'Joker: Folie à Deux' Is Punk Rock

Director Todd Phillips' much-anticipated sequel is a big middle finger to those who would glorify one of fiction's most celebrated mass murderers.

I truly did not understand what the hell director Todd Phillips was doing with Joker: Folie à Deux until the very end. And I mean, like, the very end - as in the final ten or twenty seconds. It’s not that there’s some huge plot twist or whatever (although I suspect many viewers will be surprised by the way the story concludes, despite Phillips clearly foreshadowing it very early on). It’s that the end made the meaning of everything that came before seem crystal clear; in the snap of a finger, I went from being kind of fatigued to feeling excited to see the movie a second time so I could watch it with a better understanding of Phillips’ approach. I’m not entirely sure that I love the way Phillips executed his vision, but I certainly respect it: this is Phillips’ most punk rock movie to date. Which is saying something for the guy who made the definitive GG Allin documentary.

Released in 2019, Joker was infamously a riff on Martin Scorsese’s classics Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. When word got out that Folie à Deux was going to be a musical, rumors started that it would pull heavily from Scorsese’s own foray into that genre, New York, New York.

But the Scorsese pictures of which it’s most reminiscent may actually be The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, in which the legendary director very bluntly dresses down those who celebrate Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, and Jordan Belfort as aspirational figures instead of cautionary tales. Like another sequel to a provocative movie that had an unexpectedly profound cultural impact, Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), Folie à Deux is a meta-commentary on the attention-grabbing original… or, perhaps more accurately, on the public perception of that original. Writing for Vanity Fair, the critic Richard Lawson noted that Folie à Deux “seems to disdain its audience,” and I don’t think he’s very far from the mark. Folie à Deux is designed to undermine expectations and piss people off.

It seems silly in retrospect, but in the lead-up to the release of the first Joker, there was a lot of moral hand-wringing over the film. Detractors argued that it glorified incels, mass shooters, and other dangerous criminals. Nothing could be further from the truth: Joker may be a character study about how those kinds of violent killers are made, but it certainly doesn’t endorse its protagonist, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). If anything, it subverts the title character’s status as one of modern fiction’s most celebrated mass-murderers: Phillips has said that his Joker “clearly is not a criminal mastermind.” Arthur Fleck isn’t the mad genius we know from the comics, or Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the character. He’s sad and pathetic, and his “victory” at the end of the film doesn’t change that; it bolsters it.

Still, not every viewer interpreted Phillips’ film properly. Warner Bros. judiciously (and uncharacteristically) chose to show restraint with regards to producing Joker merch, so fans made their own. Folie à Deux makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, how Phillips feels about Arthur Fleck, and about the admirers who would lionize him.

Joker: Folie à Deux begins with a fantastic prologue in the form of Looney Tunes parody that plays with the Jungian shadow (directed by The Triplets of Bellville’s Sylvain Chomet, no less!) - the first of many times Phillips will invoke the theme of duality. We then rejoin Arthur, locked up in Arkham Asylum, miserable and lonely as he awaits trial for killing five people in the first movie (although, as Arthur clandestinely admits to one ally, he really killed six people - the authorities never figured out that one of his victims was murdered). Hope arrives in the form of Harley Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a fellow inmate who Batman fans already know is destined to become Harley Quinn, Joker’s paramour and partner in crime (at least for a time). Sure enough, Harley and Arthur begin a romance, which frequently plays out in musical sequences that use old standards like “Get Happy” and “For Once in My Life.” These scenes, like the movie’s title, suggest a shared delusion.

That’s a simple enough setup, but anyone expecting a love story set against a background of violent crime (e.g., Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, True Romance, Natural Born Killers, etc.) is gonna be disappointed. The movie includes an overwhelming amount of other storylines: there’s Arthur’s trial, Arthur’s relationships with the abusive guards (led by the always-terrific Brendan Gleeson) and other prisoners in Arkham, Arthur’s relationship with his defense attorney (American goddamn treasure Catherine Keener), and Arthur’s newfound celebrity as a counterculture hero. In an effort to get Arthur the death penalty, Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), the rising D.A. who will someday become the villain known as “Two-Face” (there’s that theme of duality again!), trots out a series of characters from the first movie, including his neighbor/“love interest,” Sophie (Zazie Beetz), to provide damning testimony. Meanwhile, pro-Joker cosplayers, who see the killer as some kind of working-class political figure, passionately protest outside the courthouse, while the media goes typically apeshit with coverage.

