In one camp, you have a young, smug prosecutor named Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) and the full severity of the state. They want to literally fry Arthur in an electric chair. “He is a monster,” Dent tells reporters on the TV and radio. They view Arthur as little more than a wolf walking amongst sheep that needs to be put down. Conversely, you have the sheep, or at least the most unsettling fans: the kind who dress up like the Joker and idolize him as some kind of folk hero who gave them permission to do bad things… like, say, gun down the rich in front of little baby Bruce Wayne.
Both perspectives represent a predictable reaction to a guy who killed America’s favorite comedian on late night TV. But they also encapsulate a reaction to the previous film, which saw some critics clutching their pearls and refusing to give it a grade because Phillips’ movie was “too dangerous,” a naive and somewhat regressive way to engage with art. Then there was that group of vocal online fans who seemed to worship the movie a little too much, cosplaying as Arthur Fleck’s Joker, but also copying his mannerisms, his attitude, and thinking he had something important to say about society.
In other words, the movie appealed to both comic book fans who wanted some of their favorite characters taken seriously as highbrow art and maybe felt a little too vindicated by Arthur’s not necessarily reliable narration/perspective, as well as edgelords and alt-right media personalities who peddle in grievance for loners and toxic segments of fandom (i.e. “incels”). This in turn feeds into the narrative of Joker’s detractors. For example, David Edelstein wrote in Vulture, “It’s an anthem for incels” and seems to indicate a connection between “civil massacres” and the character of the Joker.
Both sides, Joker Folie a Deux insists, failed to understand the humanity of poor Arthur, and this becomes the entire thrust of the sequel’s exhausting 138 minutes. You have those who wish to demonize Arthur as a monster, and those who see that monster as some kind of rock star leader who needs to be unleashed again. But in Phillips and presumably Phoenix’s reading, Arthur was never that guy—not the singer of an “anthem for incels” or the idol of his age. In fact, the only person who seems to see Arthur for who he is in the sequel is his defense attorney Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), who spends most of her scenes explaining the thinly veiled subtexts and themes of the first movie.
The fact that Arthur’s mother (Frances Conroy) had him give her baths while he was in his underwear in the 2019 movie strongly hinted at a tragic background in psychological and likely sexual abuse. That is made explicit in Joker 2 when Maryanne says Arthur was abused in all those ways at seven years old when the state failed to take him away from a mentally unwell mother. Arthur is a victim of his mother but also a society that fails those without power. Maryanne says this ugly truth to symbols of the system and the status quo, as well as to those in the movie’s audience who just write off the lonely and mentally ill as “incels.”
On the flip side are individuals who see Arthur killing Murray Franklin as a moment of liberation instead of a final hard turn into endless tragedy. It’s those guys who blow up the courthouse where Arthur is being sentenced, and their fellow travelers who mistake this troubled and in-need guy as some kind of hero who they hide in their car, presumably to some “safe space” where he can tell them what to do next. They literally get themselves run over while chasing after this false messiah.