GREEN LANTERN is the Superhero Template We Needed. JOKER is the One We Deserved.

I spend a ton of time, as I’m sure most folks reading this do, hunting around for the movies I want to watch. There are all the normal methods: scouring lists and researching what movies influenced directors I already know I love and prodding various online hive minds with questions like “what movies best utilize existential use of space?” After a certain point, I found I had to dig in to more obscure methods. Recently I saw Flannery O’Connor and John Huston’s Wise Blood for the first time and was struck by this inexplicable (to me) bizarre pastiche about it, some alien intention, some era-specific ultimate style that I hadn’t come across before, a microgenre thing that I keep coming back to in the way I think about movies. When I poked around for writing on the movie to help clarify the thought, in zoomed this Guardian article deliciously, melodramatically opining on “lost films” ... irresistible!! The comments section provided movie picks for months.

But Jesus that can be grueling work. Sometimes you just want to lazily parachute into something, and with cable gone the way of all things, streaming is the closest we’ve got. (Quick poll—how many different folks’ streaming accounts have you cobbled together on your personal computer?) One night a few weeks ago, this plopped me down into the groovy green arms of Green Lantern, that strange punchline of a hero-era artifact. Fly me away, Ryan baby!

This auspicious evening coincided with all the internet’s breathless announcing that Joker had crossed the billion-dollar mark, that it was stair-dancing its way to spot 44 on the all-time box office charts, that sequels and nay WHOLE WORLDS were being manically machine-gunned into the spinoff hopper. Have we talked yet about how comic book stuff is a whole genre at this point? And, I mean, one of the big ones. Say, Western. Or Drama. Comic Book Stuff. Intellectual Property With Both Built In Story AND Imagery. And thus, at this point it’s got a whole taxonomy available for anyone interested in trying to plot it. After fiddling with several options for the axes, I think this arrangement could be a good one:

Some restless night I imagine I’ll plot this whole thing out with the full catalogs of MCU, DCEU, Sonyverse, newly christened prestige world on HBO, whatever umbrellacorp made the various Hellboy iterations, and on and on and on. It’s gonna be a big graph. But for now, suffice to say that Green Lantern and Joker are in opposite corners of this thing, with the former representing a silliness and affable charm that for whatever reason didn’t quite hit the right RDJ note to signal box-office-palatable and the latter scaling new heights of cynicism while plumbing the depths of limitless male aggression.*

Have you ever watched GL? If so, have you watched it recently, with another 50 or so hero movies released since 2011 to stack it up against? Sure, it basically treads the usual suspects of story beats: talented, disaffected white dude has it all and faces some sort of comeuppance and reckons with it and hero-journeys to his destined point of conflict with the other talented white dude who had the deck stacked against him in such a way that he turns out to be the villain that ushers in some larger villainy, they fight, hero wins. But nestled into all that rigamarole are a few moments of truly inspired nonsense. When a helicopter is about to 28 Weeks Later a whole slew of celebrants, our man GL pumps this Hot Wheels track out of his jewelry, snatching the twisted metal and hotrodding it to safety. When he’s learning that the power of will that blazes out of his ring will create anything he can imagine, we see him quickly flip through a cartoonishly enormous machine gun, some airplanes, and a big ol’ smashing fist. It’s goofy, but moment-to-moment imaginative in a way that few hero movies outside of Thor: Ragnarok can claim. (Is Taika Waititi the secret ingredient?)

So. Do these few bright lights make this a good movie? Ah, no. But, like being more or less morally obligated to vote for one of the (what now looks to be) all white Democratic presidential options, we hunt for the good where we can find it in an inevitability. Superhero movies aren’t going away; can we at least get some joy out of them?? (And, while we’re at it, de-escalate apocalyptic timelines?)

Joker answers with a manic LOL: nah brah. Have we ever come across a grimmer vision of lonely white male wish fulfillment? I’m sure you 1) have already read plenty about this movie after watching it out of dread curiosity or 2) refuse to watch it on principle or 3) are hate-reading this right now, so I won’t belabor the points too much. Really the only thing I’ll note is that I walked out of the theater after watching this with a dark cloud hanging over me that didn’t dissipate for days. This was not, as the filmmakers kept repeating, a nuanced portrait of a disturbed individual or some Taxi Driver-adjacent cautionary tale against exiling the exile, it was a dang out-and-out celebration of Fleck going all the way down. Everything is swept away by that closing shot of him rising, awed and victorious, in the burning riot he’s inspired. I guess we can’t say for sure that this movie was an engineered incel cash grab, but good lord it’s cynical.

And it’s a little hard to get there, sure. Eat the rich all day long! Throw a parade for their demise! I think the $1 billion+ box office, though, certifies the muddiness of that message. People got WAY rich on this. Any class warfare narrative that might have existed inside that object were it viewed in a cultural vacuum is fully subsumed by the underdog/bully-beating/violence-covers-all glorification we arrive at by the end. Remember Phoenix in that Letterman interview back when he was trolling everyone ahead of I’m Still Here? Art imitates life imitates art; honestly, it’s a toss-up for me whether the cinematic or the pseudo-meta-IRL talk show moment takes the cynic’s cake.

And, and, and … it just doesn’t have to be this way!! I’m no nimby, and I’d never tell any movie to stay in its lane, but the prestige trappings draped over a pop icon peddling slaughter as a salve, especially now, rings false and cruel and stadium-sized tone-deaf. And dangerous? There’s a rich movie tradition of exploring the scenarios and consequences pertaining to the elimination of a power symbol (I can’t WAIT to see Queen & Slim tomorrow), but to droolingly fantasize without a strong political analysis seems blindly irresponsible at best. If Deadpool changed the game with a $783 million take, just imagine what’s barging down the river now.

Which, finally, brings us back to Ryan baby. Hoo! If we’re gonna be slopping up propaganda ‘til our dying days, at least serve it to me with a steaming side of green abs and glam.

*I can’t remember where I read this phrase, and a search didn’t turn it up, but it’s been cemented in my brain ever since as about the most acute summation of a genre that has ever existed.