[COLUMN] Joker: Folie á Deux is an Indulgent, Committed Cinematic Troll | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains full spoilers for Joker: Folie á Deux. Like, we literally discuss the closing image over several paragraphs. So, consider yourself forewarned.

There is a moment near the end of the second act of The Dark Knight, when the Joker (Heath Ledger) dowses a huge pile of cash in gasoline and sets it on fire. Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux feels like watching that scene play out in slow motion over two hours and twenty minutes. Phillips has taken a significant chunk of change from Warner Bros. – although he argues reports of a $200m budget are “absurd” – and effectively set it ablaze on screen. It feels, appropriately enough, like a dark joke.

Thematically and narratively, there was nothing in Todd Phillips’ Joker that required a sequel, beyond its billion-dollar gross and its awards success. Folie á Deux agrees, feeling like a sequel that hates its own existence. From start to finish, Folie á Deux feels like it has been designed specifically to deny fans of Joker everything that they might want from a sequel. Folie á Deux doesn’t just fail to offer emotional catharsis. It actively denies its audience any sense of satisfaction.

This is obvious in the film’s structure. Folie á Deux is effectively half a courtroom drama that serves as a framework to put Joker itself on trial and half an attempt at a minimalist New Hollywood movie musical in the style of something like Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. There is something clever in this. Joker was very obviously indebted to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, so it makes sense for the sequel to draw from the musical that he made between them.

New York, New York was a massive flop. It was critically reviled on initial release, with pundits like Vincent Canby confessing that they were “increasingly dumbfounded” by the film, which blended gritty 1970s realism with the framework of a 1950s studio spectacular to create a “miserabilist musical misfire.” However, New York, New York was an achingly sincere film. By most accounts, the film’s failure profoundly affected Scorsese, who took its failure to mean he would “never” enjoy the mass success of Steven Spielberg or Francis Ford Coppola.

In contrast, Folie á Deux harbors no delusions of populist appeal. Arthur Fleck (Jaquin Phoenix) never gets a moment of violent catharsis to mirror the climax of Joker. Instead, the character is repeatedly brutalized and humiliated. Arthur is beaten and sexually assaulted by the guards at Arkham State Hospital led by Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson), none of whom face any consequences. He is abandoned by his lover Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga) when he rejects the mantle of “Joker.” In the film’s final moments, he is murdered by an anonymous Arkham inmate (Connor Storrie).

There is a clear sense of intentionality to this brutalism. The film's opening twenty minutes find Arthur completely silent, refusing to perform as the guards beg him to tell a joke. In one fantasy, imagining co-hosting a late night talk show, Arthur complains to Lee, “Honey, I have a sneaking suspicion we’re not giving the people what they want.” As Jackie’s goons drag Arthur to a beating, Arthur protests, “Why is everyone so upset at me?” When a car bomb goes off during the trial, Arthur finds himself on the streets of Gotham fleeing his psychotic fans, as they shout, “Come back, Joker! I love you!” That’s the movie in microcosm.

Folie á Deux is very clearly in conversation with Joker. It is in many ways about mediated reality. It opens with a Looney Tunes short starring Arthur Fleck, “Me and My Shadow”, in which Arthur is consumed by his “Joker” persona. Much of the film is seen through television cameras, including interviews with Arthur and his trial – “one of the first trials to be nationally televised.” Even the film’s musical numbers are a form of mediation. In classic musical fashion, Phillips argues they are a way for Arthur to express himself when he doesn’t have “the words to say what he wants to say.”

As such, Folie á Deux is a raised middle finger directed at multiple targets which it addresses almost directly. It rebukes a certain kind of fan of Joker, the class of modern media consumer that critic Emily Nussbaum described as the “bad fan.” It’s possible to read Folie á Deux as an elaborate and extended attempt to trick a bunch of fans who treat Arthur’s violent rampage as a masculine power fantasy into watching a musical and courtroom drama. At one point, Arthur stares down the camera and declares, “There is no Joker.”

To be frank, there is something oddly appealing in this. Certain strains of modern fandom have gone rabid. There is a reluctance on the part of the providers of content to directly confront and call out such toxic behavior, often leaving individual artists to acknowledge such conduct. Joker was undoubtedly a movie with a toxic fan culture around it, as most comic book properties have developed in recent years, and so there is catharsis in Folie á Deux’s direct provocation of those fans.

More broadly, though, Folie á Deux also feels like a piece of guerilla filmmaking within the studio system. Much has been written about how the modern superhero boom has effectively homogenized the kinds of films that major studios will spend money on. Phillips reportedly pitched Joker to Phoenix as a heist movie, stating, “We’re gonna take $55 million from Warner Bros. and do whatever the hell we want.” In reality, it felt more like an elaborate troll.

