Tea at Trianon: The Joker and the Left

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 20, 2019

The Joker and the Left

From Andrew Klavan at The Daily Wire:

Joker is, for all intents and purposes, a comic book remake of the 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver. It’s the story of a troubled loner’s descent into violence. I should say up front that I don’t like comic book movies very much and I didn’t like Taxi Driver very much, so I wasn’t the film’s most sympathetic audience. That said, I found Joker stylish, watchable, and well-done with some enriching plot ambiguities. I also found it tonally monotonous and overly derivative.

But the panic the film set off among leftist critics may be the most interesting thing about the movie. To be sure, the film’s talented director Todd Phillips taunted the leftist Outrage Beast when he gave an interview criticizing the humorlessness of woke culture. The left responded by being humorlessly woke, proving the guy’s point. After that, Phillips had a target on his back.

But it was the left’s political reaction to the movie itself that was so strangely (or maybe not so strangely) off base. “It’s an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring President Donald Trump to power,” said Jeff Yang of CNN. Anti-Trumper Max Boot wrote a WaPo piece also linking Joker to Trump and headlined, “‘Joker’ nails the nihilism and opportunism of populist firebrands.” And in a thoroughly unhinged rant, Richard Brody of The New Yorker called the film “a blatant and brazen distortion of the most substantial historical elements at which it winks. ‘Joker’ is the comic-book Green Book, twisting history for the sake of a yarn.”

That last review really is the giveaway. Because, with some caveats (the movie doesn’t deal with race at all), the film’s historical perspective is pretty damned accurate. And that perspective condemns the left where it stands. No matter how you feel about the movie’s protagonist, the one thing Joker is not is a Trump voter. He’s a leftist: a self-pitying victim; a hater of the rich; a man who takes no responsibility for his own actions but instead blames the unfairness of society. In fact, all in all, the movie is a thoroughly justifiable satire of leftist talking points. It is not — like the excellent Dark Knight trilogy — a philosophical kick in the groin to leftism in general. But it does hold the mirror up to leftist culture — and the image in the glass is not pretty.

The Gotham of the movie is late 1970’s New York, a toilet of pornography and violence. I lived there. I remember it. It was, like today’s crap-strewn and disintegrating San Francisco, a city the left made. A city that put the tender loving care of criminals above the safety of decent citizens. A city that would not get the homeless off its streets. A city that would not restrict or condemn pornography and prostitution on its main thoroughfares. Its lawmen were handcuffed by left-wing Supreme Court decisions that made it harder to investigate and prosecute the bad guys. And journalists were silenced by racial “sensitivity” because a lot of the people committing the crimes were black and no one wanted to seem racist. (Read more.)