My World Of Flops: Joker: Folie À Deux

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

When he wasn’t tearing our nation apart with divisive comic book movies like Man Of Steel, Justice League, and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, Zack Snyder co-wrote and directed 2011’s critically maligned Sucker Punch. 

Snyder described Sucker Punch as “Alice In Wonderland with machine guns.” Critics eviscerated the movie for what they saw as its sexist, objectifying plot about gorgeous young women in an abusive mental hospital who escape the horrifying reality of their real lives in fantasy sequences where they are scantily clad sex workers battling evil in a series of fetishistic, fanboy-friendly tableaus.

In the mind of the man behind the Snyderverse, critics got the film wrong. To Snyder, Sucker Punch wasn’t a facile celebration of objectification and fanboy sexism but rather a harsh commentary on toxic men who cannot see women as anything other than sex objects for them to ogle and enjoy. Snyder told Film School Rejects, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us. The men in the dark are basically me: dorky sci-fi kids.”

It was audacious for Sucker Punch to posit, incoherently and unsuccessfully, that its audience is also its villain. It’s similarly bold for Todd Phillips to make a sequel to his billion-dollar-grossing, Oscar-winning, zeitgeist-capturing 2019 smash Joker about how its protagonist is a worthless nobody with a fucked-up relationship with a dreary and joyless Harley Quinn whose “fans” venerate him out of ignorance and misguided hero worship.

Phillips essentially made a sequel saying that fans of the original movie, and the Joker in general, are pathetic incels who prefer juvenile fantasy to the grown-up dreariness of real life. Unsurprisingly, Joker: Folie À Deux had a worse opening weekend than laughingstocks like Morbius, The Marvels, and The Flash despite being a sequel to one of the most successful comic book movies ever. 

Joker: Folie À Deux opens audaciously, with Looney Tunes theme music introducing an animated short starring Phoenix’s Joker, entitled “Me and My Shadow.” The cartoon opens with Joker strutting out of an endless limousine at the Franklin Theater, the meme-friendly place where Joker famously murdered Robert De Niro’s talk show host. Joker exits the limo with a peacock strut, to the rapturous delight of devoted fans and cultists in clown makeup holding up signs. He’s in his element, but a dark shadow hangs over his unlikely stardom. 

As the title alludes, “Me and My Shadow” finds Joker at war with his shadow self in a punishingly literal fashion. Joker’s sinister shadow emerges from a scuffle victorious and sets about stealing his identity during a big television appearance. The shadow Joker is pure id. He smooches a pretty girl, breaks a wealthy man’s hand for no discernible reason, and then delights a live audience with a schmaltzy rendition of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic “What The World Needs Now Is Love.”

The real Joker—if such a thing even exists—emerges from his dressing room devoid of pants and a shirt and fights unsuccessfully for control with his dark side or, rather, his even darker side. He loses the altercation when the Shadow Joker gives him a stick of dynamite instead of a microphone. The crafty physical manifestation of Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow Self tricks the real Joker into wearing his trademark red suit long enough to be viciously beaten by a trio of comical cartoon coppers. Blood splatters against the screen until it’s nothing but a curtain of red. It’s a moment redolent of the Rodney King beating and speaks to the film’s desperate need to say something profound about society as well as its inability to do so. Like the 134 remaining minutes, “Me and My Shadow” isn’t just purposefully unfunny; it’s anti-funny. It’s devoted to punishing audiences, not entertaining them. 

Joker: Folie À Deux is a musical sequel to a movie about a comic book character who wears makeup and dresses up like a clown to commit crimes. Yet, it is grimmer and more depressing than Holocaust dramas involving children. It knows that it only exists because the original film somehow made $1 billion and won Joaquin Phoenix the Best Actor Oscar for a one-note, career-worst performance.

When we’re re-introduced to Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, he’s so unhealthily skinny that it looks like his spine is trying to escape the prison of his body. Arthur moves through his gray world like a ghost, an empty spirit. He’s a sad man in a sorrowful realm whose world brightens when he encounters Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel, who gets his attention by flirtatiously pretending to shoot herself in the head. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if someone expresses no interest in your true self and only seems into you because of your deadly, infamous clown alter-ego, they’re not right for you.

Then Catherine Keener enters the proceedings as Arthur Fleck’s pragmatic defense lawyer, Maryanne Stewart. Her defense of Arthur Fleck doubles as the film’s ham-fisted theme. Stewart thinks that the trauma Arthur endured in his childhood led to a psychic split and that it was this other side of him that committed the five murders that landed him in Arkham State Hospital.

