Artikkel - Matei Norbert Balan

In the current political climate, we are urged to closely analyze not only the things that set us off but also those that we enjoy. Film and TV characters come under scrutiny as well, as some of them are scarier now then they used to be, and frankly more problematic. Male characters stand out in this picture, especially those who resemble the people we tend to dismiss as unimportant in real life. And this might be exactly what makes them so scary.

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019) /Foto: IMDb

A decade marked by the rise of the Far-right politics from the fringes of society and culture back to the mainstream has ruined quite a few things for us. Or, should we say, it has determined us to take a closer look at things we were ignoring before.

Some movie and TV male characters are singled out as especially problematic in the current political climate. These are the underachievers, the creeps, the losers, and the so-called “cucks” that when push comes to shove, they bite back.

Take the case of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the mentally ill clown for hire that becomes the infamous Joker in Todd Phillip’s 2019 “Joker”. The uproar that the trailer for the movie caused was not surprising. On Twitter, the most virulent of the movie’s detractors immediately saw Arthur as a symbol for the already intensely debated Incel (involuntarily celibate) community and treated him as such. The fear was that Incels might go to the cinema and get a few fresh ideas from seeing Arthur taking revenge on society for the way he has been treated.

The 2012 Aurora shooting was one of the many such events that added fuel to the fear that mentally ill men might feel motivated by Arthur Fleck’s character arc, pick up guns and go on a killing spree. In this case, the perpetrator, James Holmes, stormed a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people, and leaving 70 more injured. The fact that the shooting happened during a screening of Cristopher Nolan’s 2008 “The Dark Knight”, where the character of Batman carries a hard fight against The Joker, and that the shooter had his hair dyed orange (The Joker of “The Dark Knight” has his hair dyed green), gave birth to the now-debunked rumor that Holmes was trying to imitate The Joker. Except this is not how things work. Mental instability or illness plus a villain you might empathize with and even identify with on-screen does not transition you to firing an assault rifle at a cinema audience.

The premiere of “Joker” came and went without incidents. So did the thousands of worldwide screenings. At the 92nd edition of the Academy Awards, “Joker” won two awards: one for Best Actor and the other for Best Original Music Score. But the fear that the character portrayed by Phoenix might inspire future mass shootings lingers and for a good reason. No, fictional characters alone do not turn men into murderers. We, as a society, know this. What we also know - we’ve just started on the path of coming to terms with this only recently - is that we know next to nothing about the men who live among us, and who commit these horrendous acts in real life. Slapping the label of terrorism or mental illness is not enough.

Martin Freeman and Kevin O'Grady in Fargo (2014) / Foto: IMDb

One other such character, even though less hated, is that of Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) from the ongoing TV series “Fargo”. In the first season, Lester is a doormat for everyone from his wife, who considers she has bet on a losing horse by marrying him, to his brother, and the man who’s been bullying him ever since primary school. Then Lester meets a strange man, who quite frankly resembles the Devil himself, who pushes him down the road of dark self-discovery. So Lester starts his transition from doormat to matador. He first gets his bully killed, then he kills his wife, then he frames his brother for the murder of his wife, and then he has sex with his bully’s wife after he tricks her into thinking that a sexual favor might stimulate him to go out of his way to help her with the casing in of an insurance policy. Lester exercises the same type of retribution as Arthur Fleck does. Yet there has been no wave of anger and requests for the series to be canceled.

I don’t think it’s necessary to get stuck into a moral dilemma where we would try to figure out which character is more condemnable and why. We only need to look at who these characters remind us of.

Lester Nygaard is more of a true-crime type of character. One of those husbands that just snap and commit murder. We’ve heard their stories, often so unbelievable that they seem made up, over and over again, and we have become immune to them. Lester Nygaard is still “the other”, but he is not a manacing other, in the way that we do not perceive his character as someone who is an immediate threat. Even though more men are engaging in domestic abuse worldwide, which sadly is one of the leading causes of death for women, then there are men engaging in mass shootings.

And this brings us back to Arthur Fleck, who seems far more threatening. In our minds, he is the embodiment of what we believe incel-mass shooters are like: awkward, shy, and unable to fit into the society, yet ready to wreck havoc. If there is any difference in what influence these characters have over some members of the audience, it is one that might just exist only where our suspension of disbelief ends and bias begins.

Underachievers, creeps, and losers: why some male characters scare us more than others