‘Joker: Folie à Deux’s’ Fatal Flaw Is Turning the Fans Into the Villains of the Sequel
SPOILER ALERT: The following essay discusses key plot points of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” including the ending. It is intended to be read after (rather than instead of) seeing the film.
I hated Todd Phillips’ original “Joker,” which made me feel like a crank when the hit anti(super)hero movie went on to earn the top prize at Venice, an Oscar best picture nomination and more than a billion dollars at the box office back in 2019.
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That film struck a nerve with me — not in a good way, though I fiercely believe that provocation can be one of art’s highest aims — by transforming the beloved Batman villain into a poster boy for incels everywhere. I know people like Arthur Fleck, and the last thing they (or any of us) need is such a film to encourage them. I feared it would go down like “Scarface,” as a fictive role model for sick minds.
Flash forward five years, and the character is back for a scandalously unpopular sequel, except that this time, it feels like “Joker” hates us — or, more to the point, it’s as if Phillips turned on his original audience. (Turns out, fans are returning the favor. I spoke to a couple theater managers yesterday, and they reported a strange phenomenon: People are canceling their tickets, or simply not showing up, because of the bad reviews.)
Ask yourself, who is the villain in “Joker: Folie à Deux”? Hint: It’s not Arthur Fleck. Instead of fearing Joaquin Phoenix’s character, it’s his fans we ought to be worried about — those who want him to reprise his role as the face-painted chaos-monger.
Now take that conclusion one step further: As Harley Quinn, Lady Gaga plays Joker’s No. 1 groupie, who’s as delusional as he is. Hence the title, “folie à deux,” a psychiatric term which, according to Wikipedia, applies when “symptoms of a delusional belief are ‘transmitted’ from one individual to another.” Here, Gaga is introduced looking like Angelina Jolie in “Girl, Interrupted,” but is later revealed to be someone altogether different — no better than the women who send fan mail to notorious criminals, arranging to marry them behind bars.
This is not the “Joker 2” we expected. The sequel could have picked up at the previous film’s climax, as Gotham City descends into chaos. That’s the more obvious way to satisfy anyone curious to see how Arthur Fleck’s story merges with the larger Batman mythology. (After all, “Joker” wasn’t just the title character’s origin story, but the Caped Crusader’s as well, revealing how Arthur’s actions led to Bruce Wayne witnessing his father’s murder.)
But Phillips defiantly steers us elsewhere.
Hollywood sequels typically do one of two things: Either they build on the film that came before, expanding the story into a full-blown saga (à la “The Dark Knight” or “The Godfather Part II”), or they repeat what worked about the original, recycling it bigger, louder and at much greater expense (à la Phillipps’ own “The Hangover Part II”).
“Folie à Deux” does neither. Taking a cue from the last scene of “Joker” — a psych evaluation where Arthur hears Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” in his head and starts to sing along — the film is basically one long drawn-out courtroom drama, interrupted by musical numbers (old standards, most of them sung in Arthur’s head).
If the violence and mayhem of “Joker” excited you, well, too bad. Arthur commits no more murders here — unless you count a fantasy sequence in which he bashes in the heads of the prosecutor and judge — and though everyone, from Harley Quinn to the mobs of supporters in the streets, is calling for an encore from the Joker persona, Arthur ultimately rejects his alter ego. After all that, the ending is a total let-down, though I won’t risk spoiling that until the last two paragraphs of this piece, since the film (which landed an abysmal Cinemascore of “D” with exit-polled audiences) was obviously seen by far fewer people than expected.
That’s a bold move for a sequel, which still finds ways to get Phoenix back into his red suit and demented-clown makeup. But nearly the entire film takes place either in Arkham State Hospital or Judge Herman Rothwax’s courtroom, while the songs — which are ostensibly Phillips’ way of distinguishing Arthur’s unexpressed inner feelings — serve to drag Phillips’ already tedious pacing to a virtual standstill. (The original was a “slow burn,” which always struck me as a stunt to make it seem “elevated.” This one is a moist box of safety matches.)
You want to know what’s wrong with the “Joker” sequel? It’s boring.
The plot hinges on that feeblest of trial-movie clichés: the insanity defense — that Hollywood-beloved legal loophole, rarely successful in the real world, whereby a defendant can be sent to a mental institution rather than the gallows if it can be proven that his condition made it impossible for him to recognize what he did was wrong.
