Meanwhile, back in Gotham, here comes another chaotic neutral character from DC Comics, the whirling sexy batwielding, bat-smashing Harley Quinn. The engines hum but the advance critical notice is ominously silent. With Joker getting Oscar buzz and TBS showing Suicide Squad to whet the appetite, and as a fan of strong, crazy red queen style villainesses, I'm mildly into it. Marvel is more complex in their mythos despite any Scorsese 'art' naysaying (nyaah!) but DC, home of Catwoman, offers a fusion between Jungian archetypal mythology and those old Mexican wrestling movies, the kind where cultural and financial differences are worked out in fights; and everyone prefers to use high kicks and pile drivers rather than guns, and masks protect us from the painful humanity of archetypal embodiments, and that's pretty cool. And a paragon of macho (he made Fury with Brad Pitt for god's sakes), David Ayers' Suicide Squad is the reason we have Joker getting edgy acclaim, as well as the new Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of Harley Quinn opening this weekend, so it must be acknowledged that some special magic in SS made it a cultural touchstone (all the girls in the club were Harley that Halloween). Maybe the fight club morning practices of director David FURY Ayer helped make everyone seem tougher; or maybe because Robbie was so alluring in the way only hot messes can be; or maybe I'm loyal to SS since I relapsed to it back in Xmas 2016 and my feeling of insane 'emancipation' was perfectly matched in the theme, style and plot.
You may shake your head in disgust at that last--admittedly personal--connection; if you haven't been sober for 20 years as a massive alcoholic whose life went instantly from chronic depression to magical aliveness once he started drinking (late, senior year of HS), who was terrible at sports all through his childhood but was terrific at them suddenly, with a drink in his system to improve his coordination (children of genetic alcoholics often have this weird issue), then you can't know what it means to go from utterly miserable while everyone around you on Xmass day is loud, laughing and swilling Jack Daniels, to being loud, laughing and swilling yourself, to go from a 1 to a 10 in mood over the course of 20 minutes is, itself, addictive. To know the last 20 years of your life are, with one guzzle, a closed book, is so freeing there are no words for it.
It's almost worth being miserable and winding up in the hospital for, that hour of total freedom and a sense that your horizons have just widened by a significant "Kansas-switched-to-Technicolor-Oz" level. for however short a time your biological jailer decrees. Suicide Squad gets that sense of freedom vs. restriction. Viola Davis with her remote control that detonates the jugular vein bombs in the squad's necks being my own biochemistry, no longer able to handle alcohol in any amount, as I would later learn the hard way.
No wonder I too feel the draw of the madness of Joker, a 70s NYC-ish Gotham-set saga of mental illness and delusion... and white male rage! Todd Phillips' film proves a fine echo-drenched tribute to the golden (70s-early-80s) era of Scorsese, and hence perfect in the same year Scorsese slanders comic book movies and delivers his own (early-90s) Goodfellas-"tribute," The Irishman. It all happens in the order it does for a reason.
Some day you'll understand that (1).
Living in a loosely delusional zone between Taxi Driver, if Travis was fired from a temp clown agency, and King of Comedy 2, if Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) takes over the Jerry Lewis role and is finally popped off live on TV by someone twice as crazy as him. He loses his mom, his grip on reality, and his illusory girlfriend and then he finds his true self when a Goetz-y self-defense killing of three rich a-holes on a late-night subway triggers all sorts of fun insane civil unrest as people reason killing the rich is pretty cool if they can't see your face because you're wearing a clown mask. And Fleck, I mean the Joker, I mean "Joker" doesn't disappoint his fans. To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote about "the mystic swims where the psychotic drowns," Joker sinks to the bottom and realizes he's got gills. When you've lost everything, as Tyler Durden says, you can do anything. Of course you can argue it's a symptom of our trigger happy white male rage mass shooter age and we mustn't laugh at such things. But Fleck doesn't use an automatic weapon. He uses a pistol, a present from his Peter Boyle (whom he later stabs to death with... I think... a pen). Thanks to a great color and lighting scheme (how his red, orange and green suit contrast against the dingy gray of the city) and the way---during his celebrated stairs dance---the low-end roll of convicted felon Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (part 2)" pumps perfectly through the channels opened by the mind-meltingly deep and true cello chords of Icelandic genius Hildur Ingveldar Guðnadóttir, making for one of the defining moments of the cinematic year.
