Musings on The Digital Underground, Juice, and Controversial Audiences
Everybody knows the song “The Humpty Dance”. I’m not even going to link to it because I know it’s stuck in your head right now. (Sorry about that.)
Connoisseurs of Digital Underground know that Tupac Shakur was a member of DU for a short while there. Beyond knowing that he was in the video for Humpty Dance, they know that he was given a few bars in their song “All Around The World/Same Song” (jump ahead to 2:18):
Well, Digital Underground was freakin’ HUGE in the early ’90s. Huge enough that Ronald “Money B” Brooks was asked to try out for the role of Bishop in the movie Juice. Money B asked Tupac to tag along (thinking, hey, if I’m not going to get it, Tupac should get it) and Tupac asked the casting guy if he could read for it and, whaddya know, he got the role.
Well, keep in mind, in 1988, there were a bunch of incidents at the opening night of Dennis Hopper’s movie Colors. Angel Town had a brawl and a shooting. Godfather III had a fatal shooting (perhaps they were arguing over whether one of them had promised that it was inevitable that the movie was going to be good). New Jack City had stuff happen in New York, Westwood, and Chicago. Boyz n the Hood comes out, and there are shots fired. That gets us to July 1991.
Juice is coming out in January 1992.
Having made the movie, the time comes for there to be the promotional materials. The marketing people make the iconic movie poster with him at the front holding a gun and EVERYBODY goes nuts. What the heck are you doing? , people ask. People will die! , they explain. A weird compromise comes up where they airbrush the gun out of the poster.
And this creates all sorts of drama because, right around the same time (like, February 1992), Christian Slater comes out with a movie called “Kuffs” and the movie poster is just him holding a gun. And HE didn’t have to airbrush HIS gun out. They had Kuffs posters right next to the disarmed Juice poster.
This inspired all sorts of arguments about what kind of content was okay to glamorize, whether displaying a gun was, itself, an implicit endorsement of violence (hey, Truffault is credited with saying that there is no such thing as an anti-war film), and whether some movies that depict violence are more or less harmless and other movies that depict violence need to be considered to be inspiring it. I mean, the premiere of Juice had a lot of violence associated with it. Someone got shot and paralyzed in Philly, there were threats of gun violence in Long Island, gunshots went off in Boston (eyewitnesses say it wasn’t related to the movie itself, though it did happen in the theater’s bathroom), and someone got shot in Lansing.
Anyway, Joker comes out next month. It looks pretty good.
When I mentioned to my parents I had watched The Warriors on late-night TV (this was the late ‘90s), the first thing they said was that they remember it for starting gang fights at movie theaters when it came out in the late ‘70s. And that movie was a lot closer to West Side Story dance-fighting that Juice.
Speaking of Juice: subpar movie, excellent Eric B and Rakim song, fine beverage depending on the fruit.Report
Holy crap, I didn’t know that. Three dead, California, Boston, and Palm Springs.Report
Some movies show accurate portrayals of a rough world with a commentary on how fucked up it is.
Other movies show inaccurate portrayals of imagined victims and glamorize their “plight”.
I wonder which, if any, of these categories “Joker” will fit into.Report
Is “Joker is a comic book movie” a reasonable counter-argument to the implication that “movies should show more accurate portrayals of imagined victims” argument or not?
To what extent is art obliged to reflect Truth-with-a-Capital-T?
(And that’s without starting a conversation about the accuracy of the portrayal of the rough world in The Warriors, Colors, Angel Town, Godfather III, New Jack City, or Boyz N The Hood.)Report
I don’t think there is any obligation on anyone’s part. But it does seem important to point out these differences.
To me, there is a pretty big difference between gang members going to see a movie about gang members because, “Hey, a movie about us!” getting into some beef and someone donning a Joker suit and shooting up a theater because, “Hey, the joker had a point.”
