I hardly ever go to movies. There was so much buzz about this Joker thing, that I went to see it.

Joker is a good movie. I recommend you see it, especially before you read this review which contains HUGE SPOILERS. After you see the movie, check back here to find out whether you saw the same movie I saw.

Spoiler: you probably didn’t. I’ve seen some online buzz about the movie; cracked.com published an article about 6 ways this movie is uninteresting; Ebert panned it; OregonMuse has a review over at Ace’s place. None of these reviewers saw the same movie I saw. They also didn’t see nearly as good a movie as I saw.

Superhero and action movies generally suck. They depict events in total defiance of logic, physics, human nature, common sense, good storytelling, and harmless fun. For all the lycra and exploding gasoline, it’s boring to watch stories that can’t happen about characters nobody can care about, especially when it’s ladled on with tendentious preaching.

Joker does not suffer from these glaring defects. The movie defies belief in subtler ways. But it turns out the very unrealism is a device to convey meaning. Joker makes unrealism work by viewing it through the mind of Arthur Fleck.

Arthur is a mess. He has a neurological defect which causes him to laugh uncontrollably whenever he experiences strong emotions. The emotions he experiences are mostly grief, rage and bewilderment. Joaquin Phoenix captures this plight in the opening scene of the movie: again and again, Arthur’s face contorts in grief, and just at the moment when a normal person would break down sobbing, he bursts out with a cracked, shaky laugh. You get the feeling he’d be much better off if he could only cry.

Arthur is in a downward spiral. He loses his job, the social services which he was depending on for counseling and medication shut down, he bombs his opener at the comedy club, and his mother has a stroke. To top it off, ordinary people treat him very badly. This helpless man seems to be a magnet for rudeness, hostility, even physical violence from random strangers. By mid-movie Fleck is broke, jobless, his ambitions shattered, his mother dying, and he is off his meds, whatever that means.

Turns out, being off his meds means a lot. Superficially this is a story about a broken man who starts to lash out violently against a world in which he has no place. Some have seen social commentary in the movie. But what the movie is really about is Fleck’s psychosis, the blurring of his inner and outer lives. This is revealed subtly at first, forcefully later.

The subtle reveal is in Arthur’s relationship with the woman down the hall. Played by Zazie Beetz, she is a very attractive young lady. She notices Arthur Fleck stalking her and confronts him. And then…she falls for him. At one point he barges into her apartment and makes love to her. When Arthur’s mother is hospitalized, the woman from down the hall is there with him, caressing his back as he waits by his mother’s deathbed.

And it all just feels a little off. Arthur Fleck is a gaunt, slope-shouldered, unhealthy, gray-toothed reject from society, complete with uncontrollable physical tics and zero social skills. It’s hard to believe he could even get a prostitute. Why would this young woman, who could turn the head of any man, take any interest in Arthur Fleck? He’s never said anything funny to her, so why would she think he’s funny? And why, if Arthur has this new and beautiful love in his life, does his mood not improve?

Ebert noticed this and seems to have chalked it up to lazy character development. Now, movies with no character development are boring and it’s natural to disengage. But this relationship is key to a devastating reveal, one that alters the entire concept of the film.

Because after Arthur’s mother dies, it turns out the woman down the hall doesn’t know him. She never said he was funny. He never made love to her. She wasn’t at the hospital with him. Arthur is off his meds. He’s living in delusion.

And so is the viewer. It makes this movie a very enjoyable head game. The narrator is unreliable. You have to figure out what to believe and what not to, and you notice that unreality was sprinkled into the movie from the beginning.

My own guess is that half or more of the major events in the movie don’t actually happen. Many of the most striking visuals turn out to be hallucinations. And I’m amazed to see smart people taking these parts of the movie at face value. The movie is very forceful on this point: do not believe what you see. There is makeup. There are masks. There are official lies. Things are not what they seem.

How forceful? After Arthur finds out he never had a girlfriend, he goes back to his apartment and starts calmly unloading the fridge. He takes everything out, even the shelves, and his body language shows he is sizing up the space inside. He means to get in the fridge! Why? Is he hot? Some kind of compulsion? But then he does get in the fridge, the door swings shut, and you can see it’s one of those old-style refrigerators with a positive latch that can’t be opened from the inside. Suicide. The second you realize it, the phone rings and Arthur gets out of bed to answer it.

The rest of the movie plays out in Arthur’s mind as he dies in that refrigerator. Get it? The only other alternative is that the refrigerator scene is just some kind of meaningless freak-out scene with no significance. A false memory of an image made to startle. No. That’s not what it is. In real life, Arthur never gets out of that fridge.

