The widely panned film Joker: Folie à Deux is much more interesting and probably deliberate an exercise in meddling with genres and audience expectations than critics have allowed, argues Ian Goodyer

I recently went to the cinema and watched Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Philips’s follow-up to Joker (2019). This is a film that has provoked an enormously negative reaction from critics, both ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’. At the time of writing, it scores a paltry 32% on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.3/10 on IMDb. In contrast to Phillips’s first Joker film, which grossed more than a billion dollars, Joker: Folie à Deux has been a catastrophic flop and is predicted to make a loss.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw granted the film three out of five stars: remarkably generous, given his overwhelmingly negative reception of the film. The influential Roger Ebert film review site gives the movie one out of four stars, an assessment that rests largely on the reviewer’s distaste at what he regards as the director’s exploitation of an on-screen suicide that he believes is deliberately echoed in the events of the previous Joker film and which provides an important element in the narrative of its sequel. I must admit I was motivated to see the film partly because I was curious to see if the critics were right, but also because I am a longstanding fan of superhero comics.

There are many reasons that a film attempting to unite two disparate genres — superheroes and musicals — may have become a commercial and critical disaster. Maybe the genres are inherently incompatible, and Joker: Folie à Deux is going to end up in the red for the same reason no one is likely to get rich selling fish-flavoured ice cream or rubber pillowcases. Perhaps it’s just a badly made film, or the script is poorly written, or the acting is sub-par, or it is too offensive to enjoy. It could be all these things and more. I would argue, however, that Joker: Folie à Deux is a much better film than critics allow, regardless of whether it is a sound commercial proposition. Indeed, the reasons for its failure at the box office are inseparable from its success as a piece of inventive film making.

The storyline of Joker: Folie à Deux opens shortly after the events of the previous movie, in which Arthur Fleck/Joker is introduced as a man experiencing worsening symptoms of mental illness amidst multiple crises, both personal and societal. Gotham City is trapped in a downward spiral of economic collapse and social conflict. There is widespread squalor and criminality and Arthur is living on the edge, eking out a living as a clown for hire at a seedy agency. As his mental condition deteriorates, the medical and social programmes he depends on are defunded and closed. Arthur’s experience of repeated humiliation, abuse and official neglect arouses a violent response.

The resulting mayhem, during which Arthur murders six people, including three obnoxious and bullying young business executives while wearing his workplace clown costume and makeup, explodes into citywide riots and the growth of an inchoate and violent protest movement that adopts Joker as its figurehead. Joker’s most spectacular act is the on-air murder of a famed comedian and talk show host, Murray Franklin (played by Robert de Niro). As this occurs, thousands of violent protesters, many in clown masks, have taken hold of Gotham City’s streets and when Fleck/Joker is arrested, the police car carrying him to jail is rammed with a hijacked ambulance and he is freed. While the mob rampages around him, Joker stands on a car roof and exults at the anarchy he has inspired. The film ends with Fleck finally incarcerated in the infamous Arkham Asylum.

Interpretations

The first Joker film bears many of the traits of a Todd Phillips production, including a lack of subtlety (Phillips directed and produced all three The Hangover movies for heaven’s sake). The director also shamelessly rips off themes and scenes from two Martin Scorsese films: Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. Like Joker: Folie à Deux, the first film attracted scorn from many mainstream critics, but the viewing public disagreed and pushed the movie up the box-office charts. A notable feature of Joker’s release and reception was the amount of argument it provoked. It was clearly — and I would argue most consistently — open to a progressive interpretation, but it landed in a USA led by a clownish, reactionary narcissist, and which was shot through with multiple social and political fault lines.

In a country riven by growing inequality, rampant gun crime, bizarre conspiracy theories and a sense that widespread social disorder was just around the corner, it’s not surprising that some people interpreted Joker as a manifesto for the so-called ‘incel’ (involuntarily celibate) movement and a celebration of the kind of post-truth nihilism that would eventually motivate the mobs who stormed the US Capitol a couple of years later. 

This interpretation shouldn’t be blamed on Todd Phillips; it’s impossible for any artist to determine how multiple audiences will choose to see their work. In the case of a mass, popular medium such as cinema, this is especially true. Anyone familiar with the culture wars surrounding punk rock and reggae in the 1970s will know how fascists latched on to particular songs or bands and tried to incorporate them into their cultural repertoire, the Clash’s White Riot being a prominent example.

Joker: Folie à Deux is a much more claustrophobic film than its predecessor; it is almost entirely confined to two locations: Arkham Asylum and the courtroom in which Arthur Fleck is on trial for murder. The Arthur we see in the asylum seems a very different character than the man who recently inspired a massive, anti-establishment revolt in Gotham City. He is a model prisoner who is nevertheless teased and bullied by guards and he doesn’t occupy a particularly elevated position in the social hierarchy of his fellow inmates. 

