The trip into the Suicide Squad’s animated adventures continues with a look at their second feature film Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay. Facing a terminal diagnosis with lots of red on her ledger, Amanda Waller sends her Suicide Squad on a new mission: retrieve a Get Out of Hell Free Card. In a world filled with villains of minor and super quality, the promise of escaping damnation proves to be a tempting offer as the Squad fights their way through all manner of villains not to die in the process.
While Alan Burnette is the sole screenwriter, the plot structure of the film and its main macguffin borrows heavily from Gail Simone’s “Secret Six” specifically #1-7 ‘Unhinged’ wherein the Six get in a RV and drive across the country to retrieve a Get Out of Hell Free Card.
Since the New 52 era and the resurgence of the Suicide Squad brand, the property has largely been tied to an aesthetic best described as Hot Topic chic as opposed to the pulpy mid twentieth century espionage thrills as ethics lessons of the John Ostrander-Kim Yale run. Hot Topic chic is the byproduct of the hegemonic process theorized by Antonio Gramsci and Dick Hebdige, wherein dominant forces seek to co-opt or incorporate the style of low culture (ex. punk, skating, comics, pulps, hip hop) for mass commodification. The result is something that might bear a resemblance to a punk style or appear to be transgressive, but has the rough edges sanded down so that it is safe for “everyone.” Through commodification the potential for subversion and resistance is nullified, resulting in the perpetuation of dominant modes of sexism, homophobia, etc. Assault on Arkham went this route with its gory but not too gory kills, near nudity, and bursts of sexuality that served only to objectify the underwritten female characters. It wanted to appear transgressive without transgressing. From the very first sequence Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay wants you to consider it as an exploitation or grindhouse film with its film grain and generic 80s flame effect title card, lowbrow spaces that offered cheap, base, thrills. Ironically those formal choices reflect the film’s inability to actually be those things and instead creates the space for the audience to consider how those supposedly cheap thrills are presented. Unshackled from the increasingly arbitrary PG-13 rating, Hell to Pay is allowed to finally represent the sex and violence the brand is associated with and in doing so, creates a space for critique with their presentation in ways previous entries were unable to.
Despite being the basis for a series of successful workout videos and fitness classes, the subject of various films and TV series, there are still some tawdry assumptions about exotic dancing in the American context. That cultural association makes it fitting place for the Suicide Squad to find their mark the dancer Steel Maxum and his Ankh lower back tattoo. After a short stint as Doctor Fate, Maxum is trying to keep a low profile. The character of Maxum is a joke with his twentysomething bro attitude who is incapable of not reducing everything down to a shallow reference to sex. All of which serve to lampoon not his vocation but the cultural sensibilities that translate that style into “cool.” But not his profession.
How director Sam Liu and the animators treat his performance creates comparisons to the treatment of other dancers at the beginning of the film and other DC animated pole routines. During the opening train sequence Tobias Whale’s car is filled with dancers who all exist as ornaments. In the words of Laura Mulvey they exist for their “to-be-looked-at-ness” to provide spectacles of their bodies. They were not characters; they were objects meant for the audience to be looked at via Whale and when the time came viciously murdered in a hail of bullets. The portrayal of the dancers on the train reads as sex negative due to both the association of criminality, bodily harm, and visual depiction.
A similar spectacle is at play in DC Showcase: Catwoman, an animated short directed by Lauren Montgomery (Voltron: Legendary Defender) and written by Paul Dini, that attempts to portray itself in a sex positive quas-feminist light. From the opening dance a spectacle of the female body is at play as an anonymous dancer plies her trade in front of the crime boss Rough Cut. The choreography and framing emphasize the dances sensuality through denial, bare breasts are never shown but constant cutting to Cut licking his lips wants you to imagine them. There is an elegance to Catwoman’s routine and positive spin as she uses her sexuality to disarm her prey. However, with impossible camera angles dismember Selina Kyle’s body and reduce her to a pair of breasts that tease an impossible nipple slip forecloses a more well-rounded representation. Selina Kyle may choose to do this but the camera is incapable of seeing her as more than an object while dancing, even as she dance-fights her foes into submission.
Continued belowThe aesthetically pleasing elements of Catwoman’s routine and its supposed embrace of her owning her sexuality position it in a post-feminist light. Which in turn reveals the lie to the popular thought that the feminist project has either ended or succeeded. Neither of which are true. For all her or the anonymous dancer’s “ownership” of their bodies it is solely projected through a perspective that is male and assumed heterosexual, emphasizing sexual desirability control by the spectator not the performer. The sequence in the club evokes an ahistorical aesthetic of beauty that is undone once it comes into contact with the present and historical context.
