Joker: Folié a Deux: The Disturbing True Story of Arkham Hospital
Joker: Folié a Deux promises to be even more intense than the first film with Joaquin Phoenix, and that is because a large part of the story takes place inside the Arkham Hospital, where the most disturbed patients in Gotham City are locked up. The film begins after Arthur suffers his mental breakdown and transforms into the Joker, leading him to commit a brutal live-action murder and unleash chaos on the city’s inhabitants. It is evident that Arthur is not well, so he is not sent to a traditional prison, but instead, he is locked up in Arkham, where he must serve his sentence while the doctors try to heal his mind.
Arkham has been an important place in Batman’s history, as it is where some of his most brutal enemies have been imprisoned, such as The Penguin and Mr. Freeze in Tim Burton’s film, but in Joker: Folie à Deux, which is rated R, it becomes the setting for something more twisted, a love story that fuels Arthur’s madness after he meets Harley Quinn and she begins to encourage him to let go and accept his darkness. Harley sees him as some kind of hero and that leads the two characters to share a violent and macabre hallucination, or at least that’s what we see in the trailer. The most interesting thing about Arkham is that, although it was created for the comics taking as reference a place that HP Lovecraft talks about in his stories (it is a city that the writer compares to the city of Salem), it is also based on a real place with a disturbing story.
Joker: Folié a Deux: The Story of The Real Arkham Hospital
Arkham is a very important location in Joker: Folie à Deux, because that is where Joker and Harley meet, and the two are there for different reasons, but their story goes beyond this film, which hopes to repeat the success of the first. According to Screen Rant, Lovecraft created his version of Arkham based on a real hospital in Massachusetts, called Danvers State Hospital, also known as Danvers Lunatic Asylum. The hospital opened in 1878 and was located in a rural and isolated area, where it was intended to be a center for “residential treatment and care of the mentally ill,” says the Gotham Archives site, but it later became a training center for nurses and was also used as a pathological research laboratory.
Like many other mental hospitals of the past, the history of Danvers State Hospital was marked by brutal treatment, inhumane treatment of patients, and all types of abuse. It was a place that was supposed to help people heal, but it ended up creating an environment that left them even more damaged and affected, and it was terrifying. “Although initially built to provide treatment and care for people with mental health issues, the hospital later reportedly used inhumane treatments such as lobotomies and shock therapy to cope with its growing inpatient population,” says Screen Rant about it. Straitjackets were also used to keep patients under control and prevent them from harming others or themselves.
Over time, experts began to question these methods, as they led to brutal treatment of the sick and often worsened their situation. In the 1960s, many things began to change regarding mental hospitals, so Danvers State Hospital began to suffer cutbacks and, by the 1980s, was almost abandoned. “Patients were abruptly forced to live on the streets and did not receive optimal care”, Gotham Archive says. According to Screen Rant, the hospital was so infamous, that it even inspired other films and stories, such as Session 9.
