r/1920s

People keep calling The Bride! “Joker coded” or a ripoff of Joker: Folie à Deux, and it’s driving me insane, because the movie is pulling from a completely different tradition. If anything, it’s way closer to Frankenstein movies and The Man Who Laughs (1928) than it is to anything Todd Phillips is doing.

The obvious thing: The Man Who Laughs (1928) is based on Victor Hugo’s novel(yeah, the same guy who wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and that film is what directly inspired the Joker’s face in the first place. Conrad Veidt’s carved grin becomes the visual template that the comics basically took and turned into a completely different kind of monster.(see picture)

What The Bride! is doing with Frank feels way more in line with Hugo/Shelley/German expressionism than with Folie à Deux’s whole “jukebox musical of shared delusion” thing. Frank and Gwynplaine are both made into monsters by other people and then forced to live inside a body that exists for other people’s entertainment or control. Both have to cover or manage their faces/identities just to move through the world without being treated as a threat or a spectacle. (Down to the scarf/handkerchief thing, which feels like a deliberate echo.)

Christian Bale’s Frank has some Karloff Frankenstein “misunderstood outcast” energy, but the loneliness and the very physical, awkward sadness of him reminded me a lot of Veidt too. It feels very German Expressionist: the distorted body as a mirror of a distorted world.Meanwhile, Joker: Folie à Deux is a New Hollywood inspired comic book musical about shared psychosis, abusive fantasy, staged musical numbers inside Arthur’s head. Whatever you think of it, its whole project is about turning Joker and Harley into this toxic, jukebox musical nightmare.

The Bride! isn’t interested in making a “cool villain origin” or a “broken couple we stan.” It’s more of a tragic monster story about bodies that have been used up, mutilated, stitched together, and then expected to perform romance and revolution for other people. Frank is not giving Arthur Fleck with scars vibe at all. He is someone who knows he was built as a thing and is still desperate for an actual life.

So yeah, The Bride! isn’t trying to chase Joker at all. The film lives in that sad, literary monster space (Mary Shelley’s creature, Victor Hugo’s Gwynplaine, Karloff’s misunderstood brute, Veidt’s mutilated performer). Frank and the Bride feel like a pair of walking wounds who are finally, maybe, allowed to want something for themselves.