Thursday 18 August 2016

Hicks in the City XII




We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
- H. P. Lovecraft

Or:

All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
- H. P. Lovecraft

Or (if you want to be all obvious about it):


As a baby, Shakespeare showed few signs of becoming the most significant figure in literary history, so nobody bothered noting down the details of his life.
- P. Cunk

The Him’s making a noise.

The Him:
  Frrrrmththththththtrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpfffffssssssss...

Me:  I don’t think that a slow puncture counts as a spirit animal.

The membranous noise continues.

Me:  Satisfied sea lion?

The Him:  Hrrrrrmphhhhhhhhhflfffflf...

Mystery Voice:


Me:  Sounds like a bear lying down and being quite happy about it.  Is it a sea badger?

Him:  I don’t know, but it’s getting really difficult to do.

Me:   Yeah,okay.  So, we did our annual pilgrimage to Edinburgh to see the Socks, amongst other things-

Him:  Yes.

Me:  - and this year, you got to come along with me and the Mystery Voice and see some other acts.

Him:  Yes.

Me:  Did you enjoy that?

Him:  I dunno.

Mystery Voice:


"Oh hi, Denny."
Me:  Different experience to usual?

Him:  It was certainly a different experience to usual.  It involved two trips to Edinburgh.

Me:  In a helicopter.

Him:  Sure.

Me:  Hmm?

Him:  Sure.

Me:   We always go in a helicopter.

Him:  Do we?

Me:  Yes, you spoon.

Him:  I don’t remember that part of the continuity.

Me:  We went in a helicopter last year as well.  You were mostly asleep.

Him:  I don’t remember that part of the continuity at all, but if you want to keep track of it…

Me: Well, someone’s got to.  It’s all in m’head.

Him:  That’s true.

Me:  Yeah.

Him:  Everything’s in your head.

Me:  Along with your, ummm…

Him:  Along with me.

Me:   Ha!  No!  You’re not imaginary.

Him:  I am.

Me:  No more than this sea badger is.  Well, it’s imaginary at the moment, but not for long...  Right!  Who did we see first?

Mystery Voice:


Him:  Well, that’s up to you.
 



Me:  We saw Stewart Lee first.

Him:  Yeah.

Me:  It was a smaller venue than we saw him in last year, and it was a work in progress.

Him:  Well, I wasn’t there last year.  I kind of was, because I am you, but…

Me:  Yeah, so…  Actually…  Apart from the Pun Run last year, that was the first – ah, no it’s not.  The Socks’re comedy…  It was more traditional stand-up.

Him:  What were you going to class the Socks as, if not comedy?

Me:  They’re not stand-up though…

Him:  The Clocks!

Me:   The Scottish Falsetto Clock Puppet Theatre!  I don’t know how that would work.  I’ve done enough on clocks recently what with Watchmen and Suicide Squad and-

Him:  Oh!  Not that again!

Me:  So, Stewart Lee…  You’ve seen the Comedy Vehicle.

Him:  Yes.  But the Comedy Vehicle was too good and too many people were watching it.

Me:   So the BBC killed it?

Him:  Yeah.

Me:   To see where all these golden eggs were coming from.  It was more of a traditional show that he did.

Him:  That’s definitely something you’ve said.

Me:  We had great seats for that show.  We were right at the front and-

Him:  We weren’t right at the front.

Me:  Well, tucked up to the side.

Him:  There’s such a thing as being too close to Stewart Lee.

Me:   Ha!  What, on the stage?  Close enough that he can steal your pint?

Him:  The seats up front were on the stage!

Me:  They’re always like that.  It’s totally different to a music gig where you’ve got-

Him:  I’d have felt a bit threatened being that close to Stewart Lee.

Me:  -burly people in tight t-shirts, hearing voices in their ears and stopping the great unwashed getting too close to the gods of the stage…  Yeah, I thought it was really good.  He looked like he was enjoying himself.

Him:  And the drinks!  The drinks were in glass!  Glasses.  Glasses made of glass.

Me:   Yeah!  Which isn't something you get in a music venue, either.

Him:  No.

Mystery Voice:




Me:   No.  And you be- you met him.

