Memeing Dystopia:
Joker, Trump, and a Populist Aesthetic
New Right political theory is presently stuck between two poles: one, to affirm a populist aesthetic that completely upends the current order, resulting in chaos; two, advocate for a new, enlightened aristocracy that does away with existing oligopolistic rule, that could lead with the consent the people rather than against it. Or, one leads to the other, clearing the slate before the institution of a new order. Increasingly this is how it seems it must take place. With institutions this rotten, one cannot imagine how new leaders could be forged from them.
Enter Joker, an obviously terrific film. Audiences loved it, yet somehow many regime critics panned it, allowing their political bias to override everything else they know about film. This is a dig on progressives, but one could well imagine that if this film was released in the 1980s or 90s it would be conservatives ignoring the film’s inherent qualities and lambasting it for its seeming appreciation of degenerate behaviour; the Joker would have been a satanic figure that revelled in the flagrant violation of our moral code. The Joker of our times is very different. He exists because the moral code of the film’s world has already degenerated by the film’s opening, with the law only seeming to exist to uphold elite rule. Joker doesn’t so much violate the moral code as highlight its absence, bringing to the fore what everyone already knows. The Joker’s socio-political world is only held together through inertia, the placid state by which most don’t spend much time considering how social bonds are deteriorating or how the law no longer serves a moral purpose. The Joker does notice, and chooses to point out the downward spiral in which our civilization is caught, and arrest and punctuate it by—literally and metaphorically—lighting it on fire. He takes a moment to appreciate this populist aesthetic, watching (the meme of) the world burning. “Isn’t it beautiful?,” he rhetorically asks
Law and Morality in Dystopia
Classical political theory teaches us that societies create laws based on their shared morals, and then those laws are continually tested to ensure they serve these morals appropriately. Over long stretches of time, those morals might change, and so the laws will change. Revolution strikes when the laws no longer align with morality and the mechanism to change the laws is broken. But what about those end-of-civilizational moments when then there remain no shared morals, with only inertia holding together what remains of the polity? Delegitimized, the law is increasingly backed only by force, which accelerates its delegitimization, ensuring more force will be required in the immediate future. A vortex is spawned. This is the Joker’s world, and it is ours.
Gotham is presented as the NYC of the 1970s, which is fitting as many remark that NYC is today quickly regressing to the crime-ridden, dirty dystopia of that stagflationary era. Premonitions of our immediate future lie in the past—which makes obvious sense as we regress. The film centers on the Joker’s coming to be, beginning with his being oppressed by this dystopian environment, his stifling relationship with his mother, and his fledgling career as a clown and aspiring stand-up comedian. The core of the plot revolves around his attempt to find his father, both symbolic and real. He dreams the talk show host he and his mother always watch would provide him with a paternal pat on the back, before being led to think by his mother that a paternalistic mayoral candidate, Thomas Wayne, is his father. Searching Wayne down he comes to realize his mom psychotically imagined this relationship, no doubt due to her own need for such a figure. He remains fatherless, both real and symbolically, rootless.
Having a stable father figure in childhood, of course, is the basis of later successful integration with the wider social order. The failed search in the film for a father figure is what animates the Joker to break with the social order, highlighting how dystopia is preconditioned by the disappearance of the father figure both within our individual families and within the social order writ large. It isn’t just that real humans are increasingly missing real fathers in their lives, but more importantly that they are missing symbolic “fathers,” and that our larger culture is itself missing a symbolic “father,” a moral code we live by and trust others to live by. The Joker realizes this all at once, his personal drama becoming indistinguishable from the larger social drama in the film’s denouement. Having failed at stand-up comedy, he realizes his very existence is a joke in its punctuating the monotony and illegitimacy of the present order of things. He cannot tell a joke because he is the joke. The film concludes with his having killed a psychiatrist and running from an orderly to and fro across the screen like a cartoon villain, the words “The END” written in a Looney Tunes font over the image. This most serious film ends on this note precisely to indicate the Joker has become meme, his existence serving to arrest and punctuate society’s moral and legal collapse.
Is He Just Crazy. or Demonic-Possessed?
