Joker Deux - La Mort d'une Franchise

What do you get when you put a psychotic clown in a theater, next to a toxic fan and a director that abandons them?

When will studios learn that making a movie not for the sake of art, but solely for the sake of money, actually won’t make them money?!

Anyway, spoilers for BOTH Joker movies (and The King of Comedy) if you read on.

Ahhh… now I finally get the title… it’s basically saying that I must have been crazy for hoping this would be as good as the first one. My 9 years of French finally paid off! Though admittedly I didn’t pay attention until we had a hot teacher - which sadly only happened after 8 years. But I digress.

The first Joker movie accomplished something no one thought was possible; it gave an origin story to a villain whose whole punch line (pun intended) is that he HAS no origin story. And the reason why that was possible is because as it turns out, Joker is the unreliable narrator of his movie and we see things from his perspective - so at the end of the movie we still didn’t know how much or if any of what he told us and his psychiatrist was actually true.

And that’s why even though it was all “just” a remake of the Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese movies The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver (a world completely incompatible with a world of superheros and supervillains) it still worked as a Joker origin story - but it only worked precisely because and as long we don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.

And that’s why it can’t have a sequel,because you just can’t write a sequel to events that mainly happened in someone’s head. And that’s why after the first Joker the actor AND the director BOTH REPEATEDLY said that there won’t be a sequel as making a sequel to that kind of movie would make absolutely no sense. And I completely agree with them.

Yet here we are and we got the sequel we really didn’t need or deserve. And just like with the latest Matrix movie, it really shows that it was really only made because the studio wanted to financially exploit a successful franchise. In my head I am even picturing a pitch meeting between the studio and writer/producer/director Todd Phillips where Phillips REALLY doesn’t want to do it, but is too polite to say no and so instead (and as an obvious joke) he says that he would only do it if they quadruple his budget and let him turn his serious drama about mental illness into a musical and have Lady Gaga sing it.

But obviously the studio didn’t get the joke, so here we are. So how DO you make a sequel to something you can’t make a sequel to? Well, you don’t. So you just take the studio’s money and instead make a film deconstructing the entire franchise and giving a huge middle finger to the studio and the fans as a thanks for having demanded the impossible. So if you haven’t yet watched Fool à Deux (or however you pronounce that) and you enjoyed the first movie, then PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD - DON’T WATCH IT!

All it will do is just completely ruin the first movie and the entire character for you. But if it’s already too late and you already watched it or if you haven’t watched it but intend to and spoiling it for you might persuade you to not watch it after all; here is what it all means:

One more thing De Niro; when you bring me out, can you introduce your movie as Joker?

As I already said, the first Joker is a remake of the Robert De Niro movie The King of Comedy - but it ALSO HAS Robert De Niro in it. But with switched up roles. In the original 80’s movie, De Niro played the fan and wanna be comedian attacking the famous TV host and demanding at gunpoint that they do a show together. But in Joker, De Niro played the TV host. This can also be seen as a continuation of De Niro’s original character itself, cause through his violent acts, he himself becomes a famous star beloved by fans. So the title, the King of Comedy, does not actually refer to the character of the famous Late Night TV host, but to the character of the wanna be comedian who attacks him - thereby becoming famous himself and thereby eventually replacing him as the “King of Comedy”.

So Robert de Niro could be seen as still playing the same character as he did in The King of Comedy, only that by now he has replaced the original TV host and become the TV host himself. Then Arthur Fleck (aka the Joker) comes along, kills him, becomes famous because of it and repeats the process. Then the second Joker movie comes along and repeats the process again. Only this time the movie becomes meta and WE THE “FANS” OF JOKER are ourselves put into the position of the obsessing fan demanding and even forcing our beloved TV star the Joker to do another show with us, even though he really, really doesn’t want to.

“Should we give the audience what they want?” “Nah, screw them!”

He basically makes it clear to us the fans, that he isn’t really the person we want him to be - that he isn’t some kind of cunning super villain with no remorse and borderline superhuman powers - but is just a weak and helpless guy with many flaws and problems who feels genuinely sorry for what he did and doesn’t wanna hurt people anymore. But no, we his fans (the film’s truly villainous psychopaths with no remorse) demand that he continue being his Joker character and carry on with his violent acts, but he refuses and denounces his Joker character and separates himself from it.

In reaction to this, we the fans get enraged and want our famous TV character back so much, that we are totally willing to kill the poor, helpless and genuinely remorseful Arthur Fleck, just so that we could have someone else from our ranks take his place as the next incarnation of the Joker and continue to entertain us.

There; that’s the end of the movie - the poor and sympathetic Arthur Fleck is dead, cause we the heartless fans killed him because we didn’t want a sympathetic wimp, but wanted our famously coldblooded supervillain - so we the fans were the true villains all along.

Don’t you just love movies that go out of their way to intentionally offend you and attack you personally and intentionally make you feel absolutely horrible about yourself for previously having been a fan?

So while the first Joker was a remake of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, the second Joker is actually a remake of Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games”. Which is probably the only movie even less funny than Joker 2. So even though it promises to be funny, it doesn’t need to be, because we the audience are the joke(r) to them.

Well maybe it’s not an exact remake, but it’s certainly in the same spirit as it is a movie that absolutely hates its own fans and wants to punish them and make them suffer for having had the audacity of going to see a violent movie like that…

…except of course that Funny Games was actually good.