Disclaimer #
This article contains unmarked spoilers for Joker, Joker Folie à Deux the Telltale Batman game, the Absolute Batman comic, the Batman the Caped Crusader TV show and the Batman 1989 movie throughout.
The Original #
I’ve been a huge fan of the DC Universe, or at least the Batman mythos and its surrounding characters, ever since I was a kid so when Todd Phillips’ Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, hit the big screens in 2019 I was keen to go and see it, watching it with a friend of mine at my local cinema, I was a big fan of the film’s approach, a cartoonish comic book villain transformed with a terrifying origin story, terrifying because it was actually plausible.
Most iterations of the Joker in media don’t even get an origin story, but when they do it usually goes something like this, he finds himself in a chemical plant, falls into a vat of acid and instead of being melted he has his skin bleached white and his hair turns green, his “one bad day”, he emerges as a madman who wants to bring torment and chaos to everyone else, proving that a bad day like his can make anyone snap.
Phillips’ and Phoenix’s origin is something very different, the man who becomes Joker has an identity, Arthur Fleck, a failing stand up comic and performer with a medical condition that leaves him prone to uncontrollable fits of laughter, especially when under stress, and a background of childhood trauma, Fleck is a fairly mild kind man and meets with a therapist to talk about his experiences and receive medication, but the meds aren’t strong enough, he still suffers from his afflictions.
Over time his life gets progressively worse, he gets assaulted at work, fired from his job, then he gets assaulted on the subway, prompting him to snap and shoot 2 of his attackers, then chase after the 3rd as he flees, murdering him in cold blood, the killings inspire a wave of angry vigilantes in clown masks to take to the streets.
The city’s social services get cut back leaving him with no meds, his comedy show bombs and he learns about the depth of his mother’s manipulation, he kills her, then one of his ex-colleagues, then after being invited on a popular talk show, he kills the host, who made fun of him in the past, after these 6 killings, he’s finally caught and despite a brief escape thanks to some of the clowns, he ends up in Arkham.
The slow prodding of this stimuli turning mild mannered Arthur Fleck into the murderous maniac that is the Joker was fascinating to me, the setting showed just how bad Gotham City can be, how a violent, unsafe and uncaring environment can be an incubator for all kinds of terror, and the “Joker fans” were an interesting twist, normally in the wake of this crime epidemic Gotham City turns to Batman, a violent but caring vigilante who doesn’t kill, without Batman they turned to Joker instead, an unstable killer who lashes out at the world.
It was brilliant and a massive box office success, but it was a self contained story, divorced from any other DC continuities or “universes”, it was billed at the time as a one off film and I never really expected a follow up.
Background #
But a few years later that’s exactly what was announced, in mid 2022 Phillips revealed Joker would be getting a sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux”, Madness for Two. I don’t quite remember when I first heard about it, but I really started looking into it about a month before its October 2024 release, when I worked on a series of scripts for John, also known as Frame Voyager, a YouTuber who covers cameras and the film industry, with Joker 2 coming up he wanted to a series covering the original film and the leadup to the sequel, which led me down an interesting path. I was covering the early inspirations and writing process of the film, of course pre-release there wasn’t as much to find as there will be in the future, but what I did uncover interested me a lot.
The film was taking on a partly musical theme, and although of course the studios were keen on a sequel given how much money the original made the project was actually Joaquin Phoenix’s idea, something that had come to him in a dream just as work on the original film wrapped, I really don’t like musicals, the few I’ve seen have been very frustrating to watch for me, I like films and I like music, I don’t like one repeatedly interrupting the other, but the way the musical elements were described were interesting, they weren’t going to be sung professionally and it seemed like they were going to be more smoothly tied into the narrative than your average musical, this film would also introduce a new take on Joker’s long time sidekick Harley Quinn with a new origin story much was the original did for Joker.
The more I found the more curious I got, although to be honest given how much I liked the original, I was probably always going to see this film, unfortunately I couldn’t go and see it at that local cinema because it shut in the time since the last film due to declining revenues from COVID.
This doesn’t mean I’ve just given up on cinema going, instead I have my own little trick up my sleeve, I’m going to London nearly every week, sometimes multiple times a week, to go to music gigs, London being the culture capital it is is absolutely chock full of cinemas, so when I’m really keen to see a film I tag a cinema viewing on before my gig, since the gigs usually start super late, 7pm or later, there’s plenty of time for it.
One of those London cinema’s is the British Film Institute’s Southbank IMAX screen, and this was actually the screen John had told me the film was being screened at, I decided to bite and booked the best seat in the house, a VIP seat right in the middle of the top row, screening at just past 2pm, October 17th.
