Joker : Folie a Deux An Examination

[peter]

This one is going to be difficult; it may take a few days and I'd recommend that you come back and read it when it's finished. Also it's going to assume you've seen the film, so if you haven't and don't want it spoilered in advance - off you go. I'll promise you, you'll be back.

Okay that done, let's see what we've got.

People who've seen the first film are going to fall into two broad camps. Those who got it (and by that I mean loved it - not just those who those who saw where it was coming from, but just didn't like it) and those who didn't. There is a sort of third group who saw it, didn't like it, but then saw it a second time after a few months and suddenly it fell into place for. I'm one of those and once that switch had clicked in my brain, boy did it click. We're not talking a light switch in your front room, we're talking a both hands double-lever that floods the stage with brilliant floodlights. This was for me, a film that you had to give a second chance (if it was needed). Not to, was to potentially miss one of the great eureka moments in your cinematic experience.

And this is exactly where I find myself having seen Joker: Folie a Deux. Because once again I find myself in that camp of having seen the film, got it, but not being satisfied by it.

Let's just flip back and think about the first film and consider why it was so controversial for some people. First you have the group of people who simply wanted to see a Batman film. All gizmos and no depth. They were never going to be happy. Joker wasn't a brilliant criminal mastermind - hell, he wasn't even called The Joker (more of which later). Then you have the purists who didn't even believe that the film should have been made. The Joker has no back-story in the DC universe, they'd say: but they went and saw the film anyway and really didn't like it. But the choice of Joaquin Phoenix to play the role should have warned us that something different was coming (no - not so much the choice as the fact that he agreed to do it).

But then you had people like me who didn't give a rat's arse about the DC universe, or that The Joker wasn't supposed to have a back-story. It took me a while, as I've said, but suddenly I saw, on second viewing granted (and I have no doubt some people got it straight away), that this was a thing of beauty.

Quinten Tarrentino got it. He said in interview that to take a character as bad as Arthur Fleck (cum Joker), and make him shoot a TV host straight in the face, and make an entire theatre full of cinema-goers applaud him for doing it! Now that, he said, is something special. And that's just it. Yes - Fleck/Joker was bad, but you saw this guy, this man for who nothing - nothing - had ever gone right from day one of his miserable existence (even his frikkin mother had hated and abused him...the one person you are supposed to be able to trust), you saw him transform and emerge (having killed his first three victims) into this avenging butterfly.

And it struck a chord in us. He was there doing it for each one of us for whom life has not been fair (and that, by the way, is all of us. I guarantee that every person you spoke to in depth would feel that they've had it hard - right from the King of England down to the lowliest beggar on the streets of Sao Paulo. It's just part of the human condition). He was sticking it in the eye of everyone who was screwing with him. The three guys were mocking him. He shoots them. His abuser mother. He stifles her. Sarcastic Murray Franklin. He gets his. And then we have this avenging angel doing his glorious dance down those stairs, high-kicking his way into movie history. Truly it was a thing of beauty.

And then that final scenario with the puzzled lady psychiatrist. Joker barely even aware of her. She asks, when he laughs, what's so funny, and told that he's thinking about a joke, asks if he's going to tell it to her. His final dreamy line, given far away in thought. "You wouldn't get it." It was amazing stuff - an ending in glory to a film so bleak that it should never have been possible to pull it back up, to pull it off. Simply amazing.

And this was what Folie a Deux had to compete with. How could it be done.

(To be continued. )

[peter]

And the answer was, of course it couldn't. Something had to give.

And it came back in the form of this odd musical that wasn't, this strange amalgam of bad singing and bleak atmospherics, where the Joker had dissapeared back into the ether, leaving the old broken Arthur Fleck to face the music in a nuthouse-courtroom drama, a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (without a Jack Nicholson) and To Kill a Mocking Bird (without a Gregory Peck).

And it seems that the Joke was on us. That the final scene of the previous film in which Joker/Fleck has strolled down the Arkham corridor with blood on his feet (having just apparently killed said lady psychiatrist from the above scene) had in fact, had we but listened, told it all. Because the final words of the Sinatra number were along the lines of, if it doesn't work out for me this time (after all the knocks and getting back ups) I'm going to roll myself up and lie down and die. Because That's fucking Life!

And so we are led to believe, Fleck's great big fuck-off to the world in the form of the Joker, was just piss and wind. It was never going anywhere. He simply wasn't man enough to maintain it. Joker, by the time we meet him (Fleck) again has gone. And we are back at point one, with Fleck the looser. Fleck the weak-minded cretin who is a knockabout ball for the guards and prisoners to piss on from a great hight while he just soaks it up.

