Framing Our Receptivity

In Joker: Folie á Deux, our absences are glaring

I recently went to see Joker: Folie á Deux, where, thanks to an avalanche of negative reviews and an early evening showing, I was treated to an empty theater within which to take in the supposed train wreck I had been hearing about for weeks.

I had initially heeded the consensus about what seemed to be an undeniable fact, that the second installment in this “franchise” was an unmitigated disaster, and decided I was to sit this sequel out, no matter how much I adored director Todd Phillips’s riveting original.

But I started to believe I would regret not seeing for myself what all of the negative hoopla was about; so I managed to catch one of the last showings of a film that was swiftly consigned to the pop cultural trash heap.

What I saw was no train wreck, but a competently directed—albeit bizarre—psychological thriller which, like its predecessor, worked off of a rather standard, coherent screenplay with three detectable acts, the kind you might easily find Stephen Soderbergh or David Fincher inspired by.

The film was wonderfully acted, with Lady Gaga demonstrating her acting chops at a noticeably higher level than previous performances. And, of course, Joaquin Phoenix’s acting was iconic. He is one of our time’s greatest actors and I am haunted by his tortured petition to Gaga’s Harley Quinn not be abandoned by her towards the end of the film, by those iconic steps he made famous in the first film. It was gut wrenching. The layers of anguish, love, disappointment, illness and passion that Phoenix is able to communicate just with one line of text (“I can’t go on without you”) is beyond astonishing.

The score did its job, along with the supporting cast and the mood setting color scheme.

There was, of course, the lofty concept of constraining the Joker’s story to a courtroom drama with musical numbers. Phillips’s intention to create an unexpected followup was obvious from the beginning, what with an opening animation sequence. With its deliberative pace, absence of action or violence, abundance of close-ups and theatrical constraints to interiors, this sequel was clearly intended not as a sequentialized entry into a story world, but as a framing device for the original.

Yet, all of these literary devices seemed to fit neatly into what seemed by the end of the film to be a simple, basic, slow moving story about a famous murderer colliding with his own mythos.

In short, there was nothing bad per se about this movie.

Wherefore all of the hate?

Whether or not Folie á Deux is a particularly great movie is, at this point, after the apoplexy the film has elicited from critics and fans, completely beside the point.

What matters instead is the glaring disconnect between what amounts to at worst a mediocre movie and a seething, reactionary odium coming on the heels of its release.

I suspect that the negative reviews are not about what this movie is, but what it is not.

It is not, to be clear, a film that in any way, shape or form obeys the hidden diktat of superhero franchises that stipulates the application of literalism onto the stories within their respective universes. When a movie as functional—albeit adventurous—as Joker: Folie a Deux receives the level of condemnation I have witnessed over the past several weeks, my only explanation is that Phillips has done a no-no. Something verboten has occurred.

That the director of this courtroom drama might have deliberately intended to dash these expectations is obvious from viewing the film: this sequel makes no excuses about what it wants to say, not only about the villain-turned-antihero at the center of its focus, but also of the entire entertainment-industrial complex that churns out franchise fodder for eager masses. Unsurprisingly, Folie á Deux is deeply compassionate towards the human being at the center of the drama and utterly contemptuous of the dehumanizing “bread and circuses” of the industry foisted around the characterization of that human being.

In addressing a topic as imbricated in the national culture as the moviegoing experience the film gives itself a lot to chew on. But it manages confronting this Goliath by focusing on a salient ingredient within the discourse around commercial entertainment, namely, toxic fandom.

I heard an irate YouTuber on the Piers Morgan show rattling on about betrayals and audience contempt in regard to this film, seeming only to shed, unbeknownst to the rattler, more light on what the film is trying to say in the first place. Many of the published reviews also seem to indicate that Phillips is somehow guilty of this type of contempt, as if there were a law somewhere saying “Thou Artist Shalt Think Highly of Thy Fans.”

The appropriation of a well-known superhero villain such as the Joker, as opposed to one the director made up out of whole cloth, is precisely the point this film set out to make. Our visceral possessiveness around pop cultural intellectual property cultivated by the entertainment-industrial complex is a conspicuous anthropological phenomenon that deserves much more attention than it is getting and Phillips’s foray into this exploration should be applauded merely for trying.

In its disciplined examination of mental illness, trauma, social decay, loss, fame, spectacle, persona and self, Folie á Deux uses literary devices that are necessary in order to properly examine these themes. I find it almost impossible to imagine a film that could undertake this project without the deployment of the intellectual property known as “The Joker” as its abstracted Exhibit A.

If his appropriation of the Joker in the service of this exploration communicates audience contempt, well, in a certain respect, given the reactivity among critics and fans to an at worst mediocre film, the contempt seems somewhat justified.

The resentment engendered by this film’s dismissal of franchise responsibility finds a neat diegetical parallel as Arthur Fleck, the putative human ego at the root of the Joker persona, wrestles with the mythos that has arisen around the Joker phenomenon, ultimately choosing to risk backlash in order to assert definitively his authentic subjectivity. Arthur Fleck is not the Joker, this movie seems insistent on getting across and, for good measure, Fleck is killed off at the end to seal the deal. The double sided coin of fan adoration, which includes hatred as its necessary corollary, is thereby illustrated vividly in this movie. Phillips designed the film to closely parallel the virulent reactivity he had to have known this film would cause.

