THE JOKER'S ON YOU

When Joker, the movie, was initially being promoted, I had my suspicions about it because it was getting a lot of negative reactions and being greeted with a great deal of concern over its presumed message and possible influence.  Personally the one thing that made me feel apprehensive about it was a comment from the director regarding his motivation for making the film.  Todd Phillips, who had made his name with the "frat-boy" humor of his Hangover films, had stated that he felt "pushed" out of doing comedy because of "PC culture" (political correctness).  He felt that comedy had become too constrained by PC mania and that he was no longer able to produce the kinds of comedies he wanted to make. 

Now, people protesting about "PC" pearl clutching have been putting me on alert a lot lately.  As someone who enjoys an inappropriate laugh as much as any open minded individual should, I've also come to recognize that many of those who seem the most put out by PC criticisms are the ones least likely to be hurt by prejudice and bigotry.  For a long time, I was on-side with a lot of the concerns over people getting too uptight about everything and anything, but I've come to recognize the security of my own privilege in these areas and how that makes me often immune to their damage.  The main difference with me is being homosexual.  That personal perspective was key for me to begin to comprehend the fine line between humor and abuse.  

"Political Correctness" is something that is, fundamentally, applied to comedy in most instances where it occurs.  It is frequently a response to some level of humor which an individual finds offensive, disparaging and/or cruel towards some social group.  Most frequently, the people who complain about PC culture are heterosexual white males, who are feeling the pinch of a dying Caucasian patriarchy.  They're upset because they can't freely use the "N" word or belittle and disrespect women or fill their locker rooms with homophobic slurs with the kind of abandon they associate with "the good old days".  They're the guys who want to make things "great again".  So, whenever someone whines about PC culture, my first response is, what do you want to say that you don't feel free to say now?  

I still see a lot of great comedy being produced now, so I don't buy into Phillips' assertion that he can't make those kinds of movies anymore.  I see them being made all the time.  So this whole impetus for making the Joker movie set me into a defensive posture approaching the film because its premise is highly suspect to me.  What made me want to give it a viewing, however, was when I started to read some reviews from people I respect and their feeling that it did actually have something valid to say about what's going on in our world.

That said, after watching the film, I do feel that Joker is something of an examination of the nature of humor.  I'm going to try to avoid spoilers here, but be warned if you haven't seen the film that I may slip up on a couple of plot points necessary to illustrate my premises.  I will try to stay focused on the primary character setup, but read on at your own risk.

Inappropriate laughter is the foundation upon which this story rests.  It's integral to the character created by Joaquin Phoenix.  Arthur Fleck is an individual who has a completely askew relationship with humor.  He's a "professional" clown who is virtually devoid of any sense of humor, yet he is prone to fits of uncontrollable laughter to the point where he carries a laminated card around like a deaf person might to advise strangers of his affliction.  Yet everything about his life is a misery.  There isn't a single affirming relationship in it and every stranger he encounters offers nothing but abuse, humiliation and rejection.  It's an oppressively negative existence from top to bottom, especially if you're disenfranchised.  

If you're not a "have-not", like billionaire business mogul, Thomas Wayne, or late night TV host, Murray Franklin (Gotham's answer to Johnny Carson, played by Robert De Niro), you're likely indifferent to the suffering of those with nothing and view them as victims of their own weaknesses and inabilities.  In the case of Franklin, you see them only as fodder for ridicule in order to satisfy the sadistic leanings of your audience.  There's no empathy in this city.  It really isn't very pretty what this town without pity can do!  

All totaled, you have a picture painted, in grotesque, sloppy clown makeup, of a world which has lost its sense of compassion and caring and that is exactly the world we live in now.  This is the real message of the movie.  Personally, I don't think PC culture is what's stopping people like Phillips from making funny movies.  I think the crushing, crumbling world we live in is getting harder and harder to laugh at and that's why making mindless bro-comedies about drunken abandon is less satisfying these days.  It isn't that you're not allowed to laugh at anything.  It's that we're in such a desperate, deplorable state as a species and a civilization, the adage that, when faced with tragedy, the best remedy is to laugh, has become too disingenuous to bare.  This disaster of a time we live in simply isn't very funny when we're starring down the barrel of extinction as a real possibility. 

