U.S. Army Warning About Joker

(CNN) Both the US Army and the Los Angeles Police Department will be on alert -- and one theater chain has banned all costumes -- during the screening of "Joker."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/27/enter...rnd/index.html

That's news to me. I'm sure it is in certain internet subcultures but just as often it's thoughtless, breathless other-izing by people who think berating and isolating the lonely and desperate is going to address the fact that they're disproportionately likely to snap.

When one of the main drivers for the attacks is the mythologizing that occurs from constant media coverage of the events, and more so, the perpetrators themselves, it is worth at least bringing up in discussion, would you agree? Meanwhile, this particular film seems to focus on that very subject, which is why the film is less of a deconstruction of current societal issues, and more of a symptom, IMO.

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I just think it’s crazy that the term incel has been on the net since 1996. A woman is credited with creating the phrase, which got shortened to incel when the radical misogynistic ******** co-opted it. So essentially incels have been around since the late 90s, but it only recently has become a problem/talked about because far-right/misogynistic/racist/white supremacists have plugged into their communities to recruit.

Think about it? Someone who is lonely and angry is wayyy easier to provoke and indoctrinate than someone who is happy and sociable. Not saying that those people can’t snap but rather that it’s genius, as a radical, to plug into a community of people that are largely white, male, and have the means to fund their own attacks. It’s ****ing brilliant, and equally ****ing scary.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

That long, eh?

Haven't people like this existed since, like, forever?

Just to clarify, it's essentially some dude who has trouble getting laid, right?

I think what makes it different now is mass media, and the perception (usually exaggerated, if not outright false) that lots of other people are, or are having fun, blah blah blah, so that they feel not just frustrated but like they're not part of society, or are being shunned somehow because something's wrong with them. Talking about this ("Chads and Staceys" or whatever) is a big part of it.

It's pretty sad stuff, and I think a lot of modern amenities just amplify it too the point where it's a lot more likely to turn into something dangerous.

This point is circling back around to the point we talked about in the gun debate about how all this tech/instant access to information makes it easier to broadcast hateful info etc. Point being, we keep coming back to tech being at the heart of many of today's problems in society, while at the same time amplifying both the problems themselves as well as the reactions to said problems. A nasty feedback loop, that.

It’s more than just not getting laid. Flat out rejection. Like hey, what’s your number/name and then they get told off because the person is dating someone else or has no interest in them.

I mean, basically, incels have some deplorable views of women (i.e. they are only here to serve men’s biological needs). So like women shouldn’t be able to vote, take their jobs, etc.

But you’ve hit the nail on the head: technology has allowed this people to congregate and disseminate information better than ever. Plus, when one of them goes postal the media machine blasts them all over the place. Thus, driving more ******** into the incel community, loop, loop, loop.

But incels and white supremacists are pretty much exclusive these days.

Sorry if I sounded insensitive in my comment before, I just thought this whole thing sounded crazy at first, that people would be worried, compared to any other movie. What is it about this movie that makes some people believe it's more likely to have such an attack, compared to any other movie on opening night?

I'm thinking it also has to do with how the Ledger iteration of Joker kind of played into the same anti-social agent of chaos thing that appeals to the disaffected, kind of like Travis Bickle or Tyler Durden (and that's also had a chance to calcify over the past decade or so). A main point of difference between The Dark Knight and Joker is that the former still clearly positioned him as the out-and-out antagonist from beginning to end whose lack of backstory keeps him at a remove whereas the latter looks like it's going to make him look much more sympathetic despite his villainy so there's the argument that it might work too well in that regard.

Also there is the (apparently debunked) narrative that the Aurora shooter was inspired by the Joker and allegedly referred to himself as the Joker during his arrest, but that goes back to the earlier idea that mishandling this kind of information is going to end up causing more trouble than the source material.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0