So Is Joker: Folie à Deux a Musical or Not?

Why did Lady Gaga say the movie isn’t a musical? I can think of a few possible answers. Photo: Warner Brothers

On Wednesday afternoon, Lady Gaga created a shockwave that echoed from the Adriatic across the Atlantic when she revealed at the official Venice press conference for Joker: Folie à Deux that she didn’t necessarily consider the film a musical.

“The music is used to give the characters a way to express what they need to say [when] dialogue is not enough,” Gaga explained — a sentence that was confusing in three separate ways. First, because to many people, that is the dictionary definition of a musical. Second, because the Joker sequel’s marketing materials had emphasized the fact that it would have singing, in a way that made it seem very much like a musical. And third, because almost all of the people Gaga was talking to had just come from a screening of Folie à Deux, and few of us had any doubt about the nature of the film we’d seen. This thing’s a musical!

Joker: Folie à Deux turns out to feature music in almost all the ways a film can feature music. It has sequences where the music is diegetic, as when Joker visits a prison arts-rehabilitation program — here presented slightly less sweetly than in Sing Sing — where the group is singing “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In.” Or where he and Gaga’s Harley Quinn flirt by singing “Get Happy,” as seen in this promo clip:

The film also has one or two traditional movie-musical numbers, where characters start in something resembling the normal world, then are swept into a heightened state of reality by the power of song. For instance, the sequence where Gaga’s Harley Quinn attempts to break Joker out of prison while singing “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity begins and ends with actions that are meant to be taken literally, but what’s in between is a flight of fancy that only the two of them are experiencing. (My colleague Alison Willmore calls this scene “rapturous, reaching heights the movie never bothers with again.”)

Most of all, Folie à Deux has dream-sequence numbers, which are meant to reflect the characters’ psyches even while they don’t directly connect to their circumstances in the real world. Most of what you see in the movie’s trailer are these, and they’re among the most controversial elements of Folie à Deux. (David Ehrlich complains that “most of the tunes are pared down into dull cabaret arrangements and shot against the black void of the characters’ shared imagination.”) Still, most of my audience seemed to enjoy the fantasy where Joker and Harley are the hosts of a Sonny & Cher–type program, where they sing “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” You gotta admire a good bit.

So, with all of that in mind, why did Gaga say the movie isn’t a musical? I can think of a few possible answers:

Lady Gaga has a very specific definition of musical.
Would you be surprised if Lady Gaga turned out to have a private definition of what a musical is, with strict and idiosyncratic rules about what does and does not count? Perhaps it’s the fact that Folie à Deux only has a few traditional musical numbers. Or perhaps it’s because the film’s dialogue still drives the plot, rather than the songs. Perhaps it’s something that the ghost of Judy Garland whispered to her in her sleep. Who knows?

Gaga was being a snob.
This theory comes by way of an anonymous Vulture staffer, who posited that Gaga was trying to sell Folie à Deux as a film that transcended the “lesser” genre of the musical, the same way the first Joker was taken by fans as something more than a traditional comic-book movie. It’s the “elevated horror” approach — the genre fans are already bought-in, so you market toward the cinephiles who wouldn’t ordinarily consider a horror film or musical.

Gaga misspoke.
I have gone back and listened to my recording of the press conference multiple times, and I’m still unclear on the point Lady Gaga was trying to make. Sometimes celebrities get put in front of microphones and they just say things, you know? There can be 100 people in a room, but that doesn’t mean any of them needs to take a given Gaga quote all too seriously.