Can psychedelic clinical trials be better? Researchers say yes

University of California - San Francisco

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UC San Francisco researchers are weighing in on one of the biggest challenges in psychedelic science, arguing that clinical trials need more convincing placebo treatments to better measure the drugs' true effects.

The debate hinges on "masking," the clinical trial gold standard that keeps patients and researchers from knowing who receives the active drug or a placebo. Because psychedelics produce such distinctive effects, participants can almost always tell whether they got the real thing. That makes it hard to separate a drug's effects from the power of expectation, including the disappointment patients feel when they realize they did not receive the psychedelic.

In a perspective published Sept. 16 in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers from UCSF, UC San Diego, and Stanford University call for a more aggressive approach to preserving masking in psychedelic clinical trials. The paper arrives as psychedelic research gains momentum and regulators face growing pressure to decide how these treatments should be evaluated and approved.

Instead of relying on active placebos such as niacin, which can cause flushing but little else resembling a psychedelic experience, the researchers propose carefully designed combinations of approved drugs to create a more convincing placebo. They also recommend limiting what participants are told about the study, making it harder to guess which treatment they received.

Psychedelics for serious mental illness have drawn growing interest because many patients do not respond to existing treatments. The authors argue that if researchers too readily accept failed masking as unavoidable, these compounds will never be rigorously tested.

"People say psychedelics can't be masked, so we should stop trying and just move on, because the effects are so obvious," said Josh D. Woolley, MD, PhD, associate professor in residence of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSF and the paper's senior author. "But medicine has been fooled by obvious effects before. Heart stents for stable chest pain and knee arthroscopy for arthritis both looked effective until sham-controlled trials showed they weren't. We're excited about this paper because it outlines a novel approach that might finally make effective masking possible for psychedelics."

The proposed strategy, called UMBRAA, short for Unidentifiable Multidrug Blinding with Reduced, Authorized Awareness, combines giving carefully selected FDA-approved drugs with limited disclosure to study participants about what drugs they are receiving to make it harder for them to guess whether they are in the active treatment or the placebo-controlled arm of the study.

For example, a placebo might combine drugs from different classes, such as a sedative, a stimulant, and a cannabinoid. The researchers hypothesize that pairing drugs with different effects could create an intense, unfamiliar altered state that is harder to distinguish from psilocybin than current controls.

The researchers acknowledge that UMBRAA raises safety and ethical concerns and would require careful screening, close medical monitoring, and regulatory oversight.

They stress that the framework is a proposal, not a proven method. Future research will need to identify safe drug combinations, test whether they improve masking, and establish appropriate safeguards.

Authors: Other authors include Andrew Krystal, MD, PhD, of UCSF; Kevin H. Yang, MD, of UC San Diego; and Boris D. Heifets, MD, PhD, of Stanford University.

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical system, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals  and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at ucsf.edu. 

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Journal

JAMA Psychiatry

 

Psychedelics and anesthetics create mirror image patterns in the brain

A new study offers a data-driven approach to differentiating conscious state

Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan

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For something so familiar to human experience, consciousness is still a mystery.

Each day, people cycle through wakefulness and sleep, from a higher level of consciousness to a lower one.

What’s more, some people alter their conscious experience with drugs such as psychedelics, or have unconsciousness induced by anesthesia.

Researchers have investigated these altered states of awareness in an attempt to understand how consciousness is organized within the brain.

A new Michigan Medicine led study takes a data driven approach and for the first time reveals that psychedelics and anesthetics create “mirror image” patterns of large-scale brain organization, with opposite network features.

The team, led by Rui Dai, Ph.D., and Zirui Huang, Ph.D., of the Department of Anesthesiology and Center for Consciousness Science at Michigan Medicine, analyzed functional MRI data from study participants who were administered psychedelic compounds—LSD, psilocybin and nitrous oxide—and compared them to readouts of MRIs of the brain in a sleeping state or under sedation with propofol.

“In previous literature, each individual drug’s influence on brain connectivity was analyzed separately,” said Dai.

“To our knowledge, no one has systematically assessed these two drug classes to compare network organization compared to waking consciousness.”

Specifically, the team observed that psychedelics increased functional connectivity (how closely two brain regions work together), while sleep and anesthesia reduced it.

The same pattern held for topological integration, meaning how easily information travels across the brain, and for interaction complexity, or the number of different patterns of brain interaction that can be observed.

