Warning: Major spoilers for They Cloned Tyrone They Cloned Tyrone is a peculiar little science fiction movie set in the Glen, a fictional poor Black community existing in the South. It follows the life of the protagonist Fontaine, a drug dealer without any particular flair or personality.

The Glen is rife with poverty, inequality and unfairness. For an individual not well versed in political theory, these problems might seem interpersonal or individualistic. For a Marxist-Leninist, this could only be described as one thing: national oppression.

Now you may ask: is the movie operating from a Marxist-Leninist ideology? I say most likely not. But any film that portrays racism as a social evil rather than an individual problem will usually address some aspects of national oppression. But before we can analyze the movie, we must understand what national oppression is. That means we have to understand the Marxist definition of a nation.

For a Marxist, a nation isn’t simply what’s recognized on the map or by some political body. A nation is determined by scientific and historical characteristics and can exist without having a state or even a particularly strong national consciousness. In Marxism and the National Question, J.V. Stalin defines a nation as a “historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”

According to Marxist-Leninist theory, advanced by the well-known U.S. communist Harry Haywood, “Geographically, the Negroes are scattered throughout the United States, but almost one-third of their number (five million) are still massed in the Black Belt area… Any serious examination will show that the Negro population of the Black Belt is tied together by myriad internal bonds, by all facets and agencies of modern capitalism, has all the prerequisites for existence as a nation. (Harry Haywood, The Negro Nation Chapter 7).

The Glen itself is a representation of a community within an oppressed nation. Eventually they develop a national consciousness and begin to struggle for liberation. Before they can begin to struggle for change, however, the protagonists need an inciting incident – something that makes them aware of the social evils existing within the Glen.

The protagonists of the film – Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles – are three individuals trapped by the cycle of poverty and violence existing within the Glen.

The inciting incident of the movie is the death of Fontaine. He is shot and killed by a rival drug lord after confronting Slick Charles, a pimp, about the drug money Slick owes him. After dying, his consciousness is uploaded into the body of a clone that looks exactly the same. Fontaine doesn’t even know that his original body was murdered yesterday. When the drug dealer returns to Slick Charles demanding the money, Slick explains to him that he died yesterday. After Slick Charles and Yo-Yo, an aspiring journalist who is a sex worker under Charles’ management, prove to Fontaine that he did in fact die, he begins investigating what happened to his former self.

The three unlikely detectives discover details about a conspiracy happening in the Glen, and their continued investigation leads them to realize a sort of mind control drug is being injected into everyday items in their city.

The three heroes attend the local chicken joint because they believe it holds the clues to their mystery. They discover a white powder that makes people laugh is being injected into the food at the Got Damn Fried Chicken fast food place. A kind of mind numbing chemical is also active in the 2Clean Perm Cream used for straightening hair in the local salons. That same mind-controlling drug is also being used in the church, this time inside the grape juice.

These scenes are the great accomplishment of the movie and Juel Taylor’s greatest success within the entire film. There may not be a secret government organization secreting chemicals into these products in real life, but it’s because they don’t have to. Taylor masterfully manipulates hyperbole and the absurdity of this conspiracy to highlight how these products are a representation for the mechanisms used to contribute to Black impoverishment.

All three of these commodities are examples of the psychological and social tools of oppression used to control Black people and prevent our national consciousness from developing.

The fried chicken represents the effects of obesity and poor health due to the lack of sustainable and healthy food in Black communities. For poor Black workers, who experience more than their fair share exploitation, cooking full meals or affording nutritious ingredients isn’t always a reality. It’s why there remains a disparity in Black health rates, and why things like the COVID-19 pandemic more severely impacted Black communities than white ones.

The hair products serve as a way to dull the senses of Black people, in particular Black women, in the community, to dull their consciousness and control their minds. This is a metaphor for the way national oppression forces Eurocentric beauty standards on Black women and speaks to the higher requirements for beauty and womanhood placed on Black women in general. The catchphrase “straighter is greater” is used in a commercial that takes place during the film about the hair product, straight hair being a metaphor for assimilation into white beauty standards.

The most radical part of the movie is its criticism of the contemporary Black church. The grape juice is just one part of the movie’s satire on modern Black Christianity’s tendency to convince African American communities to accept their oppression. The pastor even tells churchgoers to not worry about possible eviction, rising rent, and bills and just focus and worry about God. They end up discovering the conspiracy has an underground laboratory inside of the church.

All of these locations are ordinary. From the outside, they may seem harmless or mundane. But now that our protagonists are conscious of the conspiracy, and aware that there is an external force working to sabotage and undermine the people of the Glen, they start to become conscious of the dangers that seemed like everyday parts of the Glen before.

