Untaming Ourselves

Make Cooperation Sexy Again, Part Two, including a look at 'Joker: Folie à Deux'

In Part One we looked at the apparently inexplicable attraction of the trickster Donald Trump, and why wokeism and Covid lockdowns have made the left seem like the side of boring and even totalitarian control.

Before we go any further into the mire here's a tweet from Jem Bendell which adds to the understanding of how someone as obviously terrible as Trump could ever seem electable by anyone:

When people are suffering or anxious the 'change candidate' wins. U can't be a 'change candidate' when u are in power, if not admitting mistakes but intending 2 maintain an agenda. Nor can u be about change when yr main message is to vote against the other side. Elementary, DNC!

Which makes a lot of sense to me as a partial explanation, yet I will carry on digging into the deeper psychological underpinnings of why we need to bring back Trickster energy into our society in a healthy way, and so continue on the path to Making Cooperation Sexy Again.

While it is true that some form of neoliberalism or laissez-faire economics has become the default in most Western industrialised countries - a broadly right-wing way of managing the economy - since the 1960s the left wing has mostly been dominant in the cultural sphere.

Although the sixties Left had many trickster elements, particularly the Situationists in Europe and the Yippies in the USA, which led to things like Operation Mindfuck and Church of the Subgenius, over the years and with the spread of wokeism and an increasingly hardened materialist outlook, the left became the party of reason and 'follow the science'.

This has had the effect of making media conglomerates increasingly risk-averse and afraid to offend anybody. That will automatically repress any trickster energy which might be present within creative works commissioned by these corporations, because if one thing is guaranteed, the Trickster will offend *somebody*. A film I just saw, Joker: Folie à Deux, illustrates this well.

NB I don't give any direct spoilers but if you haven't seen the film, are intending to, and don't want **any** idea of what happens, then maybe wait until after you've seen it to read this.

The movie is not as terrible as you might have read, but especially compared to the first Joker (which you must see if you haven't), it's not that great. This is not a review (do let me know if you would like to read more of my thoughts on it though), so, as I said, I just want to mention one aspect common to both Joker films: the suppression of the trickster archetype in modern rationalist/secular society (and indeed in large part in the sort of traditional religious society out of which our own grew).

The first film was a bit of an outlier in the current media environment, being rather more edgy than most mainstream movies, and even more so when one considers that it is essentially yet another superhero spinoff, this time from the Batman franchise. I don't know, or care, if it comes from the same studio as some of the myriad other Batman-related films, I just know that it's set in Gotham in roughly the same fictional universe as the dude who dresses up as a bat and goes around saving people, although (thankfully from my POV) Batman doesn't appear in these films.

In the first Joker, as you probably know by this point but just in case, Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix), is a self-hating, weak and pitiable - yet compassionate - man who tries to fit into society as a clown or comedian but is hampered by an involuntary and creepy tendency to laugh manically at inappropriate moments. This laughter represents his shadow self - in the Jungian sense - breaking through; his powerful, charismatic, but abusive and murderous alter ego, The Joker. He is the archetypal trickster, unpredictable, dangerous, powerful, fluid, sexy, and funny.

From the first Joker film

I won't give you any more spoilers than that for the first movie; suffice to say that The Joker can also be very violent, and the film does not appear to condemn that violence to any great degree. It is presented as understandable, given what we know about the downtrodden personal history of Arthur Fleck and his desire to avenge it.

In the sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, (and, as I'll go on to explain, this is why it's rather flat dramatically), only two possible options are presented for the protagonist: firstly he can stay as Arthur Fleck and somehow fit into society, albeit committed to a psychiatric hospital for his crimes. Or secondly, embody the Joker and escape from the hospital alongside his lover Lee Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga). In this film, Joker and Quinzel are performers of jazz standards and tap dancing as well as having a tendency toward chaos (although the violence is substantially more muted than in the first movie).

A third option: of a synthesis of the positive characteristics of both Fleck and the Joker is conspicuous by its absence in the film. Thus it is implied that people in general - and especially men - need to choose between a weakened self who can fit into society or an antisocial but strong and sexy version of ourselves who can't. The film - slight spoiler alert here! - comes down on the side of the former.

By presenting the trickster archetype as firmly in the psychological shadow and never giving us the option of seeing it as anything other than a disruptive and psychopathically dangerous - if enticing - path to follow, the movie doubles down on the modern societal suppression of the trickster. This means it feels unresolved dramatically, as if the creators felt that either 'the real' Arthur or his Joker persona had to win, and to choose the latter would essentially be condoning murder.

I believe the script is attempting to make the very valid point that Arthur is being heroic when he rejects the temptation to become the focus of a cult of personality based around the myth of The Joker. Yet without a healthy synthesis of Fleck's compassion and the Joker's libidinal verve being allowed as a potential solution, the viewer is given the same sort of materialist answer that any mainstream leftist would give. That life is a meaningless accident but we should try to be nice to people if possible anyway. We must repress the parts of us which don't want to be nice, with drugs if necessary, or at least with mindfulness, and just try to muddle on, voting for what's left of a mostly-sold-out centrist rational political... it even makes me tired to type it.

I believe this fairly lame compromise is what's behind the backlash around the film. It's just not psychologically satisfying on a deep level. And in exactly the same way, the Democrats (or Labour party in the UK, Canada, Australia, and the equivalent centre-left parties around the world) are seen as a busted flush, out of ideas and energy.

BUT! The point is that we do need to cooperate. Shit is travelling rapidly fan-ward, in very large quantities. The polycrisis is real, climate catastrophe is, unfortunately, real. Do we want psychos like Trump, Orban, Putin, Le Pen etc. in power when it really hits? What do we think they'll do? Let us all sit around talking about philosophy like Nikki The Hegelian (see part one), being immigrants, being gay, having abortions, having different beliefs to the ones which will, by then, have become mandatory? Or might work camps, deportations, militias, boots stamping on human faces forever, be more of a likely outcome?

Not actually that much of a a jump from the real thing, in fact

And sorry to all the love 'n' light posse here, the manifesters, the Instagram gurus, the conspiritualists, the Eisenstein stans. As much as I love a lot of the same ideas you do, we are not going to meditate or asana our way out of this one. Not that alone, anyway.

We are going to have to coordinate, and cooperate. But people are lost in their doomscrolling, in their magic mirror which tells them they're the fairest of them all, or might become so with the right filters applied.

So the question becomes: how do we Make Cooperation Sexy Again? How can 'the Left', the bleeding hearts who can't live with ourselves if we don't do at least something to alleviate the suffering of others, who don't want to see kids being bombed in either Gaza or Israel, or Ukraine, or drowning in the boats which are left to sink off the coast of Europe... how can we regain the mantle of Trickster? We who wish Bernie and Corbyn had not been stitched up by the neoliberal wings of their parties? How can we tap back into the vital, the sensual, the creative, the daring?

It looks like that will have to be in Part Three because this is already quite long. See you there soon, I hope.

Make the Trickster come alive again! Just not as an orange man who lives in Florida!