The very nature of art is subjective. There is a difference between what is intended and what someone walks away feeling to be the important takeaway. Georgia O’Keefe spent a good part of her life telling people her paintings of flowers were paintings of flowers, not symbolic vaginas, but it didn’t stop others from making all sorts of Freudian analyses of supposed feminist sexual intent.
In recent years, this kind of open interpretation of art has led to intense arguments over what some see as problematic areas of popular culture, especially on television and in film. The release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood was met with mostly positive reactions but also discussions in the media over appropriateness. Is it disrespectful to the memories of Bruce Lee and Sharon Tate? Does the fact Margot Robbie’s character doesn’t have many lines of dialogue in the film indicative of Hollywood sexism toward fully fleshing out female characters like male ones? Does Tarantino “hate” women? Some of those issues address the movie as a movie, but most of the greater controversies are about how people react to the film, the industry which produced it, and arguments about the character of the guy who made it.
But this sort of thing extends also to retroactive reappraisals of what just a few years ago may have seemed like acceptable entertainment, but have either aged badly or feel much different in current contexts. Whether it be Apu on The Simpsons or The Crows in Dumbo, or movies about hunting “deplorables,” certain things take on a different light which goes beyond story.
The upcoming release of Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Todd Phillips, and based on the Batman arch-nemesis of DC Comics, has been met with accolades and criticism for being “a sympathetic tale of a ‘wronged by society’ white dude and their entitlement to violence.” Those concerns have been enhanced by reports of the F.B.I. monitoring “disturbing and specific chatter” among Incel groups which might use the film to perpetrate acts of violence, and the LAPD stating they will have officers “maintain high visibility around movie theaters” when the movie is released as a deterrent. What’s interesting about the debates over the movie is how many of them are occurring among people who haven’t seen the film, since the issue is not the movie per se but how people think the audience might react to the movie.
And to that end, the expression of these issues are coloring how some movies and television shows are covered in the media. The upcoming fourth season of Rick and Morty has already faced fire before any episodes have aired from some who feel the series enables certain toxic elements of society. And many of the reviews for Joker couch their praise in concern over potential violence in an America where mass shootings by disaffected white men is a problem.
And therein lies the rub. A lot of things are about more than what they’re about, with arguably much going on under the hood as far as subtext, either intended or unintended. But is it fair to judge a work of art not on what’s onscreen or in the text, but on what undesirable aspects of a culture may read into it?
And at what point are we just fighting over another aspect of an enduring culture war and the arguments over violent movies get suspiciously similar and a little too close to what cultural conservatives have been pushing for decades when they were arguing music was making people violent, hyper-sexual servants of the Devil?
From Emily Todd VanDerWerff at Vox:
I’m a lot less comfortable with the way the guy sitting three seats away from me whooped and hollered and shouted, “Yeah!” with relish when that girl got brained by the dog food can. The subtext is great. The text is still women getting the shit beat out of them.
Before we continue, I want to state for the record that I’m really uncomfortable with the paragraph above, because it’s really difficult to convey these concerns in a way that doesn’t sound like l’m saying “No violence against women in movies ever!” If filmmakers are expected to constantly answer for the worst things their audiences might ever think, no art of value would ever get made.
The interaction between the public and art is an interesting one to contemplate, since there’s the material on the surface, and there’s sometimes things underlying which are left unsaid. But there’s also themes which are unintentional and the audience adds or misinterprets. A classic pop culture theory attributed to French filmmaker François Truffaut is the notion there is “no such thing as an anti-war film.” No matter how awful combat and war are depicted, no matter how torturous the circumstances seem, an audience will still be titillated by the action and connect to the characters’ journey. Sometimes these subtexts add depth to a story, giving it a richer meaning. And sometimes those aspects fall on one or the other side of a political or social issue, leading to arguments about the consequences of any potential message. Many times these stories act as a mirror to reflect aspects which make people uncomfortable.
Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the alien Vulcan race has been a part of Star Trek since its beginning. The half-human Spock’s devotion to leading a Vulcan way of life, revering logic and shunning the emotions of his nature, is a dominant theme in the character’s evolution, and leads to one of the franchise’s most defining moments where the utilitarian decision for “the needs of the many” is remembered as being done by the “most human” of souls. In the era of The Original Series, there is a nobility to the Vulcans, with the culture seeming to be one of disciplined stoic intellectuals, and they help express Gene Roddenberry’s ideas about a Utopian future where humanity is at the center of an accepting society based around scientific knowledge and cultural diversity. However, newer iterations of Trek tend to take a much dimmer view of Vulcans. They’re usually portrayed as arrogant elitists who cloak their bigotry of anything different in a belief of the superiority of their ideology.
Some fans might chalk up this shift in characterization as a failure to truly “get” Star Trek by the people in charge of continuing its legacy. But another way of looking at this is that if someone accepts the characterization as it has been presented over the past five decades, Vulcan society is actually fucking horrifying. The Vulcans are a culture where from birth to death the entire planet is indoctrinated to suppress their emotions, passions, and desires in adherence to an ideology, and anyone who doesn’t is made to be an outcast. It’s a fictional culture that seems all too relevant to present day churches in its conformity, since it’s rooted around fundamentalism toward an idea, to the exclusion of an individual’s feelings, as an article of faith in how to live.
In its own way, the Vulcans can basically serve as a Star Trek-ian allegory for conversion therapy (even beyond the more explicit one from The Next Generation). The Vulcans are a people where at least some members carry around a lifetime of regrets about their inability to say “I love you” to the ones they down deep feel it toward.
Sarek: (His thoughts flowing through Captian Picard) Pe- Perrin ... Amanda ... I wanted to give you so much more. I wanted to show you such ... t-t-tenderness. But that is not our way ... Spock ... Amanda ... Did you know? Can you know ... how much I love you? I do … (shouting and sobbing) LOVE YOU!
Now I’m fairly certain none of what I typed above as an interpretation of the characters is what Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Ron Moore, Brannon Braga, Ira Steven Behr, J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, or any of the many, many people who’ve been involved with Star Trek over the years intended. It’s just the idea of the Vulcans being a planet of people who “pray the gay logic the feels away” is something viewers can read into it, just like those who see sexual significance in O’Keefe’s flowers, and can make it interesting to view the stories from that prism, whether it be in defining Spock as a character, the Kirk-Spock relationship, the dominant theme within Trek of being an outsider within one’s own culture (e.g., Spock, Worf, Odo, etc.), and ultimately Spock coming to realize sometimes one has to go beyond logic to what feels right.
But just as I was able to read a possible unintended subtext into those characters and story points, there’s also a subset of viewers who will see Star Trek: Discovery as the “feminist lesbian edition” because the show dares to have a female lead, or advocacy for a “gay agenda” because two male characters have a relationship and kiss.
It’s in this same space where people create their own shitty interpretations which some critics have used to call Joker “dangerous” and an “Incel anthem.” The film, which has been likened to a merging of comic-book movie with The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver (a film with its own history of controversy), chronicles a disturbed character’s journey to embracing violence and destruction in response to the perceived unfairness of his life. According to reports about the movie, the story is a villain’s journey, which in response to criticism Warner Bros. has defended by stating it may “provoke difficult conversations around complex issues” but doesn’t “hold this character up as a hero.” But since the film posits the Joker as the protagonist of his own story, the argument goes even if the movie itself presents the character’s actions as wrong, there is still a sympathetic takeaway which ultimately sees those actions rewarded, in a way, with the character being a powerful and important figure that makes a mark on society instead of a loser and a schmuck.
The question then becomes whether or not that’s a problem which should extend out to how we view and judge a movie, especially in a country where there have been over 2,000 mass shootings in the last 7 years, including one in an Aurora, Colorado theater during the opening weekend of The Dark Knight Rises.
From Zack Sharf of IndieWire:
On the same day families of Aurora shooting victims sent a letter to Warner Bros. expressing concerns over the release of “Joker,” an IGN interview with the movie’s director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix began circulating in which the two defend “Joker” against criticisms it will encourage violence. Phoenix walked out of an interview with The Telegraph when asked a question about the topic, but he was fully prepared to talk about the relationship between “Joker” and violence during his discussion with IGN’s Jim Vejvoda.