Him:  I don’t remember betting him.

Me:   You bet you could make a horror movie, and then next thing you know: Manos.

Him:  'Mangoes'.

Me:   'Cans of Fruit'.

Him:  My rendition of Manos would be swell.

Me:  How would it go?

Him:  It would star me.  Well, it would be Manos, but with me.

Me:  Would you do all the parts?

Him:  Yeah.  I would.

Me:   How would you do Torgo?

Him:  Um…  Carefully.

Me:  Give me an example.

Him:  Oh, you want to hear some of the lines?  Well, I’ve been doing some of the motions there for a little bit.

Me:  Yeah, but that doesn’t really help people who are reading this.  I mean even digital-  As interactive as this is, and it is ergodic literature, you’ve still got to-

Him:  Hang on, this is being typed up, isn’t it?

Me:   Yeah.

Him:  So it doesn’t matter.

Me:   No.

Him:  Alright.  So…  This is how I would do Torgo.

Me:  You’re not going to make an effort and put on a voice?

Him:  I did put on a voice.


Me:   You never put on a voice!

Him:  I did put on a voice!

Me:  You always do it in your own voice.  Even when I complain, “Do the voice!” you never do!

Him:  I just did do a voice!  I did the Torgo voice.  It was about as Torgo as it gets.  I’m still doing it now.

Me:  But that’s the way you always talk.

Him:  No, it’s not.

Me:   Wait a minute…  Are you… Torgo?  So, who did we see second?

Him:  Well, it wasn’t Torgo. 


Me:  It wasn’t Torgo.  It was Katherine Ryan.

Mystery Voice:



Him:  I think we spent too long talking about Torgo actually, given that he has absolutely nothing to do with the situation at hand.

Me:  It’s fine.

Him:  Alright.  So, Katherine Ryan.

Me:   Uh huh.

Him:  Did you enjoy yourself?

Me:  I thought it was great.  Like I said, her star’s been in the ascendancy ever since I held her baby…  In a tiny oven, about two years ago, with the Mystery Voice.  We were in the front row for that one and…  Yeah…

Him:  You should stop – y’know – stalking Katherine Ryan.

Me:  I’m not stalking Katherine Ryan.  We just go and see her show and give her money.  It’s not the same as stalking somebody.

Him:  You do like her though.

Me:   That’s because she’s really good.  She’s excellent.  So confident.  You had an interesting moment.  You got missed in the Audience Participation round-

Him:  That’s because no-one can see me but you.

Me:  Ha!  She asked me how I was doing.

Him:  Yeah, and you said you were ‘bettering up’.

Me:  I said I was bearing up, but she couldn’t hear what I was saying.  I became quite conscious that I was accidentally derailing the gig and…  I should just’ve said…  I don’t know.  “My leg’s fallen off,” or something.

Him:  Am fine.

Me:   ‘Am fine’?

Him:  Am fine.

Me:  That sounds like someone that would write romance novels.  Actually…  Isn’t Anne Fine a writer?

Him:  You would know that.

Me:  And the, after the gig – which was great – we malingered around outside.  We hung round in the rain, and then she came out.

Him:  Yeah.  About half an hour after everyone else had left.  She’d seen us and was, like, “Sigh.  Let’s just get this over with.”

Me:   She wasn’t at all like that!  She was lovely.

Him:  She waited as long as she could, but we just weren’t leaving.

Me:  She gave me a hug.

Him:  Yes.

Me:  And we got a photo that no-one’ll ever see.

Him:  Yes.  That even you will never see.

Me:   She signed your ticket too.

Him:  I don’t know where you put that.

Me:  It’s just above this section in the blog.

Him:  Okay.

Mystery Voice:



Me:  So, the second day…  In the morning we went into the Arctic and had a look around, and then late afternoon we headed up to see the Socks.

Him:  Yes.

Me:   That was… So, what was the theme of the Socks this year?

Him:  Why…  Why did you look at the ceiling when you asked that?

Me:  I dunno.  I thought I might’ve been having a stroke-

Him:  It was confusing.

