Is the Joker an Incel?
The Joker movie has drawn wide attention and a range of responses. One connection that has been made is one to the online community of Incels. Some Incels discussed attacking screenings of the film and around the time of its release a major Incel forum, based on the platform Reddit, was banned. Jacobin called the Joker “an angry and isolated white working class incel driven over the edge”. But the Incel-Joker connection only works on some levels and it is perhaps more telling of many of us that we refer to the Joker as being about an Incel rather it being a straightforward mirror image of one and the other. In this piece, I am interested in thinking about the psychodynamics of the Joker and Incels as well as the wider cultural responses to both phenomena and what they tell of our own defences against (being somewhat implicated in) the two.
The film is a powerful portrayal of mental health and the violence that gives rise to and results from certain conditions. There have been many reactions to the film, some very critical, because it forces us to engage with Joker as a human, who is a very disturbing and on the surface a morally wrong character, on his terms. He is in control of the film and it is his narrative that we watch. The parallels to Incels and other men today are paramount and Joker allows us more of an insight, a fictional one of course, into some of the fragmented and disturbed psyches that we find today.
Who are Incels and what, if any, is their relationship to the Joker? Incels are an online community of “involuntary celibate” men who have not been in a relationship with a woman recently, or never in some cases. For Incels, the majority of women are superficial, slutty “Stacys” who are only interested in being with muscular, successful, alpha-male “Chads”. Incels are deeply misogynistic, anti-feminist and often in close proximity to the alt-right. An Incel’s existence, so it seems, is structured along a desire for and destruction of an abstract image of woman, as the discussions that Incels engage in demonstrate. They have an intense love-hate relationship with women. Incels bemoan their own shortcomings, particularly as far as their looks are concerned. They feel they look un-manly, ugly, or somehow different to the masculine norm.
Commentators have argued that Incels and the Joker share a particular masculinity that is characterised by rage, alienation and mental health issues. The Joker, as a grown up man, still lives with his mother and desires a woman who rejects him. Some scenes in the film show his fantasies of him going out on a date with the woman, who lives on the same floor in his apartment complex. Incels, although often younger men, also frequently still live with their parents and lament the fact that they feel rejected or ignored by women. Daniel Tutt, in his Lacanian reading of the film, has argued that Joker is about imaginary and symbolic fathers, who are represented in the figures of the talkshow host Murray Franklin and Thomas Wayne.
The father is certainly a central theme in the Joker and for Incels alike. As a community, Incels are obsessed by genetics and their parental imagos. They blame their parents, and implicitly their fathers in particular, for not having passed on the right genes, or for having failed to instil the masculine authority of the Chad or alpha male in them.
It is not a coincidence, then, that Incels and other commentators have reacted so passionately to the Joker (as they have also done to films such as Fight Club). They recognise themselves in the Joker as men who blame their fathers and parents for their problems and alienation.
“I don’t believe in anything”
Perhaps the most uniting aspect of Joker and Incels is a shared nihilism and cynicism which articulates itself in humour and irony. The so-called black pill culture of Incels and other men today is about a fatalistic outlook on the world where no hope is left, human beings are stuck on their own, the welfare state has failed, and no one can be trusted. Joker says in one scene: “I don’t believe in anything”. While the film shows such a world as de-facto in operation and as being true, it is too easy to follow such a logic and to dismiss critiques of it as bourgeois or neoliberal, as some critics have. Both Incels and the Joker are trapped in a logic of nihilism and fatalism that is reproduced by them as well as by social structures and the violence, apathy or ignorance by others around them. It is responded to with irony and humour in the film. Such a worldview may be appropriated by Incels as they construct a particular version of masculinity that is coupled with an entitlement for sex. Any kind of well-meant advice, help, therapy in particular, is dismissed by Incels as stuff that “Normies” — people who are not Incels — would say because they don’t understand and cannot relate to Incels.
The world of Normies is turned into jokes and endlessly circulated by Incels in a nihilistic and ironic manner in the form of memes, animated gifs, graphics, or other content. Jokes that only Incels would truly understand. When Joker says to the clinician in the film’s final scene that he just thought of a joke, she responds: “You wana tell it to me?” to which he only mutters “You wouldn’t get it.”
Eleanor Penny has argued that the movie is
“A confessional for a culture which disowns the violence of white men — whilst endlessly forgiving it, endlessly excusing it, and endlessly placating its demands. A society which harbours the suspicion that men must be appeased with power or they will take it by force. A perfect framework for reinforcing patriarchal norms under the guise of humanistic sympathy of those bereft and left behind by a world which should ordinarily care for them.”
This may be true, but I think such a reading is too splitting in its conclusion. The film points to such notions, but to what extent they are reinforced or perhaps troubled by it remains to be seen.
Towards the end of the film, Joker is invited to be a guest of Murray Franklin’s show. Murray, a hero he regards as an idealised father, had played a clip of a failed stand-up act by Joker to the audience’s amusement. A humiliation.
Joker: I got nothing left to lose, Murray. Nothing can hurt me anymore. This is my fate, it was always my fate. My life is nothing but a comedy.
Murray Franklin: Let me get this straight, you think killing those young men is funny?