Obviously, I haven’t seen “Joker” yet. But my friend who has wrote this: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/08/joker-review-joaquin-phoenixReport
Tell your friend that a guy you know that wouldn’t have read the article has gone and went to read it and, indeed, is reading the Vanity Fair article now (or was, as of 9/20).
Okay, apparently, he watched the movie in Italy. “Perhaps it’s a bit easier to accept and digest all this horror in a country where such men seem rarer—or I’m being an over-worried pill, and it’s just a good, startling movie.”
If Joker results in fewer deaths than the gang banger movies of the 90’s… can we reach any conclusions about opinions about the movies? Or, seriously, do we live in a different society now? Like, if we find that the 2022 Dylann Roof happens to have this DVD in his collection (or Blu Ray, whatever), does that mean that we should have an opinion about the movie similar to the one that we all hold about New Jack City?
In the meantime, I’m left wondering just how serious this film is meant to be.
I’m guessing that this is Schrödinger’s Flick.
If no one dies, then it’s obviously commentary.
If someone gets shot, then it’s obviously something that we should have done something about.
Watch it. Hold your breath. Hope the cat is alive.
Seriously, it looks like it’s going to be pretty good.Report
“Results” is a curious word there.Report
There’s an implicit assertion of causation with these things that I find highly dubious. I’d take it more seriously if we had some consistency of application. Instead it’s always a moving target (forgive the pun) where people get to righteously tut tut at some huge, ill defined and amorphous blob of people or ideas and not some other simularly ill defined amorphous blob of people or ideas.Report
I’m deliberately using the passive voice.
Let’s go back to Juice real quick. Here’s a section from the UPI article:
If something like this happened with Joker, to what extent would we say “see? Disaffected young males are drawn to this movie, like a moth to the flame!”? To what extent would we say “dude got mugged in the can, would have happened if the theater was showing a Shirley Temple flick”?
And so just as we are stuck here wondering whether we can meaningfully say that Juice resulted in violence, we’re looking at the upcoming release of Joker holding our collective breath.
Here’s another fun section from the UPI article:
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I went to Medeival Times once. Someone got stabbed in the bathroom. I think that had more to do with the Lyndhurst, NJ setting than the swords-and-sandles setting.
I agree with InMD. These things are rarely causal. But dressing up as the main bad guy is a decent piece of evidence that it might be.Report
I don’t care if it’s directly causal. That’s not the point. I don’t mind the existence of movies that show the “inside view” of worlds and people I’m not familiar with. For example, films showing gang life can be valuable, because I know little about gang life. I’m certainly not going to join a gang.
What if a movie shows gang life, but if it is completely false?
If a movie lies to me, it is bad, because I want to glimpse unfamiliar worlds as they are. Falsehood is bad because I want to know true things.
So on the topic: movies about “disaffected (not always white) men”?
Here’s the problem: I already know too much about those guys. It’s been done. In fact, our culture is drenched in that shit.
Similarly, I don’t want to see a movie about a happy-go-lucky Nathan Forrest analog who gloriously lynches black people. I don’t need to see that. I don’t need another glimpse into that particular human failure. I’ve seen too many.
Haven’t we all?Report
It’s been 20 years since Fight Club. We were due.
But, checking Moviefone, it looks like The Current War and The Woman in the Window are also being released on October 4th. So there will be options for those who wish to see new movies in the theater that are not Joker.Report
Yes, there are other movies. I would also have the option of watching a different movie if they made a celebratory movie about a guy into lynching black people. I might nevertheless comment about the problems with such a movie.
Moreover, it’s not just Fight Club, although it was a particularly stark example of the phenomenon. That said, “manpain” is a common enough trope. TV Tropes has a nice list: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MangstReport
So Joker is on the same level as a movie about a guy into lynching black people?
Hrm. That would mean that a movie about a guy into lynching black people would be on the same level as the new DC supervillain origin story.
