Joker 2 Ending Explained: Let’s Unpack That Shocker

This article contains Joker: Folie à Deux spoilers. If Arthur Fleck had a favorite song, it was probably “That’s Life,” the Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon big band standard first recorded in 1963 and popularized by Frank Sinatra in ’66. A bit of a mean-spirited lament, the song features acerbic observations like “you’re riding high […]

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This article contains Joker: Folie à Deux spoilers.

If Arthur Fleck had a favorite song, it was probably “That’s Life,” the Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon big band standard first recorded in 1963 and popularized by Frank Sinatra in ’66. A bit of a mean-spirited lament, the song features acerbic observations like “you’re riding high in April, shot down in May,” and “but if there’s nothing shaking, come this here July, I’m gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die.”

Frankly, it’s pretty bleak if you listen to it for more than a minute, and diametrically opposed to where we first met Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) in Todd Phillips’ Joker, a movie that begins with a sad man desperate to bring joy and happiness to others. But it was the theme song chosen by his favorite late night comedian, Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), so that was that. At least until Arthur donned copious amounts of pancake makeup and blew ol’ Murray away on live broadcast television.

Arthur, under his new persona as Joker, made Murray live the meaning of the song, right down to a bloody tee. So by the time Joker: Folie à Deux rolled around, you might expect Arthur would still be riding high on the tune. Yet he isn’t. Despite Joker 2 being ostensibly a musical filled with sequences of Arthur imagining himself or his great love, Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), belting out standards of yesteryear, he never once vocally touches “That’s Life.”

But he still