I think it’s impossible to recall the appeal of 2019’s Joker—an R-rated comic book movie without any superheroes that grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide—without remembering how weird everything felt toward the end of 2019. A simmering rage had been building for years and society writ large was finding release points: there were angry rallies for and against Donald Trump; the reckoning that was #MeToo burned through Hollywood; white supremacists were on the march on college campuses and across city streets; black-masked Antifa counterprotesters met them on the same streets and quads. It was a genuinely strange moment, one made all the stranger by the unsettled American political scene and the unsettled mind within its most famous address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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