Joker: Folie a Deux

dir: Todd Phillips

2024

It seems like no-one was meant to enjoy this flick. That would seem to be a strange thing to say about any flick, generally, but this flick seems so deliberately intended to undo whatever the first flick did that it seems bizarre that executives would have agreed to spend $200mill to make it and then another $100mill to market it to the world. There are few bus shelters right now in Melbourne that don’t have that film’s poster on them. They paid some sell-out muralist to cover a whole side of a building with an image of Joaquin and Gaga on it, several storeys high in the CBD.

But then, what about the film they made? I don’t know, as in I can’t pretend to have any secret knowledge of why they did what they did with this film, but I have to assume that this is exactly the film Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix wanted to make. The first one made over a billion dollars. Joaquin got a shiny golden award for Best Actor for that film.

It feels like whatever they wanted people to think about Joaquin and the character in the first flick had to be the opposite of what they get here in this anti-sequel.

Allow me to reiterate that I loathed that first film that was very successful. I did not loathe it for its success, but because I thought it was a facile and ludicrous rendering of a character (one that I don’t really care for anyway, regardless of which version is portrayed).

But many of the things that I loathed about that first flick aren’t present here at all. The Joker character seems pretty much to be absent as well. There’s just Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), as a prisoner awaiting trial at Arkham Asylum. It’s not even an Arthur Fleck from the first film, who was a somewhat broken and put-upon naif who ends up embracing his most maniacal impulses and gets revenge both on some people who he feels have wronged him, and an increasingly on fire world.

He’s just a hollowed out shell. He doesn’t even tell bad jokes anymore. The Arkham guards keep asking him for a joke, and he says nothing.

People ask him a lot of questions, and he answers none of them. All he seems to do is want more cigarettes. An obscene, almost comical amount of cigarettes are smoked in this flick. It’s really quite strange.

Several people throughout the flick ask Arthur questions about himself, about the past, about whatever he might have done in the first flick, and there are various intentions behind those questions, but not only do they go unanswered, on the most part, nothing is offered in its place. It’s not so much a deconstruction of the Joker persona or character, or an elaboration upon the world that created him; it really comes across as more of an un-construction, as in the filmmakers saying “you want or need us to fill in the boxes as well as some demented need you have, but there’s nothing there. There was nothing ever there, you were fools to impute so much meaning to it.”

Arthur regularly had delusional episodes in the first flick, but here in the sequel the delusions are songs, with minimal dancing, but heaps of singing. I didn’t mind the singing, even if I didn’t care much for the songs, most of which are banal and overly familiar, even as they mostly date from mid last century. But we’re also not given much of a reason as to why Arthur, who previously hallucinated episodes of things he would have liked to have done, and also imagined a world in which people laughed at his jokes deliberately and where he was loved, now lives in a world where his singing is enjoyable and where one woman loves him, being Lee, who loves him back in song.

There’s no business like show business, and there’s no love like that sung between two crazy kids in love.

Why is this movie a musical? Well, maybe it’s to make more of the chuds who liked the first film hate this flick so much more, and then hopefully hate themselves, but also to justify the presence of Lady Gaga as some version of the legendary baddie Harleen Quinzel, better known as Harley Quinn.

Here, she makes no bones about only being interested in the Joker persona, because, honestly, Arthur Fleck is no picnic, but Arthur, being delusional, thinks she loves him for his abs, his flat singing voice and his constant smoking.

But no, right from the start we know she’s only into the murder clown guy. Just like everyone else she keeps waiting for the Joker to slip out, poke through, reappear, but like many an audience member, she will continue to be disappointed.

In one of the many bizarre but not that interesting moments that crop up in this flick, when Arthur finds himself in solitary confinement, she appears in his cell, and they have sex, which, hooray for Arthur, could be the first time he’s had non-imagined consensual sex in his life. She insists, however, that she put on his makeup before they do the deed.

But even with the facepaint on, she’s trying to fuck the Joker, but whether it’s Arthur or the Clown Prince of Crime, he’s a two-pump chump who’s done almost before they’ve started.

I mean, this is curious to me because there’s two films I’ve watched this year starring Joaquin Phoenix where he plays two very famous characters, one based on earth history, one based on comic books, who are both sexually inadequate, and who both take that insecurity out on the world.

The other flick was Napoleon in case that’s already been forgotten by the world, and that clearly did not support the Great Man theory of history, and instead depicted that monster as the piece of shit that he was (whose actions and ambitions resulted in millions of deaths).

This flick mocks Arthur Fleck for being an incel, and then rubs the audience’s noses in it when he finally gets some. Eww, no, I shouldn’t have phrased it like that.

There’s not a soul watching this who thinks Lee, as she’s styled, actually loves Arthur, other than Arthur, for a while, but he’s not the best judge of character. This never pretends to be that much of a love story, because of and despite everything we see and hear in those interminable musical scenes. There’s no shared madness of passion or delight – there’s just two people who don’t really get each other, which is like most relationships in human history.

Nah, we know Lee just wants to watch the world burn, and it takes her too long to realise that Arthur isn’t up for it any more, if he ever was. I’m not even sure what he wants or expects. He does virtually nothing to go along with the narrative that he is insane, finding it offensive, perhaps. He doesn’t acknowledge any of the abuse he suffered, or continues to suffer at the hands of the guards. He doesn’t like the idea, as suggested by his lawyer and a pet psychiatrist, that he might have suffered a dissociative split personality as a child, which created this shadow persona as a defence mechanism. He doesn’t pretend the “Joker” persona was really the one in charge when the killings occurred (in the first film).

You might think I’m belabouring certain points that seem like I’m fixated on the first flick, but the reality is this flick does nothing beyond re-litigate everything to do with the first flick. Other than some songs and a few fires, and some horrific abuse by the guards on Arthur, not much happens, which is a strange thing to say about a film that’s nearly 2 and a half hours long.

Long arse movie that doesn’t say anything more than the Joker doesn’t exist, which we knew anyway, because fictional characters don’t exist other than how they are rendered, and mocks the very people who think the idea of a chaos agent mass murderer like the Joker is a cool idea.

There’s fantasy sequences in a fictional story that don’t mean anything more than the stuff we ‘actually’ see, so maybe some times we’re not sure if what we’re seeing actually happened, or whether it’s imagined, and both amount to the same thing, being nothing.

And then, hilariously, and I don’t know whether a spoiler warning even needs to be mentioned in a flick so hated and so notorious within a week of its release, but I am going to spoil the ending, because the first film was a piece of shit, and this flick is the chalk outline around a piece of shit, Arthur is murdered, but only after being (it’s implied) sexually abused by the Arkham guards(!). Not only is the point of the film that the Joker wasn’t really the Joker, and that he was just a sad inadequate man and failed comedian, he’s not even The Joker! The fucker that killed him is probably The Joker!

Everything is corrupt, nothing triumphs over anything, love isn’t real and doesn’t save you, being an incel is bad, being inspired by people who do bad things is bad, and songs don’t help diddly squat.

Enjoy! Honestly, after the first flick, this was a breath of fresh air. Well, maybe not fresh air, maybe a breath of putrid stench, but it’s a breath all the same! And breathing is good! I like breathing. This film is fucking hilarious, but it won’t make you laugh. It might make you grind your teeth, though.

5 times this flick is the outrage clickbait film of the year out of 10

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“I HOPE YOU GET CANCER” – director Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix, to the stupid fans of the first film - Joker: Folie a Deux