[This story contains spoilers for Joker: Folie a Deux.]
Is anyone out there laughing? It seems very few are, given the dismal reception to Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux, the follow-up to his $1 billion-it, Joker (2019), which was nominated for 11 Oscars and won best actor and best original Score. A sequel with Phoenix reprising his role as Joker/Arthur Fleck, and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn seemed like one of Hollywood’s safest bets this year, despite Joker not setting up a narrative to be continued.
So, what gives?
The sequel hasn’t simply been met with disappointment, but a sense of betrayal from some fans of the first. There are certainly issues upon which your mileage may vary: the film is at times sluggish, the jukebox tunes are largely mid-20th century tracks with multiple reprises, and Phillips demonstrates a lack of commitment to cinematic musicals (and an unexpected commitment to ’70s variety shows).
But it seems much of that sense of betrayal, and anger comes from the film’s ending.
There is, of course, no right or wrong way to feel about it, or the film as a whole. What I’m offering here isn’t a defense of Joker: Folie a Deux, but a perspective through which to consider the film, however you may land on it. And with that comes a means to contextualize the ending, which in my opinion is the film’s finest moment. *Crickets.* Is this thing on?
At the end of the film, Arthur Fleck renounces his Joker persona to the court, recognizing that he’s not some rallying cry, only a man who knew with full awareness what he was doing. He was only a nobody who wanted to be somebody, who wanted to be loved. This statement causes an uproar among his followers and Lee turns her back on him, dissolving their relationship. She wanted Joker, not Fleck. Back at Arkham, Fleck sits, no longer laughing, no longer joking, only thinking of the love he found and lost, when one of the guards, Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson), tells Fleck he has a visitor and leads him out to the hall to the reception area.
Fleck is stopped by a fellow inmate, one we’ve seen throughout the film, never speaking, only watching Fleck, and the reactions he gets from the other inmates and the citizens at his televised trial, with resolute seriousness. The inmate tells Fleck a joke, the punchline being the same one Joker gave to Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro) in the first film: “You get what you fuckin deserve.” The inmate then stabs Fleck multiple times in the abdomen. While Fleck bleeds out on the asylum floor, the inmate sits in the background, out of focus, trying on a variety of laughs before carving a Glasglow smile into his face with the blade he used to kill Fleck. The inmate settles on the perfect laugh: deep, cold, and clogged with blood, just as Arthur Fleck dies. A Joker dies and the Joker is born.
To get to the heart of the matter concerning this alleged audience betrayal, we must shuffle the deck to get back to the opening play. After the release of the first film, I talked about Joker’s uneasy reliance on the comics. Despite Phillips’ attempts to sound above the genre and make, what he referred to as “a real movie” and not a (shudders) comic book movie, the diretcor is a bit of a Joker himself. Instead of drawing attention to comic book influences, Phillips positioned the film as a character study in the shadow of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982), which it is. But it is also in the shadow of The Killing Joke and multiple Joker stories told across various mediums, because if it wasn’t, if it were not a “comic book movie” audiences wouldn’t have latched onto the film like they did, and as they had previously done with Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) or Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman (1989).
Warner Bros. Pictures
Before Joker opened five years ago, the media raised concerns that a shooting might happen during the opening night, in a similar fashion to the 2012 tragedy in Aurora, Colorado during the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises. Amid those concerns, the idea that Joker was courting incels was seized upon by news outlets wanting to have a potential controversy to write about. Thankfully no violence took place, but the notion of Joker as an incel movie remained, to the point where some are calling Phillips’ sequel a middle finger to that crowd and comic book fans.
Now, I don’t find myself in the incel realm of social media and not to say “couldn’t be me,” but yeah, it truly couldn’t be me. But I do think this whole connection of the film with incels is largely overblown. After all, a movie powered by incels doesn’t make $1 billion and garner Oscar nominations, and it certainly doesn’t account for the negative critical and audience polling for Joker: Folie a Deux. But I do think that there were a not insignificant number of people, from every walk of life, who saw Arthur Fleck as a heroic figure, one who took the wealthy and the broken welfare and social services systems to task.
Some reviews at the time accused the film of glorifying violence and ending with Joker as triumphant, a broken man healed by breaking the system. Of course, following a villainous protagonist is not an endorsement for audiences to frame their values around said villainy.
Yet, because the Joker was mentally ill, and abused, some felt that there wasn’t enough within the character to clearly define him as villainous and that the film created a slippery slope. Around this same time, there emerged a popular conversation regarding Batman and the argument that he used his wealth to beat up the mentally ill instead of using those resources to help change the infrastructure of Gotham.
