Todd Phillips’ Joker sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, is catching flak from fans for deviating from perceived canon — both the various comics versions of longtime Batman villain Joker, and what fans thought they were seeing in the earlier film. But that lack of fidelity should be the movie’s greatest strength — especially when it comes to retooling Harley Quinn. Phillips, who’s had notable problems writing women who are funny, fully realized, or even functional in their own right within a story, was handed one of the Batverse’s most popular and engagingly evolved characters of the past 30-plus years. And yet he still manages to warp her with his own creative flaws and blind spots.
Harley isn’t an easy choice for live-action adaptation. She originated on the beloved cartoon Batman: The Animated Series, where her initial role as a combination henchman and moll for the Joker, dressed in an outlandish harlequin outfit, cast her as comic relief. She became popular and surprisingly durable on the series, anchoring several of her own episodes and eventually making it into the comics world. Over the course of decades, her antics became less subservient to the Joker, to the point where most current interpretations of the character fully separate her from her irredeemably murderous former boss/lover.
The previous round of DCEU movies already covered her emancipation, with Margot Robbie playing the role three times over the course of five years. By reuniting her with her beloved Mistah J, Joker: Folie à Deux runs the risk of feeling like a regression for a character no longer defined as Girl Joker. But the movie has a killer idea to circumvent that narrative. Rather than a psychiatrist obsessed with the Clown Prince of Crime, the movie’s version, incarnated by Lady Gaga as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, is an unstable fan of Joker as a media figure, not unlike those women who write love letters to the Menendez brothers.
This version of the Joker — Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a mentally disturbed man turned clown-faced folk hero — has no plan to become a serial killer, gain criminal power, or vex the not-yet-existent Batman with deadly practical jokes. In the first movie, he desperately wants to become a stand-up comedian, to gain an appreciative audience when he feels overlooked or overwhelmed with negative attention. Arthur is in a funk at the beginning of the sequel, imprisoned and back to being routinely humiliated. By locking eyes with him at Arkham and pursuing him, Lee gives him the adoration and approval he’s always hungered for.
[Ed. note: Minor spoilers past this point for Joker: Folie à Deux.]
To help that love along — and to get what she wants out of the situation — Lee fudges the truth about herself. She tells Arthur her parents had her committed to Arkham, even though she checked herself in; the better to bond over shared trauma. She initially claims to be from Arthur’s downtrodden neighborhood, even though she’s actually a rich girl from a nicer part of town; easier to affect some economic solidarity. She even lies about how often she rewatched the TV movie based on Arthur’s murders. When pressed, she admits it wasn’t “20 times,” like she initially said — more like four or five.
That last admission is a funny moment in an otherwise somber movie: Lee genuinely does seem obsessed with Arthur, but she felt a need to embellish how obsessed to impress him. He in turn requires clarification that Lee’s casual figure of speech didn’t mean she was literally watching his story 20 times. It’s a perfect little microcosm of their cracked interpersonal communication. No wonder their most intimate moments spill over into musical fantasy.
Joker: Folie à Deux shoves much of their romantic relationship into Arthur’s head, though Lee works overtime to share his delusions, whether or not she can see the musical interludes he seems to be seeing. That adds up to a potentially savvy power reversal of the earliest Joker-Harley dynamics, where she was forever under his thumb. In spite of occasional outbursts, betrayals, or attempts to go straight (as in the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Harley’s Holiday”), she kept crawling back to her abuser, most famously in the Mad Love comics story, later adapted back into The New Batman Adventures. In Joker: Folie à Deux, Lee uses her fandom as a form of control — a particularly potent idea to arrive in the same week a story emerged about studios soliciting franchise development advice from their most toxic fans.
But Lee and the movie run into a problem named Todd Phillips. Beyond the general feeling that Phillips may have made Joker 2 to punish someone, maybe everyone, for the first film’s success, he could be the least qualified major working director in Hollywood to write a multifaceted female character. This particular blockage may have been disguised for a little while, because Phillips emerged during an era of bros-will-be-bros comedies, where he was hardly alone in giving women insubstantial roles. Besides, a few actresses (Amy Smart, Juliette Lewis) seemed to enjoy working with him enough to appear in multiple Phillips projects. If everyone in his comedies is a little cartoonish, a thinly written love interest here or an objectified actress there is all in good fun, right?
