Originally published via The Untitled Magazine on February 13th, 2025.
I want to take you back to the seventies, to a time when a select few of America’s film critics operated like kingmakers, when their opinions could make or break a movie prior to it opening. I want to take you back to a time before social media, before Rotten Tomatoes, before Metacritic and the pass/fail immediacy of aggregate scoring. I want to take you back to the disco era, when America’s critics had more legroom; when they could stretch out, go deep, when they could explore a thesis without reducing it to an overview. This was not a hallowed era, and these were not angelic writers. The majority of movie critics were careerists back in those days, and, as such, they suffered from a constant fear of getting blacklisted by publicists or studios or (god forbid) their own employers. The name of the game became soft-pedalling. It became championing any projects that denounced sexism or racism or a dozen other evils; it became avoiding any accompanying takedowns that focused on the moviemaking or its shortcomings. The critics who mattered were the critics who were not preening. The most important of these critics was Pauline Kael. In 1967, Kael wrote an impassioned review of Bonnie and Clyde in which she insisted that “by making us care about these outlaw lovers, [director Arthur Penn] has put the sting back into death.” And Kael was right. But being right also meant admitting that one could enjoy the graphic depiction of violence in a gangster film without advocating for the use of violence in real life. The New Republic rejected Kael’s review, based largely on the assumption that it might alienate too many readers. Shortly after, The New Yorker published an 8,800-word version of that review as a think piece that opened with the question: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” Kael was able to parlay that think piece into a full-time position at The New Yorker, where she would remain for the next quarter century. That piece also signaled a permanent shift in the way that the public responded to Bonnie and Clyde.
Now that, as they say, is something. Listen up. There’s even more.
When Deliverance was released in 1972, the rank-and-file applauded (director) John Boorman for his daring take on masculine bonding. Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times and Vincent Canby of The New York Times were not as effusive. Ebert gave Deliverance 2.5 stars, claiming that the movie had failed in its attempt to make some sort of statement that tied all of its “latent sadism” together. Canby asserted that the movie “did not trust its action to speak louder than [its] words.” The moviegoing public, meanwhile, made a stink about the picture’s now-infamous rape scene. That scene is lurid, male-on-male, and it features provocative dialogue including, “Squeal like a pig,” and “You sure got a purty mouth, boy.” To anyone who would deride the scene, it is worth noting that they miss the point. And the point is that Deliverance is not a movie about a group of city slickers who have embarked on a four-day road trip, and it is not a movie about the unspeakable horrors that people would just as soon leave behind. At its heart, Deliverance is a movie about the rape of the land, and about man’s refusal to show due deference toward nature. Obviously, that is not a message that translates well in terms of marketing. Thus, Deliverance became a movie about Burt Reynolds in a shimmering wetsuit; about Ned Beatty, ass up and squealing on all fours.
Throughout the American New Wave, a movie might have several weeks, or even months, to establish an audience. Jaws spent the entire summer of 1975 as the number one movie in the US; Halloween remained a significant draw from October of 1978 straight up and through the opening months of 1979. Today, the stakes are heightened. Within minutes of any film’s initial test screening, the pundits have already arrived at a consensus. From that point on, pushing back would require a defense. And mounting a defense would require research and independent thought. Just get there fast and come in hot. Follow the trends and maybe go viral. It’s the same game that has been going for decades, only expedited. Consider A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Life of Brian (1979), Scarface (1983), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Do The Right Thing (1989), Kids (1995), Spring Breakers (2012), and Django Unchained (2012), all of which can be appreciated as landmark pieces of cinema in retrospect, none of which could escape some degree of public scrutiny during their initial theatrical runs.
Will Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) someday benefit from a similar reprieve? The divisive sequel currently maintains a 31% approval rating according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Top Critics Meter. That rating smacks of a preconceived bias, albeit a bias that appears to be consistent with the 68% rating that Todd Phillips’ original Joker (2019) maintains on the same scale, based on nearly 600 critical reviews. Keep in mind that the original Joker was a milestone, an academy-award-winning character study that elevated the average comic-book movie into a form of social commentary. Joker paid homage to the 1970s, particularly the early films of Martin Scorsese, including Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), and, most notably, The King of Comedy (1982). Joker captured the desperation of Koch-era Manhattan. It made reference to Bernhard Goetz and the garbage strike; itcaused audiences to feel as if the city was closing in on them, as if entire boroughs had been reduced to crooked streets and unkempt alleyways. And then there was that staircase, dark and ominous, suggesting that every day had been an uphill battle for the film’s protagonist, Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix). Phoenix lost 50 lbs in preparation for his role in Joker. He wore his hair like a medieval squire. He mimicked the movements of a marionette. When Arthur ran, he was all high knees and bobos. When Arthur got punched, he collapsed as if somebody had severed his wires. Throughout Joker, Arthur is attempting to connect with the people in his orbit. But he gets rejected, and he gets assaulted. Eventually, all of that abuse forces Arthur into escapism, and then psychosis, along with misplaced anger, rage, mass mayhem, and murder. By the film’s final act, Arthur has gone from being a sympathetic figure to being an agent of chaos … and the audience adores him for it. The audience wants Arthur to assassinate Murray Franklin. The audience wants Arthur to shake free of the Gotham PD. The audience revels in a sequence that dovetails into Thomas and Martha Wayne getting gunned down in Crime Alley. “You wouldn’t get it,” Arthur tells a social worker in the movie’s closing moments. Arthur is reflecting on the notion that both he and Bruce Wayne have become orphans by that point, and that the two of them will forever be bound by everything that has taken place. It’s a killing joke, and there is a symmetry to it. An awkward bow and then, Finis.
