Joker: Folie a Deux

I saw Joker: Folie a Deux on Friday night and liked it a lot, thought it was really well done, but a weekend of reading and listening to men talk about it has made it easily ten times more interesting to me. I don’t want to get into it here because the discourse surrounding movies like this exhausts me, but I will point out one aspect that I feel like has eluded people.

The movie is a musical, and most people think it’s a “half-hearted” musical, or a “musical that’s ashamed of being a musical,” or just a terrible musical. As someone who enjoys musicals and has seen a lot of them, I was curious to see what it was doing with the form, given the wall-to-wall suffocating grimness of the first movie.

The first thing I noticed is that everyone in the movie sings, but in varying degrees of confidence and enthusiasm, and with the backing of the production values. That is, some characters just stand in the background and hum tunes, others are more spotlit and foregrounded, some sing a cappella, some sing with instrumental backing, and still others sing in elaborate “1950s classic musical” set pieces. Everyone sings “in character,” meaning that they sing as people who don’t sing well, except in the big production numbers. It was almost as though the movie is sung through, but the songs were tuning in to a hard-to-locate radio signal, as though the movie is a straight drama where an alternate universe, one filled with musical numbers, bleeds through reality to present a different reality.

That’s a device that was used in another widely-reviled musical bomb, Pennies From Heaven, except there, the dividing line was clear and distinct: life in the “musical” universe was bouncy and peppy and carefree, and “real life” was a horrifying catastrophe full of bitterness, loss and insanity. Joker: Folie a Deux takes that concept and adds the wrinkle of “well, but it’s not that black and white.” The “musical” universe, it says, is always there, and it’s accessible to everyone, but it only occasionally blossoms into full 1950s musical fantasy.

Once I understood that’s what was going on, it occurred to me to ask “Why? What does that mean, narratively speaking?” Well, Joker: Folie a Deux is about a broken man who constantly teeters on the brink of madness, and, in the narrative scheme of this movie, “madness” is revealed by music, a desire to sing out loud. That is, Arthur Fleck, the character at the center of the story, wants to be sane, wants to matter, wants to be loved and appreciated, but he owes all the fame and love that he has to his alter ego, Joker, and we can gauge how tempted Arthur is to give in to Joker by watching how “produced” each song in the movie is. As Joker takes over Arthur’s mind, the musical numbers become more elaborate and more retrograde, reflecting the musicals and TV specials Arthur would have seen as a child (in the care of his abusive, psychopathic mother). Meanwhile, this madness, this desire to leave the gray, suffocating world, is shared by everyone else in the movie, to varying degrees. Arthur’s fellow prisoners sing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and his brutal guard sings “Get Happy.” Those characters don’t get production numbers, but then the movie isn’t about them.

In any case, while it doesn’t surprise me that people don’t like the movie (its message is, essentially, “That guy you came to see? He’s not a good person, you shouldn’t want to see that guy”) I cannot help but think that its conception of itself as a musical has been widely misunderstood.

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