We knew Joker: Folie à Deux would introduce Harley “Lee” Quinzel to Todd Phillips’s Gotham. What we didn’t know was the sequel would also serve as an unexpected origin story. The film’s shocking ending showed audiences a villain Bruce Wayne will fight one day. And while they are a major Batman villain, we least expected who we got.
Joker: Folie à Deux‘s trial ended with a bang. Literally. Only Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck decided to go out with a whimper. Loyal followers used a car bomb to set him free from the courthouse where he’d just been found guilty. That was inevitable after he had already decided to drop his Joker “act” and take responsibility for his actions. He didn’t turn himself in initially, though. He found Lee and hoped they could run off together. Instead she rejected him again. Arthur also learned she wasn’t pregnant or in love with him. She only cared about his Joker persona. With her gone, he meekly went back to prison.
During the film’s final moments, a guard—whose quick disappearance indicates he was in on the plot—told Arthur he had a visitor. Arthur never got to the meeting room. A young, mentally unstable inmate played by Connor Storrie stopped him in the hallway. Storrie’s character appeared earlier in the film watching Arthur with an unsettling fervor. That ultimately proved to be an intense devotion Arthur destroyed when he admitted Joker wasn’t real during his broadcast trial.
The inmate asked Arthur if he wanted to hear a joke and Arthur said sure. The inmate then told one about a “psychopath” who enters a bar. The punchline was about giving a patron who was clearly Arthur what he “deserves.” The inmate then stabbed Arthur again and again in the stomach. And as Arthur died, the inmate laughed maniacally while using his knife to carve a smile into his own face a la Heath Ledger’s iconic Joker. The implication was obvious. While Arthur Fleck was “Joker,” Storrie’s character is the one who will go on to be “The Joker.” In this Gotham he will become the supervillain an adult Bruce Wayne fights years from now.
This surprise origin story wasn’t about Storrie’s character. It was about the film’s namesake. Arthur’s desire for fame, the murders he committed, and the devotion he amassed left his followers feeling betrayed. Everything he thought he wanted was as false as the “love” he earned. Lee left him and his fellow inmate killed him. Worse, that young man will now go on to be The Joker people wanted.
They won’t care about who Arthur was. They won’t care about his pain and suffering. His legacy will be more death, chaos, and pain, the very thing he came to regret in that courtroom. Seeing what he’d done to his old friend Gary Puddles, the only one who ever truly understood Arthur and genuinely liked him, broke through Arthur’s anger. Gary’s humanity helped Arthur rediscover his own, but it was too late.
Joker and its sequel told the origin story of Gotham’s greatest villain, it just wasn’t Arthur Fleck. He might have been the first one with the moniker Joker, but he didn’t turn out to be The Joker. His story was much sadder and tragic. He helped create and inspire the monster he didn’t really want to be.