And yet, despite being so crowded with plot, very little actually happens in Folie à Deux. This is why so many critics have condemned the film for allegedly being a “boring,” “dull,” “plodding,” “lifeless,” “dreary, underwhelming, unnecessary slog.” The narrative doesn’t have a ton of forward momentum the way the first film did; it often feels like it’s not escalating the way these kinds of movies do. And with a few notable exceptions, the songs only sometimes advance the plot. Just as often, they kind of come out of nowhere, and accomplish very little other than to break up the monotony of Arthur’s shuttling back and forth between a mental institution and a courthouse.

Just as potentially irritating: Folie à Deux often doesn’t feel like it has a ton of new insights into Arthur’s character, and it barely scratches the potentially dramatically lucrative psyche of Harley. A lot of critics have complained that Lady Gaga is mostly wasted in this movie, and they’re not necessarily wrong.

And yet…

All of this, I believe, is born of deliberate decisions on the part of Phillips (who also once again co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver). He’s working his absolute hardest not to glamorize Joker or Harley Quinn, and to present them as they would be in real life: delusional and deplorable. Phillips gives us scene after scene of Arthur being confronted by antagonistic forces - a less-than-impartial judge (Bill Smitrovich), an unsympathetic psychologist (Ken Leung), a sensationalistic television journalist (Steve Coogan) - that all threaten to explode into violence, echoing the way Arthur murdered an obnoxious late-night host (Robert De Niro) in the first movie. It’s a dramatization of Quentin Tarantino’s observation about Joker 2019:

“[De Niro’s character is] not a movie villain. He doesn’t deserve to die. Yet, while the audience is watching the Joker, they want him to kill Robert De Niro. They want him to take that gun, and stick it in his eye and blow his fucking head off. And if the Joker didn’t kill him? You would be pissed off. That is subversion on a massive level! They got the audience to think like a fucking lunatic and to want something [they would never normally want]. And they will lie about it! [Audiences] will say, ‘No, I didn’t [want that to happen]!,’ and they are fucking liars. They did.”

There is violence aplenty in Folie à Deux, but it doesn’t come when and how you expect it. Phillips denies the viewer the catharsis of seeing Arthur get his bloody revenge. He simply refuses to romanticize Arthur any further.

Appropriately, the most affecting scenes in the movie are the ones that show the consequences of Arthur’s actions on those around him, whether that’s the fate of a fellow Arkham inmate who idolizes Joker, the father of one of his victims attempting to assault him, or court testimony from Gary (Leigh Gill), the co-worker Arthur spared in the first movie.

There’s a kind of weird tenderness in the way Arthur treats Gary before letting him go, but Folie à Deux makes it clear that the horrific brutality Gary witnessed that day was deeply traumatizing. Again and again and again, Phillips reminds us that Arthur is not a champion to be emulated. He is toxic, and like all toxic things, he’s damaging not just to himself, but to everyone around him - even people he claims to like.

For some, this is going to be hard to reconcile. Joker was, amongst other things, a convincing condemnation of a system that often fails the people it’s meant to help. Phillips isn’t doubling back on that message here (as I said, the Arkham guards are total creeps, the D.A. is a preening prick, and the judge clearly has it out for Arthur), but he is acknowledging that two things can be true at once: Arthur can be a victim of abuse and a bad person. Hurt people hurt people, as they say, and all Arthur really wants is to be loved; that’s very sad, but it doesn’t justify the pain he inflicts on others.

So Joker and Harley’s love story can’t be as grand as the versions we’ve seen before. It’s adolescent and shallow; Harley is adolescent and shallow. Lady Gaga is “wasted” in that her role is much smaller than advertised, but she’s perfectly cast in that she herself is a pop culture icon, a golden calf, a symbolic fantasy who created a whole new identity for herself.

I’m not arguing that Folie à Deux is a perfect movie. As with Killers of the Flower Moon, I’m not 100% convinced that the movie needed to abandon a certain narrative cohesion in order to make its very valid assertions. And there’s definitely an argument to be made at this point that Phillips has some serious issues with women (in case his previous movies didn’t tip you off); centering Harley over Joker might have even made Phillips’ point even more forcefully and in a way that doesn’t at least kinda-sorta posit women as being less-than-trustworthy.

But even if you hate Folie à Deux, I think you have to at least acknowledge and respect what Phillips is trying to accomplish here. When your prequel made a billion dollars at the box office and netted multiple Oscars, it take serious guts to go out of your way to make a movie that is so clearly going to anger audiences. But that’s what makes Folie à Deux so punk: Phillips has duped a massive corporation into funding a mega-budget middle finger to the very people who will be most excited to see it. If that doesn’t bring a smile to your face, nothing will.