And then suddenly his world opens up. A chance encounter at a music therapy class draws him into the sphere of Harleen Lee Quinzel, and the hapless Fleck is catapulted into a love tangle in which his Juliet is not in love with him, but rather with the alter-ego she is convinced is the true Fleck residing inside him. Needless to say he retreats into his dream world of internal fantasies played out in the form of bad musical numbers that begin in soft spoken drift into musicality, and then stay there never having the heart to go full bat-shit musical on us.

Well okay - this is Fleck.

We get a collage of this musical nonsense (the musical which isn't), alongside Fleck and Quinzel building their romance (led entirely by the manipulative latter, who for her part is lying through her teeth) and a weak courtroom drama in which Fleck sort of unleashes Joker, but as a pale shadow of the glorious character who dealt in so uncompromising a fashion with the nauseating Murray Franklin.

And then finally, he let's out his secret. Joker isn't really there at all. He has no interest in the character that the crowds (represented in piss-weak dribbles at various points in the movie) are besotted with - the character we are besotted with. It was just a brief game he wants out of. He's simply Arthur Fleck, victim of life, clown to the world and nothing special residing inside of him at all. Harley's leaving of the courtroom could just as easily be us leaving the cinema. It's like the directors mean spirited two-fingers to the audience. "Ha! Got you, fuckers!" The disappointment is crushing.

So Harley fucks him off - of all places on the very same steps that we first saw the Joker unleashed (and in a brutal bit of trickery one of the film posters actually shows the pair dancing on the same steps....a scene that is never even in the film) - telling him that it was the Joker or nothing for her. She wanted to "build a mountain" with that man (a continuous lure she has used on Fleck throughout the film to coax Joker out of him), but had no future with the Fleck as revealed in his courtroom confession.

Fleck is arrested (on the very same steps and returned to Arkham, where he is savaged by the guards he has insulted live from the courtroom in a tv broadcast (I think the implication is that he is buggered by them) and in finality, we see him vacant and broken, watching cartoons in the asylum tv room with his fellow inmates.

And in a final twist he is called to see a visitor, we know not who, and walks down a bleak corridor (exactly the opposite of the bright corridor ending of the first movie) to be called as he does so, by a fellow inmate who has followed him out from the common room. The man asks if he wants to hear a joke, and to the unresponsive Fleck, says "A psychopath asks a clown what he'd want if he could have anything in the world that the psychopath could give him". Fleck just looks on and the man, who we have seen at a few intermittent points in the movie, continues. "What he deserves," he says, and pulling out a shiv stabs Fleck in the stomach five or six times.

The final scene has Fleck sliding down the tiled wall, leaving a smear of blood, while in the rear of the shot, his killer howls in laughter in a corner. We never see who Fleck was receiving as a visitor, but perhaps it was Quinzel, come to reignite her romance with Fleck. We'll never know. But as the final credits come up and you sit there wondering what you have just seen, a faint suspicion arises in you.

Could it be? Could you have just witnessed the birth of the true Joker; the magnificent character as portrayed by the incomparable Heath Ledger?

Read on suckers.....read on!

[peter]

Okay - let's look at what we've got.

It's obvious in retrospect, that Fleck could not - could never have been - the criminal mastermind that we know as The Joker. He was simply too weak an individual, too weak and frail a psyche to ever morph into that wild unbounded figure that we have seen striding through the chaos of his own devising in all of the Batman appearances to date.

But did he, almost by accident, create the idea of the Joker as an archetype in the public mind: a larger than life figure, ready for someone else with bigger dreams to step into? Is this what the two films were really about? Fleck himself, as the figure we left at the end of the first film, had nowhere to go. He'd had his fifteen minutes, risen up to his peak, and could only have gone one way from thence forward..... down. Some people have said that Folie a Deux was the film that never needed to have been made, but I'm not so sure. Certainly it has screwed us over - the ones of us who gloried in the anarchy of the first film - but realistically, could it have been left there? With consistency? Not really.

Because The Joker hadn't been created. Not the Joker we know. Not Ledger's or Nicholson's or even Leto's Joker.

It would have been okay if that film (the first) hadn't been concerned with meeting the demands of the paradigm, could just be considered as a standalone exercise (as some clearly thought that it should). But obviously the director Todd Phillips wanted more.

Phillips has said in interview (since the release of Folie a Deux) - almost defensively or in justification - that he never said that Arthur Fleck was the Joker, that the film wasn't even called The Joker, simply Joker. So the mistake it seems, was all ours.

