Joker 2: Joke’s on You

I will fight a pitiful rearguard action. Usually, nothing could be braver than skirmishing with a more powerful foe, shielding what remains of your comrades from certain death, accepting your own end in the process. That takes courage. But announcing that you plan to fight a rearguard action is less glamorous business. I’m admitting it’s over before I even start. Instead of waving a white flag, I’m taking off all my gear and shrieking “come and get some!”

That said, I must defend Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, not because I loved it but because it doesn’t deserve the savaging it’s getting. Call me a vainglorious martyr or call me a hero. But I can’t—won’t—stand by and let critics and audiences alike maul this movie. It’s a perfectly adequate, if overlong and boring, bit of film.

In the spirit of its predecessor, the narrative focuses on Arthur Fleck, AKA the Joker (Joaquin Phoenix), who, heavily medicated, rots in Arkham State Hospital. While there, he falls in love with Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga). Now up for trial, he feels himself caught between his girlfriend’s chaotic love of his Joker persona (she has a bit of the Ted Bundy letter writer about her) and his lawyer’s earnest belief that he suffers from a split personality disorder. One wrong step and Arthur Fleck won’t live to see the day that he and Harleen can “build a mountain,” that is, live happily, if insanely, ever after.

I knew I couldn’t hate this movie from the opening scene (sans the cartoon strip that precedes the credits). Half-naked, Arthur gets dragged around the prison by mocking guards who bark “got a joke for us today?” over and over at him. They hold a razor blade to his throat, ostensibly there to shave him, while Arthur stares forward like an MK Ultra stooge. Real heads will recognize this as a recreation of an early scene from the greatest documentary ever made about American healthcare, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).

Wiseman’s documentary provides among the most harrowing viewing experiences yet put to film. Watching it means crawling out of your skin, worming back in, and never quite feeling the same again. Beginning with this, Phillips picks up where the first film left off: whether with family, social services, in society, or in prison the abused, marginalized, and unwell will be attacked and cowed. Their very humanity will be stripped away.

That is what this film is about: the inability for fantasy (in this case represented by an abundance of classic songs—often duets between the romantic leads) to overcome stark reality. It could go just as well for the violence of the first movie. Without wishing to ruin the climax, I suspect that it is Arthur’s realizing this basic fact that leads to a decision he makes. Even this moment of clarity, however, cannot rescue him from the grip of fate. Life had doomed Arthur Fleck from the very beginning. Here, we are in the realm of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983). The heart wants what it wants—and sometimes that is utter immiseration and self-destruction. Sometimes it wants these things because it knows nothing else.

Naturally, fans of the first movie hate the sequel. Anyone who valorized the Joker (which is not to say sympathized with him) will be unhappy to find him bitter, soul-dead, and degraded this time around. His fans within the movie, those who would make him a kind of king, come off poorly. But why do critics hate it? Surely, references to Frederick Wiseman are enough. But no. The unfortunate truth is that many mainstream critics hated the first film because of its association with incels. Why, then, like the second? Superficially, the messaging isn’t that different. It’s full of bizarre, meandering singing parts capped off with uninspired dance routines. The sets look like they will reek of cigarette smoke until kingdom come. Slap a “one” on it; call it a day.

Joker: Folie à Deux, however, is nothing so wretched. At worst, it is a tonally consistent, depressing failure that could use about 30 minutes lopped off and half the tunes removed. Where critics detect only inconsistency, I see perversity and depression, a cycle of trauma and violence so inescapable that not even fantasies of Golden Age crooning stand a chance.

Audiences keep taunting the film: “got a joke for us today?” Joker: Folie à Deux has the courage to stare its fans in the eyes and smirk “no.”