The Dilbert guy thinks Black Lives Matter protests are happening because of…the Joker movie?
By Dan Selcke
Things are pretty serious out there right now, with thousands of people taking to the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis last week, Floyd being only the latest in a long line of high-profile killings committed by police.
So that’s serious and should be taken seriously. But my hope is that this next story will be just weird enough to lighten the mood a bit.
So Scott Adams is the cartoonist behind Dilbert, a satirical comic strip about office life that’s been running in thousands of newspapers for over 30 years. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve probably heard of it. Like I said, it’s been around forever, there was a TV show, and all manner of mugs, tee-shirts and other merch. When I was a kid I actually had a bunch of Dilbert books, right next to my Calvin and Hobbes collections.
But I’m kinda glad I fell off that because I am now learning that Adams himself is…a bit of a whack job. The guy has a lot of opinions and likes people to know them. There was the time he compared women asking for equal pay to children asking to eat candy for dinner, the time he said it’s normal for boys who can’t get laid to become suicide bombers, or his many essays on why Donald Trump is a persuasive genius. It all ranks pretty high on the yikes meter.
But this new one is less “yikes” and more “huh”? I’ll let him speak for himself:
In the old days, movies were mostly entertainment with a bit of social mind control sprinkled in. But our skills at movie-making kept improving along with our mind control skills. In 2020, a movie like Joker can rewire an entire nation into seeing things in its frame.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 3, 2020
I'm willing to bet 90% of the protestors have seen Joker. It is so powerful and well-made that it bounces around in your brain and burrows in, forming a dominant go-to pattern for your thinking.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 3, 2020
Can one movie nudge a young person into violence and anarchy? A bad movie can't. Even a good movie can't do that. But Joker can. That movie is next level, persuasion-wise.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 3, 2020
Adams qualifies that he doesn’t think we should blame movies for how people act, just that the persuasive power of Joker was so strong that he could see this kind of thing coming from miles away, which…I mean, obviously he really liked Joker, but this is taking it a wee bit far.
So were the protests after the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and others also precipitated by movies? Did the 1992 Rodney King riots happen because of Tim Burton’s Batman? Was the Civil Rights movement helped along by Adam West’s turn as the Caped Crusader? At what point does Occam’s razor swoop in and shut this theory down?
The 1992 LA riots occurred only three years after Tim Burton’s Batman came out. COINCIDENCE?!11??! https://t.co/DsArKGzTmq
— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) June 4, 2020
Is this an example of the power of denial? Like, is Adams so desperate to avoid confronting the idea that people are angry over hundreds of years of systematic oppression that he’s willing to chock up their expressions of grief and calls for justice to a Batman spinoff?
And is that funny or sad? Maybe this didn’t lighten the mood as much as I’d hoped.
Next. John Boyega’s Black Lives Matter speech draws praise from Disney, directors. dark
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h/t The A.V. Club