As far as film making goes, this is a damn good movie.  The look of it captures the time it aims for perfectly.  It's dirty and there are some lovely callbacks to classics from the past, especially of the Scorsese variety.  And it does a surprisingly good job of fitting itself into the established mythology of the character, or rather the landscape the character is meant to inhabit.  There's even some nice nods to previous incarnations of the character in popular film and TV, from the loose resemblance to Cesar Romero's color scheme to Jack Nicholson's snatched string of pearls to Heath Ledger's bloody slash across his mouth.  It manages to put Joker into a new perspective while acknowledging and respecting his past incarnations.  

While writing this up, I notice that there's a Joker 2 movie announced, so I am hoping they don't mess up the purity of this one by overworking the concept.  This current film is a bitter pill that our culture needs to swallow, not because we've lost our sense of humor under the burden of political correctness, but because we're all sitting, dull eyed and dim witted, as our ship sails off the edge of the world and nobody seems to be too bothered about trying to stop it. 

I WORKED HARD FOR THE MONEY

On Thursday, January 7, 2010, I was dismissed from my position as business analyst at the company I'd been working at for almost 16 years.  That was ten years ago as of this writing.

I began there back in February of 1994.  It was a company that offered one of the first telephone dating services available in North America.  It was the beginning of social media, albeit in a crude, limited fashion relying on a telephone switchboard connected to a computer running voice message exchange software.  When I started, I was hired to monitor recorded audio content to screen for things like kids trying to use the service,  men pretending to be women and people being abusive.  It was essentially a virtual "bouncer" type of role.  Very quickly, I was promoted to working customer service; helping to set up membership accounts, take payments via credit card and advise people on how to use the service.

Originally, the software used was licensed from a developer back in Toronto, but the owners decided they'd rather reverse engineer their own version of the system rather than pay exorbitant fees and this would also give them complete control over future development of the product.  To this end, they hired a developer and put him to the task of recreating the product with their own code base.  In order to do this, they needed someone to work with him to make sure he replicated the functionality correctly.  As I was very familiar with the existing system by then and had diagrammed it out in order to allow me to better help customers navigate the features online, I was put to work with him to document it, test it and manage its resources such as audio files for system prompts.  This then lead to me managing the audio for the production systems, including scripting, recording, post production and archiving.  During these early years, I was doing my regular customer service work, running QA (quality assurance - testing), managing all the audio resources and documenting the system requirements and functionality, essentially all on my own.

As this software was implemented in production and the company began to expand to markets outside of Vancouver, I started to focus in on certain areas of my work while they hired others so I could offload tasks to them.  I stopped working the call center and then an audio specialist was hired to managed the voice prompts.  Next, people were hired to do QA and finally a business analyst (BA) team was created to help with the documentation and requirements management as we expanded into developing other integrated systems for business management.  These included automated payment systems, customer service tools for account management and call center automation and resource management as the business expanded to providing service throughout Canada, the US and Mexico.  By the early 2000s, the company had grown to nearly 500 "associates" (the term they preferred) with several floors of offices almost taking over a mid sized building downtown.  By this time, I had achieved the title of senior BA and was earning in the high five figure salary range.  Then, the tide turned.

By the mid 2000s, the internet was starting to surge in terms of offering dating and socializing services and telephone based services were starting to feel the squeeze.  They tried desperately to shift into this market, but couldn't figure out how to monetize it to compete with the revenue  generated by the phone services.  They even had the opportunity to buy products like Grindr before they became big, but missed the boat when they couldn't negotiate an agreeable price.  As the vice grip of falling sales and saturated markets started to take hold, the inevitable "restructuring" waves began to hit.  These became known as "black Thursdays" as they always happened on a Thursday, for some reason unknown to me.

