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| Left to right: likely Bronze Tiger; Captain Boomerang who isn't called Captain Boomerang; apparently Enchantress; definitely Katana; almost certainly Rick Flagg; claims to be Harley Quinn; heavily marketed as Deadshot; take your pick of Blockbuster, King Shark or Killer Croc, cos I dunno; and what I am assured is El Diablo and not a zombie. |
Oh,
I could rant about this image for hours. It'd be an easy post, a post
you've likely already seen elsewhere because I am slow as hell with
these things and we all know how it goes. I could point out how this
image started a forty-comment long Facebook conversation between
myself, three other comicbook geeks and an ICT teacher whose Google
Fu is worryingly good yet there were still two character we couldn't
identify. I could draw all the standard comparisons between the
DC-Warner and Marvel-Disney approaches. I could make all manner of
hyperbolic, nay histrionic, statements about how DC's obsession with
looking like adults does nothing of the sort.
But
I'm not gonna. I'm tired of being angry, about this and so many other
things, so I'm going to try and unpick something interesting (if
still highly critical) out of this image. You might remember when the
photo of the Leto Joker hit I said that when they released a
publicity shot of a halfway decent Harley Quinn then I would permit
myself to hope.
Well...
Now,
I don't want to use the phrase “slutty schoolgirl fantasy” out of
politeness... but I suspect the phrase probably came up in a design
meeting or two at Warner, is all I'm saying.
Harley's
been a lot of things over the years: a gangster's moll; an abuse
survivor carving out a life for herself; an arch-manipulator capable
of using everything from her education to her own mental condition to
twist others around her finger; an anarchic free spirit running an
apartment building for some very odd tenants... that's a lot of
different interpretations. I've seen her “be” a lot of different
characters in a lot of different media, so what is it about this
version that screams “Not Harley!” to me?
Hell,
I don't even mind the whole “Property of the Joker” line on the
back of her jacket. I mean, it does combine with the Joker's
“damaged” tattoo to make me wonder exactly how many show don't
tell violations this film will have (does Will Smith have “sniper”
written somewhere on his rifle, I wonder?) but when introducing
Harley to a whole new audience its probably important to start with
her in classic The Joker's Girlfriend mode and work up to the later
interpretations we comic fans all know and love.
(I'm
giving you credit here, Warner Bros., so please make her more than a
beaten woman and prove me right, okay? That shit's okay as a starting
point in the story, not as a whole character. Please don't make me
cringe through continuous scenes of abuse with no pay-off. Please
don't make me explain those scenes to the many co-workers who come to
me after every comicbook movie with trivia questions. Don't do that
to me. Thank you.)
No,
my essential problem with this costume is it looking nothing like a
harlequin. It actually seems to have escaped everyone's notice when
designing this thing that Harley's name is a pun. Even this
monstrosity...
… makes
reference to that fact in its use of colour. Even though its the
least Harlequin-esque of her costumes it conveys a few important
visual cues about her personality: the red and black are a bold
contrast, noticeable, its a performative costume that she wants to be
noticed; its more blatantly sexualised than her more usual look but
that still draws attention to her physicality and Harley is a very
physical character; the white skin (bleached in this version, usually
make-up in others) references her link to the Joker and serves to
make her stand out even further.
Movie
Harley has a bit of slap on her face, almost invisible given the
lighting of the picture, and we return to one of my initial problems
with the image as a whole: who are these guys? There's not much
visual information conveyed about these characters: some are clearly
soldiers, some are in civvies; there's a mummy hiding in the rear to
be as indistinct as possible; a relatively on-model version of a very
minor hero; there's Will Smith being all marketable; and our subject
for today: what appears to be a bad modernisation of Sandy from the
final act of Grease.
Yet
I can see what they're going for here once I scrape away my confusion
about who's who and look at this as marketing. Let's just take the
bull by the horns and compare this cast to the Avengers: there are
more women on this team and its more ethnically diverse even than the
post-Age Of Ultron Avengers. That message just gets drowned out
because so few of the characters have good visual identifiers and its
the geek media who are meant to share this around and go “Look!
Look which characters they're doing!”.
And
yet here I am confident the woman in the middle is Harley Quinn only
because she's the blonde. There should be more to work with than
that.
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