I messed up… there was a shooting at a screening of the dark knight rises screening in 2012 not the dark knight… either way, people were scared this would happen in Joker

I think Ted’s wife should’ve been in a whole season. It would’ve been more emotional when she died. Introducing her and killing her off in 5 minutes felt really underwhelming

To the Joker, Joker 2 is just a normal Joker

I totally thought it had similar themes to spring breakers

Ok first of all, it wasn't the Dark Knight, it was The Dark Knight Rises which was a movie that didn't even feature Joker. And second, are we just gonna ignore the Frozen 2 theater shoot out? Is Anna now an incel up riser? Like come on

Interesting thoughts, however I disagree with the premise. I don’t see anything right wing about the movement in the first Joker film. Right wing populism does not engage in class politics, they certainly don’t direct anger at the rich or the ruling class. Instead they deflect anger from the ruling class to vague ‘Elites’ usually social or cultural groups, or just a vague shadowy group of internal enemies who they claim are really pulling the strings, but conveniently aren’t actually in power. Right wing populism never engages with economic grievances, because the Right are the representatives of those who caused those economic grievances in the first place. Rather they redirect anger into social grievances, because those are vague and immaterial enough to not actually threaten anyone in power. The Movement Arther accidentally starts in the first movie is a populist one, but it’s one directly linked to economic grievances. It is explicitly anti rich, anti Wayne (who seems to me to be a stand in for Reagan era Republicans) and is one shown to be directly fueled by poor economic conditions and cuts to social services. It is shown to be a primarily male movement, but it certainly isn’t just white. A disproportionate amount of protesters in the first movie are shown to be poor men of color. With that said while the movement is too working class to be right wing, it isn’t leftwing either. It isn’t shown to be a disciplined political movement that gives its followers a way to materially engage with and fight the capitalist system to improve their conditions, it has no answers other then to violently lash out against the establishment. It’s the politics of despair, and it was inevitably going to become a death cult. As to January 6th, that was not a movement of the working class, or the ‘disenfranchised’. The idea that Trump represented ‘the left behind’ lashing out against ‘the establishment’ is a liberal myth. The vast majority of those who stormed the capital were not poor, on the contrary. They were business owners, real estate brokers, Lawyers and local politicians. They were the petite bourgeoise. This is the class that right wing populism appeals to, not the working class, but the so called ‘middle class’. They’re not quite rich, so they’re envious of those above them, but also contemptuous of those below them. They are ‘The PeopleTM’ that Right Wing Populism appeals to. Even though they don’t make up a majority of the population, they are the ones who really count. To movements like these, people like Arther are parasites and societal dangers. They don’t appeal to people like him, they dehumanize people like him. He may be White and Male, and yes this is who the Right tries to appeal to the most, but above all he is wretchedly poor and mentally ill. And because they can’t acknowledge the societal problems that make people like Arther, people like him become the problem.

I think it’s interesting how this take on the Joker continues to follow up each unexpected turn w/ another! I don’t think anyone, Todd Phillips included, thought the first film would reach the heights that it did, and pave the opportunity for a sequel. Obviously, the fans of the 1st film wanted more, but I thought it was interesting how Phillips took issue with that praise and used that fuel for deconstruction ? Like from the name of the film to the marketing that is clearly focused on Joker and Harley Quinn, it seemed pretty clear that we’d be getting another unreliable narration, but from the perspective of 2 main, mentally ill, characters. Like it’s crazy how much faith WB put in Phillips to run in this direction, and literally skip audience test screenings! Joker Folie à Deux feels like Phillip’s director’s cut, which is even crazier a lá the context of the Snyder-cut movement of corporate studio meddling of comic book films, killing artistic vision. This was, seemingly, the opposite tho? I’ve seen a lot of fan responses claiming they were the jokers for enjoying the first film and expecting too much from this sequel, but, I mean, Todd Phillips mislead studio executives and the core fan-base, alike, which is very joker 🤡 *this is the first essay response on this film I’ve seen that really delves into the political context of the far right audiences of these movies, so thanks for dialing up the interesting factor even more, Emma ! 😁