I booked the screen a few weeks ahead of time, picking this later date thinking that I was getting in early before everyone else sold out the place and packed it out, the original Joker was an incredibly successful film after all so I wanted to be ahead of the curve.
But then the reviews started coming in, Joker 2 was doing bad, really bad, it bombed so hard it was outperformed by the memetic shambles that was Morbius, it wasn’t just snobby critics shitting on it but regular moviegoers too, the film was absolutely hated, but as the days passed by I begun to hear incredibly contradictory opinions about it, that it had an “incel” message behind it, that it had a message that would make incels rage, that it had no message at all and was just a bunch of songs with nothing in the way of a plot in between; I heard that it was an unnecessary sequel and that it was a sequel that added to the original film, and not wanting to spoil myself I couldn’t simply go on a quick browse and learn what was in the plot, but an interesting thread emerged.
People I knew personally, whether that’s friends or just people who happened to hang around on the same Discord servers I do, thought it was either good or middle of the road, the critics and general audiences thought it was dogshit.
While the community and commercial trainwreck might have turned others away, this wave of contradiction actually made me even more interested in the film, I also just had an enduring faith in Phillips and Phoenix to deliver, while I did know there was a chance it could be a disaster.
I spent the morning of the screening day playing Dead Rising’s brilliant Deluxe Remaster, only suddenly realising how little time I had to catch my train into London an hour or so before, after wolfing down a few plates worth of pasta I sprinted to the station, having missed my train I got on the next one a few minutes later, but it worked out fine, I arrived a grand total of 1 minute late, a tube commute over to Waterloo station and a quick walk later and I entered the grand venue that was BFI, an absolutely huge screen…
With barely anyone filling it, the whole lower section was empty, the higher up rows had an empty right and a mostly empty centre and a packed left, I took my seat and despite being king of a mostly empty castle I was very happy with my choice, the perfect view of the whole massive screen.
Summary #
After the usual assortment of boring ads and trailers we got to the film itself, I took a quick picture of the film’s rating card and switched my phone off, we were surprised by an unorthodox opening, a Looney Tunes style cartoon of Arthur being beaten up by his own shadow, which steals his Joker motif, causes mayhem and speeds off, leaving Arthur to get his skull cracked open by the Cops, a funny little segment that already had me smiling.
Then we were presented with life at Arkham Asylum, a rotten place that looks much more like a rotten prison than a mental health facility, Arthur makes his way through the dingy cells alongside the chummy bunch of guards assigned to him, constantly badgering him to tell them some jokes, on his way to meet his lawyer his lawyer Maryanne he walks past the music room of the less secure B wing of the facility, where he’s spotted by a woman who seems to take a keen interest him, she rushes out the door and mocks blowing her brains out with finger guns, getting a smile out of Arthur, then he meets Maryanne who sums up her case on his behalf, an insanity plea, she plans to argue that “the Joker” is an alternate personality brought on by Fleck’s childhood trauma, and that the real Arthur Fleck would never do the violent things the Joker is guilty of.
This sets up the 2 key themes of the film, Arthur’s relationship with the woman, Lee, and his legal case.
The first half of the film shows Lee and Fleck’s blossoming relationship, as Fleck is allowed to spend time with Lee as a reward for being cooperative, and later because of a little bit of corruption on the part of the guards, she sees herself as a kindred spirit with Fleck, and this makes him more upbeat as he finally doesn’t feel alone anymore, she tells him she was committed to Arkham after burning down her apartment block and lived in Fleck’s neighbourhood, and together they cause mischief until she gets thrown out of Arkham for being a bad influence on Fleck.
Alongside this is the media circus surrounding the upcoming case, the press constantly gather outside Arkham’s gates, prosecutor Harvey Dent lays out his case for why Arthur doesn’t just deserve conviction, but the electric chair, and Arthur even goes on the news himself, initially trying to stick to Maryanne’s narrative, repeating talking points about not remembering the murders and seeing bright lights dizzying him away, but he eventually snaps, rants about how he’s being treated and sings to Lee.
The second half covers the court case itself, which becomes a tug of war between two sides, Lee and Joker’s “fans” and Maryanne, Maryanne sticks to her arguments about Joker’s instability, passionately arguing that the Joker persona was created as a coping mechanism in response to the abuse Fleck suffered as a child, while Lee despises this narrative, telling Arthur to reject it and embrace the Joker as who he really is, not a mental mishap.
