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.
“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.”
That’s part of what I liked about it. I felt that aspect of it could have been written much better–I think it was stereotypical in many places, and stereotypes are uninteresting unless your character is fitting them for interesting reasons. But the basic idea, I liked.
Also, re the endless and boring culture war stuff, my brain keeps going back to “the leader of the team–and one of the most interesting characters–was a black man. Did no one catch that? Or does ‘representation’ not ‘matter’ unless you like the thing?“
(I hate the fact that I’m being driven to defend Suicide Squad, but…)
In the context of a movie like this, I think that there is a general-purpose “interesting reason” for characters to be portrayed stereotypically. The stereotypes make people viscerally uncomfortable. That’s it. That’s enough, in this particular situation.
Suicide Squad is supposed to be a story about despised, dreadful monsters being given a chance to show their worth. That’s the whole point. From a storycraft perspective, this is a setup where the abstraction and distance generated by narrative are working against you. Especially if the characters in question are memorable and charismatic, as they basically have to be here for the movie to work at all, and especially especially if they’re serving as the protagonists.
It would have been easy to make a team full of weird, offbeat, highly-individualized super-criminals – and then what? Then we would have a band of Adorably Quirky Misfits, like the Avengers with a thin layer of goth on top. Every fanfic author could have her own special favorite! The text could tell us that these people are human filth, that we should loathe and fear them as we loathe and fear the worst parts of our own world, but it’s actually really hard for an author to make that stick in a visceral way. Story-framing cleans things up and makes them pretty. The title character of Hannibal is a super-cool dude, and two-thirds of the audience wants to be him or bang him or both. Something something Tony Soprano Walter White Tyler Durden.
But it turns out that decades of American cultural struggle has equipped us with these handy emotional buttons labeled VISCERAL DISGUST. Images we associate with racist and sexist attitudes, like “lazy violent BET-watching black thug” and “chick dressed like a stripper who lives to please her man,” make us want to vomit. This is transgressive, immoral, foul! Which is exactly how we need to be reacting to the Suicide Squad, on a gut level, so that appreciating their humanity can feel realistically like a struggle.
…because it is a struggle, when we try to do it for reals. Everyone deserves dignity, sure, but not everyone got the memo about what dignity is supposed to look like this week. Not everyone’s story is some surprising, heartstring-tugging, photogenic thing; lots of people are living exactly the stories you would expect from their circumstances, including stories that you find ugly and contemptible. For every little girl who wants to be Ada Lovelace, there’s another who wants to be Harley. And what then, dude? Having second thoughts about that “dignity for everyone” plan?
All right. Enough. I am rambling, and as you say, culture war is boring. I apologize.
*****
I think that we may have arrived at some bizarre cultural consensus that Will Smith doesn’t actually count as a minority. As far as I can tell, (white) people from all sides of the culture war are willing to agree on this. Don’t ask me, man. I didn’t do it.