Joker: Yeah. But comedy is subjective, isn’t that what they say? Besides, the way I see it, what happened was a good thing. All of you, Gotham, the system that knows so much, you decide, you decide what’s right and wrong. What’s real or what’s made up. The same way you decide what’s funny or not. […] Have you seen what it’s like out there, Murray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy.
The above dialogue finds similar expression in Incels and the alt-right today who fantasise about a mythic past where a gender order existed that gave men what they desired, where men had control over women and feminism did not exist. As with Trump’s Make America Great Again, such a world never really existed. It is a product of fantasy. Likewise, a time that was more civil, as Joker alludes to, probably never existed in the way he would have liked.
Joker may work so well for Incels as a projection surface onto which they can project their own feelings of inadequacy and continue to blame others for it. Whereas Joker is, as shown in the film, objectively suffering (he is twice violently beaten up, loses his job, his therapy is discontinued), such scenes work so well for Incels because they act as moments that can amplify their own self-pity and self-victimization. Like the Joker, Incels are characterised by a dynamic of desiring and destroying the other. In their case that other is women, who they blame for ignoring or rejecting them. The powerful men in the film are similar to the Incel figure of the Chad, alpha males with success, money, and heterosexual relationships. In that sense, the Joker functions as a text that Incels can use to justify the abandonment and violent structures of society that only reward particular, able-bodied, good locking men. A world of superficial looks and perfect bodies which are endlessly shown on social media. Like the Joker, Incels discuss mental health issues and a despair at the world today. However, unlike the Joker, Incels make active use of alt-right politics in designating women (and to a lesser degree non-white subjects) as the other that is symbolically and at times physically annihilated. Incels endlessly reproduce a fantasy that it is the Stacy who has all the fun with Chads and who is only interested in looks, money and sex. In their violent misogyny, Incels both destroy and desire an abstract image of woman which has little grounding in reality. They consciously create a narrative of self-castration and victimization and the only way out is to become a Chad — a fantasy that is similarly rejected as an impossibility and held on to at the same time. The fact that Incels discuss those things online also comes to matter. Their complex discourses that revolve around fantasies of revenge and desire are impossible to leave behind. They are trapped in them and provide them with a symbolic agency that relives them of having to make any real changes to their lives.
Is the Joke on Us?
Sexuality is also a theme in the film which has not been picked up that much in the various commentaries and reviews. To be a subject and to feel real and validated by others is closely connected to sexuality and being desired. This is what Joker, like Incels and other men today, lacks. The difference with Incels is that they resort to an aggressive-entitled and often violent demand for recognition and sex, without empathy for the other because they feel so alienated. An alienation that is, for both Joker and Incels, both structural and subjective. They are responsible for it but the system is too and we are too on some levels.
So far, there have been no violent responses to the film, which of course does not mean that they would never happen, and the many responses that criticize the release of a film in times of surging right-wing populism, manic Trump loyalty, alt-right online communities and polarized societies, precisely articulated such a fear: that Joker is a dangerous incentive to disaffected men. But such response are more akin to a moral panic. Incels and the Manosphere won’t go away if films like Joker were not to be made. The responses that claim that Joker is a dangerous movie suggest workings of negation or repression of forces and subjects we would not want to deal with or see: mentally unstable subjects, xenophobic, misogynistic or fascist / racist individuals. As a critic in the IndieWire argued, Joker is “exactly the movie the Joker would want.” — and Incels would want it too. The film can thus work as a confrontation with images and discourses that disturb our own fantasies of the good life. The film’s protestors are labelled as “clowns” by Thomas Wayne, and our ironic Internet culture, partly driven by social media, virality, and more notorious communities like Reddit and 4chan, has made it possible to dismiss everyone and everything in a hyper-ironic manner. This sort of irony is not only turned back on itself by Incels and the alt-right, but it is also used in response to them by those of us who feel “normal” and not misogynistic for example, where the term “Incel” has become a sort of joke in itself that is circulated on social media in relation to certain men. Both the Joker and Incels exist because many in society would rather ignore their existence.
Tyler Wells Lynch has noted that the humour of the Joker, and perhaps by extension that of Incels, serves as power for him. It is the only sort of agency he has left. But I would argue that this power remains on the symbolic level. It is no real power to achieve anything meaningful. For Incels, real power would mean to enter into a dialogue with others, something they completely refuse in their forums. But it would also mean for us to be willing to listen and respond.
Above all, this is a film about a lack of empathy that is everywhere in capitalism today. A lack that is responded to with cynicism and irony by many. From the people who mistreat Joker because he is “crazy”, to the mental health system that is programmed to ignore the individual and stuff them with pills, to Joker himself, to Murray, and even to the protestors who merely appropriate him as a leader who they can look up to without really relating to him, to Incels and our own responses to them, and to the wider workings of social media communication that is often marked by polarization, irony, sarcasm and cynicism.
Perhaps the ultimate cynicism of responses to the movie is that many have noted that it has no message, that it is an empty space, Joker can be and mean whatever we want him to be. We should think more about what such responses reveal about our own psychic investments and defences rather than those of Joker.
Jacob Johanssen is Senior Lecturer in Communications, St. Mary’s University.
