Today, I’ll review Todd Phillips anti-sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux. Along the way, I’ll touch on Warner Discovery’s multi-year string of financial busts — and the future of big-budget film with mega-fans in the chair. Put on a smile and get happy — and welcome back to Cinema Cauldron.
“Let’s call the whole thing off”
There is not a connection to 2008’s The Dark Knight in Joker: Folie à Deux.
At the end of the picture, an obsessive Joker fan carves a smile into his own face after committing a heinous act. He slumps over against a wall, laughing as he bleeds from his wounds. At no point are we given a direct, stated implication that this — this — is the Joker from the hit turkey.
Yet this alleged connection has been served to me via my Motorola Razr’s newsfeed several times. In fact, one critical write-up on Mashable actually cites this as a reason for disliking the film.
Ending Joker: Folie à Deux on this presumable origin story for Ledger's Joker is a laughable choice for so many reasons. For one, tethering yourself to the greatest live-action Joker performance of all time — especially after emphasizing that the Joker films are set apart from any other DC movie — reaches masturbatory levels of self-congratulation. "Look, we've connected both Jokers that have won Oscars! In fact, one now canonically inspired the other!"
The Glasgow smile — that is to say, the use of a razor to carve a “smile” into one’s face — is a practice that dates back to early 20th century Scotland. It hold a specific notoriety after the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia. Her face was cut similarly, shortly after the origination of the practice — in addition to the complete mutilation and amputation of her body. That said, it’s not all gruesome tragedy. Actor Tommy Flanagan was attacked by a gang while working as a DJ, and has gone on to enjoy a prominent career with his distinctive scar.
I digress — The Dark Knight did not originate the Glasgow smile.
This final moment of Folie à Deux might be a nod to the iconic Ledger turn, at most, but it is far from canon. What’s frustrating is that this sequence, which is an effective, upsetting conclusion to a breathless assault of colorful spectacle, is not being given the space to breathe on its own. The significance of this last moment, and what it might say about recursive violence and social hierarchies, has been lost in a discussion of whether or not this is connected — plot-wise — to a Christopher Nolan film from 2008.
General audiences and contracted media critics have lost interest in film. Familiar plots driven by recognizable brands feel like the only surefire bet anymore. Animated IP tie-ins such as Super Mario Brothers and The Garfield Movie are the surest recipes for success, as are live-action advertisements such as Barbie. So are obvious, morally didactic yarns like Oppenheimer and Zone of Interest. I’ve been told theaters should be more like theme parks to attract patrons, but curing this symptom won’t solve the cultural illness or lack of curiosity behind the degradation of the American blockbuster. Over the last twenty years, we’ve seen the multiplexes gutted to sell tickets to sermons and TV serials. Sony, Disney, Amazon, and Comcast are the only major studios left with true sway.
Paramount, meanwhile, has begun to sneakily recreate circumstances that led to the Paramount Decrees under ownership of theater chain operator National Amusements, Inc. This is all, of course, to say nothing of those companies’ vast networks of conglomerates, subsidiaries, and acquisitions that have worked to pull audiences away from theaters and towards proprietary streaming apps.
Despite last year’s runaway fluke, Barbie, Warner has lost footing every step of the way during this industry shift. Five other pricey 2023 Warner tentpoles — The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Shazam! Fury of Gods, Blue Beetle, and The Color Purple — fizzled at the box office and with critics. Their streaming service is a confused Frankenstein of multiple services that still hemorrhages subscribers. And — of course — several of the studio’s high-profile projects, such as Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, were shelved in post-production to the public protest of the creatives involved.
Now comes Joker: Folie à Deux, which has already been deemed a ‘dud’ by publications and sits at a ‘C+’ CinemaScore. This comes as the most brutal blow yet, as Joker was the last Warner film before Barbie to attract much major press or buzz even before its runaway financial success. By rate of comparison — Folie à Deux ended its opening weekend with $40m; Joker earned $96m. That brings the total weekend haul just under the $47m and $55m opening hauls of The Marvels and The Flash.
