“It’s funny, I’m almost nervous to share my reaction. But the truth is, when it first started happening, I started laughing. Because it was just getting so unhinged,” she said. Sounds like a very Harley Quinn (sorry, “Lee Quinzel”) response. Gaga herself didn’t bear the brunt of Joker 2‘s failures (Jesse Hassenger described her as “alluringly mismatched” with star Joaquin Phoenix in The A.V. Club‘s review), but the criticism still hurt. “When it takes a while for something to kind of dissipate, that can be a little bit more painful,” she said. “Only because I put a lot of myself into it.”
Gaga infamously puts a lot of herself into everything, including Method acting. She’s said that watching herself in Ridley Scott’s House Of Gucci “looks like I’m watching a montage of my life. I don’t feel like I’m watching a film.” And her character in A Star Is Born stayed with her for “years.” All to say that Harley (sorry, “Lee”) was probably still in the building when the singer moved on to making a new album; and amid the movie’s unprecedented failure, “I think I was feeling artistically rebellious at the time,” she explained to Rolling Stone.
The result was her Grammy-nominated album Mayhem, with the “Disease” music video specifically described as an answer to the hostility around Joker 2. “I put so much of that energy into that video,” she said. “I was in that place, you know, I was like, ‘I’ll show you who I am, and I’ll show you what this fight is like.'”
Doing so seems to have rattled the artist a bit. “When we were done filming it, I went kind of into a dark place mentally,” Gaga said. “Maybe I scared myself a little bit.… For weeks I was really bothered. It was in my head a lot. I was actually trying to figure out what I was trying to say. There’s a side of me that’s scared of another side. And I think that there was a sense in me that I was not done healing.” Move over, Joker, sounds like Two Face could be Lady Gaga’s next DC villain du jour.