While Maryanne tries to sway Arthur by exposing Lee as a liar, she never lived locally to Fleck, she didn’t burn down her apartment, and she went into Arkham voluntarily, she left because she chose to. While Fleck confronts her on the lies, she admits to them and says she went into Arkham to meet him, she might have lied about a few little things, but she still loves him, so she says. Lee wins and Arthur decides to throw Maryanne out, representing himself in his classic clown makeup and putting on a bizarre Southern accent, he completely botches his cross examination of Gary, a member of the comedy business Fleck was part of, and ends up being shocked as Gary recalls the absolute horror he faced of having the one person in the crew who didn’t make fun of him turn out to be a monster, how Fleck murdered another of the crew in front of him, leaving him with crippling trauma, Fleck struggles to grapple with how he’s ruined someone even he always considered innocent, and ultimately decides not to put up any defence, punctuating his case with a non existent “that’s all folks!”, but when he gets to make his closing remarks, he turns to the jury and drops the act, saying that there is no Joker, just Arthur Fleck, a man who murdered 6 people and wishes he didn’t, Lee and the other Joker fans walk out on him.
As the jury begins to hand down their sentence, guilty on charge after charge, a bomb goes off in the courthouse, a baffled Fleck walks through the wreckage before being rescued by 2 Joker fans, as they drive him away they get stuck in traffic, Fleck bails on them and runs to the iconic staircase from the first film, he meets Lee there and promises to run away with her, but she rejects him for killing the myth that was the Joker, and walks away. Fleck is arrested and brought back to Arkham, where he’s told he has a visitor, as he goes to meet them, another inmate stops him and asks to tell him a joke, Fleck indulges him and the punchline ends with the same words he told one of his murder victims, Murray Franklin, “you get what you fucking deserve”, punctuated by a knife to the gut, as a shocked Fleck bleeds out on the floor the prisoner carves a smile into his skin with the knife, laughing as he does so.
My Reaction #
Safe to say I left the screen absolutely shocked, open mouthed even, I expected Arthur to die but I expected it to be from the electric chair, not a sudden shanking from a broken down fan, and I was actually delighted by this ending, Arthur gets a taste of his own medicine, the monster he created, once I managed to recover that gaping grin turned into a smile, I loved the twist.
That smile is one I’d formed many times over the film, I had loved near enough all of it, the depiction of Arkham as Alcatraz, its guards as cruel thugs behind their chummy persona, really helped sell it as an incubator of crime and madness rather than a cure, the backroom gossip between them and the inmates about Arthur’s case, and Arthur’s own reactions to them, were the source of most of those smiles, especially one particular scene where a guard asks Arthur for an autograph, he starts to write “put on a happy face” but after the guard wonders aloud how much it’ll sell for when Arthur fries, he turns it into “I hope you get cancer”, these bizarre moments of black comedy worked really well for me.
Lee as a character was an excellent depiction of Harley Quinn to me, Phillips and Lee’s actor Lady Gaga managed to do what Harley what Phillips and Phoenix had done for Joker, they made a comic book supervillain a plausible character, instead of being an Arkham doctor brainwashed into being Joker’s plaything by some well placed words, Lee is an admirer obsessed with his image, this made me think of “fans” of real murderers and serial killers that have emerged over the years, like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.
Although the characters of Lee and the rest of the Joker fans can also be seen as a commentary on fans of the original film who looked at Arthur’s character a bit too sympathetically (something Phillips has denied), this issue of real life serial killer “fandoms” was primarily what I saw, and it’s a real phenomenon, I also thought it tapped into themes surrounding extremism.
The original Joker showed how extremism is created, with Arthur Fleck starting off a fairly meek, kind man, but after being constantly abused and cut off from support mechanisms he becomes violent and erratic with disastrous consequences, it was a warning of how societal and systemic failings lead to these extremes.
Joker 2 is a warning that while we need to understand where that extremism comes from, that it isn’t some random craziness that drops out of nowhere, we also shouldn’t legitimise it either, Lee and the Joker fans channel their own resentment into something destructive, not just, and they derail things in the process, these themes compliment each other nicely to me.
The whole trial sequence felt like an excellent reckoning as the survivors of the first film, Gary and Fleck’s neighbour (and in Fleck’s imagination, girlfriend), recount their experiences with him.
