Love is popular. She often puts people to bed, sometimes to hell. In Todd Phillips’ film Joker: Folie à Deux, love connects criminal lunatic Arthur Fleck and his soulmate Harleen “Lee” Quinzel in a mental institution for mentally ill criminal offenders called Arkham Asylum. Mr. Fleck, known to the world as “Joker,” has been imprisoned there for a series of misdeeds he committed in a previous film by the same director from 2019, which is called the same as Fleck’s killer stage name. Like him, Ms. Quinzel inhabits the world of the superhero Batman; In the comics she is usually called “Harley Quinn”. “Joker: Folie à Deux” fills this role with Lady Gaga, who plays the Joker like Joaquin Phoenix in Phillips’ previous time.
The woman leads. The first flirting signal comes from her, the first pick-up line, the first kiss. She puts makeup on the devil to eat him. In the end he will tell her that he can’t live without her – the final step to a punch line where a very strong joke dies mercifully. Failing jokes are usually defeats. But this film is a triumph, but above all: a musical.
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Enable external contentJoaquin Phoenix can’t sing. But he can do that very well: “not sing”, and so beautifully that Lady Gaga has to use all her skills to avoid wilting next to him. It was clear that she could do it. After all, this howling archangel has wings made of fiberglass feathers. Anyone who has seen the lady as vampire hipster Countess Elizabeth in the fifth season of the series “American Horror Story” (caution: from 18) knows all about her uncanny depth of talent: she moves and looks as if she is sucking pink instead of blood Neon light from the jugular of modernity; There hasn’t been anything like this since Elsa Lanchester in “Bride of Frankenstein” from 1935.
In “Joker: Folie à Deux” she can first remove all the cobwebs from classic Hollywood songs like “That’s Entertainment” within just a few bars and then bite into shreds with her dangerous marten teeth. This has to be seen to be heard. Or vice versa.
Lady Gaga isn’t trying to compete with Margot Robbie
Anyone who knows a little about the character she has slipped into will get more out of the film (and life in general). As I said, Harley Quinn comes from the Batman cosmos; Strictly speaking, she is not a comic character. Because she made her debut neither in a pulp magazine nor in an album, but in the animated series “Batman: The Animated Series”, in 1992. The cinema audience knows Harley as a crazy anti-heroine with the face of the great Margot Robbie; That was her in “Suicide Squad” (2016) by David Ayer, “Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of Harley Quinn” (2020) by Cathy Yan and “The Suicide Squad” (2021, with almost the same title as the Ayer one). Spectacle, but an additional “The”) by James Gunn.
Lady Gaga doesn’t even try to compete with Robbie, but rather falls back on the brand essence of the role: the cartoon character; That means that Harley is not a literary character or a poster character like other comic book favorites, but a being who doesn’t like to stand still, prefers to exert himself by fidgeting, and wants to lose himself in music (the best Harley scenes with Robbie are always small pop song video clips). first-class tracks and songs, for example by Eminem and such calibers).
The right joker for Lady Gaga’s Harley
Jack Nicholson (under Tim Burton) and Heath Ledger (under . . . no, more like: next to, no, even: just above Christopher Nolan) have played the Joker in the cinema. Phoenix is better than Nicholson, worse than Ledger, but above all just the right joker for Lady Gaga’s Harley. How beautifully he dances!
He can’t do that either, but on the other hand he can: While his body can’t quite manage it, you think you can see that his soul can do it effortlessly. Sometimes he asserts ramp dominance, sometimes he lustfully gambles it away on Lady Gaga. His role portrays a man who has been humiliated and laughed at for so long that, out of self-pity and short temper, he believes he can now do whatever he wants. What he wants doesn’t have all the cups in his cupboard. Unfortunately, after the previous film, there were a lot of crooked trolls, especially online, who targeted his show more consistently than Phillips and Phoenix could have wished. They considered the uninhibited to be strong and the insane to be cool. The monster’s followers feel like those who were incited by Trump on January 6, 2021. The second film is intended to make this misreception of the trolls more difficult.
“As cute as it is scary”
That’s what he delivers. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and how he delivers. Do you want civil war, do you want authoritarian rebellion? Nothing there. You get Lady Gaga now. You now get Harley Quinn, once aptly characterized by comic book author and color expert Jordie Bellaire as “a bubbly Lady Macbeth,” “merciless, wild and likeable at the same time,” “as cute as she is creepy” – and not coincidentally in the same year came to life on the screen with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman jumping off all sorts of roofs on screen, right on top of Batman, the poor idiot. Anyone who doesn’t love women like that is not crazy, but dead. Batman and the Joker are crazy, but alive. But what do these types of people actually imagine about love?
As far as the Joker is concerned, there is a source text on this question that Phillips may have taken note of in the run-up to “Joker: Folie à Deux”, the film smells strongly of it in places: the graphic novel “Harleen” (2020) by the comic book Artist Stjepan Šejić. In it, Harley asks the Joker why he let her live instead in a situation where she expected to be killed by him. He replies that his favorite human facial expressions in others are, firstly, boundless terror and secondly, a genuine smile, but they are difficult to reconcile. He saw Harley in fear, but thought he would like her smiling too – “no joke,” he adds. Sometimes, very rarely, madness simply speaks truth.
In the huge US election year, do we learn anything from such larger-than-life depictions of roof damage in American pop culture? Maybe about the social power of love? Donald Trump’s fans learn with admiration how he won his Melania’s heart with a private plane trip to Mar-a-Lago, and Kamala Harris’s fans hear with emotion how her future husband, already in his older years, gave her one Romeo message on the answering machine.
Love remains popular. For what reason? Because “love” is the name of the devil’s secret hope: Maybe we can close hell one day if people would rather be loved than feared.