Of course, read enough Batman comics and you’ll find that much of Bruce Wayne’s resources do go towards that change, and there’s a reason why these characters are set in a fictional world non-subject to all of our own rules and sociopolitical landscape. But the criticism of Batman was a sign of the times, and months following the release of Joker, comic book writer James Tynion IV took the reins of the Batman title and began a year-long story that saw Bruce Wayne lose all of his wealth in the aftermath of The Joker War. There was something in the air, no doubt created by anxiety over a man who lived in a golden tower possessing the highest office in the land and sucking the life out of systems people had come to rely on.
Arthur Fleck’s grievances are largely petty and personal. He may cast an eye towards the poor and downtrodden, but Arthur doesn’t care about them, or do anything to benefit them. It’s not so dissimilar to a filmmaker crafting a film about how power structures abuse those without the power to fight it, only for that filmmaker to be anti-union. Snare drums, please! At the end of the film, Fleck, locked in Arkham Asylum starts laughing. His therapist asks him what’s so funny and Fleck says, “You wouldn’t get it.” The impoverished citizens of Gotham didn’t get it when they chanted for him and positioned him as their savior, and maybe some of the audience didn’t get it either. So, what’s the joke? Well, Joker was the set-up, and Joker: Folie a Deux is the punchline.
Joker: Folie a Deux begins with an animated short, in the style of the old Looney Tunes cartoon, that sees Joker struggling against his shadow, who not only tries to steal the spotlight from him, dressing up in his clothes, doing his routine, but ultimately frames him for the murders he committed, leaving the shadow free to play Joker, and the man, Fleck, beaten into a bloody pulp. It’s a pretty chilling cartoon, but more than that, it lays out the entire movie right there.
When we’re reintroduced to Fleck, he’s a shell of a man, awaiting trial for the five murders he committed in the previous film. He’s heavily medicated, obedient, and hasn’t told a joke in months. Surrounded by his fellow inmates at Arkham, he’s back to being a nobody inside these walls. That changes when he meets Lee Quinzel, an inmate in a lower security wing of the hospital. Fleck quickly falls for Lee, and she encourages him to laugh again, to become Joker again and tells him that he was an inspiration to her, a poor kid like him who grew up in the same neighborhood with an abusive father and an emotionally detached mother. Simultaneously, Fleck’s lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) works with him to sell a narrative to the jury that Joker was a secondary persona, that he blacked out while committing the crimes of the previous films and has no recollection of them, all of this a result of the abuse he suffered as a child and his mother’s death. It’s a solid alibi, except it’s not a true one. But then neither is Lee’s story.
The film has a genuine interest in parasocial relationships and people who insert themselves into true crime narratives as a way to be seen or feel some kind of meaning. Pascal Plante’s French-Canadian horror-thriller, Red Rooms, was released a few weeks ago and tackles this very subject. That film, and Ryan Murphy’s sensationalized Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story weighed on my mind as I watched Gaga’s manipulative turn as Lee. As we come to find out, Lee is from a wealthy family on the Upper West Side, her father is a non-abusive doctor, and she finished grad school with a degree in psychiatry. She checked herself into Arkham to meet the Joker and then checks herself out once she has him on a hook and can control the media narrative surrounding him, building him up as a brilliant criminal mastermind.
Joker Folie A Deux
Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
Where the Harleen Quinzel of the comics initially did want to treat the Joker, before being manipulated by him, in this film, Lee meets Joker when he’s, perhaps not cured, but docile, and then manipulates him, has sex with him, and fakes a pregnancy so that he’s hers to mold into embracing Joker once more. It’s an interesting reversal, and Gaga plays that cruelty so well, her performance echoing the erotic thrillers of the late ’80s and ’90s like Fatal Attraction (1987), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and Disclosure (1994). Lee is possessed with a certain kind of delusion that only the wealthy with too much time and money find themselves in. She wants to live out the fantasy and play house with Joker. Yet, all the while she knows that it’s a fantasy and just like Arkham, she can leave when she wants. And with D.A. Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) calling for the death penalty, she knows from the start that there’s no happy ending for Arthur Fleck.
Lee’s portrayal could be read as that of a cunning Jezebel, a woman out to destroy the man who loves her. And if we were to put much stock in the incel narrativ, then certainly the film can be read as misogynistic, a film that blames women for the problems of so-called great men. But I think that argument only works if Joker is framed as a hero, and not the narcissistic murderer that he is.
As Joker manipulated Gotham’s poor in the first film, one of Gotham’s wealthy in turn manipulates Fleck, and for similar reasons—the camera. Much of the film features characters playing for the camera, whether it is Fleck’s interviews, the televised trial, or the musical sequences which feel more like bits from The Sonny & Cher Show, and less like the grand musical productions of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Lee gives unprompted press interviews, forcing her way in front of the camera to degrade Stewart’s legal prowess and build up the myth surrounding Joker alongside other like-minded sycophants who want to see Joker and not Arthur Fleck. Lee and these fans, many of whom dress like Joker are shadows, impressions of Joker waiting for the real thing. Only Fleck isn’t the real thing.
