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Joker: Folie à Deux’s Twist Ending Is a Lot Like Lightyear, in a Way
Turns out we were watching the origin story of the human that the Joker is based on.
Todd Phillips’s Joker didn’t have all that much to say besides “don’t be mean to socially awkward men, you never know what they’re going through and you might just push them to the point of turning into some kind of a Joker.” The most interesting thing about it, and maybe this is a generous reading, was how it got to the banality of evil by suggesting that our biggest boogeymen aren’t agents of some incredible genius and ambition, hoping to wrack their grand plans and ideologies on the rest of us; more often, they are dumb, and losers. … Or it was, until Phillips’s confused, self-loathing follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux, retconned much of the first film’s characterization, and rug-pulled its entire place and purpose in the DC Cinematic Universe. His incessant laughter is a tic, the result of repeated physical trauma in childhood, and his clown schtick comes from his rent-a-clown day job and his stand-up comedy aspirations.
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