Let’s fight about the end of Joker: Folie à Deux

Todd Phillips’ Joker sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, is a difficult movie in a lot of ways. It’s difficult to stomach, as beaten-down protagonist Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) endures still more physical abuse and mental and emotional deterioration. It’s difficult to parse, as Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver pack the script with inconsistencies and contradictions. And above all, there’s that bitter, thudding ending, which dismisses the first movie and consciously undermines any of the goodwill it garnered. How are we meant to feel about that? What are Phillips and Silver trying to say? We had differing opinions on that, so we decided to talk it out. End spoilers ahead for Joker: Folie à Deux, naturally.

Joker: Folie à Deux is framed both as a musical love story between Arthur and fellow Arkham Asylum inmate Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), and as Arthur’s reckoning for the murders he committed in 2019’s Joker. He goes on trial, with his defense attorney Maryanne (Catherine Keener) arguing that he’s not guilty by reason of insanity: She claims he has multiple personalities, and that Arthur and the Joker are different people. Prosecuting attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), for his part, argues that Arthur is sane and a cold-blooded murderer.

Buoyed by the romance with Lee, who openly admires Joker’s destructive iconoclasm and meets him throughout the movie in a variety of musical sequences that are sometimes imagined, sometimes really happening, and sometimes entirely ambiguous, Arthur eventually fires Maryanne and mounts his own courtroom defense as Joker, in full makeup. But when he’s called on to deliver his closing argument, Arthur breaks down to the jury and admits that Joker isn’t a second personality, he’s a deliberate performance. He confesses that he murdered his mother, in addition to the five murders the court already knows about. At the close of that speech, he says he’s abandoning the Joker persona, which he’s grown weary of maintaining. Harleen walks out of the courtroom in apparent disgust and disillusionment.

A car bomb goes off outside, though it’s unclear who set it off — possibly a Joker supporter protesting the case, possibly a Joker hater out to kill as many of Joker’s supporters as possible. Arthur escapes through the wreckage and returns to the Highbridge “Joker stairs” where he danced in the first movie.

He finds Lee there, but she repudiates him and walks away — she was in love with the image she had in her mind of Joker, not with Arthur. The police arrive and recapture him, and he’s taken back to Arkham, where another inmate, who’s been glimpsed briefly throughout the movie, confronts him, promising him a joke, then stabs him brutally and repeatedly, telling him it’s what he deserves for rejecting the Joker. As Arthur dies, the anonymous inmate giggles away in the background, with gory sound effects suggesting that he’s cutting his mouth open to give himself the kind of facial scars we see on Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. The intention seems to be that this inmate is the “new” or “real” Joker.

Tasha: So Susana. When we first started talking about our responses to this Joker sequel and what Todd Phillips seems to be laying down, it sounded like you found this ending pretty unsatisfying and maybe even vapid, and I wanted to dig into that. I agree with everything you said in your piece laying out the ways Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver muddle their messages about who Joker is and how we should feel about him, but for me, that “Screw you, Joker fanboys” ending was the moment where they resolved all that chaotic, conflicting thought into one stream, which says, “This guy was never what you thought he was, and now he never will be.” What’s missing for you in this ending?

Susana: At the risk of faint praise, I wouldn’t say that I found the ending more vapid or unsatisfying than the rest of the movie. My issue with it is more about intent and reality. If this was all about putting up a middle finger at people who claimed Phoenix’s version of the Joker as their own twisted icon, I don’t think this frame is at all successful.

People who watched Joker and embraced Arthur Fleck as a charismatic, philosophizing murderer with a plan were already rejecting the reality of that film and substituting their own. And for anyone who’s already done the mental gymnastics involved in reading Joker’s Joker as of a piece with The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger) or Suicide Squad (Jared Leto) versions of the character, there’s an easy and tempting way to read this scene.

After a movie about Fleck’s impotence — in the face of his admirers, the penal system, and even his own persona — Folie à Deux says, “Don’t worry about this guy, kid, he was never the real Joker! The real Joker is exactly what you always imagined: a mysterious, laughing psycho-killer with a fig-leaf desire to stick it to the system.”

If this is Phillips and company’s attempt to repudiate the attention Joker got, I don’t think it’s going to convince anyone who gave it that attention in the first place. Fight Club never stopped anyone from thinking Tyler Durden is a cool genius. But with Fight Club, I’m at least confident that author Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher didn’t want the audience to take their Down with the System Icon in that way. I’ve never felt like I’ve had a handle on what I’m supposed to take away from Arthur Fleck.

Do you think Phillips and co. meant their Joker to be… I dunno, cool? Menacing? Complex and villainous? Or just a thoroughly wrecked person whose actions were misconstrued?

Tasha: It always seemed to me like the first movie was pinned around a nihilistic message about how terrible the world is, how predatory and abusive and indifferent most people are, how family and our institutions and the people around us all fail us, so there’s a kind of power in learning to laugh at them all and embrace chaos and destruction. Not a message I can get on board with, but at least a message.

To me, Joker 2 feels like Phillips and Silver hanging onto the nihilism part of the message, while repudiating the idea that you can find power in it somewhere. I don’t think they’re suggesting that Arthur’s actions in the first movie were misconstrued, just that any satisfaction we or he could glean from them is temporary and empty. And there’s nothing cool or menacing about that. In this movie, I think we’re just meant to find him pathetic: He can only earn love (or the pretense of love, at least) by pretending to be something he isn’t. Showing his true self to the world means being condemned by the court, abandoned by his lover, and murdered by a stranger.

If anything, it seems Phillips is saying we have to put on armor against the world, and we can’t afford to drop it for a moment, or we’ll lose whatever we’ve been able to scrape together by wearing it. Which brings me back to what I wondered after the first movie: Is Todd Phillips OK? Is he currently seeing a decent therapist? Because if these movies aren’t depression and despair in tangible forms, I don’t know what is.

But it does seem to me that he allows for what you’re saying, about Phoenix-Joker fanboys not being swayed by this movie. We see that happen in the movie, as Arthur escapes the courtroom in the wake of the car bomb, and falls into the embrace of clown-garbed fans who support him and get him to safety — which he immediately rejects, which doesn’t sway them. That entire sequence feels to me like Phillips is in dialogue with fans of the first movie, telling them he doesn’t want their attention or respect or support, and won’t accept it.

The whole movie feels like that message writ large, but the escape sequence emphasizes it in a small, intense form. Which leads me back to this: Is your issue here that the message is unsatisfying, or meaningless to anyone but the people Phillips is speaking to directly, or badly articulated, or something else entirely?

Susana: A bit of everything, really. I think it’s poorly articulated, but also something of a question wrongly asked. I don’t think anybody’s figured out a fix for when your work has been adopted or co-opted by people you disagree with. No one can make a comic book about the Punisher that’s gonna stop cops and militia yahoos from putting his skull emblem on their stuff.

Ultimately, I just think that if Phillips was really committed to nihilistic indifference, to the idea that all you can do about the state of the world is laugh at it, then crafting his sequel as a direct response to Joker fanboys who attached themselves to his Joker… I mean, is that a statement of indifference?

Tasha: I think it’s entirely in keeping with these movies’ philosophy of self-destructive despair — the first movie isn’t about Arthur declaring quiet indifference, it’s about taking violent, decisive action. In the first movie, Arthur gives up on society, his mother, his goal of making people happy, and any semblence of mental health or working toward recovery. But he doesn’t just sit down and muse about it — he kills a TV star, kills his mother, starts a riot, and laughs about it all. I’m seeing that same Fight Club “blow it all up” energy in this sequel. It’s just coming from Phillips instead of from Joker.

In this sequel, Arthur gives up on the pretense that he can laugh about what he’s done, or disassociate from it, or stop feeling horrible about it. And Phillips promptly killing him off afterward seems to me like an attempt at a definitive statement, an attempt to make sure no one can co-opt or rewrite or reuse him. It reminds me of Douglas Adams blowing up every possible iteration of Earth in all universes in his final Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book, in an attempt to prove he was done with the series. (Which didn’t keep another author from continuing it after his death, which might prove your point.)

That wouldn’t work with Punisher at this point because he’s been around too long (50 years this year!) in too many forms, and has been too thoroughly integrated into culture — any attempt to end his story would certainly be short-lived. But Phoenix-Joker is a much newer phenomenon, and poisoning the well like this — presenting him as a sad, lonely, helpless victim instead of a cynical hero — really might kill him off for everyone but the most determined die-hards.

I just wonder if Phillips is killing his career in the process. This isn’t just a director following a big hit with a big flop, which happens all the time — this is a director taking active steps to disavow and undermine his last hit, to separate himself from his own fandom and make what really seems to be a philosophical statement about why people who like his last movie are misguided, shallow, and hateful. I’m not sure how you come back from that. Joker 3: I Was Just Kidding, He’s Fine?

Susana: What do you mean, Tasha? You heard that guy laughing as he killed Arthur — now there’s a whole new Joker to make movies about!