Joker: Folie à Deux might have a bunch of characters singing in it, but does that make it a musical? Short answer: yes. Find the long one below…
Since discussions around a potential Joker sequel first began swirling in 2019, everyone seems to have been very worried that the follow-up to the edgiest comic book movie on the planet would be a musical.
Inspiration first struck when Joaquin Phoenix dreamt of seeing Arthur Fleck singing and dancing on stage. He and director Todd Phillips even briefly considered giving Joker his own Broadway show.
Music, then, has clearly formed a central pillar of Joker: Folie à Deux from the beginning. But whether or not that makes it a musical has remained up in the air. Phillips and star Lady Gaga have both separately said they’re not entirely comfortable describing it as such, before describing the film in a way that almost verbatim satisfies a “What is a musical?” question on WJEC’s GCSE Drama syllabus.
But, I digress. Of course they’re not going to shout about the film being a musical. As discussed plenty of times before, Hollywood’s many marketing experts have declared the musical genre persona non grata – even the latest trailer for Broadway adaptation Wicked does its best to avoid showing off the cast’s dancing credentials.
At the same time, the urge to declare a film which is evidently a musical a non-musical is apparently quite strong. I’ve had multiple conversations with people who insist that Wonka, to pick a recent example, isn’t a musical film – rather, it’s simply “a film with songs”.
Read more: Wonka | A salute to the best movie villain of 2023
I’ve seen “a play with songs” before. There, all the talky bits would stop occasionally for a scene change, and the band’s lead vocalist would do a nice ballad to fill the space. Crucially, none of the characters in the story spend any time singing.
I’ve seen multiple “films with songs” before, too. In fact, I’d wager I’ve seen more films with songs than without them. Just because Lady Gaga (look, it’s her again) wrote a track for the end of Top Gun: Maverick does not make Top Gun: Maverick a musical (now there’s an idea…).
Wonka, which spends 27 minutes and 15 seconds of its 116-minute runtime with characters in various states of song, fits basically every definition of a musical that I can find (Merriam-Webster: noun: A film or theatrical production typically of a sentimental or humorous nature that consists of musical numbers and dialogue based on a unifying plot). But still, I’ve come across plenty of people ready to argue it’s “not really a musical” largely (it seems to me) because they don’t normally like musicals, but they liked Wonka. The absurdities of Hollywood marketing practices have poisoned our minds until “musical” starts to be used more as a synonym for “naff” than a genre descriptor in its own right.
There are films, however, in which the characters themselves do an awful lot of singing but which you’d struggle to call musicals in their own right. The music biopic genre is full of them, usually involving a single artist or band playing songs because, in the logic of the story, they are a non-metaphorical artist or band playing songs. It’s why you’re unlikely to see a version of Inside Llewyn Davis on Broadway, for example.
In Folie à Deux, the use of songs seems to fall somewhere between these two extremes. While the film does contain plenty of song breaks and dance numbers, the people involved are entirely limited to Phoenix’s Joker and Gaga’s ‘Lee’ Quinzel. The rest of the cast, for the most part, aren’t playing a part in a musical at all. Even the music itself only seems to exist in our troublesome duo’s heads.
But then again, the Joker sequel is clearly a film heavily inspired by classic musical cinema, and the fact that it’s leaning so heavily into that aspect of its presentation makes it feel more like a musical attempting to break the mould than a film that occasionally fancies a bit of a singsong. It’s not even the first musical to attempt something like this: Next To Normal, the 2008 American rock musical that recently finished a run on London’s West End, uses its own songs as an expression of its main character’s battle with severe bipolar disorder.
The only caveat to the “Folie à Deux is a musical” argument I can think of, then, is that it’s an interesting kind of musical. Just because something is having a play around with the form doesn’t mean it’s something else entirely, and the dozen-or-so people who seemed to leave for a loo break every time a song started at my screening would seem to agree. At the end of the day: if it sings like a musical, dances like a musical, and has folks walking out like a musical, does that not make it a musical?
Joker: Folie à Deux is in cinemas now.
Want more articles like this one, sent straight to your inbox? Sign up to the Film Stories newsletter. We promise not to send you tat.