This article transcribes a video essay available here, titled “Sixteen attempts to talk to you about Suicide Squad.”
1. (May/October 2019)
Look. Pay close attention. As you observe the image in front of you, never lose sight of the fact that it is a representation on a screen, derived from a video, derived from a compression algorithm, derived from a matrix of mathematical manipulations from light hitting a digital sensor in a camera positioned and placed by one or more people with deliberate choice. The image is captured, edited, stored and presented back to you with purpose and intent and the means of every stage of that process shapes the manner in which you receive it now. This is as true when you are watching a film as it is when you are watching a tv show as it is when you are watching a painting on a wall, as it is when you watching me now. Everything from my surroundings to my manner of address shapes how you receive my argument. So as you watch my review, bear in mind the presentation and juxtaposition of images and words in sequence. I am trying to persuade you and I am trying to manipulate you. And every other video you watch does the same. Video is not a hole opening into another reality. It is representation, spectacle, image and memory.
2. (October 2017)
I’m going to tell you a story, about a happy little dog, who learned how to play soccer. A Soccer-playing Dog. A Soccer Dog. A dog so good at soccer, he got sent to Europe to compete in a European Soccer Cup. This happy Soccer-playing Dog is of course the transatlantic soccer-player dog of soccer-based dog sequel Soccer Dog 2: European Cup.
Now, Soccer Dog 2: European Cup isn’t the best made film. It’s not the smartest film, it’s not the funniest film, it’s not the most snappily edited film, it’s not the best cast film, it’s not the best acted film, it wasn’t a very successful film, and it sadly spelled the end of the Soccer Dog cinematic universe. But what Soccer Dog 2: European Cup is, is a very enjoyable film. Lots of people spent time and effort making it, and they believed in that soccer-playing dog, and they wanted it to be good, and that shines out of the film like a spotlight. Anyone can enjoy Soccer Dog 2: European Cup, and anyone can enjoy Warner Brother’s 2016 superhero-based action-comedy Suicide Squad.
3. (May 2017)
So I’m not here to talk here about the characterisation, the plotting or the acting of the film Suicide Squad. In almost all big-budget films technical qualities like these are of a fixed, professional level which does not merit comment, and what comment it receives is most often pseudo-intellectual sophistry. Frankly, straying into criticising these elements for the most part is a red herring, lots and lots of film reviews attempt to talk at length about inferences on these qualities which the reviewers are ultimately unqualified to make.
People desperately want to be able to say “this is good or bad because”, or “these elements are naturally a poor mix because” or some other contortion of logic to determine what makes a good film distinct from a bad film. But there is no law of cinema, or of art more wildly, that can’t have some egregious exception pointed to. And there’s no such thing as the exception that proves the rule; in fact, exceptions are the definition of disproving rules. So when Stanley Kubrick is said to have “broken the 180 degree rule” in his masterpiece The Shining, our first reaction should be to wonder exactly what that rule was doing for us in the first place.
For this review, I’ve cheated a little and done something a Youtube reviewer isn’t meant to do: I’ve gone away and read a book. And reading a technical work about the mechanics of cinema like The Eye is Faster here, you really get a sense for what the “rules” are and aren’t — they’re more like techniques. The rules of cinema, in the sense that you might sit in a video and say “Oh the film was bad because it didn’t follow this rule”, are more like standard tools or standard chords — and like standard tools or chords, when you use them in ways they aren’t meant to be used, what you get back isn’t broken — it’s just different.
But around cinema and in the torrent of ‘video essays’ that by now must be considered to be the most popular school of film theory, amongst people likely to say they’re interested in film theory, we’ve now built an edifice of critical-sounding words and concepts that are at best useful analogies for a thing you might like to do in film, like providing — and I hate hate hate this phrase — “character beats” — and at worst are just nonsensical sophistry designed to back moral arguments with technical ones and technical arguments with moral ones, because it’s not okay to like good things made by bad people or dislike bad things made by “good” people.
This results in people talking at length about their own wacky misinterpretations of films, complaining about (often projected) ideological misalignments as if they were a measure objective quality and citing this cardboard box canon of ‘film theory’ about how the characterisation is inaccurate to the source material or the editing ‘felt wrong’ or it would have better matched the canonical ideal of a plot if events had happened differently and/or in a different order.
Let’s take the Rotten Tomatoes summary of reviews of Suicide Squad:
Suicide Squad boasts a talented cast and a little more humor than previous DCEU efforts, but they aren’t enough to save the disappointing end result from a muddled plot, thinly written characters, and choppy directing.
The cast are ‘talented’, the humour-meter is up two degrees, but the plot is ‘muddled’, the characters are ‘thinly written’ and the directing is ‘choppy’. These are not meaningful turns of phrase. What does it mean, materially, to say a plot is “muddled”? Is the plot to e.g. Primer, ‘muddled’? Maybe! But is that a mark against it in terms of quality? How does one ‘thinly’ write a character? What would a ‘thickly’ version of the same character look like? This is the language of the MMORPG character creation slider, not critical analysis.
It’s not difficult to talk meaningfully about unusual turns in Suicide Squad. For instance, that the film has two introduction scenes for individual characters immediately before a scene that starts with an explanatory monologue. That’s unusual.
