad guy, but his mother has proven to him that only bad guys get laid.
This is the first imprinting, right?
Only bad guys get laid.
He doesn't want to be a bad guy, so he's stuck in a sexless life.
Now, After he kills a couple of guys, he goes and bangs this woman named Sophie.
She is the single mom down the hallway of his dilapidated apartment building.
Now, people said to me, a number of you said to me, and I appreciate the feedback, they said, dude, you've got it totally wrong.
Totally wrong, my friend.
The relationship that he has with Sophie is It's just a fantasy.
It's a delusion. It's not real.
And they quote that because at one point, Arthur is in her apartment and she says, you know, hey, aren't you, Arthur, that guy down the hall?
Is your mom home? Or something like that.
Thus indicating to many people that he never had a relationship with this woman.
It was all made up in his mind.
Now... We've got to delve a little bit into artistic license and structure of art.
It sounds dull.
I hope it does not dull.
If you've heard this stuff, absolutely fascinating.
And I'm going to deploy, for those of you who don't know, I have a kind of an artistic background.
I... I was trained as an actor and a playwright at Canada's elite national theatre school.
They take like one out of every hundred people who apply.
And I've written like 30 plays, half a dozen novels, hundreds of poems.
And so I know a little bit about how to structure a story.
And I know a little bit about these conventions.
And you need to sort of understand these conventions to know the difference between first person, third person, and the whole problem of what's called the unreliable narrator.
Now, the unreliable narrator is someone who turns out to be lying in the story, right?
Right? Now, there's a couple of ways to structure stories, and movies are just about the newest.
Slightly older than movies are novels.
Novels are only a couple of hundred years old as an art form.
Now, novels take place generally either first person or third person.
So first person is, I did this, I thought that, I noticed that, I saw that.
And third person is, you know, he went and talked to her, she said this, and so on, right?
Now, the third person often has what's called the omniscient narrator.
Now, the omniscient narrator...
Is the narrator who knows everything and can even tell you things that the characters never tell each other.
So, sort of simple example, in The Hobbit, there is a dragon in the novel The Hobbit by Tolkien.
There's a dragon named Smaug.
Now, Smaug, at one point, has a dream about a knife, a knight with a sharp sword.
Now, he never tells anyone this dream, and he dies shortly after.
So how on earth would we know that Smorg had this dream if he never told anyone and he died?
Well, because the narrator knows everything and the narrator can float into the mind of Smorg and tell us what's going on there and so on, right?
It's the omniscient narrator. Now, the omniscient narrator generally can't be a liar, right?
Because they're omniscient, so they can't really lie.
Individuals within the story may lie.
But you can't, as the narrator, also lie about the characters that you're talking about.
So you can't say about a character, like a character can lie and say, I'm six foot when he's only 5'11", right?
But you can't, as the narrator, introduce a character as a dwarf and then later say, actually he was seven feet tall.
Because if you're the omniscient narrator, you can't really lie about things.
That's not how fiction works, right?
So, movies are even tougher to get away with with unreliable narrators than books are, because movies have a kind of implicit objectivity to them, because they're showing you things that actually occur at because movies have a kind of implicit objectivity to them, because they're showing you things that actually occur at least on the movie set, and therefore it kind of translates into your mind as And the same thing is true of plays, right?
So, in Hamlet, Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, but nobody else can see it, right?
So, but the audience can see it, which means that the audience is more likely to believe that there's something real that's going on.
In other words, if it's a complete psychotic delusion that Hamlet is having regarding his father, then the audience shares in that psychotic delusion, and Hamlet then becomes an unreliable narrator.
Now, here's the interesting thing about all of this.
My argument was that Arthur Fleck banged a single mom after he killed some guys because his mother had taught him that violent men get sex.
And unless you're a violent man, you don't get sex.
Now, let's say that everyone on the internet who said this is right, and I'm totally wrong.
And that the relationship with the woman was completely imaginary.
Please understand, that doesn't change my argument at all.
That doesn't change my thesis one teeny tiny little bit.
The thesis remains the same.
