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The Trial of The Joker

Conrad Hamilton

13 January 2025


After its release on October 4, Joker: Folie à Deux spawned a seasonally appropriate response: a moment of schadenfreude, in which critics competed to see who could do the most to slash its reputation to pieces. ‘So bad it’s almost laughable,’ blared Dana Stevens of Slate, in an abrasive notice that mocks its malign protagonist as ‘poor little clownsie-wownsie.’[1] ‘Staggeringly stupid’ declared Christina Newland of The I, charging it with both squandering Lady Gaga and a stillborn attempt at self-revision.[2] Not to be topped in this contest, RogerEbert.com’s Glen Kenny even admitted that he was so filled with ‘indignation’ after seeing the woeful work that he filed a ‘hastily-written review’ five hours before the publication ban was set to end by accident. It doesn’t disappoint: Folie à Deux is, he tells us, ‘nihilistic slop,’ the likes of which would deserve commendation for refusing to furnish ‘Joker Fan Service’ if not for the fact that the sheer existence of such fans attests to the ‘sick and […] twisted world in which we live.’[3]


While the absence of fan service might not be a problem for Kenny, it is a problem for Joker’s sick and twisted fans. Indeed, if The Guardian is to be believed, Folie à Deux is currently on track to lose between $125m-200m—making it one of the biggest flops in film history.[4] How did Philips 300m ‘art house ‘feature end up in this double bind? One where it’s snubbed by its would-be audience while still being an offense to liberal aesthetes?


When the first Joker came out in 2019, it attracted no shortage of critical derision, even being accused of complicity with a ‘clowncel’ subculture on the cusp of rampaging through America. That didn’t do much to diminish its appeal: it went on to win the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival, earn 11 academy award nominations, and make $1b at the global box office. Whether due to a conscious shift in tack or, more plausibly, just a folie en famille, the reception to the sequel has been markedly more damaging. On one hand, we’re told, the film represents a rejection of its fan base, sticking a finger in the eye of those who saw its titular anti-hero as a model worthy of emulation (or at least something other than an execrable man-child, whose formative struggles do nothing to explain away his violent deeds). On the other, this is simply not enough: while Philips may be contrite about his flirtation with right-populism, the whole conceit is still too odious—morally and otherwise—to warrant approval. Thus it is doubly damned: both by critics, as well as by its target demographic—basically young men, who swooned over the anti-establishment elan of the first but have responded to Philips’ rumoured capitulation by staying home en masse.


One of the casualties of this, as is often the case in heated cultural matters, is the true nature of the work itself. Taken for granted by both critics and a ‘core’ audience whose exposure to it is largely second degree is that Folie à Deux backpedals on the politics of its predecessor, serving as an apology of sorts. In the most basic sense, one can understand where this idea comes from: it’s a two and a half-hour courtroom procedural that—after analyzing the murders of the first film in forensic detail—culminates in Fleck renouncing the cult of the Joker. Yet in addition to omitting important plot points, the notion that this represents a swerve seems to hinge on a misinterpretation of the original movie.


When Joker came out in 2019, the most vocal reactions to it were sharply polarized: on one side were those who saw Fleck as an emancipatory figure bent on bringing down the liberal order; on the other those who saw him as a contemptible ‘incel hero,’ whose misogyny and frenzied outbursts of violence place him firmly within the imaginary of the far right. Though never as ubiquitous as these, this binary was disrupted by the presence of a more subtle reading—one that held particular interest for socialists. The essential strength of Joker, figures from Slavoj Žižek[5] to Simon Copland[6] argued, was the way that it showed the impotency of right-wing populism without undercutting the reality of its causes. The Joker is—by his own description—a ‘mentally ill loner,’ one whose actions are not expressly political but rather driven by a generic disdain for ‘the system.’ When he’s asked why he’s killed by three stock brokers by the Johnny Carson-esque late night show host Murray Franklin, the best he can muster up is a few meek platitudes: that ‘everyone is awful,’ that ‘nobody’s civil anymore,’ and that the rich ‘don’t think what it’s like to be the other guy.’ But while they remain opaque to Fleck, the film nevertheless makes clear the real causes to which his actions serve as an irrational response: the inequality that plagues Gotham City—a thinly-veiled version of New York circa the neoliberal prius of Reaganomics—as well as the cutting of mental health services, which leaves him without medication. Seen this way, its oft-maligned ‘nihilism’ is precisely the point. For what it shows us is the absence of an authentic working-class politics, capable of synthesizing these anxieties into concrete demands. Insofar as real politics appear, they only appear negatively—in the gap between Fleck’s objective conditions and the grotesque way he reacts to them. This explains, in large part, why liberal critics were so hostile to it. For to acknowledge this would be tantamount to accepting that—however misguided the far right may be—its existence attests to a deep rot within our dominant order.


