Joker: Folie à Deux

Gareth Higgins on JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX

I think Joker: Folie à Deux is a profoundly misunderstood near-masterpiece, which respects the audience enough to give them what they need, not what they think they want. I was repelled by the original Joker, but the sequel takes its ethical considerations so seriously I think perhaps that’s what its makers were doing all along. 

It’s psychologically sophisticated, morally serious, and aesthetically rich, it looks and feels bleakly magnificent, and it does something with comic book villainy that makes its analogies to the real world far more credible, and useful.

Taking place in 1983, two years after the lonely and bullied Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) took on a super-villainous identity and killed half a dozen people, the primary plot of Folie à Deux is about his murder trial. The courtroom and jail cells, conversations with lawyers, an interview with an exploitative journalist, and testimony all feel real. Despite being about the (demonic) escapist fantasies of a lonely man, it's rooted in a (semi)realistic external world, and takes the impact of those fantasies seriously enough not only to judge them, but to consider how much like Joker we are ourselves.

Opening with a brilliant animated sequence by Sylvain Chomet (whose Belleville Rendezvous is one of the great films of this century), Joker: Folie à Deux is explicitly about how the unconscious shadow drives behavior. The subtitle refers to a real mental health condition, where two people share (and reinforce) the same neurosis; a kind of telepathic contagion. Phoenix plays Fleck/Joker as if his life depends on it - it’s one of the most immersive, disturbing and darkly funny performances I’ve ever seen. He’s perfectly harmonized by Lady Gaga as Lee, an inmate at the same asylum obsessed with Joker’s public destructiveness. She and Arthur meet at a group music therapy session, watch a musical together, and the folie takes flight: it’s a match made in hell. 

Phillips’ and Scott Silver’s script dexterously shifts power (and genre) dynamics among characters and places. We move between the asylum, the city, the courtroom and back, in a portrayal of New York so movie-realistic that you can almost smell it. (The computer-generated twin towers of the World Trade Center look more real than they’ve done since they were destroyed. You can’t see them without feeling an ache, which can lead to the kind of lament that this film is inviting.) Arkham State Hospital is a stony, bleak place on an island attached to Gotham by a bridge - a New York Alcatraz. Folie à Deux is a joy for cinephiles - its primary references to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are accompanied here by a courtroom straight out of Sidney Lumet & David Mamet’s The Verdict, and soul-dulling medicine rituals from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But what's most thrillingly unexpected is that Joker: Folie à Deux is peppered with musical numbers in which Arthur/Joker and Lee/soon to become Harley Quinn step into their fantasy as if they were characters in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or One From the Heart, both visually spectacular films in which the songs (and the endings) aren’t always happy.

As for the power dynamics between people, at no point in Folie à Deux is any one character fully in charge. Arthur is at the (brutal) command of Brendan Gleeson’s security guard, but the guard is a cog in a machine; Arthur’s lawyer (Catherine Keener) is trying her best to obtain mercy from the court with a defense that it was not really him who carried them out, rather a trauma-induced “other”, but her efforts are thwarted by Arthur decided to represent himself; Lee first manifests to Arthur as a romantic savior, but eventually rejects him when he turns out not to be the monster she dreamed of.

And that’s where this film becomes most extraordinary. It doesn’t just take its villain’s motivations seriously enough to give them a psychological explanation, but it neither sugarcoats that explanation (there is no doubt that Arthur experienced some of the worst things humans can do to each other), nor uses it as a justification for his cruelty. Even then it doesn’t resolve things simplistically: the prosecution’s psychiatrist (Ken Leung) validates Arthur’s actual conditions, but asserts that they do not constitute a justification for what he did. For a moment, this feels like the final word; but Keener rebuts with a reference to how information partly derived from the agencies that had failed Arthur has a child should be handled with skepticism. Sometimes everyone can be partly right. (Though I don’t think the portrayal of mental illness here is intended as a literal representation of what it’s like for all who carry such burdens, but as an analogy to what happens in a society that values recognition for superficial reasons over genuine connection, and “winning” over kindness.)

Joker powerfully represented Arthur's suffering, but by the end of that film he was publicly acclaimed for his violence, and it seemed that the movie wanted us to go along with the hero worship. Folie à Deux answers by highlighting the disaster left in his wake, with two moments which include my favorite scene - and performance - of the year. Gary Puddles, a witness to one of Arthur’s murders, testifies to the horror of what he saw, and the trauma that it has caused. It’s a one scene tour-de-force by the English actor Leigh Gill, and if Beatrice Straight could win an Oscar for one scene in Network (another Lumet film), Gill should win for this. Gary’s testimony is followed by Sophie (Zazie Beetz), Arthur's former neighbor and imaginary lover who tells of how she has had to move house due to the stalking by Joker's fans. Arthur starts to wake up.

We live in a cultural moment when public figures routinely dehumanize their political opponents; where local civic leaders have left their jobs or their homes due to threats made at the behest of people who claim to be standing for truth, justice, and the American way. Folie à Deux avoids garish parallelism, but it is an astonishing thing to see a massively-budgeted sequel to a billion-dollar-grossing comic book film so provocatively reveal, and so squarely challenge the self-deceptive malevolence of demagogues and those who follow them.

There is a society-wide folie à deux underway anytime someone builds a movement around the idea that some lives are worth more than others; anytime stories of domination, retribution, purification, isolation, victimization, and accumulation are asserted over servant leadership, transformative justice, shared responsibility, contemplation, tending, and stewardship. The greatest need beyond food, water, air and shelter is the need for mutual recognition. Seeing the pain of another, and our own pain mirrored there, does not have to lead to redrawing an exclusive circle of belligerence toward anyone else. It can actually prompt the replication of kindness. Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t pretend easy resolution, but through acknowledging the harm he has done, and rejecting that path, Arthur has begun to claim his worth. It’s a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions that he couldn’t do that earlier, and wasn’t adequately helped. But the point of Shakespearian tragedy is to illuminate our brokenness in hopes we might change - and Folie à Deux masterfully calls us back to sanity.

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Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS: TINY FEET

I’ve long been fascinated by how children think and develop their understanding of the world, and was delighted to find Tiny Feet: A Treasury for Parents, edited by Lauren Child. Here’s Robert Louis Stevenson, from his Child’s Play, 1878, insisting that children “dwell in a mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their parents…It would be easy to leave them in their native cloud land, where they figure so prettily - pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into offices and the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let them doze among their playthings yet a little!”

And here’s Maria Montessori, from her Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook, 1914: “As a rule…we do not respect our children. We force them to follow us without regard to their special needs. We are overbearing with them, and above all, rude; and then we expect them to be submissive and well-behaved…Let us treat them with  all the kindness which we would wish to develop in then. And by kindness is not meant caresses…Kindness consists in interpreting the wishes of others, in conforming oneself to them, and sacrificing, if need be, one’s own desire. This is the kindness which we must show to children.”

And here’s Toni Morrison, from A World of Ideas, 1989, on motherhood: “If you listen to them somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things and deliver a better self, one that you like, The person that was me, that I liked best, was the one my children seemed to want.”