4. (May/October 2019)
There is a consensus around Suicide Squad, that it is a laughably bad movie, bad in obvious, overwhelming ways. But even surface-level examination reveals elements that are not just good, but elements that are outright interesting. And so lots of people — you people, online people — do not properly appreciate Suicide Squad, which is a shame because you’re genuinely missing out, on being correct.
I’ve re-watched this film once or twice while making this video, and I’m always surprised that it still immediately holds my attention; in context, later parts of the film reinforce earlier ones and vice versa. There’s a lot going on, there’s lots to pick up on, and there’s lots that’s interesting. Let’s talk.
So upfront I have to confess that I have my own working model for how Suicide Squad was originally conceived, although short of interviewing David Ayer himself I’m never going to prove it. At least, this is how I’d personally rearrange it for best effect. It’s a matter of record that the film was edited twice, once by Ayer et al and once by the trailer-making company responsible for the Bohemian Rhapsody trailer. The final cut used was then a blending of these two cuts. This, amongst other things, explains why the soundtrack is such a curious mix of languorous classic rock anthems and trashy RnB smashers — it’s hard to imagine there was a conscious decision to populate the film with both “Purple Lambourgini” and “Fortunate Son”, and if you compare the Suicide Squad soundtrack to that of Ayer’s follow-up, Bright, again with Will Smith, it’s clear which camp his foot was placed firmly in.
So we know from the off that Suicide Squad has been rearranged by committee, and what we’re getting is probably not the order that events were intended to be presented in. Specifically, I think the film has been linearised — events start roughly at the beginning, and minus one or two Harley flashbacks, they proceed one after the other until the end. Whereas my read on the scenes as they appear to be shot is that the layout was going to be something like this:
We start with the intro which flashes through the events of Batman V Superman and Waller describing her plan to the generals in the restaurant, and we follow on to maybe some introduction of the crisis with INCUBUS underground and then we lead straight into the squad being assembled outside the city where we get essentially first-scene introductions for all the characters, and then as they enter the city and move through, at that point we see the origin stories which in the released film are at the start. And this proceeds up until we reach Waller in the tower, at which point we get filled in on Waller’s intentions, her pitch for the squad that was turned down, the fact that Waller is responsible for Enchantress, and essentially that she planned the whole thing. Then the squad have their drink and we head into the finale, where presumably at the end Enchantress was supposed to die, because it is extremely strange that she does not in the released film.
This provisional structure, for me, explains most of the curious choices in the film; the intense, colourful origin sequences in the past would break up the journey through the dark, murky cityscape in the present. One of my favourite scenes, where Deadshot and Harley consider the mannequin family display, would benefit greatly from being more proximate to the scenes where we see the non-normative family relationships that those characters represent or aspire to.
Above that, this would remove the odd way in which the films plays it’s hand early in signaling which characters are going to be most important, i.e. having given four or so of the characters lengthy length origin stories. If poor old Slipknot gets the bite ten minutes into the film, before we’ve been given the lowdown on who Waller thinks is up to the task, then that’s just an excellent gag. We’d also sort out how Katana receives absolute no mention for the first thirty minutes of the film, although I’ll admit I have a soft spot for the way the film as released just goes “oh yeah, this ninja is coming too”. Most significantly, the reveal that Enchantress is supposed to be a member of the squad, rather than it’s antagonist, would play as a twist, rather than a lingering point of confusion. And Waller is cast as a master manipulator, pulling strings left and right to both cover her own mistakes, as well as get what she wants: losing control of Enchantress becomes part of a larger scheme to “require” the intervention of the squad. This handily explains why she might ‘accidentally’ leave Incubus hanging out in her printer room.
So Suicide Squad is a film out of joint. So it goes. The order of plot elements is just one aspect of filmmaking, and while the infantile online culture of consuming cinema as art by repeatedly attempting to prove that we’re better than it and would totally do better and make better art if it were us behind the camera might require us to throw the entire baby out with this bathwater, I’m here to say that it’s okay to like movies even though parts of them are poorly made or incomplete. You might call this a reaction to the “I would simply” school of film-criticism. I like Suicide Squad as the assembled parts that make it up, even though there’s a sense in which it isn’t acheiving it’s full potential. Almost any film will have some aspect that feels unresolved, heck, almost any art full stop. What do I gain by not liking a film anyway?
With all this in mind, let’s take a look at a handful of microcosms within Suicide Squad itself, relations and reflections and interesting points of notice. I love the style of Suicide Squad, the costuming and the make-up and most of the effects — the final “big fractal” thing is a little overplayed now, perhaps — and it’s a cast of top actors for the most part smashing it.
5. (June 2017)
There’s a history that begins with Jon Favreau, and Iron Man, and ends, as it were, in profits. There was Iron Man 2 and Thor, and they were not quite as profitable, but then we start a swapping game, where Jon Favreau becomes Joss Whedon and Edward Norton becomes Mark Ruffalo and Terrance Howard becomes Don Cheadle and we keep making quiet swaps until eventually we reach Endgame and pretend that it all tied together into one coherent stream. The most elegant thing about this is how closely it matches real-world rewritings of history. But a victor is a victor, and to them the spoils.
