Joker: Folie à Deux’s Twist Ending Is a Lot Like Lightyear, in a Way
Turns out we were watching the origin story of the human that the Joker is based on.
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Note: This is an ending explainer. Spoilers for the ending of Joker: Folie à Deux, which is now streaming on Max.
Todd Phillips’s Joker didn’t have all that much to say besides “don’t be mean to socially awkward men, you never know what they’re going through and you might just push them to the point of turning into some kind of a Joker.” The most interesting thing about it, and maybe this is a generous reading, was how it got to the banality of evil by suggesting that our biggest boogeymen aren’t agents of some incredible genius and ambition, hoping to wrack their grand plans and ideologies on the rest of us; more often, they are dumb, and losers. And it’s not just scary, but also sad. It was a new kind of supervillain origin story …
… Or it was, until Phillips’s confused, self-loathing follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux, retconned much of the first film’s characterization, and rug-pulled its entire place and purpose in the DC Cinematic Universe. In the new film’s final minutes, it’s revealed that this person we’ve been watching for the past two-and-a-half hours, and the two hours before that in the previous movie, was never the Joker at all. At least, he was never the Joker who fights Batman. He was, as he insists to his followers’ and Lady Gaga’s dismay, just Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) all along. The sequel ends with Arthur’s death by stabbing, making Arthur just Some Additional Guy the Joker Had Beef With, because the guy doing the stabbing is implied to be, yeah, the Joker All Along. We were never watching an origin story at all. We were watching, to paraphrase Chris Evans’s description of Pixar D-tier effort Lightyear, the origin story of the human that the Joker is based on.
The first movie is a supervillain origin story skinwalking in the guise of a gritty, 1970s Scorsese homage, turning the Joker’s traditionally more cartoonish insanity into a sadder mental illness. His incessant laughter is a tic, the result of repeated physical trauma in childhood, and his clown schtick comes from his rent-a-clown day job and his stand-up comedy aspirations. His turn towards violence begins when finance bro employees of Wayne Enterprises bully him on the subway, and he retaliates by shooting them, thus setting himself up as a symbolic opposition of the Wayne dynasty’s grip on Gotham City. Arthur is also tied to Batman because his sickly mother, a former employee of Thomas Wayne’s, insists that fatherless Arthur’s real dad is the billionaire captain of industry, so he goes to visit Wayne Manor and interacts with young Bruce, calling him his brother, before he gets told off by Alfred. When the shootings — and his subsequent, murderous live TV appearance as Joker — inspire lawless mobs in clown masks to riot against the rich, one such criminal shoots down Bruce’s parents outside of a movie theater, setting off Bruce’s own journey into becoming Batman. Everything about the first movie builds Arthur up to be the Joker, because why wouldn’t it?
Because, I don’t know, Todd Phillips is bored? He’s resentful? He wanted a twist? In Folie à Deux, Arthur/Joker is on trial for the first film’s murder spree, and the trial is televised live, turning him into an antihero to dozens of deranged freaks, chief among them Lady Harleen Stefanie “Lee” Gaga Quinzel Germanotta. Between court dates, Fleck is held in the maximum security wing for the criminally insane at Arkham Asylum, a setting portrayed about as sensitively as you’d guess. In multiple scenes of the trial playing on TV in the Asylum or of Arthur returning from a long day of court with Joker-ish swagger, the camera focuses on a young inmate (Connor Storrie) who watches Arthur with an obsessive gleam in his eye. In Arthur’s closing statement to the jury, he perches on a stool with a mic, Maron-style, and shows vulnerability, tearfully disavowing his ex-lawyer’s “split personality” defense and saying that there is no Joker; just Arthur. What happens next doesn’t make that much logical or emotional sense: his fans are disappointed in him for admitting that the Joker is not a split personality. For some reason, the Joker represented rebellion and madness to them in a way that a crazy guy who literally was the one being Joker and doing all the murders and acting out of line in court does not. To a viewer like myself, this is a matter of semantics. To Lee, it’s a betrayal. She was only ever horny for Joker, not for a guy named Arthur who is Joker.
Anyway. This young inmate is also clearly disappointed in him. The jury makes their decision and sentences Arthur to death, and what’s worse, Lady Gaga dumps him. Back in custody at the Asylum, some time later, Arthur appears to have made peace with his fate, then he’s told there’s a visitor for him. Could it be Lady Gaga, coming to break him out? Or his prosecutor Harvey Dent, revealing himself for the first time as Two-Face? We will never know, because the young inmate stops Arthur in the hall, 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” punchline from the first film’s climax and stabbing Arthur to death. As the Joker we spent the past four-and-a-half hours with bleeds out without anyone coming to save him, the young inmate laughs maniacally in the background, almost like some kind of Joker, and cuts his own face into a Glasgow Smile … almost like some kind of Joker. The two Joaquin Phoenix Joker films were not an origin story of the DC Universe’s Batman-fighting Joker. They were a misanthropic character portrait of a guy named Arthur Fleck who sort of had a Joker look to 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 presumably in the future will break out of Arkham and become the Clown Prince of Crime.
Maybe Phillips was trying to make some sort of a point about how the Joker isn’t one person but a movement, an entity, a spirit of anarchy that spreads like contagion and holds no loyalties. But like, it’s also a move that feels disdainful towards its own audience, like the rest of Folie à Deux. It’s a shock for the sake of shock. It’s an act of senseless violence. It’s … a gotcha punchline.
Whoa.
Okay, maybe this was all a portrait of a burgeoning Joker after all, only it wasn’t Arthur, and it wasn’t the inmate who kills him. It was Todd Phillips. He’s the Joker. Making these movies Joker-fied him. He’s sowing chaos and playing a dirty Joker’s 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 guy 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 this whole time. Todd Phillips is Joker. That’s what the ending means. That’s entertainment!
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