By David Futrelle
Joaquin Phoenix’s speech at last night’s Oscars was as weird as the man himself. Phoenix, who won Best Actor for his work at the titular character in Joker, delivered up a rambling monologue that touched on human selfishness, so-called “cancel culture,” and the many forms of human bigotry. He also threw in a plug for … cows? “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable,” he declared. “Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.”
One thing he didn’t mention in his speech? The incels who see his character in Joker as a sort of incel hero, a second coming of Elliot Rodger.
And they’re pretty peeved about it. On the Incels.co forums, a prolific commenter called FidelCashFlow laid out his complaint:
![[RageFuel] Why did Joaquin Phoenix not talk about incel rights at his oscar speech?
Thread starter FidelCashflow
Inceldom Discussion
-
Yesterday at 10:12 PM
#1
Wtf is wrong with this faggot. He got up there and talked some bullshit about how taking milk from cows is evil and humans shouldnt act like we are at the top of the food chain.
This retard couldnt take 5 seconds out of that boring ass nonsensical speech to talk about incel rights, the one group that supported his movie through thick and thin.
That's it, Joaquin Phoenix is cancelled](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2020-02-10_15-19-38.png?fit=600%2C1015)
In a followup comment, Mr. CashFlow elaborated on his basic critique:
I atleast expected him to talk about the downtrodden and how you shouldnt push someone down when they are already depressed or bad results are bound to happen.
But no, instead of mentioning something that would be in line with the plot of the movie, he instead talks about muh animal rights
Most of the other commenters agreed with his basic complaint, with one especially edgy incel asking “[w]hy didn’t he just go ER [Elliot Rodger] right then and there? Fucking cuck.”
“Normies care more about how cows and pigs are treated than how you are treated” complained another.
“When he started talking about animal rights like some soyboy I got pretty pissed off,” reported still another commenter..
Literally no mention of the people he’s repersenting in the movie, he cares more about animals than incels.
It didn’t take long for some of the Incels.co regulars to blame the (((Jews))) for Phoenix’s speech not being some sort of incel rant.
Every last one of these Hollywood scumbags knows where their bread is buttered and (((who))) butters it.
They won’t say or do anything that goes against the Jewish agenda out of fear that they’ll never work in Jew Hollywood ever again.
Joker though a great movie was simply another way of victimizing people like us via the cynical old Jew cash grab of the goyim.
Taking a slightly different tack, one commenter put the blame instead on Big Soy, declaring that Phoenix had to avoid talking about incels because otherwise “the soys will attack him.”
A few of the slightly more reality-based incels pointed out that there is a difference between an actor and a character, and that the Joker movie isn’t actually the incel manifesto that some incels imagine it to be.
This being Incels.co, they were mostly ignored.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@Lukas Xavier
That’s because I only rearranged something he did say two sentences later. XD Like I don’t remember enough of the character to know if “incel” is his actual history, but the shit he says is incel up the wazoo.
@Twan:
So… after following a weblog ABOUT the “men’s rights movement,” and, after reading material taken FROM incels discussion groups, we “don even know”…???
Au contraire
@Twan
Well, at least I’m not the sad person who has nothing better to do that troll random website comments.
Oh, there are far more than one incel who lionize mass killers, demand to be allowed to rape women, and hold racist and antisemitic views. And your defense of incels tells me all I need to know about you.
Yes, yes, the entire sprawling garbage dump of shitty thoughts and ideas that is the “manosphere” still doesn’t provide nearly enough information for us to draw any valid conclusions about incels.
My eyes rolled back so hard, I thought I might knot my optic nerve.
About the Joker – am I the only one who thinks that he’s about as incelish as Michael Douglas’s character in “Falling Down”? They’re both disaffected white males screwed by the system (largely run by other white males), who turn to violence. Their plights have nothing to do with the evil wimmenz denying “supreme gentlemen”, such as themselves, sex.
Please, Twan. Do educate us about incels. In what way are they not misogynistic shitheels?
@twan
Sugar you are so wrong. And besides us mocking the whiny little twats and finding that amusing will never compare to someone coming onto a site they don’t even like and commenting. If you don’t like it, leave. You don’t have to come here unless your planning on being entertaining. Be useful and be entertaining at least
Incels aside, Pheonix’s speech has this weird angelfire hippie conspiracy theory vibe going on. I feel like he’s gonna tell me I’m calcifing my pineal gland by eating gas station sandwiches
@Twan
Then I guess it’s good that David has quoted six (if I counted correctly) incels, as well as supposedly capturing the consensus of the comments in the thread. I believe him on that last point, but I haven’t looked it up myself to confirm because washing my eyes out with soap afterwards sounds like it would be painful. You can feel free to check yourself, though, if you doubt it; he left a link.
Do you consider yourself an incel? Do you disagree with FidelCashFlow’s position on Joaquin Phoenix? Do you feel at all uncomfortable with his use of two different slurs just in that screenshot? Finally, do you feel your fellow incels would generally agree or disagree with you?
I will need your essay on my desk no later than 3:00 p.m. next Thursday.