It would begin with everyone logging into their computers in the morning to find an appointment in their calendar waiting to be accepted.  People quickly noticed that they weren't all going to the same meeting room.  Depending on whether you were staying or leaving, you'd go to a specific room.  One for the slaughtered and one for the saved.  I survived two black Thursdays, which were always traumatic for both groups.  The people that were still employed were left feeling the loss of their coworkers, people who had become friends and with whom they'd developed dependencies in order to do their work.  Suddenly processes were torn to shreds and no one knew how the work flow was supposed to function.  They'd also be aware that they could be next, so everyone felt the sense of dread in their gut every time an unusual appointment appeared in their calendar.

In September of 2009, the second major purge occurred and this one hit me particularly hard.  For years I'd been working with the department managers to build the Business Analyst team and we were a tight, effective group, but this restructuring resulted in all of the team being dismissed save for myself and one other BA.  The aftermath sunk me into a depression as I felt like I was on the verge of being next.  I'd recently celebrated my 15th year with the company, a seniority only exceeded by the company founder/president, but my sense of futility and doom became a self fulfilling prophesy as the new decade of 2010 started off with me getting my exit as I had feared.  As they say, when you're trimming the tree, best cut the old branches first.  The third time was the "charm".

When the axe came down for me, because of my seniority, I was given a sizeable severance, plus, because I'd seen the writing on the wall, I'd stopped spending and started saving for the prior six months.  As such, I walked out the door in decent shape, financially.  I was still traumatized, but I tried to think positively and use it as an opportunity to pursue my passion as an artist and see if I could make a go of that.  It didn't work out, as one might expect, and eventually the money ran out.

As I began to seek work as a BA again, I found the opportunities I thought would be there for someone of my experience were nowhere to be found.   Companies love to try to poach you when you have a job, but when you don't have one, most of them consider that a check in the "con" box.  My age also proved a negative factor.  I was too "over the hill", as far as technology companies were concerned, given that I'd slipped past the 50 year old threshold.  Tech companies want young, fresh faces, not older people with higher expectations.  As I was being passed over time and again for jobs for which I should have easily been qualified, I started to lower my sights to less ambitious roles, but I couldn't even secure a position in a call center for tech support, likely because I was considered "over qualified".  

I found a short term contract position in 2011, but nothing beyond that other than odd jobs.  Ultimately, I've found myself spending the last decade in the wilderness of unemployment, running out of savings, wracking up credit card debt, leaning into social assistance and selling off my possessions in order to make ends meet.   In tandem with this, my health took a nosedive starting in 2013 and I've been dealing with those issues while continuing to tread water on the fringes of poverty.  I can still pay my rent, barely, but my standard of living has had to be constrained to a fraction of what I was used to while I was gainfully employed.

Now, at the beginning of 2020, a full decade after my "career" ended, it feels like a dream, like it happened in another lifetime to someone else.  I am often reminded of a line from the 1986 version of The Fly.  "I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over..."  I can't imagine being successful anymore.  I can't seem to find any optimism or the confidence to give me the attitude I'm supposed to need to "succeed".  I know I have abilities and skills, but I don't know how to offer them in a way that overcomes the perception that I'm on the outs of "society".  I've fallen off the map and don't know how to get back on.

Ten years is a long time to be disconnected and the longer it goes on, the harder it is to plug back into the system.  Yet so much of what I see of where the world is going makes me question whether there's any point trying.  After 16 years of being a critical contributor in the success of a business, I was still just a piece of the machine, easily sacrificed when the time came.  Any sense that I was part of a team or "family" was shattered by that rejection.  I'll never make the mistake of thinking a company has any concern for people again.  I know that it's only about the dollars and the people are no more than a means to that end.  So I don't feel compelled to want to participate in that degradation anymore.  I don't have any desire to hop onto the alter of capitalism to willingly sacrifice myself to its heartless god.

I don't know how much longer I can continue down the road of this life given my constantly dwindling resources and the complete lack of perceptible opportunities.  Honestly, it amazes me that I've managed to keep going for this long.  Somehow, just the right amount of buoyancy seems to avail itself to keep my nose above water.  But who knows how much longer that good fortune will be sustained.   I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.