Joker 2’s Nostalgia for Heath Ledger’s Version Is One of the Film’s Biggest Problems

This article contains major spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.

It is the ending which has left some fans upset and others…. still upset but also at least curious about the seeming wink, easter egg, or allusion to another, much better loved sequel. Arthur Fleck, Joaquin Phoenix’s eternally put-upon sad clown at the center of two Todd Phillips Joker movies, is dead. On a concrete floor in Arkham Asylum, he dies unloved, unhappy, and unprotected. Meanwhile just vaguely out of focus, and partially out of frame, his murderer laughs maniacally as he begins carving his own face into a so-called Glasgow grin.

A Joker is dead. Long live the Joker. At least that seems to be one possible takeaway from the ending of Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel which spent nearly two and a half hours telling audiences that the Joker they either reviled or cheered on in Phillips and Phoenix’s first Joker is actually a fraud; a sad victim of society and a broken mental healthcare system that let Arthur slip through the cracks. He isn’t even the guy who would one day fight Batman, even though the 2019 movie promised exactly that. Instead, it’s some other rando in Arkham, who just stands idly by in the background the whole movie, who might become the Clown Prince of Crime.

Hell, he even is meant to resemble Heath Ledger’s iconic interpretation of the Joker from 2008, right down to the self-inflicted facial wounds. In that Christopher Nolan classic, The Dark Knight, Ledger’s far more ingenious and menacing Joker asks various characters, time and again, “Do you want to know how I got these scars?” And in each instance, he offers a different (and therefore clearly fabricated) backstory intended to terrify his next victim.

More than a few moviegoers coming out of Phillips’ Joker 2 have reached the conclusion that, finally, we KNOW how Ledger’s Joker got his scars: he copycat-ed a more famous Joker (Phoenix’s Fleck) after killing him, stealing his throne and thunder.

We imagine Christopher Nolan would be mightily ticked off about this emerging assumption/fan theory. After all, it just came out that he stopped the first Joker movie from more or less having the same misleading ending.

In a surprisingly quick bit of backstage gossip coming out in the trades following Joker: Folie à Deux’s grisly opening weekend, unnamed sources let it be known to The Hollywood Reporter that the original Joker movie was supposed to conclude with Phoenix’s Joker carving the Glasgow smile onto his face in front of an adoring and cheering crowd, presumably during the scene where he made a bloody smile in the final cut of the movie.

“But The Dark Knight filmmaker Christopher Nolan killed that idea,” THR reported, “believing that only his Joker (Heath Ledger) should carve his face. But Nolan is no longer at the studio, and thus there was no resistance to the idea this time around.”

Nolan probably had reason to be protective of the iconography he invented, and Ledger gave startling life to, nearly 20 years ago. After all, we need to stress that the unnamed Arkham inmate played by Connor Storrie is not a version of Ledger’s Joker. Ledger’s Joker is either in his late 20s or early 30s in 2008, which is more than 25 years after the events of Joker 2. Furthermore, we saw exactly how Thomas and Martha Wayne died in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and they were of a nobler sort than the cynical elitists and demagogues introduced to viewers in Phillips’ 2019 Joker.

And yet, understandably, some casual viewers who may not remember every intricate detail or scene from 19-year-old movies like Batman Begins can come away with the false impression that Phillips’ Joker flicks are de facto prequels to Nolan’s trilogy, and that Phillips’ Joker is a “grounded,” artful contextualization of Ledger’s iconic performance.

Discovering that this might have always been a possible intention on Phillips’ part—leaving his film(s) open to misinterpretation in their connection to The Dark Knight—makes them also seem somewhat smaller in retrospect.

Phillips certainly achieves a grittier aesthetic than Nolan ever attempted in both Joker movies, depicting a Gotham City that is just New York at its lowest point in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with trash strikes and serial killers stalking the streets. But he also is couching it almost entirely in the authentic, if cynical, presentation of that urban decay documented in Martin Scorsese’s earliest films, especially Taxi Driver (1976). As a consequence, the first Joker always felt a little bit like an affectation; a fan’s tribute to the real thing.

What elevated that concept was Phoenix’s ferocious performance, an extremely neurotic and sympathetic portrayal of a mentally ill man succumbing to his loneliness and demons, in large part because he has no safety net at home or in his community. Yet Phoenix’s tragic, and some might say overly misanthropic, interpretation of the Joker always stood in the shadow of Ledger’s Mistah J. Ledger and Nolan were, after all, the ones to innovate onscreen the image of a Joker in hastily, and sloppily, self-applied clown makeup and greasy long hair.

Obviously that 2019 movie owes a great debt to The Dark Knight, but learning the creative intent was always intended to thematically lead into what became Ledger’s Joker, initially with Phoenix’s interpretation and now without, just makes the whole enterprise seem increasingly inauthentic. As with Joker’s heavy reliance on the innovations achieved by Scorsese, Joker 2’s ending seems to steal some of The Dark Knight’s grandeur and impact in order to give its own story a greater sense of self-importance.

As good as Phoenix is, Phillips seems hellbent on burying his performance in Ledger’s shadow.