COMMENTARY
Commentary
Commentary
1. The incel romance is structured around the working-class male protagonist’s subjective and unreliable narration of a relationship fantasy that imagines the impossible: reaching out against class barriers in an unequal society and its sexual economy marked by social Darwinism to achieve intimacy with the opposite sex. The frustrating inaccessibility of objective truth or reality itself to the incel (associated in several instances with mental illness) further exacerbates his abject status of being expendable and having little role to play in a hostile society indifferent to his existence.
2. The incel’s origins are inseparable from socioeconomic factors and the structural transformation of the economy. Inland parts of the country and sectors of the population devoted to agriculture and industry became marginalized in the shift towards a weightless economy privileging coastal cities. Rural and rust belt towns and communities were hollowed out from urbanization and offshoring. Those left behind found the traditional patriarchal values that had sustained an earlier generation rendered obsolete, leaving young men from such backgrounds maladjusted to a capitalist reality that has co-opted feminism and the sexual revolution.
3. The incel’s story cannot be told without accounting for his parents, depicted as a source of hidden shame reminding the protagonist of his lowly origins. This could be an ill-tempered father in trouble with the law who obstinately became a cattle farmer in his hometown despite having worked abroad as a construction worker, or the uneducated and cringe-inducingly ignorant parents whom the protagonist imagines introducing his girlfriend to in a remote rural farmhouse. The incel’s demise trapped like a naked animal in his pickup truck suggests an unescapable past.
4. The incel’s conservative patriarchal views of womanhood are coupled with an inferiority complex regarding the sexual marketplace to produce a paranoid and pathological fear of female sexuality reflecting the distorted values and twisted psychology of a society based on extreme inequality. In the incel’s imagination, the object of his sexual desire is conceived of either as his social inferior and someone vulnerable whose chastity he guards, or an alluring but promiscuous aspirant to a higher social echelon, successfully climbing the class ladder by prostituting herself in a way that men cannot.
5. The world of the wealthy is impenetrable to the incel who can only glimpse but is forever denied access: those having the power and resources to exploit women sexually from less privileged backgrounds are seen through a veil of mystery. Much like how the Jeffrey Epstein case has captured the public imagination in an age of gross inequality and populist discontent, films like BURNING tap into the zeitgeist by evoking the puzzle-like vibes of conspiracy theory: something’s wrong, the signs are there and you can connect the dots, but where’s the smoking gun?
6. JOKER’s textbook incel romance interests us for several reasons: the fantasy aspect of the incel’s imaginary romantic relationship with a neighbor, related typically through the protagonist’s subjective and unreliable narration; the cross-class dimension involving aspirations of social climbing displaced onto his mother’s delusions about a fling with the billionaire Wayne that fuel Arthur’s own suspicions of the latter being his father; the conspiratorial aspect of the mother’s mental illness as a possible cover up; and the violence with which Arthur kills off his fantasy through the substitute figure of the mother.
7. A variation of the incel romance is provided by GET OUT: the protagonist here is not an incel but a buppie with a privileged white liberal girlfriend who introduces him to her family and community in the suburbs, only for him to discover that an aging and wealthy white elite co-opts and appropriates young black talent by literally “snatching” their bodies. Despite its fantastical premise and effectively subjective narration, the film misses an opportunity at provocation by stopping short of introducing the possibility that its conspiracy might be imagined paranoically by its protagonist.
8. The masturbatory fantasy of the incel romance proposes a bleak imagination of the sexual economy in which the game is rigged in favor of wealthy elite males. Neoliberalism’s capitalist market logic is transferred to the realm of romance and physical intimacy, where men as buyers offer resources to women as sellers in exchange for sexual access. In this competition, incels at the bottom of the food chain have little to no capital for trade, while those at the top enjoy exploiting women at a social disadvantage who are eyeing their resources.
9. The impossibility of upward social mobility is implied in incel romances where the protagonist’s persistent efforts at overcoming his social origins and achieving success in a discipline not typically associated with manual labor or considered a blue-collar profession fail: the doomed attempts, say, of a janitor to become a writer, painter, or even Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The incel’s inferiority complex means that obstacles to success are projected as a form of condescending disapproval onto members of the opposite sex who represent objects of desire perceived to look down upon the uneducated working poor.
10. The incel romance or its variants typically ends violently with the crushing of the fantasy and the loss of the object of desire through death or disappearance. A vengeful act of killing is usually involved on the part of the incel to punish those deemed as the threat responsible for the erasure of his fantasy. In some cases, narrative ambiguity allows for an open ending where aspects of the incel’s fantasy as well as the subsequent killing it provoked are left unconfirmed as to whether they were imagined or truly took place.
6. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
7. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
CODA. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
8. Stories of single moms resorting to sex work to provide for their kids are emblematic of the difficulties in parenting under an economically punishing ideology that moreover atomizes the family and stigmatizes the collective in the name of individual freedom and enterprise. According to neoliberalism, aging working-class women who lose their homes or are terminally ill needing costly medical care hit the road out of choice rather than necessity. Meanwhile, the traditional wife and mother who stays at home has become an anachronism for economic and ideological reasons.
1. The incel romance is structured around the working-class male protagonist’s subjective and unreliable narration of a relationship fantasy that imagines the impossible: reaching out against class barriers in an unequal society and its sexual economy marked by social Darwinism to achieve intimacy with the opposite sex. The frustrating inaccessibility of objective truth or reality itself to the incel (associated in several instances with mental illness) further exacerbates his abject status of being expendable and having little role to play in a hostile society indifferent to his existence.
2. The incel’s origins are inseparable from socioeconomic factors and the structural transformation of the economy. Inland parts of the country and sectors of the population devoted to agriculture and industry became marginalized in the shift towards a weightless economy privileging coastal cities. Rural and rust belt towns and communities were hollowed out from urbanization and offshoring. Those left behind found the traditional patriarchal values that had sustained an earlier generation rendered obsolete, leaving young men from such backgrounds maladjusted to a capitalist reality that has co-opted feminism and the sexual revolution.
3. The incel’s story cannot be told without accounting for his parents, depicted as a source of hidden shame reminding the protagonist of his lowly origins. This could be an ill-tempered father in trouble with the law who obstinately became a cattle farmer in his hometown despite having worked abroad as a construction worker, or the uneducated and cringe-inducingly ignorant parents whom the protagonist imagines introducing his girlfriend to in a remote rural farmhouse. The incel’s demise trapped like a naked animal in his pickup truck suggests an unescapable past.
4. The incel’s conservative patriarchal views of womanhood are coupled with an inferiority complex regarding the sexual marketplace to produce a paranoid and pathological fear of female sexuality reflecting the distorted values and twisted psychology of a society based on extreme inequality. In the incel’s imagination, the object of his sexual desire is conceived of either as his social inferior and someone vulnerable whose chastity he guards, or an alluring but promiscuous aspirant to a higher social echelon, successfully climbing the class ladder by prostituting herself in a way that men cannot.
5. The world of the wealthy is impenetrable to the incel who can only glimpse but is forever denied access: those having the power and resources to exploit women sexually from less privileged backgrounds are seen through a veil of mystery. Much like how the Jeffrey Epstein case has captured the public imagination in an age of gross inequality and populist discontent, films like BURNING tap into the zeitgeist by evoking the puzzle-like vibes of conspiracy theory: something’s wrong, the signs are there and you can connect the dots, but where’s the smoking gun?
6. JOKER’s textbook incel romance interests us for several reasons: the fantasy aspect of the incel’s imaginary romantic relationship with a neighbor, related typically through the protagonist’s subjective and unreliable narration; the cross-class dimension involving aspirations of social climbing displaced onto his mother’s delusions about a fling with the billionaire Wayne that fuel Arthur’s own suspicions of the latter being his father; the conspiratorial aspect of the mother’s mental illness as a possible cover up; and the violence with which Arthur kills off his fantasy through the substitute figure of the mother.
7. A variation of the incel romance is provided by GET OUT: the protagonist here is not an incel but a buppie with a privileged white liberal girlfriend who introduces him to her family and community in the suburbs, only for him to discover that an aging and wealthy white elite co-opts and appropriates young black talent by literally “snatching” their bodies. Despite its fantastical premise and effectively subjective narration, the film misses an opportunity at provocation by stopping short of introducing the possibility that its conspiracy might be imagined paranoically by its protagonist.
8. The masturbatory fantasy of the incel romance proposes a bleak imagination of the sexual economy in which the game is rigged in favor of wealthy elite males. Neoliberalism’s capitalist market logic is transferred to the realm of romance and physical intimacy, where men as buyers offer resources to women as sellers in exchange for sexual access. In this competition, incels at the bottom of the food chain have little to no capital for trade, while those at the top enjoy exploiting women at a social disadvantage who are eyeing their resources.
9. The impossibility of upward social mobility is implied in incel romances where the protagonist’s persistent efforts at overcoming his social origins and achieving success in a discipline not typically associated with manual labor or considered a blue-collar profession fail: the doomed attempts, say, of a janitor to become a writer, painter, or even Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The incel’s inferiority complex means that obstacles to success are projected as a form of condescending disapproval onto members of the opposite sex who represent objects of desire perceived to look down upon the uneducated working poor.
10. The incel romance or its variants typically ends violently with the crushing of the fantasy and the loss of the object of desire through death or disappearance. A vengeful act of killing is usually involved on the part of the incel to punish those deemed as the threat responsible for the erasure of his fantasy. In some cases, narrative ambiguity allows for an open ending where aspects of the incel’s fantasy as well as the subsequent killing it provoked are left unconfirmed as to whether they were imagined or truly took place.