Fleck’s lawyer recognises this disparity between Arthur ‘now’ and Joker ‘then’ and is planning a defence based on the proposition that Joker and Arthur are two separate personalities. She contends that the man who went on a killing spree is not the man who is facing trial. As Arthur’s trial date approaches, he meets a young woman, Harley Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga). Lee (as she is known) is involved in a music-therapy group, which the lead therapist explains is aimed at restoring unity to the fragmented personalities of its participants.

Lee initiates the relationship and she declares that she has long been attracted to, and inspired by Joker. Arthur quickly falls in love with Lee and their romance seems to revive the Joker personality that has been repressed since his arrest. Lee is a provocative influence, however, and she and Arthur forge a bond that leads them to rebel against the oppressive authority of the asylum. Following an act of arson committed by Lee, she is discharged from the asylum because, she tells Arthur, it is felt he is a bad influence on her. In the outside world, Lee publicly champions Arthur’s cause and honours her vow to be in court throughout his trial. As the case unfolds, Lee confronts Arthur’s lawyer, whom she believes is misrepresenting him as a divided personality; he and Joker, she insists, are indivisible.

Torn between a defence strategy that appears to offer him his only realistic chance to avoid the death penalty, and the appeal of a return to his destiny as Joker, Arthur fires his lawyer and decides to represent himself (in full Joker makeup and regalia). The ensuing confrontation between Joker and Gotham’s legal establishment carries us towards the film’s third act, which concludes the story in a way that obliges us to reevaluate our assumptions about Joker and nudges us (in a truly shocking final scene) in a new direction.

Genre subversion

Joker: Folie à Deux is a film that Todd Phillips assured the world would never be made. His original movie was deliberately conceived as a standalone, with no links to other films in DC’s cinematic universe. The decision to make a sequel by framing a super(anti-)hero movie as a jukebox musical seems doubly perverse. For many critics, this (mis-)marriage of two supposedly low-brow genres must have seemed predestined to produce a dud. For aficionados of one or other genre, this hybrid will also appear confusing: the Venn diagram encompassing superhero fans and lovers of Hollywood musicals is likely to have a very small overlap, and certainly not one large enough to sustain a decent box office return.

This dissonance is heightened by the way Phillips appears to go out of his way to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood musical and the superhero film, an approach that was bound to alienate much of his potential audience. However, what I think is missing from critical responses to Joker: Folie à Deux is an appreciation for the ways in which Todd Phillips seems to be playing with the tropes of two disparate genres in order to explore the Joker character and to dramatize the peculiar pathology underlying the relationship between him and Harley Quinzel.

In a typical Hollywood musical there are conventional purposes for songs, which the audience implicitly understands and accepts: introducing a character or theme, building empathy, offering exposition, expressing intense emotions and so on. The songs in Joker: Folie à Deux don’t conform to these unwritten rules; they are almost entirely ironic. They are saying something in a context where their (more or less) explicit meaning contradicts the ‘reality’ being played out in the narrative. There is one clear exception, which occurs at a point when a character is gaining some insight into their delusions.

This makes the musical performances uncomfortable. If you simply enjoy a song on its own terms, you find yourself unsettled by the way the story then unfolds in a completely contradictory direction; if you recognise the irony, you squirm at the predicament of characters who are masking their situation with comforting illusions. Accepting the incongruities while simultaneously appreciating the performances and the work they are doing in the story allows the viewer to reconcile these antagonistic impulses, but it means accepting the lack of any consolingly cathartic resolution to the story.

The music in the film isn’t there to ease the narrative along or to straightforwardly illustrate emotions or ideas, it confronts you with the dissonance between the mental states of Arthur and Lee and the realities they are failing (refusing?) to grasp. The songs aren’t illustrative of anything, they are constitutive of Arthur and Lee’s shared delusions. In terms of a viewing experience, Joker: Folie à Deux reminds me of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, a 1986 TV series that meshed genres in a similarly unsettling fashion. In both Potter’s series and Phillips’s film, the central character is someone trapped by a debilitating condition and who copes with this by constructing a fantasy world featuring dream scenarios, invented relationships and drawing on the mise-en-scene of popular musicals.

The emotional impact in Joker: Folie à Deux is amplified by the quality of the performances. Their spontaneity and immediacy arise from the way they were filmed. Rather than perform several takes to a prerecorded backing track, Phillips had Phoenix and Gaga accompanied by an on-set pianist, who took their lead from the actors. The imperfections, the occasional bum note and cracked delivery, have found their way onto the screen, and this confounds the expectations of purists who might have anticipated the technical purity of most musicals.

Wrong footing the audience

But if we are to get to the root of this film’s failure to find an appreciative audience, we have to look somewhere other than the director’s embrace of Brechtian devices in the delivery of its musical numbers. Far more significant is his refusal to deliver the kind of superhero movie that has built a vast global audience over the last few decades — an audience that provided the reservoir from which the initial Joker film drew. This is a genre built around the idea of conflict and we have become accustomed to comic-inspired films and TV series that are punctuated by regular fight scenes and which build towards some climactic battle. The first Joker film fulfilled this brief admirably (although the moral status of Joker’s anti-hero persona complicates things).