“Overall, these results mean that during psychedelic states, the brain becomes more globally connected, more efficient in communication and more dynamic, while anesthetic states are the opposite,” said Dai.

Furthermore, their results offer a reliable way to differentiate conscious states using data.

The neural mechanism of consciousness is a longstanding scientific question, adds Huang, who is Director of the Center for Consciousness Science at University of Michigan Medical School.

“We analyze it using drugs because we know they will affect consciousness in some way, but we don’t know how. The mirror-image effect discovered by this study suggests that the integration, efficiency, and complexity of brain activity may be fundamental to consciousness.”

Additional authors: Hyunwoo Jang, Anthony G. Hudetz and George Mashour

Paper cited: “Opposite network patterns of integration-segregation in psychedelic and sedated states of consciousness,” Cell Reports. DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117830

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Journal

Cell Reports

DOI

10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117830 

 

New study shows that psychedelic drugs affect the brain differently

LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs are often considered as one group. But a new study shows that each drug affects the brain differently. The findings could have implications for the development of future treatments for mental health disorders

University of Southern Denmark Faculty of Health Sciences

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Long term effects as seen in brain scans on rats

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Credit: Mikael Palner, University of Southern Denmark

In recent years, psychedelic drugs have attracted growing interest as potential treatments for conditions including depression, anxiety and addiction. Although these drugs are often considered as one group, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have now shown that they affect the brain in markedly different ways. The findings are based on brain scans in rats and suggest that the differences between psychedelic drugs may be greater than previously assumed.

The differences can be seen directly in the brain

Previous studies have mainly investigated one psychedelic drug at a time. In the new study, the researchers directly compared three drugs: LSD, psilocybin and 2C-B, a synthetic drug with psychedelic properties.

The researchers examined how the drugs changed brain activity, both while the drugs were active and one week later.

The results showed that each drug produced its own distinct pattern. Only a few changes were shared across all three drugs.

-Psychedelic drugs are often discussed as if they work in the same way. But when we look at the brain, the differences are clear. Each drug appears to affect its own networks, and that is new knowledge, says Mikael Palner, Associate Professor at the Department of Clinical Research at the University of Southern Denmark and senior author of the study.

More than one type of psychedelic drug

The researchers found that the three psychedelic drugs changed brain activity in different ways. 2C-B and LSD produced the most changes while the drugs were active, but the researchers also found different effects after the acute effects of the drugs had worn off.

-What is interesting is that the differences do not only appear while the drugs are active. We can also see different traces in the brain afterwards. 2C-B mainly affected areas linked to reward, LSD affected areas linked to habits and motivation, while psilocybin stood out by primarily affecting areas involved in emotions, says Frederik Gudmundsen, first author of the study. Gudmundsen completed his PhD at the University of Southern Denmark and is now a postdoc at the Department of Clinical Medicine, Translational Neuropsychiatry Unit, Aarhus University.

This does not necessarily mean that one drug is better than another. But the findings suggest that psychedelic drugs may not be best understood as a single group when they are being investigated as medicines.

-If the drugs affect the brain differently, it is also possible that they may eventually prove better suited to different disorders. We do not know that yet, but our study provides a biological starting point for investigating it, explains Mikael Palner.

A step towards more targeted treatments

Interest in psychedelic medicines has grown considerably in recent years. Several drugs are currently being investigated in clinical trials for conditions including depression, PTSD and addiction.

The new study does not tell us whether the drugs work in patients. But it gives researchers a better understanding of what happens in the brain when different psychedelic drugs are active. This knowledge could become important if future treatments are to be more closely tailored to individual disorders.

The researchers also emphasise that the findings come from experiments in rats. Studies in humans are therefore needed before it is possible to say whether the same differences are also relevant to the treatment of patients.

Three questions for the researcher about the study

What did you investigate in the study?

We investigated whether three psychedelic drugs affect the brain in the same way or whether each drug has its own distinct effects.

What is the most important finding?

That LSD, psilocybin and 2C-B affect the brain differently, even though they all produce psychedelic effects.

What could the findings be used for?

The findings could contribute to the more targeted development of psychedelic medicines and help researchers investigate whether different drugs may be better suited to different mental health disorders.

