This review contains no spoilers.

Theres been a lot of digital ink spilled over the new film Joker, but whats fascinating to me about it is how much of what the critics said is simply absurd. To be sure, artistic works, like life itself, are open to interpretation, but in both cases works and life youve got to stick to the facts to get at the truth.

Joker is, for all intents and purposes, a comic book remake of the 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver. Its the story of a troubled loners descent into violence. I should say up front that I dont like comic book movies very much and I didnt like Taxi Driver very much, so I wasnt the films most sympathetic audience. That said, I found Joker stylish, watchable, and well-done with some enriching plot ambiguities. I also found it tonally monotonous and overly derivative.

But the panic the film set off among leftist critics may be the most interesting thing about the movie. To be sure, the films talented director Todd Phillips taunted the leftist Outrage Beast when he gave an interview criticizing the humorlessness of woke culture. The left responded by being humorlessly woke, proving the guys point. After that, Phillips had a target on his back.

But it was the lefts political reaction to the movie itself that was so strangely (or maybe not so strangely) off base. Its an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring President Donald Trump to power, said Jeff Yang of CNN. Anti-Trumper Max Boot wrote a WaPo piece also linking Joker to Trump and headlined, Joker nails the nihilism and opportunism of populist firebrands.

And in a thoroughly unhinged rant, Richard Brody of The New Yorker called the film a blatant and brazen distortion of the most substantial historical elements at which it winks. Joker is the comic-book Green Book, twisting history for the sake of a yarn.

That last review really is the giveaway. Because, with some caveats (the movie doesnt deal with race at all), the films historical perspective is pretty damned accurate. And that perspective condemns the left where it stands.

No matter how you feel about the movies protagonist, the one thing Joker is not is a Trump voter. Hes a leftist: a self-pitying victim; a hater of the rich; a man who takes no responsibility for his own actions but instead blames the unfairness of society. In fact, all in all, the movie is a thoroughly justifiable satire of leftist talking points. It is not like the excellent Dark Knight trilogy a philosophical kick in the groin to leftism in general. But it does hold the mirror up to leftist culture and the image in the glass is not pretty.

The Gotham of the movie is late 1970s New York, a toilet of pornography and violence. I lived there. I remember it. It was, like todays crap-strewn and disintegrating San Francisco, a city the left made. A city that put the tender loving care of criminals above the safety of decent citizens. A city that would not get the homeless off its streets. A city that would not restrict or condemn pornography and prostitution on its main thoroughfares. Its lawmen were handcuffed by left-wing Supreme Court decisions that made it harder to investigate and prosecute the bad guys. And journalists were silenced by racial sensitivity because a lot of the people committing the crimes were black and no one wanted to seem racist.

So the city went to hell. Leftist hell.

Thats where Joker takes place: Leftist hell. And because Gothams left-wing government does not really care about treating real problems like mental illness, Joker goes nuts.

The movie does depict the rich as insensitive louts. If anyone can be said to represent Donald Trump in the film, its millionaire Thomas Wayne, Batmans father. But the peoples inchoate rage and hatred against the wealthy literally turn them into a mob of clowns. And if mob of clowns is not a metaphor for todays left, I dont know what is.

No wonder the leftist critics feared this film. Its a reminder of who leftists are and what they do when you give them power. You can watch it and know everything you need to know about them and its cheaper and safer than a trip to San Francisco.

See more here:

KLAVAN: Leftists Hate 'Joker' Because Joker Is The Left - The Daily Wire