Pauline Kael would have loved it and recommended seeing it in a dirty 42nd Street grindhouse
But first, before the psychotic can swim (2)-- he or she must find their animal or elemental or archetypal talisman:a penguin, a cat, an egg, ice, earth, a playing card, fir or ice, a coin, or even just riddles: their psychosis and amoral love of crime and villainy can take to the air like a kite. And not only that, their chaotic evil gives Bruce Wayne an excuse to cut out of whatever gala he's slumming through. He's glad to have--once more--someone to chase around (if he grows up), so don't worry about him. The deal: just tie him up and roast him over some hot coals, rather than merely shoot him.
But Wayne's just a kid here. It's all Joker. It's all just Phoenix looking in the mirror and abusing his smile. But that stairs dance to Glitter's anthem works so indelibly as a moment because it takes the time to work, to breathe into it, and because the music is perfect; the stairs are perfect and the sight of this clown, literally, in this super clean clown suit is so perfectly etched against the filthy melange of urban decay/gray that it makes you stop and catch your breath. We can't help but love him because there is nothing this clown wants from us anymore. He's broken through to the other side. He no longer whines for our love or attention (the way, say, Jerry Langford used to do back in his bellboy days), and that's why we must give it. Usually there's something terrifically desperate about a clown, the human equivalent of a needy puppy that starts to whine the moment you cease petting it. But this clown has moved beyond us. The only person he needs to make laugh is himself. And he can't stop.
My guess: everyone worried the ending where it should have been might incite the juggalos to rise the way they way gang violence used to erupt at inner city Warriors screenings, or the old Aurora Dark Knight Rises incident. They even once worried Fight Club would motivate the trolls (back before they were called that) from out mom's basements and teach them the ways of men.
But no worries, the time for fight clubs has passed; the that may have come to don thy juggalo paint and raise a mighty ruckus is also past; because he has assassinated the present and there's no sense fighting if the opponent is but a dream. Safe in troll anonymity behind the goofball mask, we avoid the sting of teargas and truncheons by living outside the flow of time. The NYC of the 70s, the one of pay phones and rampant street crime, seems long gone today but it's never far away. Joker reminds us it's always close by as we walk home on NYC streets deserted of commerce (thanks to Amazon). So why worry about the present with its Disney and Warner Bros. flagships that we once bemoaned for cleaning up the dirty streets of Gotham? They're ensconced and provide fun jobs. Their clowns bounce with big bulbous heads, and if the Joker was just more cartoony, he'd be one of them. But let's face it. He's gone dark. He's joined the past, hanging out in front of the crumbling movie theaters showing kung fu movies and pornography and posing for invisible tourist pictures.
 |
Welcome the overalls |
Of course Anna Biller set the bar really high in Love Witch (2016) as far as able to bring a truly feminine eye towards lady sexy craziness. It looks from the outside like Yan and Hodson aren't even going to try, delivering instead what looks like another 'freshly broken up girl finds a yah-yay sisterhood to beat up on Ewan McGregor with' plot. Now, I'm all for beating up Ewan McGregor. No actor in the last two centuries has seemed to so fully warrant retaliation (3) but the kind of crazy that's psychotic rather than just mopey, in films is all too rare, it's like striking gold when we stumble on it, Hence the preciousness this year with Joker, the Beach Bum; the Parasite birthday picnic, the crazy subterranean's weird smiles in Us, the second half of Climax. But so much else in modern movies seems mired in a by-the-numbers sanity that unfortunately dogs even Frank Miller's DC adaptations like a plague. Money is more than just paper, signifiers connect, and noir cliches about shadows in crumbling alleys rule over all.