Joker: Folie À Deux never stops making the screamingly unnecessary point that, despite the cult of personality he has attracted, Arthur Fleck is a miserable fuck with nothing to offer the world or his fanbase, and Joker is a seedy illusion created to make a world-class depressive, and possible virgin, feel less powerless and alone. 

The world wants Joker, the brash, ostensibly charismatic star who shook up the world of pop culture and entertainment with his homicidal showmanship. They have no interest in Arthur Fleck and his small problems. In Joker: Folie À Deux, Arthur is so infamous that a television movie was made about his life and crimes. In any other comic book movie, we’d get to see some of that television movie and its iconic cheesiness, but that might be fun or entertaining, so Joker: Folie À Deux skips it. Besides, you couldn’t fit everything into a supervillain sequel that lasts only 137 minutes.

Joker: Folie À Deux doesn’t turn into a proper musical until nearly a half-hour in, when Arthur, after meeting Lee, sings “For Once In My Life”, first a capella and then accompanied by an unseen orchestra. Phillips’ bleak provocation doesn’t seem to know what kind of a musical it wants to be, or why it’s even a musical at all, beyond that marking a distinct change from the original. It’s seemingly a musical out of spite. Phillips and co-screenwriter Scott Silver made the movie a musical because that’s what the audience for the first film wants least. 

Phillips knows that the incels who made Joker a pop culture phenomenon and surprise blockbuster really don’t want to see a movie where Phoenix’s Joker sings, dances, kisses a pretty girl, and falls in love. But they also have no interest in prison movies or courtroom dramas, so Joker: Folie À Deux is a romance, musical, prison movie, and courtroom drama.

Arthur Fleck fires his attorney so that he can represent himself. Ninety minutes into the second and final film in the Joker saga, the antihero/villain starts unexpectedly doing characters, bits, and voices, most notably a fussy Southern lawyer with a shaky drawl. 

Joker suggests that, like the comedy stylings of King Of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin, Arthur Fleck’s “comedy” is less a conventional stand-up set than a dour expression of his mental illness. So it feels random and nonsensical for Arthur Fleck to instantaneously turn into a much different kind of comedian so late in this sour saga. What other comic surprises does Arthur have in store? Is he also a ventriloquist? Is he a Gallagher-like prop comic? Does he do impressions of Jack Nicholson and Ronald Reagan? Maybe he’s into commedia dell’arte, but they felt that was a little highbrow for a movie like this. Maybe those scenes are on the cutting room floor. 

Where Joker stole shamelessly from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy, Joker: Folie À Deux borrows from a much less revered Scorsese film: the flop musical New York, New York. New York, New York anticipated Joker: Folie À Deux in being a retro musical that takes pride in being no damn fun at all, but rather a grim statement about life’s inexorable horrors. Joker: Folie À Deux also recalls the musical tragicomedy of British writer Dennis Potter, who similarly used the power of cheap music to comment on the unrelenting ugliness of existence.

In the film’s most important/obvious dialogue, a broken-down and emotionally raw Fleck concedes that “there is no Joker,” just a lost man in makeup trying to make sense of a senseless life and a senseless world. Phillips is telling misguided souls who embraced Joker as a martyr and an outlaw hero that their hero is a nobody whose life means nothing. He’s an empty shell onto which the public can project its wishes and fantasies. Quinzel doesn’t want Arthur. She wants Joker, and is despondent when the man she views as her soulmate stops playing him and reverts to his creepy, small true self. 

Lady Gaga is not responsible for the film’s failure, but her performance suffers terribly compared to Margot Robbie’s version of the character in Birds Of Prey, The Suicide Squad, and, to a lesser extent, Suicide Squad. Robbie gave Harley energy, dark humor, and a spark that’s completely missing from Gaga’s morose and deluded portrayal. When Joker: Folie À Deux bombed, Kaley Cuoco was winning accolades for voicing the character in an acclaimed adult cartoon TV show that’s still on the air. Gaga may be an Oscar-winning superstar, but there are multiple better iterations of this character in multiple forms of media from the past few years alone.

In a world where people are delusional enough to idolize Phoenix’s Joker and see Joker and Harley Quinn as models for the perfect relationship, it’s worth noting that Joker is no one to look up to and that his relationship with Harley Quinn is, at the very least, extremely dysfunctional. Phillips did not need to make these points so heavy-handedly or often. He also did not need to punish misguided audiences by intentionally making a brazenly, boldly non-commercial movie that dares its target audience to hate it. 

Joker: Folie À Deux is subversive and righteous in theory, but damn near unwatchable in practice. It’s a comic book movie unlike any other. That’s a good thing, as future filmmakers would have to be out of their minds to make a movie musical this off-puttingly bonkers. 

Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Fiasco