Clown for President!

Published to coincide with the release of Joker: Folie àagrave; Deux, the sequel to Todd Phillips’ iconic blockbuster, this imaginative reading sees Joker as an economic and political allegory, presenting unexpected and dazzling insights into contemporary capitalism.

What could be more surprising than the cinematic presentation of the Joker as a key to solving our present economic and political predicament? Send In the Clowns! leads us precisely there. Grip this movie’s visual language, its authors insist, and we can also grasp a political grammar, available to all, that articulates a new, world-changing solidarity.

The predicament Send In the Clowns! diagnoses is urgent: the way late capitalism ensures astonishing inequality, unleashing a backlash in conspiracy, violence, and authoritarianism. These pages map this unraveling onto the narrative of 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. A close reading of the film allows Kennedy and McNaughton to isolate and confront these phenomena.

Send In the Clowns! shows how melodrama has become late capitalism’s preferred genre. It appears in neoliberal economic theory; in a media seduced by caricatured villainy; in state justifications for war. Melodrama allows demagogues to depict themselves as saviors and decry political opponents as criminals, threatening the foundations of democracy itself.

The myth of the lone superhero has brought us to the brink of disaster. If we don’t want jokers for president, we must empower the clowns!

Seán Kennedy is from Ireland, but lives and works as a settler in Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia. He is Professor of English and Coordinator of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University. He writes on disability, queerness, ethics and aesthetics. He is also a scavenger artist.

James McNaughton is a professor in the English Department at the University of Alabama. His book Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath appeared with Oxford University Press in 2018. His non-fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southern Cultures, and elsewhere. His academic work comes to grips with writing and art that exposes how we normalize the horrors and contradictions of political and economic history. He was born and raised in Ireland.