ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary Risk about Julian Assange, paying close attention to an awkwardly comedic scene included in the film in which pop star Lady Gaga visits Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and interviews him in his makeshift bedroom. On the surface, the scene offers light comic relief from a film that is otherwise quite serious. Yet at the same time, it resonates with the documentary’s core tensions more generally and its own fraught production history, posing a series of unsettling questions about celebrities and gender difference in the popular imaginary, particularly in the context of #MeToo activism. The chapter analyzes how celebrity, cultural form, and the logic of infotainment intersect to both manage and defer the messy problems of risk society, information capitalism, and contemporary media.