So, we’re in tired-trope territory from the outset, surrounded by all kinds of lazy-screenwriting archetypes: the abusive guard (Brendan Gleeson), the smug district attorney (Harry Lawtey as Harvey Dent), the ethically compromised defense attorney (Catherine Keener). Tell me, is this how you wanted to spend your “Joker” sequel?
Turns out, the joke’s on you if you bought a ticket. Gaga’s not bad as Harley Quinn, though she’s on-screen a lot less than you’d expect. Phoenix, who won an Oscar for going to Method-acting extremes in the first movie, seems every bit as committed here, losing an ungodly amount of weight to become Arthur Fleck once again.
But does he become the Joker this time around? You be the judge — just as you get to decide what you think his mental condition might be, and whether that excuses his slaughter of seven people in the other movie: three white-collar bullies on the subway, the co-worker who got him fired, his abusive mother, an Arkham shrink and Robert De Niro’s character, late-night host Murray Franklin.
Instead of paving new ground, much of the new movie is spent relitigating the original, forcing Arthur to confront the consequences of his actions. If you got a thrill from watching Arthur turn on those who’d taunted him in “Joker,” Phillips invites you to question why that is when you reach the end of “Folie à Deux,” trying to reconcile why you feel so disappointed. “What did you expect?” the movie seems to ask.
Has Phillips suddenly grown a conscience? The way my colleague Owen Gleiberman put it in his review, Phillips’ fatal mistake was listening to his critics — a fair reading, since the director told Vanity Fair that the last laugh in “The Hangover Part III” (a post-credits gag where the Wolf Pack groggily awakens after Zach Galifianakis’ wedding) is a “fuck you” to those who claimed this crew wouldn’t get black-out wasted more than once.
Except, it seems self-evidence that in this case, Phillips doesn’t understand people’s issues with “Joker.” That means, if he adjusted anything with his critics in mind, then he’s made a movie for no one.
Owen and I have had many a debate about the original “Joker.” He named it the best film of 2019, whereas I felt the opposite: It triggered an unusually conservative reaction in me, who found “Joker” to be the rare film whose existence makes the world a worse place.
In retrospect, I’ll admit that I may have overreacted. I was reminded of reports that the gunman who opened fire on a megaplex in Aurora, Co., had burst in dressed as the Joker. (Turns out, that wasn’t the case, although the movie he targeted was “The Dark Knight Rises,” which doesn’t feel like a coincidence.)
For starters, I don’t think “Joker” is really a Joker movie so much as a bald Martin Scorsese rip-off: “Taxi Driver” meets “The King of Comedy,” with De Niro’s involvement serving as the ultimate rimshot. Phillips wrote a tragic study of a narcissistic sociopath (nothing wrong with that) and then shoehorned that character into one of Warner Bros.’ most lucrative brands.
The result only loosely fits with Batman lore — less well than Vera Drew’s deeply personal “The People’s Joker,” I would argue, and we saw what the studio did when she made that movie. Still, the Joker is such a popular figure that treating Arthur’s psychotic break as a revisionist origin story for the character struck me not as an act of humanism (as Phillips describes it in his director’s commentary) but a reckless example to put out into the world. Lawrence Sher’s velvety cinematography and Hildur Guenadóttir’s funereal score — the best thing about both movies — serve to elevate Arthur’s behavior. The glossy treatment all but encourages copycats.
Owen characterizes those, like me, who objected to “Joker” as “scolds,” and maybe he’s right. I try not to get all high and mighty and moralistic in my reactions to movies, but I’ve always had a bee in my bonnet — or a bat in my belfry — about films that appear to glamorize serial killers: “Man Bites Dog,” “American Psycho,” “Natural Born Killers.”
I recognize the allure of these characters, and I think it’s important (albeit nearly impossible) to understand them. But there’s an entire genre of film — from the sensationalist TV movies and true-crime fodder that Netflix churns out to more responsible portraits, like “Elephant” and “Nitram” — that seems to reward sociopaths for their crimes. In modern society, if you shoot up a school or try to assassinate a president, you can count on someone making a movie (or seven) about your exploits.
