Film raises uncomfortable question

The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr, a Southern Baptist minister, it painted the Klan as the saviours of true white American culture, and the country’s newly emancipated black population as sexually predatory, brutish and treacherous. And lo and behold, that same year the Klan was refounded – with a fury and momentum its previous incarnation had lacked.

The new version drew inspiration from Griffith’s film: not just the peaked white hoods and burning crosses, but also a new fixation on protecting ‘‘the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood’’. By

1924, the Klan’s membership stood between 4 and 6 million – cinema had proven to be one heck of a recruiting tool. One century later, are we still so susceptible?

That question is being nervously asked in light of Joker, a new Warner Bros film which transplants the classic Batman antagonist into a sickeningly familiar social context. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, the villainous clown is here reimagined as a seething recluse called Arthur Fleck – a wannabe stand-up comedian willing to go to murderous extremes to be noticed by society at large.

Joker is set in the early 1980s – and has been heavily influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy – arguably the two New

Hollywood urtexts of urban male alienation. But Arthur’s plight also recalls a very modern dark phenomenon: the incel (or involuntary celibate) internet subculture, a racist and misogynist hate movement which has been linked to recent mass shootings in California, Texas and New Zealand.

When I first saw the film, that resonance made me uncomfortable. The new Joker is hardly held up as a hero, but there is a blood-curdling glamour to the character’s journey from downtrodden nobody to the extolled figurehead of an anarchist movement. Might the film end up inspiring the very kind of violence it depicts?

It’s a thorny question, and when I put it to Phoenix in a recent interview, he walked out of the room. But others are clearly aware that it might. Last week, the US Army confirmed it had issued a warning to servicemen and women about potential mass shootings at

Joker screenings, and in Aurora, Colorado, relatives of the victims of the 2012 shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, another Batman-related film, wrote to Warner Bros to express concern over its content.

To be clear, no film can hypnotise ordinary cinemagoers into violence. But for the already disaffected and disturbed, history has shown they can serve as a catalyst and template.

Taxi Driver itself was a factor in the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981: the gunman was obsessed with