Interpreting and Transmitting Kynicism in Joker

Book excerpt: Interpreting and Transmitting Kynicism in Joker: The Dark Side of Film Fandom focuses on fan discourse and discussion surrounding Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), analyzing how white nationalist movie fans code racist, sexist, ableist, and otherwise marginalizing logics into seemingly innocuous speech. Kyle A. Hammonds posits that, by arguing that their communication is “just their interpretation” of a movie, rather than explicitly political speech, white nationalists can communicate bigoted, extremist rhetoric under the pretext of good-faith film criticism. Hammonds leverages hermeneutic traditions often overlooked in communication and fan studies research to argue that interpretation is the key element of fan communication processes in struggles for authority over the meaning of texts—and that fan communities have a civic duty to identify and delegitimize exclusionary interpretations of pop culture in their fandom.