The content of Arthur’s delusions is all familiar stuff. Arthur takes bloody revenge on those who have wronged him. He becomes an important force in society, touching off a violent mass movement. He cleverly evades the police, luring them to their doom. He gets to be on a big TV show on his own terms. One of Arthur’s faithful followers guns down the evil Thomas Wayne. The mob cheers for Arthur Fleck as he dances on the hood of a wrecked police car. And all of it has that “off” quality. There is a consistent sense that this isn’t quite how the real world works.

I say this is familiar, because we all have this stuff in us. Everyone has fantasies of violence and grandiosity. Joker holds up the mirror to you, personally. The movie says, your inner life has stuff in it that is far more dark and dangerous than anything you’re likely to encounter in the outer world. Be glad you can keep it in. Be glad others can keep it in.

In the final scene, Arthur is institutionalized. It’s not clear how he got there. The setting, with its featureless white rectangular surfaces, resembles the interior of a refrigerator.

If the movie has a villain, it is Thomas Wayne. Thomas Wayne is Arthur Fleck’s biological father. Wayne knocked up Penny Fleck and then abandoned her. When she protested, Wayne physically abused her two-year-old son, leaving him with head trauma and this strange laughing condition. Wayne then had his fixers get Penny declared an unfit, insane, abusive mother, and had adoption paperwork forged for Arthur. When Arthur confronts Wayne as a grown man, Wayne brutally assaults him. When Arthur finds out the official story, he murders his mother, the only person he had ever cared for. Then he finds out Penny really was his mother and Wayne really is his father. You can see why Arthur would fantasize about killing the guy.

Or does he find out? That reveal is in the pure-delusional part of the movie. Tricky.

Thomas Wayne is a caricature of Donald Trump. Too bad about that, but it is interesting to see. The movie depicts class warfare, and it could be construed as an argument in favor of social services. But what the movie is really about is the madness of Arthur Fleck. Arthur has his reasons to resent a rich man; Arthur would benefit from social services. Arthur is the narrator of the movie. Any “social commentary” has to be from his perspective, which is to say the perspective of a madman. The movie seems to tacitly acknowledge this. You never get the sense you’re being preached to.

The only other political angle is the fact that the movie features Robert de Niro in a prominent role. De Niro has, of course, embarrassed everyone with his frequent, mindless, profane and very public attacks on President Donald Trump. But now I think maybe he was just pumping us up for the moment when his character gets his brains blown out on live TV. Of course it’s just a fantasy, but if de Niro has annoyed you in the past, you might find it satisfying. And if that really was de Niro’s intention all along, all I can say is: well played, Sir. Well played.

It’s a little confusing that Joker is associated with the DC Comics universe. It would have been just as good a movie if it was called “Arthur Fleck”. But then it wouldn’t have been the biggest-grossing R-rated movie in history. Joker is a poor supervillain origin story; the protagonist is mostly harmless, and then he kills himself. But it is an outstanding achievement to make a difficult movie like this, and make it go big. And if this means that the final showdown between Batman and the Joker is an inconclusive, drunken brawl between two crippled bums in a garbage-strewn alleyway, I’m okay with that. DC is dead to me. Marvel is dead to me. Star Wars is dead to me. Do whatever you want with the corpses.

‘Way back around the turn of the century, I was an amateur of American politics, and I argued with people online (mostly in the comment threads at salon.com; blogs weren’t really a thing yet). I was dismayed, in my naivete, to see how unpersuadable the leftists were; how completely impervious to facts, logic, and shared values their minds were.

In the apprehensive aftermath of the 2000 elections, when the recounts and lawsuits were still going on and no one could say for sure whether Bush or Gore would be president, I was talking politics with one of my office mates. I said, whoever ends up president may regret it; he will be sorely tested. I just had this intuitive sense that the fuse was lit and some big bad history was sure to play out in the next four years. I had been reading news from the Levant; very ugly goings on over there at that time.

Then George W. Bush was inaugurated, and he had this kind of deer-in-the-headlights look to him. The man did not inspire confidence. I supported him and dared to harbor hopes for him, but he ended up being a disappointment across the board.

Then came the 9/11 attacks. I was riled up and ready to kill somebody. And I thought, well, this is horrible, but it’s also a whopping big dose of reality that nobody can deny. Even those impervious leftists I’ve been clashing with have got to sober up and get serious now. The press can’t downplay this; they’ll have to acknowledge that this is a war, and get on a wartime footing to support the effort. And Bush simply must step up and be a wartime president. It should be easy to rally the public behind him; maybe with increased public support he can further a domestic agenda to restore American freedom. Surely we must all be patriots after this, I thought.

