The Suicide Squad & Hyperviolence: Themes

The Suicide Squad rocks. Hard. It’s an action spectacle and a feast for the eyes, one that balances grit and humor with ease thanks to its incredible cast and creative writing. But what truly makes the movie stand out, more than its obscure characters, interesting plot and animated style, is its violence. This film does nothing to hold back on gore. It is chock full of blood, organs, dismemberment, and everything in between. While other movies use violence for flair or aesthetics, The Suicide Squad uses violence for a multitude of reasons relevant to the plot and characters, among other things. Out of love for this film and James Gunn’s  work in the last few years, I want to highlight this films best aspects, and show why The Suicide Squad’s extreme violence was so vital to the success and substance of this movie. Oh, and I’m not holding back on spoilers, so if you need to hold back on reading this I understand.

First and most important are the movies themes. Unlike most comic book movies, The Suicide Squad genuinely has a lot to say, and the way it communicates its major points is through its most violent scenes, beginning with the mayhem on the beach. What seems at first like a doomed start to the mission proves to be an extreme diversion, with Waller sacrificing a large chunk of the squad to ensure Bloodsport’s team can infiltrate Corto Maltese safely. This battle is immediately disastrous and tone setting, and shows how manipulative Waller, and by extension the U.S government is. She sees the villains she has enlisted as pawns, assets that she can expend however she wants. It makes sense, everyone she intended to survive has either military training, or superhuman abilities that ensure the success of the mission. Though the fact that she would trade lives to cover up American secrets is vile, and something Gunn illustrates so well even before we can see the bigger picture. These people, no matter how evil, were promised a chance at freedom, but were instead mutilated, shot, burnt, blown up and otherwise abused.

The other scene I want to highlight is about twenty minutes into the movie. The squad is tasked with saving Rick Flagg, who is supposedly being held prisoner by resistance fighters. With a “kill everything that moves” mentality, they slaughter everyone they see, who are mostly people cleaning, bathing, sleeping or doing other mundane tasks. When they finally find Flag, it turns out that the resistance fighters were willing to help, and that their goals aligned. What makes this revelation worse is that during this killing spree, Bloodsport and Peacemaker were having a dick measuring contest on who could murder a civilian the best. This is another example of how gung-ho America can be, and how much value we place on the lives of minorities and foreign people. If it benefits us, we kill and exploit them. If they share our values, they become an asset. The American government has no morals, they only act out of self interest. If Flag had died on the beach, no one would have cared. Peacemaker would have gone about his mission with no physical or moral challenge. Nothing changes. This scene begins to paint a picture of greater moral changes within the group and plants narrative seeds that sprout beautifully later in the movie.

The two strongest ideologies in this movie clash toward the start of the third act. Flag and Ratcatcher find out that Project Starfish was funded and ran by the U.S., whom now want all traces of the project destroyed to cover their tracks. Upon realizing he is, in his own words, a puppet, Flag vows to take the file and release it to the press. Peacemaker, in a betrayal of trust, threatens to kill Flag in order to “protect the peace”. What ensues is a brutal fight between the two, where they go blow for blow in an incredible display of strength. Though, what’s most interesting about this fight isn’t the Star-Crossed watching from their cages, the fitness of both characters or even what’s on the hard drive. It’s the fact that they both believe they’re right. Smith believes he’s a hero for maintaining peace, and Flag believes he’s in the right for having integrity and trying to earn justice for those lost to Starro. Their brutality says it all, I mean these two really fuck each other up in the name of America. It’s just that they’re fighting for two different versions of a nation that doesn’t truly exist for either of them. Their violence against each other shows how much their nation means to them, and plays into the film's themes on heroism in a very tragic way.

My final example of how violence conveys the themes of the movie is its climax, “The Suicide Squad Vs Starro The Conqueror”. In the finale, The Squad defends Corto Maltese against Starro and the Star-Crossed, deciding that leaving the island helpless would be wrong. While it isn’t as gorey as other parts of the movie, it does get rough, one highlight being Polka-Dot Man’s death. To me, this scene sums up the films themes in one beautiful act of defiance. Rather than abandon the island as Waller orders, the team does the morally correct thing, creating some redemption for themselves. The choice is one of pure selflessness; abandoning the objective means death, instant and cruel. Yet it was the idea of unity, one good act of heroism bookending miserable lives that made it worth doing. By no means does it make them good or pure in the end, but it shows us that good is still worth something to these five. For all the bad they did, The Squad would have seen no reward, but in their dissent, they found greater emotional and moral rewards than they would have returning to jail.