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“What would I do without you?” The Joker asks Batman in The Dark Knight. “You complete me.” He’s right in more ways than he realizes, as the newly released Joker shows: the Joker, by his very nature, needs Batman, and, more importantly, so does the audience. Because without the Dark Knight there to serve as a ballast, the Joker’s anarchic, twisted, disturbing nature, and Joker itself, becomes unbearably difficult to watch.
Admittedly, in terms of film qua film, Joker succeeds in what it sets out to do. It’s well directed, Joaquin Phoenix turns in an incredible performance as the titular character, and the story provides creepy insight into the psyche of its psychopathic subject. And in fairness, Phoenix’s Joker is not necessarily more evil than past incarnations of the character. Heath Ledger’s turn as the Clown Prince of Crime, for example, was just as twisted, just as nihilistic. Also, Batman: The Killing Joke featured a Joker committing acts just as depraved and horrific. These Jokers, however, did not exist in a vacuum, and the stories in which they’re present also feature counters to their dangerous ideology.
Joker, in comparison, is devoid of any sort of moral challenge to its villain. Watching someone engage in truly despicable, grotesque evil on screen without anyone rising to challenge it, without any sense of hope for viewers is a truly painful experience, one that unsettled me so deeply I had to turn away from the screen on several occasions and nearly walked out at one point—and I managed to sit through the entirety of The Shape of Water, so that’s saying something. With scenes of murder that are realistically graphic and intense, it feels almost as if you’re watching artfully shot found footage of homicides. While it is unfair to say that Joker celebrates its protagonist, or even that it portrays him in a sympathetic light, the movie makes no argument against him, relying solely on the audience to pass judgement on the character.
The Dark Knight and The Killing Joke succeed just as well as Joker in diving into what makes the Joker tick, but the stories also provide an alternative to the villain’s sick worldview. Perhaps the most powerful scene in The Dark Knight comes when the Joker has tricked the city into evacuating onto two boats: one filled with the prison population, one filled with the citizens of Gotham. The boats are given detonators and the occupants are told to blow up the other boat or be killed themselves. After much debate, neither side decides to go along with the Joker’s game, resigning themselves to death rather than engaging to murder. Even under duress, they reject the Joker’s chaotic approach to life.
Joker took even more influence from The Killing Joke, which, like Joker, gives the character a backstory as a failed comedian, who turns into the murderous clown after life gets him down. Like the film it inspired, The Killing Joke was created specifically to explore the motivations of the Joker, showing how the pressures of the world finally led him to crack. But, more importantly, it also shows that he didn’t have to become what he is.
In the comic, the Joker decides he wants to prove that anyone would have gone down his path if they’d experienced the hardship he had. So, he kidnaps Commissioner Gordon, shoots and paralyzes his daughter Barbara (it’s implied that he also rapes her), then strips down the commissioner and brutalizes him. In addition to the physical torture he endures, Gordon is forced to look at pictures of what the Joker did to Barbara, yet when Batman rescues him Gordon insists that Joker be brought in “by the book.” The experience leaves him scarred but not broken, showing that it wasn’t the tragedies of the Joker’s life that created him, but rather his choice in response; that we all have such a choice to make when faced with hard times and that giving into darkness is never inevitable.
These stories succeed while the Joker fails because a foil provides real depth to the character. Seeing the ideological conflict between Joker and the forces of good draws attention to the ways in which his nihilistic view of the world falls short. While Phoenix talks a good talk about how his new film is a serious character study, Joker merely shocks and disgusts viewers with scenes of depravity. Toward the end of the movie, Joker states that he always thought his life was a tragedy, but he’s come to realize that it’s really a comedy. These are, of course, the ramblings of a madman; his life is tragic and so too is what’s been done with this film.
Last week, the most popular man on Tinder was all over the news for finally finding love. Stefan Pierre-Tomlin was named “Mr. Tinder” back in 2017, after accumulating 14,600 right-swipes in a mere two years, an all-time record according to the app. An untold number of likes later, Pierre-Tomlin says he’s found the love of his life, but, in one large, delicious dollop of irony, not on the app that earned him his moniker. Pierre-Tomlin met his girlfriend in person, through a friend—or as tabloid headlines are declaring “the old-fashioned way,” which is a fairly damning critique of modern society if non-digital meetings are indeed now considered passé.
