Who’s the real Joker in this cultural superhero deck?

Two interesting things have been happening in the world of film over the last month. A relatively low-budget, no-special effects movie that places Batman’s Joker in a version of Martin Scorsese’s decaying 1970s-era New York City has become one of the most successful American movies of the year — with clouds of political outrage trailing in its wake. And everyone on the internet is yelling at, about, or in defense of Scorsese himself, because the aging director told an interviewer that superhero movies aren’t real cinema.

We often talk about unexpected political controversies in terms of their relationship to an established order, an existing regime. The success of “Joker” and the outrage around Scorsese are both disturbances that matter because of their relationship to the existing Hollywood order, the current pop-cultural regime.

That order is built, to an extent that would have been unfathomable even 20 years ago, on the commercial exploitation of what was once called “genre” entertainment — the comic-book movie especially, the Marvel empire above all, with a wider range of science fiction and fantasy blockbusters and sequelae around that superhero core.

This is not just a normal sort of cultural cycling, akin to the way Westerns ruled the ’50s or pumped-up action stars the ’80s. The sheer scale of genre dominance is unique.

Strikingly, this regime is a marvel of corporate capitalism, a machine for global moneymaking — superheroes work for worldwide audiences in ways that no other entertainment can match — that is also intensely defended by people who think of themselves as rebels, outsiders, weirdos, freaks.

This nurtured sense of grievance explains the online anger every time somebody like Scorsese dares to doubt the aesthetic merits of the new regime. And it may be a strength of the superhero order, a source of resilience, that so many of its fans continue to answer

Andrew O’Hehir’s 2012 question “at what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient?” with a zealot’s absolutism: Not until the last film snob shuts up.

The superhero regime has wasted far too much talent on stories that are fundamentally unworthy of the actors and directors making them. And it has habituated adult audiences to stories that belong to the state of arrested development in which far more of Western culture than just Hollywood is trapped.

I say “arrested development” because a common critique is that these movies are childish or “infantilizing,” to quote Bilge Ebiri’s Vulture essay on the Scorsese contretemps. But that seems not quite apt: Children and their stories are much stranger and more interesting than the superhero industry.

And this is where the success of the Joaquin Phoenix “Joker” becomes especially interesting. My initial take on the movie was hostile, because I don’t think “Joker” is really about any of the things — inceldom, liberalism, late capitalism — that its admirers and enemies have read into its story. Instead it’s a competent Scorsese simulacrum whose success exposes both the frustrated desire for movies that are more politically and morally adult ... and the tragedy of a movie system that can only simulate grown-up art inside the comic-book machine.