Boy Movies #72

Return of the king* (*newsletter)

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter. Hi!

Is this thing on? Can anyone hear me? Wow!!! We’re back! I’ve been trying to write this issue for weeks and, in the interest of being fearlessly real, must tell you that I have not been able to get even a single sentence out. It’s a challenge right now but I’m pushing myself to do it because I’ve missed this newsletter and all of you dearly. The other day I was getting off the train and saw a man wearing a Pulp Fiction t-shirt and spent the entire walk to my destination panicking over whether I included any Tarantino movies in the Boy Movies 100 Best Boy Movies ranking. (I did: Inglourious Basterds.) In that moment I knew it was time to get back. What have you all been up to? What have you been watching? What have I missed? What’s the cool jams? Sound off in the comments.

Mental health power hour

Not to sound all “I started taking a mood stabilizer and now I’m not obsessed with BTS anymore,” but I started taking an SSRI and now I’m not obsessed with movies anymore. Just kidding, but I did recently start medication and it has affected more areas of my life than I anticipated. At first I felt nothing, and then a few weeks in it was like a switch flipped. The noise in my brain had quieted, but my creativity, as well as my general interest in writing, had completely stalled. “You know how all the famous authors did their best work when they were miserable? I’m afraid I might be like that,” I cockily told my psychiatrist, who responded by explaining that these are normal side effects and are all part of the process of adjusting to the medication — blah, blah, blah. While this emotional flattening is preferable to the depressing alternative, it isn’t conducive to writing a newsletter. You have to care. Or, I don’t know, maybe you don’t, maybe I’m thinking too hard about it, but I like to care. So much of adulthood already involves spending time on shit I don’t care about but have to do anyway, and I would sooner watch Joker again (more on that later) before I let Boy Movies turn into another obligation.

This is far from my first SSRI rodeo, but it’s the first time I’m making a real effort to commit to it, mostly because I hope to never have a repeat of this summer. There are entire days from June and July that I can’t remember. There were afternoons where I would look at the clock and realize several hours had passed without me noticing. Weird, random things made me burst into tears at weird, random times. I worried constantly and abstractly. I recognize now that it’s crazy to be awake at four AM watching my tenth episode of Entourage¹ in a row and still be like, “This seems normal. I probably don’t have to look into this.”

So, you know, I’m now [extremely Sexy Unique Podcast voice] in a place of managing. I’ve been taking my little meds every morning for almost two months. There are good days and bad days. A lot of normal things are still challenging, and there is plenty I need to work on that I am, annoyingly, putting off. But even the micro steps feel good. “It’s really hard to get help,” my psychiatrist said during our first meeting. “I’m glad you’re doing it.” She later told me that she feels I “use humor to make light of some pretty severe problems,” but I’ll take my wins where I can get them. (She said this after laughing at every single one of my jokes, mind you… you’re gonna have to pick one, mama….) It’s wild how talking to one mental health professional who cares and is willing to ask difficult questions and is invested in working together on solutions can be enough to make you feel like life is worth living. And it is, because it means I can be back here, talking about stupid bullshit with all of you. Boy Movies missed Brat summer and Deadpool and Wolverine (I saw it, but it’s simply too late to comment; to put it succinctly, that movie upset me) and the Bennifer divorce (genuinely thank god I was medicated when the news dropped), but who knows what this fall will bring? I mean, we’re mere weeks away from Venom: The Last Dance…

Which is as good a segue as any into what I actually want to talk about. Naturally, the second I started feeling better I decided to make everything worse by watching the movie Joker for the first time.

This happened to my buddy Eric

I have not read Hanya Yanagihara’s obscenely popular novel A Little Life, but I have had the almost comically devastating plot described to me by several friends, which is basically the same thing, and so I feel justified in referring to it as the “‘Our basketball hoop was a rib cage’ book.” Let me put it this way: It’s like if someone turned Nene’s legendary “Kim is the only person I know that has had cancer, thyroids, blood clots, open heart surgery, a stroke, and is still walking around here being negative” drag into a 700+ page story. There’s just too many things wrong with that guy! This is also the plot of the movie Joker.

The night before I decided to watch Joker I had the misfortune of overhearing a man at a bar explain to a woman in grave detail why Joker is such an important film. I wish nothing but love and light to that woman, who flatly responded, “Mhm. Yeah,” to every single one of his emphatic insistences that Joker is “very dark and very off-putting, but that’s why it’s good.” Alright, pal.

