The Joker’s Joke is on the Audience

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The Joker’s greatest joke was on the audience. The Joker 2’s greatest joke is on WB, the financiers and any of the few people who actually paid for a ticket.

“Joker: Folie à Deux”, to use the trainwreck’s formal name, was bombing even before audiences learned the titular comic book psychopath was humiliated and killed off at the end.

Rolling Stone cut to the chase, “‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Has a Message for Fans: Go F-ck Yourselves.” But the message of both movies was the same. The first Joker was slavishly inspired by “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy”. The same people who mistook Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle for a hero also mistook the Joker for a rising protagonist instead of a sad loser.

“Joker: Folie à Deux” is determined not to let the audience make any such mistake. Since director Todd Philips has no original ideas that don’t come from late seventies and early eighties movies, the ironic musical numbers echo the Steve Martin bomb “Pennies From Heaven”. Like “Pennies From Heaven”, the delusional positivity of the music is supposed to contrast with the misery on screen to leave audiences feeling that everything hopeful is really a cruel joke.

Mostly audiences are just walking out midway through the movie. If they wanted nihilism that’s really an act of contempt for everything they care about, they could turn on the evening news.

The joke there is on Philips whose bright idea was long since beaten to death by everything from “Dr. Strangelove” to “Fallout”. An ironic musical number in 2024 isn’t sardonic commentary: it’s the last resort of a YouTube influencer ripping off a game which ripped off a sixties movie.

That’s the problem with “Joker: Folie à Deux”. “Joker” was a joke, but “Joker 2” explains it. When your joke is subversive, explaining it at length kills it deader than Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck. But the trouble with wokeness is that the same old leftist rants aren’t subversive.

To give Todd Philips some credit, “Joker” set out to subvert the comic book movie without becoming one. In an entertainment industry where everything is being swallowed by comic book IPs which appropriate touchstones, styles and narratives like cultural black holes, that’s harder to do than it sounds. “Joker” was a story about a delusional mentally ill man that people could see as a comic book movie if they chose to look one way at the Rorschach inkblot.  The joke was successful enough to earn over $1 billion worldwide. Enough money to set up a grand joke.

But making a DC comic book movie bomb for WB is not a great accomplishment. “Joker: Folie à Deux” follows in the footsteps of recent WB DC bombs like “Blue Beetle” and “The Flash”. Making a deliberately bad comic book movie for Warners isn’t subversive. At this point making a successful one would be. Neither is mocking the kinds of people who thought Joaquin Phoenix having a mental breakdown while awkwardly dancing in slow motion was an anti-hero.

Subversion, like revolution, is rarely the work of the oppressed and most often the work of the oppressors. Todd Philips got a free pass to burn money by making bro comedies like the Hangover movies and “Old School”. After helping revive the R-rated comedy, Philips has all the credibility of Jimmy Kimmel when playing the woke scold over toxic masculinity. Mocking comic book fans for thinking he wanted to service their hobby is theater kid schoolyard bullying of the kind that pervades Hollywood and the gaming industry which cash in on IPs they despise.

Philips might get some credit if he were at least being creative about it, but both Joker movies were pastiches of classic films without any of the originality that Tarantino brings to such projects. That even one of these dour miserable art projects with no redeeming value became a worldwide hit was a commentary on social dysfunction and wishful thinking.

In “Joker: Folie à Deux”, the subtext is the text. No one is allowed to miss the point. Faced with that brand of theatrical totalitarianism, audiences chose to stay home or leave the theater.

There’s not much to be said for anarchy except that it’s better than the alternative.

The Joker is a chaos character there to subvert Batman’s efforts to impose order.  Subverting a subversive character restores order. But what sort of order are the Joker movies restoring? The violent anti-capitalist message of the first Joker was authentic, not a subversion. What is a subversion is the idea that an aging white man with no social skills would be the one to lead it.

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” was the line from Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” that inspired a thousand memes. Wokeness makes heroes out of villains and then turns them into villains again for not being diverse enough.

It’s not only the comic book heroes who must be replaced by more diverse black and female versions of themselves. In a world where Disney announces a new transgender stormtrooper for Star Wars, the Joker is too male and too white to lead the revolution. Killing off the Joker in favor of a female counterpart doesn’t actually subvert the Hollywood superhero complex: it upholds it.

The only fundamental difference between “Joker: Folie à Deux” and the Marvel machine is that Todd Philips took the subtext of contempt of the audience that runs through his comic book movie counterparts and made it the text. He wanted the audience to know he loathed them. And the audience responded by turning his movie with its giant payoffs for Philips, Phoenix and Gaga into a giant bomb. The joke was meant to be on the audience, but it’s once again on the Hollywood studios and producers who finance films as acts of contempt for their audience.

When woke movies, games and shows based on classic characters and franchises make their contempt for the original subtle enough to be profitable, they get away with it, but when they lose control of their hatred, they lose the audiences and their money too. When you hate the people you are pretending to entertain, it gets harder and harder to hide the hate.

And now instead of laughing, Warner Brothers will be crying all the way to the bank.