Why is Todd Phillips’ Joker sequel called ‘Folie à Deux’?
As one of the most recognisable, iconic, and enduring figures in pop culture, Todd Phillips didn’t need much more to sell Joker to the masses than its five-letter title, which was enough to help power the comic book adaptation to over a billion dollars at the box office.
It became the first R-rated movie to ever cross that threshold, with Joaquin Phoenix headlining a picture that made more money than any film to ever star a Batman who wasn’t called Christian Bale. It was an impressive feat, so it was inevitable Warner Bros would swiftly start banging on his door demanding a sequel.
Made for a fraction of the cost of a typical superhero blockbuster, Joker turned a massive profit, which was ironic in itself when the studio had tried to dissuade Phillips from making it in the first place. A small-scale, adult-skewing psychological thriller wasn’t what the boardroom had in mind for one of its most marketable assets, only for the ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ to crush the majority of his arch-enemy’s cinematic output.
Phillips didn’t enter Joker with the intention of spawning a franchise, but it’s hard to argue with those numbers. Phoenix had never reprised a role in his life, either, but he was eventually convinced to dip back into his bag of Academy Award-winning tricks when ideas began bouncing back and forth over what a potential follow-up could look like.
The way sequels tend to be named in Hollywood is that they’re either given numerical suffices like Joker 2, or there’s the standard Joker: Insert Subtitle Here format. Phillips opted for the latter, only to catch many people off-guard when he officially confirmed the second chapter’s moniker as Joker: Folie à Deux.
Inevitably, everybody wanted to find out what it meant and how it could apply to the movie. As it turned out, it was perfectly on-brand for the ‘Jester of Genocide’, even if there were no obvious connections to be made between the term and the sequel’s status as a quasi-musical.
Then again, people don’t cast Lady Gaga in major roles unless they’re expecting her to dust off those pipes and belt out a tune or two, with the movie pairing the Joker with Harley Quinn for the umpteenth time across live-action, animation, video games, comic books, and virtually any kind of media a stick can be shaken at.
It wasn’t the most obvious or conventional name for the sequel to a billion-dollar comic book flick, but at the same time, it’s hard to think of a better way to describe the two main characters and their relationship in three words more suitable than folie à deux.
What does folie à deux mean?
The term folie à deux was first coined in the 19th century and literally translates as “madness of two.” Essentially, it’s a form of shared psychosis where the two people involved transmit the symptoms of a shared delusion between each individual.
With that in mind, it’s perfect to not only describe the dynamic between Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Gaga’s Lee Quinzell in Phillips’ movie, but also the relationship shared by the Joker and Harley Quinn in most forms of Batman-adjacent media.
The latter’s origin story positioned her as a psychologist at Arkham Asylum who found herself being so deeply manipulated by the Joker during their one-on-one sessions that she fell in love with him, eventually becoming his most famous accomplice as they embarked on a life of crime together.
Within the context of the Joker sequel, Quinzell is a fellow inmate at the psychiatric institution where Arthur is being held. Their romance blossoms not because of him as a person, but her obsession with his face-painted alter ego, where it looks as though she actively encourages him to place Arthur in the rear-view mirror in favour of letting the Joker become his dominant personality.
The musical interludes are almost the definition of folie à deux, with the pair imagining themselves singing and dancing their way through a collection of well-known songs spanning multiple genres as their shared delusion turns the film into a song-and-dance spectacular.
