Joker: Folie à Deux says nothing meaningful about living with mental illness

Todd Phillips’ Joker movies don’t just want us to change how we think about Batman’s cackling ‘clown prince of crime’, they want us to think about the world that created him. The films suggest that if he was conditioned by systemic, behind-closed-doors abuses the same could happen to any of us.

The first Joker in 2019 tried to highlight the harmful ways society treats its unwell outsiders; the sequel, Folie à Deux, gives an institutionalised Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) what he’s always craved – love, courtesy of Harley “Lee” Quinn (Lady Gaga) – as a means to unpack how Arthur sees himself. But whether it’s through his narcissistic delusions, obsessive personalities or pretending he has dissociative identity disorder as a court defence, Folie à Deux is just another reminder that Phillips and Phoenix do not know how to treat serious mental conditions within a heightened ‘genre’ film.

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Arkham Asylum is a poorly funded prison with inhumane, corrupt staff. Arthur has no agency over how he’s portrayed by his defence counsel. His crimes were very lucid attempts to balance the disorder of his life. But despite all this, when the film tries to subvert the insidious ways people with mental health conditions have been portrayed in media, the leaden way Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver represent Arthur’s mental illness goes against how real health professionals want to see the conditions represented on screen.

When the first Joker was released five years ago, many experts took to the internet to break down Arthur’s symptoms and the repercussions of furthering stereotypes. While some, like psychiatrist Kamran Ahmed, celebrate the film’s anger towards the institutional violence that radicalises Arthur’s psyche, the consensus points towards one huge oversight – that very few acts of extreme violence are motivated by mental illness.

“The notion that mental deterioration necessarily leads to violence against others – implied by the juxtaposition of Phoenix’s character Arthur stopping his medication with his increasingly frequent acts of violence – is not only misinformed but further amplifies stigma and fear,” Annabel Driscoll and Mina Husain wrote while they were junior doctors on inpatient psychiatric wards. It’s difficult to take Joker and Folie à Deux’s sincere call for societal reform seriously when Arthur’s back story and behaviour are so cartoonishly embellished. People with serious mental health conditions deserve to be treated well because it’s the humane, responsible thing to do, not because it will stop them lashing out with horrific violence.

The real reason Arthur is violent is not because of his mental illness or any other motivating factor in the story, but because he’s the Joker, an iconic character who is inseparable from his violent criminality. These films are valuable intellectual property to Warner Bros and DC Comics, and their priority is to strengthen the value of their brand before making any political critique. But how do you make a Joker movie without him being violent, or locked up in Arkham Asylum or breaking the law with subversive, anarchic flair? For all their attempts to bridge the comic book character with the real world, it is not possible to make the Joker a case study for the ways that mentally ill people are victimised and sidelined by institutions. 

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It’s this insistence on making Folie à Deux as realistic as possible (yes, even though it has musical numbers, but these all happen within fantasy sequences or reflect the heightened reality of inside Arthur and Lee’s heads) that restricts the film from saying anything truly meaningful about living with mental illness. Film is a visual, expressive medium and the unbound, heightened genres of horror, fantasy, and psychothrillers may not always deal with mental health in a literal or sensitive way, but it’s possible for those with various conditions to relate to moments, characters or storylines that reflect their unique relationship to mental distress.

I conducted a brief, informal survey among film fans who have dealt with mental illness, and a huge variety of films were suggested as being particularly expressive and empathetic with the lived experience of different conditions: controversial Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Melancholia; musical sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; Irvine Welsh adaptation Filth; cult horror film May; the anime classic Ghost in the Shell. Crucially, none of these films tackle mental illness in a direct, obvious way and this makes them all the more poignant.

Folie à Deux adapts the world of comic books, a flexible and expressive art form that for a century has played with pulp, tone and imagery to express the inner world of the drawn characters. But Phillips’ film only wants to explore the interior of his characters’ minds in the most literal, restrictive way. The mental health crisis will not be improved with copyrighted characters being used for one-note attacks on institutional abuse, but if filmmakers embrace the strange, unwieldy and abstract powers of the medium then there’s no limit to who will feel recognised on screen.

Joker: Folie à Deux is in cinemas from 4 October.

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