Joker’s Prophecy About American Neoliberalism » PopMatters

In the case of Ledger, Kennedy and McNaughton argue “without backstory … we misrecognise psychic outcomes in late capitalism.” In contrast, and contextualised in his specific sociopolitical environment, Phoenix’s Joker, and his viewers, are furnished with real-world rationale for the character’s desperation. 

From Send in the Clowns! opening pages, Kennedy and McNaughton “grip read” Joker‘s visual semiotics such that they situate their implied reader in two worlds. The first of these worlds is in the film, encompassing neoliberal policy shift in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, mapped onto New York circa 1981, deftly compressing three decades of seminal events and accompanying turmoil into one notional year.

The semiotic examination implies a discreet question throughout: imagine this had happened to you?  The second world towards which the movie gestures is that inhabited by the twenty-first century audience into which Joker has recently landed, with the implied observation that this is exactly what happened to the society that continues to shape the contemporary audience. 

Consequently, the fate of Fleck can be read as both portent and aftermath. His Orphic descent in Joker foreshadows our contemporary slide into chaos, wherein the poisonous effects of decades of neglect are experienced by the film’s audience in the present moment of ongoing financial exploitation.

The presence of these twin worlds within the film also facilitates the book’s reader in recognising how current neoliberal policy is recycled and reframed around convenient contemporary enemies. For example those on welfare, once the target of Ronald Reagan, were replaced by federal workers as the bête noir of Trump’s recent campaign of local demonisation. As it was in 1981, so it is, only worse, in 2025.

Send in the Clown’s outstanding achievement is how Kennedy and McNaughton read the economic, cultural, and political climate of late 20th-century neoliberalism in the realities of the present moment. Each historical observation they make, they fold, simultaneously, into contemporary reality and reveal, in the process, a playbook of ideological practices that continue to produce increasingly unfavourable monetary outcomes for the majority.

By way of example, Phillips’ Joker opens as Fleck applies his clown makeup while radio phone-in listeners express their frustration about uncollected garbage in the street, the result of a general strike that clearly references the New York garbage crisis of 1968—herewith transported to 1981. Those on air are confused and unsure who to blame, but the garbage collectors are the first target.

Fleck, the meta-listener, cries a tear and laughs ambiguously in quick succession. Listening to the exasperated callers, intent on expressing rage they do not know how to direct, the viewer is equally unsure whether Fleck is genuine in his empathy or simply performative in his assigned role as the clown. Are Fleck’s tears those of the jester’s exaggerated care, designed to identify with an audience in distress, or the genuine weeping of a frustrated city dweller disillusioned by both the rising refuse and the rage directed at those responsible for collecting it? Kennedy and McNaughton propose that nobody really knows, least of all Fleck.

Rather, the scene stages the ideological interpolation of New York, and by extension the United States, into a new economic order that, while treating people as trash, creates the context in which refuse collectors become the intended source of displaced public rage—a rage that should be targeted at a cynical government poised to hand policy control to banking and corporate interests. Divested of the economic literacy to read the decaying situation, a consequence of a popular media devoted to cheap drama and vapid entertainment shows, the study frames Fleck’s clown as every fool. Despite his clownish regalia, he is a cypher for all working-class citizens, oblivious to the fact that they are being treated as functional stiffs soon to be marginalised to the gig economy in the new monetary order. 

The authors note that “trash bags are the movie’s visual language, there to remind us from scene to scene that something in this new dispensation is metastasizing into a crisis.” Simultaneously, they document how Reagan invoked the language of waste when turning a cynical eye toward welfare and the people who rely on it to survive, and detail how this policy shift was proposed by Milton Friedman, the neoliberal guru intent on recalibrating the Federal Reserve’s imperatives.

In dismissing total employment as a utopian illusion, Friedman proposed that the Fed should focus not on reducing unemployment but on curbing inflation. The authors tease out how these economics disguise a class position, as banks and corporate lenders are more at risk during periods when money devalues. Likewise, they outline the necessary ideological sleight of hand designed to divert attention away from Friedman’s proposed tax breaks for the wealthy—ostensibly, so venture capitalists can invest more—while simultaneously demonising the poor as a drain on financial resources and, consequently, the source of New York’s monetary problems. This is all by way of pointing out that while Fleck might be laughing, the joke is on him. 

In the next scene, we encounter Fleck in a gig economy, sidewalk advertising the clearance sale of a bankrupt company, as he is randomly attacked and beaten in the street. During the scuffle, his attackers destroy the advertising sign on which he promotes the failing business, and the cost is deducted from his pay. The authors argue that the scene “stages a crisis of signs and signification” as Roosevelt’s New Deal is swept away in a series of new neoliberal policies. As Reagan begins to squeeze unions and amplify the need for individual self-sufficiency, all the while creating a gig economy that increases job insecurity while rewarding big business, widespread unemployment results. Among the first casualties are strong unions and the securities that full-time employment bestows. Soon to be fired, Fleck will have no representation and no prospects. 