Pierre-Tomlin’s story alone is, of course, purely anecdotal evidence, but when viewed with available statistics on apps and modern dating culture, it paints a rather nasty picture. Out of all his matches, for example, Pierre-Tomlin only found two women with whom he had relationships. Which shouldn’t really be surprising: according to one survey, only 44 percent of women and 38.4 percent of men on dating apps are looking for a serious relationship.
(A slightly unrelated but still interesting aside: 0.8 percent of women on these apps are in it for free food and drinks, while 2.9 percent of men are. I’m not sure what to do with that information, but there you go.)
That a majority of Tinder users use the app for casual dating or hook-ups is both very much in line with human nature and very much opposed to it. The desire for sex is deeply human; the need to reproduce is, quite literally, hardwired in our DNA. But lurking around there somewhere in the wiring, in our souls, our genes, whatever you want to ascribe it to, is the urge to have that sex with a person one actually loves and cares for.
Seventy percent of Americans have had (or at least claim to have had) a one-night stand, but 78.2 percent of young college-educated Millennials, the age group generally thought to be the most promiscuous, are having sex with a spouse or significant other. Another survey found that 70 percent of Gen Zers and 63 percent of Millennials say they’re at a point in their lives where they want to go steady. The takeaway from these numbers is clear: people like sex, and while most don’t mind taking it where they can get it, they like it best in the context of a committed relationship.
This isn’t to say that nobody out there likes one-night stands or finds relationships through dating apps. On average, however, people still prefer a committed relationship, something that is, on average, more difficult to find on dating apps due to issues inherent to the medium.
Pierre-Tomlin is far from alone in having difficulty finding a relationship through Tinder. Only 13.6 percent of couples who meet on Tinder wind up getting married and only 15 percent wind up dating long term. Part of this is because most people who meet through dating apps don’t know each other very well before they decide to go out. Dating apps are a visual experience, with users making snap judgments based largely on the pictures in each other’s profiles. There are brief bios too, and they may exchange messages, but, as research shows, digital interactions aren’t as engaging and fail to facilitate bonds as well.
In other words, Tinder widens your dating pool, but does so by orchestrating dates between ill-suited couples, making it no surprise that research from Michigan State University found couples that meet digitally are 28 percent more likely to break up within a year than those who meet face-to-face. The author of the study suggested that the vast number of potential mates and the awareness that there are so many other options out there could contribute to that statistic. The wider dating pool works against relationships again, with the sheer volume of matches lowering their own value.
Pierre-Tomlin is just the highest-profile person to become disillusioned with dating apps. His story serves as a helpful reminder that they are simply a bad idea, a notion that Pierre-Tomlin has been evangelizing to others in his own life too. Since giving up his Tinder ways, Pierre-Tomlin has played matchmaker with more than ten couples and says that they’re all either married or in long-term relationships now.
It seems high time we gave Mr. Tinder a new nickname.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick, hit the big screen on Friday. The film’s message can be summed up in one short, and crass, line delivered by protagonist Rick Dalton (Leonardo Dicaprio): “dirty [expletive] hippies.”
While Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is nominally the story of Dalton, a washed-up actor struggling to remain relevant, it is just as much about hippies and, as the quote from Dalton indicates, how awful they were. It is, essentially, a two-hour, 45-minute middle finger to hippies.
The countercultural movement often gets viewed through rose-colored lenses. Its themes of peace and love do seem appealing, and the notion that swaths of the country dedicated themselves to promoting those ideals does sound nice. In theory. The actual movement was fairly, for lack of a better word, gross. Tarantino brings this oft-unexplored aspect of hippiedom to the forefront of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and doesn’t shy away from depicting the nasty reality of the bohemian life.
The Manson Family serves as the film’s window into hippies, and while they are obviously not representative of the movement in general (the Manson Family were, on the whole, a bit more murdery than the average hippie), certain elements of the Manson lifestyle depicted in the film were common to the hippie experience. Things like communal living and promiscuous sex, which Tarantino presents in a strongly negative light.
As viewers of the film, we are introduced to the Manson Family through a girl named Pussycat, a hitchhiker who catches the eye of Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as he drives through LA. He offers her a ride and, in return, she offers to fellate him as he drives her back to her commune at Spahn Ranch. Her seductive behavior may strike some as harmless youthful free-spiritedness; hopefully less so, however, after we find out her free-spiritedness is a bit too youthful when Booth asks her age and she admits she isn’t 18 as she initially tried to tell him.
