The Joker discourse was ridiculous in 2019- and it's even stupider in 2024

While one is a hit and the other a flop, both Joker movies are terrible- and both have found different ways of breaking people’s brains.

Image: Warner Bros. Discovery

I don’t remember any movies in the last decade that set off more insane discourse than 2019’s Joker, the R-rated comic book movie from Todd Phillips, the director of Old School, and The Hangover. 

The film, whose high concept amounted to “Taxi Driver, except with the Joker as Travis Bickle,” made over a billion dollars at the box office. It won the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival and two Oscars, including Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor. 

It was also the subject of a months-long panic — at least partially driven by the government — about violence at the theater, as well as lots of worry that the film was about promoting “incels.” But no such violence came to pass, the word “incel” didn’t appear in the film, and the character’s lack of romantic prospects had little to do with the plot or his motivations. 

And then there were the conspiracy theories that critics were trying to destroy the film, either over Marvel vs. DC bullshit or perhaps to take revenge on Phillips, who said something in an interview about wokeness ruining his ability to continue making R-rated comedies. And don’t even get me started on the multiple pieces published on movie sites that said “Why I Refuse to See The Joker.” 

Beyond all that… the first Joker is just a bad movie. Phoenix’s performance is not strong, the movie doesn’t have anything notable to say, and it’s not a very interesting version of The Joker. Whatever politics people tried to read into the 2019 Joker, its actual ideology is inscrutable and all over the place, to the point where different people saw it as an anti-Trump screed, a shot at Antifa, or a brief in favor of socialism. 

And now, five years later, we have the sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, which earned much worse reviews, appears to have tanked at the box office, and doesn’t seem likely to get much Oscar attention. It also got the worst CinemaScore of any superhero movie in history, which is hilarious because there have been some truly bad ones. 

But yes, people are being very stupid about it, once again.

I’ll say this about Folie à Deux: It takes a big swing, and I favor big swings. I always enjoy it when a new movie arrives and sets off bitter arguments. I love the idea of a superhero musical and of bringing Lady Gaga into this universe. When the early festival word about a big movie is that it landed with a thud, I’m always at least slightly intrigued. 

Everything I read about Joker: Folie à Deux, both before and after I saw it, made it sound like a considerably more interesting movie than it is: boring, inexplicable, and almost entirely unwatchable. It’s not bad in a compelling way; it’s bad in an inert, illogical, gross way, an absolute chore to sit through. And nothing about either Joker movie really fits neatly along woke/anti-woke lines, unless one believes that the musical genre, or the very presence of a female co-lead, is inherently woke.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which landed a week earlier, also flopped and left many people shaking their hands. But that movie is many things, and boring isn’t one of them. Plus, Todd Phillips is so Francis Coppola. 

Madame Web, meanwhile, is just as bad as Folie à Deux, but at least it’s bad in a funny way. 

And then there are the conspiracy theories. This one is a personal favorite: 

Yes, I’m sure that “they,” if the choice was between making another billion dollars and doing the “humiliation ritual,” totally chose the latter. 

Is the implication that the Joker, in the first movie, was seen by too many audiences as a misunderstood folk hero, and the new film needed to take pains to correct that? And that the notoriously mercenary David Zaslav would rather do that than make money? “Wasn’t meant to do well at the box office” isn’t in that guy’s vocabuilary.

Sometimes, a bad movie is just bad, but others are trying to turn what Phillips did here into some punk rebellion. Phillips, who once made a documentary about GG Allin, likely knows what punk subversion is, and a $200 million musical with Lady Gaga is not that: