No; but seriously, now...

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One's got to love the extent of the convoluted contortions the MSM and their social media affiliates will go to, to explain away what Joker is all about. The truth of the matter is they don't know what to make of it.

Case in point:



I quote:



"An alienated directionless minority," huh?!



Next, they'll be calling them "basket of deplorables."

Very obviously, Sam Adams has been struggling with this movie, as this is the second piece he laboriously writes about it. And, well, the strain of the cognitive dissonance is showing.

Deep down, I think the critics know that we know that they know that we know that they know better than that.

Do you really need a "key to understanding" the mass riots in Joker?  Do you really feel one is needed?

Try the 1992 Los Angeles riots.



Remember Rodney King?



Or what about the Yellow Vests?



No wonder police forces, all over the world, including (and maybe especially) in the USA, are being militarized. Though, there has not been much rioting on this side of the Atlantic since Rodney King.

The only people marching, nowadays, are the duly establishment-sanctified demonstrators of the bourgeoisie with a pussy-hat on their head.



I guess, the joke is on them.

But sometimes critics forget to lie, and Michael Moore perhaps said it best:





Which is maybe a long-winded way of saying what, some 50 years ago, JFK said perhaps even better:



I agree with Michael Moore: Joker is a masterpiece. And, imho, most certainly the most grownup DC (and Marvel) universe film, ever. The movie delivers everything that the much extolled Dark Knight was aiming for but quite never achieved.

Truth is, sometimes people grow tired of putting on a happy face...



It is a wonder, actually, considering what most people endure through life on a daily basis, that most of humanity has not become quite mad already—as perhaps it already has.

But never mind what Michael Moore thinks (regardless of how relevant it may or may not happen to be), never mind JFK. One doesn't need a "key" to understand Todd Phillips's film. Joker is a movie one ought to see for oneself and come out of it with one's own personal feelings about it. This is how art works. And this movie is definitely Art.

As Eugene Ionesco once put it:

"People regard politics as the only entertainment that permit us to live. In reality, one dies of politics. Politics are dead. The ideologies and philosophers are dead from which politics pretend to have originated. (...) As a reservoir of the collective unconscious, as a spontaneous or calculated expression inspired by the universal community, as prophetic language, art reveals man to himself.

If politics often lie, art cannot lie. The artist cannot lie because his creations are imaginary and imagination unmasks human significance."

But that is something that no politically correct minded reviewer looking for "keys" or some reductionists talking points will understand, because, by definition, such perspectives are politically minded, which is the reason why either political correctness or political propaganda, inevitably, has always been and will always be at the antipodes of the spontaneity and sincerity of art.