By Michael Marano

This is a work of towering, masterful, sustained cinematic rage set at the dawn of the Reagan Era.

Joker: Folie à Deux , directed by Todd Phillips. Screening at cinemas throughout New England.

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux. Photo: Warner Brothers

Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux, sequel to 2019’s Joker, gave this bitter old ’80s punk a sustained, two-hour-and-eighteen minute PTSD-inspired panic attack.

That’s not a joke.

This is a work of towering, masterful, sustained cinematic rage set at the dawn of the Reagan Era, when the old timey, Late Show-inspired Hollywood kitsch that sought to impose a “Shining City on a Hill” vision of an America that never existed gave permission for our culture to brutalize, alienate, and abandon the poor, the sick, the addicted, the queer, the Black, the brown, the weird, and basically anyone on the periphery of society. What kind of abandonment are we talking about? As junkies and gays and Haitians and other undesirables were dying of AIDS in the ’80s, Death Valley Days star Reagan said (to a room full of doctors, no less), “After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”

That same cavalier, “trickle down” devaluation of the lives, dignity, and worth of human beings living on the fringes infuses Joker: Folie à Deux. The recurring theme of the film (introduced in a pretty novel way by The Triplets of Belleville animator Sylvain Chomet) is the idea of the Jungian shadow, the darker self we carry around inside us. Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t just address that idea on a personal level, but on a societal level. Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck has his shadow self in the form of The Joker. But, exiled in the shadowy underbelly of Reagan’s America, where sadistically robbing people of social services and safety nets was seen as patriotic, Arthur’s creation of another self in the midst of an insane society seems… kind of sane.

Yeah, Joker: Folie à Deux is a musical… kind of. But even within the context of this quasimusical the shadow resonates. Music, we’re told by a helpful therapist in Arkham Asylum, where Arthur is being held, gives us “balance” and “heals the fractures” within us. But because Arthur and society are so broken, the application of music to his treatment just generates more imbalance, deepening the fractures in his psyche. The songbook interwoven into the film smacks of the same oppressive kitsch that papers over the suffering being inflicted outside Arkham’s walls.

The Hollywood/Late Show and Network TV aesthetic of Joker: Folie à Deux‘s songbook is the same cultural aesthetic that plopped the nuclear codes into the hands of the star of Hellcats of the Navy. Arthur has woven that vision into his inner — fantasy? — world. As his mind is increasingly warped by musical reverie, Arthur becomes more susceptible to sharing the movie’s titular Folie à Deux with Lee, aka Harleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, played with really disturbing aplomb by Lady Gaga.

Just as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman stole Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice right out from under Batman and Superman, so does Gaga’s Lee nearly swipe Joker: Folie à Deux from the Joker. Gaga is amazing; she’s centered in her insanity. And it takes special acting and singing chops to pull off love scenes with Phoenix that gene splice The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Requiem for a Dream, and Titicut Follies. The dynamics between Gaga and Phoenix are captivating… to the point that that movie feels almost like a Folie à Trois, with you, the viewer, pulled into their shared madness. These songs give Lee entrée to Arthur’s broken psyche (and vice versa?) in the same way the tunes are piped into our ears at the dentist’s office. And we all know, or at least sense, the cultural contexts being tapped into here. Joker: Folie à Deux features an extended, savage, and grotesque version of The Sonny and Cher Show. Even if you’re too young to have seen the program, the scene captures the show’s zeitgeist so effectively you don’t need to know what’s being parodied to gag on the anger fueling the satire.

There are searing indictments of the early ’80s’ conflation of governance, justice, and entertainment, all part of the oppressive layering of TV bullshit onto the levers of power that eventually put a failed, mentally ill game show host and rapist, who’d gone bankrupt six times, in the Oval Office. A “hard-hitting,” proto-reality-TV interview with Arthur in Arkham bears a deeply uncomfortable resemblance to Tom Snyder’s 1981 interviews with Charles Manson on the Tomorrow show. Arthur’s trial is “the first to be televised!” It blossoms into a gross spectacle, much like how the actual first televised major criminal trial in the US in 1982, that of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny became TV Land roadkill, paving the way for the OJ trial.

Joker: Folie à Deux is populated with people who have been devalued and know it. The physically disabled. Black single moms whom Reagan called “Welfare Queens.” The folks Reagan told Good Morning America in 1984 were “homeless by choice” — after he smothered federal aid to cities. Life was cheap for those who didn’t fully embrace the feel good vibes of Reagan’s “Morning in America,” huzzahed by the preppy, Replicant/Skin Jobs over at the Heritage Foundation. As the sun rose over our great country, the President of the United States pointed out those with “moral failings” and rightly condemned them to death.

Joker: Folie à Deux made me relive the devaluation of my life in the ’80s, triggering the same “fight or flight” responses I knew walking near Boston’s Kenmore Square as frat boys threw nearly full beer bottles at my head from four stories up, as assholes in shiny new cars and in older wrecks with cancer of the rocker panels swerved to “pretend” to run me down in the crosswalk, and cops half-grinned as I walked past to just get a slice of pizza at Nemo’s, drumming their fingers on their service revolvers.

That Joker: Folie à Deux co-screenwriter Scott Silver lived in the same neighborhoods as I did in those days lets me know that what I experienced was no folly or delusion.

Back in the 1980s, author, writing coach, editor, and personal trainer Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike.com)kept a chopstick from a Chinese takeout joint by the door of his apartment, to pick bits of broken crack vials out of the treads of his boot.