Joker and Folie á Deux both feel like pieces of extremely cynical performance art. Joker is proof that the only way to convince a classic Hollywood studio like Warner Bros. to make something like Taxi Driver is to clothe it in familiar intellectual property. Folie á Deux pushes that idea even further, effectively an entire movie mocking the idea of trying to franchise a film like Joker. The closing image of Arthur bleeding out on the floor is a preemptive rejection of Joker: Ménage á Trois.

Indeed, Folie á Deux often seems to troll the very idea of fan service. Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) is a major character in the film, and is in the courtroom when the car bomb goes off, but he never transforms into Two-Face. As Arthur lays dying in the film’s closing moments, his killer carves the traditional Joker grin into his own face, evoking Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. While more traditional comic book movies would focus on this transformation, Phillips lets the killer drift out of focus, panning down and zooming in on Arthur’s face. There’s a clear set-up and refusal of traditional franchise logic in Folie á Deux. It’s almost provocative.

Phillips has form here. Before making Joker, Phillips was best known for his work in comedy, on movies like Due Date and the Hangover trilogy. The second and third movies in the Hangover franchise have the same sort of bleakly cynical outlook as Folie á Deux, feeling like a joke being played on an audience that just wants more of the original film. The Hangover, Part III infamously pivots from a raunchy dude-friendly comedy into a bizarre hardboiled film noir.

This is – and always has been – part of Phillips’ character. As a student at NYU, Phillips directed a documentary called Hated about punk rocker G.G. Allin. Allin was, to put it mildly, a controversial figure. His act involved self-mutilation and coprophagia. Phillips leaned into this, getting incarcerated serial killer John Wayne Gacy to design a poster that Phillips sold that helped to pay for the movie. It worked, despite being a student film, Hated got “into like 45 theatres and it made money.”

There is arguably a clear throughline from Hated to Joker. “If I didn’t do what I did onstage,” Allin confesses in the documentary, “I’d probably kill somebody.” Joker is the story of another performer who struggles to articulate himself on stage. Arthur ends up killing six people and sparking citywide riots. There is a compelling metatext there. It is difficult to discuss Joker without talking about the national panic that greeted its original theatrical release.

While Joker won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the American media treated this $80m piece of intellectual property from a major studio as if it were an inflammatory text. Joker was “dangerous” or “reckless.” Entertainment Weekly announced that Joker was so dangerous that it had “chosen not to grade” the film. The Deseret News solemnly declared, “This is the wrong time for Joker.” Undercover cops attended New York screenings. The American military was on standby.

To be clear, this is not to belittle the risk of a horrific mass shooting event. After all, there had been one such shooting at the opening weekend of The Dark Knight Rises. However, in the United States there are almost two mass shooting events every day. American children are more likely to die due to gun violence than car accidents. In 2019, there was a high-profile case of a shooting in a movie theatre – during a screening of Jordan Peele’s Us.

Movies can lead to violent acts. John Hinkley Jr.’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in March 1981 was inspired by Taxi Driver. However, it is insane to blame movies for those violent acts. In many cases, mass media serves as a convenient scapegoat to avoid grappling with the actual causes of such horrendous events: gun culture, mental illness, misogyny, white supremacy, the broader erosion of the social fabric. Joker was a shadow, unto which these fears could be displaced.

To a certain extent, Joker itself was in conversation with that idea. Arthur was coopted as the face of a social revolution that he had no real interest in or understanding of. When Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro) asks whether Arthur is associated with the protestors, Arthur simply responds, “I don't believe any of that. I don't believe in anything.” Arthur’s white clown make-up was a mask, onto which anything could be projected by anyone.

Indeed, it’s possible to read Joker as a deconstruction of what is the core secular myth of modern pop culture: the superhero origin story. Most superhero origins build to a moment of ascent, when Superman (Henry Cavill) or Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) take flight. Instead, the most iconic moment in Joker is one of descent: Arthur dancing down the steps. Arthur transforms from man to symbol, but that symbol doesn’t actually mean anything, it just has meaning imposed on it.

Folie á Deux finds Phillips and Phoenix extrapolating from that idea, taking the cynicism that drove Joker and applying it to the sequel. This time, the pair aren’t stealing money from Warner Bros. to make their own movie, they are setting it on fire. It is possible – even justifiable – to be outraged at this. Those millions of dollars could have fed the needy or housed the homeless. In theory, it could have made several movies like Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Juror #2.

However, in reality, the money spent on Folie á Deux most likely would have been spent on something like The Flash, Shazam! Fury of the Gods or Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. In truth, it’s hard to recommend Folie á Deux as anything outside a piece of performance art – a major and mainstream studio film that displays open and naked contempt for the mere inevitability of its own existence. In that alone, it is at least more interesting than most contemporary comic book movies.

Folie á Deux demonstrates an irreverence to which Deadpool & Wolverine could only broadly gesture. It’s one grim and over-extended joke – a joke on the studio, on the audience, on the fans. However, in its own bleak way, it’s actually pretty funny.