Time for a rant. And a nitpick. The new Joker logo is out for the upcoming film released in October. And it’s supposed to be 'Joker: Folie À Deux', not 'Joker: Folie Á Deux'...
ADVERTISEMENTThe Finns have a great word for it: pilkunnussija.
It translates to commafucker, ie: someone with a particular, some might say unnecessary, attention to detail. A grammar Nazi, if you will.
I tend, as much as possible with the rotting fruit bowl of a brain I've been saddled with, to nitpick as much as possible when it comes to written standards, and a major bugbear of mine is when people fail to the use the appropriate alphabet characters, typefaces or diacritics for certain words.
You know the ones.
A cheeky (but not impudent) acute or grave accent in French that transforms an already sterling 'e' into a very different sounding ‘é’ or a ‘è’.
A dashing tilde on the 'n' in Spanish to give that ‘ñ’ its required virgulilla.
The utter delight of seeing 'a' and 'e' cozy up, get frisky, and somehow manage to mess up a '69' in Icelandic: 'æ'.
And why would you miss out on the opportunity of putting a wee hat on top of a vowel? Seriously – look how much better a 'u' looks with a rakish circumflex: 'û'.
That dainty u is ready to paint the town red.
Accidents happen frustratingly frequently when it comes to people’s names, and when publications omitted the ‘é’ for Penélope Cruz during the wave of Ferrari reviews or failed to use the umlaut ‘ü’ for Sandra Hüller during Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest reviews, a small part of me died each time.
A ‘u’ and a ‘ü’ are different letters, and the diacritic indicates certain sounds or stress patterns. While a slip up in a casual sentence is understandable, considering certain languages blandly stick to the traditional Latin alphabet, I find it uniquely disrespectful when it comes to names.
Sandra Huller and Sandra Hüller are not the same person.
Be careful, do better.
My quibbling ways resurfaced this morning when I saw that the logo for the upcoming Joker sequel had been released.
In case you hadn’t heard, 2019’s bafflingly overpraised Joker is getting a sequel this year, titled Joker: Folie à Deux. Joaquin Phoenix returns as Arthur Fleck and this time, he’s joined by Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, the Joker's romantic muse and psychotic sidekick. Call it a bad romance.
Todd Phillips is back in the director’s chair, and while plot details have naturally been kept under wraps, this time there's a genre switch, as the film is billed as a musical - one which will likely retain the grounded tone from the first instalment.
I won’t go into whether we need another Joker film, as I ranted about that when the project was officially announced in 2022. However, when it comes to the new logo, I’m off the leash.
Online entertainment publication Collider was able to snap a photo of the logo for the upcoming sequel, and the second I laid eyes on it, my pulse quickened, my toes curled, and I cringed so hard my spleen ruptured into a thousand fleshy pieces.
ADVERTISEMENTTake a look for yourself (courtesy of Collider):
Yes, the logo uses the same typecase as the original film. Well done there, marketing team.
The shiny light hue often associated with Broadway musical shows seems to confirm the musical leanings. Bravo.
But sweet vomiting Molière, what is going on with the first letter of the alphabet??
It’s supposed to be Joker: Folie À Deux, not Folie Á Deux - especially since the title is a French term which refers to shared psychosis or SDD (Shared Delusional Disorder), a rare syndrome in which two individuals share delusions or hallucinations.
ADVERTISEMENTYou’re supposed to be marketing a phantasmagorical team up between Joker and his new ally who will share his delusions, not a grammatically inept fever dream designed to provoke a haemorrhage.
Listen up, marketing team, because someone clearly wasn’t paying attention in French class.
The preposition 'à' has several meanings but can be summarized as “to, at, or in”.
It can be used for denoting, amongst many things, a destination or a location (Votre logo va à la poubelle – your logo is heading to the trash), a point in time (la suite va sortir à l’automne - the sequel is coming out in autumn), a possession (le premier film appartient à Hildur Guðnadóttir qui a créée la bande originale – the first film belongs to Hildur Guðnadóttir who orchestrated the original score) and a characteristic (une folie à deux).
'Á' is not a thing in French, and the only thing that acute mark could indicate is a higher tone ('à' as in 'car'; 'á' as in 'bat').
ADVERTISEMENT'Á' is used in several other languages, like Czech, Dutch, Faroese, Filipino, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Navajo, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish and Welsh, BUT NOT FRENCH.
AND YOUR TITLE IS IN FRENCH.
Granted, French grammar is a minefield (as you can notice from the three ‘e’s in the feminine past participle of the verb ‘créer’ used above) and not for the faint of heart. Any acts of grammatical terrorism should be treated with leniency, so I’ll attempt to pipe down.
However, it will never stop being baffling to me that when you’re dealing with a multi-million Hollywood project, someone can’t do a double-check. And if you’re going to dent my sanity, Joker team, then at least get it wrong with a character that exists in French, like 'â'.
At least the 'a' is happy because he’s got a cloche on his head.
ADVERTISEMENTSpeaking of which, cloche is French for a bell or a cover. But if you call someone a cloche, it’s slang for idiot.
Which is somewhat appropriate in these circumstances.
But then again, what do I know?
It’s certainly not the first time marketing has gotten it wrong, and perhaps the diacritic disaster is by design, and throwing WRONG accents over the shop is part of the folie...
They'll probably pass it off as that.
ADVERTISEMENTWhat I am certain of, however, is that while the first Joker film was a record-breaking success, earning more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office and securing admittedly merited Oscars for Phoenix and aforementioned composer extraordinaire Hildur Guðnadóttir, this sequel won’t win any linguistic or syntactic awards any time soon.
Will it still be a folly worth entertaining?
Judgement is reserved for its release date on 4 October 2024.
Until then, I’ll get back to fucking my commas.
