Okay, guys, be honest here — who broke Lady Gaga? Because the Gaga we know and love from press tours past is not coming out to play for Joker: Folie à Deux. Gone are the days of “there can be a hundred people in a room who don’t believe in you …” and monologues about Stanislavski acting techniques. In their place is an ugly red bob (pictured above), a new album ( Harlequin) that is just okay, and an air of overly pleasant earnestness. “It’s much more scary. I get really kind of nervous,” Gaga said, rather plainly, in a recent Vogue video while comparing releasing Harlequin with releasing Joker 2. “I feel super-fragile, which is probably unreasonable and silly, but yeah, it’s how I feel.” Then she laughed nervously.
Nervous laughter? The Gaga we know is a performer who, since starring in her first feature film, has turned promotional appearances into performance art. On the press tour for A Star Is Born, she performed a shedding of layers down to a vulnerable place through the power of Bradley Cooper from the Venice Film Festival premiere all the way through a perfectly performative and emotional “Shallow” at the Oscars. And it was great! Now, she’s having stripped-back conversations with Bill Gates where she just kind of talks like a normal person. “I tried to use the misinformation to make another disruptive point,” she told Gates when discussing her early days of press cycles when journalists would ask if she was a man. Clearly, she knows how to use the press. She must be avoiding her typical press maneuvers if the tour for a movie as big as Joker 2 (for a part as iconic as Harley) isn’t making any waves. So what gives? We have some theories.
1. She’s trying not to call attention to the movie
Joker: Folie à Deux got mediocre-to-bad reviews out of Venice with critics specifically saying Gaga herself is underutilized. It’s entirely possible that after the sting of not getting an Oscar nomination for the similarly disliked House of Gucci, she doesn’t want a repeat of that arc: an intense initial press tour, followed by bad reviews, a laughably long continuation of the press tour to awards season, and then no Oscar nomination, leaving her with perhaps a tinge of embarrassment. Maybe Gaga is just cutting her losses and waiting to put out her new pop album. For what it’s worth, her co-star Joaquin Phoenix hasn’t made much noise either (likely to quiet all conversation about him after the Todd Haynes drama), which leaves the movie pretty undersold. Still, the Gaga we know doesn’t really like to do things half-assed, so this theory makes us a little sad.
2. She’s actually doing performance art about the idea of “normalcy”
Now here is a concept: Maybe Gaga is still in performance-art mode but doing what 30 Rock referred to as “normaling.” By noting the differences between the typical, artistic, wacky Gaga and the now-normal Gaga, we can see the holes in the very idea of normalcy that our culture creates. It seems unlikely that this would be the case as this has nothing to do with Joker 2, but maybe that’s where her muse took her.
3. We broke her by making fun of her
The most tragic option possible is that, in the wake of being mocked to a remarkable degree through the entirety of the press tours for A Star Is Born and House of Gucci, Gaga decided it was no longer worth it to do press as performance art. We didn’t appreciate it, so she’s not doing it. But this would run counter to everything we know about her: She has made a career of proving people wrong out of sheer chutzpah. If she were to give up pretentious bullshit now, just because the entire world made fun of her nonstop for years, it would be entirely out of character.
4. She’s just kind of normal now
Okay, so maybe Lady Gaga just grew up. She’s 38, and she’s engaged. She has been a public figure for a decade and a half, and her new song with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile,” is a massive hit without any real sense of arty pop auteurship. It’s a song people like! Maybe she has just outgrown the need to perform a character at all times. If this one is true, that’s fine, we’re happy for her growth. However, she has said her next album will be a pop album, and we’re certainly hoping weird Gaga is back in time for that particular moment. We want her stupid love again. We promise to be nice this time.