Fans of that film have largely been left confused and disappointed by the failure of Joker: Folie à Deux to follow the typical superhero story arc. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker exists in a world in which there is no Batman to fight against (inevitable, given that Bruce Wayne is still a child at this point in the narrative), and what use is a supervillain if they have no superheroic enemy? In Phillips’s previous film, this deficit is overcome by confronting Joker with multiple foes, even if they are not wearing capes: a failing, austerity-driven city administration; uncaring health and welfare bureaucracies; bullying bigots who mock Arthur Fleck’s mental illness; a greedy, corrupt billionaire in the shape of Thomas Wayne, seeking to extend his grip on power by winning political office (Where have we heard that one before?); a beloved TV star who betrays Arthur by ridiculing his attempts at stand-up comedy etc, etc. Not all these influences have disappeared in Joker: Folie à Deux, but they never occupy the same space as before.

The challenges Arthur faces are diffuse and difficult for him to contend with; he suffers abuse at the hands of guards, but is also afforded a kind of respect; he faces a murder trial and is in conflict with his legal team and so on. As with his treatment of the musical aspects of Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips denies the film’s audience the kinds of satisfying cathartic moments that they have come to expect from a DC or Marvel film. What violence there is in the story, is generally viewed in flashback, or is the kind of routine brutality meted out by a callous penal system. None of it is righteous, but a lot of it is cold and indifferent to its victims.

Dualities

Turning the focus of a superhero movie inwards, towards the psychology of its characters, follows a trend that has been evident in superhero comics since the 1980s, most famously in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series of Batman comics. It’s also been a feature of some of the better film and TV adaptations of recent years. Phillips is continuing and amplifying this trend, but he is also capitalising on the potential of a genre that is particularly well suited to the exploration of psychological duality and shifting identities. After all, from its inception, the character of the superhero has been indissolubly linked with the idea of the secret identity and, along with that, the notion that a character’s dual identities must be kept distinct. The threat of unmasking the hero and revealing their other self is one of the genre’s persistent tropes and it goes hand in hand with the idea that to remove the distinction between the vigilante personality and its civilian alter-ego would be to destroy the viability of them both.

The superhero lives in a constant state of alternating repression and release, experiencing long periods of denial, punctuated by intense episodes of fleeting violence. This split between two contrasting personalities inhabiting a single mind and body is represented in the names each is given, such as Superman/Clark Kent, Batman/Bruce Wayne, but this applies also to the comic-book villains, for example Harvey Dent/Two Face, Joker/Arthur Fleck, Edward Nygma/Riddler. It’s not a massive stretch to infer that the heroes and villains in comic books and films share an uncomfortable psychopathological affinity and that the barrier between virtue and villainy is disturbingly porous.

In conclusion, it’s hard not to wonder if Todd Phillips has set out to provoke and alienate many of those who were most enthusiastic about his first Joker movie, and especially those who misread it as a right-wing call to arms. Anyone who saw Joker as an anti-heroic avatar of Trumpian reaction will feel dismayed by the Arthur Fleck of Joker: Folie à Deux. The character of Harley Quinzel is important in this context; her obsession with Arthur and her efforts to revivify his Joker persona position her as the symbolic representative of Joker’s toxic fan base — yearning for salvation, but needing someone else to transmute the base metal of their grievances into the gold of justice served.

Where Arthur is desperate to see Lee as a kindred spirit, the audience is frequently prompted to question her sincerity and honesty. It will be enormously provoking to right wingers who latched onto the first film to be confronted with the suggestion that they are doing the same thing she is — and that the Joker figure they idolise is actually a product of fantasy and misdirected anger. The Führerprinzip that infests the ideology of today’s far right and which demands fealty to an unfaltering leader figure is undermined by the revelation that dynamic, id-driven anti-heroes such as Joker are liable to become the hapless, indecisive prisoner we meet in Joker: Folie à Deux. The denouement of the film (no spoilers) will add to their disillusionment. No wonder they have stayed away from this movie.

If Joker: Folie à Deux is a much better film than it is being given credit for, this doesn’t mean it is faultless, or that it is likely to redeem itself in commercial terms. I rarely see a film nowadays without wishing that the director had been willing to shave off half an hour. There is too much pointless repetition in Joker: Folie à Deux and some of the scenes in the courtroom and asylum could have been cut without disturbing the narrative flow. This is not an easy film to watch in many ways, but it features some powerful performances and a great soundtrack. It definitely feels like it’s been directed by a man hoping to put some critical distance between himself and large sections of an audience he had previously courted with success, but that’s no bad thing. One last irony is that Lady Gaga has recorded a song (Bad Romance) that captures the Harley/Joker dynamic pretty accurately, but it wouldn’t have been ironic enough to make the soundtrack: ‘I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it’s free, I want your love.’