I hope I'm wrong, because I am a fan. I guess all I can do is wait. And get ready to publish a retraction of this anxious thread. Please... please be cray cray.
---
SUICIDE SQUADS AND CRAZY LOVERS
"I don't know who's crazier, me or you." - Iris to Travis (Taxi Driver)
Phoenix, coming into Joker, knew he had big shoes to fill.... big shoes to fill.... big shoes to fill... (4) The ballsy insanity we see finally erupting from the ratty shell of lil' Phoenix is like the origin story for the comic book bizarro "dog chasing cars" mania we see fully formed in Heath Ledger's "latter period" edition (in 2008's The Dark Knight.)Scenes like his burning his share of the mob's stolen money, a vast mountain of it which he pours lighter fluid on (just his half!) or his giving a loaded gun to Two-Face and leaning his own head against it (after blowing up his girlfriend). We loved Ledger for putting his head in the lion's jaws of true insane criminal genius. He became a kind of totem of lunatic freedom unseen in films since, perhaps, Tyler Durden in 1999. That model hasn't aged half as well ---too laddish. But Ledger's Joker lives large in our modern age of #metoo (he's not rapey) and global warming (he's all about depopulation). He's selfless in his homicidal genius, beyond desire and fear and even the need to commit weird social jokes (Durden in turn was the descendant of Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) the millionaire in The Magic Christian (1967) who ends the film by pouring a lot of pound notes in a big vat of sewage waste, so he can judge all the tories who go wading in, their expensive suits be hanged). When he throws down weird games of kill your friend or anonymous group on another boat before they kill you, it's not--despite Batman's smug analysis--some sick need to prove Gotham is corrupted, it's for amusement and cajones measuring, in the tradition of Price's Prince Prospero in Masque of the Red Death (1964) or Boris Karloff's General Fang in West of Shanghai (1937).Jared Leto's Joker in Suicide Squad was, in my opinion, an underrated and very druggy cool serpentine performance, the first embodiment since Ledger's untimely death. Seen through the prism of his adoring lover Harley, we see him first seducing her back when she was an Arkham shrink in a kind of fledgeling Starling nod, through to his issues trying to fight his gooey feelings towards her by convincing her to fall backwards into a vat of, presumably, magic clown-make-up, planning to let her drown in there, then sighing and jumping in after her. A scene that, strangely enough, reminded me of the end of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Anyone in a relationship they are ever kind of reluctantly continuing, a love despite their self conception as a rover and a bounder, could relate. Is that love? It's real, and that's even better. Even virgin nerds could respect that kind of vivid anarchic outlaw couple love.
If that's not crazy love, what is? There are so few examples in modern movies it's almost shameful. I think of Gun Crazy (1950) and the scene where John Dahl and Peggy Cummins abandon, spur of the moment, their 'take separate cars' getaway plan at the last second, risking it all just for a few more hours together, or Thelma and Louise going over that cliff. So few outlaw couples films get it right that when they do, as in Suicide Squad, it makes my palms sweat.
One gets a feeling that for her Boids of Prey"emancipation," Harley is not being allowed to keep that kind of moment-to-moment beyond good-and-evil kinetic batshit DSM-V charting, sexy-crazy-cool, becoming instead a kind of de facto good girl whose crazy is limited to a few giggles and goofy dances. After all, there was that one wrong note (every time I see it I make a loud buzzer sound like a wrong answer on a gameshow) in Suicide Squad, where she's shows her possible future as a banal housewife with a baby and Joker heading off to his legit 9-5 job in the sunshine of the early morning if she just surrenders. Ewwww! It's the one wrong note in the film, implying that underneath her bravado and kinetic psychosexycrazycool, she's just acting nuts because her "puddin" is nuts and that one day he'll grow out of it and get a real job, the way friends who didn't know you were gay or bi, presume you'll grow out of it after college and settle down to 'what matters."
