Hey, remember when Joker came out in 2019 and made like a billion dollars? Now, there’s always going to be popular movies that don’t resonate with me and that’s completely normal. We are all individuals after all, with our own differing tastes and perspectives on things.
However, ever since then I’ve been thinking about a movie titled “God Bless America” which came out in 2011, which I feel does whatever that movie was trying to do but much better. It’s basically about two people who go on a rampage because they feel society has degenerated, but all they really do is kill people who are being kind of rude or they’re fishing for attention.
It touches on a common sentiment that was spoken about in Lindsay Ellis’s old video, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ke$ha”. This movie was also coming out during the onset of what is now referred to as the “recession pop” era.
And speaking as someone who lived though it... I’m so fucking sorry, but I loved it. Haters, get out of here! Lady Gaga, Britney Spears with Femme Fatale, early Kesha, Beyoncé with Single Ladies and Run the World (Girls), Katy Perry with Teenage Dream, Nicki Minaj with Pink Friday and Roman Reloaded, Rihanna with Loud, and I could just keep going. I was having a blast!
But that was not how, like, the way your Dad saw things. I remember the dominant cultural zeitgeist commentary was basically like, oh my god, look at Katy Perry who is naked on this album cover. Oh my god, she’s spraying whipped cream out of her boobs. Oh my god, that’s not how you spell “girls”, Katy Perry, you spelled it G-U-R-L-S, you’re so hot and dumb, for shame...
It's obvious that the way we talked about mainstream pop music in the 2000s was largely dominated by miserable adults just being really misogynistic and mean. And I feel like this era was the double-down, we’re gonna take this but we’re going to go even further, we're gonna take it to it’s upmost extreme!
But anyways!
The point being is that while the film does try to give you the catharsis of shooting damn near every asshole in your path, ultimately, you can’t kill them all, and society will simply step over your godforsaken body and carry on just as it had been before. And in the end, you’ll have nothing to show for yourself.
And I can’t emphasis this enough, in the end, you will have nothing to fucking show for yourself. Hell, what did GamerGate actually accomplish? At best you’ll just get to be a novelty for a few weeks.
FUCKING PRONOUNS!!!
If you’re the type of person who thought American Idol was the symbol of an oncoming idiocracy, then this whole movie is about how you’re a fucking nutcase. And if you replace American Idol with TikTok, then suddenly it looks like Frank is going on a rampage because of teenagers for saying “unalive”.
This is who the Joker and Harley Quinn would most resemble in real life. The unhinged guy going on a rampage because of society would most likely just be some old man who got fired from his office job for leering at a woman. And the only other person who thinks he’s cool is a teenager who thinks she’s edgy and thinks she knows everything.
His first actual murder was a rich girl whose only crime... was being a jerk.
It goes against the common, but incorrect sentiment that we all have violent urges. But the uncomfortable reality is, no, we don’t all want to kill all the rude people we meet in our lives. We don’t all want to kill “Tumblrinas” for saying that Steven Universe is problematic, or every Linux user for simply existing within your vicinity, whatever it is you can think of... you self-adsorbed fuck!
We don’t all have violent urges towards the baby crying on a plane. And all of your violent thoughts even amount to are just a melodramatic, delusional, fantastical expression of how much you absolutely despise being even the slightest bit inconvenienced.
Because you’re such a self-absorbed little drama queen, that even the slightest obstacle apparently makes you jump to sociopathic cruelty.
You see, we aren’t ever going to get “another Luigi”. Even if you have a legitimate cause (which these characters do not), they will simply get meme’d into irrelevancy and then the rest of society will simply just go back to normal.
Think about all the things that were supposed to mean "we can't ever go back to normal". Trump, COVID-19, January 6th, the Claims Adjuster, even Palestine, and yet... we just went back to normal anyways.
You will have nothing to show for yourself. In the end, you'll just be the next loser with a gun. So, I think whatever's annoying you, it's best to get over it.
There's always going to be the next mutation.