Me:
  Yeah.  Exactly.  Everything went a bit swimmy.  Yeah, so… Erm…  So, what was the theme of the Socks show, this year?

Him:  It was Shakespeare.

Me:   And was it good?

Him:  Yes.

Me:  Was it very good?

Him:  Are you going to give your thoughts on any of these or are you just going to ask me repeated…?

Me:   I’ll stick them in at the bottom.1 


Him:  Repeated questions.

Me:   I’ll stick them in at the bottom.

Him:  You can say that all you like.

Me:  Yeah, but it won’t make for a very interesting read.  It was great, wasn’t it?

Him:  Wait.  First of all you go through and pretend you’re talking to someone else so you can write up your reactions-

Me:  Yeah.

Him:  Then, afterwards, you write up your reactions.

Me:   Yeah.  One day, I’ll have a syndrome named after me.  We’ve written over a quarter of a million words on this blog.

Him:  Do you…  even need to pretend that you’re talking to anyone else?

Me:  Doing your voice hurts my throat.  And makes me sneeze.

Him:  It just makes you look insane.

Me:  Yeah.  Do you know what the really difficult bit is?

Him:  What?

Me:   You have to use the second set of vocal cords for doing – when you do throat singing, you access your second cords.  That’s the only way I can do the moments we talk across each other.  Using the two voices at the same time is very, very difficult.

Him:  But…  You’re typing this up.

Me:  I know.

Him:  And we’re not talking across each other.

Me:  No, but-

Him:  Because there’s no way to type that.

Me:   No, but I have to do it in such a way that it sounds like two people speaking.  It was great, the Socks’ show was great.  And afterwards, their manager – the wonderful Kev Sutherland-

Him:  Yis.

Me:  - took us for drinks.

Him:  Well, he took you for drinks.

Me:  That’s true.

Him:  Because I’m not real.

Me:   No.

Him:  Ethereal beings don’t need to drink.


Mystery Voice:

Me:  That’s true!  The Mystery Voice got orange juice-

Mystery Voice:  


Him:  Yas.

Me:  I got my sparkling water, and I had to go up and pour yours into plastic glasses from the water jug on the bar and put them in the space where you’d be sitting if you existed.  Mr Sutherland was really good though and didn’t mention it once.  We had a good natter about things and stuff.  I thought it was great.  The show was…  The show was more together than last year.  You laughed a lot.

Him:  Yeah, it was good.  It was very good. 




Me:  Hell of a lot of work’s gone into it.  Some of it’s incredibly clever.  Right, after that we kind of squared-off a circle.  This isn’t part of the Fringe ‘review’, but we went to see Finding Dory.

Him:  That was not at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Me:  No.  I think we should mention it because…   I’d like to capture your thoughts in this sort-of digital amber.  When we came out of it – because we stayed right to the end – it felt…  To me it felt as though it really – and not all sequels do it – it felt like an incredibly well-crafted conclusion to the story begun in Finding Nemo.

Him:  Like the second Godfather film?

Me:  Yeah.  It dovetailed together so well .  A lot of care and love and effort-

Him:  That’s why it’s taken so long.

Me:  Yeah. 

Him:  It hasn’t been churned out a year after the original film came out.

Me:  You said something interesting about the theme of it.

Him:  Did I?

Me:  You did.

Him:  Well, I can’t wait to hear what that was.

Me:   The way it addressed mental illness.

Him:  Oh!  That was you, but…

Me:  And how the first one’s about parents and Finding Dory’s about-

Him:  I feel really sorry for anyone who’s not seen it and’s reading this, thinking, “Oh, the Edinburgh Fringe and – what’s this?  Endless, endless spoilers!”

Me:  We haven’t really said anything spoilery.

Him:  Oh, I dunno.  You named it.

Me:   That 'Boy With the Tail' ad at the start was a bit…  Well, we tweeted about that.  What was it you said?

Him:  At the start I made up a joke about seeing someone escape from a van and, only after the film did I realise there was a better joke to be had, in that they’d been advertising fish fingers before a film about sentient fish.

Me:  Ha!  It was really harsh!  “If you’ve enjoyed this film, why not eat the cast?  There’s a restaurant only fifteen yards from this cinema.”