So let's say that the argument, that the relationship with Sophie the single mom was completely imaginary, never happened, totally took place in his own mind.
Well, the fact is he still had the association of you kill some guys and you get to have sex with a woman.
In fact, you could say that my thesis is even stronger if it was an imaginary relationship, in the same way that a dream reveals more about a person than even their waking statements, because there's a kind of honesty in a dream that doesn't often happen in one's waking life.
So first, this is important.
I mean, if I'm wrong and the relationship didn't happen, it doesn't change the thesis of what I was talking about at all.
In fact, it makes it stronger. But here's the thing.
So think about the movie or the...
It's one of the first movies I reviewed on this show, even a little bit after The Godfather.
But anyway, the movie American Psycho.
It was a novel by Bret Easton Ellis.
Now, in American Psycho, it's all the spoilers.
There's a case to be made in American Psycho that the main character, the murderer, didn't actually kill anyone.
It was just his fever fantasy, right?
Okay. Well, fine.
Then you can get away with that because there's not a prequel to a later story.
But the Joker, being set in this Batman universe, is a prequel to a later character.
Now that makes things very different, my friends.
Very different indeed. Because if you have an unreliable narrator in the form of the Joker...
Then who knows what's real in the movie, right?
Because once you've broken that convention, then you can argue that nothing's real.
You can argue he never killed anyone.
You can argue because he talks to the black social worker, the woman.
He talks to this woman at the beginning of the movie, who's a social worker, a psychologist, or whatever.
And then he talks to another black woman who's a socialist, a social worker or psychologist at the end of the movie when he's in an asylum.
So maybe the entire movie takes place and he's in an asylum the whole time and he never has left the asylum and it's all a fever dream of murder and mayhem and the city doesn't...
Once you've broken that convention and you've said things that the audience have seen that are in the movie...
Never actually happened, then the problem is the whole thing can be a fever dream.
But it can't be a fever dream because it's the prequel about how a guy became a murderer.
So because it is a story about how a guy became a murderer, we can't say, well, the murders never happened because it's a prequel.
Like, if there's a movie about how a guy becomes a vicious anti-Semite, then his growing anti-Semitism can't be a delusion.
I mean, it can be morally wrong, but it can't be his own delusion, because he does actually end up as a vicious anti-Semite, right?
Or anti-whitist, or whatever, right?
So, we can't say that the murders were unreal.
Because then we end up in this situation where nothing's real.
Batman never exists. He's just a fever dream in the mind of the Joker.
The whole thing's a dream, and it all becomes too silly for words.
And then there's no drama, right? So that's an important understanding.
We cannot have the Joker as an unreliable narrator.
Now, when I say we can't, it's not like there's a law, you understand.
But according to sort of rational conventions of art, if we say that the relationship with Sophie never occurred except in his own mind...
Then we put into question everything else in the movie.
And that, to me, is not very good.
It's not very interesting. It's not very good art.
So let me tell you something, my friends.
There is a much crazier way to look at this whole situation.
And to me, it goes in line with the entire movie.
So the movie is about mental illness, right?
And that's not just me. And the movie is about mental illness.
He keeps talking about mental illness.
He writes about what it's like to be mentally ill.
He's in the mentally ill system.
He's on mental health meds and so on, right?
So the movie... It's about mental illness.
Now, when Arthur, the joker to be, first meets Sophie, the single mom, she's in an elevator, her charming child is chattering away, and Sophie puts a finger to her temple and pretends to shoot herself.
Now, that's a crazy, nasty, hideously abusive thing to do.
Right? Because that's your daughter there.
You don't mind killing yourself when your daughter's happily chattering away.
When she can see you.
That's hideous, right? So the mom is totally messed up.
Complete nut job. Abusive.
Nasty. Now, of course, given that Arthur is bonded with his abusive mom, of course he's going to find a woman who's abusive to be very compelling.
A woman who's destructive. A woman who's crazy, right?
So there's going to be a meeting of the minds, so to speak, a meeting of brokenness in this situation between Arthur and Sophie.
Now, when you have a convention that something turns out to be not real, generally the way that you do it, in movies at least, is you show the person who's not real from the perspective of The crazy person.
