This article contains spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.
When Joker was released in 2019, critics worried that the film’s portrait of a recluse 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 it to them. Right. Although Arthur Fleck, who played Joaquin Phoenix, spent the time between films locked in a mental institution, his legend grew, cemented by a TV movie based on his life and a 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 in a subway car, was a massive public spectacle, with the courtroom packed with protesters. Face paint who view Arthur approvingly as a harbinger of widespread chaos. At the end of Joker, Arthur relishes the world he helped create, a world as violently disturbed as his own mind. But in Folie à Deux, he begins to think better about what he started, only to discover that he lacks the ability to put out the fire, or even avoid being 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 a split self, which also becomes the backbone of his criminal defense. strategy. Is the Joker merely an outlet for Arthur’s long-suppressed rage, or is he a separate personality, so different from Arthur that he qualifies as legally insane? Or is there a third possibility, the one favored by Arthur’s legions of fans: that the Joker is his true self, an embodiment of what we could all become if we cast off the yoke of society and let our freak flag fly.
This is the view favored by Harley Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who is so obsessed with Arthur that she has her admitted to Arkham Asylum in case she meets him. Lee, as she’s called — the better to get rid of the vanishingly small percentage of viewers who know Batman villain Harley Quinn but don’t know Gaga plays her — could just get herself committed to the minimum-security wing of Arkham, where there’s a chance Insignificant to run into a notorious multiple killer. But fortunately, Arthur has become a favorite of the Arkham guards, one of whom thought it would be fun to secure a place for him in music lessons in the minimum security wing. Music, the teacher tells the class, is what we use to “make us whole.”
The music in Folie à Deux does much more than that. From the moment Lee, in her quivering voice, sings the first notes of “Get Happy,” the film gradually works its way toward becoming a full-fledged musical, although director and co-writer Todd Phillips avoids using it because, as he explained earlier in this The week, “I don’t know that you leave this movie feeling better than when you walked into it.” In the opening cartoon, the hallway outside the dressing room, where Arthur transforms himself into the Joker, is filled with posters of classics from the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals such as Shall We Dance and The Band Wagon, the latter of which provides the backdrop for the scene. Where Harley shows her love for Arthur by setting fire to the recreation room piano. But Phillips doesn’t have a coherent vision for how to publish songs, let alone how to extract them. Some are musical theater standards, some popular songs from the songbooks of Frank Sinatra and the Bee Gees, and some deep cabaret pieces by Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel. It is like a musical jukebox that is assembled by pressing buttons at random.
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Extending the scope of the Joker’s early antics, Phillips prods the audience through crude juxtapositions, as when Lee interrupts an imagined duet of “To Love Somebody” to shoot Arthur in the gut. But he often works against the songs rather than extracting something from them, as Martin Scorsese’s After Hours transformed Peggy Lee’s sombre “Is That All There Is?” In the lament of my nightmare. As the first Joker rips liberally from Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, Folie à Deux dips its greasy hands into the director’s hometown of New York, New York, but Phillips doesn’t have the deep understanding of the genre that his modernization requires. Or subvert it, so he just scribbles in the margins, recasting Arthur’s failed comedian as a frustrated song-and-dance man.
Arthur’s televised trial presents the perfect opportunity for him to grab the spotlight, and he does so with gusto, firing his lawyer (Catherine Keener) so he can get more time in front of the camera as his own defense attorney. (He was clearly squeezing in some courtroom dramas among those movie musicals, enough to intermittently adopt a sticky Southern accent.) But the fame he got wasn’t the kind he thought he wanted. Even at center stage, he’s still Arthur Fleck, not the Joker his fans want and need him to be. When Arthur and Lee first meet, she bonds with him over their shared upbringing—she, like him, comes from a broken and abusive home, in the same poor neighborhood in which he grew up. But this turns out to be a hoax: Harley’s parents are not only alive but wealthy, and she’s just a child of privilege playing a part, desperate to be anyone other than who she is. She needs Arthur’s alter ego to be real so hers can be too: the Joker and Harley, not Arthur and Lee. So when Arthur announced to the cameras that there was no Joker, that there had always been and only him, I lost interest in an instant and threw him into the middle of the ladder of the now-iconic first film.
In the Folie à Deux, as in the real world, the Joker’s Stairs has become a landmark, a site of pilgrimage for people who believe that Arthur’s killing spree is, if not impressive, then at least a bit nasty. (The in-universe TV movie serves as a proxy for the Joker himself, a distorted version of reality that turns a pathetic man into a tragic hero.) The new film is partly designed as a correction to the first film, but rather than an acceptance of it. Responsibility, Phillips puts the blame on his audience. It’s not an average error. It’s just a culpa.
Throughout his time at Arkham, Arthur watches over a young inmate named Ricky Millen (Jacob Lofland), who is so enamored with his popular wingmate that he asks Arthur to give him his first kiss. But it’s not Arthur that Ricky worships. He’s the Joker, and when Arthur rejects his chaos-causing alter ego, Ricky responds in kind. In the final scene of the film, Arthur is summoned to the Arkham visiting room, but before he can see who is paying him a call, Ricky catches him in the hallway and asks him to tell him a joke. A psychopath walks into a bar and begins seeing a sad old clown drowning his sorrows. The psycho offers to buy him a drink, and the clown says the psycho can get him whatever he thinks is best. So he chooses the psychopath, and Ricky concludes that he’s getting the clown “exactly what she deserves.” With that, Ricky pulls out a knife and stabs Arthur in the gut, leaving him bleeding on the floor. The camera stays on Arthur, but in the background, we see a blurry Ricky start jabbering and turning the blade on himself, cutting his face off. We realize that we are witnessing the birth of another Joker, the one played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
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The first Joker seems to exist in his own separate universe, separate not only from the one occupied by the main DC Comics films but also from the one created by 2022’s The Batman – a world of his own without Pattinson’s influence. This served to explain why Arthur’s Joker was so different from previous versions of the character, though it also raised the question of why it was a Joker film at all, aside from the universal appeal of the intellectual property. How could this scrawny, mumbling man develop into a laughing criminal mastermind? Folie à Deux offers a simple answer: he didn’t. He just inspired the man who would do it. (The film also gives us our first glimpse of Batman’s future enemy Two-Face, when Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent, played by Industry’s Harry Lawty, is blown up by a car bomb placed by one of Arthur’s students.) It’s a perfect ending, in its way, not only because of how carefully it ties up the loose ends of the first film, but because of how cowardly it panders to the demands the film refuses to do. Phillips portrays Joker fans as morons, but he also makes sure to serve a plate piled high with their favorite food, pandering to the Easter egg hunters while suggesting they get a life. This is entertainment.
