Life is a Stage

In 2019, Todd Phillips delivered his version of Joker to the world, a film that was revolutionary in its own way. A work that skillfully balanced derivative cinema, art house, and comic book films, blending the intellectual and the popular. Five years later, the minds of Phillips and screenwriter Scott Silver have birthed Joker: Folie à Deux, an intelligent and unsettling sequel. Intelligent because it betrays the first film while once again blending high and low cinema, this time adding musical segments. The abundant musical interludes, rough and raw, seem to deliberately subvert the flamboyant staging of musicals from the '50s and '60s, serving as mental projections of the protagonist. Like Selma from Dancer in the Dark, Arthur imagines his life as if it were in an old musical, using it as a way to escape the brutal reality he lives in.

Folie à Deux introduces a seemingly marginal female character into the narrative. Harley is, in fact, a modern reinterpretation of the femme fatale from classic cinema: manipulative, psychotic, deceitful. She represents love as a destructive force rather than a saving one. For Phillips, love is an infection, an illusion. Arthur, initially a shell of a man trapped in a psychiatric facility, sees his encounter with Harley and their swift romantic involvement as an opportunity to alleviate his overwhelming loneliness. Their relationship turns into an uncontrollable kaleidoscope of romantic flashes, abstractions, fabrications, and projections. Love as deception, as an act of idolatry. Harley loves Joker, not Arthur; she desires his public persona and is likely a sociopath who wants to escape reality and live in a fantastical universe. And what genre is more unreal and fantastical than musicals? (Kudos to Phillips and Silver!). The musical is used as a representation of the distorted psyche of the protagonists. Hyperrealism and songs, their bruised and unmade-up faces will eventually be smeared with makeup, transforming them into their doubles. The theme of duality dominates the entire film, starting from the first masterful animated sequence where Joker fights his shadow. Public image and private self, with an abyss between the two. Harley longs for the idea she has built of Arthur, but when his mask falls (in this second chapter, the process is reversed compared to the first, where Arthur became Joker; here, Joker becomes Arthur again), she abandons him, leaving him in despair. The two wanted to make a mountain out of a molehill. The scene where Gaga sings Sammy Davis Jr.'s Gonna Build a Mountain at the piano while Phoenix tap-dances is chilling—a musical interlude that highlights the euphoria of falling in love, only to be countered by a heart-wrenching English version of Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas at the end of their story.

Love is a serious mental illness, as Plato said. Arthur and Harley’s lives are in constant pursuit of spectacle; in their case, it’s not just a series of images but a real social/romantic relationship mediated by images. Joker: Folie à Deux reinforces philosopher Guy Debord’s concept that reality emerges from the spectacle and how the spectacle itself is real. In the case of these characters, reality is generated by their fragmented psyche. Once again, love is seen as an extreme act of illusion.

Claustrophobic, mostly built on a series of suffocating close-ups, set in a few locations, and with rare outdoor sequences, the film is a sort of anti-musical and anti-La La Land.

07-Oct-2024 by Emanuele