In that Piers Morgan broadcast, the host signs off by saying that Phillips has committed an act of self-harm in the release of this sequel, but, in my opinion, this reverses reality: in the release of his Folie á Deux, Phillips has insulated his artistic integrity from the commercial machinations and endless commodification of the superhero franchise industry, which is actually an act of self-preservation.

I remember in an interview with Phillips talking about how much convincing Phoenix needed in order to agree to star in the first one, given that the actor also shared this conviction about superhero franchises, and I am compelled to believe that Phillips might have already known that this was what he was eventually going to do, seal off his creation from the greater DC Universe through the use of framing devices in the sequel. Perhaps he dangled this carrot in front of Phoenix to get him to sign on, which, if it were true, would be a brilliant bit of artistic strategizing behind the scenes.

The final shot at the end of the movie, after Arthur has been stabbed to death in the prison, is worth a closer examination, if only to illustrate the misguidedness of so much of the negative criticism of this movie.

I don’t usually like to read spoilers of movies before I see them but in this case I allowed myself because for those first couple weeks after the film’s release I assumed that I was simply going to stay home. So I found out early about this critical nugget which disappointed so many fans, that the director decided to invert the story of Arthur Fleck as the Joker by connecting a random psychopath in the prison to the overarching storyline of the Batman nemesis.

As it turns out, far from merely a cavalier dismissal of some supposed responsibility Todd Phillips has towards Joker fans, almost all of the ligature of social critique in this film can be gleaned just from this last scene. Phillips was even careful with the casting of Arthur’s murderer, an actor with a very strong resemblance to the late Heath Ledger, who gave us one of the finest portrayals of the Joker almost two decades ago. This murderer then decides to maim his face with the same knife he used on Arthur, tying this character inexorably to the Christopher Nolan franchise.

What I found so compelling about this pawning off of canon responsibility was how expertly it adhered to the question the movie was asking all along, the question as to who gets to say who the Joker is. Out of all of the reviews of this movie which mentioned the fact that Arthur is killed off by a rogue psycho, not a single one that I read cared to illustrate what is undoubtedly a crucial framing device: keeping the killer in the background in deep, soft focus as he takes his knife to his cheeks, all the while Arthur in the foreground staring at us with his vulnerable, pained eyes. Even here the director considers what gets foregrounded and what gets backgrounded: the Joker, that mythic creature which has been over and again revamped, revitalized and reconsidered ad nauseam, is blurred off and in the distance, his movements almost indiscernible, while Arthur Fleck, the man who was to become the Joker, breathes his last breath in stark, crystal clear close up.

Phillips is unequivocal in the answer to his own question, that it is now up to us, the moviegoers and fans, to decide who the Joker really is. But there is a glaring constraint on our own ability to answer that question. For those of us who insist that the real Joker was the villain so frequently portrayed over close to a century of comic books lore, that declaration must now reckon with a very human version of that mythology, one which captivated us for some years in the stunning portrayal of Joaquin Phoenix. In the second film, it is this Arthur Fleck who stares right back at us as he bleeds to death on the floor of a hallway in a prison. We are now to decide. It is a test.

And I’m afraid we’ve already failed that test.

Many of the reviews use the line “the joke is on us.” But they misunderstand what that “joke” really is.

I was actually not alone in the theater. There was one other person three rows behind me. When I purchased the ticket the clerk told me one other person had purchased a ticket for the showing and I said to myself, “Shocker.”

As the two of us shuffled out of the showing, we both looked at each other, immediately aware of what we were going to say:

“What was everyone talking about?”

She mentioned that one of the more controversial of the devices which Phillips used, the musical numbers in the film, is itself a critical deployment in the examination of franchise culture, given that comic books share with musicals a kind of hokeyness and absence of realism. It is yet one more example of the Brechtian effects littered throughout this film.

Similar complaints happened when David Lynch released his long-awaited third season to the Twin Peaks saga, when, instead of reifying the achievement of the 1991 original through a simulated followup in 2017, he instead used seventeen hourlong episodes to frame the original story within an art gallery cavalcade of surreal imagery. That anyone would insist that this “new season” needed to adhere to canon and plot points would immediately illustrate a conspicuous absence of receptivity to artistic intent.

The same goes for Joker: Folie á Deux.

Like another preceding dud, Megalopolis, this sequel will go down in cinema history as a grossly misunderstood movie. Sometimes an artistic statement occurs with very poor timing and I believe that explains most of what’s happening here.

Yet, even if Folie á Deux never receives its deserved reexamination and is kept in its present location in the pop cultural trash heap, it will nonetheless point to a rather inconvenient truth: that fan culture, along with its imperious drug dealer fueling its habit, the entertainment-industrial complex, is a conservative, reactionary force that most of the time refuses to countenance the possibility that experimentation and self-examination are two essential components of the artistic experience, a critical part of what makes us human. The problem of fan culture is that, at its root, it is part of the greater societal problem of the profit motive in late-capitalism. But what makes it particularly sad is fan culture’s seeming exuberance in joining the industry to take up arms against artistry.

Arthur Fleck himself was trying to say this to us, all the way to his necessary end. I hope, as the disappointment fades, that a film director chose art instead of genuflection, more of us will become receptive to Arthur’s plea.

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