Todd Phillips’ move Joker isn’t out yet, but critics have seen it. While many have given it glowing reviews, others have said that it glorifies real-world patterns of violent behavior. Plot synopses have led some to worry the film might normalize the beliefs of the incel community, which has produced several murderers already.
Todd Phillips responded to that criticism in an interview, saying,
The movie still takes place in a fictional world. It can have real-world implications, opinions, but it’s a fictional character in a fictional world that’s been around for 80 years. The one that bugs me more is the toxic white male thing when you go, “Oh, I just saw John Wick 3.” He’s a white male who kills 300 people and everybody’s laughing and hooting and hollering. Why does this movie get held to different standards? It honestly doesn’t make sense to me.
This comment has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter. I’ve seen some people argue that it’s a faulty comparison because John Wick’s victims provoked him to kill them, by attacking him and killing his dog. Others are saying that Phillips has a good point, and those critical of violence in media shouldn’t get to pick and choose which violence they abjure.
The people who say it’s a bad comparison are correct, but not for the reasons given.
It’s not a bad comparison because of who gets killed, or the motives of the main character. It’s a bad comparison because the movies operate in two different rhetorical modes. Or, to put it another way, because not all fictional worlds are the same.
The John Wick series are solidly action fantasy movies. The copious violence is choreographed and balletic; combination fist/gun/knife/car/axe fights that would be impossible in reality. The main character belongs to an international secret society of genteel super-assassins, with its own baroque customs, currency, and global infrastructure. This is a fictional world that is blatantly unreal. No one worries about John Wick inspiring copycat crimes because it would be literally impossible. Behaving as John Wick does requires living in a world that doesn’t exist.
Joker, from its marketing and reviews, appears to be working in the rhetorical mode of psychological realism. This is the same mode as a great deal of mainstream literature—fiction which concerns invented but believable people, doing things that didn’t happen but believably could have. Phillips admits this in another interview, saying, “I literally described to Joaquin at one point in those three months as like, ‘Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film.’” So while the world of Joker is, as he says, fictional, this depiction of it is striving to be realistic. That’s why people are criticizing it in a way they don’t criticize John Wick.
John Wick 3 valorizes a kind of violence that doesn’t (and can’t) actually happen. Joker, according to some critics, valorizes a kind of violence that does. Those critics may turn out to be wrong, but they aren’t hypocrites for treating the two movies differently.