Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Note: This is the explanation of the end. Spoilers for the ending of Joker: Folie à Deux.
Todd Phillips Joker didn’t have much to say besides “Don’t be mean to socially awkward guys, you never know what they’re going through and you might push them to the point of turning into some kind of joker.” “The most interesting thing about this, and perhaps this is a generous read, is how it reaches the banality of evil by suggesting that our biggest bogeymen are not agents of some incredible genius and ambition, hoping to destroy their grand plans and ideologies to the ground. The rest of us; and in Most of the time, they’re stupid and losers, which is not only scary, but sad. It was a new kind of supervillain origin story…
…Or so it was, until Phillips retconned its confused and self-loathing sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, from much of the first film’s characterization, pulling out the rug entirely for its place and purpose in the DC Cinematic Universe. In the final minutes of the new movie, it was revealed that this guy we’d been watching for the past two and a half hours, and the two hours before that in the previous movie, wasn’t the Joker at all. At least, it was never the Joker fighting Batman. He was, he insists to the dismay of his followers and Lady Gaga, just Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) all along. The sequel ends with Arthur’s death by stabbing, making Arthur just one more guy that the Joker had beef with, because the guy doing the stabbing is implied to be, yes, the Joker all along. We weren’t seeing an origin story at all. We were watching, to paraphrase Chris Evans’ description of Pixar’s D-tier Lightyear effort, the human origin story on which the Joker is based.
The first film is a deeply sinister, skin-walking origin story in the guise of a gritty 1970s Scorsese homage, turning the Joker’s traditional cartoon insanity into a much sadder mental illness. His incessant laughter is a tic, the result of repeated childhood physical trauma, and his clownish manner comes from his day job where he hires a clown and his comedic aspirations. His turn toward violence begins when Wayne Enterprises’ financial employees bully him in the subway, and he retaliates by shooting them, thus positioning himself as a symbolic opposition to the Wayne family’s hold on Gotham City. Arthur also bonds with Batman because his ailing mother, a former employee of Thomas Wayne, insists that Arthur’s real, orphaned father is a billionaire captain of industry, so he goes to visit Wayne Manor and interacts with young Bruce, calling him his brother, before that. Alfred had told him. When the shootings – and his later murderous live television appearance as the Joker – inspire outlaw mobs wearing clown masks to riot against the rich, one of these criminals shoots Bruce’s parents outside a movie theater, setting off Bruce’s own journey to become Batman. Everything about the first movie has Arthur becoming the Joker, so why wouldn’t he?
Because I don’t know if Todd Phillips is bored? He’s upset? Wanted a twist? In Folie à Deux, Arthur/Joker is put on trial for the murder in the first film, and the trial is broadcast live, turning him into an antihero to dozens of deranged freaks, the most important of whom is Lady Harleen Stefani “Lee” Gaga Quinzel Germanotta. Between court dates, Fleck is held in a maximum security ward for the criminally insane at Arkham Asylum, a place that is as sensitively depicted as you might imagine. In multiple scenes of the trial being shown on television at the asylum or of Arthur’s return from a long day in court with the Joker’s swagger, the camera focuses on a young prisoner (Connor Story) who watches Arthur with a maniacal gleam in his eyes. In Arthur’s closing statement to the jury, he sits in a chair with a microphone, maroon-style, and shows vulnerability, tearfully disavowing his previous attorney’s defense of “split personality” and saying there is no Joker; Just Arthur. What happens next is neither logical nor emotional: his fans were disappointed by his admission that the Joker is not a split personality. For some reason, the Joker represented rebellion and insanity to them in a way that the madman who was literally the Joker and committing all the murders and acting out of line in court did not. For a viewer like me, this is a matter of semantics. For me, it’s betrayal. She was only passionate about the Joker, not a man named Arthur who is the Joker.
anyway. This young inmate is clearly disappointed in him. The jury makes its decision and sentences Arthur to death, and what’s worse is that Lady Gaga dumps him. Returning to custody at the asylum, some time later, Arthur appears to have come to terms with his fate, and is then told that there is a visitor for him. Could Lady Gaga be the one coming to break it? Or District Attorney Harvey Dent, who for the first time reveals himself to be Two-Face? We’ll never know, because the young prisoner stops Arthur in the hall, tells him a “joke” about how much he admires the Joker and is let down by Arthur, before repeating the “You get what you deserve” line from the first film. Climax and Arthur is stabbed to death. As the Joker we’ve spent the last four and a half hours bleeding out with no one coming to save him, the young prisoner laughs maniacally in the background, almost like some sort of Joker, and cuts his face with a Glasgow grin. …almost like some kind of joker. The two Joaquin Phoenix Joker movies were not an origin story for the DC Universe’s Batman-fighting Joker. It was a misanthropic avatar of a man named Arthur Fleck who kind of looked like the Joker and was also a criminal and also crazy but was actually just someone who was stabbed to death by the actual Joker, a young man who was supposedly in the future. He will get out of Arkham and become the Clown Prince of Crime.
Perhaps Phillips was trying to make a point about how the Joker is not one person but a movement, an entity, a spirit of chaos that spreads like an infection and carries no allegiances. But it’s also a move that, like the rest of Folie à Deux, feels contemptuous of its audience. It’s shock for shock’s sake. It is an act of senseless violence. It’s… a gotcha phrase.
Stop.
Well, maybe this was all a picture of a budding Joker after all, but it wasn’t Arthur, and it wasn’t the inmate who killed him. It was Todd Phillips. It’s the joker. These films made his Joker-fied. He sows chaos and plays the Joker’s dirty trick. That’s what this ending is! This is the message, this is the point, and this is what he is trying to tell us! Someone call Commissioner Gordon and lock this guy up! This movie was a duet, but not between Phoenix and Gaga. It was between Phoenix and Phillips. It’s been right under our noses all this time. Todd Phillips is the Joker. This is what the end means. This is entertainment!
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