The end of Joker: Folie á Deux really begins following the assault by the guards and the death of Arthur’s fellow inmate and friend, Ricky. The assault itself is a full circle moment, as we find out in the original film (and it comes up in Folie á Deux) that Arthur had been the victim of sexual abuse by his mother’s boyfriend(s) and that’s probably what split Arthur’s personality to begin with. Phillips uses the guards taking Arthur into the shower as a callback to that childhood trauma, and it serves as almost a reset. What started Joker is what ends Joker. I’m not defending that choice or saying it was a good one, just stating the function it has in the film.
Once that reset happens, Phillips spends the last few scenes deconstructing various aspects of Joker.
Arthur Fleck, not Joker
First, the closing arguments, what should be the big finale where most courtroom dramas swing for the fence, is a total anticlimax as Arthur seemingly gives up. With none of his previous character or fire, he perches atop a stool in front of the jury and takes accountability. Quote: I wanted to come out here as Joker. And I was gonna go on an angry rant. And blame all of you, and everyone, for this f***ing miserable life. But it wouldn’t matter, because I can’t do this anymore. Because I can’t be who you want me to be. It was all just a fantasy. There is no Joker. It’s just me. I killed six people. I wish I didn’t, but I did…. I just wanna blow it all up, and start a new life. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Arthur Fleck. Arthur Fleck who?
It’s not really very subtle, right? Phillips, through Fleck, tells the audience, straight up the difference in what they expected versus what they got. And in that way actually critiques the reaction to the first film. “You all liked when Joker shot Murray? You all became Jokerholics like the people on the streets who rioted across Gotham? Like Lee Quinzel? Did you expect more of the same this time? Well, this time, I’m going to make it very clear—you’re not supposed to root for Joker.” And Phillips reinforces that by having Lee and a few of the other Joke-alos (does that joke work? Juggalo. Jokealo?) walk out on Joker, revealing that they never cared about him, they only cared about the clown.
Burn it down? No, I don’t think I will.
What does Phillips do next to further deconstruct Joker? After another song (sigh), a random bomb goes off and leaves the court in ruin. Arthur makes it to his feet and leaves. He’s free! More Joker shenanigans should follow, right? He runs into one of his supporters who recognizes him, puts him in a car with another supporter, and it seems like surely a Joker revolution is right around the corner. That’s exactly what the two stans discuss. First, they praise him. “You said you wanted to blow it all up. And somebody blew it the f*** up!” Which is a complete misunderstanding of what Arthur meant. He didn’t want to blow up society. He wanted to blow up Joker. Next, one says “This is just the beginning, man. They’re gonna burn the whole f***ing city down, now.” As soon as Arthur hears that, he jumps out of the car.
In the first film, Phillips showed us how a charismatic leader in a broken society can cause a community to devour itself. It was a chastisement. Political failure creates people like Joker then media gives them a voice in the name of entertainment. It was a warning.
Back in 2016, Phillips did an interview with IndieWire about the film War Dogs, and he said: It’s a movie about guys making bad decisions that lead to mayhem, which is really what all my movies are about…. Oddly, it’s almost too similar to me. I love chaos, so bad decisions lead to mayhem equals chaos, and I just love chaos. I love it in my own life. I love it in movies. I love documenting it in movies.
I actually didn’t read that quote until after I wrote everything above this, so it’s nice to find some supporting evidence about the whole “bad decisions that lead to chaos” thing. To NPR, after Joker came out, Phillips said: We really thought it was important to shine a light on the system. I think, like a lot of people, the system’s broken, and why not use a film to make a comment on that? …. [Should we] pretend that we’re not failing these people? Why is it so bad to shine a light on them and see what makes them that way or try and look into it? That’s what it felt like we were doing. It didn’t feel like by making a movie about something, you’re celebrating it. Representation is not endorsement.
In that same interview, he was very aware, and disappointed and kind of upset, that people thought he was encouraging “incel” violence. So here he features the exact kind of people who were excited by chaos Joker caused and has Arthur run away from them. Since everyone seemed to miss the message the first time, he went the opposite direction and showed the character distancing himself from such actions.
That’s entertainment
So Phillips has had Arthur reject being Joker, then reject leading incel nation. What next? We get the final confrontation with Lee. She liked him, right? The funny guy gets the girl, right? They’ll run off and have a happy life?
