When Donald Trump announced his run for Presidency over 9 years ago, the world laughed at him. The world was right to do so. The office of the Presidency is a serious office, and Donald Trump is a fundamentally unserious person. Mixing the two is comedy at its finest. His presidency was the gag of a Simpsons episode that aired over a decade and a half before his announcement. Trump did little to assuage these notions as President with his blustering and bumbling. It would be the stuff of comedy if not for the lives lost and weakened democracy. The more catastrophic his first term was, the more outrageous his reelection is. His first election was a tragedy. His second election a farce.
When I imagined the end of democracy in America, the pride I felt in my country lead me to believe it would be at the hands of an unconscionably ambitious but brilliant upstart like Julius Caeser or Napoleon Bonaparte. In terms of pop culture, an Emperor Palpatine or Frank Underwood figure if you will. What a world we live in if representative government in this country should instead be brought low by a Saul Goodman or Krusty the Clown-like figure like Trump (gaudy architecture included). If it was not a tragic drama or act of hubris that ended the American experiment but a farce. A circus.
But why not? The model of modern American “freedom” is the uncentered play of the carnival. Disruption to this play is called tyranny. In this world, a clown is the ideal master. -even if that means dictator. Their only creed is carnival and fun and isn’t that the very creed of Trump who commanded us to remove our masks and do as we please? Responsibility toward those with compromised immunity is for fussy adults who spoil the fun. Lower taxes in times of prosperity with no regard to how it will burden future generations or strip the public. Guzzle the gasoline and abandon the climate to Armageddon. Leave tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow. It’s time to play.
In the third season of Stranger Things, Dr. Alexi, a Soviet scientist, experiences the joy of the American carnival for the first time in his life, complete with games and cotton candy. He wears a smile of pure delight and satisfaction before being brutally murdered by an invading Soviet hitman. Here America’s Reagan-championed, carnivalesque freedom bring sheer consumerist bliss of which the enemies of freedom will prohibit violently if not prevented.
But there is horror in the carnival in and of itself. As I pointed out in one of my “recent” post (source), carnivals, fairs, and (by implication) circuses are where slasher monsters reside. Dumbo’s clownish farce that delights children is only possible because of the abuse of the poor baby elephant and his mother. There is a clear divide between those who benefit from the circus (the consumer and owner) and those who suffer at its creation (the worker). The same clowns who entertain audiences also torment Dumbo in his dreams because his oppression is not just physical but mental and spiritual.
This is only half the story. The stated purpose of the circus is to amuse and delight its audience, but even the very beneficiaries grapple with what supposed joy they find at the circus. Clowns are meant for children’s amusement, but children generally find them frightening. Murderous clowns revel in this irony. “Why so serious?” taunts the Joker before killing a man. “Don’t you like clowns? Don’t we make you laugh? Aren’t we fucking funny?” demands Captain Spaulding as he holds a child hostage.
The popularity of the murder-clown in popular media reveals an uncanny horror at the center of the vacuous farce of the carnival and circus. This narrative and model of freedom that demands, often through propaganda, to be taken as complete when it is sorely lacking creates a terrifying hollow vacuum. Pennywise the Dancing Clown, like God, has no real name. He is simply It and he lives in the sewers where no one dares look.
That American politics is a farce is old news now. To many, electing someone like Donald Trump to the highest office is merely uncovering a façade and finally providing a centerpiece worthy of the show. What better star for a circus than a clown? But clowns, as is especially the case with Trump, have always been better showmen than caretakers. The end goal of the circus might be fun and games, but actually putting the set into action has always been serious business. Even as a businessman himself, Trump has never shown himself up to the task. Besides, a good farce needs a setup before a payoff. There has to be a serious backdrop that cascades into romp. What’s happening here is the opposite. The unserious is demanding to be taken seriously.
The biggest impact made by a movie in recent memory is about a clown. Joker is about a friendly but ineffective man working as a party clown to make ends meet at his rundown apartment and care for his ailing mother. Over time, he comes to recognize his status as a victim of society’s oppression and wrecks violence on those who wrong him, sparking a mass movement that rallies behind his violent clown persona, Joker. Praised as “profound” and “necessary” by Michael Moore, young men took to social media en mass to bulk at it losing at the Oscars to Parasite. Many such screeds suggested Parasite only won because of Hollywood “wokeness,” given it's a Korean film, despite it similarly offering a rich and insightful narrative on struggling families under highly unequal modern capitalism. As a story of class struggle, it offered far more to its viewers. But Trump has an agenda to fuel only specific outrage to gloss over more relevant grievances, and he implied solidarity with the backlash against Parasite in favor of Joker by howling outrage that a foreign film should win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Young men’s devotion to this film is revealing. Their broadly documented failing position in life, despite their much-touted male (and often white) privilege, makes them a source of ridicule. Those condemned as unserious, like Donald Trump or the Joker, are a source of identity. In his film, the Joker is dismissed as a “clown” by billionaire, Thomas Wayne, for killing privileged and bullying Wall Street brokers. Protesters respond by marching the street in solidarity, one sign reading: “We are all clowns.”
What every mass shooter and incel understands is that the only way for a fundamentally unserious person to be taken seriously is to become dangerous. Trump knows this. On some level, I think his most passionate supporters do too.
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