As much I loved since I grown up with this show (which I shouldn't do at that age) I agree with your take. Yeah, it is sitcom, but at the same time it can be criticize because everything can/should be criticize (still hate the ending tho)

do you have letterboxd? <3

This is a nice video. Have you thought of putting house plants in the background? I think it would make the space look more cozy. Anyways I'm looking forward for your future Videos :)

Joker is such a boring character, but I’m glad I’m finally understanding what makes him so interesting to people. They see him as this edge lord like you said. I’ll never watch these movies, but I appreciate the breakdown, good stuff.

They are all so cringe. Real women are not like that. Right ?

It's a fantastic film.

girl u literally me

2008 dark knight joker violence? you sure you arent thinking of the 2012 dark knight rises mass shooting in aurora co?

joker 2 is peak, yall just arent as cool as me but in 3 years youll be telling your first gay date that you saw it in theatres and loved it but didnt want any of your friends to tease you about it. pansies the lot of ya

I still don’t think we’ve managed to see a good modern depiction of Harley Quinn. They really do just keep messing it up. Maybe I had fallen bait to some of the marketing and hoped more for her character - You can tell Gaga ws committed to this role, however, let’s face it. Gaga plays Gaga. But regardless I still think she sounded great and enjoyed some of her scenes. But I think the greatest disrespect to her character was her resolution. It diluted her entire existence within this plot to have only really ever been a fan. The film failed to recognise her on even par with the joker. And this comes after 2 hours of playing with the audience making us question whether she’s real or not? *cough cough* the prison cell s*x scene?! We didn’t really get to see her mentioned psychology degree or intelligence really play out in a way where it affected the narrative in the film. I kept thinking the film was building us to believe that maybe she was pulling more strings behind the scenes and that maybe this would tie together in the end. Sadly not. I think what’s also frustrating when we amount the screen time we were given of this character, in reality, if this role had been played by a lesser known actress, I really don’t think they’d have set her completely side by side with the joker in all of the marketing we’ve seen. I would actively say the marketing for this film has been off. Let’s not even talk about naming the lawyer Harvey Dent because there’s literally nothing to discuss there is there..For me it’s clear that Gaga had one specific idea of how this film would look, as did Phoenix, as did the director and most importantly, Warner bros. And I don’t think they all matched.

I think the bandwagon slander towards this film seems to be aimed primarily towards the musical numbers. I personally didn’t mind this aspect of the film, I think we just expected more nuance with it. I kept thinking the musical numbers would blur more into his reality but they really were being used to chop up disjointed scenes. One thing I do agree with is the speculation around where the budget of 200 million went. It really didn’t show on screen and I think somehow if they made this film on a way smaller budget scale not only would have it made more sense with its tone but maybe it could have worked??

No the megopolis shade is so real. U ate this up

As someone who is roughly the age the characters were supposed to be and who watched the show as it came out, I`m flabbergasted by people seeing Barney as anything other than a mockery of the pick up artists from back then.

You dropped a photo with Lin Manuel Miranda in it and didn’t talk about it haha

The hate for the movie is bandwagon hate and it's so pretentious in my honest opinion. It was a depressing watch that had me in my feels. Everyones critiques are not in good faith, bringing up the most shallow points, instead of using critical thinking (in my opinion). I think the movie is about how it feels like to be in love with someone who is gaslighting you on the low or just all around makes you feel like you're crazy, always questioning whether or not they really love you or not.