About the study

Method

The researchers compared LSD, psilocybin and 2C-B in rats using PET scans and measurements of brain activity and connections between different brain regions. Brain activity was studied both during the acute effects of the drugs and one week later.

Funding

The study was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, Neuroscience Academy Denmark and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The authors have also disclosed relevant potential conflicts of interest. Mikael Palner holds shares in Compass Pathways and AtaiBeckley. He has previously been involved in research collaborations with Compass Pathways, A7imuth, TetraKit, Arla, Cymap and Bright Minds Bio and is an adviser to BrandarisTx. None of these companies or relationships had any influence on the study.

 

5-HT2A-PET

Credit

Mikael Palner, University of Southern Denmark

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-75890-0 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Serotonergic psychedelics induce distinct patterns of metabolic activity and covariance within biologically informed rat brain networks

 

Carilion Clinic researcher receives NIH award to study use of psychedelics to treat cocaine addiction

Initial award could grow to $3.5 million to support larger clinical research phase

Carilion Clinic

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Albert Arias, MD, chief of addiction psychiatry at Carilion Clinic, has received an award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to research how psilocybin, a psychedelic compound being studied for several psychiatric and substance use disorders, can offer a new approach for people with cocaine use disorder.

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Credit: Courtesy Carilion Clinic

Albert Arias, MD, chief of addiction psychiatry at Carilion Clinic, has received an award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to research how psilocybin, a psychedelic compound being studied for several psychiatric and substance use disorders, can offer a new approach for people with cocaine use disorder.

The initial $623,000 award is part of a phased project to evaluate whether psilocybin can help reduce cocaine use when administered in a carefully controlled clinical research setting combined with structured psychotherapy. Subsequent funding to support the larger clinical phase of the research could bring the total award to $3.5 million.

“Cocaine use disorder can have devastating consequences for patients, their families and communities, yet we still do not have an FDA-approved medication to treat it,” Arias said. “This study gives us an opportunity to rigorously investigate a promising but still experimental approach and determine whether it may ultimately have a role in helping patients reduce or stop cocaine use.”

The research comes amid growing scientific interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic compounds. Previous research has suggested possible benefits of psychedelic-assisted treatment for conditions including alcohol and nicotine use disorders, but clinical research involving stimulant use disorders remains limited.

The first phase of research will examine safety, tolerability, feasibility, dosing, and early signals of efficacy. If successful, the project will move into a larger clinical trial designed to test efficacy and better understand why some patients may respond better than others.

The NIDA award expands Carilion’s growing research in addiction psychiatry and reflects the health system’s commitment to investigating new approaches for patients affected by substance use disorders.

“Research is especially important when patients and clinicians have limited treatment options,” Arias said. “Our goal is not to assume that psilocybin works, but to ask the question carefully, scientifically and safely. If we find evidence of benefit, it could provide the foundation for larger studies and, eventually, new treatment options.”

Carilion Clinic is a nationally recognized health system based in Roanoke, Va., advancing the health of communities in Virginia and surrounding states through comprehensive patient care, education and research. The health system includes 7 hospitals, more than 250 physician practices and a range of health and wellness services. Through partnerships with premier institutions such as Virginia Tech and Radford University, Carilion trains tomorrow's clinicians, discovers new treatments and techniques, and enhances patient care.

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Study shows sharp increase in rate of unintentional ingestions of recreational drugs among young children since 2000

Marijuana edible ingestions in the home drove dramatic rise over the last decade. Experts call for increased prevention efforts

Nationwide Children's Hospital

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(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – A new study reveals that unintentional ingestions of recreational drugs by young children have increased dramatically in the last 25 years. Researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Central Ohio Poison Center analyzed calls to U.S. poison centers and found that the recreational drug ingestion rate per 100,000 U.S. children younger than 6 years old increased 3,307% from 2000 to 2024, with a rapid increase beginning in 2013.

In a study published in BMC Public Health, researchers found 41,612 unintentional ingestions involving recreational drugs among children younger than 6 years reported to United States poison centers from 2000-2024. Most were among children younger than 3 years (58%), involved a single substance (96%), and occurred in a residence (96%).

“The recreational drug ingestion rate among children younger than 6 years reported to United States poison centers increased substantially over the study period, with increases especially pronounced for edible marijuana and psilocybin products,” said Gary Smith, MD, DrPH, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s.  “Additional efforts are needed to prevent these unintentional ingestions among this vulnerable population, including education of parents and caregivers, promotion of safe storage practices, and implementation and enforcement of child safety-focused public policy.”