But like all beginnings of history, and especially beginnings in comics, there’s more beginnings before and many more beginnings after. X-Men 2 proved for the first time that you could make a serious, mature superhero film only five years after Blade did it and only nine more years since Batman did it and eleven more years since when Superman did it. And superhero movies reached a dull, tacky end with X-Men 3 and Superman 4 and Blade Trinity, bound up in apologies for past mistakes. The jovial cynicism of a character like Ant-man — as appears in Captain America: Civil War — is drawn liberally from Hancock. Ang Lee’s excellent Hulk takes a swing in 2003 and starts the magic-Marvel-money-making mark without actually being invited, forcing itself as a pre-sequel to Incredible Hulk, before that movie itself was relegated to characters and appearances only.
And this web expands to the horizon. All modern films with duels owe a debt to the Star Wars prequels, and all modern films with wars have stolen liberally from the Lord of the Rings films. All the action films steal from Aliens and all the biting political satires steal from Robocop (except for Robocop (2014), which steals from I, Robot. You might call it… I, Robocop.) This is just part of how culture works.
All this is to set the scene, as it were, for our objet d’art, David Ayer’s movie Suicide Squad. Marvel’s bread and butter for years has been spinning successful films out of comic book sideshows who conventional wisdom regarded as the warm-up for the main act; characters with zero name-draw, terrible conception or a pitiful lack of universal appeal like the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, or the interminable ‘Captain America’, patched over only by Chris Evan’s portrayal of him as a man tortured by the prospect of having seen a Howard Zinn book on a bookstore shelf once.
DC, on the other hand, had naught to show cinematically for most of the last two decades but Batmen; their 2006 attempt to pivot Superman from being an eighties film about exploitative property ownership to being a post-9/11 film about exploitative property ownership had turned to dust in their hands. But Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, riding in in 2013, is an essentially perfect movie, a gorgeous existentialist fable which mulls over the demand on man to construct his own morality, while effortlessly managing sew in a complete alienation, item by item, of everything turbo-nerd fans of the Superman comic hold dear. And how they hate him for it, a hate that has only intensified as distance has revealed how properly prophetic the film is.
But by the time of Suicide Squad, DC and Warner Brothers are flapping in the wind trying to recreate the endless money-sluice of Marvel efforts — and the history of DC tie-in movies is a history of failure , with names such as Steel or Supergirl or Catwoman or Green Lantern or Jonah Hex remembered only as blemishes.
This plus the film falling into the hands of David Ayer, a director mostly known for producing crime dramas so down to earth that audiences emerged from cinemas with mouthfuls of topsoil. What he produced, courtesy of a cornucopia of big-name actors, is defiantly idiosyncratic: it’s got about as much in common with a fig as it does Guardians of the Galaxy — its closest stablemate amongst the Marvel films and the infuriating point of comparison for every bad video review.
Where Guardians is a light-hearted jaunt amongst the stars with some brigands and their shared heart of gold, Suicide Squad is a film set in prisons; physical prisons, metaphorical prisons, mental prisons, and the prison we call — society.
FIRST INTERMISSION (December 1993)
6. (April 2019)
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” The words hit the floor like a lead balloon, an ask too great even for the feted charisa of Will Smith.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” as if the phrase were commonplace, universal. Oh, how’s your new job? Some kind of Suicide Squad.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” like Deadshot has read and is referencing the comics. You know that comic, Suicide Squad? This is like that.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” More or less than the other squads, you mean? By any measure, the squad comes out of the conflict with fewer losses than the military teams who go in with team, or the teams who are supposed to have gone in before.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” a Suicide Squad is a squad which goes on suicidal missions.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” it’s the alliteration that does it, and the one-two-three-four bounce of the syllables in the mouth. Pure comic book pulp. Laugh-in-the-face-of-danger Squad. Live-free-or-die-hard Squad. You won’t believe what happens on the next page.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” comic books aren’t just for kids anymore.
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” is this inappropriate?
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” it’s been awkward describing this project to people because to bring it up, you have to also bring up the topic of… suicide?
“What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” The recently announced sequel to Suicide Squad is going to be called… The Suicide Squad. What are we? Some kind of definite article?
7. (July 2017)
Suicide Squad is a curiously flat concept. Whether the film, or the (impressively sleazy) Justice League Unlimited cartoon episode, or the comics I couldn’t be bothered reading for this review. No, the very concept of taking a group of outlandish criminals with varyingly negligible talents and press-ganging them into service as a Task Force is the kind of thing which you can elide the sensibility of when it comes in a floppy pamphlet but it’s shaky ground, and it easily just translates into nonsense outside of the specific literary cruft which has built up around comics, that shifting morass of plates of canonicity freely sliding over one another, so that characters can simultaneously be heartless villains, vacant caricatures, and deft antiheroes.
In comic world, much like in Dragonball Z, every monster is just a friend you haven’t made yet — and vice-versa. This is to DC and Marvel’s advantage, really. What’s the point of having all these toys in the chest if you aren’t gonna play with them? And that’s the pseudo-tradition which Suicide Squad grows out of, alongside other fruity microdramas like Justice League International or the Thunderbolts, where writers take some existing characters out of the box and have them act out a few little amateur dramatics.
