There’s a great moment at the end of Brian Azzerello and Lee Bermujo’s Joker – an original graphic novel published right around the same time as The Dark Knight’s theatrical release and appropriates much of its aesthetic — in which the jig is finally up for the Clown Prince of Crime. He’s on a bridge with one of his henchmen (our POV protagonist whose life has been thoroughly ruined by this particularly Bundy-as-crime-lord take on the character), using the goon as bait to reel in his big fish. The clown gets pensive when that white whale finally arrives, albeit dressed in black body armor, having foiled all the Joker’s plans. Gun held to his hostage’s head, he asks Batman why he has a square cut-out in his mask to show his mouth and chin. Doesn’t he want to be feared? Why emphasize that he’s just a man under all that? The Bat responds with just three words, his only dialogue in the entire book: “To mock you.”
A similar ethos governs Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux, which is about as catastrophic of a take-down for this imaginary boogeyman as much as the first film built him up. Or at least that’s what people assumed Joker was back in 2019 when it was the poster child for a particularly moronic strain of criticism about dangerous art in the waning hours of the Trump administration. I’ve come to see that movie, for all of its flaws, as a shockingly perceptive jab at the notion of superhero-movie-as-art, the culmination of three decades of the genre’s fight for respect. Following the release of Tim Burton’s Batman, that period saw budgets balloon, markets expanded worldwide, and competition emerged, initially in the form of Peak TV and then from streaming. Hollywood turned upside down, and studios began seeking out committed audiences, with “geeks” becoming godfathers, little Vito Corleones who’d make or break the bottom line behind a keyboard and who would show up each week without fail for their next serving of gritty gruel. After all, they held the power, so they demanded respect.
The form that “respect” took was overly serious, “badass” media that mirrored the same downward trend that comics themselves were on, having chased headline controversy — did you see DC killed Superman? — or meager literary acclaim to fuel speculator interest and juice sales from attention. The eventual collapse of direct-market sales meant that only adults or older teens were reading the books now, with the rack spinners of yore left to rot in the back rooms of newsstands, soon to vanish from internet competition. The comic book shop scared away a healthy amount of readers, and the culture of those places could be toxic for anyone not immersed in it already. As their power increased in Hollywood and declined in its original form, comic readers found themselves in a strange bind: Their icons were omnipresent and beloved but weren’t given the kind of respect they wanted. It wasn’t enough that the MCU broke the grimness of the ‘00s and opened up the field to a more broadly accessible audience, nor was it enough that their movies were, for the most part, accurate to their source material in tone, especially by 2019. No, they wanted the accolades. They wanted a Dark Knight Best Picture nomination, so the Academy expanded the category from 5 to a potential 10 nominees. They wanted their movies at festivals, so Joker went to Venice and won the Golden Lion. They wanted everyone to see how powerful and transformative the media they loved was, so they turned it into “dangerous art” that had all the hallmarks of precocious adolescence with its pathos replaced by a threat: take me seriously or else.
And so we get Joker, a feature-length burlesque of comic book respect entirely mortgaged by Martin Scorsese’s style and reputation. To echo a popular sentiment of the time, its banality was the point, and Phillips was and remains the right troll for the job. His movies are almost bitterly cruel in their perspective, with the male bonding ostensibly the focus of the Hangover movies taking a backseat to its wholesale mockery of the types of American masculinity, a riff on a similar thematic level as Old School or Road Trip. Viewed in that light, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is just the same archetype that Phillips has worked with throughout his entire career, applied with more surgical precision: he is the malcontent who demands that he be feared and loved unconditionally, who never got the respect he deserved until he stumbled on an act with mass appeal. This discontent is perhaps the defining attribute of American masculinity in the popular psyche at the moment, and its “toxicity” emerges from its unpredictability and its inherent goofiness. It’s a routine that thrives on attention and one that can only be done with precision. Any misstep renders it pathetic, which is what Phillips has spent two films trying to illustrate. The only difference is about a billion dollars, and some accolades, and Phillips now feels emboldened to say it loudly enough for those in the cheap seats to understand each word.
Or, perhaps, sing it. Had you told me a few months back that I’d like the Joker sequel as a musical more than Joshua Oppenheimer’s long-gestating The End, I’d have laughed at you while, somewhere inside the recesses of my brain, a little voice would say, “Yeah, that tracks.” While there’s a decent amount of New York, New York in here — the plot has echoes of that Star is Born revisionist element that Scorsese mined in a coke-fueled haze back in ’78– those same revisionist musicians that I cited in writing about The End are echoed to a better effect here. The Hollywood Pennies From Heaven is a major point of comparison, given that they’re both about how fantasy leads to delusion, assisted by decent imitations of the Freed Unit, with your average set of standards providing the musical milieu. The positions are reversed, though: Fleck is closer to the Bernadette Peters character in how he’s manipulated by Harlem Quinzel (Lady Gaga) as he awaits his trial for the six murders he committed in the last film. His life at Arkham State Hospital is mundane and stacked with cruelties, and he’s retreated into a kind of catatonia, at least until he sees Quinzel, bathed in warm light, singing with a group of less criminally insane patients while he’s being led to meet with his lawyer (Catherine Keener). A guard (Brendan Gleeson) pulls some strings and gets him in the class, and the two hit it off, bonding over the shared traumas they had: shitty parents, the same stupid neighborhood, and the criminal lashing out as a consequence. She “idolizes” the Joker — Fleck’s haunted alter-ego, dramatized in a pre-film cartoon as a shadow chasing him — and wants Arthur to bring a smile to the faces of all his fans on the courthouse steps.
