The second part of “Joker” features the super villain from “Batman” in a mix between drama and musical comedy. A sign that the boundary between genres has definitively fallen?
“We must put an end to this absurd separation between musical comedy and drama.” This is the character of a classic Hollywood musical comedy masterpiece, All on stage by Vincente Minnelli (1953), who pronounces it, and this snobbish Broadway director will end up discovering the opposite: a certain purity of the genre, inassimilable (to realism, to prosaism, to the authorizing moods of a director scene).
This phrase is also heard in Joker: Folie à deuxquite simply because the Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) and Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) watch Minnelli’s film together with passion. But here, taken literally, it has programmatic value: in any case, in this second part, everything is soluble in everything. This is the very principle of Todd Phillips’ film series: to elevate superhero cinema to the aesthetic dignity of social drama and New Hollywood (the first multiplied the references to Scorsese and De Palma), then propel the bad luck and the darkness portrayed by the first opus in the codes of Hollywood musicals. Folie à deux is not only that of two characters, it is also that of different genres, phases, stages of American cinema, aggregated into a multipolar film.
Breaking down borders
The musical comedy is currently a very popular genre: Jacques Audiard adapts it to the cartel film (Emilia Perez), Gilles Lellouche boosts his tragic love story (Love phew) by reminiscences of West Side Story. The use of musical genre in worlds where it was not expected is often an attempt at decentring, an effort (more or less successful) to challenge the stereotypes of a genre. In Joker: Folie à deuxit is that, but also more than that. Something in the film is akin to pure will to power. As if superhero cinema now wanted to annex everything: the spoken form and the sung form, the market for young audiences and that of adult cinema, the box office peaks, but also the highest awards for prestige films (the first Joker won a Golden Lion in Venice, and this one has the Oscars in its sights). That nothing, no genre, no category of cinema, is now outside the influence of superheroic franchises.
It is not only, like the character of All on stage, put an end to the separation between the musical and the drama that aims Joker: Folie à deuxbut the establishment of a hegemony (economic, symbolic) which would know no borders.