Well that was a sentence.
@Ronwerks
Huh… in what way did you get that vibe? I got a strong “anxiety at public speaking” vibe (from both his speech patterns and his fidgety mannerisms like touching his face all the time), but wondered whether or not to believe it as he is, after all, an Oscar-winning actor. I did not notice anything that was not based in fact in his speech, but perhaps you could point out the conspiracy? (Full disclosure, I watched a 4-minute Facebook version which may not be the whole speech.)
As someone who’s seen Joker, I’ll throw in my 2 cents: Joker in this is just not an Incel. They simply interpreted him that way because they desperately wanted to have at least one known, relatively mainstream media character to identify to and claim as their own – even though they themselves constantly whinge about said media being controlled by cucks, soys, Chads, Stacys, and of course (((Das Jüdenkonspiration)))/s (is that how the German language works?).
How can I say that with confidence? Due to his delusional relationship with his neighbor (played by biracial Zazie Beetz) and its dénouement.
WARNING: SPOILERS
He gets infatuated with her after meeting her once in the elevator, stalks her for a bit, then at some point starts to have delusions of beginning a relationship with her, all while it’s made pretty clear to the audience that it’s all in his head. Towards the end, after he’s both become aware that he’s been living a lie and started killing those who he feels wronged him, he breaks into her apartment, she comes home to see him there, is completely freaking terrified and begs for him not to hurt her or her son (who’s sleeping in his room, unaware of all this) and what does he do? Looks obviously disappointed, but basically says “Okay”, and while the movie doesn’t show him leaving the apartment from inside it (leaving a bit of uncertainty as to the fate of the woman and her son), it’s been revealed in interviews that he really did simply just leave, without harming either.
This fits neatly with his characterization, since he was also shown to let go a work colleague who saw him brutally murdering another colleague, with the rationale that unlike the murdered colleague, the spared one had been decent to him (despite just having witnessed him killing someone). His neighbor hadn’t done anything wrong, and he’d realized that their relationship was just a delusion on his part, so while he certainly didn’t like it, he didn’t take it out on her.
Make no mistake, what he did was super creepy and most definitely not okay by any reasonable metric, but methinks an actual incel would have, at the very least, been much more misogynistic and verbally violent towards her, and would have considered her to have wronged him just because she wouldn’t feed his delusions. Instead, he accepted her point of view when confronted to it and left her alone, unharmed (apart from the psychological trauma involved, of course). Pretty sure if he was an incel he would have done much worse (especially given that many of his issues came from the toxic relationship with his mother), and instead of killing a talk-show host he’d have gone on an Elliot Rodger-style misogynistic killing spree.
Anyway, those were my 2 cents as to why I don’t consider Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker character an incel.
I got a strong “anxiety at public speaking” vibe (from both his speech patterns and his fidgety mannerisms like touching his face all the time), but wondered whether or not to believe it as he is, after all, an Oscar-winning actor.
So… fun fact! When I was studying ethics lo, so many years ago (IANAPsy), I took one grad level course in psychology (after doing a psych / gender studies undergrad). That course was about how to use the DSM in the process of differential diagnosis. This was purely academic – no clinic, no seeing patients. I wasn’t doing a psych masters and even if I was I wouldn’t have been ready. This is the prep coursework of background knowledge that might get you ready for that. I was only taking it because how medicalization/pathologization happens was part of what I was studying, so taking this class cross-discipline made sense.
Background out of the way? In that class we had to learn the basic diagnostic criteria for every single disorder and guidelines about how one would recognize those criteria in a clinical setting. The prof was very careful to drill into us that the underlying disorder is entirely separate from the developed coping mechanisms. When we got to phobias and anxiety disorders, the prof used professional actors as an example of how the underlying disorder might not be expected by a naive lay person.
If you have a dramatic fear of social situations or of having attention focussed on you, one possible solution is to avoid social situations entirely, but another possible coping strategy is to not be you when in social settings or when the attention is on. If you have to do pretending just to get through the day, you likely become skilled at it. If you become skilled at it, you might make your living at it as an actor.
So, it seems, while a great many actors do enjoy being the center of attention, a significant minority became skilled at acting because they couldn’t stand being themselves under the scrutiny of others.
The real trick, here, is that even those people who become skilled at acting in personal life because of this anxiety are unlikely to actually move to Hollywood and beg to be in a movie. They might be very skilled, and they might be an asset to any movie that hires them, but they probably wouldn’t go out of their way to audition for such things.
The people most likely to get over this hump? Child actors who are pushed into this by their parents, and whose skills are discovered without them really ever volunteering. If you’re a child actor with this anxiety, or even just someone from a Hollywood family who gets offered a role as a young adult and finds it hard to turn down (something one might find difficult to do if one has social anxiety), the skill you’ve developed from acting as anything other than yourself would make you relatively more talented, better at portraying false emotions and reactions, than your peers. This leads to more job offers and on the spiral goes.
