The weeks leading up to the release of Todd Phillips’s 2019 film Joker wereawash with hysterical corporate media warnings about insane killers shooting up theaters at screenings. But this hysteria was not a spontaneous reflex of the media hive mind: it originated with a memo produced by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, warning of “incel extremists” attempting to replicate a 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in which a young man dressed as the Joker armed with tear gas grenades and multiple firearms reportedly killed twelve people and injured 58 others at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises.
The terrorist incel, of course, is today a major obsession of the US security state and its proxies on the Left. But it’s only the latest incarnation of an archetype woven deep into the fabric of modern American culture. The desire for fame (or infamy) was already linked to spectacular violence in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver. Premiering at Cannes in 1976, Taxi Driver immediately generated controversy for its sexualization of thirteen-year-old Jodie Foster, on the one hand, and fears of the prospect of inspiring Travis Bickle copycats, or what screenwriter Paul Schrader called “Taxi Driver kids,” on the other. Five years after the film was released, these fears materialized in the figure of John Hinckley, Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in the chest on March 30, 1981. Hinckley sent Schrader a series of letters before the assassination attempt, which Schrader instructed his secretary to burn in order to conceal them from the FBI. In a successful insanity defense, Hinckley’s lawyers argued that their client’s obsession with the film and his identification with Bickle had spawned an infatuation with Foster whom he wanted to impress by killing the President.
Three months earlier, on December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman had murdered John Lennon outside of the Dakota building in New York, where Lennon was living with Yoko Ono and their young son, Sean. Chapman was also supposedly motivated by a desire for fame arising from a deranged relationship to pop culture and claimed to be getting subliminal messages from films.
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