Deconstructing the Entertainment Complex of the Managerial Society

A Freudian Study of the Joker Film

I have recently made a video on the 2019 hit Joker, using the first few chapters of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. This may sound like a strange concoction of theory-cel mania (which would simply describe all my writing if I were to compliment myself). But there really is a striking relevance hear; one that allows us to challenge the dogmas of psychanalysis itself, using Freud himself. (I refer here to the more biologically reductive understandings of repression)

Let me set the scene using the Joker. The Joker depicts—likely more intensely than any other film—a tension of psycho-politics; and a tension within psychology itself. In other words, we likely do not need much more psychologization of politics (for example the Frankfurt school’s psychologization of anyone not on the left). We need a political understanding of psychology itself. But what is meant by psychology? I mean, not simply our psychology, but the social mechanisms of restrictions and releases (Reiff’s terms) that make up a civilisation. Mechanisms that psychologists in theory try to understand, and in practice try to alleviate those suffering under.

In the Future of an Illusion,(which is about religion) we see a larger analysis of public and collective storytelling, mythology, art and culture. According to Freud, art serves the function to compensate for the restrictions and sacrifices that civilisation pushes upon us. Yet—this is crucial—art is not depicted as a vulgar release, in the sense that you can merely release an instinct or drive that is verboten by the usual moral norms of the day. Art, in some sense, actualises a catharsis and therapeutic release. However, more importantly, it represents the sacrifice and suffering caused by the restriction. Thus, is recognises that sacrifice. It compensates, not simply through allowing a vulgar biological allowance—but by facilitating a thymotic(proud) representation for that sacrifice.

Freud, however, lacked the language of thymos,(Plato’s term for spirit, recognition and pride) and generally put the libidinal as primary. However, as Sloterdijk has pointed out, in The future of an Illusion, Freud touches upon a starting point of the thymotic, without an explicit reference to it. If we simply swap out art (as the more bourgeois understanding of culture) for the late capitalist entertainment, Joker offers us a class politics of psychology in its methods of cultural representation of those civilisation repressions and sacrifices.

Interestingly, Freud mentions a sociological situation, whereby access and participation in these competitions for our repressive sacrifices, goes awry; in other words, access to the culture meets a political crisis. He claims that if a society monopolises these public identifications and representations of sacrifice, and leaves out a large demographic of people, whose repressions are not recompensed though culture and its art and customs, the left-out sector of society will grow to despise—not simply the privileged class—but the culture itself. They will not internalise the societies moral character, but continue to see as imposed externally and coercively.

This makes perfect sense when one takes a quick cursory glance at the character distinction of working class people (or low paid immigrants) and the middle and upper middle classes. The middle and upper classes tend to internalise the moral norms of a society far more radically. This has led to frequent tensions and often comical humiliations in our time. The middle class have a tendency towards public displays of moral signalling—and will believe almost any absurdity that is seen as fashionable, progressive, enlightened or what ‘good people should think’. While working classes tend to more frequently retain a distance from it.

We see this distinction between those who have internalised—and those who don’t— depicted in the Joker, whereby a sort of Trumpian-populist anger at the status quo erupts: somewhat because a lower class resists internalisation—and also because the privileged class internalises too much, or in a contradictory or vulgar way. This tension will be explained as we go on.

It’s important to point out that this eruption is not economic or legal (primarily), but it comes about through the psycho-political realm of cultural compensation. When Joker kills Murray, we see this tension emerge in the entertainment industry. Joker is humiliated on national television( a chat show), so that a certain sector of the population, can feel a comedic relief; they can maintain their feeling of moral superiority while also feeling compensated and rewarded for their repressions. While others are either left out, or become (like Arthur fleck) the butt of the Joke.

I won’t explain to the reader how relevant this is to understanding ‘culture wars’, mass media, or politically correct censorship and mutilation of previous forms of art and media. It is clear that within our contemporary post-war America led media culture, a certain sector of society is left out of the the cultural compensation realm, or has become the butt of the joke that allows an increasingly decadent sector of privileged ones to feel compensation and realise at another’s expense.

We should think about how within public entertainment, humour plays this role of identification, release and compensation. In particular relevance for our time is humour, and the taboos constructed around what is funny. Politically correct culture constructs taboos around humour, not to ‘protect’ anyone, but to enforce an authority on these cultural mechanisms of collective release and compensation.

As Joker points out;

‘Comedy is subjective, Murray. Isn’t that what they say? All of this, the system that knows so much. You decided what’s right and wrong, just like you decide what’s funny or not.’

Through entertainment today, more so than art, we see a similar tension that Freud warned about the best part of 100 years ago. A large sector or society whose sacrifices and repressions are not compensated, identified with and allowed to be publicly represented could lead to a collective hatred of the culture itself.

One can expand on this observation today. Men degraded in favour of inflating the hardships of women(entirely inflated by the middle class). National sacrifices, identities and histories being destroyed in favour of the prestige of a cosmopolitan affluent, multicultural elite. Working class jobs and labours being down played and outsourced to the third world, in favour of an inflated prestige of white collar workers (who are now in the face of AI realising how useless they themselves truly are). The list goes on.

In fact, Freud’s more bourgeois understanding of art and literature being a privileged compensation and practice of an elite that excludes a large majority, is outdated. Our contemporary ‘elite’—the managerial ones, empowered by post-industrial, tech-capitalist industries—engage with higher culture to the same degree as a mediaeval peasant. Rather they use public entertainment to humiliate and degrade others in order to prop up their vacuous moral superiority and compensate themselves for their repressions.

Rather than an educational gap being what excludes a lower class from the culture, today a barley educated managerial class exclude the rest through social taboos, fads, peculiar rules of linguistic conduct (think of pronouns ect.). This managerial class reads real books to the same degree an obese man competes in triathlons. The managerial elite laugh at those who either engage in actual higher culture, literature, athletics, philosophy ect. They see real higher culture as superfluous. Just as they look down on those engaging in manual labour; of which they deem dirty and beneath them.

The outsourcing of manufacturing to the third world is culturally akin to the replacement of art with entertainment—just as reading has been replaced by screen watching and media obsessed social formation. It is the by product of a culture whose compensations and identifications are designed around a vulgar, uncultured, semi-educated class of managerial parasites who have been super-empowered by post-industrial work, digital technology and pharmaceutical technologies. They care about science, only insofar that it can be used as a tool to empower their social control and profiteering. They care about art or philosophy only as a tool to elevate their narcissism by way of a degrading critique of other people they know nothing about. They are as likely to make military sacrifices as fish are to fly.

Joker, perfectly represents a historical situation whereby the older realm of art —just like the older elites—are replaced by the entertainment of the managerial elites who relieve themselves of social stresses by humiliating, excluding and downgrading others. They suck out the energy and pride from all the rest; and the result is populism, mass anger, despair, social dis-unification and so on.

The increasing vulgarity and ugliness of our contemporary entertainment industry perfectly reflects—just as Freud observed—the privileged class (who have internalised the moral character of their time more radically). The ugliness, exploitativeness, triviality and derangement of that entertainment complex—as an outlet for this increasingly hated class—is cathartically destroyed by Joker. Thus the film depicts a revolution in the mechanisms of cultural compensation for social repression. It kills their most believed public figures. It laughs at the wrong joke, at the wrong moment. A revolution of inappropriate laughter. A liberation from the managerial classes ‘moral’ character.