THE CUCKOO'S NEST, FLOWN TO BITS
Man, that Enchantress (Cara Delvinge- above) was like a sharp intake of breath, the kind alive with tentacles and dreamy electric cloud shapes on exhale, her shimmering South American rainforest ayahuasca energy pulsing and slithering around the bigwig government Pentagon offices like an anaconda of kundalini dark magic. Yet she could still say "you don't have the balls" when mentioning her Jekyll side's boyfriends threat to stab her separated straw heart). Her Jekyll half being a mild-mannered executive assistant to Viola Davis, June Moon, the transformation to swaying dirty shaman a perfect analogy to my own transformation in one gulp from frazzled irritated misery of sanity to loose and amok.So much druggy energy in that film, man! Watch it again and clock Leto's cobra sway in the club when preparing to kill Common after he expresses admiration for Harley's pole dancing. That's right when the booze was really hitting me, and the way he kind of sways backwards and forwards, grabbing the words he says as if on a basketball rebound. And Common, gradually realizing Joker's insane craziness is too focused his way for it not to finally coil and erupt like a cobra strike of violence, but reacting too late to fight back. Boom! Anyway, that's my defense of Leto's Joker. Moving on.
THE AWAKE RUNNETH AMOK IN THE CITY OF SLEEP
What makes DC comics different from Marvel is that Marvel generally makes every character (this being Stan Lee's secret sauce) complex. There's no all-good hero or all-bad villain - everyone has their reasons and their weaknesses. They are 3-D people down to the smallest role. DC on the other hand, is all about empty types, signifiers with no persona beyond their function. Gotham in particular, is a land of 'types' - everyone not in the main character roster is as banal and shorn of tics as a civics lesson film strip. The news vendor must sound like a blue collar guy from the 30s ("papah heeeeah!"); the thugs must be brutes with bad teeth and a thoid grade education; the victims must cower in the corner of the parking lot before saying "Th-th-thanks, Batman"; the mobster on trial must cover his smirk with his hand as the rigged jury finds him innocent; his lawyer must be a shifty mouthpiece; the DA a noble idiot whose hands are tied. Even Batman with his childhood trauma of seeing his rich parents shot, is a type -seldom smiling, all justice but never killing anyone (that we see, he risks terrific collateral damage in order not to directly kill or permanently maim even the most evil of villains). Who wouldn't be crazy in a city like that? And who wouldn't be motivated to crime, as if no one but you really exists, this is all a dream so there are no consequences to your actions. You'll just wake up when the alarm rings irregardless, hopefully into a world with real people, like Marvel.
Thus, it's fitting that the villains generally wind up not in jail but in Arkham, Gotham's asylum for the criminally insane, where it's very easy to escape. In short, being the only complex characters in a city of 'types' like Gotham has made them crazy. There's no reality to challenge them. Even Phoenix's Joker, whose Gotham is perhaps the most realistic, has no firm grip on reality. It's all a dream within a dream. Phoenix, being the origin story Joker, is just realizing it. He thought he was in real life but by the end he knows it's "just a comedy." The best moment in Squad, for example, is Harley asking one of the other members if he can see the wild light show effects circling above the amok Enchantress and her newly incarnated temple god brother as they turn the Philadelphia (?) train station, into their own evil power station; her relief to find out she's not just hallucinating is both hilarious and true (to any tripper or psychotic) and in the context of the film, a little touching - that is some growth on her part. The old Harley wouldn't worry whether the orbiting cloud of stuff was real or not. No true psychotic ever bothers to sort that shit out. They presume it's all both real and illusion, hence the lack of consequences. When Don Birnim screams at the sight of the bat eating the rat in the wall during his DTs in Lost Weekend he's proving he's still a punter. A seasoned tripper wouldn't blink twice, even if the bat and rat were really there he'd presume he's hallucinating and shrug it off. We've all looked down at our hands and seen the flesh melting off the bone during bad acid trips, but we're not wally enough to try to cut it off with a bandsaw like in Psych-out or demanding his tripping friends drive him to the ER.
