American snipers

Suicide Squad (2016) (d. David Ayer)

It goes without saying that it’s a terrible film. It is not entirely pointless because it is doing something, which is the placating of underdog sentiments. At one level, the movie is a reaction to the heavily plotted, multi-part Marvel flicks. At another, it is tapping into the Trumpian tendency to get the attention of those who see themselves as the new social underdogs like the anti-hero rejects that make up the superhero team in the movie. Key scene is at a bar where squad members trade war stories. Sniper kills for money, not much different from the film American Sniper, while the pyromaniac has killed women and children, insistently coded as brown victims, echoing the civilian collateral damage from US military forays of the last two decades. Here the tropes of War on Terror culture is linked to the anxieties of the economic and social underclass. Manic Pixie Girl equalizes everyone’s sins by claiming everyone is damaged goods and have blood on their hands. The point is bad things happened and while they may trouble the conscience, they are ultimately justified since these acts were for the greater good: family, country, what have you. Who is the villain in the film? Why it’s the woman with the crescent symbol on her head. Is she supposed to be a stand-in for Islam? Her witchcraft has a weird cosmopolitanism: Meso-American mythology with a British accent and a French last name–the embodiment of a digital money transfer to an off-shore tax haven.

Sold as an anti-hero movie, the soundtrack and stereotypes are appropriately dated. Movie kills of its POC squad members exclusively with un-PC glee. Female members are defined by their damaged relationship to men. The Asian woman is a triple stereotypical threat: she was a dutiful wife; she adorns herself with the rising sun insignia; and she walks around with a samurai sword. She can not even be Asian-American but a foreign Asian; and she doesn’t get the candy-colored backstory given to the other team members. The Native American is DOA while the Latin dude is the stereotypical papi chulo. Amanda Waller may be a strong black female character but she is also characterized as manipulative, self-serving, and pro-military. Condi Rice’s big screen debut. To top it all, it is the white heterosexual couple that gets reunited in the end, which goes to show how the film is ultimately interested in maintaining the white status quo.

The film begins and end in prison. There are huge smiles upon their return to their cells due to some small changes: cable TV and an espresso machine. The fanboys and viewers are also in the same mental space. The awful movie gave them a momentary respite to feed into their disillusionment only to be enclosed back into the grind of mindless productivity and consumption.

#2016 #August