During the press tour for Joker, Todd Phillips kept alluding to the possibility that maybe Arthur wasn’t the actual Joker; that maybe Arthur represented the inspiration for a much more sinister Clown Prince of Crime who had yet to surface. Only the public would not abide it. The public had bought into Joker’s origin story, and they were eager for another installment. Developing a sequel would present issues. The biggest obstacle – at least in terms of building on the first film’s narrative – would be that Arthur did not have the makings of a supervillain. The original Joker worked because Arthur had been hoist into extraordinary circumstances. To recreate those circumstances would be to recreate Jaws 2. And perhaps that’s what the fanboys wanted. Who could blame them? Joker had grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office. It had been nominated for 11 Academy Awards with Joaquin Phoenix taking home every major trophy on the circuit. Artistically speaking, Phillips and Phoenix might have painted themselves into a corner. And so they gave us Joker: Folie à Deux, an homage to the golden age of musicals (i.e., the 1930s through the 1950s). Abandoned were the sullen themes of the original, replaced with a subtext about love and confinement, narcissism and abandonment, freedom and choice. More than anything, Joker: Folie à Deux appeared to be consumed with the shadow self (i.e., an alter ego that generally manifests by way of a dream state). Whereas Arthur kept slipping in and out of delusions during the first movie, he started escaping into musical numbers by way of the sequel. Most of these numbers had been written as cutaway scenes (to be read as: dream sequences) with Arthur made up to look like the Joker. Arthur is a lounge act. Arthur is a talk-show host. Arthur is a prideful groom and he is waiting at the altar. Beneath the sizzle, Joker: Folie à Deux was aspiring to be an allegory about the masks that we put on to perform for the world. But it was also aspiring to be an allegory about the bravery that is required to deconstruct our own myths, to lobby for integrity, to carve out a truth all our own.
Joker: Folie à Deux infuriated audiences; it frustrated critics, and it sent DC diehards to social media, where they hurled expletives at the sequel and its director. Devotees of the original felt betrayed. The depiction of Arthur as Joker, his build, his suit, his palette and aesthetic, that cackle. Sprinkle in an eight-year-old Bruce Wayne who arrives onscreen by sliding down a pole, and the table was set. Alakazam. There should have been no need to question where any of this was headed. The decision for Folie à Deux to go careening into the abyss seemed to have as much to do with Arthur Fleck as it did with Todd Phillips. Phillips knew what it was to be a victim of his own creations. As a director, he had spent his early forties all but shackled to The Hangover franchise. Joker, by way of comparison, grossed more than double what the original Hangover did at the box office. Perhaps Folie à Deux provided Phillips with an exit strategy. Even if that were accurate, it would not change the fact that Folie à Deux is a wildly nuanced movie, riddled with complexity. The cinematography is stunning, the screenplay raises legitimate questions about the boundaries between entertainment and real life, and the outcome suggests that there is a price to be paid for integrity. Folie à Deux’s downfall is that it refuses to treat the audience as if it owes them something. It does, because Folie à Deux would not exist without the audience’s patronage. And it does not, because there are no rules in art except anarchy.
In October of 2024, Quentin Tarantino appeared on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, where he launched into a protracted defense of Folie à Deux that he started by stating that he “really, really likes [the movie] … tremendously.” Tarantino admitted that he had gone into Folie à Deux assuming it might feel laborious. He was mistaken. Citing his reasons, Tarantino heralded the love story. He heralded the musical sequences, particularly the arrangements, many of which recast the shape and beat of American standards in a way that brought their essence to the surface. Above all, Tarantino heralded Todd Phillips with pulling off what he called a massive act of subversion. “He’s saying fuck you to the movie audience,” Tarantino exclaimed. “He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood. He’s saying fuck you to anyone who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers … Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un Film de Joker is what it is.” This was a turning point. Here was the oracle, a true believer, and the closest thing to a kingmaker that the modern medium could hope for. When Tarantino speaks, he speaks with gravitas. He has a pedigree. He writes his own film criticism. He is an acolyte of Pauline Kael, and he has an affinity for the cinema of the seventies. As such, it should come as no surprise that Tarantino would rush to the defense of what he views as a largely misunderstood neo-noir film about a pair of outlaw lovers that is punctuated by the sting of death. Another killing joke, if you will; one that references the shadow self, no less.
At the end of the day, both Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux should be lauded for breathing fire into a genre that’s grown flaccid like a parade. Why watch a comic-book movie? There is nothing at stake, at least not anymore. The scripts have all become sanitized and the plots have all become absurd. Snap your fingers, and half of the Avengers have been wiped from the planet; snap ’em a second time, and that same group of Avengers are back on the attack, footloose and hurtling into war. It’s insulting, and it makes one wonder how anyone could hold Todd Phillips in contempt. Phillips took a risk, and in doing so, he created what has become the most talked-about movie of 2024, a conversation piece, an experimental drama that will go on to enjoy a long and favorable shelf life. How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? If you’re in it for the right reasons, why not get jumped on? To the artist, the controversy is a lot more interesting than remaining in one place.
Leave a Reply