Send in the Clowns! reads Todd Phillips’ blockbuster movie Joker (2019) as an economic and political allegory of our times.

What could be more surprising than Joker as a solution to our present economic and political predicament? But in twelve riveting chapters, Send in the Clowns! leads us precisely here. Grip this movie’s visual language, the book insists, and we can also grasp a political grammar, available to everyone, to articulate a new solidarity.

The predicament Send in the Clowns! diagnoses is urgent: how late capitalism ensures astonishing inequality by persistently depoliticizing the demos, only to unleash a backlash in conspiracy, violence, and authoritarianism. Send in the Clowns! maps this unravelling to Arthur Fleck’s own transformation into the Joker. When the movie begins in 1981, neoliberal tides are shifting the sands: the rise of insecure work; the destabilizing of welfare; the explosion of racialized incarceration. Neoliberal theory vilifies power formed in solidarity with others. It criminalizes poverty. It labels social justice, democratic regulation, and collective redress as both inefficient and evil. Slow-reading this film, what Kennedy and McNaughton call grip-reading, allows Send in the Clowns! to isolate and confront the effects.

But Send in the Clowns! says that movies have still more to teach us. Joker challenges the superhero melodrama of Batman: that we will be saved by canny corporate accounting and trust babies, tech bros and saviors who work beyond the law. Send in the Clowns! reminds us instead how inheritance and trust law fashion capital to offload costs to others and to nature. What’s more, Send in the Clowns! shows melodrama itself has become late capitalism’s preferred and recurrent genre. It appears in neoliberal economic theory; in a media seduced by villainy; in state justifications for war. Melodrama even appears perverted and disfigured in conspiracy theory. Melodrama allows demagogues to describe themselves as saviors and decry political opponents as criminals, threatening the foundations of democracy itself.

Whether addressing psychic outcomes in late capital–where mothercare inverts to smotherhood, where broculture slips to incel—or diagnosing the structural fissures within liberalism itself—where prioritizing economic freedoms leads to suppressing democracy—Send in the Clowns! presents a compelling, accessible account of our current moment. And in a final chapter, Kennedy and McNaughton succinctly offer some ways forward.

The myth of the lone superhero has let us down. If we don’t want jokers for president, we must empower the clowns!

wSean Kennedy is Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of New Brunswick and the author of Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français 1927-1945 (2007).

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