Don’t Blow Up The Walls
Joker: Folie à deux (Todd Phillips, 2024)
Every comic-book movie is already a musical. The modern superhero movie seems to often forget it has super-powers, that it can bend what is possible in reality.
The sequel to Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), titled Joker Folie a Deux (I’ll just call it Joker 2 to make it easier), is mostly set in and around Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) trial. It is a courtroom drama musical set within the constraints of an ever-growing cinematic universe. While the first installment (Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)) was a bad film posing as a New-Hollywood masterpiece, the second one tries to break from the boundaries of the comic-book film in the same way, but differently. With the exception of the climax of the film, the explosive moments of the film are always met with song. Joker 2 uses the tropes of the musical to answer to Joaquin Phoenix’s limit-experiences. It is nonsensical, but what superhero film isn’t?
The musical follows a logical nonsense: if you don’t know how to answer to death staring at you in the eye or your own feelings on love, you may as well just dance. Joker 2 is methodical when it comes to this, emotional moments in the film are always met with an imaginative or diegetic musical sequence. The genre seems to run towards these limit-experiences, it makes me think of the song Words, by F.R. David: “Word’s [unsung] don’t come easy” to someone in love:
While the musical goes hand-in-hand with suspending disbelief, it also seems to make us believe that a song is enough to describe all the complexities of falling in love. “The inexpressible (what I find enigmatic & cannot express) perhaps provides the background, against which whatever I was able to express acquires meaning.” (1998, 23). If you don’t understand the context of this Wittgenstein quote, listen to Words again: “there is no hidden meaning, you know? When I say I love you…”
But what the musical represents in Joker 2, above all, is the drawing of a limit, “and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.” (Wittgenstein 2015, 25). Joker 2 can be seen as a reminder that the logic of the comic-book movie relies on the limit being drawn at what a superhero can do, but also very close to the ground, in more sincere human emotions.
“My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running up against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.” (Wittgenstein 1993, 44)
Joker 2 is also part prison-drama. The protagonist, Arthur Fleck, is an individual physically and mentally caged, using the Joker as a coping mechanism to deal with his past of physical and mental abuse. When the film “runs up against a wall” its characters sing, it turns its hopelessness into nonsense, and it is not until the climax of the film that is turns back to its original limitations in the bombastic way we have grown accustomed to. Once the verdict is in and Arthur is found guilty, the film has nowhere else to run, so the walls of the courtroom form a cage and are thus blown-up, the limit of the film is once again redrawn and the outside is visible, although fogged by the dust. It is worth noting that it is in this scene in which the limits of the film’s own cinematic universe reappear. When the bomb goes off, we see Harvey Dent’s face divided in half. The blowing up of the wall seems to rather signal the limitations of the film rather than make it go beyond them. The musical sequences cease to be nonsense, they’re now just part of the frame.
Like its protagonist, Joker Folie a Deux struggles between different personalities. It does not allow itself to fully commit towards the absurdity of the material, often attempting to tackle difficult subjects like mental illness, or to speak of a failed justice system, only to ultimately show its limitations through the musical pieces.
So while every modern superhero film reaches their limits and makes sure of it with a sincerity-ruining joke, an explosion or a brawl, Joker 2 instead simply signals the limit. It is a successful failure in showing the shortcomings of the modern and often “powerless” superhero film.
CITATIONS:
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1993. Lectures on Ethics. London, UK: Wiley and
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value. London, UK: Wiley and
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2015. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. London, UK: Wiley and
Blackwell.