Him:  Ha!

Mystery Voice:  


Me:  Right, we better wrap up there, so…  I’ll explain why the square’s a circle and write up the other stuff underneath this…  Can you make the noise of a sea badger, please?

The Him makes the noise of a sea badger, using all his cords.


Me:   And, on that bombshell…



The Him’s Socks Review.  It’s a tradition, or an old charter or something.

1.
STICKING IT IN AT THE BOTTOM
Or: 2
A CIRCLE SQUAR’D3


This is usually the section where I blather on with an actual ‘review’ of the shows we saw.  I’m not going to do that this year because, well, things change.  And that’s okay.  It’s certainly nothing to be scared of, to misquote Adam Ant. 

There’s a mountain ledge in the Arctic’s Werewolf Country that’s clear of snow this time of the year.  It’s high enough to allow you to look down on the clouds, but the road to the ledge is often closed, even in ‘Summer’.   The seasonal melt releases incredible amounts of water to piss joyfully down the slopes, dislodging boulders that bounce like rolled cheeses onto any vehicle unlucky enough to be grinding up the ascent at the time.  I neglected to mention this might be a factor to the Mystery Voice, which is mostly why he agreed to drive up there in the first place.

A lifetime ago I took the Him to see Finding Nemo at a cinema that doesn’t exist anymore.  I’m not sure, but it might well be the first time he’d even gone to the pictures.4

We’d lost all coverage as the road started rising, so the Mystery Voice had to rely on my directions.  He’s obviously braver than anyone realises.  We reached the ledge and parked up.  Within seconds of getting out, all of us were drenched.  The ground falls away quickly there, thousands of steep feet lead to a plain sprinkled with trainset-sized Christmas trees.  All the life-threatening torrents are distant enough to look like tears running down a wall.  The further away you are, the more real it feels; the way patterns naturally repeat becomes more obvious.  The air tastes white and the border between the world below and the other one are thin enough for you to feel fictional.  If you’re prepared to look, to properly look, then you can get a brief glimpse of how time works.

They skinned the cinema first, exposing its concrete skeleton and hidden chambers.  Discarded slabs that used to be walls were ground and smashed by bright yellow machines, until they were rendered removable.  The walls of a cinema hold dreams and memories in the same way a mountain stores fossils.  But cash, like rust, doesn’t understand sentimentality.

There are tributes scattered around the ledge, looking into the valley and the clouds.  Flowers, bleached cards, metal plaques: all of them mementos mori.  The dead see things differently. 

The Him and myself watched Finding Dory in Europe's tallest car park disguised as a cinema.  The film itself is stunning.  Individual grains of sand fall and clump, foam foams, scales sheen, all of it a tribute to Moore’s Law.  There’s something else though, something lurking inbetween the callous certainty of cold binary.  It’s like a ghost, but ghosts aren’t real.  The Turing Test misses the same, most obvious, test of what it is to be human, that English exams do.  Y’see, there’s no difference between low art and high art, and there never was.  Art isn’t objective, agendas are.  Does it move you?  Does it make you feel?  Does it tell you something about yourself?  It’s not enough to know how it was made, or even why it was made – those explanations are almost always wrong anyway – the only thing that matters is that it’s there, and that encountering it changes something in the you that lives behind your eyes.  Shifts it.  Maybe only momentarily, maybe for the rest of your life – avalanches gotta start somewhere, after all – but there’s a reaction to it that takes place on an animal level.  That’s all that matters.  That’s all that counts. 

After twenty minutes there were still no werewolves, so we got back in the car.  The creatures we used to be watched us turn back onto the shrinking ribbon and head downhill, growing steadily less distinct.  Eventually we vanished into the cloud and they went home.



2.  You pays yer money, you takes yer choice.

3.  Arf.  Just kidding.  I’d only type something like that if I was passing myself off a ‘professional writer’, darling. 

4.  It definitely wasn’t the first film he saw though.  That was The Wolf Man, which remains one of the few watchable films set in Wales.  Certainly the best one with a werewolf in it.