The film does present the Joker as suffering from a mental disorder, the nature of which isn’t specified. In trying to diagnose the Joker according to DSM criteria, psychologists reviewing the film find themselves stumped; he seems to be psychopathic, but maybe he was just dropped on his head.[i] This confusion is surely intentional. The Joker’s origin story cannot be reduced to mental illness. A mental disorder is a necessary but not sufficient condition for his break from society.
The more interesting question is if the Joker is demonically possessed. Elsewhere I argue that demonic possession is the state of eliding one’s own agency and individual responsibility in the annihilation of meaning. It is the precise reverse of the leap of faith into the religious experience that opens a horizon of subjectivity and meaning; it is a Fall that closes the possibility of this horizon. School shooters, for instance, typically attest in their diaries or video ‘confessionals’ that they make a conscious choice to engage in this act and then plan it meticulously, often remarking how free they feel once they’ve decided on their course of action prior to the action itself; they are freed of responsibility and agency, and there’s a certain exhilaration to that state. The Joker does not appear to follow this logic. He doesn’t really plan the act and he doesn’t seem to be blissed out ahead of it, though it doesn’t ‘just happen’ either. It’s more that the act seems necessary given the interrelationship of his personal history and that of his culture; everything has flowed to this point. It is inevitable, it is fate—and indeed, it is righteous. Once it happens, he doesn’t expect to disappear as do school shooters; he’s finally happy, he finally feels like he exists, and he wants to share this feeling with the world he now remakes according to his own desire.
The Joker is not merely accelerating down the civilizational vortex caused by the disappearance of a shared moral code, like the demonic school shooter does in indiscriminately murdering the most innocent among us. On the contrary, the Joker is indignant about the loss of a moral code and admonishes his civilization for its disappearance. He partially opposes the lack of a code with his own, and creates a situation that allows for the illegitimate—illegitimate because unbacked by shared morality—law to collapse. The demonic-possessed merely reverses the Good in excising individual agency; the Joker is, as his name suggests, more of a wild card or troll, reasserting his agency now as opposition to a failed society.
Cultural Connotations: Trump, Populism and the Fight Against the Technocracy
So why exactly do regime critics so publicly dislike the film? Could one reason be that the Joker appears overlaid with Trumpian characteristics, or that there is a way in which Trump had Joker-like qualities for his admirers, promising to smash a system—both legal and moral—that had and has failed so many? Being no moral paragon himself, Trump didn’t so much promise to re-establish a conservative moral order as he did to disrupt or destroy the system that seems so out of touch with our everyday lives. Regardless of his accomplishments or lack thereof, Trump’s caustic style both highlighted and aggravated a lack of social cohesion. Part of what goes by the name of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is the consequence of people realizing that nothing any longer binds them together, with Trump coming to stand in as the scapegoat for this lack. Progressives now rely on the signifier “Trump” as cause of all social disfunction, allowing them to then rule in “opposition”—even when they hold power. They need “Trump”—and everything they link to that signifier, such as nationalism, white supremacy, the alt right etc.—as the scapegoat against which they rule. For anyone suffering from—or revelling in—TDS, Joker hits too close to the bone. Joker highlights their dishonesty as it reveals the uncomfortable truths lurking below the ritualistic incantations of “Trump.”
Conservatives often deride each other for not presenting a positive vision as to why they should rule, typically offering instead only a softer liberalism as the counter-option to voting liberal—conservatism in this view is merely “progressivism driving the speed limit.” But is a similar logic not also true of the liberals? Some argue that their claims to social justice represent a positive vision that outcompetes the conservative lack of vision; why wouldn’t a young person join the more positive vision? I am not so sure, however, that the social justice worldview is actually seen by its adherents as particularly munificent. It is outwardly angry, racist, and sexist, and none of its proponents ever appear particularly happy or satisfied, unless one counts smugness as an indicator of same. A positive vision needs to have some sort of ideal world, if not utopia, in mind to be coherent. The social justice worldview does not; on the contrary, the world it imagines is one of perpetual strife amongst the power-mad, without even the possibility of social or political harmony.
