Honestly what did you expect? Maybe you were expecting it to be capeshit? Maybe you wanted another one of those lazy “This isn’t like other super hero stories, it’s dark and gritty and made for adults” superhero slop. Maybe you wanted Watchmen, Suicide Squad, Umbrella Academy, The Boys, Doom Patrol, Kick Ass, Deadpool, etc. Boring. What if we had a super hero movie but the heroes were flawed and tell edgy jokes and do meta commentary and sometimes they break the 4th wall and mention memes from reddit? Boring.

When the movie ended, I’ll admit I was sort of confused about what I had watched. I remained seated in the dark theater while everyone else walked out. I sat alone, the credits are rolling and I hear a familiar song. During the final credits, Joaquin Phoenix performs a cover of the song “Daniel Johnston - True Love Will Find You in the End” as Arthur Fleck. Suddenly I felt like the whole movie made sense. By having Arthur Fleck perform a song by Daniel Johnston, I believe that the movie was trying to make a comparison to the real life artist.

Daniel Johnston is an artist who gained a cult following in the 1980s by giving away mixtapes while working at McDonalds in Texas. Daniel Johnston suffers from severe mental illness and has spent extended periods of time in psychiatric institutions. In 1988, was arrested at the Statue of Liberty for vandalism, drawing hundreds of christian fish symbols on the monument. Later the same year, Daniel broke into an elderly woman’s home while hallucinating and attempted to give her an exorcism. Daniel was arrested after the woman jumped from the second story window, breaking both legs. In 1990, while flying in a 2 seater plane with his father (a pilot), Daniel has an episode and tries to crash the plane, taking the keys from the ignition and throwing the keys out the window. In 1992, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana is seen wearing a Daniel Johnston T-Shirt while performing at the 1992 MTV music awards. While at this time, Daniel Johnston was institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital in Austin Texas, multiple record labels competed to sign him as an artist. While Daniel was receiving treatment, his fans were demanding music and record labels were demanding profits.

In Joker 2, everyone is always demanding things from Arthur, but nobody cares about his health. Nobody actually cares that he’s having hallucinations where everyone sings and dances, not even the audience. The Joker fanatics are demanding that he leads some kind of movement. The lawyer is demanding that he pretend to have a split personality disorder so she can win this case and have a successful career. Even the prison guards demand that he perform jokes to entertain them. Even one of the guards makes him sign a book so that the guard can get rich by selling it. Everyone wants to take from him but nobody cares about him. Arthur falls in love with Harley Quinn because he believes they both have abusive parents, but even she says she only likes him because of the Joker persona. Arthur’s court trial is even televised because the whole world is demanding a spectacle from him.

Throughout the movie, I found myself constantly asking the question, “When does Arthur escape and become the Joker?” The movie is always teasing you. The audience is just as selfish as the people in the movie. The point is that Arthur never wanted to be “The Joker”. Arthur just wants to be loved and live a normal life and to spend time with a woman, but he can’t because of his mental illness. Everyone around Arthur, uses his mental illness to take advantage of him. Being the Joker is a curse. We want Arthur to lead some movement that he never wanted to be a part of. The point is that heroes are not real.