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Politics is everywhere in movies. Take this shot from Do The Right Thing:
This does a couple things. It assigns power to Pino in the way the camera points up, and the way he's positioned forward to be made larger. It makes him authoritative. It also puts him in white--in classic cowboy movies, the good guy is in the white hat, rides the white horse, has the white vest, and the bad guy is in black. Vito is assigned the black that traditionally goes to the bad guy and by his positioning in the shot he is assigned a weaker spot.
Except Spike Lee is black, the movie a racial powder keg. Lee does not empathize with Pino, Vito is the preferred brother. He's taken the traditional "bad guy in black" and turned it around, while acknowledging visually that Pino is the more powerful of the two, the White one, with the way the camera and actors are positioned.
There's a full array of politics in that one image in a film composed of something like 170,000 images. Good filmmakers are always telling us something on purpose, like Lee, and they're often telling us something not on purpose, like whoever made Coyote Ugly. Sometimes Lee beats us over the head with his point, sometimes it's more subtle. But it's always there and we always react to it, whether the reaction is indifference or a strong emotional/intellectual reaction. When we see Charles Foster Kane through a wide-angle lens in Kane, he's bigger than life, impressive as hell. Whether we think about it or not, we accept him as authoritative, impressive, powerful having seen that. That's politics: I'm going to make the audience see this character this way, I'm going to take part of the decision-making process from the viewer by presenting a place or person in the way I want them to be seen.
Consider for a second Face/Off. Not the preposterous plot, but the gun fetish. John Woo's camera swooping over a table full of firearms before a big shoot out, is practically gun porn. Cage slo-mo loading a clip into his ridiculously embellished handgun as he ponders his next move is gun fetish writ large. About 20% of that movie is gun porn. If Face/Off is titillating to a viewer that viewer is getting off to really lazy politics that play into gun culture. Do I think video games and Face/Off is why we have mass shootings? No. But I believe Face/Off is useless garbage that just entertains people by giving them gun porn, and we like it because we are gun nuts. ie Face/Off doesn't [expletive] up society, society is already [expletive] up and Woo/Cage/Travolta are happy to profit off our gun mania even if it means contributing.
The big difference between Joker (or Taxi Driver) and Face/Off is that the former two appear to be movies with messages, that are not all about the fetishization of guns and murder, but rather consider people committing violent acts to be sick in the head. We're too programmed, though, to let the politics of a movie pass by, and to lazily applaud something like Face/Off, to really examine what Taxi Driver or Joker is telling us.
