What was the first scene in film or vision to feature whimsical or upbeat music played over horrific violence? My best guess is the Singing in the Rain scene from A Clockwork Orange, but my knowledge of media gets shaky before the 70s that if there’s something earlier I probably wouldn’t know it.
So let’s just say Singing in the Rain, with Alex belting out the song as he beats one man and then rapes his wife. It’s a brutal scene, and my guess is that in 1971 audiences would’ve been immensely disturbed by the juxtaposition of the violence and the singing. But when I watch this in 2024, all I think is the same thing that I imagine everyone else is thinking: oh they’re doing the incongruous music with violence thing.
You know, the thing they do in Reservoir Dogs, American Psycho, The Cabin in the Woods, Watchmen, Face/Off, and dozens of other films that I won’t run through. And the thing they do for nearly the entire two hour plus running time of Joker 2: Folie à Deux.
Two scenes from the original Joker loom over this one. The first is what has come to be known as The Bathroom Scene, an unexpected but strangely moving moment when Joaquin Phoenix, having fled to a public bathroom, does an interpretive dance to a dark cello score. The scene was improvised, and turns out to have been an inimitable moment of lightning in a bottle — we know this now because Joker 2 spends much of its time trying to recapture it. When the movie isn’t hamming it up with boisterous showtunes it’s trying to milk the same juxtaposition of dissonant strings with Phoenix’s (further) descent into madness.
The showtunes moments, meanwhile, plainly owe their inspiration to a second scene from the original film: the famous Stairs scene. Indeed, the long flight of stairs where the Joker danced in the original film to Rock and Roll Part 2 play a prominent role in the second film, appearing multiple times before the end. As if caught in the throes of bipolar, Joker 2 lurches constantly from the downbeat shadow of the Bathroom scene to the unbridled mania of the Stairs scene: see his flight from prison while singing If My Friends Could See Me Now or the interminable Gonna Build a Mountain performance.
This movie is a love story, and if there were a way to excavate that story from beneath the avalanche of musical spectacle it would probably be genuinely heartbreaking. Phoenix’s character has retreated so far into fantasy during this film that he hardly has time to show us the fragile, victimized Arthur Fleck who won our sympathy in the first. Lady Gaga, who is in her element once the musical numbers start, can’t portray Harley Quinn as much more than a troubled Joker superfan. These shortcomings prove disastrous, because for the tragedy of their romance to work, Fleck needed to put his wounded heart on the line, and Quinn needed to telegraph that she might break it at any moment.
It needed, in other words, to be the classic anxious vs. avoidant attachment disorder story that Phoenix’s Joker was born to play. Instead, the bare bones of this romance mostly serve as a jumping off point for songs that take on a belabored predictable sameness. It’s all minor key violins playing against shaky-voice solos from Phoenix, or peppy brass horns set against gun fire and police sirens; it’s all just a hundred different permutations of Singing In The Rain. If anything good comes of this, perhaps Todd Phillips has unintentionally convinced the film industry that this particular kind of film cliche is box office poison.