There’s an inherent plasticity to these character models which makes them open to this kind of inversion, which isn’t necessarily shared with the mode of action movie protagonists. It’s difficult to imagine someone conceiving a Die Hard sequel in which Hans Gruber is the protagonist, using his knowledge of FBI tactics to assist in solving crimes. Where action movies do practice subverting expectations, it tends to follow the model of either action movie heroes and their approach to things proving successful in unlikely scenarios, or else unlikely protagonists proving to be adept at taking on action movie hero strategies. You could imagine John McClane and Hans Gruber being temporarily forced to work together, but doing so invokes a ‘Chekov’s gun’-esque tension as to when this unnatural state of affairs will cease.
Actual turns in action films tend to be weighty, over-signified things, like that jerk in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull who suddenly decides to defect to the USSR because of his strong ideological commitment to being a huge jerk. Or Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron, who just sort of squat in the scenes until they get recruited to be good guys for fear they might do something irredeemable.
In comics, the elasticity comes more from a tendency to return to the ‘norm’, to a sort of averaged character that represents the commonality between the current generation of writers. This is where ideas such as “Batman doesn’t kill people” flourish, in this fungible state of pseudo-canon which is more of a power relation between writers, generationally, than of textual authority. Batman has, of course, never sat down and explained exactly why he cannot kill, in a coherent fashion.
But the problem with dipping into such a mixed bag is that you get, well, a mixed bag. And translated into screen space the Suicide Squad characters, who in comics are categorised as ‘villains’ in much the same way that our categorisation of people in real life as ‘celebrities’ is more a loose family relationship that an tangible quality or status. These characters placed on screen are an incongruous mix to headline a major motion picture together. Of the squad in the film, which consists of Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Killer Croc, Diablo, Captain Boomerang and Enchantress — all ably lead by salt-of-the-earth Rick Flagg — only Diablo, Croc and Enchantress have any particular talents at all. Deadshot’s really good at shooting, I guess? And Captain Boomerang can fight his way out this canvas bag.
On top of that, Amanda Waller, the hyper-competent mandarin who runs the show, is on the face of it an incompetent buffoon. She’s a security expert with appalling home security who leaves powerful artefacts in her printer room. She’s a master persuader and manipulator who loses control of her only asset within seconds of a crisis — she can put a bomb in everyone else’s head, but for Enchantress she has three cocktail sticks and a pincushion box? On a cursory reading of the film, the squad’s only given mission is to rescue her from peril, not once, but twice.
The only thing that actually bugs me about Waller though, is the moment where she sees these bubble-headed chumps being mown down by the bucketload and immediately gets that thing people are always getting in the Alien movies where their eyes drift apart and they start whispering about the military applications.
Hey, who did that. Rewind that. Who’s doing that? Who’s firing those shots? So the first and most crucial question you have to ask about Suicide Squad, is: Who shot down this helicopter? The dust has finally settled, and the Squad are sent in by chopper on their top-secret rescue mission and… they immediately get blown out of the air by gunfire. But the enemies they fight — the Jagaroth from City of Death — they didn’t do it. We see INCUBUS bring down some helicopters, but he does it with this boxing glove on a spring set-up. It’s not him here. But there is one helicopter we see get shot down by gunfire in Suicide Squad, and that’s the Joker’s helicopter at the climax of the skyscraper section of the film:
This bird is… what? But yeah, the Joker’s helicopter is shot down — at a stroke — by Waller, who in every way is the prime antagonist in the film. I said I wouldn’t talk about plot but if you are struggling with why events happen in the way they do, the answer is that Waller is a tactical wizard who planned it all.
Just a quick exegesis of this scene: Waller, sleeping, summons Enchantress through her subconscious. We see later in the film that Enchantress can read dreams and desires; Waller wills her to take INCUBUS and set him loose in the city. We know that Waller wants this to happen because we know what Waller doesn’t want to happen: Enchantress to get the heart. She has opted to permit this, and prepared for it by stashing INCUBUS in her printer room. She has the option to destroy Enchantress’s heart at any point, and opts not to. Her remaining in the tower block when she has private staff and is only one floor down from the roof where she can be helicoptered out is similarly intentional. Later in the film, it is implicitly suggested that Enchantress, even once she has her heart back, is unable to dispose of Waller; she doesn’t kill her, or transmute her, or harm her in any way.
Waller dreams of an incident catastrophic enough to deploy her squad and — subconsciously or otherwise — summons it. Simple stuff.
8. (April 2019)
In The Rocky Horror Show, evil Dr Frank-N-Furter has been indulging in the dark arts. Using only pluck, grit and the set from a Hammer Horror movie, he constructs not just a man… but the perfect man. In Altered States, evil Dr Jessup has been indulging in dark psychology. By dunking himself repeatedly in a sensory deprivation tank, he’s able to transcend physical form and become first a wolfman, then later a formless blob of pure energy. In real life, the CIA conducted experiments under the MKULTRA program to identify, among other things, drugs which could “increase the efficiency of mentation and perception”. Wherever we look, evil Doctors are pushing the bounds of human capability, and this is no different in superhero movies.
