Todd Phillips should have kept this wrongly-cut scene in ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’
It’s been no secret that Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the acclaimed 2019 film Joker, has not been doing well at the box office. Whatever magic director Todd Phillips managed to have with the first one has been snuffed out, and in its place is a boring, bloated, and meandering film that doesn’t seem to know which audience it’s for or what direction it wants to take. Instead, it often feels like a rehash of the first film, and a poor one at that.
I personally enjoyed the grittiness of Joker. It seemed fresh and interesting. Then when they announced a sequel, it had me tentatively excited. Surely they had told everything they needed to already, but, hey. I’m just the audience! Then it turned out to be bad, I was disappointed, and focused on the superior Folie à Deux: Fall Out Boy’s 2008 album of the same name.
It really seems as though Phillips is determined to do everything he can to make us hate this film. First, when he sat down with Entertainment Weekly, we learned about an unnecessary origin story. Again, what was the point of the original film at this point? Then, the director explained why he cut a scene of Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) kissing a woman:
“It had dialogue in it, and, all of a sudden, I wanted it to be more of a music and vibe moment. For that moment to have played, it needed dialogue behind it. Meaning, the woman said something, and then Gaga stopped and did this thing, and it just kind of got in the way of the moment.”
Gaga improvised the kiss, according to Phillips, but that statement has not been confirmed by her team.
Even though it was brief, the scene should have stayed. Harley Quinn is long-documented as bisexual, and if kept this would have been the first time it was acknowledged in a live adaptation. Her bisexuality is, at this point, a part of her character. And the representation is so important. It could have been an opening for future adaptations as well. I would have loved to see that potential.
In the past, her trysts with Poison Ivy were brief and happened between her and Joker. It wasn’t anything overtly serious. That is not to say this particular adaptation would have solved that, but it at least would have been an acknowledgement in a mainstream film. It could have also been opening a door to explore it elsewhere. Maybe somebody else would have been inspired. It is those little steps that can sometimes make all the difference.
The missed potential is something that irks me the most about Folie à Deux. This is just another facet of it. There is so much Phillips could have done to really enrich the world he created. Instead it feels like a continuous series of misses and confusing decisions. Hopefully somebody more competent can give us the canonically bisexual Harley Quinn we deserve.
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