Someday over the previous a number of years, a specific meme-like social media put up format grew to become standard: Somebody would put up somebody saying one thing that was completely self-contradictory or self-undermining, one thing so patently loopy or ridiculous that no sane and affordable particular person might probably settle for it.
Given the timing, this was most likely at the very least partially the results of the 2019 film Joker, an origin story by which Batman’s archnemesis was portrayed as a dim, determined, depressed loser who snaps in response to an uncaring, ugly world that appears formless and uncontrolled.
Nicely, I am right here to let you know that I’ve seen the follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux, and that it’s such an inert, joyless, disagreeable slog, I battle to conceive of the way it obtained made or to plausibly think about what any sane particular person might have been pondering in the course of the improvement or manufacturing.
Joker: Folie à Deux is a two-hour-plus, event-free recapitulation of the occasions of the earlier movie. Nothing occurs. The primary Joker was ugly in spirit and had basically one thematic be aware, however there was at the very least a gradual development towards a second when the titular character would lastly manifest in full. The sequel has no such development, and certainly little or no narrative in any respect. It is principally only a recap of the primary movie, plus some underwhelming musical numbers in a courtroom setting. It is lifeless, pointless, and humorless all through.
How, once more, did this film get made? Simply—how?
Pricey readers: I’m going to turn out to be the Joker.
The apparent reply to that query, sadly, might be that the primary Joker made $1 billion worldwide on the field workplace and in addition generated some Oscar noms, a uncommon feat for a dirty R-rated comic-book movie. This necessitated a sequel, and in addition gave director and co-writer Todd Phillips extra management.
And what Phillips appears to have wished, greater than the rest, was to make a feature-length rebuke to followers of the primary movie, particularly followers who thought Arthur Fleck—the unhappy, disturbed, lonely man who turns into a well-known homicide clown—was sort of cool.
The primary movie was about this too, in a means casting the Joker’s rise as a cautionary story in regards to the viral attract of loopy individuals committing sensationalistic acts whereas being egged on by the media. It wasn’t a superb film, however Joaquin Phoenix’s gaunt, menacing portrayal of the title character was charged with anarchic power, and its Martin Scorsese-inspired portrayal of Gotham by means of New York round 1980 made an incredible backdrop for its story of a determined clown going murderously mad.
For the follow-up, Phillips has chosen to return to the occasions of the primary movie, reviewing them in conversations between Fleck and his lawyer in a sensationalistic TV interview, and eventually in a trial that takes up a lot of the film’s second half. At each level that Phillips might have moved the story ahead, or allowed one thing to occur, he slams on the brakes and calls for as a substitute that the film gaze backward. It is an prolonged sneer of a movie that spends most of its time not solely recapitulating all of the ways in which its fundamental character is and was terrible, however insisting that for those who loved the primary film as a fan, you most likely are too.
To this boring setup, Phillips provides two new, associated parts. First, there’s Girl Gaga as Joker’s loopy flame, Harley Quinn. Second, and presumably due to the primary, the sequel is a musical of kinds with a handful of set-piece singing numbers that showcase Fleck’s deteriorating psychological state. Gaga’s job is to sing and look the half, and he or she does each fairly nicely. But, outdoors of a pyromaniac meet-cute with Mr J., the film provides her little or no to do.
Nonetheless, she’s the one character with something like an arc or a metamorphosis: On the finish, she turns into Harley Quinn, Joker’s tormented sidekick and lover. But her climactic second comes when she lastly reveals up in clown make-up and costume, as a camera-ready reflection of her superfan obsession: In that second, she turns into the Joker too.
Quinn was launched three many years in the past in Batman: The Animated Sequence, an animated kids’s present that additionally supplied surprisingly subtle takes on the caped crusader and his weirdo rogue’s gallery. It situated the impolite and rowdy characters of the Joker and Harley Quinn not of their tortured biographies or their cracked psychologies, however of their zany, warped, comically violent actions and interactions with one another.
Looking back, it serves as a counterpoint to Phillips’ glumly, literal mytho-psychologizing. The present’s leering, menacing, playfully psychopathic Joker, voiced with maniac glee by Mark Hamill, was absolutely realized reasonably than absolutely defined. The loopy did not get to him. He was the loopy that obtained to everybody else.
To place it one other means: He did not turn out to be the Joker—he simply was the Joker.
It is a much more horrifying solution to clarify the persistence of insanity on the earth, the fear of the violent unknown. And in its implied reversal of the meme, it suggests a worrying chance: Perhaps as a substitute of all of the sudden cracking on the craziness of an insane world, we have all at all times been the Joker all alongside.
