Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

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When watching musicals, you have to buy into a certain level of delusion on screen, otherwise you’ll just be scratching your head for two hours. Likewise, if musicals were absolutely literal, it would be preposterous for any sane character to sit there without questioning why everyone around them knows the words and dance moves to a brand new song that’s never been heard before. There’s a fantasy element to musicals that many of us might mimic in our heads in real life. Wouldn’t it be awesome to live in a musical every once in a while?

I spent a lot of time thinking about whether Joker: Folie à Deux could have been told as effectively without all of its musical elements. And after considering the alternative, I’ve concluded that it was actually a great move by director Todd Phillips, establishing a different tone from the 2019 original while also juxtaposing realism with fantasy, allowing us to live inside of protagonist Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) head during his abstract romance with one Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga).

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This is not a musical in the strictest sense. The music itself doesn’t really imbue much energy into the picture but serves as an abstract representation of deliberate ambiguity. In fact, only the film’s two main characters ever really sing, and almost exclusively inside their heads, be it individually or together (hence the folie à deux).

To get the job done, Phillips, who also co-writes the script with Scott Silver, employs older pop standards and musical numbers for his stars to sing. However, this eschewing of original tunes is no act of laziness but a thoughtful consideration of its titular character. I’m sure there are some viewers who had wished Phillips hired songwriters to pen new musical numbers instead, but that would have been a mistake. Arthur is an uninspired, vapid bore of a person. Why would he have the creative capacity to come up with his own original songs in the context of this film?

We catch up with our Gotham villain in jail awaiting trial for murdering five people in cold blood. The first film tells the downfall of Arthur as he goes from a compassionate party clown to a troubled man tormented by the accumulated rejection he’s faced in his life. It comes to a head once he’s ridiculed on live TV following his catastrophic stand-up routine. Phillips allows us to rest uncomfortably in our sympathy while leaving a sour taste in our mouths following the final denouement.

In Folie à Deux, we see how Arthur has become something of a symbol of the misunderstood outcast, the psychopath, and the failure. He’s a popular guy in prison, where the guards take a liking to him and his fellow inmates see him as an iconoclast to be cherished. There was even a TV movie made about his life. In court, a jury will decide if he acted on his own free will or if a separate person inside his head persuaded him to commit the murders. If the latter is decided, he won’t get the death penalty.

In prison, he meets Harley, possibly his biggest fan. She relates to his struggle as she too came from a broken home and wants him to own his actions, leaning into his demons like she has. Harley plots ways for him to break out but eventually threatens his plea for insanity by telling the press that he, in fact, is the Joker and only the Joker (i.e., it’s not a separate entity from Arthur).

For better or worse, the majority of the film is set in a courtroom with DA Harvey Dent (Harry Lawty) trying to get Arthur to the electric chair for his crimes. It’s unclear what Arthur wants, which sort of quells any of the courtroom tension, reduced to a MacGuffin of sorts. Of course, I’m oversimplifying things.

In 24 hours, I’ve thought about Joker: Folie à Deux perhaps more than any other film this year. Specifically, the way Phillips filters the idea of celebrity and fame through the prism of a crazy person. The fellow misfits of Gotham dress up like Arthur, paint their faces, cheer him on at his trial — not for whether or not his insanity plea is successful but for his innocence. This is a preposterous, delusional notion to us in the audience. But for those who feel “seen” by Arthur’s existence, the truth hardly matters.

There’s no doubt that Arthur committed these crimes. For us, the question is never innocence but whether or not he’s embodying two separate individuals at once, which never explicitly gets answered. Nevertheless, the Joker wannabes in the movie are merely looking for an ambassador; they want validation for their own nefariousness.
Arthur’s fans don’t love Arthur but the idea of him — which may even get supplanted if a new, crazier psycho killer were to come into the picture. Much like society’s delusional adoration of popular celebrities, this isn’t love but infatuation, even if that’s not how Arthur sees it. The same analogy can be made for the bond between him and Harley. Is she really in love with him or is he simply a symbol of chaos?

After firing his lawyer in the courtroom, Arthur represents himself. His first scene as attorney is also the first time we see him in full Joker makeup. It’s set up so we think this is his final transformational stage into the villain we all know from the comics. There’s a scene when he gets to cross-examine Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill), a little person who he used to work with, and whose life he spared despite him being sole witness to one of his murders.
At one point, Arthur appears to emotionally react to Gary’s testimony, which laments Arthur’s downfall since the killer was the only one who actually didn’t make fun of his diminutive height. Phoenix is so brilliant here that we’re able to see the total nuance of Arthur despite him being such a mercurial character. A scene at the end (which I won’t dare spoil) brings clarification to Arthur’s humanity in this moment.

Phillips also shows us the delusion of celebrity by the celebrity himself. Arthur’s fame in the outside world changes his personality, with Harley being a conduit for society’s view of him that he wasn’t previously privy to. Suddenly, he starts souring the only good relationships he has, with the guards, his therapist, and other inmates. Fame changes you, even if you’re a psychopath.

And in fact, it’s here that we really see Phillips’ intent. It’s the conclusions we can draw from all of these crazy people in this film that allow us to hold a mirror up to our own obsession with celebrity and fame. Why is it less crazy when we do it?

My biggest gripe is that Phillips never clearly defines his themes, or at the very least gives us a thread to grasp while sitting in the movie theater. I gleaned more from my own reflection and surmising than I did from the film itself. Joker: Folie à Deux is just as much about Arthur and Harley’s love story as it is about the perception of identity and what that means for a newfound celebrity — and his fans. Or is fixation on fame itself the psychotic behavior?