[COLUMN] Joker: Folie á Deux, The Matrix Resurrections and the Modern Self-Hating Sequel | by Darren Mooney

Joker: Folie á Deux is a sequel that seems to radiate contempt. It often feels like the movie hates its audience and its critics. However, Folie á Deux most aggressively hates itself. It is a sequel that seems angry at the very notion of its own existence, of the studio system that ushered it into being, and the market forces that made it an inevitability. In that way, Folie á Deux feels like a particularly pronounced example of a very modern trend: the self-hating sequel.

Sequels have always been in conversation with their audience. Frank Herbert followed up Dune with Dune Messiah, which often feels like it was written by Father Leviatch (Stephen McKinley Henderson) from Lady Bird, lamenting of his audience, “They didn’t understand it.” Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II, which the director claims was the first Hollywood sequel with “two” in the title, plays as a deconstruction of the power fantasy of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino).

Sequels have always zigged and zagged, pivoting sharply from one idea or perspective to another. James Cameron’s Aliens is almost diametrically opposed to the central thematic ideas of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Under showrunner Ira Steven Behr, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine often defined itself in opposition to Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, it was rarer to encounter a sequel like David Fincher’s Alien³, a bleakly nihilistic work that seemed to cynically condemn its entire existence.

On release, Alien³ felt like an oddity. There had never been a sequel in a major franchise quite like it. It was a movie that seemed designed to punish its characters, and through them punish the audience for their desire to perpetuate the franchise. Everything that Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) had earned at the end of Aliens was stripped away from her. It wasn’t enough to kill the adorable young Newt (Carrie Henn), the audience was made to sit through an extended autopsy.

Alien³ ended with Ripley throwing herself into a blast furnace to destroy the xenomorph embryo in her chest, denying “the Company” the opportunity to further extend the Alien franchise. It was also Weaver herself declaring herself over and done with the film series, ready to move on. There was no happy ending. There was just an ending. Of course, Weaver would return five years later in Alien Resurrection, because even this was not enough to kill the series.

In recent years, sequels like Alien³ have become a lot more common. There is, for example, a similar vibe to Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, which finds Scott offer a sequel to Prometheus that is both much more conventional and much more contemptuous in its treatment of the iconic xenomorph, a monster so familiar that Scott had described it as “cooked, with an orange in its mouth.” Covenant is a nasty and mean-spirited piece of work, which laments the franchise’s lack of creativity.

However, these sorts of sequels also occur outside the confines of the Alien franchise. Scream VI, for example, is populated with characters – both heroes and villains – who seem to hate scary movies. “What’s your favorite scary movie?” the killer (Roger L. Jackson) taunts Laura (Samara Weaving). She chuckles, “Not that one.” The film’s opening sequence closes with Jason (Tony Revolori) protesting that he needs to finish the movie, only for the killer to reply, “Who gives a fuck about movies?”

These films often feel like they exist in conversation with larger factors, the meta-narratives that shape the franchises and industry as a whole. The reshot ending of Dark Phoenix, for example, feels like an elaborate and committed troll. The film finds Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) trying to rebrand the merry mutants as generic superheroes and the climax finds the characters taken into the custody of the Mutant Control Unit – herded into cages by men in uniforms branded “MCU.”

There are also a number of recent sequels that feel like a conscious effort to close off the larger franchise. Despite the launch of The Continental and the looming release of The Ballerina, John Wick: Chapter 4 made a point to close with the death of the title character (Keanu Reeves). Much like killing off Ripley at the end of Alien³, that would seem to be the end of that. Inevitably, there are already rumors swirling of plans for John Wick: Chapter 5.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is not Reeves’ only dalliance with a self-hating sequel. Up until Joker: Folie á Deux, perhaps the best illustration of this trend was Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections. The long-delayed fourth film in the franchise often feels like Wachowski trying to wrest control of the legacy of The Matrix from its worst fans, avoiding easy nostalgia to offer an even more aggressive version of the argument advanced by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream.

Folie á Deux is even more of a “screw you!” sequel than these examples. Following the arrest of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) pursues the death penalty. Set largely in a courtroom, Folie á Deux uses this framing device to put Joker literally and figuratively on trial. It largely exists as a rebuke to both the “bad fans” who embraced Joker as a power fantasy and as a middle finger towards the idea of these sorts of intellectual property plays.