Folie à Deux does not then, contra the critical consensus, seek to ‘revise’ the first film. Rather, the task it takes upon itself is to elaborate and clarify something that was already there. After a self-consciously retro animated sequence by Sylvain Chomet, the film takes us into the septic interiors of Arkham State Hospital, where Arthur Fleck is held in custody pending trial. That trial is set to determine whether Fleck’s crimes were the result of dissociative identity disorder—and, by extension, whether he deserves the death penalty. Abused by the prison’s guards and with little sense of agency, he initially agrees to cooperate with his lawyer’s request that he present himself as someone regretful for actions beyond his control. But his commitment to this approach begins to waver when he meets fellow patient Harleen “Lee” Quinzel. A wild-eyed Joker fangirl of sorts who first learned about him in a shoddy made-for-TV movie, Lee and Fleck instantly bond over their shared backgrounds: she too, she tells him, grew up in the poor part of Gotham, was abused as a child, and hates her parents (though Fleck killed his mother, Lee was less successful, lighting their apartment on fire without result). As inseparable as they could be while encased in separate cells, their romance provides the occasion for a recurrent feature of the film: the singing of (mostly) old standards, which are wheezed out at first but—as their love heightens—gain in competence and clarity.


Obscured by this seductive fantasy, however, is the true nature of Lee’s motives. She’s not really, as Fleck’s lawyer informs him, someone whose life story tracks with his own. Rather she’s a psychology grad school dropout from a rich family, whose goal is to ensure that Fleck doesn’t deflate his populist following by self-renouncing in court. Torn between conflicting impulses, he goes back-and-forth in trial. At first he accedes to his lawyer; later, he fires her and dons his Joker makeup, electing to self-represent—before finally caving and taking full blame for his actions. But as soon as the jury pronounces him guilty, something else happens: a bomb rips through the court. Liberated, he makes his way to the iconic step street of the first film, where he encounters Lee. In spite of carrying his child, she refuses to help him escape: she was in love with the Joker, not Fleck. Back in Arkham Hospital, he’s led down a corridor to meet a visitor. Midway, he’s stopped by a fellow patient, who—after telling a ‘joke’ of Fleck’s making—stabs him in the stomach, leaving him for dead. He then carves a smile on his own face—a sign that he may be the Joker of comic book lore.


The idea that Folie à Deux walks back its precursor rests on a fairly reductive reading: that Fleck is ‘correct’ to distance himself from his rabid followers, and that his admission of (personal) guilt is the ‘truth’ of the film. This is, to put it mildly, misleading. For what it overlooks is that much of it is devoted to a critique of the limitations of law. Fleck’s killing of six people is, as mentioned before, a form of substitutive anti-capitalism. Unable to identify the true causes of his conundrum, to align himself with what Lukács terms the ‘Archimedean point from which the whole of reality can be overthrown,’[7] he responds with spectacular displays of violence. The very existence of the trial shows that the ruling class is divided over how to deal with this. The defense—represented by his lawyer, for whom Fleck as a helpless victim of childhood abuse—believes it would be unjust to sentence to death someone so obviously afflicted by mental illness. The prosecution—represented by the haughty DA Harvey Dent, an image of conservative propriety—rejects this, asserting that this is not severe enough to negate his guilt, and that he needs to ‘pay’ for his crimes. Yet what both of these positions share in common is that they further obfuscate the latent political content of his actions. Either Fleck is terminally mentally ill… or he is simply evil. Lost in this is the fact that, to quote the popular Joker meme, ‘we live in a society’—that his outburst was conditioned by social factors; social factors the film situates as beyond the remit of individualizing, bourgeois law. The ultimate proof of this is that he’s attracted such a devout following. For if his actions were merely the result of individual illness or, barring that, individual evil, why is it that they have such widespread resonance?