So he goes to a nightclub, he does some terrible stand-up, and she's there in the audience, right?
Sophie. So, if you were to see Sophie from Arthur Fleck's perspective, like from him, you know, up there with the microphone and the lights and so on, and then you see...
Sophie out there in the audience and nobody's interacting with her and there's no drink on her table and waitresses are all passing her by.
That'd be kind of a hint, right?
Kind of a clue. But...
In the movie, there's a very clear shot of Sophie, like in a three-quarters profile, laughing at Arthur Dent's comedy.
I'm sorry, Arthur Dent and Arthur Fleck's comedy.
And this is an indication, when you see her, not from his perspective, but from a neutral third-party perspective, like as if you're sitting next to her, that's kind of an indication that she's real, that she's really there, she's really at the comedy club.
Now, He follows her to the bank and she seems to say that she works in the bank or there's indications that she works in the bank, right?
Now if she works in a bank...
I mean, that's a fairly solid middle-class profession.
And, of course, the women in finance are single moms who are nice and sane, at least according to some parts of the narrative.
Whereas, of course, the white males who work in finance are evil people who beat up clowns on a subway.
But that's, you know, so predictable.
It's people's capacity to consume the boring and repetitive in art is kind of staggering, but that's a low-rent phenomenon.
But anyway... So the question then comes, why is Sophie, who works in a bank and therefore is making some pretty decent money, why is Sophie living in this absolute crap-hole hellscape of an apartment?
She can afford better.
She works in a bank. Right?
So why is she in this hellscape of an apartment?
Well... One argument would be that she doesn't work in a bank.
That she's just sitting on welfare.
And she doesn't work in a bank.
And that's why she lives in this hellhole.
Because she doesn't have the money. Because she doesn't work in the bank, right?
Now, let's say that she does exist.
And they do date. How could you possibly explain that she doesn't recognize it?
Well, remember... The movie is about mental illness.
And that's important, right?
The movie is about mental illness.
Then there are a number of perfectly plausible reasons as to why she might not recognize him, right?
Perfectly plausible. Look at that.
Lovely sunset. Perfectly plausible reasons why she wouldn't recognize him.
So, maybe she has severe memory problems.
Maybe she forgot that she dated him.
Maybe she has schizoaffective disorder or multiple personalities or something like that.
So in one scene, Sophie is with Arthur in the hospital.
His mom had a stroke. And Sophie says, I'm going to get a coffee.
Do you want one? He says, sure.
And then she leaves.
So maybe one personality of hers dated Arthur.
But then another personality took over in the hospital and was like, well, I don't know what we're doing here, but I guess I better head home.
Whatever, right? And so that's certainly a possibility and would fit into the mental illness theme of the movie.
It would also explain why she's living in a crap hole place, even though she's supposed to have a nice middle-class job.
So that would explain a lot, right?
There's another possibility as well, of course, which is that she does remember dating him, but she pretends she doesn't know him, knowing that he's confused and unstable.
And that's one of the final betrayals that really pushes him over the edge.
Because, you know, you can cut people, you can ghost people right to their faces, right in real life as well, right?
So, that's another possibility.
And the reason why I think that's important is that if we are going to surrender the objectivity of the movie and say, well, we now see crazy things that are going on in the Joker's mind, as if we are the Joker suffering from the same psychotic delusions, then he becomes an unreliable narrator.
Then everything in the story...
Falls into disrepute.
You can question, and the moment that you can question everything in the story, whether it's real or not, whether he's in a city, whether he killed anyone, whether he actually was a clown, whether, you know, like, the moment that you can start to really question everything.
In the movie, the movie loses its power, and it also loses its status as a prequel as to how someone became crazy and evil.
Now, can you imagine...
If the only time you let down your defenses and you got romantically involved with someone and they were there and they supported you and they seemed to care for you and they sat by you when your mom was ill in the hospital and then you go over to their place and you know the fact that he had a key that he got into the apartment and Seems to indicate that he'd have some relationship there,
but... And then the woman doesn't acknowledge you at all.