Take this scene from Captain America, where a villainous Doctor and a villainous Capitalist team up to reenact the Milgram experiment, where a voice casually advises them that nothing is wrong and to ignore the screaming of the man losing physical form in the sensory deprivation chamber. The moment passes, and out he comes: it hasn’t even taken seven days, and they’ve made him a Man. But of course, these aren’t the villains; they’re now the heroes. The party invested in the strictest eugenics of man have crept from being unambiguous villains and egomaniacs, to being the heroic defenders of western civilisation. There is also Nazi villain in Captain America obsessed with perfecting man — but he’s doing it wrong.
Suicide Squad has several of its own super-soldier moments, and it explicitly calls out these references — nodding to Altered States, the Enchantress transformation turns the soldier in question not into a classical depiction of manhood, but into a nightmarish blob monster. The super-soldier transformation is properly horrific in this way, and the film’s primary villain Amanda Waller is on hand to offer commentary on the scene from the perspective of the military industrial complex: Imagine the combat potential of that.
But this isn’t the first time we see Altered States visually referenced in the film; El Diablo is introduced seated calmly in a deprivation tank to make Dr Jessup proud, and we’re explicitly told that it fills with water. Waller’s aim could not be more directly expressed over Diablo’s subplot in the film: she has been attempting to transform him into something more beast than man — and failing. Through the application of the Squad — through the application of friendship, by using the methods and motives we associate with heroism rather than villainy — she finally succeeds.
9. (January 2018)
My favourite bit in Suicide Squad is when Killer Croc drops a sweet Bane reference. He’s doing a bit! He’s doing the Bane bit! Whatta champ. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane’s beatdown on Batman is a dramatic announcement that everything Batman is, Bane is superior to, more authentic, more effective, and everything Batman perceives as his rightly belongs to Bane — who is everybody. Nobody cared who he was, after all, until he put on the mask.
And this duality, the perfect object versus the inherently flawed failure, is mirrored on all levels through Suicide Squad. Rick Flagg is the perfect soldier versus Ike Barinholtz’s ‘snivelling coward’. Bruce Wayne’s attempts to play shadow government are infantile in contrast with Waller’s machinations. Harley is more fearless and more dangerous than the Joker — because, as we see, left to his own devices his shit is tiresome, mechanical, and often just fucking dull. Leto’s Joker is at his most interesting when we see him through Harley’s conception, ascended into this fucked-up John the Baptist diving into this tank to baptise her. When we see him cut off from her, he’s this fucking goon laying out his knife collection to show off or talking about grape soda or getting the name ‘Joker’ stencilled on his SWAT uniform.
And there’s Deadshot’s inverted Batman origin, where he’s a single parent walking his daughter home down a dark alley when he’s mugged — not by the faceless poor but by an extra-legal agent of the state. And unlike that spineless haemophiliac Thomas Wayne, he fights back and successfully defends his family; he doesn’t fail in this context because he’s weak, but as yet another act of strength. And to add insult to injury, in the film’s second best joke, the one true desire Enchantress offers him at the climax of the film is to replay this moment over again, throwing his coat at Batman and getting the shot off before anyone can intervene. He turns it down, because unlike Batman, Deadshot has an understanding and acceptance of the unfairness and imbalance in the world. Despite the material wealth he has acquired in his job as an assassin, he lacks the inbred hubris of Bruce Wayne to take a single personal tragedy as a cue to reshape the world in his own image. He’s not up for spending the rest of his life making other people suffer because one time circumstances were out of his control. And ultimately, while it doesn’t help him live out a power fantasy, his actions secure him a relationship with his daughter — and, notably, one which compromises on his daughter’s request for him never to kill anyone. Unlike Batman, Deadshot can’t afford a fixed arbitrary moral code.
10. (May 2017)
An often repeated line about Suicide Squad is that people wish the film had focused more on the Joker and Harley Quinn, by which they mean they wished the film had focused more on Harley Quinn, they’re just trying to get around that tragic law of international cinema which makes it super-illegal to have a solo female lead in a superhero movie, and while I disagree that her story needed fleshing out — it’s all there on the screen to see, idiots — I think people are right to perceive Harley’s story as being the one of the primary movers in the plot and her character expressing a significant degree of agency which the other members of the squad do not possess. Harley moves through the film with a cartoony resilience, just lounging around with a baseball bat through scenarios which are essentially life-or-death for the other characters — up to and including bouncing off this building. But there’s also more subtle moments — to the extent that this gaudy-ass film is ever subtle — where she gets a free pass, bypassing challenges which the other characters are forced to deal with.
Here’s the main example: Skyscrapers have a strong literary and cinematic heritage and I’m not short of clip footage to slot in here to illustrate this.
Tower blocks are purgatory. They’re a bleak, symbolic punishment for attempting to live under capitalism and it’s no coincidence that we have reams of cultural depictions of Skyscrapers as hellish warzones in a way that they rarely are in real life — primarily because they’re in the habit of catching fire and falling over. We have a strong instinctual fear of skyscrapers, a primal knowledge when within them that they are in multitudinous hidden ways working against us, working to our detriment.