Yet just as the overall sourness of Phillips’ work seemed to increase over time (just watch the Hangover movies, which go from mildly unpleasant to downright foul), so has the sense that women aren’t just a casual blind spot for him, but maybe a point of active contention. Over and over, the women in his movies are defined as unfaithful sluts (like Juliette Lewis in Old School), social/familial obligations applying some form of plot pressure (like Ana de Armas in War Dogs), or an unholy combination of both (Rachael Harris as the abusive girlfriend in The Hangover).
The more sympathetic women in the Phillips oeuvre are characterized almost entirely by how much they like and appreciate the male leads. If they’re nice to the boys (like Michelle Monaghan in Due Date or Heather Graham in The Hangover), they get a pass. But they certainly don’t get any real desires apart from servicing the male leads’ stories. Most of the time, they don’t even get their own punchlines. The closest thing to a joke handed to Smart and Carmen Electra in the otherwise quite funny Starsky & Hutch is that they’re willing to kiss each other for the boys’ excitement. Phillips could be read as having nasty instincts toward a lot of his characters, male and female, but his women seem to engender disinterest bordering on dislike.
This may explain why Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver use the idea of Harley Quinn’s power mainly as a means of humiliating and demoralizing Arthur. She doesn’t crack jokes, like the more innocuous versions of the character, nor does she commit actual violence herself, like darker versions. The only real character development or action she’s afforded over the course of Joker: Folie à Deux are revelations about the lies she’s told to ensnare Arthur and convince him of her devotion. Then, when Arthur undergoes his own, seemingly unrelated epiphany that he can’t really inhabit (or blame) the Joker persona for his crimes, she immediately severs their relationship, chased with one final extension of her duplicity: She reveals that she lied about being pregnant with their child, a classic manipulative-woman trope.
In more caring hands, this fame-dependent dynamic between Arthur and Lee could be heartbreaking, chilling, or darkly funny. Phillips and Silver instead turn Harley Quinn into a stereotypically “crazy” fair-weather fangirl who tries to trap a man with a fake pregnancy. The more charitable read of the movie might be that Arthur fails to fully understand Lee as a person, relying instead on his musical-fueled delusions about their blossoming non-relationship. In other words, Lee’s incompleteness in this movie is Arthur’s failing, rather than the movie’s. But Lee encourages (and deceives) him every step of the way, while the movie takes absolutely no interest in who she is as a person, apart from whether she’s true to Arthur. Even the things we’re told are true about her aren’t ever shown on screen.
Look, there’s no rule that Harley Quinn has to be fashioned as a feminist icon. Margot Robbie does a fine job of liberating Harley from the Joker, letting her become her own agent of chaos, and having her embrace female friendship in 2020’s Birds of Prey, a fun action crime-comedy that Folie à Deux is clearly not trying to imitate. (I’d be surprised if Phillips or Phoenix have even seen it. Doesn’t seem like either’s cup of tea.) Harley is so often depicted as a likable barely-even-antihero of late — the most recent Birds of Prey ongoing comics series treats her more or less like any other superhero, unpredictable but entirely trustworthy — that having her be disturbed and cruel, rather than zany, could even be refreshing.
But like everyone else in the Joker sequel, she’s treated as contemptible by the filmmakers — and because she’s a woman in a Todd Phillips movie, she also lacks the inner turmoil that lends Arthur some default sympathy, even (or especially) in his anticlimactic defeat at the hands of the world.
That’s too bad, because Lady Gaga probably has some ideas about the way fame, media, and parasocial relationships can create a hall of mirrors where a disturbed mind could easily get lost. She obviously felt some connection to the Phillips version of this character: She just released a whole companion album called Harlequin. She does her best to create a more grounded version of Harley than we’ve ever seen — she doesn’t even do the high-pitched, Brooklyn-accented voice associated with the character. Her restraint brings to mind the less exaggerated vocal patterns in the graphic novel Harleen.
Yet Phillips and the movie still leave her out to dry, giving her a final scene where she unceremoniously dips out on Arthur, leaving him (and the movie) primarily with memories of his delusional musical numbers. She isn’t purely an illusion herself, but she might as well be. Yet by default, she’s still the most interesting female character in a Phillips movie. He was practically handed a multidimensional woman to match up with his Oscar-winning version of the Joker, and still, somehow, half the population remains well out of his reach.
