The joke’s on you

The novelist John Gardner once classified a certain type of hack writer as the “disPollyanna” — a curdled optimist whose wounded, childlike idealism is inverted and weaponized in the form of “crude jokes and images, slang phrases borrowed from foreign languages” meant solely “to shock prudes.”

The disPollyanna “simplemindedly long[s] for goodness, justice, and sanity” while cloaking their bromides in stock nihilism and abstraction. As Gardner concluded: “No one is shocked, of course, though a few may misread their annoyance as shocked.” In the hands of midwit provocateur Todd Phillips, the annoyance inspired by his comic book sequel Joker: Folie à Deux approaches levels requiring intervention by an international weapons regulator.

Phillips’s 2019 Joker was one in a long procession of films attempting to strip down the iconography of familiar comic book heroes, or villains, reconstructing them along more “realistic” lines. In that film, the titular Batman antagonist, already well known to audiences as Cesar Romero’s or Jack Nicholson’s iterative playboy clowns, or Heath Ledger’s identity-free terrorist, was reinvented for the 21st century as a mentally ill sadsack driven to insanity and murder by cruel, unfeeling systemic forces.

Phillips, as director and co-writer, clearly meant to strike a chord with audiences feeling alienated and empty amid the anomie and hostility of the 2010s. He succeeded wildly: The film grossed more than $1 billion globally, inspiring a moronic, unfounded moral panic that its sympathetic treatment of the titular psychopath would inspire a wave of “incel” violence.

The film’s pretentiously titled sequel at first seems to double down on that controversy, pairing Joaquin Phoenix’s nü-Joker with a would-be girlfriend. Lady Gaga, government name Stefani Germanotta, last seen prosciutto-ing it up in Ridley Scott’s preposterous House of Gucci, here plays a version of Harley Quinn, the Joker’s wish-fulfillment gangster moll reinvented over the past 30 years as a feminist icon. Here, she’s a kind of proto-K-pop fangirl — the precursor (the film is set in an anonymous, lazily conjured early 1980s) to the sick Tumblr users pining over Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza. She parasocially pines for Phoenix’s Joker, who spends most of the film imprisoned.

But any social tension their relationship might symbolize is quickly discarded in favor of the film’s central flaw, in one where they’re too numerous to count: the singing. The cinematic musical is so polarizing that recent entries in the genre, such as Wonka and The Color Purple, have purposely gone out of their way to conceal their song-and-dance numbers in promotional materials, and Joker: Folie à Deux follows suit. It’s earned the film a “D” from the research firm CinemaScore that measures audience responses, the lowest ever for a comic book film, and disappointing box office returns thus far to boot.

Phoenix and Germanotta break out musty old standards that range from the venerable (Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin) to the profane (Rod McKuen, the Bee Gees). All are deployed in high disPollyanna style, inviting the viewer to gawk at the thwarted lovers’ misplaced, unhinged quasi-sincerity while sympathetically contrasting the source material’s guilelessness with the film’s grim urbanity. Phoenix’s unexpectedly winning, cracked, Chet Baker-like tenor — which, like his general overacting in the Joker films, recalls his infinitely superior performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master — cannot redeem these dull, unimaginative, inexplicably drab musical numbers.

The film’s many conceptual shortcomings would be easier to forgive were it not so cinematically uninteresting. The first Joker was wildly overpraised for its saturated, nostalgia-baiting 1970s color palette and stunt casting of Robert De Niro, earning it unwarranted comparisons to Scorsese’s cult favorite The King of Comedy. Joker: Folie à Deux attempts to conjure a darker, more Gothic New York — excuse me, Gotham City. This, as well as the gambit of kicking off the film with an unfunny, unstylish animated short, seems a nod to the hyperstylized, almost Randian Art Deco nightmare of the 1990s’ Emmy-winning Batman: The Animated Series. The director of Old School and The Hangover saga, paired with his longtime cinematographer Lawrence Sher, lands you closer to a video game cutscene.

The film’s story does not sustain this $200 million conceptual edifice. After murdering a late-night talk show host on live television at the end of the previous film, Phoenix’s proto-Joker, Arthur Fleck, is serving time at a prison in which he’s alternately taunted and indulged for his celebrity. A wildly overqualified Catherine Keener appears as Fleck’s lawyer, mirroring the audience’s alternating appalment and boredom with his antics. Fleck fires her in favor of defending himself, on the grounds of insanity, for the murders he committed over the course of the first film, setting up a belabored courtroom drama that inches the film toward its operatic conclusion.

Phoenix tries during these scenes with all his might to conjure the anarchic, cartoonish Warner Bros. spirit on which this entire premise is based. Ultimately, his schtick, which includes a grandiloquent Southern accent and Bugs Bunny-style osculation, can’t thwart the film’s shovel-to-the-face sentimental drift. Through a series of increasingly maudlin interactions with his fellow loners and weirdos, both in prison and on the stand, and the betrayal of his superficial would-be girlfriend, Fleck painstakingly hauls himself up the mountain of moral development. He learns that other people are messed up, too, and tries to repent.

The convoluted machinations that follow, including an explosion, car chase, riot, and the introduction of even more DC Universe Intellectual Property, are better left to the imagination. Ultimately, Fleck is shanked by a fellow inmate in a prison riot, becoming a sort of anti-martyr at the hands of the uncontrollable, copycat mass nihilism his crimes and show trial have unleashed. The film is obsessed with the impact of media on “society,” as embodied by Fleck: With typical subtlety, the suave, articulate, do-gooding district attorney who prosecutes him is shown largely through the lens of a television camera in the courtroom.

This eye-rolling false equivalence is at the core of the film’s cynical sentimentality, and the vague contempt Phillips and his co-writer clearly have for their audience. To incriminate the audience in antisocial behavior is an old cinematic gambit that dorm-room staples such as Fight Club, American Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange have attempted to varying degrees of success. But more so than those films, Joker: Folie à Deux and its predecessor are literally about watching: Fleck is deranged by his obsession with a television comedian; he deranges the nation that watches him shoot that comedian on television; and their bloodlust not sated, the populace then supplants Fleck with their own barbarism when he fails to continue to provide them with violent entertainments.

So … gotcha! By making its viewers the actual, on-screen villains, Joker: Folie à Deux transcends mere badness to reach new heights of cinematic self-regard, self-pity, and cynicism. DisPollyannas to the core, Phillips and his co-writer lament the perversion of a put-upon wretch such as Fleck at the hands of a culture obsessed with the prurient, the puerile, and the cheap thrill. To do this, they put aside the inconvenient reality that they are the ones who have reaped millions of dollars and heaps of critical acclaim for a film that treats cultural anomie, and life itself, as cheaply as their imagined antagonists. Those antagonists are you, the viewers, who walk away with little to show for it and 138 absent minutes from your one precious life. Every joke needs its punchline.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.