Let's try this again.
http://thebaffler.com/blog/kriss-ho-hum-squad
Great piece. Nice to see some actual cultural criticism of a comic book movie rather than just "you should see it/not see it". It really is insidious how Hollywood encourages passivity and resignation in its audiences; they've conditioned you to just accept the shit that's thrown at you, because it's not as bad as the the worst-case scenario. To reviewers' credit, they at least seem to have shown some resistance to the utter vapidity of Suicide Squad, so maybe we're on the verge of a change? Or maybe I'm being too optimistic. I do feel, though, that there are some important political parallels to be drawn between the political malaise of 2016 (i.e., shitty Trump versus not-quite-as-shitty Clinton) and the box-office malaise of 2016 (watch a shitty sequel or another not-as-shitty sequel; either way, it's the same shit as what's come before.) We're due for a major correction on both fronts, a fact that can be observed in the unpopularity of both presidential candidates and the increasing number of box-office bombs and the increasing failure of the Hollywood blockbuster machine (just look how many bombs there are this year.)
http://thebaffler.com/blog/kriss-ho-hum-squad
Some time in April 2015, Jared Leto sent someone to throw a dead pig on a table during the rehearsals for Suicide Squad. Those who were present at the time recount their shock and fear beholding the scene, their worry that they might be working with someone who was genuinely crazy. This is bullshit. It’s marketing patter, nothing more: their immediate reaction to having a dead pig plonked down in front of them was almost certainly exactly what yours or mine would be: an immediate, wretched boredom.
This was the first in a series of increasingly desperate pranks Jared Leto would go on to perpetrate on the film’s cast and crew—mailing them used condoms and anal beads, presenting them with dead rats and live snakes, and never once breaking character, on or off the set. In a film that takes pains to remind everyone at every stage how twisted and fucked up it is, Leto was playing the most twisted and fucked-up figure possible: the Joker, a comic-book caricature that, thanks mostly to Heath Ledger, has come to function as a grand symbol of anarchic, nihilist evil. The Joker is the laugh radiating out the heart of the black hole—the dianoetic laugh that gorges itself on all the misery of existence. The pure evil of this supervillain who wants nothing more than to watch the world burn is dedicated to what Samuel Beckett called the “saluting of the highest joke” and registers its force with a cackle of full diabolical evil.
Our society is obsessed with diabolical evil—in any big-budget film, Suicide Squad included, the villain’s plan can never be anything less that the willful extermination of humanity. And diabolical evil might exist. But it’s as if all of Jared Leto’s stupid and boring antics were actually performing a devastating critique of the film he was working on. Unwittingly (for when can it ever be said that Jared Leto has possessed genuine wit?), he’s shown us that, however twisted and fucked up we imagine diabolical evil to be, its representation is only ever deeply annoying.
. . .
Great piece. Nice to see some actual cultural criticism of a comic book movie rather than just "you should see it/not see it". It really is insidious how Hollywood encourages passivity and resignation in its audiences; they've conditioned you to just accept the shit that's thrown at you, because it's not as bad as the the worst-case scenario. To reviewers' credit, they at least seem to have shown some resistance to the utter vapidity of Suicide Squad, so maybe we're on the verge of a change? Or maybe I'm being too optimistic. I do feel, though, that there are some important political parallels to be drawn between the political malaise of 2016 (i.e., shitty Trump versus not-quite-as-shitty Clinton) and the box-office malaise of 2016 (watch a shitty sequel or another not-as-shitty sequel; either way, it's the same shit as what's come before.) We're due for a major correction on both fronts, a fact that can be observed in the unpopularity of both presidential candidates and the increasing number of box-office bombs and the increasing failure of the Hollywood blockbuster machine (just look how many bombs there are this year.)