“Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.”
-Elena Ferrante
“You can do anything you want. You’re Joker.”
-Lee Quinzel
The swift judgment leveled at Joker: Folie à Deux, following its opening weekend box office disappointment, seems to be that the film fails. (Because money makes for greatness, right?) It is slow, some say, and it defies expectations. The swiftness of online judgment impacts even those who haven’t seen the film, keeping many away. But there is far more going on in the sequel than most reviewers have let on. To begin with, Joker’s character evolves in unexpected ways. In response, the audience (inside and outside the film) reacts to the Joker’s evolution in potentially unexpected ways, invoking remarkable irony, hypocrisy, or sympathy, depending on the viewer.
Joker and (Potential) Redemption
At the beginning of the film, Arthur Fleck (aka Joker) is locked beyond reach of hope or redemption, it seems. He is about to be tried for murder. He will likely get what he deserves, legally speaking. (Unless perhaps an insanity defense prevails.) Spiritually speaking, he already seems dead.
And just as he is beyond hope, so he is thought to be beyond morality. “You can do anything you want. You’re Joker.” So Harley Quinzel (aka Lee) tells Joker authoritatively. According to this view, Joker is beyond good and evil (or believes himself to be). And this is precisely what some critics and audience members want to see, along with the chaos and destruction his absence of morality can create. Lee’s provocative line invites comparison to the classic Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment. In this view, Joker is like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment who temporarily believed himself to be beyond morality too, an ubermensch (overman or superman) in Nietzschean terms. This license led to terrible crime. Still, redemption came. In that novel, a female character pointed him toward redemption. Joker’s love interest, in contrast, is anything but angelic, and as she becomes his principal audience, she drives him to embody irrevocably the unrepentant Joker persona.
But love is a powerful, inspiring thing. Even in imperfect form, it may act on Joker in ways that are beyond Lee’s anticipation or control. And there may be other things pushing Joker toward redemption. There is music. For a quasi-musical, surprisingly, too little has been said about the music. First of all, the aspect ratio of the film enlarges, becoming more immersive, when a musical number begins. It is a testament of sorts to the power and importance of imagination, something uniquely related to the comic book genre.
The nature of the music, too, is significant. Much of it is older and nostalgic or innocent. Much of it is romantic. More importantly—as the nostalgia and the romance may prove false—much of it is spiritual. While the music oscillates, there is a motif in the music that pulls toward redemption. In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne’s rule-breaking performance of Mozart offers inmates a transcendent experience of hope and freedom. Similarly, in Joker: Folie a Deux, some of the music inspires in Joker (and other inmates at times) transcendent longing for love and hope.
One spiritual, When the Saints Go Marching In, is repeated so often it becomes a refrain. The sound of a guard whistling the melody is one of the very first sounds the audience hears inside Arkham. Later, an inmate plays it on trumpet. Prisoners eventually sing it as protest. The song explicitly evokes the idea of redemption and the coming of judgment, wanting to be numbered among the saints, marching toward freedom, love, fraternity, eternity. This is an unexpected prison song. But it fits because it alludes to the possibility of redemption, even for unlikely people. It’s apt also because it alludes to coming judgment, which for Joker is coming very soon in the form of a capital trial. He may merit a death sentence.
The trial brings another element that pushes toward redemption. In an outstanding supporting performance, Leigh Gill portrays Gary Puddles, who had worked as a clown alongside Arthur Fleck in the first Joker film. Gary’s testimony piercingly relives the murders and reveals the impact of Arthur’s crimes in the first film. Gary has been suffering post-traumatic stress disorder ever since. Through Gary’s eyes, Joker sees a little more clearly and fully.
When he returns to prison that night, another experience seems to stir in Arthur a sense of remorse and desired redemption. In his cell, lying on his bed after an assault by the guards, Arthur hears as another inmate is defenselessly murdered. Tears fall from his eyes. And in that moment, it’s apparent at least that Joker knows clearly that the murder is wrong. And, by implication, it may suggest that he repents the murders he committed too. Later events seem to confirm this view. Redemption may be at hand, even for Joker.
Joker and the Critics
Joker’s character and persona are inherently, painfully, vainly focused on performance, on evoking a particular reaction or relationship from an audience. Like many comics, he has tremendous emptiness and suffering to fill. Thus, both Joker films self-consciously interact with this performative aspect of human nature. The character becomes symbolic or metonymic of our own narcissistic online culture. Yet by the end of the sequel, remarkably, Joker no longer cares what the audience thinks of him. And this is a positive development for the character, because his popularity may prove to be fickle. If he relinquishes the Joker persona, he relinquishes the perverse adulation that goes with it. As one line says, “They don’t care about him. They care about Joker.”
