SPOILER ALERT! Some clarifications on Joker: Folie à Deux, in theaters from October 2, 2024, with Warner Bros.
To understand Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the film Joker (2019), directed by Todd Phillips, we must first start with the title. If the first chapter had, in fact, addressed the psychological distress of the protagonist Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix) focusing on hysterical laughter and letting us investigate the possibilities of pathology, this second film inserts the “diagnosis” and the anticipation of what we will see on the big screen in the words “Folie à Deux”.
This expression, in fact, refers to a rare psychiatric syndrome discovered in 1877 by French psychiatrists Ernest-Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret, which literally means “madness shared by two” and which materializes when a patient transfers his delusional picture to another patient, giving rise, precisely, to a shared psychotic disorder.
Joker 2, in fact, is a succession of visions that blend with reality. From the moment Arthur meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) he begins to no longer feel alone and to fantasize about couple actions that most of the time manifest themselves in real shows that at a narrative level represent the backbone of this second chapter (goes from the thriller genre of the first film to the musical).
The dances, the performances, the sharing that we see and that involve the characters of Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, therefore, are nothing more than shared delusions, directly attributable to what the title of the film itself anticipates.
How Joker: Folie à Deux ends
To try to understand Joker: Folie à Deux, however, let's start with the last scene of the film, in which we see Arthur Fleck bleeding to death after being stabbed by another patient of Arkham Asylum. This tragic ending, in which Arthur lies in a pool of his own blood, closes the circle of a character whose crimes have managed to foment a social revolt in Gotham City and who has reached the height of success and madness by killing a TV host live.
The ending of Joker: Folie à Deux not only confirms that Arthur will never return to terrorize Gotham, but also summarizes the central thesis of Todd Phillips' films: Arthur is neither a hero, nor a villain, nor a god, nor even an anti-hero, he is just a man alone and abandoned, both by his family and by the world. His evil actions, which cost him his life, did not bring any real change but simply paved the way for new forces, bearers of a more powerful and in some ways more deleterious change.
The meeting with Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga), who Arthur meets by chance in another wing of Arkham prison, gives him a hint of hope. To this we must add that Lee is crazy about the Joker and ready to support him but, be careful, she loves the Joker, not Arthur! And this is a detail not to be underestimated since it places the two characters on two opposite levels: if he idealizes a romantic future, finding psychological support during the hearings that would like to cage him, she draws only from the mask thanks to which the rest of the world praises and loves him: she doesn't care about the real Arthur Fleck!
Joaquin Phoenix's character, for his part, suffers this trauma of the mask in two key moments: the first is when he witnesses the brutal killing of a young inmate by the hospital guards, and the second is when he finds himself face to face-with a witness traumatized by his past crimes.
Arthur's turning point: giving up the Joker
Director Todd Phillips, in an interview published on Entertainment Weekly, explained Arthur's inner journey in Joker 2, revealing how the character finally accepts that he has never been Joker, but always and only Arthur. A choice in the film is also supported by the lawyer who defends Fleck and who tries to underline this identity binomial. Phillips explains that Arthur, after seeing the murder of the boy in the hospital, understands that his disguise as the Joker has changed nothing in the corruption that surrounds him.
His decision to confess to the jury that Joker is not real and to affirm that it was always and only Arthur marks a crucial emotional turning point. This admission, however, leads him to lose Lee's affection, who abandons him because she is attracted only by the chaos and power that the figure of the Joker represents: just like everyone else, she is only interested in the clown mask he wears and not in what led him to wear it. The entire audience and Gotham itself coagulate in Lee; a world that has loved nothing of Arthur other than the symbol of violence that he has built for himself.
Speaking of Lee's character, some sequences remain intentionally ambiguous, such as the intimate encounter that the two have while Arthur is locked up in isolation in Arkham. Lee claims that the guards allowed her to see him, which seems very unlikely, raising questions about the reliability of the Joker as a narrator and calling into question the events of the entire film.
An involuntary icon and the failure of change
Joker: Folie à Deux deals with the conflict between being a symbol of revolution and the inner reality of those who struggle with their demons. While the first Joker focuses on how an apathetic society can push a fragile person over the edge, the sequel questions what happens when that person, now becoming a symbol, realizes that he never wanted to be the rebellious hero that the world created. Arthur is trapped in his own iconography, even if in the end he decides to give up that mask. This represents one of the strongest reflections of the film: the audience of Gotham and Lee want to see in Arthur only the psychotic clown who burns the city, not the man who only wants to be himself.
In a particularly significant final scene, Arthur, after being captured again by the police, listens to another patient tell him a joke similar to the one he told Murray Franklin before killing him in the first film. The final line, however, is a stab wound, which leads to his death. However, at that very moment, the real Joker reveals himself: another patient, inspired by Arthur, cuts a bloody smile on his cheeks. This act suggests that Arthur was never really Joker; he only inspired the one who would become him.
Joker: Folie à Deux and the meaning of the ending
Joker: Folie à Deux offers a complex closure to Arthur's journey. Throughout the film, we see how his desire to be recognized and loved leads him to don the Joker's mask, the same mask that ultimately leads to further alienation. Phillips describes this moment as a bitter realization: "The world is too corrupt to change, and the only way to fix it is to wreck it." However, this destruction does not bring any catharsis for Arthur, who ultimately realizes that the power and notoriety he has acquired as the Joker have never made him happy or satisfied.
The film, with its disturbing themes and musical performances, also explores how society often romanticizes violence and chaos, ignoring the real people behind the created symbols. As Lady Gaga sings in the film's theme song, That's Entertainment, suffering can be transformed into entertainment, but at what cost? For Lee, it was easier to love the idea of the Joker than the real man behind the mask.
In the end, Joker: Folie à Deux upends fans' expectations, showing an Arthur who does not celebrate his past actions, but sees them as failures, incapable of changing a society that ultimately abandoned him.