This article contains spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.
When Joker was released in 2019, critics worried that the movie’s portrait of an alienated loner who becomes a folk hero by killing a talk-show host on live TV might inspire real-world violence—and in a way, Joker: Folie à Deux proves them right. Although Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck has spent the time between movies locked up in an insane asylum, his legend has only grown, bolstered by a TV movie based on his life and a cheesy true-crime book called The Day the Laughter Died. His trial for the on-air murder of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) and several others, including the Bernhard Goetz–style shooting of three men who harassed him on a subway car, is a massive public spectacle, the courthouse swarmed by demonstrators in face paint who approvingly view Arthur as a harbinger of widespread chaos. At the end of Joker, Arthur reveled in the world he’d helped create, one as violently unsettled as his own mind. But in Folie à Deux, he starts to think better of what he’s set in motion, only to discover he lacks the power to put out the fire, or even keep from getting burned.
Opening with a faux Looney Tunes cartoon, drawn by The Triplets of Belleville’s Sylvain Chomet, in which Arthur’s Joker is strangled by his own shadow, Folie à Deux is organized around the idea of the split self, which also becomes the backbone of his criminal defense strategy. Is the Joker just an outlet for Arthur’s long-suppressed rage, or is it a discrete personality, so distinct from Arthur that it qualifies him as legally insane? Or is there a third possibility, the one preferred by Arthur’s legions of fans: that the Joker is his real self, the embodiment of what we might all become if we threw off society’s yoke and let our freak flag fly.
That’s the view preferred by Harley Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who’s so obsessed with Arthur she checks herself into Arkham Asylum on the off chance she gets to meet him. Lee, as she’s called—the better to throw off the vanishingly small percentage of viewers who are familiar with the Batman villain Harley Quinn but don’t know that Gaga is playing her—can get herself committed only to Arkham’s minimum-security wing, where there’s little chance of running into a notorious multiple murderer. But as luck would have it, Arthur has become a favorite of Arkham’s guards, one of whom thinks it would be amusing to secure him a spot in the minimum-security wing’s music classes. And music, the instructor tells the class, is what we use to “make us whole.”
The music in Folie à Deux does a lot more than that. From the moment Lee, in her breathy, quivering voice, warbles the first notes of “Get Happy,” the movie gradually inches its way toward becoming a full-blown musical, although director and co-writer Todd Phillips has avoided using the using the term because, as he explained earlier this week, “I don’t know that you leave this movie feeling better than you did when you walked in.” In the opening cartoon, the hallway outside the dressing room where Arthur transforms himself into the Joker is lined with posters for classics from the golden age of Hollywood musicals like Shall We Dance and The Band Wagon, the latter of which provides the backdrop for the scene in which Harley demonstrates her love to Arthur by setting fire to a rec-room piano. But Phillips doesn’t have a coherent vision for how to deploy the songs, let alone where to draw them from. Some are musical-theater standards, some pop hits from the songbooks of Frank Sinatra and the Bee Gees, some cabaret deep cuts by Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel. It’s like a jukebox musical assembled by pushing buttons at random.
Extending the first Joker’s edgelord antics, Phillips prods at the audience with crude juxtapositions, as when Lee breaks off an imagined duet of “To Love Somebody” to shoot Arthur in the gut. But he’s often working against the songs rather than pulling something out of them, the way Martin Scorsese’s After Hours turned Peggy Lee’s melancholy “Is That All There Is?” into a nightmarish lament. As the first Joker swiped liberally from Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, Folie à Deux dips its greasy hands into the filmmaker’s New York, New York, but Phillips doesn’t have the deep understanding of the genre it would require to either modernize or subvert it, so he just scribbles in the margins, reconfiguring Arthur’s failed stand-up comedian as a thwarted song-and-dance man.
Arthur’s televised trial is the perfect chance for him to seize the spotlight, and he does it with gusto, firing his lawyer (Catherine Keener) so that he can grab more camera time as his own defense counsel. (Evidently he’s been squeezing in some courtroom dramas among those movie musicals, enough to fitfully adopt a slimy Southern drawl.) But the fame he’s got isn’t the kind he thought he wanted. Even center stage, he’s still Arthur Fleck, not the Joker his fans want and need him to be. When Arthur and Lee first met, she bonded with him over their common upbringing—she, like him, came from a broken and abusive home, in the same impoverished neighborhood where he was raised. But that turns out to be just a put-on: Harley’s parents are not only alive but wealthy, and she’s merely a child of privilege playing a part, desperate to be anyone other than who she is. She needs Arthur’s other self to be real so that hers can be as well: the Joker and Harley, not Arthur and Lee. So when Arthur proclaims to the cameras that there is no Joker—that there was always and only him—she loses interest in an instant and dumps him in the middle of the first movie’s now-iconic staircase.
In Folie à Deux, as in the real world, the Joker Stairs have become a landmark, a site of pilgrimage for people who think that Arthur’s killing spree is, if not admirable, at least a little bit badass. (The in-universe TV movie acts as a proxy for Joker itself, a warped version of the truth that turns a pitiable man into a tragic hero.) The new movie is designed in part as a corrective to the first, but rather than accepting responsibility, Phillips turns the blame on his audience. It’s not a mea culpa. It’s a tua culpa.
Throughout his time in Arkham, Arthur is shadowed by a young inmate named Ricky Meline (Jacob Lofland), who’s so enamored of his famous wing-mate that he asks Arthur to give him his first kiss. But it’s not Arthur that Ricky idolizes; it’s the Joker, and when Arthur rejects his chaos-spawning alter ego, Ricky responds in kind. In the movie’s final scene, Arthur is called to Arkham’s visiting room, but before he can see who’s paying him a call, Ricky catches up to him in the hallway and asks to tell him a joke. A psychopath walks into a bar, he begins, and sees a sad old clown drowning his sorrows. The psychopath offers to buy him a drink, and the clown says the psychopath can get him whatever he thinks best. So the psychopath chooses and, Ricky concludes, gets the clown “exactly what you deserve.” And with that, Ricky pulls out a shiv and stabs Arthur in the gut, leaving him to bleed out on the floor. The camera stays on Arthur, but in the background, we see a blurry Ricky start to cackle and turn the blade on himself, slicing into his own face. And we realize that we’re seeing the birth of another Joker—the one played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
The first Joker appeared to exist in its own discrete universe, separate from not only the one occupied by the mainline DC Comics movies but the one created by 2022’s The Batman as well—an Affleckless, Pattinsonless world of its own. That went a ways toward explaining why Arthur’s Joker was so distinct from previous versions of the character, although it also prompted the question of why, apart from the allure of internationally recognizable IP, it was a Joker movie at all. How could this scrawny, mumbling shell of a man evolve into a giggling criminal mastermind? Folie à Deux provides a simple answer: He didn’t. He merely inspired the man who would. (The movie also gives us the first glimpse of Batman’s future nemesis Two-Face, when assistant district attorney Harvey Dent, played by Industry’s Harry Lawtey, gets blasted by a car bomb set by one of Arthur’s disciples.) It’s a perfect ending, in its way, not just because of how neatly it ties up the first movie’s loose ends, but because of how cravenly it submits to the demands that movie rejected. Phillips casts Joker’s fans as slobbering loons, but he also makes sure to serve them a plate piled high with their favorite slop, pandering to Easter egg hunters while suggesting they should get a life. That’s entertainment.