“Well, I think that, for most of us, you’re able to tell the difference between right and wrong,” Phoenix said. “And those that aren’t are capable of interpreting anything in the way that they may want to. People misinterpret lyrics from songs. They misinterpret passages from books. So I don’t think it’s the responsibility of a filmmaker to teach the audience morality or the difference between right or wrong. I mean, to me, I think that that’s obvious.”
Phillips said that “Joker” makes “statements about a lack of love, childhood trauma, and lack of compassion in the world.” The director, who also co-wrote the “Joker” script with Scott Silver, continued, “I think people can handle that message. It’s so, to me, bizarre when people say, ‘Oh, well I could handle it. But imagine if you can’t.’ It’s making judgments for other people and I don’t even want to bring up the movies in the past that they’ve said this about because it’s shocking and embarrassing when you go, oh my God, ‘Do the Right Thing,’ they said that about [that movie, too].”
There is a history of media talking heads have concern trolled about the threat of movies and media inspiring violence for a good long time. To this day, Spike Lee remains pissed off at writers like David Denby and Joe Klein who made inherently racist arguments about black people not being able to control themselves after seeing his film, and would leave the theater and start burning down neighborhoods. Klein's article in the June 26, 1989, issue of New York Magazine warned readers that audiences would come out of the theater and react violently all across America, hurting David Dinkins’ chances at being mayor. And 1979’s The Warriors became controversial after the movie’s release coincided with acts of vandalism and three murders associated with viewers who had seen the movie. In response, Paramount pulled advertising for the film, and allowed some theater owners to get out of their contractual obligations to show the movie.
After the recent massacres in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, conservatives attempted to blame video games as the cause of homicidal outbursts to deflect criticism away from ease of gun access. However, the fact violent crime has dropped like a stone since the 1990s, a period where video games and access to more and more movies, television shows, and all sorts of media has flourished, puts a dent in causality claims between violence and forms of entertainment. But many times these issues are a bloody shirt to wave in order to motivate an ideological side.
Todd Phillips: “I think it’s because outrage is a commodity, I think it’s something that has been a commodity for a while … What’s outstanding to me in this discourse in this movie is how easily the far left can sound like the far right when it suits their agenda. It’s really been eye opening for me.”
However, perhaps a better argument can be made that movies and TV shows don’t cause these issues to exist, but brings a bigger spotlight to defects of the social stage. Aspects of Joker or Rick and Morty are similar in their appeal to the anti-hero dramas which have dominated the past few decades of premiere television. In almost all of them, the stories become power fantasies where angry white men attempt to break free in the worst possible ways from a paradigm they believe is not of their own making.
But they’re also examples of how we push the uncomfortable lessons to the back of our brains.
Do people who watch Walter White’s selfishness or Tony Soprano’s failures get that message? Or, like with Truffaut’s belief with anti-war movies, do they only take away the “ownage” both characters lay down in their flashiest moments while pushing the larger themes out of the mix?
From Mark Laherty at The Mary Sue:
Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty is a cartoon, created by Justin Roiland and Community’s Dan Harmon, about amoral space-adventurer Rick dragging his grandson, Morty, into dangerous sci-fi nonsense. In the face of its deteriorating reputation, the show has been defended as a deconstruction of toxic nerd masculinity. Probably the best argument for this has been made by Bob Chipman, who says that Rick is a skewering of media depictions of angsty smart men … The point being made here, a point that is well-worn in conversations about the show by now, is that the story knows that you, the audience, shouldn’t want to be like Rick. It shows Rick to be a pathetic, miserable person, led into despair by his own crummy, screwed-up value system.
One week, Rick’s cool edginess is exposed as hollow and pathetic. The next week, the clock is reset. We’re expected to view him as cool and edgy again. The show got better at avoiding this with its more focused third season, but everything up to that point was a shambles. How can we take the show’s attacks on Rick seriously when they’re immediately followed by a goofy parody of The Purge with Rick back in funny-smart-cool mode? The show touches upon Rick’s serious character flaws, then dances away from them. The ultimate impression is that Rick is a bad person, but it doesn’t really matter.