This granular degree of box office assessment is something I try — try — to keep away from my critical process. But when a film like Joker fails, it forces me to reassess much of what I understand about modern Hollywood and the standards around it. At least Furiosa’s failure at least made sense. Mad Max has never been a runaway success at the box office; a numbered entry starring a supporting character from the fourth entry was a risky move that only a director like Miller could have attempted. However I felt about the film — I liked it, but it’s no Three Thousand Years Of Longing — I’m not too surprised about the reception, by and large.
Folie à Deux, however, is a much different beast. This is a high-profile sequel that centers the most recognizable adversary from film’s most consistently bankable superhero franchise. Trailers have played in front of every major movie I attended this year. YouTube ads have been a regular presence for the past couple of months. For all intents and purposes, this was Warner’s saving grace for 2024 — the mega-hit that could bankroll their next batch of flops.
For my own money, though, Joker: Folie à Deux is the best comic book film you’re going to see for a while.
“Bewitched, bothered and bewildered”
It starts at a base level — Todd Phillips is not here to make friends with comic book fans. He, in fact, reportedly wanted “nothing to do” with DC Studios; Folie a Deux does not open with their logo. While there are knowing nods to key frames and iconic panels of the Clown Prince of Crime, Phillips has not set out to make a film about The Joker. Instead, his target is a much larger one: the cultural institution, weight, and popularity of a Joker figure itself. Similar to The Hangover Part II — another underrated Warner sequel, if there ever was one — the provocateur sets out to alienate the very audience he courted with the first picture. It’s a bait and switch, an interrogation of the mentality required to empathize and project onto a figure like Arthur Fleck. We got to experience the highs, and now, here come the doldrums.
The prison sequences are pure misery. Defined by dim, dull lighting and muted yellow-blue palettes, these parts of the film highlight the system of negative reinforcement latent in our carceral facilities. Prison guards are made out to be the monsters they often are, as they manipulate and abuse the mentally ill for personal entertainment. Guard Jackie (Brendan Gleason) teases out Arthur’s Joker personality to the surface, plying him with cigarettes for jokes. Another guard is eager to have Arthur sign a book on his story, despite Fleck’s therapist’s (Catherine Keener) insistence that star treatment will lead to relapse. Other guards even strong-arm a confused, sad, and sweet inmate into kissing Arthur for their own disgusted amusement. Arthur obliges; the moment seems to mean something to the young man. It’s a cruel allusion to a much darker topic - prison rape being instigated by guards.
These beats reinforce a core theme, which is that aspects of incarceration often sensationalized and satirized are actually products of the abusive itself. This is incendiary, borderline abolitionist rhetoric to ground in the most realistic portions of the film.
Then there is the much-criticized courtroom sequence, which unfolds over the better part of 70-80 minutes. Arthur’s actions in the first film, and his subsequent cult of personality after murdering talk show host Murray Franklin, are litigated on live television. His trial is turned to spectacle, as leading questions and misunderstood intent give way to a public defenestration of the Joker identity. Phillips makes this languid choice for a simple reason - courtroom dramas. The courtroom drama became increasingly popular as the musical wound down, as law and order grew more fascinating to an America restructuring after World War II. Warner had no shortage of these — I watched one just this past year called Perfect Strangers, which actually released a bit before the boom of classics like 12 Angry Men and To Kill A Mockingbird. These films traded in slow, dreary pacing to unpack the minute details of a crime. Drama and excitement tended to come from the performances and twists along the way. They're bone dry watches, at times, but interesting characters bring them to life. For instance - most people can't remember the plot of My Cousin Vinnie, but they absolutely remember Marisa Tomei’s performance. And what better person to stand accused than Joker? It's an entertaining and extremely meta choice for the second of the two ‘real world’ settings.
