You’d think that the world was a less paranoid place five years ago, when the collective trauma of the pandemic hadn’t clobbered us on the head with a comically large mallet. But remember when governments were put on high alert before the release of a comic book movie about a murderous clown? Prepared for the riots that the supposedly incendiary film might incite, teams of police were stationed outside certain screenings of Todd Phillips’ Joker — a movie that was viewed by alarmists as a sort of dog whistle for basement-dwelling incels. Nothing happened, of course, and Joker went on to become a blockbuster. But its success, fuelled as it was by the apparent ignorance of its central themes, seems to have angered Phillips. His sequel, the even more radical Joker: Folie à Deux, has nothing but disdain for the people who made the first one a bigger box office hit than even Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

It’s a movie that commits itself to antagonising them with a sort of single-minded dedication that inspires admiration, if not outright awe. And it appears that the experiment has paid off. Entirely by design, Joker: Folie à Deux has earned the worst-ever CinemaScore for a film inspired by a comic book property. Fans of DC superheroes are annoyed by just how aggressively disinterested the movie seems to be in giving them what they want. Indeed, the Clown Prince of Crime spends the entirety of Joker: Folie à Deux incarcerated, both physically and psychologically. Casual moviegoers, on the other hand, appear to have been turned off by the film’s true identity — Folie à Deux isn’t a conventional big-budget sequel; it’s a movie musical, a fact that the film’s marketing tried very hard to hide from the masses.

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But Joker: Folie à Deux preempted this venomous response. While its anti-hero protagonist might not be the agent of chaos that he has previously been portrayed as, the movie does the rabble-rousing on his behalf. Joker: Folie à Deux positively thrives on anarchy, as it flicks lit matchsticks in our direction every five minutes, only to watch us squirm. The audience surrogate character is Lee Quinzel, played by Lady Gaga. She is introduced as a fellow inmate of Arthur Fleck’s at Arkham Asylum, to which he was committed after murdering a late night talk show host named Murray Franklin at the end of the first film. Sparks fly the moment Arthur lays eyes on her. Love blossoms over songs and shared sociopathy.

Lee confesses that she became obsessed with the Joker after watching him murder Murray on live television. Her fascination was further fuelled by 20 repeat viewings of a TV movie made on his life, which she insists was very good. This is a meta nod to the 2019 film, and the legions of questionable admirers that it attracted. It is later revealed, however, that Lee isn’t a trauma survivor like Arthur at all. She is an arsonist who tried to kill her wealthy parents, and then, voluntarily had herself committed to Arkham only because she wanted to meet Arthur. Lee is a groupie, like the women that attached themselves to Charles Manson.

Phillips has always insisted that Joker was his grand statement about the absence of empathy in the world, which he verbalised in the film’s final moments, when Arthur ranted about being trampled upon by society and shot the opportunistic Murray in the face. But the filmmaker soon discovered that discourse around his movie was largely limited to its apparent endorsement of Joker’s crimes, and Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning lead performance. People were distracted. They weren’t paying attention to what the movie was trying to say, that murderers like Arthur are created, not born.

“Do you really care?” asks Arthur to a television news reporter in Joker: Folie à Deux, as he is interviewed in prison ahead of his ‘trial of the century’. “You just care about sensationalism. You just want to talk about my mistakes.” More than the reporter, to whom this trial is nothing more than a piece of entertainment, Arthur is addressing the audience who cheered when he shot Murray in the first film’s climax. It was a scene that Quentin Tarantino hailed as ‘subversion on a massive level’. “They got the audience to think like a f**ing lunatic,” Tarantino said excitedly on a podcast. A similar sort of response was observed in our country as well, when people clapped at the misogynist antics of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s ‘heroes’. The crucial difference is that Phillips is actively exposing the declining moral standards of society, while Vanga is validating them. Joker was co-opted as a mascot by toxic males, both inside and outside the movie. And Phillips, in no uncertain terms, has decided that he wants to sever this connection once and for all in Joker: Folie à Deux.

Arthur abruptly halts one of the film’s many musical sequences — a Sunny & Cher-style duet, in this case — and accuses Lee of stealing the spotlight from him. “We’re singing for them,” she says, gesturing directly at us. But Arthur is unconvinced. “I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that we’re not giving the people what they want,” he says. And he’s right. This isn’t a miscalculation on the filmmaker’s part. He wants the Batman fans to be outraged while they watch his film. The metaphor becomes all the more pointed at the end of the televised trial — more entertainment for the masses to consume, because that’s all that this is to them — when Arthur admits that he’s no symbol, and that he’s just a sad, lonely man who committed terrible crimes. He doesn’t even justify them by bringing up the years of abuse that he suffered at the hands of his mother.

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“There is no Joker,” he says. “It’s just me. I killed six people. I wish I didn’t.” And then something incredible happens. Fans who’d gathered in the courtroom to watch the trial slowly start filing out. Lee, now in Harley Quinn makeup, walks out as well. It is as if Phillips is challenging audiences to follow suit, cackling to himself as he does it. They can’t be trusted to empathise with the outcasts of society, to feel their pain; all they want is a good show. And neither Arthur nor Phillips is interested in giving them one any longer. The filmmaker even goads the crowds by briefly allowing Arthur to escape at the end, potentially setting up his criminal career and a future tussle with the Caped Crusader. But this is a misdirection, a final middle-finger to ‘fans’ who couldn’t care less about Arthur’s rehabilitation, or his heartbreak at having discovered that he can probably never be loved.

Fully expecting to be crucified for his creative choices — Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t just a musical that opens with a cartoon sequence; it’s a psychological thriller, a courtroom drama, a prison movie, and most effectively, a tragic romance — Phillips concludes the film by hoisting himself onto a cross and inviting the audience to nail him to it. By having one of Arthur’s other groupies stab him to death in a secluded prison hallway, Phillips sets fire to his own franchise. If these movies don’t exist, he seems to be saying, the wrong sort of people wouldn’t be inspired by them. It’s a shockingly nihilistic climax, a perverse punchline to a joke that has been played on all of us.

Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.

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