Pretends she's never met you before.
That's a... That's a Mach 12 afterburner burn, my friends.
And that would be enough, I think, to help push him over the edge, perhaps that final bet.
So I want to make a case that he's not an unreliable narrator.
That he did have a relationship with this woman and either because she's crazy or she's really mean she either couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge his presence or existence in her life as a dating partner which is pretty harsh.
Now another thing that I wanted to mention is that when he finally does recognize the evil of his mother There is a chance for freedom when you recognize evil.
It's a glimpse of an open door that is really, really important to assess and then just sprint the hell through as quickly as you can when you recognize evil.
When you recognize evil, the great temptation is to join it, right?
So he recognizes the evil of his mother, and what does he do?
He goes and kills his mother, right?
Bad idea, right?
I mean, I recognize the evil of my mother.
I recognize the violence that she was partial to from a romantic standpoint, and that didn't take any particular genius on my part.
What happened was, even from about the age of 10 or 11, my mother would describe to me the violent sexual situations that she pursued and got herself involved in.
So once you recognize this kind of evil deep down in your core, Then what you have to do, you must do, in order to escape it.
Here's the great temptation, which Arthur fell prey to in the movie, which really defined his villainy, and I don't want more villains in the world, that's why I'm telling you all of this.
But here's what you need to do.
The great temptation, when you look at a parent's villainy, in this case it's the mom, the great temptation is to say, well, that's just female nature, right?
That's just female nature.
And therefore there's no escape from this.
It's like asking women to be nine feet tall, to expect women to be different, right?
But it's not true. It's not female nature.
It's the specific choices of an immoral individual.
Specifically evil choices of an immoral individual.
It's not human nature. It's not female nature.
It's not the case at all. Now that's very painful because then you have to say, well, my mother or my father or whoever chose to be evil.
And they could have chosen differently.
So the great temptation and the temptation will be pushed upon you by whoever the evildoer is in your life or evildoers.
They will want you to become so cynical that you think it's all of human nature.
And they will also then want to redirect your anger towards something else, right?
So let me give you two scenarios, right?
So the first scenario is, well, one event, two scenarios.
So let's say you were severely malnourished as a child, right?
Sounds bad, right? But it might actually be the result of virtue.
Let's say that you're in some occupied country and food is extraordinarily hard to come by and your parents actually gave you the food out of their mouths and suffered through life with even fewer calories than you did because they wanted to help you grow and flourish and all of that, in which case your malnutrition should give you more love and respect for your parents, right? Because they sacrificed to keep you strong.
But imagine a different scenario wherein you were severely malnourished as a child, but there was more than enough food around, your parents just didn't bother feeding you, or withheld food as a form of psychotic punishment or something like that, right?
So in the first example, your malnourishment, while tragic, would not lead you to have a problem with your parents, but you would actually probably thank them for their sacrifices on your behalf, and you'd be right to do so.
In the second instance, of course, your parents did you a great immorality and should be castigated for the torture of an innocent child.
So, if you understand these two scenarios, and I'm sure you do, you understand the difference between moral accountability and a generalization.
Your parents did the best they could when there was no food around, versus your parents didn't feed you or punished you by withholding food Which was a moral choice.
They could have chosen differently.
Now, if you redefine immorality as, say, female nature...
We're talking about moms in this situation.
If you redefine female immorality, individual female immorality, as female nature, then you get to rescue your relationship with your mother.
Right? Because she was not evil.
She was just doing what women do.
Right? But, if you understand...
That there are good, strong, virtuous women in this world.
Then your mother made a choice, and that's painful as hell to understand.
But it's essential.
Arthur Fleck was viciously abused while under the care and control and custody of his mother.
And rather than say, my mother did evil, I'm going to go in pursuit of good, he believed that the world was evil, and he believed there was no such thing as virtue, really no such thing as identity.
And that's what happens when you take the evil actions of individuals and extrapolate them to some kind of general assessment of human nature or female nature.
It's a horrible injustice to all the good and virtuous people out there whose ranks you will never be able to join if you confuse them and blend them and merge them with evildoers.
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