But Folie a Deux weaves between reality and unreality with true reckless abandon. Audience disorientation is expected, as Arthur freely bends the narrative to his will. He twists and contorts life into a kaleidoscope of musical sequences, TV variety show performances, and Hello, Dolly! adjacent outdoor theatrics. Everything around him is chaff for Arthur to process as delusion, to externalize and internalize alike as his lived reality. Is there really a shadow-self lurking beneath Arthur? Or should his actions carry more personal weight?
Phillips stops short of answers because there aren’t any clear ones to be found. Follie a Deux is less diagnosis, more public bloodletting. As a creative, the War Dogs director has come into his own with a film that balances fierce, vitriolic anger and infectious, true zeal on the edge of a butterfly knife. The fury comes from multiple angles, but the two most overt are pointed jabs at comic book movie diehards and the recursive violence of mental healthcare in America. We learn how intense physical and sexual abuse shaped Arthur from a young age, as his trauma is litigated in a public trial attended by Joker cosplayers and apologists alike. The violent anti-hero we’ve followed is a victim not just of an unjust system, but of very intimate and personal abuse that’s socially unacceptable to discuss.
Just this has a large impact on both Folie a Deux and the 2019 original. Behavior seen as violent, anarchic backlash to a classist and neurotypical system is the direct result of marginalizing abuse. We’re left to question a slavish and loyal devotion to it, then. Can any of us, really, be “The Joker”? Or does being “The Joker” entail a degree of emasculating hurt most men with Heath Ledger posters in the dens of their souls could never truly grasp? Wanton embodiment of and shrine-making to Arthur is a benign sort of trauma tourist. It has the same worthless social currency of a Punisher skull.
Lee Quinzel is the most embodied realization of this concept. In this continuity, Lady Gaga plays a psychotherapy student with rich parents and too much time on her hands. While we do get the sense that she has an attachment to Arthur, we come to understand this as infatuation versus real, tangible love. She has no plans nor machinations for the sustainability of the relationship, and her conception of Arthur is largely built upon his sensationalized reputation. To her, Fleck is a fetish, one she has the privilege to indulge in as much as she wants. Quinzel voluntarily checks herself into Arkham, concocts wild stories about herself, and knowingly fabricates a reality that Arthur can exist within.
This is the key difference and delineation between these characters. Fleck was forced into a position he cannot escape from by a classist and ableist system. Quinzel actively places herself in harm’s way and plays chicken using family fortune. Arthur cannot distinguish between actual reality and his falsified one; Lee can, and uses Arthur’s to indulge in a fantasy until it becomes inconvenient for her. This is, as stated above, trauma tourism — and Folie a Deux indicts its audience as complicit in the same behavior.
Parts of Folie a Deux are inspired fevered dreams from Hollywood’s sordid past. Berkley, Freed, and Pan are invoked for the dance sequences, in some of 2024’s heaviest and most sumptuous frames. A particular highlight is a dazzling duet atop a lavish rooftop setpiece, capped by a large and looming Hotel Arkham. Costume designer Arianne Phillips cites Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire films as a key influence in the costuming for the sequence, which itself evokes ‘Let’s Face The Music And Dance’ under its constructed night sky.
Of course, neither Phoenix nor Gaga have the fancy footwork of those two legendary talents. This is part of Folie a Deux’s inherent charm and magic. Both leads are talented, prolific performers in their own right, but they aren’t tap dancers being driven until their feet bleed like Astaire and Rogers. Making the choice to invest in these sets and this costuming for these performers is, itself, a joke. It alludes to the idea that even without the qualifications or abilities, delusion can make our best or worst moments feel much larger than they actually are. Film, then, is often the middle ground between our ambitions and our presumptions of grandeur. A larger-than-life place for our wildest, most vivid fantasies to come alive and be experienced as a communal shared delusion. This, itself, is a folie a deux.
