My “In Defense of Doctor Who Series 11” posts on “Thin Ice” and “Knock Knock” are proving way longer and more complicated than I thought they’d be. To give me more time to work on them, let’s instead resurrect my “Zac Synder vs. the World” series (in which I argued that Zac Synder’s films in the DC Cinematic Universe were brilliant movies which weren’t aimed at any of the audiences most likely to watch them) and apply the same approach I developed for that series to the rest of the DCEU. We start with a doozy:
Written by Tom
Much like Justice League, the fact that Suicide Squad‘s production was an incompetent dumpster fire was well known even before it hit cinemas. Indeed, the main thing the film is known for is being terribly made. It’s become a warning for film students first, an actual movie second.
Nevertheless, let’s recap the basics. Zack Snyder had finished Man of Steel and was hard at work on Batman vs Superman, both of which were over-the-top deconstructionist grimdark movies which took the narratives they promised and actively refused to do any of them right. Given that this was how the DCEU apparently worked now, the idea of making a Suicide Squad film became the obvious way to continue the series. The idea of “a superhero film where the heroes are villains” was the DC modus operandi of “superhero films done wrong” made literal. The Suicide Squad comics featured a lot of iconic characters mixing with characters the film could hopefully make iconic, making the film high on marketing potential and an easy thing to spin-off from. And all of these concepts had recently been used by Marvel in the highly successful film Guardians of the Galaxy. In short, Suicide Squad was DC’s most obvious way of taking the series aesthetic created by Zack Snyder and turning it into a film which would become a sure-fire hit. Give the project to David Ayer, a well-versed director used to over-the-top action flicks, and what could possibly go wrong?
Well, for starters the DC Cinematic Universe was already years behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe before DC had started even thinking about retroactively making Man of Steel it’s origin point. As such, the producers’ main desire was to start paying catch up with Marvel, and they wanted to catch up fast. The result was that David Ayer was given an inhumanly small amount of time to get Suicide Squad together. Trying to find ways of streamlining the process, he decided that he would only write one draft of the script and would purposely overload it with every single scene he might even consider using, planning to spend his time in the editing booth doing the types of structural decisions you’d usually do on the page.
While he was filming it though, the rest of the DCEU hit something of a snag: Batman vs. Superman had been released and was proving divisive. The film had its good reviews and its defenders (why hello there) but it was also getting severe criticism from people who thought it was overly-serious, needlessly baggy and narratively unsatisfying. Given that these were meant to be some of selling points of the series overall, things were not looking good. There was a ray of light though: DC had farmed some of Ayer’s initial footage to a trailer house who’d put together a vibrant, punky, hypervisual trailer that set the entire film to Bohemian Rhapsody. And people loved it. Suicide Squad was getting some serious buzz.
This wasn’t the film that David Ayer was actually making though. Firstly, Ayer didn’t know what film he was making. Secondly, the bits of the script that he was focusing on were its darker, more serious elements. Suicide Squad was to be a movie about misfits being abused by a government agency which was willing to torture and kill anyone that the public could be trusted not to care about. That was the point of giving Captain Boomerang a pink unicorn toy, playing Harley Quinn as someone in an abusive relationship, and having scenes where the government turned out of be using them as collateral to protect themselves: it made the Suicide Squad into underdog miniorities who were being rejected, vilified, broken and exploited by an uncaringly sadistic society and who needed to learn how to identify their oppressors, unite and fight back. This was to be more politically charged and darker than Batman vs. Superman could’ve been in its wildest dreams.
But according to Batman vs Superman‘s reviews and the reaction to the first Suicide Squad trailer, that wasn’t what people wanted. Given how Ayer didn’t have a lot of plans for the film other than taking the raw footage and messing with it until he made something cohesive, the producers decided that they could do the same and so shipped the entire film over to multiple editing companies, asking them to re-edit the film so that it looked more like its trailer. The various versions were then collected, assimilated into one final cut, rendered and sent out to cinemas as a supposed finished product.
No wonder the final result is a mess. It was made in pressurised conditions without a functional script; multiple companies independently edited their own versions of the film with the strict instruction to make it unlike what everyone else was doing; these completely conflicting versions of the film got smushed together with an eye towards the marketing rather than telling an actual story – the result is an almost directionless film that constantly fights against itself. The “Kooky Trailer Edit” makes a joke in Captain Boomerang’s title card about how he carries around pink unicorns because it’s his fetish, something which steamrolls all the scenes where him hugging a pink unicorn for support is supposed to present him as a damaged, relatable individual. Conversely, the Harley Quinn/Joker relationship would’ve probably sung if filtered through the pop-video trailer style, something indicated by the sublimely unexpected moment where Harley imagines a life with the Joker as part of a 1950’s nuclear family, but ultimately the whole things gets ruined by the “Grimdark Edgy Edit”‘s desire to make the Joker a grim, unfunny asshole that you couldn’t see this version of Harley really falling for. Nothing gets followed through properly and so nothing is allowed to work.