Smudging the two concepts together strikes me as something that is far more to the benefit of racists than the detriment of Cape Aficionados… but, as I said, I’m one of the folks looking forward to Joker.
NPR gave an argument that I found much more dissuasive:
Now *THAT* is how you get someone to not see a movie! Far more effective than accusations of wrongthink on the same level as racism.
(Pity she had to praise Phoenix on the way there.)Report
No, of course not. It’s more the point: if the argument works for the one, should it not work for the other?
“You can watch a different movie.”
True, but so what? I still notice the “manpain” dynamic. I’m free to comment on it.
“He shot up his school, but he was bullied.”
“He went on a killing spree, therefore women should have slept with him.”
These are real opinions I see shared quite often. Perhaps it’s not identical to lynching. On the other hand, “angry chan guy stockpiling weapons for the beta revolution” is his own kind of terrible.
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Am I trying to get people to not watch the movie? I wasn’t aware of that.
I think I’m more hoping that people who do choose to see the movie will understand the reality of “chan guy” and how he will see the movie. Myself, I was quite surprised at the edgelords who liked Fight Club. The first time I encountered them, I was like, yeah it was a good movie, but don’t you understand that “Operation Mayhem” was full of dipshits and Tyler was an absolute pud? His observations weren’t deep. They were childish.
They didn’t understand that. He was their hero, in all his banality.
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One can always say, “Gamers rise up! Fuck you, Veronica.” I’d appreciate it.Report
It’s a weird phenomenon that I’ve seen in a lot of places.
The problem isn’t a particular thing. It’s how some people, other people, will enjoy the thing inappropriately.
We saw that with the gang movies in the early 90’s. Juice was a pretty good movie! The problem, of course, was the people who shouldn’t have seen it.
I think I’m more hoping that people who do choose to see the movie will understand the reality of “chan guy” and how he will see the movie.
Yeah, I didn’t really get into this with the gang movies of the late 80’s, early 90’s, but this argument you’re making is one that mirrors the one made back then too.
For the record, I thought that Boyz N The Hood was a really good movie.Report
The Joker is a hot property and there were about several dozens potential origins story that could have been told. The simplest and least controversial Joker origin story was the gangster suffering from science fiction industrial accident doesn’t make for a long or compelling movie. The Joker was always bad but then he fell into a vat of black magic chemicals and became the monster with a sick sense of humor we all know isn’t going to get big audiences in the seats.* The big problem seems to be that the most compelling of these origins stories are what we can call problematic because they tend to be varieties of down on his luck white man reaching the breaking point and killing many innocent people. I don’t think any Hollywood script writers can make a full length movie about the Joker as an eternal agent of chaos.*
*I think one of the Joker origins stories had him start as not very good down on his luck stand up comic. If I could write, I see two potential ways to use this background and tell a Joker origin story that might avoid the down on his luck white man breaking issue. One is that the Joker is a criminal that uses a gig in comedy as a cover for his crimes. Something like edgy cartoon writer during the day, gangster by night and then he gets dropped into black magic chemicals. The other is that he might be an ordinary comedian whose quest for material takes him off the deep end with him turning into the Joker. The key is that you need to avoid the down on your luck white man breaking narrative.Report
The viral ads are stepping up:
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WB is clearing up some things that may not have been clear before:
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Okay. This was funny.
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Minor update:
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And, finally:
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We are officially in late stage accountability-free punditry.Report
And–y’know, people are gonna say “oh, well, you were the one saying we shouldn’t pay attention to some kid posting Nazi white-supremacist transphobic hate speech, you were the one saying that some guy retweeting Tosh.0 didn’t mean anything”, and, yeah, we did say that. But you’re the ones who explained how it Didn’t Matter that time because it was Exhortations To Violence and The Equivalent Of An Attack and Creating A Climate Of Fear and so on.Report
Post-finally:
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Post-post-finally:
The Joker has received 11 Oscar Nominations.
These include Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.Report