What occurs inside the courtroom is, in this sense, only half of the story. For no less important is what happens outside of it—the dialogue between Fleck and his supporters, a contingent of whom assemble on the street out front with placards. It’s for this reason why Lee is so important: because she’s the sole link between Fleck—and by extension, the audience—and the populist hubbub that’s fomented around him (this is brilliantly subversive casting—Lady Gaga, the pro LGBTQ+ left liberal darling, as avatar of the extreme right). But her role has also been insufficiently analyzed. It is not a coincidence, nor stroke of thoughtless plotting, that she pretends to be working class while in reality hailing from a privileged background. For this mirrors a similar form of minstrelsy that we see within the far right at large: the way the trucker blockades are spun as working class in spite of being comprised of ‘petit-bourgeoisie owner operators,’[8] the way the ‘common’ men and women of Capitol Hill were really ‘middle-class to upper-middle-class Whites,’[9] the way Donald Trump—the scion of a colossally rich real-estate developer—styles himself as a defender of the little guy.


Much as these are all smokescreens which disguise viciously anti-labour agendas, it’s clear that Lee doesn’t really care about Fleck. Her attempt to pressure him to stay the course of his persona is, ipso facto, an attempt to make him into a martyr for the higher cause—one that’ll be all the more easy to co-opt once he’s gone. Given the chance to help him escape, she refuses it, coldly informing him that all they ever had was a ‘fantasy’ that he’s now fatally punctured. Of course, through the intervention of his lawyer, he’s made aware of this. But without a clear alternative, the only other path he has is an equally unappealing capitulation to bourgeois justice. The possibility of a different kind of politics thus only surfaces at the margins of the film. ‘You weren’t even looking at me anymore. You were making it all about yourself. And the song is about loving me!,’ he tells a bell-bottomed Lee, after she breaks out into a solo vocal performance midway through an imagined duet of the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody.’ ‘It is, but we’re singing for them,’ she responds soothingly. He doesn’t buy it: ‘Oh? Cause I got the sneaking suspicion that we’re not giving people what they want.’ Agreeing with him, she then withdraws a revolver from her dress, and abruptly shoots him in the stomach—a premonition of his death later in the film. In a way, this captures Fleck’s key limitation. If he can’t resist the right, it’s because his ‘suspicion’ never congeals into the awareness that what the people really want isn’t to love him. It’s the elimination of the structural injustices that created him.


Only with this understood can we grasp Fleck’s ‘confession’ at the end of the film. In a sense, what’s striking is that it’s barely a confession: while he originally wanted to come out and ‘blame everyone’ for this ‘fucking miserable life,’ he admits, ‘it wouldn’t matter because I can’t […] be who you want me to be.’ He then follows this up with an even bolder statement: that ‘it was all just a fantasy’ and that ‘there is no Joker.’ That there is ‘no Joker’ should be obvious to anyone watching—the Joker was from the get-go a collective symbol upon which class anxieties were projected. But far from this admission vindicating the idea that his violence was merely the senseless outburst of a discrete individual, it serves a subtler function: to show his failure in linking up the ‘I’ with the ‘we’; that is, in producing a new frame of reference through which it could be understood. ‘I killed six people… I wish I didn’t, but I did,’ he mumbles wearily, ‘I wish I could just blow it all up… and start a new life.’ What would be more accurate here is for him to say that—if the Joker is a fantasy—so too is the ‘I’: that both are ideological terms which attest to the non-articulation of the proletariat.