Plot-driven critics will likely go home disappointed, because this metaphorical level is the one Folie a Deux operates on for its majority. It requires an appreciation for lack of clarity and obfuscated narrative. Character action is limited, and some critics have harped on the limited ‘reality’ setpieces as dull mise en scene. To approach Phillips’ film from this angle is disingenuous — the ‘reality’ of Arkham is a clear nod to the gritty, ugly claustrophobia of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which is homaged liberally through costuming, composition, and script.
Further, this is a character study made on the budget of a maximalist blockbuster. Where Cuckoo’s Nest used stark reality to unsettle and distress within a minimal budget, Folie a Deux escapes from reality with glitz and glamor. This has two major impacts — it both tells the audience about Arthur and leans into the class commentary Phillips wields in both pictures. With the style itself, the director seems to suggest that only money and fantasy can provide an escape from the grim, brutal reality being faced by the majority of Americans. And if you can’t have it, perhaps hallucinating it would be easier than accepting how unfair and hopeless our lived state is.
Yes — Folie A Deux is a hopeless film. Phillips takes a medium predicated on selling hope and dashes his own, his characters’, and the audiences’ against the prison yard gravel for over two hours. His dissatisfaction is palpable, even as he litigates clear points of joy and influence throughout his picture. This is work of a director enraptured by film, but frustrated by its place in the culture and the process through which it’s made. Moreover, his film is laced with inciting, ugly truths about mental healthcare and policing in America.
While some may take Phillips to task for spending $100-150m of the $200m budget on diagnosing a spate of problems and providing zero solutions, I applaud him for it. The fantasy of comic book films — and mainstream American comic book storytelling, in general — is that they offer easy obfuscations of real, tangible issues. Ugly and bleak problems with no clear way out can become a simplified talking point that Batman, Spider-Man, or Wolverine can demonstrate acceptable enough social politics about. 2019’s Captain Marvel doesn’t show the audience the last moments of a migrant child choking and gasping in salt water as they wonder what home feels like. It uses spaceships and Skrulls as a palatable analog to remind grown adults to that more women in the military could be the solution to senseless death. There was an Air Force crossover promotion for this film, by the way.
The Joker sequel does not try to hide what it is talking about, and by consequence, it does not profess to know the answers to its own questions. What Phillips focuses on is the effect these issues have on the individual — how rights and freedoms that should be unalienable don’t exist for certain classes of citizen. How overreach and government misspending has led to a broken system enforced by underpaid, overworked bullies. And — further — how this system has become a sort-of human zoo to opportunistic riches and eager media hounds, who freely spend accrued wealth to exploit the impoverished for entertainment. Through this, the intersection of art, class, and politics is freely litigated. The anti-comic book movie.
“Face the music and dance”
Joker: Folie a Deux will not be the final Batman film. It will likely not be the final solo Joker film, even if we never see this version again. And it almost certainly won’t be the last superhero film within a year of this writing. (There are 7 between now and next October, including this year’s Venom and Kraven.) But at this point, I ask myself if it shouldn’t be. It’s fun, I won’t deny, to indulge in the spandex fantasy as an adult. I’ve enjoyed my monthly Big Two pulls well enough, and getting used to my local shops has been a treat.
Yet more and more, I find myself less challenged and engaged by the recursive, regurgitated narratives hallmark to that side of the medium. Further, I’m extremely dissatsified with the state of comic book films in general. The Marvels, Black Widow, Eternals, The Flash — these are all lovely pictures, and they were all rushed out the door before they had any chance to take purchase. Their creatives did the best they could with what they had, but ultimately, they couldn’t contend the market Disney, Sony, and Warner have cultivated for their own products. Deadpool and Spider-Verse went home happy because they simply gave audiences what they wanted. These were safe, focus-tested cartoons driven primarily by secondhand reference. (Deadpool & Wolverine uses enough CG to qualify, sorry.) Even during the pandemic, The Batman also succeeded largely on this merit — it was the grim, gruff, cop-supporting conception of the hero that sells bumper stickers versus how he’s been written in the books as of late.