All this is just to say that when we see our squad rocking up to a skyscraper in this movie the subtext is clear: this will be a grind. You are going to have to fight your way slowly up through the terraces of purgatory, earning your passage every step.
But right here in Suicide Squad: Harley just… steps into a lift. And the logic of the film makes a half-hearted attempt to punish her for this but the message is clear: Harley is operating outside the narrative, outside of the truth-field which defines reality for the other squad members.
And I think this has a lot to do with the way Harley’s mirrors the other big female character in the film, Waller — who is in total control of the tower block throughout this sequence, we’re repeatedly shown. Like Harley, Waller is violent, unpredictable, amoral and she’s a sole female character adrift in a sea of dongs. They both get these scenes where they have to prove themselves worthy of attention to male authority figures through unconventional methods which might backfire. When the squad reaches the top of the tower, there are two evacuation helicopters waiting: one to rescue Harley, and one to rescue Waller. And at the end of the film, they both walk free, relying on their extra-legal actors to avoid the punishment of the state. And in the same way that Waller’s embodiment of state power protects her, Harley receives the same boon from her association with the Joker.
10.5 (May 2017)
It’s interesting to note that this reflects back that Waller must have an element of mercury about her also. You might think she was sulphuric, what with all her work with the deep state and her general accoutrements of sulphur. But Waller is an agent of change, direct change, despite her work for this most conservative organisation, and this is borne out in several scenes where just by her very presence the regular order of things is disrupted, such as the beginning of the prison sequence where she’s repeatedly identified by characters to other characters as the boss. It’s a fairly bleak joke on the part of the film, that this character who embodies control is still marginalised to the point where people have to be reminded that she’s in charge.
But I am reminded that you, the viewing cynic, won’t be happy without hard textual evidence to back up this wild theory. I think the evidence is there, tucked into interesting little scenes like this one, where for no reason at all Waller is up on the elevated platform around the edge of the prison cell. The effect is double, both to cage Waller as well as Harley and to place Waller in heaven compared to Harley’s hell. As above, so below. And this structure, with Waller above and Harley below, is the skyscraper sequence in miniature.
And as well it’s at this point at the top of the tower, when Harley and Waller and being ‘rescued’, that we get given the fullest context of Harley’s transference into the world of the Joker, where she crosses this threshold from the regular world into the exaggerated Joker-world. Harley has her own alchemical process which ends in transmutation, and the warping of reality. The unrealistic dive into the paint tank which is simultaneously about twelve inches deep aligns with that fall from the helicopter just moments later.
11. (November 2017)
As an aside, these sequences actually ape one of the more popular in fandom aspects of the Joker’s backstory, the suggestion that he has a multiple-choice origin. We’re given three encounters between Harley and the Joker which on one level are presented as continuous but if you reflect on it there’s nothing else really to support that outside of the necessary linearity of film — and any of these segments on their own would be a sufficient backstory for Harley — Harley could be incipient in this electroshock therapy, or in this moment of rejection, or in this moment of communion. Or a synthesis, or none of this.
The three proposed origins also each represent a different power differential between Harley and the Joker; in the hospital, her institutional power over him is flipped into his physical threat to her. On the bridge, the relationship between them is less stark: she is pursuing him and he’s playing hard to get. In the paint factory, the relationship between them is one of leader and disciple, where Harley’s participation is an act of deference between equals.
Harley’s deepest desire, when Enchantress offers it at the climax of the film, is domestic life with the Joker — again reflecting not only Harley’s affection for the Joker (she envisions him as a caring husband) but also that Enchantress struggles with non-standard social relations. The Joker is not cured in the vision, because there’s no concept of him in which he can be cured. The same psychopathy expresses itself as middle class. She whispers: “he married me!” as if marriage itself is the difficult part of the vision.
SECOND INTERMISSION (December 1993)
12. (July 2017)
First and foremost among the film’s images of self-destruction is Harley’s jump from height into the paint tank, one of the film’s more overt cinematic references and one where the symbolism is fairly straightforward: destruction of the self, sacrifice of the self, fall from grace, descent into hell, leap of faith.
In the first Assassin’s Creed game, the leap of faith is the peak cultishness of the Assassin’s movement. To become an Assassin symbolised through physically suffering, including the brutal detachment of your finger, and this act of spiritual sacrifice, in which you place your life into the hands of the Assassin’s Creed. As opposed to Assassin’s Creed 2, which is a lot less ambiguous in how it depicts the Assassins as the good guys and not just a weird cult; Ezio’s physical suffering is the torment of being hit in the face with a small stone, and ultimately his spiritual sacrifice consists of beating up the Pope.
In the Les Misérables movie, which I hate, the climactic fall into the Seine corresponds with Javert’s worldview falling in on itself: if the world is not set to the strict order he has held to his entire life, then reality, he judges, does not meet up to his standards — so he destroys it. Again, Hans Gruber’s fall at the end of Die Hard, in which Diane unclips the watch given to her by Harry Ellis, is the total failure of his worldview — Harry Ellis, sleazy, treacherous, and ultimately motivated by personal gains is only a less successful Hans Gruber. This motif of control and worldview is shared with Mama in Dredd — there’s an air of single combat in all these, of power coming into and out of focus. In 1Q84, my all-time favourite touchstone for describing the fabric of reality, Aomame slips between worlds when she takes the emergency exit down from a raised highway — and what is a drop but the most emergency exit imaginable.