The next chapter, “Strip Search”, undertakes a deep dive into the same street scene, proposing “a confusion of hands” wherein that of Adam Smith—whose benign view of the market’s stabilizing, invisible hand—is, in a memorable phrase, “repurposed as a pickpocket” by Freidman et al. This corporate thievery produces the type of working-class conditions in which we currently find Fleck, raising his hands in surrender as he is robbed in the street. Again, in this sequence, the authors identify that the neoliberal policy shift takes place “above Fleck’s head” in the sense that he does not understand how, in the visible skyscrapers of Manhattan’s burgeoning downtown financial centre, the conditions of his street hassle have been forged.

In the rich semiotic language of Joker, also above Fleck’s head is a movie poster for Strip Search, a notional early-‘eighties’80s’ grindhouse flick featuring the searching hands of three white women engaged in auto-erotic exploration. Challenging this titillation, the authors posit the snow-white hands of the porno as “a fantasy of whiteness” designed to disguise the otherwise racially determined pornography of American incarceration rates.

Kennedy and McNaughton expertly read the evacuated politics of the porno against the contemporary reality of an explosion in American corrections, and particularly the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans and people of colour.  Identifying that today’s neoliberalism requires the largest incarceration system in the world, they point out that the US has one-fourth of the world’s prison population despite having only five percent of its global population. Consequently, “neoliberal man … casts a strange disfiguring shadow … the carceral state, the policing network and prison complex that trail wherever neoliberal polices tread.” Joker concludes, inevitably, with Arthur Fleck incarcerated.

Chapter Seven considers the rise of Bros and Incels, and positions Fleck squarely within the latter cohort. Kennedy and McNaughton argue that Joker’s pathological behaviour is not purely a consequence of bio-psycho etiology, but rather that his manifest mental illness is a result of bio-psycho-social circumstance. The authors read Fleck as both mad as hell and mentally ill, wherein each condition impacts and exacerbates the other. Subjected to the “sado-fiscalism” of Friedman, brutalised Fleck is incapable of engaging with women in an empathetic and meaningful way.

Chapter Nine, the most ambitious chapter of Send in the Clowns, proposes that conspiracy theory is a type of counterfactual to the melodrama that governs conventional politics. The authors understand post-truth fantasies as “performative strategies to be judged based on the aim of disrupting melodramas the state employs to justify its own violence”.  This is insightful and brave criticism, framing conspiracy theory as oral revenge for a punitive social hegemony equally invested in promoting “political narratives” of smoke-and-mirror obfuscation.

On the back of such conspiracy theories, by the end of the film Joker, as a carnival clown, will be promoted to a paper throne as a pseudo-prophet of apocalypse. The parallel to the current clown incumbent in the real world could not be more obvious. As an element of its conclusion, and in one of the book’s excellent semiotic turns, the authors elucidate how Fleck is too agitated to seek his redemption in forms of political agitation, even if others read his murderous responses as acts of political resistance. Essentially, the book asks what happens when America’s increasingly agitated population, mad as hell, turns to a new form of political agitation characterised both by anger and psychic breakdown.

In Send in the Clowns! Kennedy and McNaughton read the past in the present and predict a chilling future that may be averted if policymakers adopt unlikely economic and cultural solutions, which the authors offer in the conclusion of their study. Closer to home, in mobilising their nuanced and compelling reading through the figure of an alienated clown, the authors offer a mirror to the reader’s contemporary individual circumstance. In consolidating analysis that makes political epiphany possible, their study opens onto the possibility of dramatic transformation.

My first cathartic experience took place on a school trip to Stratford-on-Avon in 1984 as Friedman, Reagan, and Thatcher got to work. There I witnessed Anthony Sher’s professional stage debut as Fool to Michael Gambon’s despairing monarch in King Lear. Blown away by how this spiteful jester spat satiric truth in power’s face, something shifted within me that night, and a career as a literature scholar began, one immersed in a white privilege that took many years to unpack.

Kennedy and McNaughton are cut from the same cloth—both Irish literature professors with a keen understanding of the deleterious effects of American neoliberal privilege, which they attempt to dismantle in Send in the Clowns with a mordant deadpan wit. Consequently, they represent jokers in the academic pack. Their highly entertaining book is dedicated to understanding the complex and ambiguous character of Arthur Fleck, and the social conditions that have produced him, exemplifying the claim of Shakespeare’s Fool that “jesters do oft prove prophets”, in this instance of the ongoing implosion of America’s failing neoliberalism.