Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

Note: This is a final explanation. Spoilers for the end of Joker: Folie à Deux.

Todd Phillips joker didn’t have much to say other than “don’t be mean to socially awkward men, you never know what they’re going through and you might push them into turning into some sort of Joker.” The most interesting thing about it, and perhaps this is a generous reading, was how it got to the banality of evil by suggesting that our greatest bogeymen are not agents of some incredible genius and ambition, hoping to fulfill their grand plans and ideologies to destroy. the rest of us; more often they are stupid and losers. And it’s not only scary, but also sad. It was a new kind of supervillain origin story…

…Or it was, until Phillips’ confused, self-loathing sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, recaptures much of the characterization from the first film and takes over its full place and purpose in the DC Cinematic Universe. In the final minutes of the new film, it’s revealed that this person we’ve been watching for the last two and a half hours, and the two hours before that in the previous film, was never the Joker at all. At least he was never the Joker fighting Batman. He was, as he insists to the dismay of his followers and Lady Gaga, always just Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). The sequel ends with Arthur’s death by stabbing, leaving Arthur as just one more guy that the Joker had beef with, as it’s assumed that the guy carrying out the stabbing is, yes, the Joker all along. We never looked at an origin story at all. We watched, to paraphrase Chris Evans’ description of Pixar D-tier’s efforts Light yearthe human origin story upon which the Joker is based.

The first film is a supervillain origin story, skinwalking under the guise of a gritty ’70s Scorsese tribute, turning the Joker’s traditionally more cartoonish madness into a sadder mental illness. His incessant laughter is a tic, the result of repeated physical trauma in childhood, and his clown trick comes from his day job as a clown and his stand-up comedy aspirations. His turn to violence begins when Wayne Enterprises financial officers bully him on the subway, and he retaliates by shooting them, casting himself as a symbolic opposition to the Wayne Dynasty’s hold on Gotham City. Arthur is also connected to Batman because his ailing mother, a former employee of Thomas Wayne, insists that the fatherless Arthur’s real father is the billionaire captain of industry, so he visits Wayne Manor and interacts with young Bruce , calling him his brother. he is narrated by Alfred. When the shootings – and his subsequent, murderous live TV performance as Joker – inspire lawless gangs in clown masks to rise up against the wealthy, one of those criminals shoots Bruce’s parents outside a movie theater, marking the beginning of Bruce’s own journey to becoming Batman. Everything about the first film makes Arthur the Joker, because why wouldn’t it?

Because, I don’t know, Todd Phillips is bored? Is he angry? He wanted a twist? In Folie à Deux, Arthur/Joker is put on trial for the murder spree in the first film, and the trial is broadcast live on television, making him an anti-hero to dozens of deranged freaks, chief among them Lady Harleen Stefanie “Lee” Gaga Quinzel Germanotta. Between court hearings, Fleck is held in the high-security unit for the criminally insane at Arkham Asylum, an environment that’s depicted as sensitively as you’d guess. In several scenes of the trial that play on TV in the Asylum or in which Arthur returns from a long day in court with Joker-like swagger, the camera focuses on a young inmate (Connor Storrie) who pulls Arthur in with an obsessive glower. looks at his eyes. In Arthur’s closing statement to the jury, he sits down on a stool with a microphone, Maron style, and shows himself vulnerable, tearfully disavowing his ex-lawyer’s “split personality” defense and saying there is no Joker is; just Arthur. What happens next doesn’t make much logical or emotional sense: his fans are disappointed in him for admitting that the Joker isn’t a split personality. For some reason, the Joker represented rebellion and madness to them in a way that: crazy guy who was literally the one who was Joker and committed all the murders and acted outside the rules in court not. For a viewer like me, this is a matter of semantics. For Lee, it’s treason. She was just horny for it joker, not for a man named Arthur who is Joker.

Anyway. This young prisoner is also clearly disappointed in him. The jury makes a decision and sentences Arthur to death, and what’s worse, Lady Gaga dumps him. Back in custody at the asylum some time later, Arthur seems to have made peace with his fate, after which he is told that there is a visitor for him. Could it be Lady Gaga coming to free him? Or his accuser Harvey Dent, who reveals himself for the first time as Two-Face? We’ll never know, because the young inmate stops Arthur in the hallway and tells him a “joke” about how he admired Joker and was let down by Arthur, before repeating the “You get what you fucking deserve” from the first movie. climax and stabbing Arthur to death. Like the Joker we’ve spent the last four and a half hours bleeding out with no one coming to save him, the young prisoner laughs maniacally in the background, almost like some kind of Joker, and cuts his own face in a Glasgow Smile… almost a kind of Joker. The two Joaquin Phoenix joker movies weren’t an origin story for the DC Universe’s Batman-fighting Joker. They were a misanthropic character portrait of a man named Arthur Fleck, who had a Joker of sorts Look before him and was also a criminal and also insane, but was actually just someone stabbed to death by the actual Joker, a young guy who will supposedly escape from Arkham in the future and become the Clown Prince of Crime.

Perhaps Phillips was trying to make a point about the Joker not being one person, but one movement, An entity, A spirit of anarchy that spreads like a contagion and has no loyalty. But it’s also a move that feels dismissive of its own audience, just like the rest of the film Folie à Deux. It’s a shock for the sake of shock. It is an act of senseless violence. It’s… a stupid punch line.

Wow.

Okay, maybe this was all a portrait of an emerging Joker after all, but it wasn’t Arthur, and it wasn’t the prisoner who killed him. It was Todd Phillips. He’s the Joker. Making these films made Joker his. He sows chaos and plays a dirty Joker trick. That’s what this ending is! That’s the message, that’s the point, that’s what he’s trying to tell us! Someone call Commissioner Gordon and lock this man up! This movie was a two-hander, but not between Phoenix and Gaga. It was between Phoenix and Phillips. He was right under our noses the whole time. Todd Phillips plays Joker. That’s what the end means. That’s entertainment!