In exciting young-adult romp Divergent, there’s a whole sequence of activities where the children, having word the sorting-hat, have to transgress all kinds of central American anxieties, culminating in a leap from a rooftop which is as notable for the safety and security — surely none of these children thought they were in any more danger than someone attending Go Ape — as it is for the bait and switch which follows, where the pseudo-military order they’re inducted into permits no transgression at all.
Great falls often mean great ideological shifts; I really appreciated the way that the chemical brew in the tank is at once deep enough to dive into from height and yet also shallow enough to stand in for a baptismal scene — reality has changed, while there has been cinematic continuity, the basic nature of these objects has moved.
There is a second fall for Harley, of course, when she falls from the escape helicopter after it is shot down — like Bruno Mars, she’s locked out of heaven — but she does, hit the ground running. The character we see fall and eat dirt is, naturally at this point, Waller — whose ostentatious helicopter nosedive seems almost to head off, this moment of failure for the character.
13. (July 2017)
The other essential dichotomy here, the one which is usually front and central in films which feature Batman, the material and ideological contrast between Batman and, in this case, Jared Leto’s hyper-materialist Joker. And like how in the rest of the film the Joker is set up as a dark inversion of the military-industrial complex, this all follows through here. Batman drives this ludicrous power fantasy car — and the Joker drives this ludicrous power fantasy car. They both have unlimited resources, unlimited reach, they both engage in extra-state violence and petty vendettas, and they’re trapped, cold war style, in an escalating conflict. The difference between them, especially in Suicide Squad, is entirely an aesthetic one.
Suicide Squad recognises, is the first film to recognise I think, the inherent triumph of the Joker over Batman. In the same way that BvS grapples with the idea that Batman is inherently fiercely reactionary, Suicide Squad really takes up this idea from the end of The Dark Knight where the Heath Ledger Joker is hanging there and he says “We’re going to be doing this forever, you and me” and Christian Bale kicks him in the dick or something. The point is that if Batman and the Joker are doing this forever, that pretty much suites the Joker. They’re both enabled, by their privileged positions, to operate on a basically supernatural level where the Joker always knows exactly who to torture and Batman always knows exactly where to track him down to. But the Joker’s goal ends in this; to do as he will. Batman’s goal, though he can do as he wills, is to keep the Joker frozen in a certain position, in statis. Bruce Wayne devotes his fortune and business to the all-important task of producing a river you can step in twice.
This is borne out hugely in The Dark Knight Rises, a film where Bruce Wayne invents free energy, a technology with unlimited radical potential, and pretty much shits himself over it. To the extent that he’s clearly allied with these borderline radical green activists to develop it and for all that he pretends like it’s a freakin’ shock to find out that they’re the, ah, human-negative league of shadows there must have been some signs, y’know? But faced with the possibility of the transformation of society he recoils in horror at the very principle and becomes a recluse, like the huge, useless dork he is.
But in Nolan’s Batman the “You and I” scene with the Joker is tempered somewhat by how Nolan’s Batman is always unsustainable; by The Dark Knight Rises he’s lost all his knee cartilage and he’s limping around Wayne manor in the dark. Nolan takes pains to show that he literally couldn’t keep on doing this forever even if they were able to bring the Joker back for another movie. Both physically and politically, there is no option for Batman to continue — even the sham consensus they form over Harvey Dent’s dead body is only contingent.
Ben Affleck Batman, however, in Batman V Superman, which I am not going to talk about, and in Suicide Squad, is much more stable in his reactionary moment — and correspondingly, the Joker is too. Where Ledger’s Joker’s almost supernatural powers of scheming are so freakin’ imminent that sometimes it’s hard to imagine them persisting longer than a single night, Leto’s Joker is basically an establishment man. He has his own cars, his own clubs, his own penthouse apartment. When Harley is separated from him, he has the resources to pursue her above and beyond.
14. (June 2017)
“We’re bad guys it’s what we do.” I mean, is it? This sort of looting is more traditionally associated with societal unrest and oppression; the unconscious pressures of consumerism bubbling under until people snap in an orgy of consumerist expression.
The coercion of death and the carrot of family life are directly mirrored in the storefronts. Deadshot stands in front of this motionless image of family life and daydreams of having a perfect mannequin family. When he talks to Flagg, who offers him a deal, the image is still in his eyes. Harley, however, presented with the image of aspiration in the storefront window approaches it the same way she approaches every adversary in the film, and applies force. Flagg can’t understand it, because Flagg has literally never felt anything in his life. We see a montage towards the beginning of the film of Flagg’s sexless Ken doll relationship with June Moone, and his not-even-oedipal relationship with Waller is Jorah Mormont levels of pathetic. Rick Flagg is the castrated consumer. He sees orgiastic violence against property and blurts out “what is wrong with you people?” Aside from the coercion of participation on threat of death in a military endeavour, nothing is wrong.