Pussycat invites Cliff to look around the commune and meet her friends and, as Cliff walks around, we’re shown how repellent their communal life is. The ranch is rundown, the buildings are dingy, and the residents are far from clean. We find that Pussycat’s unrestrained sexuality is shared by her fellow residents of Spahn Ranch. The Manson Family was able to maintain residence on the ranch in large part thanks to the fact that many of the young women in the group were having sex with the 80-year-old owner, something the movie makes mention of but, thankfully, does not depict. The term “free love” brings to mind new-agey thoughts of love without restrictions. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood points out that truly unrestricted sex means things like ephebophilia and group sex with an octogenarian.
The far-too-loose attitudes surrounding sex depicted in the film make it no wonder that the Sexual Revolution was soon followed by the AIDS crisis, a general rise in occurrences of STDs, and out-of-control, out-of-wedlock births that consigned untold numbers to lives of poverty and hardship. Maybe, just maybe, some restrictions are in order?
The anti-hippie attitude of the film spills into the extreme at times. Take the climax, for example, a gratuitously violent scene, the details of which i’ll avoid to prevent spoilers.
But even with those few uncomfortably vicious moments it remains about as accurate a portrayal of hippies as Hollywood has yet produced. Yes, Tarantino’s portrayal of violence is disgusting. But, as the film shows, so too are hippies.
This is the first time it’s ever happened. It came close last year, closer than it’s ever been before, but even then it felt a little…well, a little forced. People like superhero movies, sure, and Wonder Woman was good enough, but a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards? Isn’t that reserved for films a bit more highbrow than superhero flicks? But here we are, one year later, and one such movie has made the jump: Black Panther has received a nod from the Academy in the Best Picture category, and a few others too. And nobody is surprised. Frankly, it would have been a bit shocking not to see Black Panther among the nominees. Not because it necessarily deserves a nomination, but because we’ve been moving toward this for a while now. “This” referring not just to the acceptance of CGI-slugfests at the Oscars, but towards a broader cultural movement. “This” referring to the mainstreaming of geek culture.
That traditionally nerdy interests are entering the mainstream is far from a controversial proposition. Comic book movies have dominated cinema the past few years and will likely do so for some time to come. There is no film more hotly anticipated this year than Avengers: Endgame, and in 2018 Black Panther was the highest earning film of the year in America. Four more movies based on comic book properties took spots in the domestic top 10 last year, along with a movie from the equally geeky genre of sci-fi, Solo: A Star Wars Story. 2017 saw a similar pattern, with Star Wars: The Last Jedi taking the top spot in the American market and five comic book movies occupying spots in the top 10. And back in 2016, a Star Wars movie ended the year first again, with four comic book movies joining it in the top 10.
And it’s not just the big screen, the reach of geek culture extends to television as well. Ever heard of a show called Game of Thrones? How about Westworld? Rick and Morty? And as if one Star Trek show on the air wasn’t enough, CBS is developing another that focuses just on Jean-Luc Picard, a very French name that just doesn’t seem to fit the very British Patrick Stewart who plays him. Even more shocking than the success of nerdy-topic TV shows is how the portrayal of nerds has shifted as well. Nerds are now the heroes in shows like The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off Young Sheldon, Parks and Rec, and, most especially, Stranger Things.
But perhaps the greatest evidence of geek culture’s growing influence is the normalization and increasingly widespread playing of video games. A study performed by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 62 percent of Gen Xers have a video game console in their home, along with 66 percent of millennials and 73 percent of Gen Zers. It’s become so popular that competitive gaming organizations have sprung up, complete with tournaments, rankings, and prize money. Some devotees are calling for video game playing to be recognized as a sport, euphemistically referring to it as “eSports,” and just last year the National Federation of State High School Associations, the governing body of athletic competition for over 19,000 high schools in America, recognized eSports as a varsity sport. Colleges are even starting to put together eSports teams, making it a very real possibility that it could wind up being an NCAA-sanctioned sport. Especially since it’s already going to be a medaling event in the 2022 Asian Games, and members of the International Olympic Committee have stated support for its inclusion in the Olympics—though whether it should be in the summer or winter games (or both?) is unclear.