We all know how that worked out. The media downplayed the attacks from day one. Instead of a storm of righteous anger in the opinion press, we saw nuanced takes delivered in calm, deliberate NPR voices. The president was not galvanized; he revealed himself to be a slave to political correctness, a man with no ideas and no charisma, a man unwilling or unable to use the bully pulpit. The public did not rally. Additional constraints, often arbitrary and humiliating, were applied to individual liberties. Anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-American demonstrations became fashionable. And leftists slipped their mental moorings and sailed off to a place even further beyond the reach of reason than they had been.

Matt Drudge today ran a story about how the country is more divided now, compared to the “unity” we experienced after 9/11/2001. That unity is a fiction. It never happened, not even for one tiny instant. The squabbling grew loud before sunset, on that terrible day.

The horror of thousands of people flattened by impacts or charred by fire gave way, over time, to the realization that all the people in a position to do anything about it were not in a mindset to do anything about it. Bush should have dished up daily doses of fire and brimstone; instead he came out bi-weekly to serve weak tea and steamed melba toast. The media jerked his chain any old way they liked, even as they acted as a soporific to the public and donated publicity to the anti-war movement. You know the rest.

9/11 wasn’t just an atrocity and a horrible experience. It was also a red pill, a destroyer of illusions. 9/11 shone a harsh and sudden light on the frightful decline of America. After 9/11, anyone who had thought there were moral and conscientious limits to the human capacity for partisanship and doublethink, found out there were no limits after all. Anyone who had confidence in the authorities found out that confidence had been misplaced. Anyone who cherished his liberty and dignity got aggressively frisked by the TSA. Anyone who hoped America could heal its partisan divide by uniting around a shared value – any value – found his hopes dashed for good.

The thing about red pills is, once you’ve had one, you get more. There must be numerous Americans who got their first red pill after 9/11. Those who continued to pay attention have acquired a lifetime supply by now.

I came across this item; where a patriotic couple, regular fans and attendees of the Real Salt Lake soccer club, got in trouble for displaying a Betsy Ross flag at a game. Flags are permitted, including (for now) American Flags. But the Betsy Ross is now seen as a symbol of hate or whatever, so it had to go. The Chief Business Officer of the soccer club, a fellow by the name of Andy Carroll, said so.

This episode made me so angry I went postal. That is to say, I licked glue and dropped off a letter at the Post Office. The letter was addressed exactly as follows:

Andy Carroll, CBO
Real Salt Lake
9256 South State Street
Sandy, UT 84070

I did include a genuine return address. And here’s what I said to Andy:

September 9, 2019

Andy Carroll
Chief Business Officer
Real Salt Lake

Dear Mr. Carroll,

As an American patriot who has paid a steep price for his country, I was infuriated to learn that a Betsy Ross flag was prohibited at one of your events.

You claim that the Betsy Ross flag has been appropriated by gangs of white bigots. I don’t believe that, but even if true, is it right to let a handful of deviants deprive us of our national symbols? If they really have appropriated it (they haven’t), it means normal people must not abandon it! We must take it back!

The Betsy Ross flag is a beautiful flag; it was the first flag of our nation; the men who fought under that flag went on to drive the first nail in the coffin of slavery. To say that the flag is a symbol of oppression is as ignorant and spiteful as Colin Kaepernick himself.

Look at the real oppression going on this minute in Hong Kong. The protesters there, innocent people who are being teargassed and beaten and disappeared by the police, fly hundreds of American flags including the Betsy Ross. They know what that flag stands for. Why don’t you?

Shame on you, Mr. Carroll. You are a liar. You are a coward. You are no American, and certainly no patriot.

With All My Heart,

Gentle Reader, you might not be comfortable saying you have paid a steep price for your country. Just edit that part out if you like; you can still be a patriot. But post this letter or one like it if you have a minute to spare. With all my heart, I would be glad to learn that Mr. Carroll had received many thousands of these letters. That man deserves to live under a burning cloud of shame.

Of course, Kevin Williamson won’t read this. And if he does, his eyes will glaze over. And if his eyes don’t glaze over, he’ll shrug it off as the uninformed rantings of some anonymous internet troll, even as cognitive dissonance roils his brainstem. Who cares? I’ll address it to him anyway. Maybe it will make him feel better.

Disclosure: I have an emotional attachment to the name “Kevin” because it’s the name of the brilliant protagonist of one of my favorite movies of all time.