There is one Batman movie where Gotham is nuts as the villains, i.e 1997's Batman and Robin,(above) in which everything resembles one big black light poster; all the graffiti is Day-Glo and ridiculous art deco sculptured skyscrapers threaten to swallow up the villains to the extent they become normal inside the context. It's Batman with his copycat hangers-on Batgirl and Robin, that become the odd ducks. Freshman 15-afflicted Alicia Silverstone as ill-equipped for form fitting black leather tights and also too short to seem at all menacing; Robin bidding for Poison Ivy's attention with Bruce's own money like a bitch, trying so hard to seem straight while wearing little green shorts and a sailor boy crew cut. Clooney's Batman doing his best with this dopey coterie of kiddies but gladly letting Uma and Arnold take the cake and run. But run where?
Heath Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight on the other hand gets that he's dreaming for no city could be this 'film they show you at jury duty'-level banal. He thinks he Batman are the only normal, cool people in town. (Two-Face is only half there). Batman on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge the divide, doesn't even grant Joker a courtesy laugh. In other words, Joker guesses wrong about they're being alike. Sadly, Joker is alone in his full consciousness. He just gave Batman the benefit of the doubt because of the kinky get-up. But sometimes loners dress like bats for reasons that have nothing to do with pleasure, or so they keep telling themselves.
Everyone has their favorite villains in this DC-verse and the worst (Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor). When it comes to Catwoman I belong body and soul to Julie Newmar. See my praise on nearby Mediated "Kitty Kali" if you doubt that I'm down. Her playful ease with her mouse-eared crook gang in the 60s TV show is exactly the way I imagined myself in her presence (me being merely seven or eight when I first fell for her), a kitten luxuriating in the clawy grasp of a lithe black-spangled diamond snatcher. Runner up Catwoman would be Ann Hathaway, who still rocks the best eyeliner in Hollywood, and turns out looks great in leather and whipcord. Michelle Pfeiffer's was okay of course, but that Burton sequel was rather leaden and hard to wade through with all Danny DeVito's hamming and Michael Keaton's sulking. And Halle Berry's the worst Catwoman of all, mistaking mousiness for for normal and materialism for a superpower (she's only a hero because when she's about to rob a diamond store, someone is already there first, so she settles for kicking their ass -stealing from thieves being the lamest kind of heroism).
As for the Riddler, there is only Frank Gorshin. As for Two Face, who gives a shit? On the other hand, who doesn't give a shit? The rest of my love goes to Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy. and Dr. Zodiac himself, Ceasar Romero as the TV show Joker (far underrated over the sea of time, check him out again if the series rolls past you and give a close reading of his giddy mephistophelean relish for crime and cunning).
As for the heroes, there's no such thing as a good Robin - the whole boy sidekick idea is misguided and shows a horrific lack of understanding of the average child reader's psyche (Marvel never had them after Stan Lee took over). The best Batman is Adam West. Batgirl by Yvonne Craig is delicious but the idea of just feeling the right to imitate Batman's schtick out of some little sister copycat style impulse is kind of anathema to what superheroism is all about, Mom! Cindy, get your own cave and animal totem. I support the lesbian slant of the new WB's new version, but what's with the terrible red wig? One bad fashion choice can swamp a whole franchise.The key to all the villains' success is, as you may guess, insanity without reverting to overplaying/hamming. Anyone can vibe off Jim Carrey's looney tunes overacting the way Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face does in Batman Forever, but the result isn't memorable. Michelle Pfeiffer knows not to let DeVito's hamming upset her catnip cart, so she underplays in Batman Returns. Her dry "Me-yow" is the stuff of legend. But the result of their combination is just back to zero.
