Well, I did, pretty much. I make lots of predictions, often without intending to, and sometimes some of them come true, and this is one of those times. In my exceedingly—though not excessively—long-winded review of Quentin Tarantino’s fitfully entertaining Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, I remarked the following:
Much of the violence in Once Upon A Time is gratuitous in that it’s clearly wish fulfillment on Tarantino’s part, but there’s little that I found outright sadistic, which is what I really object to. It’s notably less sadistic than the coming features that I saw advertised with the film—It Chapter 2, Hide and Seek, and Joker. Obviously, audiences like sadistic.
Well, I haven’t seen any of these films, and I’m not going to, but my prediction regarding Joker has obviously rung true, judging from the half dozen reviews I have half read. The film rings the predictable changes on the notion of the self-loathing stand-up—not only a dead horse but a smelly one—and the idea that mass murderers are the honest ones among us, because, let’s face it, wouldn’t it be just the greatest fun to slaughter a hapless horde of humanity?
This conceit was already given a pretty good run in the last “Joker/Batman” movie, whatever it was called, in which the Joker supposedly had at his disposal hordes of no-name psychos anxious to self-immolate for the greater glory of the Boss and his body count, which he was able to summon merely by his existence, while the idea that mass murderers expose the sicknesses of our society was given perhaps its loudest exposition in Oliver Stone’s intensely avoidable Natural Born Killers, which I did not see, as I will not see either It Chapter 2, Hide and Seek, or Joker. Please do not try to impress me with your knowledge of “the dark”. All you are exposing is your own banality.