I want to explain, Kevin, why Donald J. Trump is going to be President for the next eight years, and why that doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I trust you’ll agree with this: people mostly don’t vote on “the issues”. People mostly vote their social identities. We look around and make our best guesses about who the cool kids are, and then we like and say and do and vote whatever the cool kids are liking and saying and doing and voting. If we consider “the issues”, it’s mostly an exercise in rationalizing the cool kids’ worldview. We seek out facts and arguments that confirm the preferences associated with our social identities, and give short shrift to facts and arguments that go against those preferences. It all comes so naturally, it actually feels like thinking! But it’s not. Nice as it might well be, to have a democracy of thoughtful voters who decide what to do based on rational, elegant persuasion coming from the finest minds, that’s not what happens. In won’t be, while we’re alive.

Full disclosure: my own social identity is Traditional American. The values I associate with that identity include: reverence for our Declaration and our Constitution; pride in our liberties, our legal institutions, and our jury trials; understanding of checks and balances; love for our Flag and our Anthem; a can-do attitude; fighting spirit; a high degree of neighborliness and trust; promotion for merit; leadership in technology; lawfulness in government; victory in war*.

We Americans tend to be vulgar. It’s fun. America really was a better place when you could make “Blazing Saddles” in it.

American values aren’t much appreciated by the Ruling Class. Our top politicians and commentators find the idea of American exceptionalism to be kind of embarrassing, if not an outright liability. To them, Norman Rockwell is mythology, and corny mythology at that. They don’t like guns. Racial humor sets them on edge. And they have a knack for outing, shaming, and punishing Americans who go too much against the delicate and nuanced sensibilities of the elite**.

The result is, you don’t hear much from Americans in the public sphere any more. Progressives are not shy about stating their opinions strongly, even when they’re not sure of the social and political alignment of their audience. I’ve heard it said with some emphasis, in casual conversation, that the Tea Party was “stupid”. It was just assumed that nobody would take issue with that. And of course nobody did, overtly. That’s how you can spot the Traditional American in any conversation about politics. He’s the guy who’s not participating. There’s no point. You can’t reason people out of what they were never reasoned into in the first place, and you risk various kinds of retaliation by speaking out.

So Americans have suffered in silence for over a quarter-century by now. But what is it we’ve suffered? You, Kevin, wrote an internet boogeyman article a while back. The idea was that Americans are bent, and the reason we’re bent is because we think the Mexicans stole all our jobs, made our communities crumble, and left us economically worse off. You then went on to demonstrate that Americans haven’t really suffered economically on average, so we’ve got no real reason to be bent. We’re just a bunch of selfish whiners and losers. QED.

Equating economics with happiness is a leftish mistake, by the way. But I’ll grant that Americans are bent. Why are Americans bent? Because shitty stuff is happening to our country, and the perpetrators are not only getting away with it, they’re living high because of it. Here’s the short list of what Americans see happening (the long list would suck the rest of this letter into a black hole):

• Fast and furious: ATF perpetrates a fraud to get people killed and pin the blame on Americans.
• Obamacare: obviously unconstitutional with its individual mandate, and wrecks the healthcare system
• Massive bailouts and spending initiatives from a drunken, insolvent government
• EPA out of control, DOE sadly in control
• The Feds going to some trouble and expense to make government shutdowns exceptionally painful for Americans
• Bungled, interminable wars
• The Benghazi debacle and coverup
• The Secretary of State conducting illegal business on an illegal email server, greatly to the benefit of a hostile foreign power
• The creeping normalization of NSA snooping on Americans not involved in any official investigation
• The OPM hack: A strategic defeat both devastating and historically unique. Agents of a hostile foreign power were put in charge of securing our most sensitive information, with predictable results.
• The VA scandal: veterans dying while bureaucrats falsify records and collect bonuses
• The transmutation of our institutions of learning into hotbeds of mental illness and hysteria
• A general “can’t do” attitude as regards securing our border with Mexico
• The President, in negotiation with Iran over nuclear weapons, actively and energetically represents Iranian interests, without trying to win even the most marginal concessions for America.

This kind of thing makes Americans feel sick with rage. And the perps prosper, instead of swinging on the end of a rope. It’s intolerable.

Enter Donald Trump. Now, nobody really knows what kind of President Trump will be. It’s pretty clear that he himself hasn’t worked out the details. Trump’s ideological integrity is an unknown, and he has a streak of violence and unpredictability.

