The Political Unconscious of Late Capitalist Discontent

Rating: 6/10 (6 January 2020)

The Joker stands on the top of a crushed police car from which he has just been rescued, surrounded by crowds of supporters, setting fire, destroying properties, killing the rich. He smears his blood across his face and dances in front of the chaos. Cut to the next scene - the Joker is in a uniform, being committed to the Arkham State Hospital.
What happened in between? Everyone knows what happened. The film knows that everyone knows what happened, so it doesn't bother to show us. But this omission, which is also in a sense an admission, is the key to understanding this film's political unconscious.
Despite the political, social, and psychological chaos embodied and unleashed by the Joker, there is a fatalism in this film. The film, as well as the audience, knows that the Joker is not going to inspire a successful revolution. We know that Gotham is not going to change for the better. We know that, although Thomas and Martha Wayne are murdered in a moment of revolutionary rage, their son is going to inherit the vampiric system on which their wealth is built.
How did the riots die down? Did the system make any compromise to the economically disenfranchised and socially alienated population? Was there any reckoning of the structural violence and the deep antagonisms of Gotham? These must be crucial moments in Gotham's history and social consciousness, but to the story-tellers and to the audience, they do not matter.
The return to order is inevitable, not just in Gotham, but also in Occupy and the yellow vests. The narrative fatalism of the film is predicated on a fatalism of the political, which fundamentally accepts that despite all the rage and chaos, the capitalist machinery is here to stay. When the carnival is over, people eventually go back to working for the rich.
The allure of the Joker, the feral energy and the unhinged neurosis of the anti-establishment zeitgeist, is precisely the reason for its failure. Against the relentless machineries of neoliberal alienation and the failure of traditional forms of political organizing, the populist protests of the 21st-century, although socially powerful, have become politically impotent, precisely due to a lack of positive social vision and concrete political demands. As such, the return to order is predicated on the very chaos of the Joker, a character that pushes the libidinal economy of contemporary anti-establishment populism to its psychological extreme.
This is why the Joker of 2019 is more of a symptom of late capitalist discontent than a critical engagement with it. The film captures, almost brilliantly, the psychological reality of today's anti-establishment in the west - the blind populist rage resisting politicization, the cynicism regarding a positive and concrete political program, and the gleeful celebration of nihilistic violence which operates with a subconscious acceptance of the inevitability of the status quo. It is thus not surprising that what the Joker inspired is not a revolutionary politics, but the aesthetics of fascistic mobilization.
Herein lies the crux of the political problematic in which the film unknowingly occupies - contrary to what the incels and the Joker want to believe, political nihilism in the form of an individualist exit does not amount to a true negation of the status quo. Quite the opposite, in its pure negativity, it is complicit in the very logic of fatalism on which the status quo is erected and maintained. Its pretension to be the absolute negation of the existing order is constantly undermined by the fact that it is fundamentally incapable of transcending the cycle of violence and alienation engendered by capitalist modernity.
Joker seeks to provide, among other things, a compelling account of how a victim of social, political, and family violence comes to embrace nihilistic violence as an apolitical subjectivity. In this process, the film unwittingly betrays the paradox of its own political unconscious, and demonstrates that the Joker's newfound subjectivity is, despite its aesthetic and emotional appeal, ultimately trapped in the political and ethical impasse of contemporary populism.
If such a symptomatic reading is warranted, then it explains perfectly why Joker is so successful as a psychological thriller, but utterly impotent as social commentary.