Now I heard a review by Mark Kermode in which he said of the ending scene of Folie a Deux, that while we were looking at Fleck in the foreground, we should in fact have been looking at what was going on in the rear. He didn't enlarge on this, but I've heard - I didn't see it myself, being too busy watching Fleck die - that if you did, you'd have seen the maniacal prisoner who'd just stabbed Fleck, using the same shiv to cut his 'smile' into his cheeks as he crazily laughed at his actions.

As I've noted, the character has been seen only a couple of times, certainly with a focus that implied he had a future input into the story, but with nothing more than that. He's just seen staring at Fleck in a sort of fixed way, from the corner of rooms and whatnot. Also as noted, the DC universe gives The Joker no back-story, and this is emphasised in a sort of way by Heath Ledger's Joker in his telling a number of different tales about how he got his 'smile'.

So okay, let's run with this and take it that what we have in both films taken together, is a Joker origin tale in which Fleck is not the actual Joker, but creates the archetype into which the 'real' Joker will slot himself. And that we witness the origin of this second (if you like) Joker at the very end of the film. The question is, does it work? Am I going to be able to re-watch the film in a few weeks in the light of this knowledge, and suddenly see a very different film?

Well, consistency?

I'm just (at present) not buying this idea that Fleck was 'just putting it on'. That no fundamental change had occurred within him at that point where he danced down those steps. It seems to me that, on his own as it were, if this were the case, he'd have reverted to his weak self, despite what he'd been able to pull off in his (not) alter-ego form. But no. Rather we saw a man suddenly free from the grinding boot of reality stamping on his face. And where did that man go? Could Arthur just decide to put him back in his box because he had no interest or capacity to be what his adoring fan-base wanted of him? Why would he do that? Suddenly he had everything to live for and this surely was what his dance was all about. So it makes no sense to me that he would voluntarily and publicly cast this aside and revert to his downtrodden former self - the clown with a small c that we meet at the beginning of Folie a Deux.

So no - I can't just swallow this and reconcile it with the first film.

But having said that, I don't actually have a problem with the idea that Fleck was the originator of the idea of the Joker rather than the article itself. That seems like a good take of things to me - I just can't add it to the presentation of Fleck as a character in the first film.

And speaking of consistency (continuity?), here's another small thing that is bugging me. Throughout Folie a Deux, they keep saying that Fleck killed five people. Fleck himself says this, but adds that it's really 6 because he killed his mother as well. So let's just tot it up. He killed the three guys on the tube. He killed the bloke in his flat. He killed Murray Franklin. That's five. His mother he confesses to, that's six. But what about the lady psychiatrist at the end? Surely that makes seven? Okay, you don't actually see him killing her, but as he walks down the hall and you see that his footprints are left behind him in blood, are we really supposed to believe that she survived? Certainly at the point of time of the first film, the implication was that he'd killed her. It's what gives his dreamy comment that she "wouldn't get it" (the joke) it's very power as a line. And again, is this the Arthur Fleck that is really just playing that something new has occurred in his psyche, that inside he's still weak, fragile Arthur Fleck, cowering away from the world? No - sorry Todd; it doesn't wash.

But let's put these (for me) problems aside. When I return to the film for a re-watch, will the fireworks go off? I'd have to say that if it does work like this (and I really hope it does) then Todd Phillips will have pulled of one of the greatest bits of film creation in the history of the art-form. Taken together, they will have swept the viewer on a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs that will be referred to in university classes in film studies for decades to come.

As I have said, I'm not adverse to the ideas I've outlined - I have no beef that Arthur Fleck must be the Joker. In fact I actually like the idea that he's not. But to be great, the execution of both films would have to have been consistent with this idea, and I just don't get that they were. Granted there was the one scene in the first film where Fleck takes of a clown mask he's disguised himself in (on the train full of clowns) and throws it in the bin, but he's got his Joker paint on underneath this and anyway, it simply doesn't negate all the other places where he is seen as the Joker in the making. No. It's as though the first film was made as standalone, and the second came along and had to retrofit a story that changed the initial premise. It would be nothing short of a cinematic miracle if by watching either the second film again, or indeed both back to back, if these inconsistencies could be suddenly reconciled into a coherent whole.

And one last point. Folie a Deux just wasn't (I'm afraid to say) very good. I got bored and lost interest about two thirds in. I just can't see that ever changing. I don't see any eureka moment that's going to make up for this. Sorry, but I just don't. But if by some miracle it does happen - be assured I'll come back and say so.