Want to see the best documentary ever made about Donald Trump?
Look at the first Joker by Todd Phillips, with Joaquin Phoenix.
It’s all there.
This is the best film to understand the Trump phenomenon.
COCKTAIL AND LOUNGE MUSIC
In 1960, the great American writer Norman Mailer attended the Democratic Party Convention for the magazine Esquire.
The report he wrote – titled Superman Comes to the Supermarket – is considered today as one of the greatest journalistic texts of the 1960s and appears in all the New Journalism anthologies.
If the Democrats chose John F. Kennedy as their candidate, Mailer wrote, it was because they knew that Americans needed a hero.
And in the 1960s, the biggest hero factory in the United States was not Harvard, Wall Street, or the Armed Forces as it had been in previous decades, but Hollywood.
It was Hollywood that created the new American mythology.
So, to win the hearts of Americans, the Democrats then chose the candidate who most resembled an actor!
Kennedy, Mailer wrote, was like “a neon-lit highway” that one traveled while listening to jazz.
Kennedy was Palm Springs.
A happy hour around a swimming pool.
A Technicolor film.
A song by Burt Bacharach.
The clinking of an ice cube in a cocktail glass.
In short, a superhero tailor-made for the air-conditioned supermarket that was America.
ASYLUM
Sixty years later, America is no longer an air-conditioned supermarket, but an asylum.
And the country’s soundtrack is not Smooth Jazz or musak, but death metal.
It’s no longer the heroes who thrill us when we go to the cinema, but the villains.
Why care about Batman or Superman when you have the Penguin and the Joker?
They’re a lot more entertaining!
And they embody better than anyone the most shared emotion in the 21st century.e century, that is to say rage.
Americans in 2024 are not cool and optimistic like John F. Kennedy.
They are furious.
They don’t want to sip martinis while smoking Pall Mall, but throw trash cans into store windows.
If there was a film that perfectly represented the 60s it was Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Sophisticated. Charming. Harmless.
Today it is The Joker.
As much as Kennedy with his sailboats, his cardigans and his Pepsodent smile embodied the beginning of the sixties, Trump embodies the 2020s.
A guy who rides on the anger and frustrations of the masses.
We moved on from the series Mad Men to “Mad Man.”
Like him or not, like him or not, for many people, Trump is the “hero” of our time.
A clown who makes a mess.
Who throws a metal bar into the machine.
A big F**K YOU to the institutions.
If Norman Mailer were alive today, he would write a text entitled “The Joker comes to the Nuthouse».
HATE
«What the world needs now is love, sweet love“, sang Burt Bacharach in 1965.
It seems that today what half of Americans want is hate.
Hence Trump.