I'm not gonna lie, I expected Joker 2 to be way worse than it actually was, while I get that genre-bending (which I honestly wouldn't say was bad, it was kinda fascinating to me) is not everyone's cup of tea and it's hard to watch such an iconic character be unable to do almost anything for over two hours, I find the criticism a bit too harsh. Maybe it was the lack of expectations that made Joker 2 enjoyable-ish for me, but I would not discourage anyone interested in a non-action superhero-adjacent movie from watching it.

instead of watching joker 2 im going to go watch spring breakers again

I dont know, i think the episode where nick fucks an 18 year old freshmen might be the episode that aged the worst

Lena Dunham is not white

Subscribed immediately after the intro 😭

You summed up how I’ve felt about Barbie since its release. I left the theatre thinking, okay that was fun and cute. Didn’t say much but I guess it is a movie about a doll. And then I went online and saw people posting about how Barbie gave them so many revelations and it left me feeling frustrated. I wasn’t frustrated at these women, but I was frustrated that we were so much farther behind than I thought. I was frustrated that we are still fostering such a strong culture of misogyny that it took the Barbie movie for SO MANY women to even think at all about how their gender may have impacted them throughout their life. I was sad and frustrated that in 2023, hundreds of years after books like Little Women and The Awakening, a large amount of women are still not even aware or thinking critically about the most basic factors of the discrimination they face. Again, not against the women, but against how little progress we’ve made since the 1800s.

I will randomly watch the show but my hatred for how the show ended is always in my head ruining the old enjoyment I used to have watching this show…

Watching this now and thinking back, it’s interesting how much of the “girlboss, quirky Hillary girl” feels like a continuation of the broader “we elected a black president, we’ve won, we did it, we finished history” vibe that dominated so much of the liberal discourse of the Obama era

"Huh, sure, I'll check this out." "To quote Mark Fisher..." *Subscribes*

First time watcher, I really enjoyed your analysis! Really contributes to the discourse, and inspiring :)

well that was anxiety inducing. Great video!

Honestly looking at the show with this lens just makes one of the worst TV endings make sense on a meta level. It's still an awful ending that throws out everything the show built for seasons on end, but hey they certainly didnt let go of that """nostalgia"""

I appreciate this analysis, but it's still a comfort show for me. Also, I'd just like to suggest that when it comes to the jokes we now understand as problematic, the writing and execution to me always seemed to be making fun of barney for being insanely vapid and misogynistic, not the women themselves or fat people or whoever they were seemingly poking fun at.

HIMYM is crazy to me because it used to be my favourite show in my early/mid teenage. Like the show had already wrapped up and I cringe to admit that I rewatched it mutliple times lmao. It was a really strange experience then to sort of be in acknowledgement of how Barney is not great but having rose tintet glasses for the things in it that I resonated with and that were heartwarming for me only to then go back to it pretty recent,y and no longer be blind to all the biggotry in the show. It’s wild because now I’m realizing the internal damage that thing contributed to as a she/her in my teens who didn’t know I was gay and enby yet and actively felt like I had to combat something in me that failed to meet the expedtations of womanhood that I internalized from media like HIMYM….

I tried watching Girls. It was just annoying, as the characters were just unlikeable. New Girl was fun and light tho

"evil and cringy" is literally psycho. The show was funny and lighthearted not evil.

Starting with 911 is crazy

Man I love the show and I watched it for the first time time in 2024, I think its funny and I like it and Barney is awsome for my standarts(the womazing stuff is made by the production for laugsh)

I’m gonna tell you something that somebody that used to do Zoe’s blowouts and hung out with her boyfriend who used to be a guitarist a certain band before she married and had a kid - Zoe DashChanel is not that nice and she actually pretty mean. AND Gwyneth PALTROW too… actually, there are several actresses in Hollywood that are supremely awful . Not only that but Drybar and most blowout bars were notorious for not giving hairstylist breaks or lunches or paid them unfairly , or sometimes you didn’t get paid at all for a week. ZOE was an investor for DRYBAR AND BLO both businesses know for not training hair stylist, not giving them fair pay and treatment . Also both businesses had racist policies. Zoe she funded most of them and she was well aware of this. She’s NOT nice, quirky, white woman. She’s actually a horrible mean quirky white woman. I stand by the statement.

