I love that Joker: Folie à Deux sticks a middle finger up at incels

First published on Metro

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

It’s become a familiar routine. The movie drops and social media becomes inundated with negative reactions.

YouTube videos called ‘THEY DESTROYED THE ESSENCE OF THE CHARACTER’ start appearing on your homepage. You check Rotten Tomatoes and see a tanking score. Articles pop up saying it’s bombed at the box office. 

Joker: Folie à Deux was released last week and all the above happened. I saw it this weekend too, convinced that this particular type of loud, negative reaction that sprung up like a tidal wave might mean there’s something worth checking out there.

The film itself, from a technical perspective, is a mixed bag. It is beautifully cinematographed and edited, creepily but gorgeously lit and has some truly excellent performances. Narrative wise – it’s a little weak, so if you’re looking for a strong story arc – it will likely fall flat to you. If you hate musicals (yes, if you’re late – Joker 2 is a musical) it’s probably going to be a hard no.

But there is a particular group of people which this film seems to have annoyed immensely, to an unhinged extent. They’re not too hard to find either – as they are likely to be the ones yelling at your screen in all-caps on YouTube, or buried in the comments of those videos saying how the movie ‘reversed all the character development’ of the guy from the first film who ends the movie killing people on live television.

Hilariously, what was extremely clear to me after seeing it, was that this movie this group seem to hate so much, was very likely made like this with them in mind. It was made, quite intentionally, to p*** them off.

When the first Joker came out, there was a reading of the character of Arthur Fleck that struck a chord to this group – a sympathy to his motivations and circumstances, of being lonely and ignored, of being angry about men’s potential successes restricted by a ‘decaying’ society. 

This group – often called ‘incels’ or ‘edgelords’ – are an online community of predominately white men who resent progressivism and blame it for their circumstances at work and their inability to attract and sleep with women. Expect an unhealthy dosage of racism and misogyny there.

Many of these incel internet communities have been going on for years and share many similar internet rabbit holes, linking ‘mens rights activists’ to Pepe the Frog memes to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. DC Comics’ the Joker, with his anarchical motivations, quickly became the ideal symbol for these movements. 

And Todd Phillips – director of both recent Joker movies – knew what the Joker could mean to these anti-woke groups. In an interview prior to the 2019 movie, he spoke about why he quit comedy: ‘Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture. I’ll tell you why [comedies don’t work anymore], because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’

Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker became the perfect accumulation of edgelord and incel ideas, a character driven to the edge by a degrading society, a society that didn’t take him seriously – and yes, didn’t find him funny. He was a character designed – as Philips alludes to – to relate to these sub-cultures as a representation of the ‘inevitable’ backlash to wokeness. His now infamous final line ‘You wouldn’t get it’ has done a lot of heavy lifting online since.

Many (including myself) appreciated the movie, seeing it as a tragedy about a man suffering from severe mental health. Edgelords around the world, however, rejoiced after watching it. From their perspective they had found a piece of Hollywood media that spoke directly to them and appreciated them. 

Very real concerns began to spread that the community would be inspired by the movie into committing acts of violence, concerns voiced by the families of the victims of the Aurora theatre mass shooting, which took place during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Online rumours suggesting to attack the Joker premiere and screenings began to spread with some reddit threads shut down and thousands more continued to celebrate the character on incel forums.

Many from these groups felt the character spoke directly to them and appreciated them. (Picture: Warner Bros)

Though (fortunately) these acts of violence did not materialise, nothing stopped the community getting increasingly excited by the prospect of them happening, and for years after the movie, this version of the Joker was always at the forefront of these movements.

Which brings us to Joker 2. 

Joker: Folie à Deux pulls no punches, and feels like a film made almost entirely to address the reaction and fans who celebrated the villain in 2019. In this film, the Joker from the first movie (and the incel community symbolically) are literally put on trial. Harvey Dent – the prosecution – says on TV: ‘There are people who are still willing to commit acts of violence in his name. They believe that he’s some kind of martyr. Well he’s not’. 

In the sequel, the Joker from the first movie (and the incel community symbolically) are literally put on trial (Picture: AP)

Those followers are presented as delusional losers, as worshipers who only end up being run over while chasing Fleck, crying out how much they love him. All the promises of what being an incel can be – get the woman, find respect among the community – are torn away from Fleck by the film’s end.

The take down of the incel-celebrated Joker is an exhausting two hours 20 minutes long, but its final middle finger up to the community is saved for right at the end, when the hero of the movement is brought to a pathetic end. The message is unequivocally clear: the grandiosity of incel culture leads only to loss and self-destruction, not to success.

It is a bold, daring move by the filmmakers, one which would have surely been expected to annoy some of the first film’s most passionate fans. Like Mad Max: Fury Road before it (which took on men’s rights activists by downgrading Max for a badass female protagonist), Joker 2 took a gamble at challenging incels, and made a movie that was predominantly just about that challenge, with very little room left for plot.

Unlike Fury Road, the lack of plot in Joker 2 isn’t something you can laugh off because of how much fun you’re having; it’s a bit dull and hard to engage with on any level apart from rejoicing in the ‘f**k you’ message it gives to incels. 

So is it good? Dramatically speaking it isn’t the best. But it made incels sit through a musical where the dance numbers ridicule incel delusion, a musical which deconstructed the character they had tried to claim as their mascot. It p****d off all the right people. That’ll sit just fine with me.