Joker: Folie a Deux (2024)

Rated R for near constant swearing, abuse, suicidal imagery, violence, self-mutilation, murder, gore, and a possible rape scene.  It's got a lot of stuff, as did the first movie.  It is slightly more tame than the first movie mainly because much of the movie is a trial film compared to the first movie that's about a killing spree.  That being said, it's still a lot to take in.  R.

DIRECTOR: Todd Phillips

I'm so sorry, guys.  Really, I'm sorry.  I'm going to hate me too after this.  While watching the movie, I knew that I was going to have to cross this bridge.  But I might be the guy who didn't hate Madame Web and straight up liked Joker: Folie a Deux.  Even worse, I'm one of the people who disliked the first Joker movie.

Now, I do have to put some qualifiers on this take of the film.  There are things in the movie that absolutely do not work.  The big miracle here is the fact that I like a movie that I shouldn't like.  I don't love it.  I probably won't watch it again.  It won't make any lists.  But did I earnestly like it?  Sure.  But since I'm bringing up the weak stuff, mind as well start there.  It's going to get spoilery, so please understand that as I harp on this.  The cartoon at the beginning is off-putting.  I tend to like this kind of stuff.  The idea of doing something different and out of the box tends to work with me, especially when it is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia out of a concept.  With Warner Brothers owning the DC characters, I love the idea behind a Looney Tune being made out of the Joker.  There's something there, but this does not work.  When I see stuff like this, it has to be pitch perfect.  I'm looking at the alternate opening to Into the Spider-Verse where we see an alternate reality cartoon show for Spider-Ham.  When I watch that, it feels like it was a fully fleshed out cartoon that we're just catching a glimpse of.  The Joker opening?  It feels almost like a fan movie.  Immediately, the movie is trying to win me back.  Maybe the same thing happened for other people watching the movie and it never won them back.  For me, I could set that bit aside and move on.  (Note: I googled it and apparently people love the cartoon because it came from the Triplets of Belleville guy.  Great, now I'm really off the mark.) 

The other thing that bugged me was the end.  I'm talking entirely execution (no pun intended).  A lot of people were upset the fact that Arthur Fleck was not the canonical Joker that would fight Batman.  I mean, I'm going to go into DC Comics canon and talk about how there are multiple Jokers and that people shouldn't get all that hung-up on this idea, but that's besides the point.  I kinda sorta like the idea behind the fact that Arthur Fleck dies as the Joker only for the Joker to be a concept.  It's been played around with in DC media for a while.  I know Gotham made a meal out of that idea because, from what I understand, Gotham couldn't use the Joker for legal reasons so they kept creeping in closer and closer to the Joker concept without actually naming him Joker?  I don't know how much of that is true.  I just heard that.  (Another note: I powered through Gotham because my completist brain won't let me leave a show unwatched.) My biggest problem is two-fold.  1) It really feels like Joaquin Phoenix wanted to be sure to never return to this part.  A lot of what I like about the movie is that it is, while tonally very similar to the first movie, significantly riskier than the first movie.  That was Phoenix's stipulation for coming back for a sequel, the notion that he was going to be challenged to do something new.  But it also felt like a lot of arm twisting to get him back.  So the death of Arthur Fleck felt more about Phoenix than it did for the character.  2) It's very rushed.  There's a way to kill Arthur Fleck that feels more thematically appropriate to the way that the movie sets him up. He could have been killed in his escape as an effigy to his cult following.  It could have been one of the random masks in the crowd.  It could have been in a moment of Arthur finding success, knowing that the mantle of Joker is too big for even him to handle.  But instead, it's this scene that I feel like Todd Phillips really wanted to do in the first movie (which was kiboshed by Nolan) and he kind of just slid it in there.

The movie is actually quite cruel to Arthur.  The first one is too.  I don't deny that.  Joker, for all of its glorification of violence, is a condemnation of society that wants to build up evil.  We are our own executioners and I can kind of get behind that.  It has a lot of that Fight Club syndrome happening, where we celebrate the thing that we're supposed to be condemning.  But Joker 2 does some good things to remind us that the justice system is completely screwed over.  It builds this story that shows that Arthur Fleck needs the Joker to survive.  The movie starts with him in this liminal space.  He has done all of these things and he's a criminal celebrity.  But he's also someone who hasn't the freedom to be a fully embraced Joker, so why bother try?  Part of me argues that it backpedals the character a bit to get him to be the abused Arthur from the first movie. But I get more of a "If I can't do it right, why bother do anything at all?"  There's the scene where the guards trick one of the slower inmates who worships Joker to try kissing Arthur.  Arthur goes through with it, emotionless.  He's not this suffering guy. He's numb.  

