Todd Phillips’ move Joker isn’t out yet, but critics have seen it. While many have given it glowing reviews, others have said that it glorifies real-world patterns of violent behavior. Plot synopses have led some to worry the film might normalize the beliefs of the incel community, which has produced several murderers already.
Todd Phillips responded to that criticism in an interview, saying,
The movie still takes place in a fictional world. It can have real-world implications, opinions, but it’s a fictional character in a fictional world that’s been around for 80 years. The one that bugs me more is the toxic white male thing when you go, “Oh, I just saw John Wick 3.” He’s a white male who kills 300 people and everybody’s laughing and hooting and hollering. Why does this movie get held to different standards? It honestly doesn’t make sense to me.
This comment has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter. I’ve seen some people argue that it’s a faulty comparison because John Wick’s victims provoked him to kill them, by attacking him and killing his dog. Others are saying that Phillips has a good point, and those critical of violence in media shouldn’t get to pick and choose which violence they abjure.
The people who say it’s a bad comparison are correct, but not for the reasons given.
It’s not a bad comparison because of who gets killed, or the motives of the main character. It’s a bad comparison because the movies operate in two different rhetorical modes. Or, to put it another way, because not all fictional worlds are the same.
The John Wick series are solidly action fantasy movies. The copious violence is choreographed and balletic; combination fist/gun/knife/car/axe fights that would be impossible in reality. The main character belongs to an international secret society of genteel super-assassins, with its own baroque customs, currency, and global infrastructure. This is a fictional world that is blatantly unreal. No one worries about John Wick inspiring copycat crimes because it would be literally impossible. Behaving as John Wick does requires living in a world that doesn’t exist.
Joker, from its marketing and reviews, appears to be working in the rhetorical mode of psychological realism. This is the same mode as a great deal of mainstream literature—fiction which concerns invented but believable people, doing things that didn’t happen but believably could have. Phillips admits this in another interview, saying, “I literally described to Joaquin at one point in those three months as like, ‘Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film.’” So while the world of Joker is, as he says, fictional, this depiction of it is striving to be realistic. That’s why people are criticizing it in a way they don’t criticize John Wick.
John Wick 3 valorizes a kind of violence that doesn’t (and can’t) actually happen. Joker, according to some critics, valorizes a kind of violence that does. Those critics may turn out to be wrong, but they aren’t hypocrites for treating the two movies differently.
Ex Machina – Alex Garland shooting his own script in his directorial debut. This story about the ethics of artificial intelligence and gendered expectation is that rare beast, a science fiction movie that 100% respects the intelligence of the audience. Every obvious question of premise gets immediately addressed by the characters. The performances are compelling, and the SFnal ambition staggering for a film with only four real characters. The intersections of masculinity, technology, and capitalism are picked at until they bleed, and Garland manages a more sensitive exploration of female objectification in just a few scenes than, say, Under The Skin manages in its entire runtime. The suspense mounts and mounts until an inevitable ending that’s simultaneously harrowing and triumphant, insisting that we accept Ava’s definition of freedom over one that we might be tempted to see as more just. I’ll be thinking about the nuanced interplay between narrative expectation and models of consent in this film for years.
Snowpiercer – Bong Joon-Ho crafted a film here that’s as conceptually and visually ambitions as anything on the list, making good story choices every step along the way. We’re prepared for it be a standard movie of class warfare; what we get is something more like a mortal rebellion against an unfair god–a war that can only ever end in pyrrhic victory–waged via one shockingly original set piece after another. The result is like nothing else I’ve seen, an action movie where the triumphant conclusion is the death of all humanity. One of those movies where going back to look at a clip of a single scene all too easily turns into re-watching the entire thing. (Though I will cop to a personal bias here: I am a sucker for stories that take place in a linear restricted space. Trains, standing in lines, mine shafts, infinitely deep stairwells, whatever. I always love it.)
Her – This movie comes so close to being in Tier 1 for me, but doesn’t quite make it. It’s wonderful all the same. I’ve never seen a Spike Jonze movie I didn’t like (though Where The Wild Things Are I did not love), and this one is easily my favorite. It’s science fiction as metaphorical exploration of human romantic relationships, especially relationships that challenge notions of self and social propriety, and is whip-smart in pursuit of that end. But what keeps it out of Tier 1 is that it downplays exploring its own premise–that of an artificial intelligence so advanced that it forms a real romantic relationship with a human. The one (excellent) scene that invested more in science fiction than metaphor, wherein Samantha recruits a surrogate, embodied woman to join her relationship with Theodore, almost feels like part of a different movie. By not investing in the SFnal premise, the movie neatly insulates itself from questions of consent (Samantha begins her life as a purchased consumer product) or the nature of human versus nonhuman desire (touched on toward the end of the film only as a metaphorical growing apart of the main characters). Off the edges of the screen there’s a eucatastrophic AI singularity, with no apparent influence on society. Its only purpose is to make inevitable the end of Samantha and Theodore’s time together. This all works just fine narratively; the movie is elegant as can be. But I strongly believe that somewhere out in the universe of possible stories is a version of this tale that takes the science fiction as seriously as it does the emotion.
