Joker, Fringe Experiences and the Presumed Depravity of the Poor.
Last night (07/06/22), I watched Todd Philips 'Joker' (2019), and earlier that day, I listened to a Theory & Philosophy Podcast on the first half of Derrida's 'Of Grammatology'. Watching the film's signs and representations, looking to see if there was a subversion within them or if the subversion was not as subversive as one might first realize. Arthur Fleck's work-life is abnormal. A rental clown (with a surprising number of co-workers) is an outcast within the social order (even of rental clowns). His living situation buys into the cliched "still lives with their mother" (bringing all the implications of dual-dependency between the carer and cared-for, some developmental issues, and infantile behaviours).
The film is markedly one-note up until the talk show scene. The things meant to appear uplifting are part of his delusion. His daydreaming fantasies of meeting his parasocial father figure Murray, morph into more profound Schizophrenia when he wonders the street with his nonexistent lover. Arthur's world is one of transmogrification, his folding of what can be denoted as external reality into his interior world is so vast that the perspective of the film can only be that of a hallucinatory rendition of that which is "truly" ongoing. At times it is as if the world folds Arthur into itself, and that it is not a matter of the interior having once been exterior, but the exterior is made up of Arthur's interior. The film ungulates between Arthur passively exerting his untethered perspective onto reality and him being crushed by the intake of events experienced by the public around him.
When he is assaulted, when his sign is stolen, when he bombs during his standup, and when he is punished for his workplace misconduct, he appears as if being blindsided by an invisible assailant. It's as if the veneer of the world morphs to attack him.
And this is how we insinuate the lives of the deluded impoverished playout. Articles are written about "Florida Men" committing violent and illogical acts, often based on their unfounded delusion. This is, of course, existing in a binary of the wealthy (or even as far as the non-impoverished, the unpoverished ), the Rich and Poor, the haves and have-nots, the intelligible and the sensible. The deviant acts of the poor are carried out by them. Whereas similar atrocities by the rich and unpoverished are surprising, are scandalous, are unfounded.
But there is a clear inaccuracy in this binary opposition. The deluded pauper acts in a way that is disconnected from the dominant perspective of the events of reality; their acts are emergent from their excessive transmogrification of the sensible and their inability to make their sense intelligible in a social conforming way, or their alternative efforts to make an account of the world. This account is viewed as being holistically part and parcel of the mentally ill poor's experience. The journalism surrounding the extraordinary crime of some "Florida Man" is one of unsurprised bemusement. Yes, it's not typical and its unfounded, but of course, a person like "this" did it. Yet the misbehaving prince, well their criminal act is also out of character, unexpected, its a scandal, shocking, unfounded.
How can that be, the binary that they are set against one another, the insane pauper and the rational prince, yet both are unfounded. The pauper's mentally ill delusions prompt them to commit violent or unusual acts. Arthur brings a gun to a clown rental in a hospital's children's ward, murders their mother, and a former co-worker who wants to offer condolences and line up their stories to the police. Arthur acts irrationally, but the film's perspective (like journalistic media) displays the acts as if they were perpetually about to occur, expected, and timely; the attitude is that these unfounded delusions emerge from an agent who is operating rationally within the world they perceive. Yet turn the coin, and we find the baseless actions of a middle-class criminal to be beyond reason, unprompted, possibly later pathologized to a mental break, or that they were some sort of hidden evil who had existed falsely within the community, a John Wayne Gacy type. The escape hatch was built into so many idyllic social orders, all priests are holy unless caught committing heinous acts and then were agents of the devil. The king was divinely appointed until he chose a different religious sect to be the dominant one. The un-poverished is ideal until it isn't, it ceases to be within the confines of the classification that makes a criminal act be viewed and approached in this alternative light.
The sane and unpoverished are held up to a standard with a rejection clause built in, you are measured against the stone, but your rights to the commandments will be stripped if you breach the terms.
The acts of the unpoverished are unfounded, not the people. But it is not the acts of the delusional poor that are unfounded because the criminal act is expected and legitimate to that kind of person's experience. So what is unfounded about the delusional poor? Their very existence. The petit bourgeoisie are set up in the binary as being held to a different standard, but if excursions default one to being likened to the other then are these not the same measure? There are acts then which align with the curated image of the non-delusion impoverished and there are ones that are delusional and spiritually impoverished. The criminal actions of the wealthy are always equal to that of the delusional poor, except on one plane. One can be blamed for the others very presence in the circumstances that prompt the act. The wealthy are only emergent because of the subjugation of the poor, and the poor are only so deprived because of the systems which uphold the rich. But the poor are not included within the dominant ordering of the right ways to be alive; they exist instead as an uncategorized non-space, to which the affluent can detain their incriminated scoundrels.
The wealthy hold themselves to the account of the rich, and the poor are held against the same measure (with full knowledge that they do not fit) and punished on the same grounds. The mould was created as if another way of being was not natural, the poor are square and the form of judgement is a round hole. The wealthy who misbehave are banished back through the passage, but since they still fit the shape (through birthright or ongoing economic gain), they often worm their way back in, whereas the poor were never granted. Their actions are outsider, as they are outside, so papers and talk shows may gawk at their alienness; the alienness is not what is surprising, more so the contrast and terms of delusion. To be ousted to the outside, and behave outside norms, and abandoned by the micro-ordering of societal standards of life, is it not then founded, logical, and intelligible to behave as Arthur does? And is it not then unfounded and delusion for the perpetrators of social order and cultural powerf to develop a measure of society that is blind to the people who enable their perpetual wealth? The system is implicitly illogical, and therefore any binaries between the societal fringe and hegemonic norm are so thinly veiled that to buy into them is a schizophrenic and irrational act. James Baldwin asked and answered in the essay dark days:
What happens, black poet Langston Hughes asks, to a dream deferred? What happens, one may now ask, when a reality finds itself on a collision course with a fantasy? For white people of this country have become, for the the most part, sleepwalkers, and their somnambulation is reflected in the caliber of US politics and politicians⊠(my educators) were people whom I had no choice but to imitate and, in time, outwit. One realizes later that there is no one to outwit but oneself.
It is not the criminal acts of the clown-faced mob in Gotham that shocked the rich but the actual requirement to acknowledge the existence of this class of people. They, the rich, had incited the terms of this rebellion, they were implicit in the social hierarchy and mobilized underhandedly by the papers and News which sought to both condemn and profit from the riot-as-spectacle's occurrence. There can be no delusion if you are none-existent, unless you do in fact exist, and it is those who refused to see you that are living in a none-existent and unfounded conception of reality. Kim K and Molly Mae say "we have the same 24 hours in a day", a truly unhinged take on the world, yet the world cannot consider why such sentiments are at odds with our very existence. Its as if the terms that we view the world are entirely incompatible, Arthur Fleck chose to do all one could, create your own world with the cards your dealt, and double down on the reception of the action not its intention, make sensible the sensible for the intelligible is privileged only in delusions.
