Batman media is at its best when it uses its premise--a broken man trying to reconcile the trauma that his conditions have caused him--to interrogate the question of how to respond to the evils of late-stage capitalism. Which is why this type of media always has its social commentary aspects revolve both around the vigilante billionaire "hero," and around the villains, who like Bruce Wayne have been shaped by their environment to become reactive forces who ultimately reinforce the system they're disillusioned with. Gotham, a commentary on poverty-ravaged cities like Los Angeles, has been used as a thematic environment for Heath Ledger's 9/11 terrorist interpretation of the Joker, for Joker 2019's exploration of a mentally ill man pushed to the brink, and of The Batman's vision of a Riddler who was driven to serial murder by the demons that his impoverished orphan upbringing created within him.
"You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it's like to be someone like me?" said Joaquin Phoenix' Joker. "To be somebody but themselves? They don't. They think that we'll just sit there and take it, like good little boys! That we won't werewolf and go wild!" Ledger's Joker essentially concludes the same, saying about the people living under the system: "They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve." Paul Dano's Riddler expands upon their sentiments by articulating the vision for destruction that these villains collectively see as the solution to society's contradictions, saying to Batman: "All it takes is fear and a little focused violence. You taught me that."
Their thesis is that because the system is designed to create violence, their adding to the violence is justified. That whatever harm they cause is a proportionate response to what's been done to them. Increasingly, there are individuals who think exactly like this. And for revolutionaries, success depends on identifying and rejecting the ideas that lead these individuals to ultraviolence.
"Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?"--Arthur Fleck
The most incoherent, base examples of these ideas are all of the violent outbursts that have been appearing around the United States amid the pandemic. The mask temper tantrums, mistreatment of service workers, and assaults that we constantly see these days seem like unavoidable animal madness, but they're informed by political ideas. Caught up in their American obsession with individualism and interpersonal dominance, these belligerents carry out ridiculous and damaging actions, taking out their rage at their conditions against often the most vulnerable people. From this attitude of pride and ego, instilled by a cultural hegemony that encourages ruthless competition, these and all the more severe manifestations of violence are being proliferated.
"Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019," writes The Atlantic's Olga Khazan. "Substance-abuse treatment, never especially easy to come by, was further interrupted by COVID. Americans have also been buying more guns, which may help explain the uptick in the murder rate. Gun sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, and more people are being killed with guns than before. In 2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in 2019--a short 'time to crime' window that suggests criminal intent. 'Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes,' Champe Barton writes at The Trace. Though owning a gun doesn't make it more likely that you'll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you'll be successful if you try."
Such vices--substance abuse and reactionary gun culture--are also symptoms of the system the ruling class has engineered. Robbed of the life they deserve, the masses are turning to the poisonous coping mechanisms that are being marketed to them. What's essential to the marketing is to convince its targets that by contributing to society's deterioration, by embracing the violent, narcissistic, and hedonistic hyper-individualism that's pushed by our cultural hegemony, one is rebelling against the system. American gun culture is partly a product of the ultraviolent mentality that the masses are saturated with due to the covert influence of the military-industrial complex, which inserts glorifications of war into video games, TV, and film. Along with this fetishism for violence naturally comes a paranoia, an ingrained sense that humanity can't be trusted to act collectively when faced with a crisis--and therefore the only rational thing is to look out for oneself and the others in the in-group.
"Everybody just yells and screams at each other," observes Arthur Fleck in 2019's Joker. "Nobody's civil anymore! Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy." The tragic irony to Fleck's character is that when he's driven to insanity by this casual cruelty from others--born out of the system that's driven Gotham into poverty and cut him off from mental health treatment--he responds by making the cruelty worse. He goes on a murder spree, picking off various individuals whom he feels spite towards and inciting angry mobs to committing random violence. The latter of which he lacks real culpability for, since the conditions are what sparked the riots, but that feeds into his conclusions that human life doesn't matter and that destruction is the only option. "When on the Murray Franklin show, Joker recites some dark humor about a drunk driver killing a child, and Murray protests that he has gone too far," observes Left Voice. "In response, Joker says he is sick of not being able to laugh at 'inappropriate' things; that society should not be the arbiter of what is right or wrong anymore. This echoes the alt-right cultural war against political correctness and 'cultural Marxism,' starting with Milo Yiannopoulos' attacks against minorities, masked as comedy, and ending with Andrew Anglin's 'ironic Nazism.'"
