Joker

Through matters beyond my control the second part of the article on the psychological effects of imposed social change has been briefly delayed.

In the interim, I wish to sing the praises of the brilliant dystopian film Joker, which is currently in the cinemas.  Dystopian with a capital D in that, despite being set against a comic book background, it convincingly portrays a world psychologically very close to our own; indeed, just one step beyond our own; where violence, neglect, paranoia and greed have combined to form some great heavy beast, it’s belly dragging along the city streets, like the keel of a ship grinding nervously across a submerged ice-floe.

So brilliantly done, that it manages to convey in one scene of a couple of seconds the way in which the gangster element took advantage of the ideological flim-flam of the 1960s to reinvent how it presented itself.  And this did happen.  I saw it happen.  And I saw people die as a consequence of its happening. But such was the naivety of the revolutionary left at the time, mainly middle-class and anxious to view everything through the make-believe of red-rose-tinted glasses, that it was wide open to such penetration.

Wise guys who would otherwise have been doing it for themselves as a form of private enterprise were now doing it for a ‘cause’—or so they thought to persuade the world, often convincingly

That is not to say that there were not genuine people involved, too, save that they left themselves vulnerable through a simpleminded intellectualism, as so often happens, to those with a harder, more-stripped down, more closely focused and more ruthlessly accurate view of the world.

Sometimes you hear arguments about which political forces or parties are likely to come out on top in the event of social collapse.  Make no doubt about it, the ones who will inevitably rule will be the gangsters.  Untrammelled by any drag of ideology or principle, they tend to be brutally effective at what they do.  While the ideologues are debating, the tough who get going when the going gets tough will be running rings round them.

Nor take any consolation from the various state institutions that are supposed to prevent this, they are just as bound up in red-tape and bullshit and careerism as the rest.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, one stage of that collapse—or of the recovery from that collapse—was the fragmentation and localisation of power, so that control descended to those ruthless and strong enough to grab it.  From being a vast and unified enterprise, the map of Europe—purely notional, because by that stage society had degenerated to the borders of ignorance and illiteracy—turned into a patchwork quilt of tiny, independent and unmappable  fiefdoms.

There is no reason why this time it should be any different –save that there is always the suspicion that beyond the present chaos there may exist the hand of some hidden controlling agency—perhaps the intertangled intelligence services—shadowy as sharks when viewed from above.

But that is all just speculation.

What is true, however, is that Joker is a brilliant film, with one of the most outstanding lead performances—if not the most outstanding—for quite a long while.

Don’t miss it.