I would argue that the central animus of liberalism today, for its true adherents if not its venal elites, is hateful, spiteful, and full of Nietzschean ressentiment towards present-day kulaks, bourgeois, and billionaires. This is dissimulated only by 1) the reference to social justice as its goal; 2) the alibi of “Trump” as being hateful, to which they are ‘opposed.’ Since the notion of a positive social justice vision disintegrates on first glance, the alibi of Trump must do the work and keep on giving—hence the present day show trials and Democratic Party funding of “Trumpian” candidates in Republican primaries. Again, liberalism is primarily oriented negatively against “Trump” as a means of solidifying its real regime power and denying the truths that were revealed by “Trump.” The Joker shines light on those truths and so must itself be derided by the regime.
Trump, they say, was memed to the Presidency. In these accounts, a “meme” is typically defined as the social media meme of a single image with minimal text. These memes are nearly always intended to be humorous and they are usually intended to troll, to embarrass someone or something. Typically, they are self-explanatory in the sense that you either get the cultural reference involved or you don’t. Memes are not supposed to be explained any more than jokes are; the timing, the moment, is everything. If you have to explain it, you’ve already lost it. When one of these memes works, it punctuates, arrests the sound and fury of contemporary culture, and provides a humorous, trolling view onto it. It highlights the nothingness around which so much of our activity and communication circles, and laughs. That is why most memes employ such an economy of words, using the minimal amount needed to provide for the appropriate affective ‘understanding’ of the subject being trolled. Memes operate by sensibility, not syntax, providing a view onto the world but not providing comprehensive meaning on or about it.
There is a meme logic to the Joker and to the film itself; like social media memes, the Joker arrests meaning from his particular point of view. In a culture that endlessly signifies without saying anything—insofar as it’s been diluted of meaning through the excision of individual agency and morality—the Joker puts a stop to processes of pointless signification. He memes, he declares his point of view on the social order, and grins widely at what he’s just done. As meme, he gives body to the lack of a coherent social order. The media multiply his reach and thousands then mime him in the streets.
This is a populist aesthetic in that it is opposed to elite rule. There is, of course, nothing “problematic” or “dangerous” with populism, so long as it is properly distinguished from mob rule. Indeed, it becomes the most obviously correct position to oppose globalist technocrats who already rule the world but are never so satisfied they don’t continue to make pronouncements about how they want to block out the sun to avert climate change. Previous generations of aristocrats, fortunate by birth, felt obligation towards their subjects, but today’s aristocrat-technocrats are unfettered by such concerns to the extent they can claim they arrived at their positions through merit. It’s probably worse than this, in practice, as the upper echelons always seem to be filled by those who routinely get things wrong—often very publicly, as with COVID modelling—but fail up nonetheless; these leaders likely know they are midwits but are afforded the public pretence they are meritorious, creating much psychic turmoil that results in their revulsion for the people they control, many of whom the technocrats secretly know would do better. “The people” then need to be (made) truly ‘beneath’ them in a way that would make any of the Louis’ squirm, and as such only a populist opposition makes any sense whatsoever. The swamp really does need to be drained, the slate truly wiped clean.
The more important moral fight today is against this technocracy, which is made up of members from all political parties and institutions around the world. It’s to remain in continuous opposition to the reification of globalist technocracy in a world of decreasing national and local socio-political bonds. The technocracy calls remaining traditional ties “nationalist” and “white supremacist” as a means of cementing its own status as the only political order capable then of managing our affairs. There are no individual rights within the technocratic world order, of course. You will have no voice or bodily autonomy; in the end, “you are the carbon they want to reduce.” Global corporate authoritarianism in the service of this aim is its feature, not a bug. So, we musn’t gloss over the disappearance of our socio-political bonds, because that paves the way for liberals to win but more importantly for the technocrats to win. We need to highlight the degradation of these bonds, and really dwell on them, to finally reassert them at local and national levels to secure effective political representation and individual liberty. Let’s watch the Joker watch the world burn, so that we may save it.
[i] Valentin Skryabin, “Analysing Joker: an attempt to establish diagnosis for a film icon”. BJPsych Bulletin , Volume 45 , Issue 6 , December 2021 , pp. 329 - 332