Joker: Folie à Deux Commits the Mortal Sin of Wasting Lady Gaga

When Joker came out in 2019, it was greeted with a firestorm of controversy about its potential to instigate violence that verged on a moral panic. The furor didn’t come out of nowhere. Todd Phillips’s atypical comic-book origin story took place in a Gotham City that resembled 1970s New York and riffed on Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy in telling the story of failed comedian and eventual killer Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). But its depiction of a downtrodden outcast...