Shared Madness: What Joker: Folie à Deux Means to Me
Joker: Folie à Deux has only been out one weekend, but it’s effectively come and gone. Well, at the box office, anyway; with a disappointing opening, a huge $200 million budget (which I can only assume mostly went to the inflated paychecks Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix likely demanded after Joker overperformed), and a rare D CinemaScore, this one’s got a tag on its toe. In terms of the zeitgeist, however, I think the movie will linger, though not in a good way; the memes are flying, and people seem to love to hate Joker: Folie à Deux. It’s not so much the quality of the writing, acting, or filmmaking, though; this isn’t a Madame Web situation. Joker: Folie à Deux seems to have made people angry. In the coming days, possibly weeks, you’ll see a ton of articles and videos picking this film apart, heaping indignation on it, or asking the question, “What the hell were they thinking?” And that’s all fair. But as one of the seemingly very few people who liked the movie, I’d like to talk about why in a bit more depth than I could in my non-spoiler review.
***SPOILERS***
Joker: Folie à Deux is an examination of both Arthur Fleck and the Joker, two separate individuals. The opening scene, an animation in the old-school Looney Tunes mold, establishes this concept, painting the Joker as a larger-than-life persona that is consuming the scared, almost waifish Arthur. That is what the film is about. Arthur is locked away in Arkham Asylum, waiting to go to trial for his murder spree, and everything has gone back to normal for him, inasmuch as he’s in a nuthouse. He’s getting his medication again, which he was denied at the beginning of Joker – just before the trouble started. Now, he’s back to being a boring nobody, not making trouble, going along to get along, not even making jokes anymore. This is not the Joker as we’ve come to know him, not the ostentatious force of chaos that set the city on fire with his murder of Murray Franklin following his rant about society’s cold indifference to people like him. (This in itself is an indictment of government’s bureaucratic incompetence; if they had gotten him his meds when they should have, all of this could have been avoided. Now that the only potential victims are either government employees or those specifically in state custody, they’re making damn sure Arthur is docile.)
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been affected by the Joker independent of Arthur or his perceptions of it. He’s comfortably numb, to borrow a phrase, while everywhere else, people are still reacting to the Joker. His lawyer, a bleeding heart, thinks poor Arthur is the victim, and he just needs some big group hugs in therapy to free himself of the murderous monkey on his back. Harvey Dent, the assistant district attorney prosecuting him, thinks he’s a monster that needs to be put down before he kills again, as well as a means of advancing his career by allowing Dent to try a high-profile case on national television. (Remember, this takes place in the 80s, just before this kind of televised judicial sensationalism became popular; there was no OJ trial yet.) To the judge, he’s a clown, mocking the system, society, and laws to which he has dedicated his life. For the Arkham guards, he’s a novelty due to his notoriety, someone they can push around a bit to make their jobs more bearable. And to his many fans, he’s a symbol of the counter-cultural movement that has formed around him, one that led to Gotham City burning in riots and Thomas and Martha Wayne being murdered. (If only these punks knew what was coming; it’s interesting that the Waynes being killed is never mentioned in Joker: Folie à Deux.)
Inevitably, the two personas, Arthur and the Joker, will collide again, and they do so through Harlene “Lee” Quinzel, a patient in the less-criminal wing of Arkham. Harley (let’s be real and just call her Harley Quinn) is the first contact Arthur has had with one of his admirers, and she reignites the spark in him that pushes his inner mania to the surface, breaking through the walls his medication put up. He’s reminded of his loneliness, of his longing for a human connection like the one he imagined with his old neighbor, Sophie, and he slowly allows himself to become the Joker again. He’s combative with the guards, he resumes telling jokes, he inspires his fellow inmates to get unruly, and he shows up to court in his clown makeup. He even fires his lawyer – the only chance he had of escaping the death penalty, or at least life in Arkham – and decides to defend himself. Now, think of what these plot points typically are; they’re the get-up-and-cheer moments, where the misunderstood underdog hero finds true love, believes in himself, and stands up to win the day. This is, at least partly, why much of Joker: Folie à Deux is a courtroom drama; you expect these moments in a John Grisham adaptation (minus firing the lawyer, unless the prisoner is secretly a lawyer himself; Grisham gets how crazy that is). It’s initially presented as triumphant, like Arthur dancing merrily as Gotham burned in Joker.
