Death by discourse

Todd Phillips may have listened to his critics, and Joker II flopped. Was he wrong to?

In a recent podcast interview with the New York Times, Sally Rooney thoughtfully described her relationship with the “discourse” around her novels. She described letting “the reader or the critic have their own conversation…I don’t need to be over the reader’s shoulder thinking, what did you think of that page?”

Her point comes at an interesting time for criticism. The unexpected flop of the Joker sequel Folie à deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, has prompted multiple thinkpieces analysing what went wrong. The most compelling theory is that the director Todd Phillips listened to his critics. 

In the first Joker, Phoenix’s character Arthur Fleck is a violent and lone vigilante – eventually killing a late-night talk show host on live television – but, some critics posited, he was portrayed sympathetically, as a kind of heroic underdog of the white working class. And so, in our febrile political climate, would Arthur Fleck inspire copycat violence and validate incel rage? Was the film ethically irresponsible? 

When the Telegraph’s film critic Robbie Collin put this to Phoenix in an interview – “aren’t you worried that this film might perversely end up inspiring exactly the kind of people it’s about, with potentially tragic results?” – Phoenix was so disturbed he walked out of the room. 

When Phillips was asked about the ethics of the film, he was taken aback. But he had an answer: “Isn’t it a good thing to take away the cartoon element about violence that we’ve become so immune to? I was a little surprised when it turns into that direction, that it’s irresponsible. Because, to me, it’s very responsible to make it feel real and make it have weight and implications.”

With Folie à Deux, Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety, Phillips, having taken all of this backlash to heart, took the danger out of Joker. “There’s no longer any danger to [Arthur Fleck’s] presence. He’s not trying to kill someone, and he’s not leading a revolution. He’s just singing and (on occasion) dancing his way into his Joker daydream.”

I wonder what Phillips would make of Sally Rooney’s take on criticism. I wonder too what critics make of it. I can imagine certain pompous literary types huffing and puffing at the idea that an author did not care what they thought. I think many critics write with the hope that perhaps the subject of their insight might actually read what they have to say, even learn something from their ‘constructive’ feedback. Perhaps they have fantasised about receiving an email, sent years after an excoriating review, beginning, ‘I want to thank you…’ 

Usually, however, critics are only aware of when a celebrity hates what they have written. Film critics have described the venomous emails they have received from directors squabbling over a star rating. If you read memoirs from rock journalists, rarely a chapter passes without a colourful anecdote about a rocker either threatening to, or quite literally, storming into the NME or Melody Maker offices for a punch. More recently, artists such as Lana Del Rey and Nicki Minaj have both taken critics to task on Twitter. Perhaps the most shocking ‘retaliation’ took place in dance: last year the ballet director Marco Goecke smeared dog excrement in the face of critic Wiebke Hüster after reading her negative review in the German press.

These days I think young journalists are so worried about offending a celebrity, or are so beholden to the promises of personal branding and self-promotion, they will write glowing reviews in the hope that their subject will read them and share them. I can only imagine the thrill certain UK journalists felt seeing their five-star reviews of the Tortured Poets Department posted by Taylor Swift on Instagram earlier this year. Of course she didn’t share the four-star ones.

Some writers dare to dream of the hallowed partnership between Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau, who met outside of a Cambridge concert venue in the freezing cold in winter 1974, the night Springsteen was to play a gig – Landau walked up to the entrance to find Springsteen reading Landau’s review of his second album, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, which was pinned up in the window. Landau asked Springsteen if he liked the piece. “It’s good,” Springsteen replied. “I’ve read better, you know.” The next day, after the gig, Springsteen called Landau, and they spoke for hours. For years later, Landau became his manager; Springsteen described him as “the Clark to my Lewis”.

But should celebrities care what we think? I do think that one of the reasons Sally Rooney remains at the top of the game four novels in, despite weathering a kind of fame almost unheard of for writers, and the enormous weight of being heralded ‘the voice of her generation’, is that she does not. Of course, if she wasn’t so successful, perhaps she would feel like she had to. I would imagine some of that freedom to ignore what critics think is that her books are going to sell either way.

I was speaking to a musician friend the other day who felt that book critics were entitled to their opinions, as they were writers. But music critics had often never made music, so how did they qualify their criticism? The same, therefore, could be said of other forms of art. 

In the case of Joker, if Phillips muted the sequel because of the critical backlash to the original, then it’s a shame. Journalism thrives on hot takes, while negative press rings much louder, and longer, than positive press, even if it is the minority opinion. And besides, the majority of the handful of reviews questioning the “possibly irresponsible” content of the film still thought it was excellent. Much of the ‘moral panic’ surrounding Joker was a kind of self-sustaining media bubble: report on something fringe loud enough and it becomes the news agenda. Not that it made much difference, anyway – Joker grossed over $1b at the box office; if anything it made everyone want to see what all the fuss was about.

While writing this piece I stumbled upon a very funny story about the unique relationship between a writer and critic. The actor John Hurt had been “trounced” by a critic in the Express for his play, Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against Eunuchs in 1965. Hurt read the story at 5am following a night of partying, and drunkenly wrote a letter to said critic: “Dear Peter, Whoops. Yours sincerely, John Hurt.” Three weeks later Peter the critic replied.  "Dear Mr Hurt, thank you for your short but tedious letter. Yours sincerely, Peter." Hurt, realising that, when it comes to arguing with writers, it’s a losing battle, replied again: “You win.”

This week in links

I’ve been reading the New Yorker’s profile of Zendaya’s stylist, or rather “image architect”, Law Roach. He’s fascinating – he says he wanted to buy a house on a plantation, to reclaim the past – but the piece also unearths an interesting nugget about the origins of celebrity ambassadors for designers. Forward thinker Giorgio Armani wanted to get his clothes on the red carpet (European fashion houses looked down on Hollywood), so he employed journalist Wanda McDaniel to network for him, as a kind of ‘corporate liaison’. When Jodie Foster arrived at the 1989 Oscars in a widely mocked ‘prom dress’, McDaniel phoned her up to offer Armani’s services. This led me down a Wanda McDaniel rabbit hole, and I found this 1988 LA Times profile charting her ascent from doing 5am shifts on the Dallas Times Herald to getting paid for wearing $2000 suits. Sadly I don’t think this is a viable career plan for most journalists.

Also, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which I review on my pop culture podcast Straight Up. I think it might be my favourite of all her novels so far. She certainly writes the best sex scenes I’ve ever read.

And I enjoyed GQ’s cover interview with Paul Mescal, which I read mainly to see if Gabriella Paiella would ask him about the rumours that he takes his one-night-stands on morning walks and then sprints off mid-conversation to escape them. I am happy to report she does, but omits other reports about him haunting the Old Queen’s Head.

I’ve been watching Demi Moore’s grotesquely brilliant body horror The Substance, which made me feel revulsion at my own gnawing obsession with anti-ageing. My podcast co-host Kathleen and I also dissect whether it's a feminist masterpiece or has internalised the male gaze here.

I've been listening to Kill List, the excellent Wondery podcast about a tech journalist who found himself in possession of a 600-strong list of names others wanted dead. With the police unwilling to help, he goes about trying to warn every single one.

I can’t stop thinking about the disturbingly brilliant exhibition of Francis Bacon’s portraits of his inner circle at the National Portrait Gallery, where dislocated bodies and melting faces reveal Bacon’s own “exhilarated despair”. He once said that every portrait was in fact a self-portrait.