Reading, Watching, Listening 10/4/2024
A few words about becoming the Joker
So I went and saw Joker: Folie à Deux yesterday. I didn’t like the first movie, but I had some hopes for the sequel. A musical? Co-starring Lady Gaga? The trailers looked great—though the first film was shot well, too, and that didn’t mean much. I went into the new one having been spoiled on the ending and told enough about what the rest of the film was that I was reasonably sure the movie would be terrible, but there were seeds in those descriptions, the potential promise of something intelligent, subversive even. I genuinely hoped that I’d be able to walk out at the end, taking on the contrarian mantle, grabbing everyone by the lapels to say, “Joker 2 is great!”
Joker 2 is not great. At least, I don’t think it is, but this morning, as I write this, I’m starting to entertain the idea that it might be, or might at least be interesting. A film worth giving some credit, perhaps. Truth is, what’s not great about it comes down to its lack of dramatic propulsion. After the events of the first film, Arthur Fleck is now at Arkham Asylum awaiting trial for five of the six murders he committed—they don’t know about his mom, you see. His life imprisoned is ugly, oppressive, but also humdrum. The guards even seem to like him to some degree, or at least get a kick out of him. He entertains them. Arthur meets Gaga’s Lee Quinzel there, too. Her take on Harley Quinn, of course, and the two fall for each other, though that gets twisted as the film goes.
The musical element of the film emerges from that romance, the pair using song to enter into a liminal dreamspace, outside the confines of their boxed-in reality, and the place for Fleck’s Joker side to emerge in what on the surface feels like a more positive expression of his inner turmoil. The sequences themselves are… Well… This is where the film languishes in “not good!” territory. Everything looks very handsome, but there’s no verve, nothing to excite the imagination. The songs become dull diversions from the plot, and there’s hardly enough of that to begin with, making it all into an overextended chore. And that’s without even talking about the courtroom scenes, which, in Sienfeld finale style, serve to relitigate the events of the first film, keeping the motor of this sequel stuck entirely in place. What’s teased out is not anything narratively new, but a question: are Arthur and the Joker one and the same?
In practice, we’re dealing with a 138-minute bore, though it’s clear Phillips has a notion of what he’s doing, or at minimum attempting. Perhaps even the boredom is intentional—I doubt this, as the film displays an earnestness about its protagonist’s dilemma that suggests you really are supposed to be invested. The movie feels for him, it really does. Despite my misgivings, though, I’m starting to feel some real respect for what Joker 2 is up to, and what it accomplishes. Thank Reddit, where I was scrolling through reactions to the film, and came across more than a few fans of the first Joker almost apoplectic over the sequel, riled up because of its bucking of expectations, its interrogation of its own hero’s patheticness, and the fact that this Joker, as it turns out, is not even intended as the Joker that will eventually face off against Batman. There are literally people online—adults presumably—upset at the idea that the movie they watched was not sufficiently tied in to the IP they love.
The film’s undermining of the Joker personality as a Voice of the Dispossessed—Arthur’s supporters try to co-opt his “revolution” and eventually discard the man himself outright when he displays actual humanity—is effectively mirrored through the real-life fan reaction. It’s yet another revelation of the sick, anti-art, and frankly anti-human attitude of modern fan culture, steeped in consumerist logic, expressing itself in growing streams of online fascism. If the first movie exhibited some understanding of that dynamic—though only at the margins, more concerned instead with a pipeline from oppression to voilence—the sequel takes it on in full meta fashion, suggesting that not only did people take the wrong messages from that first movie, but that of course they did, it was inevitable given the nature of fan culture. They were seeing what they wanted to see. Now they’re getting the sad truth. Indeed, it seems Joker: Folie à Deux manages the trick of real subversion, not a bad result, though that doesn’t make it an enjoyable or even worthwhile watch.
Bit of a strange week media consumption-wise. I did read a bunch, and listen a bunch, and watch a bunch, though I only have a couple of things to recommend from all that.
Reading, Watching, Listening
“Elevate Me Later” is John Semley’s latest over at The Baffler, published a couple weeks back, about the trend of so-called Elevated Horror. I don’t agree with all the specifics, and I specifically don’t agree on a few of the films mentioned, but John lays out an excellent case for how stifling the trend has been for the horror genre as a whole, and he does so very perceptively. “By contrast, a great many of the postmodern and elevated horror flicks feel as if they’re knotting in on themselves. They’re hermetic in the negative sense. There is not much to do with Scream, or The Cabin in the Woods, or Get Out, or Midsommar other than to say, ‘I get it.’ Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or ‘elevated’) any buried subtext to the level of text.” Good stuff, even if I think three out of four of those movies are great.
Something Horizontal, by Blake Williams, is a short from by the Canadian experimental filmmaker, whose primary focus has been in 3D. This short—featured in 3D on the Blu-ray of his great feature Prototype, and in 3D on Mubi for anyone with an Apple Vision Pro apparently—is a fantastic exploration of stereo images, using dingy digital video aesthetics and flashing editing to play with perception of depth in the space of persistence of vision. It’s thrilling stuff, and if you have access to 3D equipment, you owe it to yourself to give the film a watch, along with Williams’ other 3D work.
That’s that for the recommendations. Come back Sunday, when I’ll be kicking off my new series, Late Eastwood, with a look at J. Edgar. (I’m actually considering going back and giving Hereafter a rewatch, given its afterlife themes, so that might actually be the kick-off, we’ll see).