Without this recognition, there can be no ‘new life.’ And so with mechanical reliability—like pistons firing beneath a car hood—he’s found guilty, then killed off by his supporters, for whom he’s no longer useful. Yet the film still offers us a faint glimmer of hope. After he’s stabbed, it jumps back to the scene where he was shot by Lee. Leaning over and grasping his stomach, blood in his mouth, he begins to belt out a few lines from ‘Gonna Build a Mountain’ by The Monkees:

 

When I build that heaven, as I will someday,

And the Lord sends Gabriel to take me away.

I want a fine young son, to take my place.

I'll leave a son in my heaven on earth, with the good Lord's grace.

 

Who is the ‘fine young son’ he’s referring to here? The answer seems to be inherently polysemic. It could be his biological son, who Lee deprives him of the opportunity of raising. It could be the ‘real’ Joker, who will presumably replace his wavering with an unambiguous love of wanton destruction. But it also could be someone capable of affecting larger social transformation—of giving a voice to the downtrodden that isn’t just a ‘fantasy.’ While Philips has helped clarify our impasse, he eschews—as much as with the first film—any easy answers. The question is left open for the audience.


The fact Folie à Deux is so consumed by the events of its forerunner has contributed to the dim view many critics have of it—as if, in addition to everything else, it’s guilty of not offering us anything ‘new.’ One should be careful, however, about condemning it on these grounds. Fifty years ago, a well-known critic wrote a lukewarm review of a film, charging it with offering us—in lieu of ‘simple, absorbing narrative’—’prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions.’[10] That critic was Roger Ebert, and the film was The Godfather Part II—a work that masterfully extends the scope of its predecessor, deepening its anti-capitalist allegory. It would be premature, of course, to compare Folie à Deux to arguably Coppola’s finest achievement. But what seems fairer to say is that—with his Joker diptych—Phillips has created the definitive cinematic portrait of our populist moment. Long after the charges have been laid, the suspects rounded up, and the ill-doers found guilty, it may then be him who gets the last laugh.

 

References


[1] Dana Stevens, ‘Joker 2 Is So Bad It’s Almost Laughable’, Slate, October 4, 2024, https://slate.com/culture/2024/10/joker-2-movie-lady-gaga-joaquin-phoenix-review.html.

[2] Christina Newland, ‘Gaga is a star – but Joker: Folie à Deux is staggeringly stupid’, The i, October 3, 2024, https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/gaga-star-joker-folie-a-deux-review-3306410?srsltid=AfmBOorP_mqyLlyebUYtR79tjYn9u7olfgOiil7Zo-pPd2VPQCExC6_3.

[3] Glen Kenny, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ (review), RogerEbert.com, October 3, 2024, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/joker-folie-a-deux-dc-film-review.

[4] Phil Hoad, ‘Why did Joker 2 lose so much money? And how on earth did it cost so much in the first place?’, The Guardian, October 16, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/oct/16/why-joker-folie-a-deux-2-lose-money-and-how-did-it-cost-so-much-in-the-first-place#:~:text=With%20bubonic%20word%20of%20mouth,%24475m%20to%20break%20even.

[5] Slavoj Žižek, ‘Žižek on Joker’, My Heart Will Go On, November 2019, https://myheartwillgoonandsoonandsoon.blogspot.com/2019/11/zizek-on-joker.html.

[6] Simon Copland, ‘On the Politics of Joker’, Simon Copland (blog), October 14, 2019, https://www.simoncopland.com/blogexample/on-the-politics-of-joker.

[7] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge 1971, p. 193.

[8] Adam D.K. King, ‘The Trucker Convoy Is Not A Workers’ Revolt’, The Maple, February 4, 2022, https://www.readthemaple.com/the-trucker-convoy-is-not-a-workers-revolt.

[9] Eugene Scott, ‘Data about the Capitol rioters serves another blow to the White, working-class Trump-supporter narrative’, The Washington Post, April 12, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/12/data-about-capitol-rioters-serves-another-blow-white-working-class-trump-supporter-narrative.

[10] Roger Ebert, ‘The Godfather, Part II’ (review), RogerEbert.com, January 1, 1974, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-godfather-part-ii-1974.

 

Conrad Hamilton is a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University. His works deals with the relation between social agency and the value form in the mature writings of Karl Marx. He is co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson and author of the forthcoming Marxism contra Subjectivity.

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