They don’t make them like they used to
I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs (‘madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder. But in popular culture, we generally mean a pair of lovers who act in such a way that anyone outside their set-up sees them as insane (‘folly of two’ or ‘madness shared by two’) and who provide a great deal of entertainment – and reassurance – for those who have chosen a tamer path.
