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

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.