This dream scenario of family life comes up again at in the climax of the film, where the vision of life Enchantress offers to Harley is this fascinating five second clip of a domesticated Joker in the vein of Patrick Bateman, visibly even here still psychotic, presiding over a 2.4 child nuclear family. It is explicitly the dream vision of capitalist society, and it is explicitly — here with Enchantress, here in the storefront, and here in the real world — a trap.
15. (October 2019)
I didn’t really want to spend the video responding or reacting to other people’s criticism of Suicide Squad, partly because it’d be kinda crass and partly because I don’t really think much of it is interesting enough to deserve response — a whole lot of people wanting to dunk on Leto’s Joker in a way that unmistakeably tells on themselves, just in my opinion of course. But there is one thing I wanted to touch on specifically, which is the joke about Captain Boomerang and his pink unicorn fetish.
The structure of the joke is this: Captain Boomerang’s neon profile lists “fetish: pink unicorns”, leaving us to wonder what strange sexual hang-up the Captain has. Then the payoff is that once he’s out in the field, we see that it is in fact a literal ‘fetish’ — a physical unicorn plush that he takes comfort in retaining. Now, an unnamed youtuber reviewer who famously didn’t understand the ending of Man of Steel has made the rather presumptuous claim that there’s a third part to this joke — although it’s by no means certain that jokes are meant to come in three parts, lol — in the later scene where Captain Boomerang is struck in the chest with a knife, roundabouts where he keeps the unicorn. Said youtuber wants us to believe that the ‘obvious’ thing to happen here is the unicorn, a plush, is supposed to stop a thrown knife. Seems odd, but okay. Then, when Captain Boomerang removes a large pile of money with a knife embedded in it, this is evidence of the film doing a joke ‘wrong’.
So, uh, two things here: one, someone getting hit in the chest with a knife and revealing that it instead struck a large pile of money is a decent self-contained gag, playing off the old ‘bible in the shirt pocket’ trope which is clearly being referenced. Two, if you insist on seeing this as playing off the earlier joke, it does so capably — Captain Boomerang places a material object into his coat, but when it is removed — it has been transmuted into cold hard cash. What he really has, is a commodity fetish.
16. (November 2019)
So what do we even do with Suicide Squad? Even more so than when I started writing this review, many moons ago, it is a film out of time and place. A companion piece to a solo Batman film that will never come, replaced in it’s own instance by a film with the same name and one (1) extra definite article — the new film itself a pastiche, that seems happy to draw on this film for casting and character even while implicitly insulting it. Suicide Squad is a film with its own orphaned sequel, which may or may not have its own follow ups. People like, it seems, everything about Suicide Squad other than the film itself. Back when I started writing, the only constant was that Ayer himself would step up and defend his own artistic work. But as these little digs have taken hold, he’s been more and more vocal about how he feels corporate interference spoiled his film — and it probably did. Even in this, Suicide Squad is a dark shadow to Justice League, the movie with it’s own cottage industry in campaigning for a recut. In any thread with more than five people demanding the “Snyder Cut”, you’ll probably find at least one person saying “and also the Ayer Cut!”. The revelation that as originally planned, Justice League’s Steppenwolf would have played the secondary antagonist in this film too, is darkly funny.
All the promise in Suicide Squad might have been realised in the film itself; it might have been realised in sequels and tie-ins and Cinematic Universes, although the outlook there is less positive. Ultimately though, the promise in Suicide Squad is left beneath the surface, for us to scratch away at the dirt covering it with our own hands. For all that there is a contingent which mocks the class trimmings of Leto’s Joker, there is also a large contingent of authentic fans — and time tends to mute contempt and amplify affection. There will probably never be a critical reassessment of Suicide Squad — the marks where it has been bent and dismantled are too apparent, too ready to hand — but it will surely have a lasting influence, in terms of style, character, and ambition. But not for now.
I spent three years writing this review. Suicide Squad is fascinating and unusual, and over. For now.
EPILOGUE (February 2020)
I love Suicide Squad. When I see scenes from it on TV or on YouTube, I’m momentarily excited. I’ve spent three years casually dropping into conversations — at work events, at parties, at weddings — “oh, I’m working on a review of Suicide Squad. The script is 10,000+ words. Yes, a video review. Yes, it’s going to be over an hour long. Of course I’ll let you know when it’s done — you’ll have to try and stop me.” People express alternately bafflement, or interest. What is there to say about Suicide Squad? I didn’t know. I just started digging and the ideas turned themselves up.
Your job as editor, your job as reviewer is to form those ideas into a coherent statement. And that’s where, more so than the movie itself, I’ve been unable to succeed. After three years I’m content to cease waiting for lightning to strike in this regard. The film has lots to say, and with small consideration for how it’s laid out, is genuinely fun to watch. This much I believe: It does not deserve to be the punchline of an increasingly tedious online consensus on what kind of mediocrity a ‘good’ film should be. I’d watch Suicide Squad a hundred times before I’d watch Avengers: Infinity War again.
But the task of laying out exactly why, in precise form with an introduction and a conclusion, is beyond me. Good luck to anyone who tries.
What is in this video, then, is parts of an incomplete whole. I think they’re interesting enough to release into the world regardless; I hope you agree. Personally, I’m looking forward to meeting people at parties or social events and saying “Oh the Suicide Squad review? Oh yeah I finished that. It was fun.”