Watching these films, the impulse is to ask, “Why?” After all, these movies seem almost deliberately designed to provoke fan outrage and anger. They are movies that are built in such a way as to not only avoid giving a vocal portion of the audience what they want, but also to actively deny those viewers any satisfaction. “Honey, I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re not giving the people what they want,” Arthur confesses to Harleen (Lady Gaga) in Folie á Deux. This is an understatement.

This impulse runs counter to the core tenets of capitalism, the belief that “the customer is always right” and so the obligation is to “give the people what they want” because nobody “has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” The argument is that the audience knows what they want, and it is the responsibility of creators to offer consumers more of what they know that they enjoy. It’s a logical – if somewhat cynical – argument.

That said, this also fundamentally misunderstands how the creative process works. Storytelling is not a service industry. “My approach to writing is never ' give the audience what they want ' because the audience don't know what they want,” explains comic book legend Alan Moore. “That's why they're the audience.” If fans want to dictate the direction or flow of a given narrative, that is what fanfiction is for. It is a simple fact of life that the audience is not the creator, and it never will be. The viewer buys a ticket, not a stake.

However, there is an inherent tension between that reality and the demands of the larger market. While sequels, franchises and spin-offs have always been part of the Hollywood business model, the trend has undoubtedly exaggerated over the past few decades. In 1990, there were only two sequels among the ten highest-grossing movies of the year at the domestic box office. In 2000, there was only one. By 2010, sequels were fully half the top ten.

In 1993, there was not a single sequel among the ten highest-grossing movies of the year. In 2011, the only non-sequels in the top ten where Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, both part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 2019, the only film in the top ten that wasn’t a sequel, a remake or part of a larger shared universe was Todd Phillips’ Joker, which was a pastiche based on existing intellectual property. These kinds of films are just what the major studios make now. The market must be fed.

As such, film production has become an exercise in what might be termed “cultural fracking”, a desire to ensure maximum return on investment for shareholders by mining audience nostalgia for existing intellectual property. It doesn’t matter whether an earlier film needs a sequel. It doesn’t matter how long an earlier film has gone without a sequel. If there is profit to be wrung from a brand, that intellectual property will be squeezed until there is nothing left but pulp.

Of course, these corporations only pursue this approach because there is a clear sense that there is an audience that wants it. There is money to be collected by making these sequels. As such, there’s an increasing impulse to pander to existing audiences, to flatter fans and convince them that they are part of the creative process. Recent reports confirm what most observers of contemporary pop culture long speculated, that these studios are extremely beholden to the most vocal of fans.

To be clear, Hollywood was always an inherently capitalist enterprise. To quote David Zaslav, recycling some intellectual property from Jerry Maguire, “It’s not show friends – it’s show business.” However, there was always an understanding that the profits and sustainability of the industry derived from the creative vision of artists and creators. That there was some ineffable spark of personality that made these projects – even the biggest ones – profoundly human and resonant.

That idea has been largely eroded. This is obvious in smaller details, such as the way that media has been reduced to “content”, treating it as bland and indistinguishable slop that can be generated and portioned like any other byproduct. It’s also evident in Hollywood’s eagerness to embrace technologies like large learning models, which can compile and concatenate large data sets into output that superficially resembles art, but cannot generate anything new or personal.

Many of these modern “screw you!” sequels feel like a response to these trends. They are the work of artists trying desperately to assert ownership of their work, even if that means raising a defiant middle finger to those that would just reduce to formless content. “The market’s tough,” explains Smith (Jonathan Groff) in The Matrix Resurrections. “I’m sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Bros., has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.” He warns Neo (Keanu Reeves), “They informed me they’re gonna do it with or without us.”

This felt like an admission from filmmaker Lana Wachowski that The Matrix Resurrections was her last chance to assert her ownership of The Matrix, a film that was profoundly personal to her and coopted by the worst reactionary fandom. Incidentally, Wachowski was correction. Warner Bros. have announced that they have a fifth Matrix film in development from writer and director Drew Goddard. While Lana is an executive producer, neither Wachowski Sister is actively involved.

It's hard to recall a time when mainstream Hollywood filmmaking has been so actively hostile to creatives. This wave of self-hating – and often self-immolating – sequels feels like the last tangible form of resistance, the last chance that these creators have to assert control of their work, even if that means burning it all down.