This article contains spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.

When joker released in 2019, critics worried that its portrayal of an alienated loner who becomes a folk hero by killing a talk show host on live TV could incite real-world violence — and in a sense Joker: Folie à Deux proves them right. Although Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck has spent time locked up in an insane asylum between films, his legend has only grown, bolstered by a TV movie based on his life and a lame true crime book called The day laughter died. His trial for the on-air murder of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) and several others, including the Bernhard Goetz-style shooting of three men who harassed him on a subway train, is a major public spectacle; the courthouse is overrun by face-paint protesters who approvingly view Arthur as a harbinger of widespread chaos. At the end of jokerArthur reveled in the world he had helped create, a world as violently unsettled as his own mind. But inside Folie à Deuxhe begins to think more carefully about what he has set in motion, but discovers that he does not have the power to put out the fire or even prevent it from burning.

Opening with a mock Looney Tunes cartoon, drawn by The Belleville Triplets‘s Sylvain Chomet, in which Arthur’s Joker is strangled by his own shadow, Folie à Deux is organized around the idea of ​​the split self, which also becomes the backbone of its criminal defense strategy. Is the Joker merely an outlet for Arthur’s long-suppressed anger, or is he a discrete personality, so different from Arthur that it qualifies him as legally insane? Or is there a third possibility, favored by Arthur’s legions of fans: that the Joker is his real self, the embodiment of what we could all become if we would throw off the yoke of society and drop our freak flag flutter.

That’s the position favored by Harley Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who is so obsessed with Arthur that she checks herself into Arkham Asylum when she gets the chance to meet him. Lee, as she is known – the better to turn away the vanishingly small percentage of viewers who are familiar with the Batman villain Harley Quinn but don’t know Gaga is playing her – can only commit to the minimum security wing of Arkham, where There’s little chance you’ll encounter a notorious multiple murderer. But as luck would have it, Arthur has become a favorite of Arkham’s guards, one of whom thinks it would be funny to get him a spot in the minimum security wing’s music classes. And music, the instructor tells the class, is what we use to “make us whole.”

The music in it Folie à Deux does much more than that. From the moment Lee sings the first notes of “Get Happy” in her husky, trembling voice, the film gradually evolves into a full-fledged musical, although director and co-writer Todd Phillips has avoided using the film. term because, as he explained earlier this week, “I don’t know if you’ll leave this movie feeling better than when you came in.” In the opening cartoon, the hallway outside the dressing room, where Arthur transforms himself into the Joker, is littered with posters for classics from the golden age of Hollywood musicals such as Shall we dance? And The bandwagonthe latter of which sets the scene for the scene where Harley demonstrates her love for Arthur by setting fire to a piano in the rec room. But Phillips has no coherent vision of how to deploy the songs, let alone where to take them from. Some are musical theater standards, some pop hits from the songbooks of Frank Sinatra and the Bee Gees, some cabaret deep cuts from Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel. It’s like a jukebox musical put together by randomly pressing buttons.

Extending the first joker‘s edgelord antics, Phillips tantalizes the audience with crude juxtapositions, such as when Lee breaks off an imagined duet of “To Love Somebody” to shoot Arthur in the stomach. But he often works against the songs instead of getting something out of them, like Martin Scorsese After hours played Peggy Lee’s melancholy “Is That All There Is?” into a nightmarish lament. Like the first joker generously swiped from Scorsese The king of comedy And Taxi driver, Folie à Deux puts his greasy hands in those of the filmmaker New York, New Yorkbut Phillips doesn’t have the deep understanding of the genre needed to modernize or subvert it, so he merely scratches around the margins, reconfiguring Arthur’s failed stand-up comedian as a thwarted song-and-dance man.

Arthur’s televised trial is the perfect opportunity for him to step into the spotlight, and he does so with gusto, firing his lawyer (Catherine Keener) so he can get more camera time as his own counsel. (Apparently he squeezed some courtroom dramas in between those movie musicals, enough to adopt a slimy Southern accent.) But the fame he has isn’t the kind he thought he wanted. Even in the center of attention, he’s still Arthur Fleck, not the Joker his fans want and need. When Arthur and Lee first met, she bonded with him over their shared upbringing; she, like him, came from a broken and violent home, in the same impoverished neighborhood where he had grown up. But that turns out to be just a joke: Harley’s parents are not only alive but rich, and she’s just a privileged child playing a role, desperate to be someone other than who she is. She needs Arthur’s other self to be real so hers can be too: the Joker and Harley, not Arthur and Lee. So when Arthur proclaims to the cameras that there is no Joker — that there was always and only him — she loses interest in an instant and dumps him in the middle of the first film’s now-iconic staircase.

In Folie à DeuxJust like in the real world, the Joker Stairs have become a landmark, a place of pilgrimage for people who think Arthur’s killing spree is, if not admirable, at least a little badass. (The in-universe TV movie acts as a proxy for joker itself, a twisted version of the truth that turns a pitiful man into a tragic hero.) The new film is designed in part as a corrective to the first, but instead of accepting responsibility, Phillips places the blame on his audience. It’s not a mea culpa. It’s a tua culpa.

Throughout his time in Arkham, Arthur is overshadowed by a young inmate named Ricky Meline (Jacob Lofland), who is so in love with his famous wingmate that he asks Arthur to give him his first kiss. But it’s not Arthur that Ricky idolizes; it’s the Joker, and when Arthur rejects his chaos-generating alter ego, Ricky responds in kind. In the film’s final scene, Arthur is called to Arkham’s visiting room, but before he can see who is calling him, Ricky catches up with him in the hallway and asks him to tell a joke. A psychopath walks into a bar, he starts, and sees a sad old clown drowning his sorrows. The psychopath offers to buy him a drink, and the clown says the psychopath can give him whatever he thinks is best. So the psychopath chooses and, Ricky decides, the clown gets “exactly what you deserve.” And with that, Ricky pulls out a shiv and stabs Arthur in the stomach, causing him to bleed on the ground. The camera remains focused on Arthur, but in the background we see a blurry Ricky begin to cackle and turn the knife on himself, cutting his own face. And we realize that we are witnessing the birth of a new Joker – the one starring Heath Ledger The Dark Knight.

The first joker seemed to exist in its own separate universe, separate from not only that of the main DC Comics films, but also that of 2022. The Batman also – its own Affleck- and Pattinson-less world. That went some way to explaining why Arthur’s Joker stood out so much from previous versions of the character, though it also begged the question of why, beyond the allure of internationally recognizable IP, it was a Joker movie at all. How did this skinny, mumbling shell of a man grow into a giggling criminal mastermind? Folie à Deux gives a simple answer: he didn’t. He merely inspired the man who would. (The film also gives us our first glimpse of Batman’s future nemesis Two-Face, when Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent, played by Industry(‘s Harry Lawtey, is shot by a car bomb planted by one of Arthur’s disciples.) It’s a perfect ending in its own way, not just because of how neatly it ties up the first film’s loose ends, but also because how cowardly it submits to the demands the film rejected. Philips cast joker‘s fans are drooling idiots, but he also makes sure to put a plate in front of them with their favorite cut, favoring the Easter egg hunters while suggesting they get a life. That is entertainment.