This is an additional coda to Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, my 2020 video essay about the movie Suicide Squad.
17. (October 2021, ahead of announcement of a new Director’s cut for Suicide Squad)
There is an importance to making art and art is important; making quiet, personal art, making large mass-market art. It’s the nature of the movie-making system that to paint on the largest canvas you have to compromise to commercial interests, commercial brands, ‘intellectual property’ — and the corrosive influence of that term has burned away more culture than any ‘modern mythology’ could hope to restore. But what comes out is still art, sometimes pop art, sometimes crass art, sometimes art we appreciate and sometimes art we don’t.
Making art — making meaning — and showing it, or not showing it, saving it or destroying it. These are universal experiences. Showing art to each other is how we come to understand ourselves in relation to another human being. We cannot communicate directly, brain-to-brain. We only have words and images, and we use them to tell each other things we don’t even know we know.
This goes some way to explaining the sense of natural justice to hearing that someone has prevailed against the machine and had their authentic vision made available, however much the nature of a collaborative artform means that the idea of any one ‘vision’ is illusory. It was right that the world got to see Blade Runner without narration, it was right that Ken Russell’s The Devils was liberated from the censors, and it was right that Zack Snyder got to release his Justice League. If this list is of films by directors with a fairly homogenous demographic, it is only because relief for this injustice, like so many others, is distributed unfairly. But that does not make any individual case less unjust.
Which is all to say that it is as important that David Ayer gets to have his cut of Suicide Squad as it is when an indie musician releases a treasured album or a writer submits their first essay. It may not even be ‘good’, whatever ‘good’ should mean. It has probably come about as the result of some tedious bean-counting exercise; such is the world we live in. But we should celebrate that on the largest scale there is an affirmation that it is good for people to be able to create and release art for its own sake, and for the sake of creative integrity.
I closed out my last essay by saying that “Suicide Squad is over, for now.” Somehow, against all odds, Suicide Squad has another attempt to explain itself.
Editorial note: Contrary to rumour at the time, there was no announcement and Suicide Squad did not get another attempt to explain itself.
Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’ is also available in written form.