Thursday 11 August 2016

Suicide Squad 'review'



Dad was much more… witty.  Umm…  I remember watching a particularly inane dance routine with him on television once, and he turned to me and said, “I don’t think this will ever replace entertainment."
- John Cleese, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut)

That American optimism... I think it does speak to, now that we’re a global family, what it means to police the world and how hard that is.
- Zack Snyder

An eternal story of love and loss, set against the backdrop of an abortive alien invasion. Though you don’t actually find out it’s abortive till the end of the show.
It’s my
Romeo and Juliet
But less whiny.

- Garth Marenghi

Let’s start with some basics. 

Comics are a medium and superheroes are a genre within that medium.  A genre aimed at children.  Specifically, American children.  During the period that folk in the UK are currently lucky enough to think of as 'post-War', there’s been some clever cultural sleight-of-hand blurring those basics.  And that’s far from the worst of it.

Work-made-for-hire is a concept that consumers seem happy to ignore when nostalgia’s involved.  If I were to compare Marvel and DC to Burger King and McDonalds, it might seem an irrelevant stretch.  Stick with it though, because by the time I do make that comparison, many people reading this will already be so annoyed they might miss the opportunity to become further enraged. 

This may sting.  Ready?

DC need Suicide Squad to be a financial success.  It’s essential to them.  Or rather, it was, because at the time of typing it’s already obvious that, despite an exceptional opening weekend, this film’s going to die on its arse.  Now, before going any further, let’s make it very clear that when the covering of backsides and throwing of blame really gets going, DC will forget that there's absolutely nobody responsible for the critical and financial kicking other than themselves.  Suicide Squad, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Team America (and FANT4STIC before that) are exactly the movies that they wanted.  The buck stops with them.

You’ve read this far, so I’ll stop teasing you by telling you the result up front and then showing my working afterwards:  Suicide Squad is not just a terrible film, it’s also an extremely scary one. 

Suicide Squad is a mash-up of two different edits.  The first is the film that director David Ayer turned in (this edit has an orchestral soundtrack), the second is the remix that the folk who spliced the trailers together came up with (this is the edit that sounds like someone forgot to remove the temp score).  The final cut-and-shut currently stinking up flea-pits all over the world (with the exception of most of Mexico and all of China, who saw this faecal tsunami coming) has been welded together by DC’s accountants, and they've produced a disastrous pile-up, lacking the integrity of even Alien Vs Predator.1

Suicide Squad contains no thrills, no laughs, no engagement, no jeopardy, no surprises and, most damning of all, no soul.  Manos: The Hands of Fate is often cited as one of the worst films of all time, but if you ignore its technical deficiencies, Manos is a far superior film to Suicide Squad because its intentions were at least honourable: director/producer/writer/actor Harold P. Warren bet he could make a horror film by himself, and he did.  Not only that, Manos was, and is, an entertaining film, although probably not for the reasons Warren intended.   Suicide Squad might have one or two good shots and - mostly - competent acting (Will Smith's performance as Will Smith in the Will Smith role ticks all the Will Smith boxes; Margot Robbie cheekily sneaks character moments past all the editors), but it would still be a colossal disservice to accuse it of being entertaining.

Of course, despite what I'm about to type, many people will enjoy Suicide Squad for many different reasons, and more power to them.  To drag out the emaciated cliche, "It'd be a dull world if we all liked the same things."  Of course, having said that...

Someone in Hollywood’s fed all those huckstering How-To-Write-An-Accountant-Moistening-Movie-Script books into a Transformer, and Suicide Squad is the soulless, cliché-recipe subsequently squeezed out through the machine's inky printer-sphincter.  Make no mistake, you’ve seen all of this before: for a start, the whole final act's from 1984’s Ghostbusters.

There was a joke doing the rounds when The Sopranos was about to cut to black for the last time: any recap of the preceding episodes would need to be days long, in order to bring a casual viewer up to speed.  Suicide Squad feels like that’s actually happened.  In their greedy rush to catch up with the franchises they scavenge behind, DC’ve compressed so many characters, backstories and events together it plays more like a ‘Previously… on Suicide Squad’, than a coherent narrative.

