I’m not saying Suicide Squad was a good movie, because it wasn’t… but I don’t understand the sheer degree of hatred for it. I enjoyed it and thought it had potential.
Is it just because Leto was a terrible creep?
…people hated Suicide Squad because of basic cultural and ideological promptings.
I mean, OK, that’s not the whole of it. Apart from anything else, it was a bad movie in a normal evaluation-of-narrative sense, as it turned out. Characters made decisions for incomprehensible reasons or for no reasons at all. Plot points were justified with paper-thin unconvincing explanations. All that jazz.
But you didn’t need to know any of that to know that people would hate it. You could tell what would happen as soon as you saw the first promotional picture of Harley decked out in hot pants and fishnets and tattoos and that Uncomfortable Shirt. Everything about her presentation screamed: this is a sexualized hot chick and you should totally leer at her. In the cultural zeitgeist of the chattering class, images like that are the symbols of the Problematic (whether or not we’re talking about the sectors of the chattering class that would actually use that word), and they don’t show up in Good Art.
And then the actual movie did that same kind of thing over and over and over. Killer Croc and Diablo present as straight-up black and Hispanic tough-guy stereotypes out of Central Klansman Casting. Boomerang is a gleeful monster who tramples (ahem) bourgeois morality and etiquette with every line of dialogue. We get a brief look-see into Joker and Harley’s relationship, and it turns out to be a trailer-trash swinger fantasy.
This was, in actual fact, the film’s main redeeming feature. It faced up squarely to the fact that it was centrally a story about heroism amongst the lowly, the outcast, the dispossessed – and also faced up to the fact that the dispossessed, by virtue of being dispossessed, lead lives that often are not acceptable within the culture of their alleged betters. Which is not just a matter of being kinda dirty and using a picturesquely lower-class accent. They do not necessarily shy away from the norms and tropes that the middle class deems Problematic. Sometimes they embrace those norms and tropes, for defiance if for no other reason. Sometimes they talk and act like thugs. Sometimes they dress up like tarts. And either you’re willing to acknowledge their humanity, despite the affront to your cultural mores, or you’re not.
But the chattering classes these days prefer their monsters defanged, and resent being reminded of the discrepancies between their desire to honor the oppressed and their non-oppressed-person-friendly codes of conduct. So, no, they are not going to like a movie like Suicide Squad.
Of course, not everyone is a member of the chattering class. Which may have something to do with the $750 million global box office, all the hate notwithstanding.