Joker: Folie à Deux’s Ending Answers a Disturbing Question

“Judas, must you betray me with a joke …?”

The ending of Joker: Folie à Deux has been unsettling and rankling audiences ever since its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, and the backlash has gone mainstream now that it has opened for moviegoers everywhere. Director and co-writer Todd Phillips crafted a conclusion that is unreservedly, unabashedly bleak, and the fate of Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck aggressively defies both the the musical sequel’s oft-reprised song (“That’s Entertainment!”) while seeming to reject the original 2019 movie’s suggestion that this anarchist clown is an avatar of everyman rage.

While it’s understandable that those who admired this Joker as a transgressive anti-hero are fuming after having the rug pulled out from under them, there’s also something … kind of funny about it? How do you expect true-believers to react when their own messiah informs them they’ve been wrong all along? Phillips has turned on his followers, and they’ve lashed out at his movie in return. For the rest of us, there’s actually something meaningful to be found in the film’s conclusion, regardless of whether you enjoyed or despised the overall courtroom antics and madhouse romance with Lady Gaga‘s Harleen Quinzell.

Joker: Folie à Deux feels like a response to a question often asked about Donald Trump: What would it take for his supporters to finally turn on him?

Ugh. I know—politics. But it goes beyond that. Since we are currently in the throes of a presidential election, this question can’t help but take on political significance, especially since one of the major party candidates (spoiler: the one with the caked-on make-up, absurd hair-do, and buffoonish tendencies) has himself long marveled about the steadfastness of his own devotees. Remember that 2016 declaration: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Few objective observers can wrap their minds around why anybody, but especially large swaths of the population, continue to pledge loyalty to such a chaotic, morally destitute failmonger. Even the object of that adoration seems surprised sometimes.

Apart from Trump, there are countless others in our culture who raise the same frustrating question. Andrew Tate and Alex Jones come to mind as corrosive personalities who retain their many adherents despite a litany of disgraces. It’s not strictly a right- or left-wing phenomenon, since the progressive side of the discourse also has its share of figures whose questionable tactics and ongoing support baffles some observers. But few rise (or sink) to the level of those on the rightward fringe who marshal grievance to stoke anger to a Joker-esque degree.

At what point do disciples of such individuals decide enough is enough? That’s the question explored by Joker: Folie à Deux in its finale, which features a painful outcome for Mr. Arthur Fleck. [Major Spoilers Ahead.] The breaking point is not an especially brazen or repellent act by the Joker that finally snaps them out of their stupor. He has gone as far as it’s possible to go, including shooting to death multiple people, not on Fifth Avenue, but on live television. Fleck’s violation of their trust comes from reflecting on his actions and expressing sorrow for them. He stops the strong-man act and displays the most unforgivable of traits—human decency. Frailty. Regret.

That is what his horde cannot abide. And for this, he must be punished. One of his admirers, a fellow Arkham Asylum inmate, stops him in the hallway when they’re alone and asks, “Hey Arthur, can I tell you a joke I came up with?”

“Is it quick?” Arthur asks.

“Yeah, I can make it quick.”

“Mm, go ahead,” Arthur tells him.

The young man clears his throat: “So, a psychopath walks into a bar and sees this famous clown sitting there, all alone, totally drunk. It’s pathetic. ‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ he says. ‘What a disappointment. I used to watch you on TV. What can I get you?’ And this clown turns and says, ‘If you’re buying, you can get me anything.’ ‘Perfect,’ the psychopath says. ‘How about I get you what you fucking deserve?’” With that, the inmate rapidly stabs Arthur in the stomach dozens of times.

As Arthur lies dying on the floor, the inmate sits behind him and appears to either smear his victim’s blood on his lips in a lurid imitation of the Joker’s own make-up or uses his weapon to slash open his own cheeks in what gangland terminology calls a “Glasgow smile.” Is this man the “next” Joker? Maybe. He’s certainly one of the legion whose disappointment in his idol has metastasized into a rage that, in this case at least, becomes homicidal.

This isn’t the first time Arthur has died in front of us, in one manner of speaking. The first time was when he attempted actual stand-up comedy in the first film. “Dying,” to shift to comedian terminology, is the well-known term for when the laughs don’t come and the silence and awkwardness are so suffocating that it feels like exiting the mortal realm would be a mercy.

The inmate in the final scene of Joker: Folie à Deux may slay Arthur Fleck (or appear to, anyway), but Joker himself is already gone. That clownish alter-ego dies before his countless followers in the closing argument of his murder case, when Fleck stands as his own attorney. He appears ready to give them what they want, positioning himself on a stool before the jury and clutching his microphone like Lenny Bruce in a nightclub, poised to deliver hard and hilarious truths. But he falters. A moment from earlier in the trial has gotten under his make-up, crept under his skin, and burrowed into his brain.

