Somebody who truly knows about film/art help me out here: I've been stuck a lot on the film Joker (2019). Thing is, I watched the movie when it came out. In a really good movie theater, very good sound system for that OST and I was severely depressed at the time. All this to say, I had an amazing, approaching psychedelic experience. Saying that I thought the movie was good would be an understatement. I felt like I was entering into some kind of strange but exultant nihilistic communion with the universe through how much I unironically related with the hyper-alienation of the protagonist, the instinct displayed against the status quo, and the fact they have a pseudo-anti-neoliberalism message only enhanced it even more.
However, I have been watching movies for a long time. I have a basic grasp of movies as art or as a display of a genuine artistic vision. I have acquired some media and textual comprehension through experience and some of the classes I took in Uni. I understand there's a difference between subjective experience and objective reality. And the more I thought of it, the more I realized it objectively wasn't that good. Phoenix's performance was stupendous, the OST was excellent and combined with the visuals pretty well, and the production design choice of mimicking the Taxi Driver aesthetic was a good one. But apart from that, it's the epitome of the "we live in a society" meme. It portrays tragic "amounts" of alienation but doesn't add anything new to it or add any subtlety, it bandwagons of a lot of the ephemeral contemporaneous imagery of incels and whatnot. It's a manifesto of endless self-pity and inertia justified through the despair of the late-stage capitalist subject and the anti-neoliberalism is fucking razor thin. My question is: how do I deal with this huge contradiction between my subjective experience and my objective reasoning? Honestly kinda breaks my heart to be cynical about the movie but I also don't wanna be a rube who unironically thinks this movie is somehow dangerous or controversial in any meaningful way.
Sorry if it's a self-indulgent long post, but I just felt like writing it down.