The team who made Suicide Squad's trailers have been cursed by their success.  The sections they’ve been tasked with ‘enhancing’ are, in long-form, clumsy and ludicrous.  Anyone unlucky enough to’ve experienced the Michael Bay produced ‘reboot’ of The Hitcher should start feeling uncomfortable right now.  Also, the use of familiar songs is cynical.  Some cigar-chomping mogul noticed that the Bohemian Rhapsody promos were getting better reviews than Batman v Superman, and decided it must be the music that was responsible.  Simple.  Add more tunes the peasants and livestock’ll recognise and the money’ll print itself.  The songs in Suicide Squad are even more misjudged than each contractually-obligated Piece for the Proms Murray Gold gets to emit every year  Doctor Who’s on the TV.  There’s no artistry to the choices, which is why they sound like a temp score. 

Speaking of desperately rolling turds in glitter.  I’m willing to bet someone else’s money that I can identify every scene recorded during the infamous, and very expensive, reshoots.  Most of the Bar Scene for a start.  Touted as something that’ll astound, it’s exactly what a script-squirting algorithm would think of as ‘character moments’.  To paraphrase Alan Moore’s glorious D.R. & Quinch, “scar tissue adds character, man.” 

Ah.  Alan Moore.  The hairy, snake-worshipping magician in the room.  Yeah, let’s talk about Alan Moore shall we?  Especially as, despite attempts to hide the evidence by throwing reshoots over it, Zack Snyder’s involvement in this film is still honkingly obvious.  And I don't just mean the scene he directed.  Or the massive smiley badge filling the screen at one point.  (To be fair to Snyder, the badge is only really there as a greasy, 'Funk you, you funking hippie!' from DC.)

The decision to use Zack Snyder as DC's 'through-vision' to success was obviously going to result in a mess like this.  Anyone who understands how comics work could it see it coming as soon as Snyder disgraced himself all over Watchmen, an adaptation that simply revealed that he didn’t have a clue what the damn thing was about, but just thought it looked cool.  Snyder’s vision is limited solely by his inability to understand that all those words in comics are there for a reason, and are often just as important as the art (no matter how cool that art may be).  Alan Moore has apologised more than enough, even though it’s not his fault, for Watchmen's legacy.  The work's been enthusiastically misinterpreted for decades by folk who got trapped in the surface.  Watchmen's beautiful narrative structures - the illusions and allusions, reflections and reversions, all designed to highlight effects only available in the comics medium - were largely ignored by the next generation of Hot Artists.  Like mosquitoes staring through the glass face of a watch,
unable to comprehend the hidden interacting layers of careful precision implied, and rubbing themselves to mimic ticking, the deconstructive aspects of Watchmen, itself based on a satire of superheroes from the Fifties,2 were decoded as: TITS!  GUTS!  GUNS!  VIOLENCE!  RUDE WORDS!  POUCHES!  These artists (and writers) completely failed to understand that the work they worshiped was showing that ridiculous children’s characters would fit no more comfortably into a complex, consensual reality with consequences,than an enraged bear would remain quietly in its seat during a film premiere.  I’ve discussed this at tedious length before, so at this point we should return to why Suicide Squad's scary.

Suicide Squad feels like a music video.3   It also feels like watching someone else play a video game.  The structure, such as it is, acts like a set up for each new level.  The dialogue does nothing more than explain to the audience what they’re about to see.  Characters are introduced as though they can be upgraded later; more than one feels as though they’ve been unlocked after the completion of a level, turning up out of nowhere, solely to fulfill an obvious plot function in the almost-totally-CGI climactic battle.  Perhaps it’s been based on the Arkham series.  Ultimately though, who cares? 

To touch on the Intellectual Properties briefly (it hardly seems fair to dignify them with the term ‘characters’ as they’re only there to shift t-shirts), some mention should be made as to how repugnant they all are.  Yes, even Will Smith (whose orthodontist deserves his own credit).  Why are the audience supposed to sympathise with these scumbags again?  The female characters are also dealt a particularly unpleasant hand, from Amanda Exposition to the gratuitous ogling over the other three.  Maybe I’m getting old, but it seems there’s a far finer dividing line between empowerment and misogyny than I’d previously realised.  Living, as I do, in a country that has a mature attitude to guns, the scenes of firepower porn’re just tedious, for reasons we’ve not quite reached yet.

