By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Last year, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. No, I didn’t end up blowing my savings on crypto, emailing dank memes to the work server, or donating money to a politician whose campaign wouldn’t stop texting me. Instead, I spent time and money watching Joker 2 in theaters. I didn’t think it would be possible for anyone to defend this humorless box office turd, but to my astonishment, Lady Gaga’s recent defense of Joker 2 as a bold artistic statement softened (if not changed) my view of this cinematic stinker.
Lady Gaga Is Right About Joker 2
Honestly, I had been waiting for Lady Gaga to go in the vein of Quentin Tarantino and praise Joker 2 simply because it went against the grain of what critics, audiences, and Hollywood execs were expecting. Instead, she simply said in a recent Variety interview that “people just sometimes don’t like some things” and “to be an artist, you have to be willing for people to sometimes not like it.” She capped this off by noting how giving in to a fear of failing is one of the worst ways we can harm ourselves and “can be hard to get control of.”
Paradoxically, what I liked about Lady Gaga’s defense of Joker 2 is that it wasn’t a defense. At least, not in the strictest sense. She didn’t go on a rant and try to convince us that the movie was secretly brilliant, nor did she pout about how a creative masterpiece was simply being misunderstood by the masses. Instead, she pointed out that taking risks is the price of making art and that nothing would ever be created if all of our artists were constantly paralyzed by fear that they would let people down.
While laying out this very sage wisdom, Lady Gaga also hinted at why she hasn’t been very bothered that her highest-profile movie became one of the biggest flops in Hollywood. “You keep going even if something didn’t connect in the way that you intended,” she said. This goes hand-in-hand with her Dune-like thoughts on fear being such a mind-killer. As someone who has created awesome things in the past and plans on creating awesome things in the future, she can’t afford to let one failure (albeit a very high-profile failure) destroy all her creative ambition.
After I read Lady Gaga’s statements, I couldn’t help but reconsider my own thoughts about Joker 2. Now, make no mistake. I still think this is an awful film, one that failed on almost every level. And it remains linked with the likes of The Rise of Skywalker in my mind when it comes to big-budget bombs that I watched in theaters exactly once and will never return to again.
But comparing the Star Wars and Joker franchises is the best way to appreciate what Gaga is saying here. With the Sequel Trilogy, The Force Awakens was a soft reboot of A New Hope, and we didn’t get a movie that tried to do anything new until The Last Jedi, which became a flop that nearly derailed both the fandom and the franchise itself. Afterward, Disney frantically played it safe with their expensive IP, making The Rise of Skywalker a nostalgia-fest of familiar faces and places even as they went all-in on TV shows featuring familiar characters like Ahsoka, Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Lady Gaga, in defending Joker 2, pointed out that artists can’t afford to worry about critical and commercial failure if they want to keep on creating. That’s exactly what Star Wars did, though…after experiencing one major failure, Disney began to do nothing but play it safe, and those efforts (The Book of Boba Fett, anyone?) may ironically doom the franchise. If they ever want to get it back on track, they need more creatives like Gaga who are hungrier to take risks than they are scared to lose face.
Of course, neither Disney execs nor screenwriters need to emulate Lady Gaga’s former project so much that we end up with other films as bad as Joker 2. But they need to embrace that maverick creative spirit that allows for taking big swings rather than bunting their way into the record books. Not every swing will connect, of course, but if producers are never willing to be as creatively crazy as the Joker himself, we may never get a truly big-budget blockbuster again. That’s far, far worse than having to sit through a single disappointing sequel.
Source: Variety
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