NOT LONG INTO Joker: Folie à Deux – things are already going downhill and I’m honking mournfully in the pews – our sap of a hero meets his amour. He’s a manic headcase called Arthur Fleck, manacled in an asylum for sextuple murder; she’s called Lee and has a bad case of regrowth. “You know,” she says, “I must’ve watched that TV movie they made about you, like, twenty times.” He mumbles interest: “Yeah? Was it good?” She replies: “It was good. It was really good.” They share some softlit smiles and sing ‘Get Happy’ (“Get ready for the judgement day…”) but catch the whistle of meta hurtling past: a hint that the “TV movie” is really this film’s predecessor Joker, from 2019. If this is correct, we can easily answer Arthur’s anxious query. Was it good? No, not particularly. Later, during a courtroom sequence, someone calls it “stupid.” I rest my case.
Still, Joker I was a marker of cultural crack-up, another sordid episode when art (or what was trying to look a lot like art) was feared to have a magical effect beyond its medium. Back then, it was supposed that the cranks would be lured from their basements to see the picture and be so moved by Arthur Fleck’s lash-out that they too would paint pale faces with a rictus and have their revenge on an unfeeling society. Such unease was drawn, in part, from a rumour James Holmes was acting as The Joker when he shot up a movie theatre in 2012 during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. This was never true. But the culture was primed to believe it, primed to believe any appearance by the villain on our screens might loose another massacre. In the rush to erect metal-detectors at cinema doors, they confused the difference between madness and reality, between culture and reality. They forgot that screen violence can sway the manner and style of an atrocity but cannot attract anyone to a crime they weren’t already willing to commit.
It was a hysteria made worse by the reactionary impulse of investing a cultural product with a malevolent spirit – like those white suburban mothers who played their kids’ Judas Priest records backwards to pick up direct messages from the devil, or when Joe Lieberman in the mid-90s opened congressional hearings to interrogate Mortal Kombat. You can’t convene a House Committee on Social Atomisation (though that might be nice), thus the true cause is always missed. And it was a hysteria precisely mirroring the downcast arc of Arthur Fleck. Because he, in the film, was made insane by the gulf between an uncherished existence and the screenlife he adored, so somebody out there – in the hordes of inceldom, perhaps – would be made insane by the span between their own misery and the gorgeous catharsis of vengeance. And because our social malaise seems invulnerable to any kind of political challenge, we flee – as Fleck does in his disease – to the redoubts of culture. But culture alone cannot contain all that stress and all that yearning; culture alone makes nothing happen.
In the first film, Arthur Fleck was already well down the road to complete dysfunction. Sunk in the detritus of neglect, abuse, and longing, his psyche clung to a televised dream: that one day the man he watches nightly on the box might become his best friend. An infantile dream, really, to be taken under that wing of celebrity, to take that applause long denied. But only those who have never tasted anything other than the sour opposite of celebrity think celebrity will be a quick route to adoration. And isn’t stardom for its own sake the last refuge of the unwell? The Joker endures as a villain for his skill in tarring reality with a japer’s psychopathy. “The world’s first fully-functional homicidal artist,” says Jack Nicholson’s 1989 version. Grotesque spectacle is his promise. It serves no higher purpose.
Fleck’s Joker hankered for spectacle as well, but as his fantasy of a Pupkin-like career in standup comedy curdled to self-annihilating violence (much the same thing), he was so tightly hemmed-in that the source of his obsession became the object of his revenge. Live on national television, for one night only: murder. Seen from this far down, in the mire of helplessness, a barn-burning nihilism sure looks like a way out: fire the bridges, torch the ladders, light the scaffold, and so what if you go down with it? All the better. “I haven’t been happy,” doesn’t he say, “one minute of my entire fucking life.” Perhaps Thomas Crooks, Trump’s near assassin, if he had any discernible opinions at all, might agree. Well, how does he feel now?
Because our social malaise seems invulnerable to any kind of political challenge,
we flee to the redoubts of culture.
The dregs of Fleck’s life have been further enclosed in Joker II: his settings are a courtroom, a holding cell, the asylum, a police car, and, presumably past the credits, a casket. Twice he threatens to break out only to come up against a locked gate and another paddy wagon. With nowhere left to turn, habit takes over. He retreats back and deeper to the trap of culture that landed him in the slammer in the first place: old showtunes, big-band bombast, plaintive ballads of half-forgotten Hollywood glamour. Just as the almost-slaying of a president seemed to have changed nothing at all, so Fleck’s killing joke does not fix his insanity nor set off a wider rampage of the dispossessed; he inspires no revolution nor even the mildest of riots, just a dumb TV movie. Spectacle begets spectacle; the world proves invulnerable to the will of a lone actor. Indeed, Fleck seems more worried about whether he looks good in that dumb TV movie than he does about the mercy seat of the electric chair imminent in his future. His trial too is broadcast live for a gawking audience; he delivers his last atoning monologue as a piece-to-camera. His romancer Lee, in her own madness, swoons to his stardom, his status as a magnet for the disgruntled. When he refuses, at the film’s close, to sanctify that stardom with more blood, she refuses to indulge his longing for escape. Worst of all, Fleck’s rare encounter with anything beyond the asylum comes in the unhappy shape of a sit-down interview with Alan Partridge.
Unlike his ancestors, Fleck is a modern Joker and therefore is not allowed to be just mad – he must be mad and mediated, blurred in self and psyche between a social order that regards him as expendable and a hothouse culture whose offer of redemption turns to powder at the merest touch. All he can do, in this collapse into total alienation and dysfunction, is to run what remains of his mind through the sieve of popular art. Don’t we do the same? Profoundly atomised, fragmented from each other, we displace and divert our impotence in the shadow of real power away from the ready roughness of political contestation, away from communion with others, piling it instead onto a medium incapable of achieving what we wish it would. We are moved and swayed and incited by the screen but cannot breach the glass. In blending fiction with life, the culture gets saturated with fright, fright which is provoked – let’s face it – by a make-believe villain. Like Fleck’s obsession with a hack-like late-night talk-show host, our fear about surges of stochastic violence – violence which is going to happen anyway, Joker or no Joker – is funnelled into a very frivolous thing that is unable contain that fear nor cure it. This is still just another comic book movie. Maybe it was easier when comic book movies took the inane form of a dozen lumbering lunks lamping each other four times a year. No one tried to pretend they were more important than they really are.
Spectacle begets spectacle; the world proves invulnerable to the will of a lone actor.
Because this sequel is gasping for a good laugh, here’s a joke: the stammering fury of The Joker’s fans when they realise their favourite antihero is not the twisted sicko they were promised but an all-singing’, all-dancin’, feelins-havin’ theatre kid. And here’s another: none of this requires either Joker to be good films. They are not. Nor does it imply Todd Phillips, the director, is even aware of what he’s made. I doubt his capacity. These editions have happened upon, like smears of burned rubber on a highway pointing to a broken guardrail, a resonance or a regnant suspicion about modern life: things can change, but only for the worse. Borders wear more wire, money rises topwards like the floodwaters, more children die for messianists’ dreams, and popular movies get dumber. Arthur Fleck gets to do his dying on the linoleum gut-shanked by a pretender even more possessed by the image and spectacle than he once was. Nothing happens by his spasms of violence; nothing happens by his acceptance of guilt; nothing happens for his death. He gets to go out to the tune of someone else’s chuckling. And the century is still young.