Harley Quinn is an eternal comic book character. Since her debut in 1992, she's had a million lives through the countless iterations in the DC universe.
But a new one has entered the realm of Harley-lore alongside the only other live-action portrayal from Margot Robbie in "Suicide Squad" and "Birds of Prey." In Todd Phillips' "Joker: Folie à Deux," musician Lady Gaga ditches her pop star digs to morph into an unrecognizable version of the character. Simply, "Joker: Folie à Deux" has a flagrant Harley Quinn problem and not even Gaga's performance can mend it.
The sequel to Phillips' polarizing "Joker" has been marketed as the deluded, toxic love story between Arthur Fleck, who doubles as the Joker (Joaquin Phoenix), and a troubled psych patient, Harleen "Lee" Quinzel, who confusingly doesn't go by Harley (Lady Gaga). The wounded individuals meet each other at Arkham Asylum in Gotham at a choir class. Their psych ward meet-cute isn't as romantic as it sounds — I promise. Oh yeah, the sequel also attempts to be a musical too.
In Phillips' Gotham, Lee is a mental hospital patient who is admitted involuntarily because she set fire to her parents' apartment. But mostly, what we see from her characterization is that Lee is a Joker fangirl. She is deeply fascinated by the media frenzy that surrounds Arthur. While he did kill five people (six including his mom) and one of them on live television, Lee watched the story of Arthur's life unfold and fell for his violent persona in much the same way as a certain facet of habitually online man in the real world did.
While Phillips said the film was "never about addressing toxic fandom," its involuntary commentary on fandom and the idolization of cult-like figures inadvertently took Harley's characterization and flushed it down the toilet. Phillips molds Harley into an adoring member of the Joker fan club and nothing else.
In an interview with IGN, Phillips told reporter Jim Vejvoda that the film is about the idea of cult personality being thrust on an unassuming person when "it's not actually what you are."
He continued, "And then, what happens in the worst-case scenario if you finally find love in your life or you think you do, but that person is in love with the character that you represent, not the person that you are?"
It's clear that the Harley most fans know — the one who is a psychiatrist at Arkham who is eventually manipulated by the Joker and slowly descends into madness — isn't the Harley we see in this sequel. Instead, Lee becomes the manipulator.
In this deluded fantasy, Arthur daydreams about a life full of grandeur and performance with Lee. That is, until she shoots him in his fantasy and he's ripped from his dreams and thrown into a nightmare. Eventually, he confronts Lee about her lies while he is on trial and he asks her if she actually grew up poor and in his neighborhood. Lee lies, again. Her manipulations are supposed to make the audience sympathize with Arthur's pain and humanize him. At his lowest, he is being taken advantage of by another woman in his life.
This constructed narrative has stripped Harley of what made her a fair match to the Joker's manipulations in other iterations of the character. Her education is gone, her bisexuality erased, and her unhinged, pyrotechnic personality and actions have disappeared. Phillips said in an interview with Variety, “The high voice, that accent, the gum-chewing and all that sort of sassy stuff that’s in the comics, we stripped that away. We wanted her to fit into this world of Gotham that we created from the first movie.”
What's left of this version of Harley is a shell of a master manipulator who only exists to make us feel bad for poor Arthur. If "Joker: Folie à Deux" had a point in its dreary two hours — it would be to serve as a manifesto for the disgruntled, single male trope that plays to men being the misunderstood victims. It sounds eerily similar to the misogynistic tropes that incels spew, blaming women as a whole for their manipulative, Jezebel ways; women who'd rather be with powerful men instead of the "good guys" like themselves.
Phillips' decision to transform Harley from the canon survivor of the Joker's abusive tendencies to a perpetrator and partial architect of Arthur's pain just feeds into dangerous, prickly narratives about women. The film's ending cements Phillips' tired male fantasy. Arthur admits that the Joker is a persona that is not real — Arthur is the only real part of him.
This entirely disenchants Lee. So when Arthur's fans bomb the courtroom during his trial and aid in his escape, he makes his way back to his love, Lee. However, Lee rejects him because he publically rejected the Joker. It is implied that Lee was only attracted to what was powerful and violent about Arthur but wanted nothing to do with the real him. When he asks her what about the baby, it is again implied that there is no child and she lied about their future. It is shattering for Arthur. But it means absolutely nothing to Lee. Ultimately, the pair were in love with parts of each other that were purely a fantasy.
As for Lee, there's nothing inherently bad with this version of her being more subdued with her "mania and chaos" swirling inside, as Gaga explained in an interview with Vogue. But what is disconcerting about Gaga's version of Harley is that she has no soul — no driving motivation other than a misguided power trip written in the projection of the male fantasy that a woman's love can only exist if she's out to get something.
Harley is characteristically a longstanding villain in the DC universe and a part of her appeal is that her actions are morally questionable. Despite her anti-hero lore in "Joker: Folie à Deux," it's exhausting watching the same narrative be written of women. We are either the victims or the perpetrators with no room to be more than just power-hungry manipulators.
