Joker: Folie à Deux: Double Fantasy and the Faceless Mask

Joker: Folie à Deux: Double Fantasy and the Faceless Mask

In Joker (2019), Arthur (his name hardly matters) retained his agency as a character. He would apply makeup and perform, work as a clown, ride the bus home, watch talk shows with his mother, and chat with people in elevators. Through these slice-of-life moments, we glimpsed the city’s inhabitants, even if they were often thoughtlessly conceived. Throughout these fragments, Arthur underwent an unsettling split. At times, these seemed like different people merely unified by Joaquin Phoenix’s face. What truly connects these fragments? According to Lacan, it’s politics. Joker perhaps never truly wrote characters — those lives genuinely situated in specific times and places. Instead, Joker functions as a suturing machine, spinning half the world’s detritus into itself. The Joker manifests in the endless drone of radio chatter, in those gray, rat-maze trains, in the repeated struggles of discarded workers. He is an inner scream made manifest, an overlapping of shadows. Then we hear the inciting voices, concentrated in Arthur, though he remains unaware of his burden because we don’t know his origins.

In 2019, that contradiction-laden time, people seemed to sense what was coming as they stared into that gloomy dusk, devoid of both vitality and hope. The Joker, in his red suit and green hair, took the stage like a noxious flame. Four years later, many events feel hazy, as if they never happened. Anger and passion have gradually dissolved into time-worn exhaustion, and we find ourselves back before a strange screen, watching life slowly torment itself into extinction.

If Joker had the rare fortune of finding an angle for collective postmodern political expression (in the late 2010s, we’d forgotten about Batman’s attempt to compensate for reason), then Joker: Folie à Deux, like many directionless sequels, is a film born from its predecessor, retreating into a world without courage. On some nameless day, Arthur splits mentally (including the elements that created him), becoming a stranger to true suffering. At that precise moment, he divides in two, following parallel tracks that will never meet. He becomes a light-bathed deity, only to be immediately committed to an asylum — a king in a prison cell. At this point, Joker emerges from shadow into visible human form. We watch him as we might watch a zoo animal, anticipating his contortions and struggles, hoping he’ll scream, roar, and run to display his bestial nature before accepting the banana from our hands. His eventual death feels both inevitable and uninspired — a gaze we knew would come.

The film opens in rain, everything drenched. Characters are dutifully shepherded indoors as the director eagerly displays Arthur’s emaciated back, matter-of-factly announcing the return of not the Joker, but Joaquin Phoenix himself. This time, he’s no longer inhabiting the chaotic but traversable Gotham City, instead confined to a cage in an impossibly cramped world. Winter arrives swiftly. The courtroom bristles with stern light — cold sunshine that blurs the line between hope and despair, simultaneously bringing and taking time. The Joker’s chalk-white face resembles snow on the ground, forcing unendurable light into viewers’ eyes. Everyone studies him. Winter has truly come: wool coats, damp earth, trembling hands lighting cigarettes, the flame’s tip contracting into a circle before revealing the impassive faces across the table. He believed that donning a mask would make him invincible, that his courtroom performance with its recycled platitudes would draw applause and believers. But he gradually realizes otherwise. All eyes fix upon him. He sits there in perfectly fitted clothes worn countless times, mindlessly repeating meaningless lines until exhaustion and tedium overwhelm him. The performance becomes unbearably dull, his lines ring hollow, and he yearns for escape. A tear falls as he declares, “I want to be a person — neither stage clown nor pitiful survivor”. But who is he? No one has given him an authentic human history; like the yellow billboard that suddenly crashes toward him, he was never real — just a cinematic artifice. Cold, flight, prison, stage, reality, fantasy — why bother distinguishing between them? They’re all hypothetical light, easily crumpled and discarded.

Arthur is a hollow puppet. Strip away the dazzling spectacle and we see the puppeteer’s arrogance — a naive craftsman. The 2020s Joker is merely a starry-eyed dreamer, neither a political fantasist nor someone with the tenacity to embrace absurdity. He isn’t even properly seduced; he’s just a trembling sticker, a dial trying to express an opinion. While weakness can constitute authenticity, Joker: Folie à Deux handles this frivolously. Characters shouldn’t be folded paper but woven thread, for once the heart sets out, there’s no return. Godard said cinema is a battlefield, a passionate fight. Yet here, Joker abandons his armor — an opportunist. Would Arthur, in his fantasy, meet Macbeth, who hesitates before regicide, weakened by the realization he might still be human? That Macbeth fights symbolic temptations and, though failing inevitably, finds a path beyond symbols through death, collapse, and tragedy. But Joker — or Arthur — can’t identify his enemy or his cause. He never truly resists symbols, temptations, or fantasies. He pursues “Joker” for a counterfeit “lover” and promised “mountain”; he rejects it because a symbolic life proves insufficient. He sees clearly but lacks resolve to proceed. Weak and mediocre, he tries to please everyone. His false confession can’t mask his opportunism. We witness an awkward transition, like a naughty child begging forgiveness. We see neither his inner decay nor a truly transformative event. Behind the glamorous mask lies only hollow mystery — eyeless and faceless.

Death arrives powerlessly, devoid of courage or surprise — exactly as predicted. Spring rain washes away blood as if nothing occurred, and we move on to seek the next symbol.

wirtten by AIRES