Gravity – Alfonso Cuaron communicated the visceral inhospitality of space like no other director ever has, and made it beautiful it the same time. That accomplishment alone is enough to make this movie great. What keeps it out of Tier 1 is the unfortunate dialog and score–which sounds like it should be a huge deal, but in this movie makes up a relatively small part of the whole. The rebirth metaphor powering the narrative struck others as more effective than it did me, but I wasn’t put off by it. This movie earns its place in the SF movie conversation via awe-inspiring technical accomplishment, on a historical line with The Matrix and Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Mad Max: Fury Road – This is the first movie in years that I paid to see more than once in the theater. The plot is stick-figure simple, but within that formula George Miller executed so perfectly and with such verve that it felt like a reinvention of the action tentpole. The visual vocabulary of Mad Max: Fury Road is pristine, effortlessly tossing off details that feel fully realized through just the perfection of their iconography. (The Doof Warrior, for example, the blind guy with the flamethrower guitar whose name isn’t even in the movie.) Add in the amazing diegetic score, and you already have enough to make this movie a hit. But what makes it great is that, on top of all those elements, it’s a startlingly progressive story about violence against women, and how those women stand up to and overcome it. Titular Mad Max is, frequently literally, just along for the ride. It’s not forced or didactic or self-satisfied, every move is earned. That Miller was able to fit all this into a package sufficiently uncontroversial that it reached screens intact is miraculous, and we might end up looking back on it as a kind of turning point in big-budget cinema history.
Dredd – A movie that’s way better than it should be, Dredd sneaks its way into Tier 2 by a deep, resolute commitment to its philosophical premise. Early on the movie tells you that the world is a hopeless place, and then, unlike every other apocalypse on the list or in recent memory, it never wavers. Dredd isn’t interested in redemption, it’s interested in nihilism. Good intentions count for nothing, principled stances go unrewarded. Its main character arc, that of Judge Anderson, is the story of an idealist embracing brutal pragmatism. And I do mean brutal; the action sequences in this film are gorgeously decadent. Karl Urban has never been better, and proves that a talented actor doesn’t need to ever show more than about 30% of his face to get the job done. Basically, this is a movie that bullseyes every one of it’s goals, while being consistently smarter than it needed to. Which makes sense when you learn, as I did only recently, that the script was written by Alex Garland, who I think just beats out Christopher Nolan for the most important SF screenwriter of this period.
Attack the Block – Before he was on the poster for the new Star Wars movies, John Boyega was patrolling council flats and protecting the Earth from alien invasion. What start out looking like class stereotypes become explorations of insecurity, and eventually camaraderie. A delightful movie of an unlikely ensemble coming together to face a common enemy. Suspenseful and funny.
Inception – Nolan has an instant classic and a great movie on his resume (Memento and The Prestige, respectively), but his most recent SF offerings don’t match that standard. Inception was a cultural event when it came out, but it’s been long enough since we all saw it and liked it that we can admit that the basic idea is dumb as hell, right? The plot intricacies are delicious in their complexity and ambition, and filmmaking talent on display is top-notch. But the whole dream spies concept is really, really silly. Also, this was the movie where it became impossible to ignore that Nolan writes exclusively meager roles for women.
Interstellar – I honestly loved this movie. It did a ton of things I adore and rarely get to see. It’s a deterministic narrative, which always makes me giddy. It has a legitimate sense of galactic scale. It’s intriguingly structured; if most movies are novels, then this one is a collection of linked short stories. Almost all of the really important story choices in this film are done right. But even though I loved it, I can’t ignore that this film is oppressively self-important. It’s exhausting, being reminded over and over that it’s a film about serious events and high stakes that should be deeply meaningful. I’m fairly forgiving of pretentiousness, but it does keep this film from being higher on the list.
Source Code – Duncan Jones followed up his wonderful debut Moon with this script plucked from The Black List of well-regarded but unproduced movies. It’s a film that uses many worlds QM to tell a Groundhog Day-esque story about trying to thwart a terrorist attack on Chicago. It’s well made and effective, but suffers from not thoroughly exploring its own premise. For example, at the end of the movie we have what is supposed to be a happy ending in which our hero Coulter Stevens has his mind transferred into a healthy body he gets to keep and use to seduce a pretty woman. But that body was previously in use by someone else, who has functionally been murdered to facilitate Coulter’s ride into the sunset. The major ethical implications of the plot are simply never addressed.