Algorithmic influence over what audiences respond to has, effectively, cooked the brains of the moviegoing public. Going to the theater is a dead art in rural and suburban areas alike in modern America, as independent moviehouses shutter and consolidated multiplexes downsize. Corporate-backed repertory screenings of older films have become commonplace, because not enough studios can produce enough bankable films to keep in theaters for long enough to turn a profit. If studios can’t make a recognizable enough product to sell someone, they’ll simply sell them the same one again — sometimes even twice within two months, in the case of Anyone But You. (Which was a savvy move on Sony’s part to deflect from lead Sydney Sweeney’s other February opening.)
This moviegoing landscape is why a picture such as Joker: Folie a Deux was always destined to fail. Phillips alienated his audience of Fight Club tattoo owners with musicals, then alienated Lady Gaga fans with comic nerd stench. He then spent two hours in a courtroom and an institution, in a sub-genre built around constant in-plot scene changes. Further, he frames Arkham Asylum as an evil and abusive place, not a big, bad prison for big, bad criminals as it can often be conceptualized in the Batman lore. And — for a coup de grace — he explicitly confirms that Joker is a victim of child rape, a topic most films don’t want to touch with a ten-foot-pole. In doing this, Phillips not only takes a broad piss on a hyper-masculine ‘cool Joker’ image, but also provokes a contingent of moviegoers offended by the implication that being raped can make people do bad things. The latter is a theme Edgar Wright toyed with in Last Night In Soho, and one he suffered for, as some critics incorrectly decried his film as “victim-blaming.” I suspect similar criticism may be levied here, though as is the case with Soho, it’s a disingenuous line of thought at best.
Folie a Deux and its large-scale failure will doubtless be litigated by box office analysts and production houses alike. It’s the sort of radical divergence from source material that’s encouraged studios to break bread with the enemy and hire fans as contracted supervisors to guide new installments in legacy IPs. As reported by Variety,
“They’re very vocal,” says the studio exec. “They will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.’” These groups have even led studios to alter the projects: “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.”
This type of decision-making is informed by that very Mashable article quoted at the top of this episode. Audiences who can’t distinguish between reference and canon, whose plot-driven reads of movies deny them access to the depth of subtext, are not limited to Redditors or Twitter comments. These days, many of these opinions are reinforced by click-eager media sites, whose very existence thrives on questions like, “Is Spider-Man In Madame Web?” or “Is Joker Based On A Comic?” Many of these sites have a reviews vertical, as reviews used to be a reliable way of generating clicks and revenue.
Because there aren’t enough qualified writers to go around as many sites as need critics, anyone can get into the industry with no writing background or interest in building one whatsoever. Some sites, in fact, will give fans seniority when it comes to covering their favorite franchises. This creates a culture of critics driven by a need for clarity, understandable references, and the desire for a “good message.” Some European and American start-ups have attempted to solve this problem in games media by contracting their writing out to non-gaming outlets. But the issue is larger than any one industry — it’s systemic. A calcified rot that has come to dictate what gets made, who gets to make, and how it gets to be watched.
How, then, does this get fixed? How do directors, writers, actors, and crew get to make films like Joker: Folie a Deux? Like Don’t Worry Darling, or Last Night In Soho, or Megalopolis, or Furiosa? How can big-budget art survive in a cinematic landscape built around familiarity and accessibility?
If the fans have anything to say, it won’t.
Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
Episode music by Chris Botti
Back soon! Until then, consider watching Shall We Dance — it’s nodded at the top of Folie à Deux, and I couldn’t recommend it more. One of Ginger & Fred’s most stupendous pictures. For those interested, I have a ranked list on Letterboxd of Ginger & Fred collaborations, as well as a ranked Ginger Rogers filmography.
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