Joker 2019 perfectly captured the cultural moment because it perfectly understood the vibe of the country, viz, that we all wanted to go crazy and kill ourselves and everyone around us, however precise or imprecise our understanding of why SOCIETY made us feel that way. The cultural moment of 2024 is so much different because the Biden era has seemingly foreclosed all possibility of that kind of antisocial rebellion. The national mood is not one of unfocused violent passions, but rather of being asleep at the wheel as we drift into inevitable crisis. When we fantasize of adventurism, we cannot bring ourselves to imagine a crowd of Sickos cheering us on, as at the end of the first Joker - instead there is only the crowd of mindless sheep, as at the end of Nashville. Capturing that vibe shift would be an incredibly difficult pivot for the coming second Joker film to make, even putting aside the creative exhaustion that almost invariably accompanies sequel films. So as much as I loved the first film, I will enter the second with low expectations.