Edge of Tomorrow –An even more Groundhog Day-esque story. I was legitimately surprised by this one. Emily Blunt is great, Tom Cruise is tolerable (!), and the plot mostly makes sense, even if the premise that gets us there feels lazily off-the-shelf. The middle 60% of this movie is as much fun as you could ask for, and while it’s bookended by weaker material–like a stab at ensemble camaraderie for the secondary characters that never really coheres–the whole remains quite satisfying.
The Martian – I can’t better Randall Munroe’s description of this, a feature-length version of the scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers dump a bag of garbage on the conference room table and say, “We have to figure out how to build a CO2 scrubber out of that or the astronauts die.” One part scientific literacy, one part nerdy playfulness, and two parts triumphalism, mixed thoroughly, then desiccated in the near vacuum of an alien atmosphere. It’s nice that Ridley Scott managed a good SF film in this stretch, as it makes the post-Prometheus universe that much less bewildering. Aberrations are easier to explain than full reversals.
Pacific Rim – “You know what would be awesome?” I might believably have thought to myself over the years, “A sort of live-action Evangelion movie with all of the giant robots fighting interesting monsters for the fate of humanity, and none of the angst.” Pacific Rim is exactly that. This movie knows that we bought our tickets to see mecha versus monsters, and devotes all of its resources to that cause. A big dumb action movie that knows its a big dumb action movie and glories in it. Fun SF fact: the baddies in this movie are so good because the head creature designer was Wayne Barlowe, of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, which was my most checked out book from my middle school library.
Melancholia – Probably the most controversial movie on this list. I know people who absolutely loved it, and people who hate it so strongly that its mention raises hackles even years later. I went in with very low expectations, having not been a fan of previous Lars Von Trier movies, and came away wowed. An astronomical calamity as objective correlative to explore depression? Sign me up. Bonus points for gorgeous cinematography. Certain scenes, like when the guy holds up his son’s wire contraption and discovers that Melancholia is indeed getting larger in the sky, have remained indelible. The worst thing about this movie is that it gave me enough good will toward Von Trier that I then went and saw both parts of Nymphomaniac in the theater. All of that good will is now gone.
Predestination – A film adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies…,” which sounds like a great idea. While there’s some quite good acting in this (especially Sarah Snook), the pacing drags, and the screenwriter made the inadvisable choice to add big picture stakes by inexpertly welding on a terrorism plot. But it’s still a rare deterministic time travel movie, which earns some points.
Europa Report – The best things about this movie are the use of NASA assets to create visuals that would have once been unimaginable in a small indie film, and one truly great scene about a fatal accident in space. The rest is interesting, but slow, and story-wise the movie ends right at what, in a stronger film, would be the start of act two.
Upstream Color – I actually find this movie fascinating in a lot of ways. It starts out with the most disturbing scenes of mind control I’ve ever seen on film, and then turns into an oneiric watercolor of a film unlike anything else I’ve encountered. But with all the gorgeous acting and swirling acoustics, I ultimately just can’t get over this movie asking me to invest in the trauma of being infested with a parasite that makes one psychically connected to the emotional lives of some pigs. This may be a personal failing. Maybe, as a carnivore, I’ve developed a self-protective but pathological inability to take pigs seriously enough for this narrative device to work? This movie is one I think difficult to recommend, but might well do anyway given the right mood.
Under the Skin – Memorable as a gnomic experience, this movie is an ultimately empty vessel built to hold a message about the commodification of women’s bodies that never actually gets communicated. The visuals are striking, and strange enough to not read as gratuitous even when fixating on Scarlett Johansson’s frequently naked body (which I’m cynical enough to think does still have much to do with the film’s largely positive critical reception). But it’s all just an object for contemplation; any interesting ideas here were brought in by the audience.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens – By far the best thing about this movie–it’s really not even close–is that it’s soon going to be the most successful film ever, and it stars a woman and a black man. That’s important for the same reasons I said above that Mad Max Max: Fury Road might someday be seen as a turning point. Beyond that, though, this movie is merely serviceable. 
Jurassic World – Basically the same deal as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, except without any progressive casting and some mildly unfortunate gender stereotypes. I think I’m more forgiving of Rey in The Force Awakens suddenly knowing the Jedi mind trick than I am of Chris Pratt hypnotizing velociraptors with the power of his extended palm because Star Wars always had some conceptual silliness in it’s heart, whereas Jurassic Park didn’t. But fun enough to earn a billion dollars and lock in Pratt as a major movie star, which is nice.