Although 51% of children experienced no or minor effects, 5% had a major effect (i.e. symptoms are life-threatening or result in significant disability or disfigurement). There were six deaths, all children younger than 3 years. Children younger than 3 years were more likely to experience a major effect, be medically admitted and specifically, admitted to a critical care unit than children 3-5 years old. The higher ingestion rate in children younger than 3 years is consistent with the younger age group’s developmental behaviors associated with increased mobility, exploration of the environment, and placing objects in the mouth.

Cannabinoids accounted for 85% of ingestions, with edible marijuana preparations representing almost half of all ingestions. The rate of cannabinoid ingestions increased by 2,349% from 2015 to 2024. This increase in cannabinoid ingestions was driven by the ingestion rate of marijuana edibles, which rapidly grew from 2013 (when the first marijuana edible ingestion was reported in this study) to 2024. Although the rate of marijuana edibles exceeded that of other preparations starting in 2019, the rate of the latter also increased by 1,460% from 2010 to 2024. This may, in part, be associated with growing state legalization of cannabis and increased availability of cannabis products in the home. Ingestion rates following cannabinoids were stimulants (8%), psychedelics (including psilocybin) (4%), opioids (3%), and dissociative agents (<1%). Ingestions involving opioids, stimulants, and dissociative agents were more likely to be admitted to a critical care unit than the other substance categories combined.

"Because almost all exposures in our study occurred in a residence, parent and child caregiver education should emphasize keeping recreational drugs out of the home, or at a minimum, stored up, away and out of sight and reach of children, preferably in a locked location,” said Hannah Hays, MD, co-author of the study and medical director of the Central Ohio Poison Center. “Adults should avoid using these products around young children, who naturally imitate adult behavior. Edible preparations of recreational drugs may be appealing to toddlers because they resemble candy or food, and they often contain multiple servings in one package.”

Prevention strategies for manufacturers and policy makers include requirements for opaque, child-resistant packaging with limits on the total dose contained in each serving and the number of servings per package, single-serving packaging, and appropriate labeling. Given the increase in legalization of cannabis and psilocybin for recreational and medical purposes, access to these products in the home by young children is likely to continue, underscoring the need for increased prevention efforts.

Data for this study were obtained from the National Poison Data System (NPDS), which is maintained by America’s Poison Centers. Poison centers receive phone calls through the national Poison Help Line (1-800-222-1222) and document information about the exposure, which is reported to the NPDS.

The Center for Injury Research and Policy (CIRP) of the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital works globally to reduce injury-related pediatric death and disabilities. With innovative research at its core, CIRP works to continually improve the scientific understanding of the epidemiology, biomechanics, prevention, acute treatment, and rehabilitation of injuries. CIRP serves as a pioneer by translating cutting edge injury research into education, policy, and advances in clinical care. For related injury prevention materials or to learn more about CIRP, visit www.injurycenter.org. Follow CIRP on Instagram @CIRPatNCH.

The Central Ohio Poison Center (COPC) provides state-of-the-art poison prevention, assessment, and treatment to residents in 64 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The center’s services are available to the public, medical professionals, industry, and human service agencies. COPC handles more than 42,000 poison exposure calls annually, and confidential, free emergency poisoning treatment advice is available 24 hours per day, seven days per week. To learn more about COPC, visit www.bepoisonsmart.org. Follow COPC on Facebook Facebook.com/CentralOhioPoisonCenter.

About The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
Named to the Top 10 Honor Roll on U.S. News & World Report’s 2025-26 list of “Best Children’s Hospitals,” Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of America’s largest not-for-profit free-standing pediatric health care systems providing unique expertise in pediatric population health, behavioral health, genomics and health equity as the next frontiers in pediatric medicine, leading to best outcomes for the health of the whole child.  Integrated clinical and research programs are part of what allows Nationwide Children’s to advance its unique model of care. As home to the Department of Pediatrics of The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Nationwide Children’s faculty train the next generation of pediatricians, scientists and pediatric specialists. The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of the Top 10 National Institutes of Health-funded free-standing pediatric research facilities in the U.S., supporting basic, clinical, translational, behavioral and population health research. The AWRI is comprised of multidisciplinary Centers of Emphasis paired with advanced infrastructure supporting capabilities such as technology commercialization for discoveries; gene- and cell-based therapies; and genome sequencing and analysis. More information is available at NationwideChildrens.org/Research.

