Social commentary in the upside down world

Rating: 9/10 (8 February 2020)

It's very hard to duly rate "Joker" as an art object. The problem lies in determination of functions you'd expect from an art object - is it entertainment, aesthetics, deep morale, involving story, neat dialogues, believable characters, thought-provoking or expression of social archetypes which are bigger than the artists who have created an art object? Personally I prefer aesthetics, combined with deep morale and thought-provoking. But art is bigger than this. Why Venice gave it "Golden lion" while North American critics and mass media were so disturbed (if not triggered) by "Joker" which became commercial success (60 million R-rated movie passed over 1 billion USD) and cultural symbol, a banner of protests in different countries - from Lebanon to Hong Kong? The answer is - it is genuine art, an unconscious expression of archetypes which are not fully comprehended by artists themselves. It is like poetry, or music, or dance.
It's no secret that modern popular culture is more propaganda than art. Distinguish them is simple - an artist expresses things that he is often not able to explain himself, while a propagandist always knows what, how and what for he shows. As Socrates says in "Apology," "Almost everyone present here can better explain what poets created than they do themselves not by wisdom they can create but by some innate ability and unrest, like diviners and soothsayers because they also say a lot of good things, but they don't understand anything from what they say." An artist is a kind of "medium" that captures senses, "archetypes" that bind chaotic facts of reality in a structured story. That is why artists expressing things that we feel, but are often unable to express. Not so with a propagandist - he does not "capture" the meanings, stories which exist in reality, but tries to create, impose artificially created meanings, ideological narratives. This is what so repulsive in popular culture - instead of art that expresses something bigger than its creators, certain archetypes that contain more wisdom than those "mediums" who use archetypes in their stories, instead of this audience receives ideological agitations, flat and poor as well as promoted ideology. Not so with the "Joker".
There is a type of joke called "Russian reversal" - starting with the words "In Soviet Russia" and than reversing subject and object of a statement. The "Joker" has the same pattern of an inverse social commentary in it. In European culture carnivals represented irony of the reversal of phenomena in their opposite, turning normal to abnormal. Carnivals turned servants into lords, women into men, proclaimed ugly things beautiful, made kings out of clowns, and turn kings into clowns. Carnivals temporarily abolished usual social, political and religious hierarchies - during the period of a carnival reversed hierarchy prevailed: nobles were humiliated, and holy things turned profane, laws were almost not obeyed, and ethnic ideals changed into their opposite. In the XII century France celebrated the festival of fools, during which a complete change of customs to the opposite took place. A least significant deacon from a cathedral proclaimed bishop, pope, or king, depending on the location, and led his deacon friends into Church. There they've done a clown worship: an altar was decorated with puddings and sausages, and the usual answers of the faithful were replaced by shouts and squeals. Sometimes they made mock consecrations of bishops. There were also such false ceremonies concerning political powers a crowd of carnival participants "elected" kings among it. Carnival jocks and mockery seemed ridiculous to the inhabitants of medieval cities because they meant temporary release from the rules, throwing the world upside down, supposedly destroying everything that people thought was the real order of things. As Ernst Curtius noted, in medieval Europe there was a topos of the "inverted world", which was one of the main instruments of medieval humor. This topos was a source of laughter for the reasons that later Kant has defined in his reflections on humor as a sudden transformation of intense expectation into nothing. A laughing man does not take the upside down world seriously because it is governed by rules that conflict with those which are generally considered proper. If we agree with Kant's reasoning about humor, it follows that the concept of law should have been be firmly rooted in the views of medieval Europeans and endorsed by them, since deviation from the ordinary order of things seemed unrealistic and therefore ridiculous.
It is not necessary to remind that the modern world has adopted carnival, a temporary and ridiculous deviation from normal, as normal. We live in a world of carnival - an upturned world where people choose clowns to be kings, inversion of women and men roles, sexual uncertainty, trans-sexuality and homosexuality reign, vice and lasciviousness are "sanctified" by the authority of "science", while chastity and reverence ridiculed, holy things turned profane, ethnic ideals change to their opposite. While in Medieval normal world (world with fear of God) carnivals and fools were ridiculous because they distorted normal, normalized abnormal, in a modern world which is "free" from God, a twisted world where everything is a joke, a carnival ceases to be a joke, and a twisted fool ceases to be ridiculous, he becomes president. In an upturned world, a clown can be a joke when he behaves rightfully, corrects distorted, tells the truth. Therefore, during this year's Golden Globe, Ricky Gervais' jokes consisted in stating obvious facts about the Hollywood champagne socialist liberal elites - about the ignorance of "stars", their detachment from real life, their greed and hypocrisy. In essence, Gervais served as court jester. Something similar at the American level did the "Joker". Venice, with its long-standing aristocratic traditions, immediately recognized the "Joker" as a medieval fool pointing at the naked king and awarded the movie with the Golden Lion. Instead, the left-liberal ruling class of the United States, which simply has no resemblance to Venice's historical memory, initially panicked when noticed allusion to its nakedness, in every possible way bashing the movie by the hands of critics and mass media. However, they are learning fast, and already at the Golden Globes, such a whistleblower fool as depicted in the "Joker" movie has become part of the show represented by Ricky Gervais.
That's where the "Joker" hits the nerve independently of what its creators desired. During the movie as Arthur takes less drugs (mass media lies and hypocrisy inducted by the ruling liberal elites wishing to preserve status quo if you want an allegory) he became more and more aware about the real state of the world he lives in. Despite being Joker he is not funny at all because how can you be funny in the perverted world of abnormality other than being genuinely good and right? Nope, Arthur became the same with the world he lives in, he became "normal" by the modern world's standards - crazy and murderous. He adopts. In terms of aesthetics "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" beats dark and depressive "Joker". In terms of morale also. Characters in the "Joker" are exaggerated while dialogues are not bad but neither outstanding. It is not very thought provoking either. But still it hits and it is the best movie of 2019 because of perfect depict of an epoch we are living in with its clueless elites which are out of touch with reality and growing anger among masses in the world corrupted by those elites.