The problem is that no one, Arthur included, really understands what the Joker is. Quinzel thinks it’s the real Arthur, which isn’t right, given that he’s more multifaceted and wounded to be the physical manifestation of nihilism. His lawyer thinks it’s a split personality when it’s more just an act and crafts his defense around that idea. Meanwhile, the public thinks it’s a boogeyman, representing their fears in a single unpredictable character, which also isn’t right. Arthur’s a coward who took the path of least resistance to superstardom, stumbling ass-backward into becoming a figurehead for the deluded masses through the archetypes of the people he killed. In reality, he’s just Arthur, who painted his face and put on a smile to ensure his thunderous hurt echoed: he’s still human and very pathetic, no matter what the media says. Phillips’ approach is similar to what a lot of the best True Crime media does when covering infamous serial killers: They are fed by the perception that they are demons summoned out of hell itself to wreak havoc upon the innocent. In truth, they’re just, to paraphrase an absent character in the Joker films, a cowardly and superstitious lot, who are worthy of ridicule rather than infamy and whose actions should be met with scorn. The only difference is that he’s doing this to an idea, a fantasy that’s as painfully dull and hopeless as it is, at this point, boring.
It’s lively enough, at least in practice. The film’s fantasy elements are wonderfully realized, with Hildur Guonadottir’s score carrying a lot of weight. Her work on the first film popularized her as the heir ascendant to her countryman Johann Johansson, and the soundscape she’s crafted here is as much of an aesthetic transformation as it is a refinement of what she had already established. Her discord pairs beautifully with the bright-and-sunny Broadway score, endowing the entire enterprise with a sickly sunshine, a cinematic dream jaundiced by reality. It’s performed capably by Gaga and Phoenix, both restrained and breathy, in contrast to the spectacular elements of the score. The fantasy sequences themselves are also capably realized by Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Shor, who echoes neo-revisionist musicals like Annette in the staging and set design (there’s a reason Maggie Gyllenhaal sought out Shor for her Bride of Frankenstein retelling, and it’s because he’s an undervalued stylist who never got a shot to cook working in the style-free trappings of Hollywood comedy ). Gaga is once again the pocket ace for films like this, matching Phoenix’s energy at every turn, shepherding him through the theatrical elements, shielding them both like a lead-lined fridge from what is sure to be disastrous fallout online and via word-of-mouth once the credits roll.
And make no mistake: This is going to be hated by practically everyone who sees it. I’m not saying this to hand out swag with “I liked the Joker sequel on release, and all I got was this stupid t-shirt” for people to wear in 20 years when the culture reevaluates this movie; I’m saying that it is a confrontational experience that mocks you for giving a shit about it and assigning it with “importance.” These movies should have never existed in the first place, and the Joker, as a character, was played the fuck out by the time we saw Jared Leto’s face tattoos. His gradual drift from “a funny mobster in face make-up” to “the physical manifestation of anarchic chaos, the pure antagonist of man, a primal unknowable evil that we’re all one bad day away from” has been one of the worst evolutions in popular culture. The best take on him isn’t Ledger’s — it’s Mark Hamill’s, who understood the character’s appeal and core so that it ruined it for generations. Any attempt at “recasting” the character in a new light or in a darker way makes him duller, replacing whatever intelligence the character possessed with empty nihilism. He always has a plan; even Ledger’s take on the character has that. A Joker being consumed by bloodlust is a boring Joker, and besides, we have Jigsaw for that.
The adage that “if you have to tell a joke twice, it isn’t funny” sucks, and I don’t think Phillips restating his thesis — that the trappings of art don’t make pulp poetry and that pulp doesn’t have to be poetry in the first place — is properly served by it. Follie a Deux is best seen as the punchline to Joker’s set-up, presenting us with the full story of this particular take on the character’s downfall while accurately summing up everything that fucking sucks about comic book movies, film culture, and audience expectations. After all, this is a film series that got hit with so many inaccurate labels — remember when the first one was going to be the thing that kickstarted the incel revolution or whatever — and suffered the indignation of an audience that had decided what it was before they actually saw it. Intellectuals assumed it was red meat for their cultural opponents, fans assumed it was the moment in which superhero-adjacent movies became art, and every ironic shitposter balked at both of those stupid ideas, filling the internet with more ephemeral slop.
These movies are best thought of as poison pills, meant to enrage and frustrate anyone locked into a particular vision of what cinema should be. The sequel simply demonstrates that it agrees with its detractors on all points, just not how they like it. It depicts, not endorses, refusing easy condemnation for those too busy looking at their phones; it takes comics seriously, finds the medium not up for the task, and suggests that it was always art, to begin with, worthy of respect but not in this form. It’s the ultimate troll job, self-immolating atop the positive press the first film got, acknowledging shitposting flippancy, and then doing it better than one could do in a tweet or an image macro. He does all of this while absolutely destroying the perception of this blighted and awful character as a power fantasy for the powerless, so much so that I doubt Barry Keoghan will show up in The Batman Part II and that James Gunn will likely wait a decade before introducing him to David Corenswet. Phillips has gone out on his terms in the most theatrical way possible, mocking the idea that minted him and WB a billion dollars, and it’s hard not to imagine that, somewhere in hell, GG Allin is proud of him.