But Trump’s social identity is clearly American: crass but competent, vulgar but victorious. And when you look at that list up there, it’s hard to picture Donald J. Trump being the perp in any of those cases. Can you imagine him getting as raw a deal as Obama did with the Iranians? (By the way, a touch of violence and unpredictability is a huge asset in those kinds of negotiations.) Do you suppose Trump would smile benignly on the incompetence and corruption that led to the VA scandal and the OPM hack? Would Trump be tempted by bribes from the enemies of America? Trump has already pledged, in writing, to secure the southern border and repeal the individual mandate. Are these bad things?

But then, what will happen to the Republican party? You lately wrote:

[T]hat is what the Trump movement is about: Murdering the Republican party as a vessel of classical liberalism of the Adam Smith variety and reanimating it, Frankenstein-style, as a vehicle of Anglo identity politics.

Well, I’ve pretty much redeveloped your point about identity politics. Trump is scoring because of his frankly American identity. But what about the “vessel of classical liberalism”?

Here’s what: it’s hogwash. Look again at that list up there. Most of the perps were Democrats. So Americans voted for Republicans, to punish the Democrats and get government in line. Again and again, we voted GOP. And again and again, the Party turned our rage into despair. Republicans talk a good game about limited, accountable government, some of the time. But deeds speak louder, and in deed what the Republican party has been, since Reagan, is an immovable object placed between government wrongdoers and the wrath of the voters. You call yourself a conservative, but what does your party conserve? The momentum of Leviathan and the impunity of traitors – nothing more.

We gave you majorities in the Legislature and on the Supreme Court. You were supposed to fight for us. But you always had higher priorities, and you didn’t want to make any dramatic gestures. John Roberts’s collapse on the constitutionality of the individual mandate is typical of the kind of opportunity followed by frustration which has become the GOP’s utterly predictable modus operandi. “Nothing happened to them,” you sneered about the angry voters who are upsetting your apple cart. Well, we voted for your boys and nothing happened, that’s for sure.

The anti-Trump movement is the vehicle of identity politics for “conservative” “elites”. And it turns out “conservative” “elites” identify more closely with Democrats than they do with Americans. How did this sorry state of affairs come to pass? Partly, probably, from trying to market the conservative brand. Democrats always are happy to portray Republicans as drooling, gap-toothed, illiterate racist gun nuts. So you took it upon yourselves to craft a less threatening, more intellectual-seeming conservative brand. And in the process you assumed every cultural and social assumption of the enemy; in trying to occupy enemy territory, you went native with a vengeance. When the country needed blood and thunder, you learned to speak in NPR voices. You wanted independents’ votes, and you assumed that independents leaned left, so you learned never to do or say anything that might upset a Democrat. You fired John Derbyshire, when he was the only remaining reason for a serious person to read your dumb magazine. You were so afraid of being marginalized and shamed that you effectively dropped all pretense of furthering American interests. I say, “effectively”, because there was plenty of pretense. But the pretense grew pellucidly transparent over time.

How many citizens’ interests were actually served by the GOP? I put the number at less than a thousand, maybe less than five hundred. And you were among them, Kevin. I recently had a conversation with a co-worker, and he said, “Trump understands how much it hurts to be an American right now.” I now realize that you don’t, and you never did. All that stuff on that list up there didn’t really get under your skin. You were so inside the whole “can’t do” DC process that massive abuses and screwups were taken for granted. From your point of view, political life was all about cocktails, cruises, and cunt, and there was nothing for anyone really to get worked up about.

And in the meantime, you talked quietly amongst yourselves about classical liberalism. But the real vessel of classical liberalism is the USA, not the GOP. And if we’re serious about classical liberalism, that means big dramatic things will have to happen, very soon. Classical liberalism is utterly incompatible with the bloated, incompetent, and fraudulent government which Republicans have so effectively shielded against reform.

Americans do not want a soft-spoken, beta-male, non-threatening, baby-steps executive. There are some people we definitely want to feel threatened, like our geopolitical enemies and the traitors and bed-featherers currently thriving in the Deep State.

What will President Trump do? I have my doubts. But any doubt is preferable to the certainties that come with, say, Jeb Bush. And the possibilities on the upside are YUGE. I’d find it especially satisfying if Trump managed to drag the social and cultural center in a more American direction. This could happen. A lot of people seem frightened by Donald Trump right now. What if their fears don’t materialize, and real benefits do? If Trump pulls off even half of what he’s pledged, we’ll really all be better off. And that may put a new shine on the American identity.

And what will you do, Kevin Williamson? Simple: register as a Democrat. It’s who you are. Maybe if you switch sides (though it’s not really a switch) with enough publicity, they’ll let you keep the cocktails, cruises, and cunt.

* And to think: I used to call myself a conservative!

** Identifying as an American does not make one a cool kid. Apparently, there is something Americans value more highly than mere social acceptance.