Nope. Lee was never interested in Arthur Fleck. She’s a privileged person who did cosplay-trauma for fun. She liked the power of being Joker’s girl, of driving this man into his persona. What Arthur’s lawyer said about her was in the movie for a reason—she didn’t have Arthur’s best interests at heart. She wanted the fame she would get from her time with Joker. Prompting him to be his own defense counsel wasn’t for his sake, it was for hers. And when she told him she was pregnant? That was just “entertainment”. Part of the show she was putting on.
What’s the point? The point is, people who say they love you don’t really love you. They love your celebrity and the fame you provide them. So anyone who fancies themself a Joker is never going to end up in a happy romance. It was always, and will always be, a bad romance. One-sided. Predatory. No one will love you for you. And Arthur’s already proved that you can’t always be Joker. Because no one is actually Joker. It’s always a show. A mask. You need to find people who love you for you, who like you for you.
You get that dialogue at the end. As Lee sings “That’s Entertainment”, Arthur says: “I don’t want to sing anymore. Just talk to me. Just talk. Please stop singing.” Singing was always part of the fantasy, part of the performance. And he wants to be real. She won’t give him that, because, for her, as we said, it was always performative.
Arthur’s then re-arrested. No great escape. No crime genius.
Joker’s death
As this final bit opens, Sullivan, the guard, walks by and sarcastically tips his cap to Arthur. He sings lines from Frank Sinatra’s song “We Three”. These are the song lyrics:
- We three, we’re all alone
- Living in a memory
- My echo, my shadow and me
- We three, we’re not a crowd
- We’re not even a company
- My echo, my shadow, and me
- What good is the moonlight
- The silvery moonlight that shines above?
- I walk with my shadow
- I talk with my echo
- But where is the one I love?
- We three, we’ll wait for you
- Even till eternity
- My echo, my shadow, and me
- We’ll be there waiting
- My echo, my shadow, and me
Remember the little short that plays at the very beginning of Joker: Folie á Deux? The opening card said Joker in… “Me and My Shadow”. The ensuing cartoon shows Arthur Fleck, dressed as Joker, arrive at a red carpet event. In the dressing room, Arthur’s shadow puts on the clown make up, steals Arthur’s clothes, locks Arthur away, then heads out and starts causing mayhem. He kisses a woman, hurts people, then keeps embarrassing Arthur on national TV. When the police show up, the shadow slips away and leaves Arthur to bear the burden of responsibility. The cops beat him (seemingly to death).
That cartoon tells us that Joker was never good for Arthur. That it was always something that took Arthur over rather than a thing Arthur controlled. Which points to Arthur’s lawyer being right. He did need help. And that’s what we saw in the first movie, a man who had a hard-but-decent life thanks to support systems offered to him by a functioning society. Once those systems disappeared, the shadow came out. But everyone missed the point. So we get Folie á Deux where Phillips spends the whole movie saying “Do you see now? None of this is cool.”
Sullivan, in the world of the movie, doesn’t know what he’s doing by singing “We Three” but Phillips introduces the idea of the “echo”. The echo takes the form of the young man, the self-proclaimed psychopath, who follows Fleck into the hallway on his way to the “visitor” (probably a setup by the guards).
The final conversation:
- Echo: Hey, Arthur, hold up. Can I tell you a joke I came up with?
- Arthur: Is it quick?
- E: Yeah, I can make it quick.
- A: Okay.
- E: So, a psychopath walks into a bar, and sees this famous clown sitting there, all alone. Totally drunk, it’s pathetic. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he says. “What a disappointment. I used to watch you on TV. What can I get you?” And this clown turns and says, “Well, if you’re buying, you can get me anything.” “Perfect,” the psychopath says, “how about I get you what you f***ing deserve?”
The kid then knifes Arthur right in the stomach. A lot of times. We get a final fantasy, where Joker’s back on stage with Lee, after she had, much earlier in the fantasy (and movie), shot him in the stomach. He sings “Gonna Build a Mountain”, a reference to what Lee had, in reality, said they would do.
