‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ and What It Can Teach Screenwriters

This article will include spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux.

Joker: Folie à Deux is the latest DC Comics release, written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver and directed by Todd Phillips, it sees Joaquin Phoenix reprise his role as Arthur Fleck/Joker and brings Lady Gaga into the fold as Harley Quinn. The film is partly a musical and partly a meditation on what our personal responsibility is for our mental health and what the societal responsibility is. It’s also a look at how we may idolize the wrong things. Whether it does any of that successfully is a different story, but there are a number of lessons to be learned from the film for screenwriters that are worth looking at.

Story in a Story

Joker: Folie à Deux begins with an animated sequence that shows us a metaphorical version of the themes of the entire film. The sequnce, replete with Looney Tunes music and classic Warner Brothers logo, “Joker’s Shadow”, gives us a look at the split in Arthur Fleck, where his shadow is trying to conjure the Joker and Arthur Fleck is just trying to live his life. The two of them wrestle and argue and which one is driving and which one is in control? Are the same? Are they aspects of each other? Ultimately, these are the questions Arthur and his alter ego of the Joker must grapple with as they are forced to defend their actions and the resulting celebrity from the first film. 

It’s an old technique going back to Shakespeare, with Hamlet bringing the play within a play to bring forward themes of guilt. Powell and Pressburger—the Archers—built their entire masterpiece, The Red Shoes, around the ballet that establishes the thematic push-pull between the three leads that create the key to understanding the gut punch of the ending. Now, Joker: Folie à Deux is no where near as deep or well thought out or well written as either of those, but it is a technique worth thinking about and seeing if it can be used in your story to help your audience clue into the themes of your story and decode them through the course of the film.

Do the Research

Whenever you’re dealing with issues of mental health and real diagnoses, it’s really important to get them straight and not fall into harmful stereotypes. In the case of Joker, the filmmakers fell into the “multiple personality” diagnosis, which is in itself not what it’s referred to as anymore. Now it’s “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (or DID.) And there’s even more recent thinking that they shouldn’t even be calling it a disorder because it’s how your brain was wired to deal with intense trauma during development. 

I think any use of a complex traumatic diagnosis should include a lot of first hand research into it, as well as discussions with those who have it to find out what the most harmful tropes surrounding it are. Talking to folks with DID, one of the most harmful tropes in movies and media to them happens to be the “person with alters who are violent, homicidal criminals.” More often than not, alters were developed as defense mechanisms for severe psychological, physical, and sexual abuse during childhood (which Joker: Folie à Deux got right) and practically never lead to murderous clowns.

Joker: Folie à Deux reminded me that while the filmmakers probably did quite a bit of research, they might not have done as much as they could have. Be sure you’re doing your due diligence. Talk to people. Reach out. Folks almost always want to see their story accurately portrayed on screen, even if it’s just the details of their mental health diagnosis.

Visual Storytelling

Pay attention to including great visual storytelling in your screenplay. Joker: Folie à Deux has a few terrific moments of visual storytelling, but few are as great as its final moments.

Through the ending of the film, Arthur Fleck does everything he can to die by suicide. First, he enrages the guards at Arkham, trying to goad them into killing him on live TV. Unfortunately, they kill someone else and Arthur is forced to listen as “The Saints Go Marching In” plays in the background—oh, how he’d like to be part of that number…

Then, he proclaims that the Joker isn’t real. It’s not another alter. He did it all. The state is looking for a reason to give him the death penalty and so he gives up his entire defense.

Unfortunately, this attempt at suicide fails as well when the celebrity brought on by his crimes results in a terrorist attack that frees him.

His life is utterly crushed even further when the one thing he wanted to live for—the love of Harley Quinn—is gone because she believed him when he said Joker wasn’t real.

Finally, after coming to terms with his lot in life in the maximum security wing of Arkham Asylum, he’s stabbed to death by a fellow patient.

Arthur falls to the ground, his stomach bleeding profusely. And, as the fellow inmate starts cutting his own mouth open to adopt his own Joker persona, Arthur smiles.

He’s finally at peace.

He’s finally a part of that number, as the saints go marching in.

The scene plays out silently as soon as the stabbing happens and the smile tells us everything we need to know.

As you write your screenplay, look for places where the performances and the actions of the characters can tell the story rather than dialogue. There were definitely more times Joker: Folie à Deux could have relied on visual story, but the ending was one place where they did it right.

Overall, the film was not for me, but neither was the first one. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have anything to teach and it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate all of the hard work that went into making it.

Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters now.