It is this historical context that makes Steel Maxum’s performance (cultural appropriation aside) read as sex positive! Or, at least, more positive, and thoughtful than one would expect for several reasons. His performance presents a spectacle of the male body, one that runs counter to the hardbodied masculinity that underpins the characters bro ethos by unambiguously transforming him into a site of sexual desire. Tara Strong’s Harley Quinn arousal is a recurring gag in this sequence, but unlike previous sequences it is one of multiple instances of recognition, demonstration, of the capacity for female pleasure. Previous sequences have limited the audience to a single male subject. The animation and choreography for Maxum’s routine isn’t as elegant or fluid as Catwoman’s but importantly the camera spends nearly as much time on his routine as capturing the enthusiastic responses from a female, mixed-race, audience. Hell to Pay isn’t Magic Mike or Magic Mike XXL but it creates a similar space where exotic dance is destigmatized. It is his profession. Instead of centering on singular view through a negatively coded lens disperses it into an overwhelmingly positive reaction.
Does the film with its loudspeaker declaration that the audience is “ladies and ladies” try too hard to deny a queer subtext? Yes, but nobody’s perfect.
Hell to Pay was the fourth animated feature to receive an ‘R’ rating from the MPAA, the previous films being The Killing Joke, Justice League: Dark and Gotham by Gaslight. During this period from Justice League: War on the animated films had become increasingly violent to the point I was surprised a film like Batman: Bad Blood did not earn an ‘R’ rating for its off screen blood splatters and gruesome character deaths. The blood splatter and graphic wounding in the train sequence of Hell to Pay more than earned the ‘R’ rating, the few brief instances of graphic female nudity were likely the cherry on top. This is the only instance of graphic nudity being cited in a DC animated feature thus far, prior films certainly emphasized butt shots and sexualized outfits but if there is one thing the MPAA thinks Americans cannot handle and that is the female nipple. And yet calling it graphic nudity feels like it’s overselling it, the kind of over the top promise you’d find on posters for Olga’s House of Shame.
The two instances of blink and you’ll miss it nudity occur as Knockout first gets out of the pool and when she drops her towel to kiss her girlfriend Scandal Savage. In the comics Scandal and Knockout are a polyamorous couple with Liana Kerzner, who is absent from this film. Amazingly the film does not hyper sexualize or make a spectacle of the queer female couple in the way entertainment often does. Knockout’s beauty is remarked upon by various characters, but she is not portrayed with the same base to-be-looked-at quality female characters are often subjected to. Her nudity is not spectacularized but a natural byproduct of her skinny dipping in the apartment she shares with her girlfriend. The hint of a sexualized gaze directed at her is presented by Professor Pyg, who is a cocktail of monstrous queer coding and misogynist lechery that renders him a confusing mixture of harmless-harmful. His denial of such a gaze by gesturing to his profession as a plastic surgeon, that he’s “seen bodies before,” emphasizes his obvious desires. Nevertheless, his scopophilia is quickly denied as Knockout tosses her towel over him with, much to his displeasure.
Continued belowIn this world of the disreputable and unethical, Scandal Savage and Knockout also are positioned as the ideal relationship and ethical heart of the film. Their relationship is the only one, if momentarily, that is allowed to be explored and represented as mutual and healthy. Punch and Jewelee’s relationship quickly revealed to be an act on the train, their hypersexual displays of affection a cover for their shallow Gun Crazy routine. Jewelee and Vertigo’s relationship is also revealed by sudden affection and built on deception. All involved are dead by the title card. Deadshot’s relationship with his estranged daughter Zoe is just that. It is an ideal that keeps Deadshot going and a means to counter his sociopathy in the eyes of the audience, but is ultimately unrepresentable in both this and Assault on Arkham. Which leaves Scandal and Knockout. The film isn’t afraid of showing a butch lesbian kiss her femme girlfriend, but it doesn’t emphasize their affection the way other couples are. Not out of prudishness, but because you get the sense they actually like one another from how they interact with one another. It doesn’t need to be underlined the way others have to.
Writer Alan Burnett does lean into the Bury Your Gays trope by having Knockout mortally wounded. She’s only mostly dead and what Scandal does next is covered in the comic follow up also called “Hell to Pay”. Scandal’s reaction to this event is what matters. She betrays her father for callously injuring her girlfriend. Unlike all the other self-centered betrayals that litter this film, she does it out of love.
Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay isn’t entierly subversive nor is it a banal perpetuation of how sex and violence is presented in imaged entertainment. It exists in a messy middle where formal choices interact and contradict one another resulting in one of the interesting iterations of the Suicide Squad. It is a feature filled with violence and sex, double crosses, thinly sketched characters, and a cast all out for themselves vying for a literal get out of hell free card. In all that chaos it undermines the dominant perspectives and allows women to be aroused at a man stripping to a thong and the queer couple gets to be the ideal relationship.
Next week we continue to look at other iterations of the Suicide Squad such as the trio of Squad centric episodes from Arrow.