You will never be Nina Sayers!!!!!!!!!!

My decision to spend two hours of my precious singular life on this earth observing the inner workings of Todd Phillips’ twisted mind had nothing to do with these two strangers — in fact, I only became intrigued after the middling reviews of Lady Gaga Presents Joker: Folie a Deux came out of the Venice Film Festival, which is such a funny turn of events that it managed to pique my interest in a movie I’ve spent the last five years refusing to engage with. Look, I always knew I’d have to slay this beast eventually, but I was trying to put it off as long as possible. Joker is a pillar of modern boy cinema, and I was going to be seated for Folie a Deux just as I have been diligently seated for every Gaga-starring film to date. (Little Monster first, human being second, etc.) I don’t know if Gaga is a “good” actress, but she has a presence unlike any other and, crucially, seems to believe she is inventing the concept of acting every time she steps in front of a camera, which I love. Regardless of her talent as a dramatic performer, I can already tell you with certainty that Joker does not deserve her. She’s too earnest and too talented. She’s profoundly weird, but in a vastly different way than Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix are weird. Get a job, stay away from her!

So where to begin with Joker? It is an Academy Award-winning film from 2019 that stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a man suffering from ambiguous disorder who starts committing crimes to retaliate for his life being so shitty, all while dressed as a clown. Or, well, that’s what Joker purports to be about, but it’s also just the 500th cinematic take on the notorious Batman villain — like, relax. That’s what’s always bothered me about the whole conversation surrounding Joker. Hearing Phillips and Phoenix talk about it might lead you to believe the film is a necessary and provocative meditation on society, man. The same thing is happening all over again as press for the sequel kicks into gear, as not one person involved with Folie a Deux is willing to call this movie that is clearly a musical… a musical. “I just don’t want people to think that it’s like In the Heights,” Phillips told Variety last month. Brother, why don’t you shut up? In trying to set himself and his tWiStEd creation apart, Phillips stripped Folie a Deux of anything that made it remotely interesting. Why are you “not like other girls”-ing your own movie, man? And why does it seem like you have so much resentment for it?

Probably because that attitude is fundamental to Joker’s entire deal. It’s not necessarily incorrect to describe it as a movie about an incel turned anti-capitalist folk hero, but Joker is a film with such murky politics and such inconsistent characterization of its titular figure that it ends up being about nothing. Never defining exactly what’s wrong with Arthur is Phillips’ way of deliberately confusing the audience, of making sure we never quite know how we’re supposed to feel about him. Are we supposed to understand that his vague mental issues are propelling him to kill, or is he simply a product of neglect, of the dreaded male loneliness crisis? The problem is that Arthur has such a ferociously terrible go of it (it = life) that it circles back around to being funny. He’s Sideshow Bob endlessly stepping on and getting hit in the face with rakes. To crib from Nene again, God has let him live through every disease in America! The result of relentless suffering for suffering’s sake is that Arthur ends up less a character than he is a blank canvas on which the film’s clown mask-wearing mobs, and the viewers who identify with him, can project whatever they want. It’s almost sinister.

A widely agreed upon critical pain point of Folie a Deux is the fact that Arthur’s Jokersona fades into the background for much of the film, leaving the audience with Arthur himself, who absolutely sucks. Some critics have presented this as a new issue, but from my view, it doesn’t seem all that different from what Folie a Deux’s predecessor did. The Joker was always more of a concept than something Phillips and co. took seriously. At that point, when you have your title character hurtling toward an identity that doesn’t actually exist, where does that leave him? More importantly, where does that leave the viewers who dared to trust this franchise with our time? The joke, obviously, has always been on us.

Much of this is now outdated, but if you want to catch up on the few things I did manage to do during my hiatus:

• Longtime friend of the newsletter and friend to me in my life Akosua Adasi kindly asked me to contribute to Consumption Report’s fabulous fall syllabus. I wrote about spending this autumn with Green Day and Lost!

• I reviewed Three Women, which… uhhhhhh…

• I reviewed the new season of Industry, which is so so so so so so good. We must canonize Ken Leung.

It’s nice to be back. I’m hoping to be back in your inboxes very soon. <3

1. Should I do an Entourage issue??? Lmk.