Then again though, we could’ve seen this coming a mile off. The film’s production woes were heavily documented way before the film came out: we knew that it was being rushed, farmed around and chopped up to hell. The initial reviews weren’t good; the marketing was mixed; and even the initial trailer sold itself on how messy it looked. Dan and I certainly went into the cinema expecting it to be a mess. And, well, the film delivered what was expected. Art, from the perspective of the artist, is as much about managing audience expectations as it is about producing the art itself. You can get away with your show being a mess if you scream loudly “This is going to be a mess!” at the start of it and then actively direct the audience towards wanting to get caught in the messiness. This is what Doctor Who did: by moving from “school drama” to “caveman action serial” to “space adventure with killer pepperpots“, it set itself up as the show in which the unexpected happened, thus allowing it to not only produce something as bewilderingly strange as “The Web Planet” but to have it become one of its most iconic and highly watched episodes of the time. Suicide Squad is just taking this approach and expanding it to work outside of the film’s paratext. By openly and publicly taking the position of “production dumpster fire” during its making, it ensured that its audience would sit down and expect “production dumpster fire” level plotting. So the question has to be asked: if the film doesn’t want us to be watching it for its plot, characters, editing or quality, what are we meant to be watching it for?
Well, the main thing left when you boil all of these things out of a movie is just Pure Image. This becomes particularly true when you remember that the film is literally attempting to be a feature length movie trailer – movie trailers are literally quick successions of unrelated images designed to peak interest. And the thing is, if you’re judging it in terms of Pure Image, the film is on form. The iconic Harley Quinn costume. The Joker’s new look. That strange scene of Harley and Joker’s nuclear family. Captain Boomerang’s pink unicorn. The actually quite funny title cards and captions. Killer Croc. Harley Quinn’s birdcage. There’s a lot of good looking things here shoved into a row. That’s not all though: what unites all this imagery is the basic and willful subversiveness that runs through it all. This desire to subvert is blatant from its core “superhero films but everyone’s a villain” premise, but it results in a film whose main aim is to present odd stuff you wouldn’t get anywhere else. Again, we have an Australian hit man with a pink unicorn toy, or we have pretty anything this movie does with Harley Quinn. The whole point of the movie is to present the audience with beautiful, weird images that go against the grain of the entire rest of its genre.
Of course, when I say “the entire rest of its genre”, I mean Marvel. If there is one true point to Batman vs Superman and Suicide Squad, then they’re about defining the DCEU as “the anti-Marvel” which doesn’t do what those other guys are doing, or at least doesn’t do them in the same way. And honestly, there’s a lot of good reasons to be anti-Marvel right now. It being bought by Disney alongside Star Wars was a large part of Disney’s current attempts to monopolise the entire creative industry. Combine that with the fact that Disney has worked directly with the Trump Administration in order to dictate its policies and that Marvel is now following Disney’s actions of kowtowing to far right voices by purging vocal left-wing ones out of its brands, and you have a company with have gone from “problematic for a number of reasons” to “not worth supporting”. That’s why I’m currently boycotting Marvel no matter how supposedly liberal Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse is, and honestly the only reason I haven’t boycotted Disney yet is because I’m currently doing a PhD on the animation industry (of which Disney’s too big a part to ignore).
Given all this, the idea of having an entire cinematic film which is dedicated to aggressively not being Marvel appeals, particularly given that the film is dedicated to outcasts and freaks who are pitted against a monolithic institution whose unaccountability makes it untouchable. Marvel and Disney are playing the cheerful faces of a neoliberal regime currently keeping itself in power by cultivating increasingly violent far right groups to support it. They’re trying to dictate who works in the industry and how they voice their opinions when off the job. They’re establishment figure during a time where the establishment is being wantonly sadistic. And so it’s nice to have a film that takes the genre that Marvel’s created, decides that it’s wank and sticks two fingers to it.
Suicide Squad would be a much less likable film if it was made with even the barest amount of competence – instead the film’s pure dedication to not working in favour of presenting images designed mostly to say “Fuck these guys” gives it a punk swagger at a time where we could do with some punk. Punk was never about technical ability or the talent of the players, it was all capturing an aesthetic of nihilism in as outrageous way as possible. That’s what Suicide Squad does with aplomb, and basically justifies it’s existence whether it’s typically well made or not.
Of course, there’s issues. The fact that the Suicide Squad keep working in favour of the government even after they’ve been betrayed and released from service is unsatisfying. And while it can hate Marvel movies as much as it likes, it’s still trying to be a superhero movie complete with a nigh-on meaningless CGI final battle that’s just aping all the standard Marvel endings of the time (this won’t be the last DCEU film with this issue). But that’s just another one of its long list of failures in a film where the idea of something being a failure doesn’t mean much. Punk was never about being sustainable or particularly internally successful, it was all about failing well and failing loud. Suicide Squad is the loudest failure that the DCEU has produced so far, and I’d argue a worthwhile one.
FNORD 