And now, between the three recent Jokers--Phoenix's low key psychotic, Jared Leto's druggy serpentine hustler, and the late Heath's ambulance-chasing dog anarchist, the bar has been raised mighty high. The big issue which we will learn this week is: Does Harley Quinn survive her girl power makeover emancipation or does she become just another over-costumed mannequin on which various craftsman all drape to the point of overkill in mad Oscar bids? Shall she be drenched in the stagnant swamp of unconscious Gotham sanity, nailed to the wall of soapy motherhood-sanctification? Shall the Birds of Prey lure her into peppy 80s-scored montages of sisterhood traveling pants shopping and nail salon cattiness? Will this become another girl Ghostbusters making bad genitalia jokes or tired Charlie's Angels boasting of their concert hall-style closet, forgetting to add fire, zest, madness and respect for their sources?
Make no mistake, DC villain roster! After Phoenix's Joker and Robbie's first rendition of Harley Quinn, the writing is on the wall - go nuts or go home. And when I say nuts I mean legitimately nuts, not 'art director given an unlimited budget to grab the Oscar brass ring one last time before he retires by this time really imitating old MGM musical numbers so slavishly the geriatric Academy risks cracking their wrists in applause' kind of nuts. And I don't mean the hamming it to the rooftop with evil laughing nuts, I mean DSM-V-charting here comes the warm jets surrealist gibbering nuts. I mean the 'break the shackles of the establishment and terrify the old academy into turning the channel lest the villain crawl through the screen and grab them around the neck'-kind, the kind that the Academy will only vote for if, like Heath Ledger, the actor has died so can be safely worshipped, or--like Angelina Jolie's in Girl, Interruptedor Daniel Day Lewis' in There Will Be Blood, already on the establishment's radar, via legacy status with Oscar-winning father (i.e. John Voight) or a past winners/nominees (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) so they know you're not really... you know... dangerous.
I have a terrible feeling that Robbie's Quinn doesn't have it anymore in Birds of Prey. That she will fall into a Tank Girl, Sucker Punch, Charlie's Angels Reloaded kind of shrill anti-action (albeit high Bechdel-charting) melange of gravity-defying high kicks. You know, stuff that won't freak out mom if you end up wanting to be Harley for Halloween again. That's fine if she's still dancing in the flames of a burning Gotham gala, but if she's helping to put the fire out, because some kid who makes her want to be a mom is there, trapped in a stroller on the far side of a raging banquet table, the trolls of the world's basements won't just rise and storm the City Center in full juggalo riot/looting gear, but worse, as far as the movie is concerned, they'll stay home.
I hope to god I'm wrong. The last thing we need now is another step back from the ledge. We've come so far! Just one more push! And this time, no "it was all a psychotic break hallucination," por favor. Some of us still just want to watch the world burn! (5)
Oops, forgot - it's burning already. Sorry, Australia. Change it back to TCM!
2/7/20: The film is out and the critics have spoken. So far the reviews are good! Looks like I was wrong (though the critics are all dumping on Suicide Squad at the same time and citing references to Tank Girl, which I don't care for. Confidentially, that's kind of why I wrote this, on a subconscious level, like going outside for a cigarette at a slow restaurant, so your food will be there when you get back, getting cold. It's a sacrifice we make for the good of the group. Amen.
Hurray for Harley I hope. And yr welcome.
NOTES:
1. as Bogie once said to Ingrid in Casablanca, a line that smacks of patriarchal condescension (she's been trying to get him to understand it all through the movie; then she realizes the easiest way to get those visas is to play along and let him think it's his idea)
2. To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote (? was it Jung?) "A mystic swims where a psychotic drowns"
3. Though to be fair, I'm basing that off of three movies he was in where he played a reprehensible swine, his smirky wally in The Men Who Stare at Goats; his entitled abusive/possessive poet in Moulin Rouge; and his bad haircut-sporting traitor ex-boyfriend to Gina Carano in the oft-seen-by-me Haywire.4. Simpsons quote (S1: "Krusty gets Busted"), because we shouldn't let the last 20 seasons sway us from remembering the brilliance of the first 10
5. As Alfred sums up the Joker's MO in Dark Knight.