We might never know how close we came to a Lily Aldrin ‘soft -a’

I grew up watching this show as a teenager. I had a buddy that projected himself on to Ted, but admired Barney. Lot of the group admired Barney and his "intellectual" prowess. I did like the show for the gatherings. It was game of thrones type of watching but for suburb kids. I didn't grow up in the suburbs so this kinda of get together felt familiar and comforting. But the Barney thing. I like Niel, alot, and I think his acting is why he got away with the predatory behavior from the character. For me though, the other characters acceptance of the behavior is what I think supports your hypothesis. Comfort, we let the lion sleep next to us because we know it is fed. I am extrapolating a little, so don't mind me. The group would rein in Barney's behavior sometimes when they were close proximity to the group, but not always. Robin and Lilly have both been accosted by Barney in front of their partners respectively. Just alot going on in the show. But yeah the first time I thought about HIMYM in years. Easy sub.

My wife just started watching new girl, and so I'm watching it too. I find that none of the comedy stands, but my wife and kids are laughing, so maybe that's just me. I also think Barbie was actually extremely critical of 2010s feminism. I wonder if this is the flight club of today, and Barbie is the new Tyler dyrden. To me, the movie said these are all facades. The idea of representation when being sold is never really what it is. They are selling another thing. When America Ferrara ends her arc with her attempt to jump into the petite bourgeoisie, she will simply become the person in power who is doing the exploitation of feminine representation. We see that, in the Barbie world, when men were in power and when women were in power, we had winners and losers with an underclass and a class in power that did not want to give up the power. The underclass was happy with taking on the facades of power but not attaining equality in the supreme Court. I guess it should be no surprise that the message is lost in the masses.

I never thought of the nostalgia but I have to admit there have been numerous times in which I have randomly come across a HIMYM episode and changed the channel because I knew I would have felt depressed afterwards EDIT: I mean coming across random episodes after watching the whole series

i thought people hated lena Dunham due to what she did to her sister

NIce, another racist on youtube!

I don't recall that New Girl episode... but I _do_ recall a similar sort of episode from Broad City. It felt _so_ out of place to see Hilary show up and I'd gotten the impression that that particular episode had been paid for by her campaign. Maybe both were. Which does play into the inherent insincerity she had. Hilary had _no_ policy when she ran, it was 100% "vote for me because I'm a woman". If that had been in _addition_ to an actual campaign, it'd be fine. But it was pretty much the entirety of her platform. Don't get me wrong, I have a number of issues with Harris. It'd be so nice if we could get a woman candidate who was awesome. Couldn't be a full on socialist because too many people would freak out about it, but even just some mild SocDem proposals would be great and, I think, massively motive people to vote for that person. Hilary was -- and is -- a hanger-on to the billionaire capitalist elites, who had no issue with a lot of very right-wing politics just so long as she could fit it into a liberal aesthetic. All surface, no depth. And that too would have been preferable to Trump. But in 2016 Hillary was doing all she could to downplay the threat of Trump and clearly didn't believe it herself that he could get elected. The guy just had to tell people what they wanted to hear, ramp up the fear-mongering with some sleazy charisma that apparently works for some people, and Hillary more or less did the rest of making herself unlikeable. Harris, despite some horrendous policy stances, is a much more likable person. And, I think, the threat of Trump (and his dangerous incompetence and love of fascism) is not being undersold. It's not "no way could this guy get elected" but more "look, he's gotta lose this... but could she just come out against genocide? Why is it so hard for her to say mass murder of a whole people is bad?"

18:08 You just cant please some people. Toy companies are gonna make and market toys. And some people are out here getting mad that they're getting more diverse and inclusive..?? As if it's ~*some big trick*~ to make us like them. It isnt a trick to give people the representation they want lol

Why do they behave like children?