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Journal

BMC Public Health

DOI

10.1186/s12889-026-28233-z 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Unintentional ingestion of recreational drugs among young children, 2000–2024

Article Publication Date

27-Aug-2026

The Feral Spectacle of the Radical Blockbuster Movie

Nicky Reid

 August 21, 2026

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“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

-Werner Herzog

The blacktop is simmering like a skillet beneath the rising heat of the dog days of summer and once again I find myself missing the movies. Not that streaming shit on your goddamn phone but the flickering flame of machine gun celluloid making a cool dark room in some suburban strip mall glow like a ghost trapped in a coal mine. Back in nineteen-ninety-something, escaping reality was still a collective experience. You and your brother and a dozen strangers that were just as bored as you getting together over dangerously over-salted butter popcorn to watch Quentin Tarantino kill just enough people to squeak by with an R rating.

It’s all gone now. It’s all over. Everything is digital. Everything has been separated from the fragile fingertips of another actual sentient human being by fifty-five layers of synthetic software. Hollywood is dead and Marvel buried it in an empty computer box. Everything has been reduced to a formula, from the tightly focus-group tested plot of another poorly regurgitated superhero saga of good versus evil to the computer generated, greenscreen special effects of an AI animated cartoon with the faces of A-list celebrities pasted to the action. I know I’m a bitter old soul, but it all just reeks of insincerity and inauthenticity, and sometimes I feel like the only curmudgeon under eighty who can’t bear to participate in this mockery of something I once loved in the name of nostalgia.

I feel silly, bellyaching about the “good old days” of something that has always been a very contrived industry at best. If I could just truly divorce my morality from my sentimentality, I would say good riddance and welcome the destruction of another evil empire. Hollywood has always been a corporate sewer of sexual predators and military-industrial propagandists, selling a deeply mythologized interpretation of American cultural supremacy to a world held hostage by their commercial hegemony. In the light of cautious Gramscian hindsight, it really was little more than very well-made shit. But every once in a while, some mad genius with a coke habit and a dream would secure a budget for something downright revolutionary and what probably should have been just another narcotic blockbuster became a zeitgeist rattling status quo disruptor.

2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Day of the Dead, Falling Down, American Beauty, Fight Club… The ‘wait-a-fucking-minute-how-did-they-get-away-with-that’ movie. Sometimes they seemed to come completely out of nowhere, from some career scoundrel who somehow tripped over prophecy on his way to the bank.

That was Terminator 2: Judgement Day in a gun shell. Nothing about that film should have been revolutionary; a bloated, over-hyped, colossal budget, sequel directed by a man who has always been more of a CEO than an artist. But that movie, James Cameron’s 1991 Arnold Swartzenegger juggernaut, seems to ring a little closer to Old Testament style prophecy with every passing year. A terrifying portion of it has already come true and the rest seems to be in the process of transpiring as we speak.

Unlike the first Terminator in 1984, which seemed to be very much focused on a distant, barely tangible future, foretold by time travelers to a bewildered young waitress who would someday give birth to a robot fighting messiah, Judgement Day seemed to set its sights on the near future. Sarah Connor, former waitress and “mother of the future” had transformed herself into a luddite guerrilla, every bit as dangerous as any machine and the story Arnold Swartzenegger’s new android arrived to tell was one that was already unfolding in Silicon Valley. And it is that story, told in robotic monotone which stays with me late at night, burning holes in my head bigger than any pyrotechnic magic trick.

“In three years, Cyberdine will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdine computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2014 am Eastern Time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug…”

Change the name Cyberdine to Palantir and the date to 2027 and science fiction begins to feel eerily close to documentary. The rest of the film plays out like a high-octane, Ted Kazcynski fever dream. Sarah Connor targets brilliant technophile computer researcher, Mike Dyson, only to be stopped by the son who would become messiah and his Terminator companion who get both Sarah and Dyson to realize that something far more revolutionary is needed to prevent the apocalypse and an armed assault is launched on the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 500 company.

Even what could have very easily been a cheesy ending syncs in with Industrial Society and Its Future. When the Terminator reaches a level of artificial intelligence high enough to resemble empathy, he realizes that the only truly ethical choice he can make is to destroy himself before some other clever scientist can find a way to justify his replication in reckless pursuit of power through technological advancement.