This potential movement toward redemption for Joker raises provocative questions, especially in light of the real-life audience’s reaction to the film. If the audience began to sympathize with, or feel pity for, Arthur in the first film—a film so successful it made over a billion dollars at the box office—why wouldn’t the audience care enough about the character to see a dramatic positive shift in the second film? If audiences don’t watch to empathize, do they watch to vilify? To participate? To indulge? Do they/we seek stories about the Joker just to see him go mad, to vicariously indulge a dark desire for chaos? Or do audiences watch not just to see heroism, but simultaneously to vilify and then validate innate desires for retribution and bloodletting? Perhaps there was simply not enough chaos, killing, and vengeance in this story?
The filmmakers may know what audiences want when they watch the Joker. In the trailer for the film, toward the end, Joker says, “I got this sneaking suspicion that we’re not giving the people what they want.” Lee answers, “Let’s give the people what they want.” This is immediately followed in the trailer by a sequence of carefully orchestrated violence. This, the filmmakers suggest, is what the audience wants. With money on the line, the fact that the filmmakers have a different story to tell, one which does not truly indulge such desires, seems an act of moral courage. This courage to go a different direction, along with impressive filmmaking, seems to be what Quentin Tarantino praised so highly in recent comments. (That, and he also calls Joaquin Phoenix’s work “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life.”) Unexpectedly, Joker is conquered in the end not by force, but by a trial and, perhaps, by a “true love” referenced in the final song of the film.
The title of the film is Joker: Folie à Deux. The “folly of two”1 refers to an older psychological term that attempts to describe a shared folly or madness, more specifically a shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder. The idea suggests that such folly can be communicable. But if crime can be copied, evil can be imitated, and folly can be passed on, goodness can be imitated too. And it is only virtue that brings true happiness or eudaimonia, according to Aristotle and other ethicists. The movie’s meditation on such cultural imitation is an apt one in a culture of increasingly rapid cultural transmission.
Arguably, the direction of the film elevates it to the realm of tragedy, awakening in audiences open to it the pity and fear, based in shared humanity, that Aristotle wrote about in his Poetics. The action of the drama then moves audiences to wonder, wonder at the unlikely and unexpected shift in Arthur at the end of the story. “[A]t the end of every tragedy,” writes Joe Sachs in light of Aristotle’s Poetics, “we are washed in the beauty of the human image, which our pity and our fear have brought to sight.” This is a sight worth seeing.
Yes, the director enables pity for the character. But at the same time, he doesn’t make it easy for the audience. He preserves too much complexity, critical distance, and realism for that, even in this trailblazing fantastical prison/trial/musical drama. Even toward the end, after Arthur begins to display remorse and empathy, he still laughs at awkward, inappropriate moments. He remains at least partially in thrall to the destructive power of Lee, even after his generative dark night of the soul. Arthur is a criminal who has only begun to turn toward redemption. And while we may ultimately come to pity him, albeit without excusing him for his crimes, will we, in the real world, pity with prudence the next off-putting, wounded, self-absorbed, troubled soul that crosses our paths? Ultimately, the final character implicated in the film is the viewer. We each chart our own response.
Years ago, The Shawshank Redemption, another prison drama with an affinity for music, failed at the box office; yet hindsight recognized its greatness. This is not to say that Joker reaches that level of freedom, hope, or beauty. But with time, Joker: Folie à Deux may be appreciated as an audacious, subversive comic book film that interrogates the genre, the audience, and the role of art more broadly.
And a soul
if it is to know itself
must look
into its own soul:
the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.
-George Seferis, “Mythistorema”
- Alternatively, it wouldn’t be surprising if “folie à deux” is intended, as an ironic inside joke almost, to refer to the sequel itself. The filmmakers likely knew that, as a musical, prison drama, and trial drama, the second film would hardly approach the first in box office. Yet that doesn’t mean the sequel has been unsuccessful. It’s earned over a quarter of a billion dollars so far. Few musicals or prison dramas or trial dramas have ever achieved such success. But there are other measures of success besides just money. Moreover, the film may function as a fascinating experiment, testing the rationale for the popularity of the first film. It is a bold filmmaking move. Arguably, few filmmakers have such courage now. After all, our culture conditions us to maximize wealth, not art or virtue or meaning or beauty. We have yet to learn how to value such (seemingly) intangible, life-giving goods. ↩︎