In fairness to Jared Leto, he manages to achieve something that no other actor playing the Joker has ever nailed, by delivering, hands-down, the worst-ever interpretation of the Clown Prince of Crime.  Deleted scenes (and probably illegal 'gifts' to fellow performers) be damned, this children's entertainer can’t hold a lubricated candle to even Caesar Romero, an actor who felt so little respect for the character of the Joker that he refused to shave his moustache off for filming.  The abusive relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn could be played as something complex, but that’s not what we’re here for, so what we get is stupid, ignorant and astounding that it made it to the screen, especially when Cap'n Boomerang’s rumoured bigotry doesn’t seem to've.

America is a young country, it doesn’t have legends.  The upcoming American Gods adaptation will probably address both those points.  A culture's popular entertainment reveals a huge amount about what’s going on behind the curtains.  Suicide Squad, unfortunately, seems to be an accurate, if broad-sweeping, portrayal of America itself:
dressing children’s characters in adult themes and pretending that this makes them edgy and grown-up; mistaking money, shimmer, glimmer, glam and bling for talent and worth; believing that violence is the only answer.  Might makes right, motherfunker.  Whether it's ignorance or, more likely, immaturity that causes the confusion of weaponry and the basic mammalian reproductive drive doesn't really matter.  Immaturity seems more likely, because of America's odd inability to have an adult conversation about the mechanical action that, whether they like it or not, manufactured everyone living there.  Humans aren't miracles, not even Fox News viewers. 

Even more troubling is Snyder’s Justice Team America crusade, apparently adopted as a deliberate echo of his country’s attitude to the rest of the species clinging to this rock.  In Snyder/DC's films, America represents the sole defence against the threatening, faceless hordes of the Other.  Only their might can make it right, everyone else being too lazy, stupid or weak to rise to the challenge.  To quote Ms Quinn, they/we're all "pussies".  There’s no nuance here.  These are absolutes that religious fundamentalists wouldn’t have to make a huge leap to identify with.  Suicide Squad is shallow propaganda.  That’s what makes it scary.

Marvel are basically a Burger King variation, DC're the Hamburglar.  Both have almost identical menus with enough variations in decor, costumes and vegetarian options to differentiate who you're giving money to.  Work-made-for-hire is like employing a chef who’s achieved a reputation elsewhere to offer their own spin on a Whopper or a Big Mac or a superhero (calling them ‘metahumans’ ain’t fooling no-one).   Once the company've received this critical darling's new recipe they offer a taste of it to the peasants and livestock to see how it tests.  When those results come back the recipe's altered according to more closely suit the test audience's tastes, creating a hybrid that nobody really wants. 

The talent, if it knows what's good for it, keeps its mouth shut, does what the contract states, kisses the ring and takes the cash.  As we’ve seen recently, we don't need no ‘experts’ no more.  Pol Pot wasn’t keen on 'experts' either, let’s not forget that. 

America’s legends are franchised children’s heroes, just as their exported restaurants are franchised chains.  Both are fast, memetic, market-driven and disposable.  Ultimately, both are junk food.  Fun, filling, comfortingly predictable, but also nutritionally basic, unhealthy and potentially lethal as an exclusive diet.

I'm afraid of Americans.
- David Bowie
 
TL; DR:
Stupid Shite Plod: Too Many Accountants Spoil The Big Mac


1.  Only the first one, to be fair.

2.  As usual, Mr Moore's Scottish Tribute Act's mistaken on this point (just like he was with the ending of The Killing Joke).

3.  In fairness I typed this before Die Antwoord's accusations made the news.  Freeky.  Die Antwoord've been creating some complex, intriguing, brave, powerful and important art (yes, it is) for years now.  Their accusations don't exactly damage any of my observations about Watchmen either.4

4.  Die Antwoord understand how to read comics.  The journey from Max Normal to Zef makes perfect sense.