The most radical blockbusters however turn the cameras on themselves and attack the mass media as a whole and few if any other blockbuster is more radical than 1994’s Natural Born Killers. Oliver Stone, already a reputable loose cannon among Hollywood elites, originally took on the Tarantino helmed script about a pair of mass murdering lovebirds who find themselves transformed into celebrities by the tabloids, with every intention of making a fairly conventional action movie. Then he began doing psychedelics and watching the news during the age of O.J. and Waco and decided to do something far more radical.

The result was essentially an arthouse movie with a blockbuster budget; a hallucinogenic journey into the dark heart of the American spectacle. Micky and Mallory Knox become two horrifically abused kids raised on television who become accomplices to the mass media who raised them to be monsters and then turned them into stars. Everything is done in the name of the parallel universe that only exists through the kaleidoscope of the commercial zeitgeist. Acts of shocking violence are interspersed with snippets of Coca-Cola commercials and flashbacks of child abuse. Or to paraphrase Guy Debord, all that was once directly murdered becomes mere representation.

Hollywood hated it for the same reason Sergio Leone once told a young Oliver Stone that they would hate Scarface, because it was about them. The most diabolical villain in a movie about serial killers is actually the tabloid “journalist”, Wayne Gale, played brilliantly by a clearly drug fueled Robert Downey Jr., doing his best impersonation of Geraldo Rivera. By the end of the movie, Gale transitions effortlessly from merely covering the crimes of Micky and Mallory to actually engaging in them himself, only to be murdered by the subjects he transformed into Frankenstein spectacles. It was a step too far even for a guaranteed money-maker like Oliver Stone and it was beautiful. Hollywood never forgave him and his career never fully recovered, but Natural Born Killers continues to haunt the spectacle to this day. Its place in the zeitgeist cannot be erased.

Todd Phillips managed to perform a similar trick by hijacking the superhero genre itself with 2019’s Joker, in which the titular villain of Batman fame is transformed from an insane mastermind to a shattered manchild failing to be somebody in a grim world haunted by the spectacle of glitzy talk shows and billionaire politicians. Arthur Fleck, played by a neurodivergently inspired Joaquin Pheonix, doesn’t actually become the Joker. His crimes and what they come to represent to a Gotham City of lost children are the Joker. Crowds of enraged misfits in clown masks setting the city on fire.

After Arthur is transformed by this phenomenon, he echoes the warnings once delivered by Paul Goodman in his revolutionary study of late capitalist juvenile delinquency, Growing Up Absurd, during his interview with the cluelessly sadistic late night host Murray Frankin (played by Robert DeNiro),

“Have you seen what it’s like out there, Mur-ray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells, shouts and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy… They think we’ll all just sit there and take it like good little boys. That we won’t werewolf and go wild… (Well) what do you get… When you cross… A mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?!… I’ll tell you what you get!! You get what you fucking deserve!!!”

This is the sermon of the active shooter, a generation of lost boys failed by a society that failed them by turning manhood into something empty and absurd to grow into.

Joker was a huge success, but Hollywood hated it as much as they did Natural Born Killers and they hated its sequel, the gonzo jukebox musical Joker: Folie a Deux even more, only this time the audience hated it too, because Philips and Pheonix explicitly decided to turn the Marvel Studio model of braindead fan service on its skull and presented Arthur Fleck as a victim of the Joker spectacle that he never really had any control over. It was a brilliantly daring gamble to make with another soulless studio’s money, but its message was lost on the lost boys who just wanted to live out their phantasy of getting even with the system without every really dealing with their own symbiotic relationship with it.

Regardless, I feel like Folie a Deux was actually a nice way to leave the superhero genre; with a totally unconventional slap in the face, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe Hollywood deserves to die as much as Arthur and America do. Maybe the insane matrix of market diversity brought on by streaming is far more conducive to bold artists with inconvenient visions.

But on a climate change scorched afternoon in mid-August, I still miss the movies of nineteen-ninety-something, when a dozen lost strangers could find themselves trapped in a flickering coal mine and ambushed by the collective experience of an unexpected reality two-stories tall.

What a beautiful nightmare… The feral spectacle of an industrial society with no future.

What more can I say but that’s life, that’s what all the people say…

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.