So while it’s not unknown in people that came to acting as adults, the most common way to get into acting for someone with social anxiety and the pretending-to-be-someone-else coping strategy is to get in as a child or very young adult because of family connections to the theater and/or TV/Film industries.
If Phoenix were such a person (and, bonus info: he was from a Hollywood family and started acting as a child) then it would be easy/comfortable to pretend to be the Joker while in front of a bunch of professionals running around a set, but very hard to be Phoenix himself in front of an entire auditorium full of people, with no mask, no lines, no character to fall back upon.
I’m not saying that this is what happened or that Phoenix does have social anxiety (clinically significant or not), I just thought I’d point out that while it’s not literally the most common thing, it’s definitely a reasonable percentage of Hollywood stars that would be uncomfortable being themselves on that stage, accepting an award which focusses on them as individuals rather than on their imaginary characters.
So I find the idea that Phoenix might have been genuinely nervous, anxious, or uncomfortable up on the stage to be highly plausible. I don’t really know why (if he fits the type I’m describing, which is not guaranteed) his coping mechanism would have failed him, but the underlying anxiety is not unexpected.
@ crip dyke et al
I know a lot of very successful performers, both actors and musicians. A fair few of them got into performing precisely because they had social anxiety. They found it easier to play a persona to thousands of people than be themselves in front of a small group.
@crip dyke, Alan Robertshaw
Yes, I am aware of this coping mechanism, originally being from the performing arts sphere myself. I have generally found that actors will use it in all settings where it is needed to avoid the possibility of vulnerability, much like comedians are allergic to sincerity: they simply adopt a different version of themself at will. Or they take a beta blocker like a musician. I’m not saying he couldn’t be genuine, just that it would be out of keeping with the habits of people I know from that sphere, which is what makes me doubt.
@Big Titty Demon:
Oh I thought your comment was very respectful of this possibility. It was more Ronwerks’ comment that I thought neglected that dynamic as an explanation (by jumping to conspiracy theory stuff).
I also could be misreading Ronwerks. Perhaps that was meant more in jest? But since I didn’t read it that way, I thought I’d say what (very little) I knew about the possibility that Phoenix might feel a lot of anxiety when being himself in front of others.
(and again, all this comes from a single lecture in a single course I took years ago – I’m relieved to have others confirm it b/c this isn’t at all a subject where I’m very knowledgeable.)
@ Big Titty Demon, @ Crip Dyke, @ Alan Robertshaw:
I can’t see why someone would fake being nervous and awkward in an awards speech– I mean, I guess it could be a kind of humblebrag, but a lot of people in that audience are his bosses or co-workers and presumably have some idea of his real personality, so why bother? I’m going with the simpler “he probably just really was nervous” explanation.
@Moon Custafer
Oh, because it would be better PR than looking like an arrogant asswipe, or even merely confident. Everyone loves nervous awkward success more than confidence, especially if your message could be taken as judging by powerful, prideful people (of which it might be expected there would be many such in that audience, the Harvey Weinstein-adjacent). For example, of space company tycoons think how many diehard fans Jeff Bezos has (never met one), and how many Elon Musk has (they’re everywhere): it’s because Musk is nervous and awkward and Bezos is confident, even though both are assholes.
This is why women always thank their producers and family and ten gazillion other people: when they give the same speeches men do, having confidence in their own talent, it’s a PR nightmare and they are regarded as horrendously arrogant. It’s better to be nervous and anxious and unbelieving that they won, thank you so much to all the people that supported them. They have to do it even if they have no message that could be perceived as judgey. I don’t find it at all unbelievable that a man could deploy the same tactic to deliver a message.
@Crip Dyke, Alan Robertshaw:
And my immediate thought on reading this line was ‘Peter Sellers’. His line on the Muppet Show about ‘There used to be a me… but I had it surgically removed.’ has all sorts of implications once you read about the rest of his life.
(I will admit to having a certain fondness for the movie ‘Two-Way Stretch’.)
SEVERE social anxiety here… and I was a drama nerd in high school. Ask me to speak to five people, and I was a wreck. Ask me to perform in front of the entire school, and I was fine.
Bit of politics for you.
https://kirschnerskorner.com/2020/02/14/joaquin-phoenix/
This discussion reminded me. One of the things my brethren at the Masonic lodge appreciate about me is that I actually *enjoy* public speaking. After much introspection, I think it’s related to my childhood experience with stuttering.
After several years of speech therapy, I had a brand new voice – clear, crisp and fluent. It was a pleasure to use it, and the vocabulary I’d acquired during the years of solitary reading just added to that.
I’ve joked to my husband that I can’t dance or sing, but I can walk and talk with vigor and enthusiasm.
Regarding “Joker”, as the father of a young man diagnosed with a mental illness, I’m particularly struck by the movie’s detail about Fleck losing access to medication and therapy. There’s an argument to be made that he could have maintained himself indefinitely if that had not happened. I’ve often thought that having been adopted by committed and involved parents, rather than remaining in foster care, made a tremendous difference in our son’s life.
Is Joaquin Phoenix involved in PETA? checks
Yep.