Catalyst or cautionary tale?
Films may sometimes inspire violence, Robbie Collin writes, but it’s tough to prove.
It is well known that the Ku Klux Klan was founded in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, but rather less so that within a few years it had all but fizzled out. By the time it had been classified as a terrorist organization by the federal government in 1870, the white supremacist group had already been formally disbanded. What brought it back to life more than 40 years later was a film.
The Birth of a Nation, a historical epic directed by D.W. Griffith, was released in U.S. theatres in February 1915. Often described as the first blockbuster, it was an immediate hit. Adapted from a novel called The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr., a Southern Baptist minister, it painted the KKK 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 four and six 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 that 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 standup comedian willing to go to murderous extremes to be noticed by society at large.
Joker is set in the early ’80s, 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.
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 an interview, he walked out of the room. But others are clearly aware that it might. The U.S. army confirms it has issued a warning to servicemen and women about potential mass shootings at Joker screenings, and in Aurora, Colo., 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 hypnotize ordinary cinemagoers into violence. But for the already disaffected and disturbed, history has shown they can serve as both a catalyst and template.
Taxi Driver itself was a factor in the attempted assassination of then-u.s. president Ronald Reagan in 1981. The gunman was obsessed with the film, in which Robert De Niro’s character plots the shooting of a presidential candidate. Oliver Stone’s violent Bonnie and Clyde-style thriller, Natural Born Killers, inspired a series of copycat crimes, including the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School.
And in 2009, 17-year-old Kyle Shaw, who bombed a New York City branch of Starbucks — with no casualties, mercifully — told investigators he was trying to launch his own “Project Mayhem,” the movement led by Brad Pitt’s character in Fight Club.
In the early ’70s, such was the furor over a spate of crimes that resembled some of the sequences in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange that the director himself had the film withdrawn from U.K. cinemas in 1973. Yet in an interview with Sight & Sound a year earlier, he cast doubt on the causal relationship, saying: “To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around.”
For Joker too, Kubrick’s words ring balefully true. When cinema feels dangerous, it is often because it reflects a real-world danger that we might prefer was out of sight and mind. It is less as a symptom of societal sickness than a diagnosis. And we ignore the doctor’s orders at our peril.