Episode Details

Many of the 1 star ratings for Joker : Folie A Deux are angry that Steffani Germanotta isn’t as hot as Margot Robbie.

Robbie’s Harley Quinn is one of the all time great sex fantasies, up there with chainmail bikini Leia. Super-villain as pornstar.

Steffani Germanotta in her Lady Gaga alter-ego laughs at these male sex fantasies about women.

Her Harley Quinn is a depiction of what the real women under the make-up of our hyper-sexualised fantasies are actually like.

And nothing makes us angrier than having our fantasies shown up as cheap.

Watch the video essay on YouTube

We’ve been living on a diet of force-fed fantasy for twenty years or more.

Fantasies of muscular men in spandex, and hot babes fighting evil, wearing only a swimsuit.

Fantasies of boy wizards, wars among the stars, games of thrones, post-apocalypses and blue alien avatars

Computer Generated Imagery made it possible to put our wildest fantasies on our screens, and we’ve been gorging on fantasy ever since

Then along come Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix and smuggle into a superhero franchise at the heart of our fantasies, a nugget of pure anti-fantasy

The Joker movies aren’t realism. Sadly, the fate of the mentally ill in our society is sadder even than the life of Arthur Fleck.

Instead Joker and its sequel are stories *about* fantasy. How fantasy holds us in a powerful grip, and the high cost of living in our fantasies.

And like the collision of matter and anti-matter

The collision of our fantasy soaked culture with this anti-fantasy movie

Is explosive 

Joker isn’t a Joker movie.

Gen-Xers and Millennials who remember Vertigo comics will know what Joker is.

The Vertigo comics imprint was where DC let its best creators mess with its IP, to remix Batman, Superman and the rest of the pantheon.

Vertigo was formed after the success first of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1985), Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988).

Moore, Miller, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis and a coterie of writers under editor Karen Berger rewrote the DC pantheon and created new characters.

Many of the best Vertigo style comics deconstructed the fantasies of superhero comics into sophisticated anti-fantasies that confronted readers with what our fantasies really are.

The second group of 1 star reviews for the Joker movies are fanboys of Zach Snyder enraged, our just confused, that Joker doesn’t continue the absurd power fantasies of his reign over DC.

The first Joker movie was the cinematic equivalent of a Vertigo comic. It was Todd Philips and Joaquin Phoe