What unites all these hobbies, and what makes their pervasiveness troubling, is their attitude of anti-reality. Be it through comic books, fantasy TV shows, or video games, geek culture separates adherents from the real world, encouraging them to escape the reality rather than engage with it. The geeks of yore turned to these pastimes because they weren’t good at sports or couldn’t get a date or didn’t have a wide social circle. They turned to these pastimes because, essentially, they had nothing better to do. That geek culture provided an escape for the unpopular and awkward isn’t a bad thing in itself. But, sola dosis facit venenum; the dose makes the poison. And right now we’re overdosing on geek culture.
Comic book movies contribute in their own way too. While children of years past may have looked up to athletes or actors, the heroes of today’s children are fictional beings. While these figures may embody certain heroic traits, the veneer of fiction distorts viewers’ understanding of these traits and makes them less relatable. The heroes of these movies have incredible powers that make them larger than life, making them impossible to stack up to. There is nothing wrong with superheroes in and of themselves, and the stories about them can be enjoyable. But when they overwhelm our culture, it’s easy to forget that real-world problems are solved by normal people.
Even more dangerous, comic book movies, and fantasy and sci-fi stories as well, have helped reinforce the idea that everything needs to be a big, epic fight. Just look at the Trump resistance, where protestors take their cues from Harry Potter, The Handmaid’s Tale, Star Trek, and other works of fantasy. After the Parkland shooting in 2018, author Patrick Tomlinson noted the same phenomenon, though in a more supportive manner, on his now-suspended Twitter account:
“You watched a generation grow up on a diet of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Marvel movies, you stripped away their hope, their jobs, their futures, and then backed the most cartoonish super-villain in history for President, and you’re shocked the children are fighting back?”
“Really? You followed the damned script to a T. You pumped up millions of kids, for two decades, to believe they and their friends could make a difference. Then you thrust them all into a dystopian nightmare of violence and persecution. And NOW you’re shocked they’re all Katniss?”
A generation truly interested in creating change might think to start at the local level, but, they’re far more interested in the big fights playing out on a major scale. And even those debates are being blown too far out of proportion to better fit youngsters’ desire for a blockbuster struggle against evil.
Our current time was, in many ways, the perfect setting for nerd culture. Technology has already separated us in so many ways, and thanks to the politically correct world in which we live many virtues that were once celebrated are starting to fall out of favor. Admiring athletic prowess is ableist; good looks, body-shaming; sociability and charm, unfair to introverts. But as these “jock values” exit the mainstream, so to do the tangential virtues they engender.
Participating in sports teaches lessons about commitment, self-control, discipline, and hard work in a way video games never can. Face to face interaction makes athletics an inherently social activity, forcing participants to engage with each other. And while “eSports” may require hours of practice to master too, it’s a stretch to say they require hard work—you’ll never see a gamer pouring their literal blood, sweat, and tears into their craft after all. And sociability is a good in itself, or at least it used to be thought of as such. Even attractiveness, while it might have a genetic base, requires a level of skill with self-presentation, exercise, and fine attention to detail. With these virtues gone, we’re on track to have a generation of obese hermits who dress like Mark Zuckerberg.
Black Panther is a perfectly good movie, but its acceptance at the Oscars 20 years ago would have been laughable. But things have changed since then; the nerds have won, their culture is mainstream now, and so, too, are the virtues and vices that come along with it. Welcome, to repurpose a line from Dr. Ian Malcolm, to Poindexter World.
Christmas time, to borrow a phrase from Charlie Brown and the gang, is here and with it comes all the yuletide traditions: hot chocolate, festive tunes, gingerbread men—sorry, gingerbread persons—and, of course, Christmas movies. It’s a Wonderful Life! Miracle on 34th Street! Scrooged! Those claymation movies from the ’60s and ’70s that aren’t actually very good, but skate by on pure nostalgia! And, as is wont to happen, such old classics have been joined over the years by more recent offerings, like the Jim Carrey Grinch remake, The Polar Express, Elf, and Love Actually, movies that, in their brief time on this earth, have ingratiated themselves into the holiday season to the point that they’re regularly lumped together with Miracle on 34th Street, et al., as Christmas “classics.” The only problem is: they’re not.
Now, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the quality of these movies—though, cards on the table, I do think most of them are not very good, especially Elf—but merely suggest that we jump the gun in declaring modern works “classics.” The simple fact is, we don’t get to contemporaneously decide what earns the title, and, what’s more, are probably the worst judges of what from our pop culture deserves such esteem. We have a say in how popular a work is, certainly, but as Anthony Patch posited in The Beautiful and Damned, a classic needs to be more than popular, it needs to prove it’s not just a trend by “surviv[ing] the reaction of the next period or generation.” And to do so, it has to be something of enduring value, something that isn’t just a product of its time but speaks to eternal themes, to the common human experience.
