Folks, we've lost Lady Gaga

We have got to stop sacrificing talented people and Jared Leto to the all-encompassing Joker.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news tonight that Lady Gaga is in talks to star as Harley Quinn in Todd Philips’ Joker: Folie á Deux—which will apparently be a musical, because why not. Sure, the deal hasn’t been closed yet, but as Polygon notes, “Joker: Folie à Deux would fit the trend of her previous movie selections perfectly,” given Joker’s (perhaps unearned) patina of Serious Drama Film and previous success at winning Oscars, which Gaga is clearly hungry for. If I were a betting blogger, I’d bet the house on this going through.

I was already on the ropes when they announced Joaquin Phoenix would be doing Joker in the first place, which was then followed by an even harder gut punch when I saw Barry Keoghan1 don the face paint in The Batman. (Zach Galifianakis gets a pass because The Lego Batman Movie absolutely rules.) Margot Robbie eventually shone as Harley, but that was after the indescribably bad Suicide Squad. I don’t want that for Mother Monster.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times: we should have stopped after 2008. Please, for the love of god, enough with the Joker, and especially enough with the Joker as awards bait. Heath Ledger’s win should have been an anomaly; a well-earned reward for jumping headfirst into a risky take on a classic character. Instead it set a precedent that riding Ledger’s coattails of a darker interpretation of the character could earn money and accolades, all without actually having to come up with something yourself.

This isn’t invective against Lady Gaga for contributing to the death of cinema or anything. She can do what she wants, and she’s mostly just caught in the crossfire of my frustration. I just really, really dislike the impact Joker has had on the larger cinematic landscape. And it did have an impact: Joker is the only R-rated movie to ever gross over a billion dollars worldwide. Studios pay attention to huge numbers like that and they change their strategies to follow suit. The lesson that studios learned is a boring and predictable one—Adult™ takes on characters created for children can make a lot of money, and when nuanced films for adults not based on comic books are kind of an endangered species these days, that’s not good for people who want to make original works that might not be suitable for the whole family. So you get talented performers like Lady Gaga going to the big IP projects because those are what get made, those are what make money, and those are what’s starting to make a dent in the awards races.

I don’t doubt that there will be something enjoyable coming out of all this. Maybe she’ll whip out another truly buckwild accent for the ages. And the benefits of another wild Gaga press tour are absolutely not lost on me. But musical or not, “unhinged” or not, the second coming of Joker is the same depressing process played out once again: the subsumption of a unique star into the IP void that does not blink.