In the Blu-ray release for Joker, there’s a featurette called Joker: Vision & Fury in which Todd Phillips says the following: “There’s many ways to look at the movie. [Arthur Fleck] might not be Joker. This is just a version of a Joker origin. It’s just the version this guy is telling in this room at a mental institution.” Joker’s origin being “multiple choice” was a concept introduced in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ The Killing Joke, which has been utilized many times over the decades as different writers and artists have put their stamp on the Joker’s origin. One of the central complaints from comic book fans about the first film was that Arthur Fleck is Joker in name only, and doesn’t fully epitomize the character we know from the comics, and instead binds him to a sad sack of a man. There were also questions about the logistics of how this Joker could ever fight Batman, given that Fleck is in his early 30s and Bruce Wayne is 10 in the film. The movie geek answer is to just look at the age gap between Keaton and Nicholson in Batman ’89. The more interesting answer, the one the film commits to, is that Fleck is not Batman’s Joker.
After Fleck’s former co-worker Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill) testifies to the psychological scars his encounter with Joker left, how he’s lived with the fact that the only person who was kind to him at work and didn’t make fun of his height had murdered someone in front of him and made him feel powerless, Joker’s mask begins to slip. After all, how can a man propped up as the symbol of the poor, disabled, and oppressed simultaneously be the oppressor? And when a fellow inmate at Arkham, a young man who idolized Fleck, another shadow who seemed like the obvious choice to be the Joker, is murdered by the guards at Arkham, reality sets in for Fleck. He’s not an anti-establishment figure, or a character starring in the lead of his show. He is a murderer who wanted to feel power and use that power to be seen, but Arthur Fleck is nobody.
And as he admits this to the court on live TV, a car bomb goes off, destroying the courthouse. Arthur wanders outside in the chaos, only to be picked up by two groupies who want him to lead them in burning all of Gotham to the ground. But Arthur runs, his followers chasing him, until he’s back at his apartment, where he finds Lee, her hair cut and make-up done up like a clown. For a moment, Arthur thinks he can still be somebody, that with Lee he can finally exist. But she has no interest in Arthur Fleck. No one has an interest in Arthur Fleck, except for an audience that thought he was the Joker.
What fascinates me in terms of these two Joker films is the willingness of certain audiences to immerse themselves in Arthur Fleck’s story, only when they thought he was the iconic Batman villain. When it’s revealed that he isn’t, that he’s just a miserable, tragic man and the persona was merely a foundation for the real deal, well suddenly it’s a betrayal. And I have to admit, I do find it funny that for seemingly a lot of people, it wasn’t this character study of Arthur Fleck they were interested in, but how he becomes the villain so adored. But upon reflection, it never seemed like Arthur was going to be that guy. Instead, he inspires the true Jokers, both in the form of Harleen Quinzel, who essentially becomes more Joker than Harley Quinn here, and the inmate, a nobody who can presumably become a bigger somebody, and bigger threat than Arthur’s Joker ever was. And Joker: Folie a Deux does this while also tipping the hat to the comic book mythos of Joker never having a concrete backstory.
Arthur Fleck and these two shadows that rise in his wake isn’t the first time the concept of multiple Jokers has been utilized. In the Fox TV series, Gotham, the proto-Joker was Jermone Valeska (Cameron Monaghan), but the real Joker is revealed to be his twin brother, Jeremiah (Monaghan) who improves upon his brother’s work. There’s also the matter of Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok’s Batman: The Three Jokers, which explains the Joker’s change in characterization over the years as the result of three individuals, The Criminal, The Clown, and The Comedian who all serve the role of Joker. What Joker Folie a Deux does here isn’t outside of the realm of ideas that have been broached before in different ways. But it’s never been done in this fashion, a $190 million sequel to $1 billion movie.
So, is it wrong to feel betrayed by the Joker Folie a Deux, to spend two films focused on a character who was never meant to become the comic character fans know, and came out to see? No, it’s not necessarily wrong. It comes down to what you want from the Joker. My take is that we’ve seen thousands of Joker stories in every medium over the decade, why not cast the die and do something controversial within a film that has no connection or intentions upon a larger cinematic universe?
Maybe it’s not the punchline we deserve. But in terms of a filmmaker who tried to stray from the comics, only to wind up indebted to them, and a portion of the audience very invested in comic book accuracy and forming connections to characters who fit within the conditions of the IP they seek to have some control over, Joker: Folie a Deux dances through a messy delivery to land on a pretty killer joke. We can’t force a character to become something they aren’t, and creatives can’t try to divorce themselves from the source material without circling back around to it in the end. I don’t know about you, but it sure puts a smile on my face.