Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me About Joker?

I know a lot of people are hating on Lady Gaga’s performance in Joker : Folie à Deux, but I can’t give her enough credit. After all, without her, I never would have watched it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Folie à Deux was the peak of cinema, but I don’t think it was as bad as everyone’s making it out to be. I’m not going to lie, though, I’m a little mad - why didn't anybody tell me Joker was actually good?

For the long time, I thought Joker was all about men’s rights and being a misogynist because that's what I saw online. I can't be the only one who’s seen endless Joker edits with weird captions about how hard it is to be a man and how awful and selfish women are. I still don’t understand why they kept popping up in my algorithm - I’m a woman, and a feminist at that. I’m all for addressing men’s issues, but when those issues are “women won’t sleep with me”... yeah, not my problem.

I'll admit, part of me does understand why the film appealed to incels. Just like them, Arthur Fleck (the titular Joker) doesn’t have much if any romantic success. He’s an ordinary guy who’s been beaten down by “society”, he has no economic prospects, and he’s stuck living with his potentially abusive mother - he’s basically the poster boy of the disaffected modern man. But it's ironic that the people who worshipped him ignored the fact that Arthur didn’t hate women - if anything, he liked them too much.

In fact, if you ask me, this isn’t a movie about being an incel but rather about how austerity and capitalism creates the kind of social malaise that leads to incels. It might even be a little (gasp) leftist.

Hear me out : What’s the real problem in Arthur’s life? It’s not women or immigrants or whatever else incels like to blame these days, it’s rich people who think ordinary people and their issues are beneath them. Obviously the film didn’t go too deep into it - people don’t tend to love propaganda - but beyond Thomas Wayne (your average heartless capitalist), the biggest problem in Arthur’s life is the lack of funding for social services.

Gotham’s equivalent of CPS couldn’t save him from abuse. There’s no system in place to help him or his mother get out of poverty. His psychologist seems overworked at first, probably because there isn’t enough funding to hire more, and then she’s let go too and he's left alone and unmedicated.

It's only a fraction of the picture, but it's a grim indication of what the rest of life in Gotham is right. Somehow I don't think they have food stamps.

I’m obviously not going to say it’s the most leftist film out there, but the themes are there. That I avoided this film for so long because of what I saw online is a travesty - which might just be part of the reason why I liked Joker : Folie à Deux so much.

I know that liking Folie à Deux is a controversial opinion right now, but I honestly don't understand why. Maybe because the musical numbers, which even I can admit were poorly executed. For all I appreciate what Todd Phillips was trying to do with it, well... he failed.

Folie à Deux is far from a masterpiece, and not just because of the music, but still, I thought the movie presented some interesting ideas on what it means to become an icon. Maybe I’m a bit more sensitive to it since I’ve always found myself “cast” as the sweet, angelic, can-do-no-wrong outsider in my own life, but seeing how Arthur’s role as Joker only led to him being further dehumanised resonated with me. Arthur wasn’t never the main character. It was never him that people liked. It was Joker. Arthur was just the actor cast in the role, and when he stopped performing well, there was no more use for him.

Part of me wonders if Phillips chose to explore that idea specifically because the original was so popular with incels. They dream of getting revenge on society just like Arthur did, but those of us looking in from the outside can see they just need to feel a connection with other people. It's a lesson Arthur unfortunately learned too late. He got his revenge and felt loved and accepted for the first time in his life, but it was worthless in the end. Nobody actually liked him - they only cared about Joker.

I missed out on Joker because of its online reputation. Don’t be like me. Don’t skip Folie à Deux just because it’s getting so much hate online. It’s not nearly as good as the first movie, but its message still makes it worth the watch. We don’t often see a film from such a fan-oriented franchise try to be creative at the cost of alienating its core audience, and for that alone, I think it deserves more praise than it's getting.

But maybe I'm just dreaming. We live in a society, after all.