This is a wonderful representation of national oppression and national liberation. The United States of America has purposely and meticulously created a political system that is unfair and unjust for Black people. At first, people accept that system as normal; they see it as the way their community has always been. But when circumstances change and the aggression and cruelty of the empire are exposed, some members of the community begin to develop a national consciousness. They start to understand the reasons behind their oppression and the sinister undertones behind the at times seemingly benign or mundane features of the system.

In the movie, Black communities are oppressed and treated like colonized nations so that government officials can find a way to assimilate Black people into being totally white. In real life, Black communities are oppressed so that the ruling class – the monopoly capitalists, politicians, and wealthiest property owners – can extract “super-profits” from the Black community.

Harry Haywood theorized that imperialists don’t just oppress Black people due to hatred and bias, although those do play major roles in the system of oppression that exist. The imperialists in our country do it to super-exploit the African American community, meaning that they can pay African Americans lower wages, use us as a way to perpetuate the drug trade in the U.S., and devote less resources into Black community’s public infrastructure, schooling and livelihoods.

This system gives a massive payout to the 1% of this country, while also acting as an obstacle to unity between the Black and white working class. Due to the stereotypes, bias and terrible conditions foisted upon Black communities, the elites get to pay everyone less and blame the oppressed for the reason why living conditions in this country are awful.

After discovering even more shocking truths about the Glen, including discovering that Slick is also a clone, one of the leaders of the conspiracy confronts the protagonists and reveals the Glen is being used as a scientific experiment. He threatens to murder Yo-Yo, Fontaine and Slick unless they return to their regular lives.

After an initial moment of despair, Fontaine and Slick unite the community to save Yo-Yo, after she is captured and imprisoned by the Institute for trying to expose the conspiracy to the press. Through trickery and clever planning, the Glen community leads a rebellion against the conspiracy with their community members.

The characters in They Cloned Tyrone don’t just accept defeat. They analyze their conditions and develop a plan to defeat their oppressors. Unlike They Cloned Tyrone, a single individual rebellion won’t defeat our oppressors. The monopoly capitalist class, the true rulers of our society, rule the African American Nation in the Black Belt South openly. They actively work to destroy these liberation movements and inhibit the development of the Black Nation, as well as the Chicano Nation, indigenous peoples, and other oppressed nationalities in the U.S.

The most important similarity between the movie and real life, however, is that the oppressed communities can fight back. We can win the struggle against our oppressors. Instead of organizing a quiet conspiracy, we need to build a mass movement that can win victories for the national liberation movement. We need to fight to institute community control of the police across the nation. And we need to fight to overthrow the monopoly-capitalist class for once and for all, so all oppressed communities, fictional or otherwise, can be set free.

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Jacksonville, FL – It’s tempting to say the outrageous moral panic and woke-scolding over Joker made it a less effective movie. Tempting but wrong. What really undid this Scorsese-esque ‘supervillain’ film was the rampant over-production of comic book movies (and television shows) in the last three decades.

Put it another way, how many times have we seen the Bruce Wayne origin story? The five corporations that own almost all media – and creative intellectual properties – in the United States have run dry on ideas, content instead to retool stories from the past with proven records as cash cows. Batman and its associated universe are just among the most heavily exploited.

The problem with over-mining intellectual properties and franchises is that, like real mines, eventually there’s nothing left to dig up. We’ve seen it all before, especially after Fox’s ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Gotham series, which ran for five seasons.

Joker had liberal commentators and Twitter personalities in an uproar months before its release. A full-blown moral panic ensued, with many warning that the film catered to right-wing misogynists and mass shooters in-the-making. Some predicted violence at movie theaters. It’s worth noting that the Republican Party made the same type of argument – that violent movies, video games and music cause mass shootings – after the El Paso massacre this summer by a Trump-inspired white supremacist.

As it turns out, Joker isn’t a right-wing mass shooter manifesto at all. Its class politics are remarkably left-wing, especially when compared to the dozen or so Batman movies over the last 30 years. The problem with Joker is that for all its build up, it’s just not a very compelling film.

Batman has always existed as a comic book character for the right wing. Bruce Wayne, a billionaire industrialist, vows to avenge his parents’ murder by a ‘street thug’ by donning a spandex bat-suit and waging a ‘war on crime’ as a vigilante. His only superpower is his outrageous wealth, which allows him to build a veritable arsenal and conceal his identity.

Even the framing is right wing: Gotham – a composite of New York City and Chicago invented by D.C. Comics – is full of costumed criminals, freaks and weirdos, all with fantastical motives and vague backstories. These ‘supervillains’ see their plans foiled by the billionaire vigilante Batman, acting in alliance with ‘good cops’ in the city’s otherwise corrupt police force, like Commissioner Jim Gordon.

