Joker: Folie á Deux 2024

This movie falls into a weird space in the DC films continuity. It was released well over a year after James Gunn was hired as the head of the DC films division and a year before the first fully James Gunn produced DC movie Superman, but it’s not a part of either the DCEU or the DCU, instead it’s an Elseworlds movie following the outside of continuity Joker movie from five years earlier. And this movie even goes further from that premise, shifting from inspired by Taxi Driver and the King of Comedy into something that keeps that same tone but throws in a musical reality into the mix. It’s something that’s really bizarre to describe that doesn’t seem to be catering to the fans of either genre. The musical numbers don’t fit very well with fans of the dark and gritty style of movie, and the dark and gritty style of the majority of the film doesn’t mesh well with typically bright and cheery musicals. I found the film rather fascinating, especially with the thought in my mind that it’s pretty much impossible to find the line between what’s actually happening in the world of the movie and what’s happening entirely in Arthur Fleck’s imagination.

What really helps this movie along is that you have to keep in mind the fact that a large portion of the first movie was entirely within Arthur’s imagination. Every scene with his neighbor becoming and being his girlfriend were entirely fictional while the deaths and murders were supposedly real and actually did happen. From this perspective, it calls into question every single element of this second movie including everything surrounding Lee from her initial interest in him to her eventual rejection of him. Her initial interest draws him in, as well as Paddy as the guard who seems to be soft on Arthur at this point in his incarceration. She initially draws his interest and shares how much she is like him, and Paddy continually pulls strings to allow them to spend more time together until it culminates in her starting a fire during movie time which creates enough chaos to allow them to escape the building, but get caught at the fence. Their love affair keeps having these moments where she is allowed close contact with him in ways that are varying shades of unbelievability with the extreme happening when she is seemingly allowed into his solitary confinement cell where she smuggles in makeup to give him a loose approximation of his Joker appearance before they have extremely awkward sex.

The unanswerable question is where does the fantasy end and the reality begin? The fantasy moments begin simply enough as Arthur Fleck breaks into song in the dining area. His singing voice isn’t perfect, it’s weak and unsure, slightly off key and the other inmates play along, one miming the piano playing. This is something that could be entirely fantasy, or it could be entirely real, or it could be somewhere in between. It’s followed up not too long after by a purely fantasy sequence where Arthur imagines himself and Lee on stage in a more produced production number with an audience and a bright red curtain, full costumes with him in the full Joker gear though the singing is still closer to the level of reality. And when Arthur’s lawyer tells him that Lee is just playing him and telling him lies about her past to get on his good side, and she is actually fully educated as a psychologist from a wealthy family and had committed herself likely in order to get close to him, then his fantasy has his fantasy version of Lee turn on him and shoot him as he feels like he has been betrayed. And when he ends the trial by rejecting his Joker persona, she fully rejects him showing that she was only ever interested in him as the Joker, the psychiatric case and anarchist celebrity, and not ever as Arthur the troubled man. It’s also worth mentioning that for most of the movie, Lee is portrayed as very unglamourous, wearing very little makeup until her final scene at the courthouse where she dons something approximating Harley Quinn’s look, and even most of her singing is unglamorous outside of a couple high fantasy sequences.

Things get even more bizarre when it comes to the trial, as Arthur spends the first couple sessions taking time to look for Lee who doesn’t show up immediately the first time and has to get a seat in the back. Lee also eventually convinces Arthur to fire his lawyer and represent himself, which he not only does, but uses that as an excuse to represent himself in his Joker persona with the face paint and all. The movie even takes a moment for the judge to comment on how that is extremely unusual but technically not against any rules. Joker then goes onto conduct the trial slipping in and out of a Southern Gentleman lawyer persona as he spends more time balking at the fact that Gary, who he spared in the first movie has an actual last name of “Puddles” than he does actively trying to defend his case. And it’s arguably due to Gary’s heartfelt condemnation of Arthur’s actions in the first movie that he drops the Joker persona and confesses to the jury during his closing statement.

During the trial, there’s also a moment where he insults the guards who had generally been nice to him, at least by movie prison guard standards, and faces the consequences of that when he returns, as does Ricky his most ardent supporter within Arkham. The ending is worth commenting on as Arthur had been found guilty on the first two counts before a bomb blows up the side of the courthouse, freeing Arthur to be rescued by other Joker supporters only to abandon them to find Lee who in turn abandons him, and back in jail he is led by the guards to his death in the form of that same disillusioned Joker supporter. It’s all intended to be a tragic story about a sad man who became the inspiration for quite possibly the next actual Joker. But it’s difficult to take anything in this movie at face value due to not being able to draw a clear line between fantasy and reality which simultaneously makes the movie more and less fascinating. It’s possible that it could be studied to find a deeper meaning, but it could just as easily be disregarded as overly pretentious slop posing as something deep and I’m honestly not entirely sure where I stand on it. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.