- I’m gonna build a mountain, from a little hill
- I’m gonna build a mountain, least I hope I will
- I’m gonna build a mountain, I’m gonna build it high
- I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, only know I’m gonna try
- I’m gonna build a daydream, from a little hope
- I’m gonna push the daydream, up that mountain slope
- I’m gonna build a daydream, whoa, I’m gonna see it through
- Gonna build a mountain and a daydream
- Gonna make ‘em both come true
- I’m gonna build a heaven, as a will someday
- And the Lord sends Gabriel to take me away
- Whoa, I wanna fine young son, to take my place
- I’ll leave my son in my heaven on earth with the good Lord’s grace
The daydream portion relates to the sense of twisted fantasy that had plagued Arthur over the course of both movies (throughout his life, really). And what he dreamed came true—he was seen by the world, made an icon. But the monkey paw curled and his dream ended up a nightmare. The same goes for “son”. Arthur, still as Joker, sings about wanting a son (an echo). But the son isn’t Arthur’s. It’s Joker’s. And the heaven on earth Joker created is actually a hell. When Arthur sings those lines about “heaven on earth”, Phillips actually cuts back to the prison hallway.
So we get that last shot of Arthur dying, as his “son” laughs Joker-y in the background, then even cuts his mouth like Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight. “That’s Life’ plays the same way it did at the end of Joker. In the original, the song was tongue-in-cheek, kind of fun. Now it’s bitter. Brutal. Sad. And notice that the young inmate repeats the “you get what you deserve line” that Joker said to Murray in the first film? Echo.
Like with the other moments of deconstruction, Phillips acknowledges that characters like Joker have consequence, because you do have the followers who aren’t just cosplaying for fun, like Lee, but will seriously misunderstood and “take the joke too far” so to speak. Playing a “Joker” creates a Joker. You become part of a cycle of violence and unrest. And it’s not cool. You don’t go out a legend, or a hero. You’re forgotten on a cold floor. So. Don’t admire people like this. Don’t act like this. That’s why Phillips doesn’t even really show the new Joker. He doesn’t want to give the kid “a moment” or treat him as special or important. He’s not the heir but the conclusion. A period rather than an exclamation point.
I’ve never seen a filmmaker so fed up with the reaction to a film and a character that he would make a sequel just to tell everyone to shut up and move on. But that’s what we got here. Phillips demolishes his version of Joker, not as an apology, but as a last, frustrated laugh. “You jerks didn’t get it the first time. So we’re going to do it again, but this time, without the sarcastic cool. Maybe you’ll get it now.”
Personally, I didn’t like the movie very much (if at all?), but I think the concept is kind of awesome. I admire what Phillips wanted to do more than the execution. Maybe, someday, we’ll all chuckle about it.
A note about the title, Folie á Deux
I did want to mention the meaning of the title. Folie á deux is French for “folly of two” and refers to when two people, who are close to one another, share the same delusion (or mental illness). A real example was Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt. Ruby was a family vlogger who was pretty popular. Jodi was a counselor who started coaching parents. She believed in discipline so strict that it was actually abuse. Where a normal person would say, “I’m not doing this,” Ruby bought right in, and the two began to torture Ruby’s children, thinking they were answering a higher calling. It was horrific. Thankfully, they were both arrested, convicted, and have decades to spend in prison.
When Joker 2 was first announced as Folie á Deux, people already knew Lady Gaga would play a version of Harley Quinn. So people figured the title simply referred to the two of them sharing a delusion. Which ended up being true. In the film, they both do share a delusion.
But it actually extends beyond that. Knowing what we now know, the title can be applied not only to Lee Quinzel but to those Jokerheads in the film who wanted to support him no matter what. And to the people in the real world who took Joker the wrong way. And maybe even critics who didn’t understand what the original was saying.
Cast
- Arthur Fleck – Joaquin Phoenix
- Lee Quinzel – Lady Gaga
- Jackie Sullivan – Brendan Gleeson
- Maryanne Stewart – Catherine Keener
- Harvey Dent – Harry Lawtey
- Gary Puddles – Leigh Gill
- Dr. Victor Liu – Ken Leung
- Ricky Meline – Jacob Lofland
- Young Inmate – Connor Storrie
- Written by – Scott Silver, Todd Phillips
- Directed by – Todd Phillips
Great job!
Hey Chris, this is great! Really well thought out and written. I appreciate all of the time and effort you put into constructing this.