As for the musical elements, I didn’t like all of them, in some cases I do think I would’ve preferred to just have more plot over musical numbers, but I didn’t have as much of an issue with them as I could’ve done, especially because of the decision to make some of them part of Arthur and Lee’s delusions and others real events as part of the plot, for example the first musical number has Arthur whipping up his fellow inmates in a sing-a-long as he sings about how he no longer feels alone now that he has Lee in his life, but then we cut back to Arthur staring at the TV as those inmates ask him how he feels about his impending death, the second number however comes as Lee burns up a projector in a movie screening at the Asylum, then she dances outside with Arthur as they run away to escape, they jump onto the gates in front of the press and then it turns out it was real, Arthur gets tossed in solitary while Lee leaves, pretending to get thrown out.
It doesn’t always work, but these numbers brought in the whole guessing game of what’s real and what’s not that Arthur’s experiences with Sophie did for the first film, and the other thing I appreciated was that they weren’t song professionally at all, despite being a singer herself, Gaga along with Fleck put in a fairly amateurish raw tone to their vocals, fitting the fact that they’re the ramblings of the mad rather than a genuine happy go lucky musical number, this made the musical segments feel more grounded in the world compared to most musicals, where everyone interrupts the plot to dive into pitch perfect song repeatedly.
So while the musical side of things was hit or miss, that’s more just me not being a musical fan in general, its forgivable, the rest of the film I absolutely loved and while I got why it wouldn’t be for everybody, I was genuinely baffled that it got the level of hatred it did.
The competing narratives then, did it have something to say? Yes, it clearly did, it isn’t just a bunch of songs, which should be clear by the fact that I summed up the plot without once mentioning any of the musical numbers, and that was a slimmed down summary mostly patched together from my own memory and a few webpages I used to jog it, I could’ve written a longer one had I written this right out of the theatre or on a rewatch.
Was it an “incel” film? No, I don’t think so at all, while Lee is the source of a lot of Arthur’s problems, she’s not presented as that source because she’s a woman, but because she’s got an unhealthy obsession with a murderer and her fantasy idea of him, again, similar obsessive “fans” have existed in reality. Sure, Lee is a kind of femme fatale figure, and I can see why that would be a turn off for some, but to me she was a fascinating character, and not one who was somehow rooted in Phillips having some kind of hatred of women.
It’s worth pointing out that the number one person trying to save Arthur in the film is Maryanne, while the narrative she spins for her insanity plea is a disingenuous one, she’s shown as genuinely caring about Arthur, whether she believes the specifics of her arguments is left open for debate, but she does clearly see Arthur as mentally unwell, rather than someone who was totally sane and conscious of his actions, and so deserving of the full punishment for them.
Was it an unnecessary sequel or did it add to the original? In this case, I actually think it’s both. It’s totally true that Joker didn’t need a sequel, it was a great movie that stood on its own right, it told its origin story and that was that, it wasn’t created with a sequel in mind, there was no hook for one, because Phillips didn’t go into it to make one. But does that mean it shouldn’t have been made? Well, I thought the film was great, so obviously I’m glad it was, to me I would call the film a kind of coda for Joker, I’ve at times called it an epilogue but I think that sells the film short, it has its own story to tell with its own characters, but that story is reliant on the original film and it makes very little sense without it, the whole thing is an aftermath, Arthur Fleck’s wreckoning, Joker’s chickens coming home to roost.
The Critics #
Now of course, I can see why some audiences would be angry at the film, Philips and Phoenix absolutely tear down the Joker, then they get the last laugh by killing him off, this film makes it clear that Arthur Fleck will never truly be the Joker we know from comic books, cartoons, TV and other movies, the one who carries out elaborate plots blowing up buildings, lacing people with laughing gas and bending minds with a gaggle of henchmen at his beck and call, Arthur is in fact quite pathetic, he gets a kill count of 6 people, all of them caught by surprise, he doesn’t break out of Arkham, he immediately gives up after getting caught again at the court bombing and then he gets stabbed.
The plot thread the original film set up with the Wayne family, where Joker’s mother tells him he’s Bruce Wayne’s son, he meets a young Wayne himself and the rioters he inspired kill Bruce’s parents? That will never go anywhere, in this universe Batman will never meet the Joker.
If you wanted something closer to the Joker of tradition in the Batman rogue’s gallery, you will be bitterly disappointed by this film, but for me as a longtime DC fan I think it’s just fine, one of the reasons I love the DC mythos is how many takes there are on it, almost all of the time Mr Freeze is a sympathetic villain who commits his crime sprees to bankroll his search for a cure for his wife’s disease, but in my childhood Batman cartoon of choice, The Batman, he’s just a wanker who steals because he wants cash.
