The Trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (Joker 2) is Out

As I remarked before I found the 2019 film Joker to have a very interesting premise and display a good deal of ambition, and achieve moments of real bite--but as is all too often the case in contemporary filmmaking its derivativeness and conventionality ultimately got the better of it, leaving us with elements that proved discordant, and undermined the whole. (When you want to say something about reality it is best to avoid playing "reality games" with the audience--and sticking so close to the inspiration of Martin Scorsese seemed to result in exactly that. It also seemed to me a mistake to make Arthur Fleck such a nonentity.) The result was still a worthwhile film, but one which still fell short of its potential.

Of course, the film was a billion dollar hit anyway--which all but guaranteed a sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, which we were told would be a musical. My first thought was that this could see the movie end up New York, New York to its predecessor's Taxi Driver--a big failure following a big hit. Still, I checked out the trailer with interest--and am not sure what to make of it. It gives an impression of a (very) dark and twisted take on that old standard, the romantic comedy musical, with the lovers in question the Joker and Harley Quinn (here not his psychiatrist, but another mental patient at Arkham Asylum). Yet that seems unlikely to be all there is here--especially going by what we have heard about a possible order-of-magnitude ramping up of the violence of the first film, and at the same time, the themes of the first film that caused such a moral panic, namely societal decay, inequality, mental illness, and the confluence of them in monstrosities like the Joker.

Especially reading comparisons to A Clockwork Orange on the part of people who claimed to have seen the script, I suspect we are more likely to see a nihilistic reveling in brutality than any thoughtful attempt at social criticism. That, of course, would be just fine with those who so vocally despised the first movie.