1. Globalization’s hollowing out of the working class is reflected in the depiction of aging blue collar fathers whose physical labor involves (pointedly) the construction of homes. Faced with work-related injuries that variously leave them unemployed or dealing with chronic medical conditions that require prohibitively expensive treatments, these characters struggle with neoliberal corporate insurance policies and state welfare directives that make it hard for them to claim legitimate benefits, even as they come to terms with bodies that have become frail that were once robust.
1. The incel romance is structured around the working-class male protagonist’s subjective and unreliable narration of a relationship fantasy that imagines the impossible: reaching out against class barriers in an unequal society and its sexual economy marked by social Darwinism to achieve intimacy with the opposite sex. The frustrating inaccessibility of objective truth or reality itself to the incel (associated in several instances with mental illness) further exacerbates his abject status of being expendable and having little role to play in a hostile society indifferent to his existence.
2. The incel’s origins are inseparable from socioeconomic factors and the structural transformation of the economy. Inland parts of the country and sectors of the population devoted to agriculture and industry became marginalized in the shift towards a weightless economy privileging coastal cities. Rural and rust belt towns and communities were hollowed out from urbanization and offshoring. Those left behind found the traditional patriarchal values that had sustained an earlier generation rendered obsolete, leaving young men from such backgrounds maladjusted to a capitalist reality that has co-opted feminism and the sexual revolution.
3. The incel’s story cannot be told without accounting for his parents, depicted as a source of hidden shame reminding the protagonist of his lowly origins. This could be an ill-tempered father in trouble with the law who obstinately became a cattle farmer in his hometown despite having worked abroad as a construction worker, or the uneducated and cringe-inducingly ignorant parents whom the protagonist imagines introducing his girlfriend to in a remote rural farmhouse. The incel’s demise trapped like a naked animal in his pickup truck suggests an unescapable past.
4. The incel’s conservative patriarchal views of womanhood are coupled with an inferiority complex regarding the sexual marketplace to produce a paranoid and pathological fear of female sexuality reflecting the distorted values and twisted psychology of a society based on extreme inequality. In the incel’s imagination, the object of his sexual desire is conceived of either as his social inferior and someone vulnerable whose chastity he guards, or an alluring but promiscuous aspirant to a higher social echelon, successfully climbing the class ladder by prostituting herself in a way that men cannot.
5. The world of the wealthy is impenetrable to the incel who can only glimpse but is forever denied access: those having the power and resources to exploit women sexually from less privileged backgrounds are seen through a veil of mystery. Much like how the Jeffrey Epstein case has captured the public imagination in an age of gross inequality and populist discontent, films like BURNING tap into the zeitgeist by evoking the puzzle-like vibes of conspiracy theory: something’s wrong, the signs are there and you can connect the dots, but where’s the smoking gun?
6. JOKER’s textbook incel romance interests us for several reasons: the fantasy aspect of the incel’s imaginary romantic relationship with a neighbor, related typically through the protagonist’s subjective and unreliable narration; the cross-class dimension involving aspirations of social climbing displaced onto his mother’s delusions about a fling with the billionaire Wayne that fuel Arthur’s own suspicions of the latter being his father; the conspiratorial aspect of the mother’s mental illness as a possible cover up; and the violence with which Arthur kills off his fantasy through the substitute figure of the mother.
7. A variation of the incel romance is provided by GET OUT: the protagonist here is not an incel but a buppie with a privileged white liberal girlfriend who introduces him to her family and community in the suburbs, only for him to discover that an aging and wealthy white elite co-opts and appropriates young black talent by literally “snatching” their bodies. Despite its fantastical premise and effectively subjective narration, the film misses an opportunity at provocation by stopping short of introducing the possibility that its conspiracy might be imagined paranoically by its protagonist.
8. The masturbatory fantasy of the incel romance proposes a bleak imagination of the sexual economy in which the game is rigged in favor of wealthy elite males. Neoliberalism’s capitalist market logic is transferred to the realm of romance and physical intimacy, where men as buyers offer resources to women as sellers in exchange for sexual access. In this competition, incels at the bottom of the food chain have little to no capital for trade, while those at the top enjoy exploiting women at a social disadvantage who are eyeing their resources.
9. The impossibility of upward social mobility is implied in incel romances where the protagonist’s persistent efforts at overcoming his social origins and achieving success in a discipline not typically associated with manual labor or considered a blue-collar profession fail: the doomed attempts, say, of a janitor to become a writer, painter, or even Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The incel’s inferiority complex means that obstacles to success are projected as a form of condescending disapproval onto members of the opposite sex who represent objects of desire perceived to look down upon the uneducated working poor.