I was asked to review the first Joker film for this paper when it came out five years ago. This was my main takeaway at the time: it was an origin story that missed the point of the titular character entirely.
To recap, I had a gripe with the concept before the movie was even filmed. The Joker, I still believe, is one of those characters that are enriched by a lack of background. Filling in that void, instead of enhancing them, robs them of their mystique. The Joker, I repeat, exists only to provide a foil to Batman: how long will our hero continue to believe in redemption for a villain so irredeemable? Will Batman compromise his principles for the greater good? Or is the very idea of greater good the point where we succumb to evil? I can go on and on.
That Arthur Fleck, the pre-Joker of Todd Phillips’s DC Universe, is so non-threatening only fuelled my dislike even though the film itself, I admit, wasn’t fundamentally bad.
But no one died and made me king of what constitutes a good screen adaptation of a beloved comic book character. My feelings aside, the first film was a resounding success, winning both mainstream acclaim and a fanatic cult following. The latter, over the years, mined the movie for a never-ending stream of ‘literally me’ memes.
The Joker character has long resonated with the misfits and the outcasts. Young people, mostly male, who never quite seem to gel with the world around them have long found the character strangely ‘inspirational’. “Keep pushing us and see what happens. Maybe we’ll go ‘Joker’ on you one day,” is a fantasy the character fuels. If you can’t be Batman – handsome, rich, good at everything – why not be the Joker, the next best thing?
The market for a Joker film was always ripe. But I can’t help but wonder if the makers regretted inadvertently (or advertently) pandering to an audience mainstream American pop culture no longer wants to associate with. It’s funny in fact how starkly different trajectories two characters joined at the hip – the Joker and Harley Quinn – have followed over the last decade or two. Both were equally deranged and depraved when the latter was conceived. They were literal examples of folie à deux, ‘madness of two’ in French, which is used for a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are ‘transmitted’ from one individual to another.
But where Harley has found redemption – first by being reframed as a victim and survivor of a toxic relationship, and now as an empowered, if slightly maniacal, anti-heroine who doesn’t play by the rules of a patriarchal world – the Joker in his titular film franchise was reduced to a husk. His origin recast him as a meek, psychologically troubled man. We were meant to feel sorry him for but not admire him. I personally found it hard to imagine how the Todd Phillips version would go toe to toe with the Batman.
Fans of the first film missed that memo and something about Arthur Fleck resonated with alienated young men. Like Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver or Tony Montana of Scarface, he became a celebrated icon rather than the cautionary tale the authors intended.
This leads us to the widely derided sequel released this month. Fans who saw the film in the first week took to social media to warn others from ‘wasting their time’. Posting clips and spoilers, they generated a negative word of mouth that turned the sequel into a ‘black eye’ for Warner Bros, as one Wall Street analyst put it. In its first two weeks, Joker: Folie à Deux (JFaD) generated a little more than half of what its prequel earned in three days. Reports suggest the movie will end up losing between $150 million to $200 million at a time when the studio was banking on a hit.
When the sequel was announced, fans had hoped they would get to see Joaquin Phoenix’s Fleck fully morph into a more menacing and psychotic version of the Joker than the first film. What they instead received is what critics have called an experimental metacommentary, seemingly intended to antagonise the character’s fanbase. In leaning so heavily towards subversion, however, it seems the makers of the film quite literally lost the plot.
Where the first movie had episodes of that built up towards a violent climax, JFaD seems to lead nowhere at all. Fleck is bullied and antagonised in a series of dour exchanges that build up to his final trial that seem to be aimed at the audience rather than the protagonist. Those exchanges are interrupted by the questionable choice of musical numbers that make me wonder if ‘The Jazz Singer’ would have been a better title for the sequel.
More than anything, it is the conclusion of the film that I find both deeply problematic and pointless.
***SPOILER ALERT***
When Fleck reveals his abuse by prison guards during his trial, they respond by stripping him naked and brutally assaulting him upon his return to prison that night. It is implied Fleck is raped and at the final hearing in court the next day, he renounces the Joker persona. I don’t quite understand how we should interpret this troubling choice. Are we to think that sexual assault is a good way to fix the delusions of would be supervillains?
The film ends with Fleck’s stabbing and presumed death at hands of a fellow inmate. The assailant then carves a smile on his own face à la Heath Ledger’s Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night. If Fleck wasn’t intended to be the Joker then whose origin did we watch over two movies anyway?
Perhaps the real joke was on the fans all along.