The unsettling thing is that in the context of the film's world, where no alternative to the present social order is within immediate reach, resorting to such destructive measures feels to the audience like the best course of action for Fleck and the others whom society has pushed aside. Being trapped in an increasingly claustrophobic world, where everything is bearing down to try to crush you, instills an animal rage. It feels like you have no choice but to werewolf, even though you always have the option to choose revolutionary theory over impulsive action for action's sake. This risk of falling for one's worst urges is greater the more inhospitable of an environment one is in.
The stresses that many middle-class white people are newly experiencing right now are absolutely nothing compared to what the disproportionately colonized people in impoverished neighborhoods have had to try to survive for generations; studies show that growing up in a violent community is as likely to give someone PTSD as going to war is. Is it any wonder why, according to voices I've encountered from the black community, the experience of living as a colonized person in this country tends to make one desensitized to tragedy? Reactionary attitudes go hand in hand with this kind of trauma-ingrained hardness, as indicated by how the black YouTuber F.D Signifier names "patriarchy" as one of the great problems the impoverished people among his community face: "wherever there is poverty, wherever there is patriarchy, you'll see it." "It" being a dynamic where men react to their conditions by internalizing "apathy and callousness... a greater sense of becoming a monster themselves."
When one embraces the reactionary beliefs that can come from this dynamic, whatever survival plans one develops in response to our society's unraveling become based around a mentality of insiders and outsiders, anti-social and alienated from one's community. And the less coherent responses that a follower of this toxic individualism carries out in their everyday lives--resorting to violence on a whim, embracing close-minded anti-intellectualism, adopting a rigid with-me-or-against-me mentality--reflect this. Naturally, it's easy for such attitudes to be directed towards bigotry and the reinforcement of oppressive power structures. Sexual predation, domestic abuse, hate crimes, toxically masculine aggression, and racial or gender chauvinism get almost necessarily nurtured by individualism in a society where these things are systemically enabled. The individualism adds fuel to the tendencies towards abuse, exemplified by the pandemic's instances of belligerent anti-mask outbursts and even intentional weaponizations of the virus during interpersonal disputes. The collective good is disregarded in favor of personal spite, the world dragged further down into hell just so that one person can feel emotionally satisfied in a single moment.
But for the reactionary psychological state, which is what takes that individualism and animates it into destructive action, mere apathy or lack of compassion aren't enough. The cold attitude towards those deemed undeserving needs to go along with a mentality of perpetual war. Reflecting the literal endless war that our government carries out, the follower of what Umberto Eco called "Ur-Fascism" (or "eternal fascism") must apply the war mode to how they relate to the world: "For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a 'final solution' implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament."
This practical absurdity of Ur-Fascism's mission matters not to those who've been assimilated into the ideology. It tells them that life itself is one big reaction, a struggle that can never be abandoned lest the enemy win. The seeds of this mentality exist within every act of petty abuse or senseless descent into brutality that these pandemic-era belligerents commit. To turn these seeds into more coherently destructive forces, the kinds of forces that the state seeks to harness for counterrevolutionary purposes, a rejection of clear-headed thinking needs to be ingrained. The concept of introspection needs to be viewed with contempt, with war for war's sake being the only acceptable mindset.
"You know the thing about chaos? It's fair!"--Joker, The Dark Knight
To radicalize someone with this reactionary individualist mindset towards fascism, you need to convince them to see their darkest impulses as correct. These are the inner voices that say that inflicting harm on others is justified by the pain they themselves have experienced, that those they target in their perpetual war are deserving of brutal punishment or are necessary collateral damage. Essential to this is rejecting material analysis, which can put the contradictions that the reactionaries see in their proper context; according to materialism, embracing ideologies like racial supremacy is a self-evidently absurd response to capitalism's contradictions. But when this analysis is made to be viewed with suspicion, the Ur-Fascist war mentality becomes even more entrenched. Whenever you see something wrong with the world, it's further proof that hatred and ultraviolence are the answers.
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