“I wanted to come out here as Joker, and go on a rant, and blame all of you, and everyone,” he says, in a near whisper. “But this fucking miserable life. … I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be what you want me to be. It was all just a fantasy. There is no Joker. There’s just me. I killed six people. I wish I didn’t, but I did.”

He even confesses to killing his mother, which no one knew. “I just wanted to blow it all up and start a new life.”

He loses his love, as Gaga’s character—a classic serial-killer groupie—makes a grandstanding exit from the courtroom as he speaks. She was drawn to the carefree, seemingly indestructible persona he affected. The man beneath it is repellent to her. His admirers, clustered on the street outside, doubtlessly feel the same.

Arthur continues to shatter their illusion of him as he concludes with a joke that highlights what a nobody he was, and is: “Knock, knock,” he says. “Who’s there? … ‘Arthur Fleck.’ Arthur Fleck who?” The joke ends there. So does the Joker.

The subtitle, Folie à Deux, is a French psychological term for a “delusion of two,” in which the distortion of reality is exacerbated by the participation of another person. By later admitting his guilt and expressing remorse, he is the one who steps out of the dance, leaving his many partners still reeling.

His epiphany begins earlier in the film, when the Joker cross examines one of the first-hand witnesses to his murder spree, a fellow former street clown named Gary Puddles (an extraordinary Leigh Gill). As the small man sits nervous on the witness stand, recounting the killings he saw, the Joker/Arthur attempts to humiliate and rebut him while strutting back and forth and adopting a southern-fried accent to make himself sound like a grotesque parody of Atticus Finch.

He begins by questioning the man’s name—Puddles—and whether it could possibly be real. The “joke” wears thin fast, but he keeps pushing it. Joker himself feels betrayed by Gary, someone he considered a friend, someone he had allowed to live. He is furious that Gary doesn’t appreciate this gift, and is prepared now to mock him mercilessly. On his legal pad, he has scrawled a line about “a man of your stature,” meant to ridicule Gary’s diminutive height, but he never gets to those barbs.

The cross examination breaks down when Gary admits he didn’t see Joker’s “act” later that night, when he performed summary executions on live television. Joker simply can’t believe this, but Gary explains: “I was locked up in the police station, in an interview room. They thought you might come and kill me. They kept me in there all night.”

“You didn’t see anything I had to say? I can’t believe it?” Arthur says, dropping the southern accent momentarily.

His goal is to get Gary to say that he seemed like a “different person” when he was committing his killings, thereby proving his innocence by way of insanity—and establishing the Joker as a real and genuine presence, not a put-on. A trembling and tearful Gary admits that his followers see the Joker, but he makes Arthur see him as a real person too. “I can’t go back to work,” he says. “I still can’t sleep. I’m scared all the time. I never used to be scared, but I’m scared right here, with you in front of me. I couldn’t do anything that day. I felt so small. It reminded me how powerless I really am.”

“You have a flare for the dramatic,” Joker says, dismissing him. “You are tugging at my heart strings, little Gary.”

But Gary stands strong. “Do you know what that feels like, Arthur?” Arthur undeniably does. “You were the only one at work who never made fun of me. You were the only one who was nice to me,” Gary continues, as Joker tries to silence him.

Gary is disillusioned because the kind and gentle man he knew as Arthur seems to be a facade. He wanted that man to be real. For a moment, a moment that grows and endures until the closing argument, Arthur wants to be real too. But if that humane and decent part of him is his true self, then the Joker must be the fake identity. And that’s something Harleen, his eventual asylum murderer, and his legions of mask-wearing acolyte’s cannot bear.

The revelation is the gag Joker chooses not to make. He never ridicules Gary’s height, despite scripting such an attack. He’s not that guy anymore.

Joker: Folie à Deux makes the same choice. It’s not what you may have thought it was. This may be why why those who relished the transgressive thrills of the first movie may be recoiling now. What would it take for his supporters to finally turn on him? The answer is disturbingly simple: I was wrong for shooting those people on Fifth Avenue.

As a pop culture touchstone, Joker was supposed to be a middle finger to the way things are, a 21st century super-villain variation on Falling Down, which told a similar story of a besieged everyman (played by Michael Douglas) who lashes out at the unfairness around him, first justifiably, then with inexcusable violence.

That movie also ended with his vigilante anti-hero realizing the error of his ways in his dying moment. “What have I done?” is a common trope for storytellers to explore. Alec Guinness’s Colonel Nicholson has the same awakening in The Bridge on the River Kwai as his mortally wounded body falls on the trigger that destroys the enemy bridge he helped to build out of a sense of misguided honor. There are countless other examples.

Arthur does not die a hero. But, at the very least, he ends his unhappy life knowing who he truly was.