In his book “On Moral Fiction,” author and critic John Gardner argues, “Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.” He makes the case that writers — though we might as well lump filmmakers in with them — ought not “celebrate ugliness and futility, scoffing at good,” but should instead focus on creating “the kind of art that beats back the monsters” and “tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.”
I cite Gardner not because I agree with him. He’s even harder on critics than he is on “bad artists,” and his parochial arguments are blinded with bias toward a conventional (white, male) canon he likely would have derided as degenerate in its time. By contrast, I find artistic value in marginal voices and moral ambiguity, from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” to a film like “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.”
I quote Gardner because he pioneered the category of fiction to which “Joker” belongs: He wrote “Grendel,” which recasts the legend of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view. And he did so in a way that he considered responsible — not a rallying cry to would-be anarchists. On this point, Gardner and I agree: “The artist’s imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable.”
As best I can tell, the central premise of Phillips’ “Joker” is that the nihilism of society (or of Gotham City, at least) justifies Arthur’s actions. From the opening scene, when Arthur is beaten by a pack of kids in an alley, the character is a victim. Now, in the sequel, a lawyer steps in, formally attempting to frame him as such. She argues that childhood abuse (alluded to in “Joker,” confirmed here) and other mistreatment are the source of his disorder — whether schizophrenia or those uncontrollable laughing jags, based on a condition called pseudobulbar affect (PBA).
This view is mockingly introduced by the Looney Tunes-style opening cartoon, “Me and My Shadow,” in which Arthur’s alter ego emerges to kill Murray Franklin, then disappears in time for Arthur to take the rap. Will he escape from custody? Will he again get revenge on his tormentors? Or will he spend most of the film in court? Arthur is a fictional character, which means his insanity is a construct, while said plea makes a weak plot for a follow-up. That’s why I choose to read “Joker Folie à Deux” as an attack on the fans (and quite likely the critics as well). From that irreverent animated intro, the film assumes an oddly antagonistic tone.
In his “Joker” commentary, Phillips describes one of the director’s key jobs as being “the purveyor of tone,” and here, it might aptly be described as “meta-ironic” — that ambiguous, confrontational and often nonsensical form of satire in which it’s all but impossible to untangle the author’s intent.
Phillips never mentions the word “incel” in his “Joker” commentary, and yet, the first film was widely interpreted as a study of that phenomenon. The way I see it, the sequel is pitched in the language of the incel community, as seen on 4chan and other online forums, where trolls post inflammatory memes wrapped in multiple layers of irony. If you take it literally and get offended, that may have been the point.
How else to explain Phillips’ decision to follow up “Joker” with the polar opposite of what the target audience would have wanted? The movie is a musical, for crying out loud — a genre the studio deems so unpopular that they went out of their way to conceal in the marketing campaigns for “The Color Purple” and “Wonka” last year. In another jab at the bros (not Warner, but the same dudes Phillips has been tweaking since his 1998 Sundance docu debut, “Frat House”), “Folie à Deux” features a scene where Joker kisses another man on the mouth. These choices can’t be accidents — and they are certainly not what the fans demanded.
Phillips isn’t pulling his punches. He’s aiming them directly at the demo to which Arthur Fleck belongs.
As Arthur says at the end of the first movie, when his therapist asks, “What’s so funny”: “You wouldn’t get it.” The entire sequel feels like a private joke, of which those who imitate or take inspiration from the Joker are the butt. In the film (now we’re getting into spoiler territory), Arthur eventually fires his lawyer and decides to defend himself, appearing in court as the Joker. As Arthur turns to address the TV cameras directly (as he did on Murray Franklin’s show), this is when we’d expect him to do something anarchic. Instead, he disavows his alter ego and accepts the verdict.
After a car bomb disrupts the courtroom proceedings and Arthur is rescued by supporters in clown costumes, he looks horrified by their adoration and desperately attempts to escape them. Come to find, Harley Quinn is their queen. The tragedy of “Folie à Deux” is that no one seems the slightest bit interested in Arthur Fleck. Only the Joker matters. Even if Arthur were to be erased, the Joker mythology he created would endure. (That’s what the out-of-focus activity in the background of the last shot signifies.) It’s also the central flaw of Phillips’ franchise — and the ultimate irony of this film: Take the Joker/Batman element out of the equation, and no one would care a speck about Arthur Fleck.
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