Joker 2: A Modern Kafkaesque Tragedy That We All Misunderstood

THE BACKLASH Joker 2 received, and how quickly it faded from cultural relevance, is ironic to its core. The real-life audience acted exactly like the in-film audience. In a strange, unconscious way, they became an extension of the film itself. They did not just watch the story; they unknowingly participated in it.

The film opens with Arthur in a mental asylum. He is heavily medicated, subdued, and quietly fading. Then he meets Harley, a brilliant, manipulative woman posing as a fellow inmate who uses her background in psychiatry to weaponise affection and love. She pierces through Arthur’s defences by playing on his deepest wound: his desperate, unmet need for a nurturing figure.

But Harley does not love Arthur. She loves the Joker, the theatrical mask he wears and the persona that entertains, shocks, and dances. Just like the world outside the screen, she falls for the performance rather than the person. The audience, both in the film and in real life, mirrors this perfectly. They love the chaos, the flair, and the delusion, but not the man beneath it all. Arthur said it best: “No one cares about me.” And the film proves it.

It is a story about how society treats the mentally ill: with fascination, so long as they perform. Arthur is a modern circus act, loved when he is spinning and ignored when he is still. This is highlighted beautifully in a small but telling moment when Arthur shows kindness to the little person during the trial, recognising that they are both treated as sideshow curiosities. Respect is rare, even among the rejected.

What is even more tragic is that Arthur is never truly treated. No one makes a real effort to understand him. The therapists are cold, dismissive, and entirely uninterested in his inner world. His medication numbs him into silence; it does not heal him, it erases him.

Only during his trial, when he is off his medication, does he begin to show signs of genuine emotion and memory, zoning out, sketching to run away from his trauma, and reacting as pieces of his psyche fight for the surface. Ironically, his healing begins when he is finally allowed to feel, even if painfully so.

This all echoes Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but in reverse: in this version, Arthur is only loved when he is the bug, when he is the Joker. When he reverts to Arthur, no one cares.

The film reaches an unbearable emotional peak as the guards brutally abuse him, possibly even sexually assaulting him, as is heavily implied, beating the Joker out of him. They do not help him; they strip him of the only identity that gave him power. He loses Harley, and he loses himself. He is no longer even a spectacle, just a broken man, discarded.

And yet, many viewers dismissed the film entirely. Why? Because it had singing. Because it felt theatrical. They assumed it was just another film chasing trends, trying to be marketable. But Joker 2 is the opposite of that. It is not “Disneyfied”; it is a raw, grotesque, psychological descent. The musical numbers were not meant to entertain; they were meant to disturb. They showed how fractured Arthur’s mind had become, and how deeply lost he was in fantasy.

Unfortunately, the critics who might have defended this film have lost the public’s trust, with many seen as compromised by industry politics and safe takes. At the same time, society has grown more anti-intellectual, more obsessed with spectacle and consumption. Real, challenging art like Joker 2 does not stand a chance in a world that demands dopamine hits over discomfort.

And so, just like Arthur himself, the film was misunderstood, sensationalised, and ultimately abandoned. The audience became part of the story without realising it, treating Arthur exactly as the in-film audience treated him.

It is truly unfortunate that this story was not a novel, free from the “Joker” label. Stripped of comic-book expectations, it could have stood on its own as a haunting portrait of a mentally ill man: decent at heart, broken by neglect, and victimised by the very systems meant to help.

But perhaps that was the film’s final point.

We, the audience, imposed a role onto Arthur that he himself never fully chose. And the moment he stopped fulfilling that role, we discarded him.

Without the weight of the DC label and the expectations attached to it, Joker 2 might have been recognised for what it truly is:

a modern Kafkaesque literary tragedy.