The movie builds this Arthur to a crescendo.  His relationship with Lee pulls him out of this stupor not because she loves Arthur, but because she loves Joker.  If the movie argues one thing, it's that Arthur and the Joker aren't two separate people, as much as people want them to be.  Arthur sees Lee as someone who loves him.  She hates the face he has, but she has that idea that she can fix him.  The whole "Put on a happy face?"  That's a bit on the nose, but it works really well. It's only when Lee is disappointed that Arthur is first and foremost a person and not the face of mass murder that she leaves him behind.  It's a weird subversion of the Harley Quinn mythos, where Joker is the toxic one and Harley is the victim of his madness.  (That's where the term Folie a Deux comes from!  Neat!)  It's such a desire to split Joker from Arthur that Arthur himself starts to believe it.  It makes sense.  Joker and Arthur act differently.  He has this confidence that he traditionally does not have.  Why would he think any differently when it comes to splitting his personality?

But the possible rape sequence?  It's never clear that it's a rape.  I think we're meant to believe that it is a rape because of Arthur's reaction after the assault.  I oddly choose to view this scene as a sex crime mainly because Arthur is physically brutalized many times between both movies.  If anything, physical trauma only galvanizes his Joker persona. It's when he's abused in the subway in the first movie that he kills his assaulters execution style.  But after the moment with the prison guards, he's broken.  All signs of Joker are missing.  He puts on the makeup and that doesn't even bring that personality out.  He seems ashamed of his actions.  I even go as far as to applaud that Arthur confesses that he is not the person that the world wants him to be.  I do hate that it comes out of sexual assault (again, my read of that cryptic scene).  But it is also the only thing that makes sense if we're looking at his characterization as a whole.  Is it possible that it was just a beating that was the last straw?  Maybe.  Is it that they potentially beat him harder?  Maybe.  Maybe he was so high at the trial and so low at the beating that something in him snapped.  These are all options.  But he just seems so broken in that scene that I'm choosing to view the scene as a commentary on sexual assault.

Now, I think that people hated this movie for the wrong reasons.  I have a handful of reasons why this movie went down like a lead weight and that it is better than people understand.  The first reason is dumb and it makes me mad at audience and mad at studios.  People didn't want this movie to be a musical. Hollywood has been so scared about making musicals outside of Wicked.   Trailers for movies that are musicals hilariously avoid any sign of singing because musicals are a thing of the past.  Look at the Mean Girls trailer.  Yeah.  It's dumb.  As a continuation of that reasoning, it's the incel crowd.  I honestly think that the first movie --like that Fight Club in its attempt to satirize society but got lost in the coolness factor --was hoisted up as this piece of cinema that spoke to the darkness of a lot of bad people out there. When there was singing and love and that Arthur isn't lauded as a hero at the end of the movie, people lost their minds.  They wanted Joker 2 to be exactly like Joker 1, only with a bigger body count.  Instead they got a dancing, singing, courtroom legal drama.  Tone and characters can only go so far with a crowd that wants misery.  

The final reason is the most disturbing.  I bet you if you released that movie today, it would do significantly better.  I'm actually afraid to write this because I'm worried it will get flagged for something. For those people who saw this movie, can you imagine if it was released today?  I'm not talking about a Christmas release.  I'm talking in light of Luigi Mangione.  Yeah.  Now part of my SEO has that name under it.  I wonder how long until Facebook blocks my blog.  Joker: Folie a Deux is, at its core, a story about a guy who murders someone publicly and, instead of society getting upset, raises that murder to celebrity status.  Arthur Fleck gets copycat killers and people wearing his outfit out in public.  They call for his freedom, claiming that his victims got what they deserved.  Listen, I'm processing a lot of that assassination.  The one thing I know is that I hate gun violence so much.  I do.  I'm an aggressive pacifist, to the point of being stupid. But I also know that we're in a place in society where we have to consider what constitutes murder and what constitutes shareholder profits.  Now, release the Joker movie about a trial that has a hard time convicting him because so many people like what he did.  That's a different movie than it was in October.  

Anyway, I have to say that I liked the movie.  I think it was complex.  I think the musical stuff aligns with the better parts of part one.  After all, Arthur always did live in a fantasy world where he's the star of his own show.  Just because the show became a musical or a variety show, it didn't change the character's core.  If anything, it made it more complex when you added a second character to shift the little things going on in Arthur.  Am I going to be defensive about liking it?  Yeah.  I'm probably going to downplay it a bit.  But I'm the guy who liked Joker: Folie a Deux when he didn't even like Joker.  I'm the worst.