Critique of Phillips’ Joker series
Obviously, spoilers…
I think the biggest issue with Joker: Folie à Deux is not that it was “too deep” or “too high brow.” Some of the ideas in it are genuinely interesting.
“What happens when society mythologizes a broken person?”
“What happens when a man disappears inside a persona?”
“Why are people attracted to violent rebellion in the first place?”
Those are legitimate artistic questions. Profound even. My issue is that the film seemed to believe it had to spend its entire runtime condemning the audience for emotionally engaging with Arthur and the Joker mythology in the first place. The first Joker already handled this balance incredibly well. The Gary scene alone accomplished almost everything Folie tried to reiterate for an entire sequel. That scene (and his subsequent court testimony in Folie) devastated me. I cried for him. I felt awful that Arthur made him feel that way. It instantly reminded the audience that Arthur’s actions have real consequences for innocent people.
The film trusted us to hold two truths at the same time:
Arthur is suffering.
Arthur is becoming horrifying.
That is sophisticated storytelling.
Folie, on the other hand, often felt like it distrusted the audience’s ability to understand complexity without being repeatedly corrected or morally guided.
And this is where I think the film fundamentally misunderstands the Joker/Batman dynamic. The moral counterweight already exists. It’s Batman.
Batman is the “good man.” He is discipline, restraint, sacrifice, principle. He refuses to kill Joker despite endless opportunities. The mythology itself already says almost everything that needs to be said about morality and chaos through the simple existence of these two opposing characters. Joker stories do not need to become TED Talks about why violence and nihilism are bad. Batman’s existence already serves that function structurally.
What audiences connected to in Arthur was not “murder good.” It was catharsis. Release. Watching a man who spent his entire life folding into himself finally exert agency and stop apologizing for existing.
That is why scenes like the staircase dance became iconic. We were not asking the film to endorse Arthur’s violence morally. Most adults already understand right from wrong before entering the theater. We are capable of emotionally engaging with dark characters without literally endorsing their actions. We watch characters like Tony Montana in Scarface and understand this instinctively. Tony is selfish, paranoid, cruel, and destructive. The film never hides that. But it also gives him conviction, charisma, pride, and a moral boundary. The scene where he refuses to kill the woman and her children is crucial because it reminds us there is still a line inside him somewhere. We are fascinated by contradiction.
That is what mythic antiheroes are built on.
Arthur being merely the “contagion” or prototype for the real Joker is actually a genuinely ingenious twist in concept. It solves one of the biggest criticisms people had of the first film: Arthur never fully felt capable of becoming the criminal mastermind force of nature Joker archetype we associate with characters like The Joker from The Dark Knight. The problem is not the idea. The problem is the timing. By the second film, audiences were already emotionally invested in Arthur AS Joker. Revealing that he was only the spark after years of investment felt less like a revelation and more like a rejection.
And that rejection felt intentional.
Almost as if the film was saying:
“You were never supposed to enjoy this myth in the first place.” But mythic villains endure precisely because they embody tensions people already feel:
chaos vs order
rebellion vs restraint
freedom vs morality
release vs discipline
That is why Joker works. That is why Batman works. The duality itself is the commentary. The audience does not need to be scolded for emotionally engaging with the dark half of the equation. Fiction exists partly so people can safely explore impulses, fears, rage, rebellion, and catharsis through story without endorsing those things in real life. That’s not a moral failure, that’s art functioning exactly as it always has.
And honestly, I think the saddest part about Folie is that it seemed so afraid of Joker as an idea that it forgot why the character became mythic in the first place. Joker is not compelling because he is mentally ill. He is compelling because he becomes a force.
Arthur Fleck was a man. The Joker is supposed to be something larger, scarier, and strangely magnetic:
an idea that spreads because Gotham itself is broken enough to feed it.