Here’s what Joker gets right: In 30 years of Batman on screen, this is the sole movie to portray Gotham as a real city divided into classes – not just caricatures of ‘good heroes’ and ‘bad criminals.’

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a severely disturbed man working as a clown-for-hire, bringing in just enough money to take care of his aging mother. Emaciated and mentally ill, he makes it through the week thanks to a cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs and counseling sessions at a publicly funded clinic. He’s no working class hero, but it’s stunning to see a Batman movie center on someone who isn’t obscenely wealthy.

Joker’s class politics don’t start or end with Fleck. Immediately we’re shown a Gotham quite different from Tim Burton’s gothic playground or Christopher Nolan’s gritty war-zone. It’s 1980. The sanitation workers are on strike. Unemployment and poverty run high. Right-wing billionaire Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce/Batman and a stand-in for Ed Koch, is running for mayor on a platform of tax breaks for the rich and austerity for the working class.

Life takes a rough turn for Fleck. In about 20 minutes of film, he gets mugged, loses his job, and bombs his first night doing stand-up at a comedy club. When Gotham’s right-wing city officials cut funding for public health care, Fleck can no longer afford his medication or counseling sessions. The inciting incident for his transformation into the titular Joker happens on a subway. Three drunk Wall Street bankers are harassing a woman. When they turn their aggression on Fleck, clad in clown makeup, he shoots and kills all three.

Joker makes an interesting point on class perspectives for anyone familiar with earlier Batman films. The corporate-owned media brings on Wayne and other spokesmen, to denounce the violence committed against their fellow one-percenters. Wayne takes the opportunity to ridicule poor people as “clowns,” too lazy to make something of themselves. His comments incite anger across Gotham’s working class, who see no great tragedy in the bankers’ deaths at all. They pour onto the streets in protest, with some ironically donning clown masks.

Fleck’s Joker may be the focus of this movie, but you don’t come away from it calling him a hero, as many pre-game detractors claimed. He’s quite clearly insane and dangerous, at one point breaking into the apartment of a Black single mother based on a hallucinated relationship between the two. The movement we see on the streets of Gotham didn’t start with Fleck’s Joker, nor does he lead it in any discernible way.

Instead, Joker does what every other Batman movie in the last 30 years has miserably failed at doing. It shows us characters whose actions are shaped by larger social and economic conditions; not stereotypes who do things “just because.”

But old habits die hard. After the Joker is arrested on live TV, a riot ensues. We already know what’s coming next long before Thomas and Martha Wayne, with their little son Bruce in tow, step into that fateful alley where they will be murdered. Yes, for the 11th time across films and TV episodes in the last 30 years, we get treated to yet another re-enactment of Batman’s origin story. This time, it’s carried out by a protester seemingly unleashed by the Joker.

Time is a flat circle for Batman movies. For all the ways Joker breaks the stale formula in character development and indicting Gotham’s billionaire class, we end up right back at the same place Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises took us. The masses are once again an anarchic force prone to criminality. Thomas Wayne is no hero, but neither is the Joker. Offering no other solution, Joker leaves us with a sense that it will take some third force – a more just, more compassionate billionaire, perhaps young Bruce – to set all this madness straight.

Joaquin Phoenix is now the fifth actor to portray the Joker in a theatrically released film over the last 30 years. When Heath Ledger did the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), it was a sharp contrast from Jack Nicholson’s portrayal 19 years earlier. Nicholson’s Joker was a 1930s chain-smoking mobster. Ledger’s Joker, by contrast, was a deranged product of the War on Terror: an insurgency commander, badly scarred from combat and intimately familiar with explosives, who waged warfare on Gotham’s authorities, both militarily and through symbols.

Phoenix draws his character from the headlines too – now mass shooters instead of terrorists – and has all the unsettling twitches and laughter we expect. It just feels played out at this point. We’ve had Al Capone-Joker (Nicholson), clown-prince Joker (Mark Hamil), terrorist-Joker (Ledger), theatrical-Joker (Cameron Monaghan), laughable white rapper Joker (Jared Leto) and more.

Just before the film’s third act, there’s a scene where Phoenix, clad in clown makeup and the iconic purple suit, dances on a set of stairs while Gary Glitter’s Rock n Roll Part 2 plays. For a second, you can see the glimmer of a genuine ‘moment’ of cinema genius... but all too appropriately, a bumbling set of cops interrupt the scene and it’s gone. This movie wants so badly to be game-changing, edgy and provocative, but it’s trafficking on dog-eared imagery and unclear messaging.

I don’t think Joker glorifies its main character the way some allege, nor do I think the movie is dangerous. But we’re also too far through the looking glass in capitalist America to have a compelling story told about the ‘clown prince of crime’. Phoenix is a fine actor, but nothing in Joker remotely compares to the real larger-than-life supervillains on TV every night in the age of Trump.

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