Almost every adaptation shows the Wayne family as generous philanthropists, Thomas and Martha being some of the few who stood up to Gotham City’s corruption and had the money to actually make a difference, supporting public infrastructure, charities, you name it, in the excellent Telltale Batman series the Wayne’s are knee deep in that corruption, they’re in bed with the mob and they use Arkham as a gulag for anyone that cross them. That game toyed with the mythos in many more ways, the Penguin, usually a fat slob with no class, is skinny and posh, the usually maniacal Joker is sympathetic, being at worst a well intentioned extremist, and it was great.
So when some sections of the fandom get angry because “the rules” get broken, whether that’s Arthur meeting an unceremonious end at knifepoint, Penguin being presented as a woman in the recent Caped Crusader cartoon or Batman dropping his no killing rule and gunning dozens of people down in the Snyderverse, I’m not very sympathetic, the outrage is often quite selective anyway, the 1989 Batman movie also showed a Batman willing to kill and shoot people, it also killed off the Joker too, Batman punts him off of the roof of a tower at the end of the film and he never comes back, he didn’t even get a second film, yet it was well loved!
So unless you’re defining yourself as faithful to the comics, which the Joker film series created by Phillips explicitly doesn’t, “the rules” don’t really matter, if it’s well acted, well shot and the plot isn’t stupid or cringy, it can work, and for me Joker 2 ticked all of those boxes. Given that most people agree Phillips can direct and Phoenix can act, as the original film’s reception proves, I wonder if this is the case of initial sensationalism run rampant, most people haven’t bothered to see the film because of how bad the early views for, if they actually did would many of them find themselves pleasantly surprised like I did? I think it’s possible.
I definitely don’t see this sequel as some sort of tonal 180 from the original as most of its critics seem to, I think it expands and continues on the original’s themes quite consistently, I think this idea of a disaster 180 comes from people just misunderstanding the original film, like when people think Patrick Bateman is some sort of alpha when he’s the biggest loser in the world of American Psycho, or “redpill” right wing culture warriors pick up the language of The Matrix, a trans allegory, with no sense of irony.
Now to be clear I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with disliking the film or that if you weren’t a fan you must be media illiterate, if the acting didn’t work for you or you hated the direction Phillips took, fair enough, and I’m happy to be in the minority on this one, but I don’t think any of this film is because Phillips supposedly hates DC and the fans, I was a fan and I loved his take, I didn’t feel like it was a fuck you to me or to anyone else.
I knew from the original that Arthur Fleck wasn’t a hero or someone to be romanticised and he wasn’t a power fantasy, it made perfect sense to me that with a more realistic origin for the Joker we would get a more realistic outcome to his crime spree as well, this isn’t a world where Arkham has paper thin walls the villains can walk through any day of the week, it’s not a world where the Joker will seemingly be allowed to get off scot free even if he kills thousands.
In the first film Arthur Fleck only briefly got away with his 6 murders because he carried them out in a short timespan and it incited a bunch of unrest in the city, his luck quickly ran out and his criminal career was cut short when the cuffs were slapped on at the end, he was never some sort of master criminal.
Phillips never made it a secret that the world of his Joker took on different inspirations than most adaptations, he drew from Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Serpico and the real life subway killer Bernhard Goetz, now Goetz didn’t get the death penalty or shanked, but he did get knocked back 8 and a half months in prison on a weapons charge and found himself faced with millions of dollars in civil damages, he only avoided them by not having much money to his name in the first place and living in “squalor”, despite being a racist asshole it also probably helped that he didn’t go into court in clown makeup, or sack his lawyer.
Maybe there’s a world where Fleck somehow does escape or is savvy enough to maintain the act with Maryanne to beat his case then becomes some Unabomber style domestic terrorist, a supervillain of a different calibre, but Phillips chose one where Fleck pays a price for his actions and I don’t fault him for it.
In fact, Phillips actually suggested what was going to happen here in a talk the very day the original Joker came out:
There’s a strong implication that the “real” Joker is Fleck’s killer, laughing as he carves a smile into his face after the murder, whether that’s the case or not the film makes it quite clear that the Joker persona won’t end with Fleck, the courthouse bombing also leaves Harvey Dent scarred, and Phillips has confirmed that this was a setup for a Two-Face origin story, so even though he has no plans for a sequel (and given the bad performance of the film that probably won’t change) he did leave some loose ends, the ending wasn’t him cutting off all the branches out of spite.
With the film’s disaster box office results it’s reportedly getting an early digital release in just a few days, maybe this can lead to a second shot for the film as those who were put off from buying a ticket and going to the cinema by the bad reception can watch it on their existing streaming platforms for no extra cost, hopefully audiences will take the film as it actually is rather than buying into some of the more disingenuous and sensationalistic headlines drummed up by the hate train, whether they like it or not.