It’s difficult for us to evaluate recent works because we often struggle to differentiate between what speaks to our culture and what transcends it. We know the references, the actors, the very world in which the movies are set. And with social media and Netflix and smartphones creating an outsized role for pop culture in our lives, there’s a sense of nostalgie du present—or nostalgie du just a little while ago—in our relationships with our culture. It’s for these reasons that we tend to rate new movies, television shows, music, etc. as being better than they actually are, in a sort of bizarre artistic recency bias. Out of a generational arrogance, we assume both that our cultural preferences are on par with, if not superior to, those who came before us and that they will be shared by those who come after. But times change and tastes change along with them.
Take, for example, Love Actually. A staple of Christmas-classic lists since its 2003 release, it’s now unclear if Love Actually will even survive this period of movie-watchers. The gender dynamics in the film didn’t raise many eyelids at its release, or even for several years after, but now, just 15 years later, the workplace romances between male bosses and female subordinates are, rightly, judged differently. Reed Tucker discussed the matter in the New York Post back in 2013, writing, “Next time you watch, take an inventory of the (almost always younger) women in the film and their relationships to the (older) men. In the case of the Hugh Grant and Colin Firth storylines, these guys are sleeping with their secretaries and their maids. Emma Thompson’s husband is having an affair with his secretary too.”
In the wake of the Me Too movement, the topic has now been tackled by a fewotherwriters, and as we move toward a future in which “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” disappears from the airwaves—even though it actually has a fairly solid defense—would it be so surprising if Love Actually fell out of favor too?
The premature judging of Christmas movies’ lasting value is part of a larger aggrandization of current pop culture taking place in Western Civilization today. Comic books are literature, video games are sports, rap is poetry. We want to elevate such things from the mundanity of the masscult—there is much that is popular after all—to the dignity, the importance of the timeless. While this is especially true of younger members of society, who want the culture that fills our lives to be deemed significant, it is not a problem isolated to millennials and Gen Z—there is, after all, perhaps no example of the phenomenon more egregious than the Baby Boomers on the Nobel Committee for Literature naming Bob Dylan the 2016 laureate.
George Orwell once wrote that “each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” That same generational self-regard can be found in our cultural tastes as well. Our television shows, our music, our Christmas movies may indeed be as beloved by generations to come as they are by us. But, then again, they may not be.
Alec Dent is a contributor to the Washington Free Beacon and panelist on Ricochet’s “Young Americans” podcast.
“What would I do without you?” The Joker asks Batman in The Dark Knight. “You complete me.” He’s right in more ways than he realizes, as the newly released Joker shows: the Joker, by his very nature, needs Batman, and, more importantly, so does the audience. Because without the Dark Knight there to serve as a ballast, the Joker’s anarchic, twisted, disturbing nature, and Joker itself, becomes unbearably difficult to watch.
Last week, the most popular man on Tinder was all over the news for finally finding love. Stefan Pierre-Tomlin was named “Mr. Tinder” back in 2017, after accumulating 14,600 right-swipes in a mere two years, an all-time record according to the app. An untold number of likes later, Pierre-Tomlin says he’s found the love of his life, but, in one large, delicious dollop of irony, not on the app that earned him his moniker. Pierre-Tomlin met his girlfriend in person, through a friend—or as tabloid headlines are declaring 
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick, hit the big screen on Friday. The film’s message can be summed up in one short, and crass, line delivered by protagonist Rick Dalton (Leonardo Dicaprio): “dirty [expletive] hippies.”
This is the first time it’s ever happened. It came close last year, closer than it’s ever been before, but even then it felt a little…well, a little forced. People like superhero movies, sure, and Wonder Woman was good enough, but a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards? Isn’t that reserved for films a bit more highbrow than superhero flicks? But here we are, one year later, and one such movie has made the jump: Black Panther has received a nod from the Academy in the Best Picture category, and a few others too. And nobody is surprised. Frankly, it would have been a bit shocking not to see Black Panther among the nominees. Not because it necessarily deserves a nomination, but because we’ve been moving toward this for a while now. “This” referring not just to the acceptance of CGI-slugfests at the Oscars, but towards a broader cultural movement. “This” referring to the mainstreaming of geek culture.
Christmas time, to borrow