Clown for President! reads Todd Phillips- blockbuster movie Joker (2019) as an economic and political allegory of our times.
What could be more surprising than Joker as a solution to our present economic and political predicament? But in twelve riveting chapters, Clown for President! leads us precisely here. Grip this movie-s visual language, the book insists, and we can also grasp a political grammar, available to everyone, to articulate a new solidarity.
The predicament Clown for President! diagnoses is urgent: how late capitalism ensures astonishing inequality by persistently depoliticizing the demos, only to unleash a backlash in conspiracy, violence, and authoritarianism. Clown for President! maps this unravelling to Arthur Fleck-s own transformation into the Joker. When the movie begins in 1981, neoliberal tides are shifting the sands: the rise of insecure work; the destabilizing of wel