But it’s not triumphant. Arthur is completely insane, and he and his minions are celebrating the fact that he murdered a bunch of people, and for some reason, they consider him a hero. In real life, the normal among us would recognize how crazy and dangerous this is, and Joker: Folie à Deux has it getting so out of hand that even Arthur eventually recognizes it. The Joker is not Arthur’s true self but a manifestation of his insanity, and it’s become a (metaphorically) living, breathing thing, encompassing Gotham City and spreading madness like an airborne pathogen. This is the meaning of the subtitle Folie à Deux: “shared madness,” meaning the madness Arthur now shares with the rest of Gotham. Suddenly, the other Arkham inmates can no longer be controlled, ranting and raving, almost rioting. The courtroom becomes the exact circus the judge feared it would, with cheering maniacs and a defendant putting on a phony Southern accent as he cross-examines witnesses (shades of Grisham again). Harlene Quinzel, a woman of wealth and privilege who studied to be a psychiatrist, threw all that away and had herself admitted to a mental institution to be close to the Joker, with whom she’d become enamored. And the guards have become savages, brutalizing Arthur because he made fun of them and murdering an otherwise harmless inmate when he complains about it.
It’s during this murder that Arthur begins to wake up. Hearing the guards kill the other inmate makes him realize what he’s wrought. He’s making everyone crazy over what he now realizes is a delusion. Hearing testimony from Gary Puddles, the witness to one of his murders in the first film, also contributes to Arthur’s awakening; he hears first-hand the psychological toll his actions took on this poor man. And he now gets it; he is not the Joker. This is a fantasy he embraced to indulge his delusions of grandeur, his desperation to be noticed, to be important, to be loved. That’s why, outside of the courtroom, we only see Arthur in his makeup during the musical sequences; the Joker is who Arthur has convinced himself he truly is because it’s the grandiose persona he wishes he had. But the truth, as he tells it to the court, is that he is just a mentally ill man who killed six people. It’s the first responsible thing Arthur has done, his attempt to stop the madness he created before it becomes a force from which there’s no turning back. That’s a character coming full circle, discovering the truth about himself rather than the story his damaged psyche told him he was.
Unfortunately, it is too late. While a few of his admirers leave the court, a car bomb some of them planted goes off, killing more people (and, it’s heavily implied, creating Two-Face) and letting the killer loose again. And the Joker fans who find him on the street are still in awe of him, still seeing him as the symbol of anarchy they turned him into. And once he’s back at Arkham, the guards indicate that they’re not giving up on their newly adopted violent tendencies. Arthur failed to stem the tide of the insanity he unleashed, and in the final moments of Joker: Folie à Deux, that insanity destroys Arthur for good, revealing not only that it will never stop but that it unleashed the real Joker on the world. Fortunately, though we’ll never see it, it also unleashed Batman, as Joker revealed. Think of the symmetry in these two endings; Joker ends with Arthur telling a sane person she wouldn’t get the joke he saw life as, the one that saw the chaos he fomented create the ultimate symbol of order. Joker: Folie à Deux ends with the true symbol of chaos revealing that Arthur doesn’t get the joke, either. The tragedy of Arthur Fleck is that he isn’t the hero or the villain; he’s just another nut, a sacrificed pawn that led to the unending battle between opposing kings.
To answer why I liked it, it’s simply that I found all of this fascinating, and the movie held my interest for its entirety and beyond. Joker: Folie à Deux wasn’t what I expected, if only because it couldn’t be; like Joker, I had no idea what to expect from it. But I was happy that it had something interesting to say, and, for my money (though, evidently, not for Warner Bros.’s), it said it well. I understand I’m in the exceedingly vast minority, and that’s fine with me; I’ve been on both sides of that coin before, and I’m sure I will be again. And I’m sorry so many people didn’t like this movie. But, to steal another line because it’s the spooky season, I saw what I saw when I saw it, and I saw a lot in Joker: Folie à Deux.
Let us know what you thought of Joker: Folie à Deux in the comments!
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