The Fine Art of Audience Implication

“I got this sneaking suspicion that we’re not giving the people what they want,” Joaquin Phoenix says to Lady Gaga midway through the sequel to 2019’s dreary blockbuster Joker. Phoenix is decked out in his now-iconic maroon suit and clown makeup for this bad trip version of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour with Gaga taking the reins in a sparking imitation of the Queen of Camp. It’s a self-reflexive moment of pure punk spirit from director Todd Phillips meant to egg on those who came to see the Joker once again rage against the machine. 

Throughout his career, Phillips has proven much more than just an insular Hollywood bro who enjoys pranking his hard-working audience. In lowbrow hits like Old School and The Hangover released before his metamorphosis into an awards darling, he railed against the ruling class status quo and revealed himself quite ambivalent about his success.

As he told The Hollywood Reporter at a now infamous 2010 writer’s roundtable when asked about the Writers Guild’s penchant for strikes. “I make more money as a writer on Old School than my sister, who is a pediatric oncologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I’m embarrassed to be talking about money and standing in front of a studio holding a sign fighting over 3 cents a DVD when we’re already overpaid.”

It took Joker for Hollywood to tentatively consider Phillips a serious filmmaker. However, the problem with that movie’s runaway success was that its Golden Lion win at the Venice Film Festival forced critics and self-serious cinephiles to acknowledge its merits months before it spoke so deeply to the same mass, largely male, audiences that are now proving a major hurdle to the Kamala campaign. Hollywood admitted Phillips into its most lofty of echelons before they realized for whom he was speaking.

So, what would once have been unifying work made by the Hollywood system at the height of its artistic power devolved into a discourse on problematic incels by the media trendsetters who just can’t bear it when grandma gets on TikTok or Kendra Scott produces downmarket Target exclusives. 

In the fraught half-decade since the release of Joker, the divide between critically lauded and popular media has widened to a point that those in control of our pop-culture output don’t even bother to hide their contempt. Talent agencies start siloed-off “Heartland” wings so they can better woo the residents of Flyover country without harming their street cred. Studio superhero movies don’t even bother finishing their VFX while streamers like Netflix prop themselves up on exploitative series like Tiger King and a string of murder shows that detail the violent end of unsuspecting middle-class victims. The result is that audiences have become so desensitized to the gruesome tragedies they consume along with their Uber Eats that the very real crime problems of America’s metro areas appear as unsolvable as they are inevitable. 

Truthfully, Joker: Folie à Deux was a film marked from the beginning–one that culture writers knew they had the opportunity to joyously excoriate when it couldn’t match the success of its predecessor. However, Phillips also knew what was coming and responded accordingly, creating a subversive masterwork with a $200 million palette that melds the original Joker’s anarchic grit with the conventions of the musical.

Despite the numerous stories on the film’s failure that paint Folie à Deux as a bait-and-switch, its musical bent is a natural extension of the delusions that caused Arthur Fleck to take on the Joker persona in the first place. This go around finds Fleck in an oddly lax maximum security facility awaiting his court date who just happens to meet superfan Lee “Harley” Quienzel (Gaga) in music therapy.  Beyond Fleck’s internal monologue of musical numbers, he is a resoundingly passive character –at the mercy of Harley, a group of abusive guards led by Brendan Gleeson, his adoring fanbase, and an opportunistic news media that British comedian Steve Coogan represents with gusto.

Deviating sharply from comic-book sequels’ tendencies toward maximalism, Phillips’s movie is essentially a courtroom drama that details the “trial of the century.” It requires its viewers to keep the first film’s acts of violence on replay in their minds for its 138-minute run time. If Joker’s murder of Robert DeNiro’s snarky late-night host Murray Franklin in the previous entry was a Scorsese-tinged comment on violence’s marketability via mass media, the sequel is an interrogation of the viewer’s capacity for such acts. 

Phillips knows his musical numbers are absurd, but his ultimate joke is that they reveal our mass culture’s obsession with real-life violence as passive entertainment, which is just as theatrical and antithetical to the human spirit. Through such swinging for the fences, Phillips calls attention to how an onslaught of “trails of the century,” have not just sapped individual agency, but created a cultural milieu in which violence is no longer reserved for restorative catharsis, but has become a quick route to the type of fame that, though made all the more disposable by clickbait and doom scrolling, still provides some semblance of purpose for those awash in anonymity in an era of diminishing returns.   

Currently, Folie à Deux is poised to lose $200 million for its parent company Warner Brothers, a news item that outlets of all stripes have made viral over the past two weeks in an effort to dethrone Phillips from the A-list. But, in a healthy media ecosystem, the real question would be how much our culture has lost on its endless diet of trashy true crime best typified by Warner programs like Snapped and Quiet on Set. It’s a question awards darlings like last year’s Anatomy of a Fall and May December quietly asked to their niche cinephile audiences. 

But with his epic blockbuster failure, Phillips has proven himself as the rarest of artists, one unafraid to put his own reputation on the line at a time when he was ready to become a bona fide Hollywood player. And, despite the fallout, our culture is all the better for it–whether we realize it right now or not.

Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing in theaters.