Issue #56: Souped Up Tentpoles 🎪
Issue #56: Souped Up Tentpoles 🎪
No Time To Die + The Suicide Squad
We’re barrelling headfirst into 2022 (who said the sun could set at 4pm?!) so it’s as good a time as any to clear out some of the movie mulch from this year. This week we’re bringing you more major blockbuster releases — or they would have been, in a regular year. These superheroes weren’t the same box office draw they once were, but were no less interesting to consider.
First up: Zosha with some spoiler-y thoughts on No Time to Die and where it leaves her majesty’s secret service. Then Cate on The Suicide Squad, the second outing for the titular squad (or some of them), but no less biting in their exploits. Happy movie yelling!
Zosha on No Time To Die
Before you ask, let me answer the question at the forefront of your mind: In No Time To Die, someone does say, “You know what time it is? … Time to die!” The question is not directed at James Bond, but it’s still important that you know that.
Because here is also the thing [spoiler coming, better stop reading if you don’t wanna be spoiled, here we go]: James Bond does die. And not in a way the franchise could easily squirm out of it (though it wouldn’t be the dumbest stunt a franchise has ever tried to pull). At the end of No Time To Die, Bond stares down incoming missiles as he talks on the phone with his lady love, knowing her and his daughter were safe from harm. After several decades of adventures, the man has finally perished.
More than a week out, the thing that lingers with me is how conservative the ending feels. Bond died saving the world, as we always knew he might. He ensured the girl was good, like he often did. But ultimately No Time presents his death as if it is his only option: he’s mortally wounded, sure (like, he’s been worse probably), but really it’s the nanobots he’s been infected with that would kill his child and love were he ever to touch them again.* Once infected, he moves slowly, mentally working his way through any possibility for escape from certain doom. But it becomes clear before too long that he has resigned himself to his fate. His death may come from a bomb, but James Bond dies of a broken heart.
There shouldn’t be anything surprising about it, I suppose, even in a world where James Bond has now canonically died. The Bond world was never a close study in continuity, even in the serial installments of the Daniel Craig era; it should be easy enough to slot in a new Bond actor somewhere along the timeline, maybe even with a wink to the timey-wimeyness of it all. That “James Bond will Return”, as the end credits have always teased, feels less like a promise and more like a threat. Bond could represent a new world, but probably he’ll always be James Bond, fantasy masculinity. The surprising thing is that Bond needed a reason to die, and that the reason should be the deprivation of his partner and child. There’s a world I can imagine where the fact that he could never touch them would be the way we write this little family out of the story completely, so he may still jetsetting and kicking ass. But No Time To Die (blessedly) couldn’t imagine that. The film recognizes the heartbreak as a death sentence, and James Bond goes gentle into that dark night, having already spent most of the near three hours of its runtime pushing her away.
As for the rest of the film, is it worth it? It’s not terrible. Having seen a number of 2 ½+ hour movies in the theater over the past few weeks I’ve grown a bit numb and even appreciative of the privilege of spending three hours in a dark theater, to the point where I feel I have to warn people that only they can justify the runtime to themselves. No Time breaks up nicely into hour or so chunks, so you can do the Irishman thing and watch it like a miniseries. But there is something to sitting and taking in the whole of Bond’s machismo across No Time To Die, as it stretches and unfurls. You see the cracks Craig has worked to put in his foundation, his hardheadedness and fragility. How deaths wear on him and echo back through his time on screen. How he loves; how he stops himself from love.
I didn’t come from a Bond family, and I will not say this performance is the definitive Bond. But I will say that the more I reflect on it Daniel Craig feels like the only person who could have shepherded this role from the highs of Casino Royale to the place it ended up. His installments were increasingly self-serious, bruising, and sometimes dull. But they did seem to be aware of the heart of the man, even if they could only sometimes sell us on the chemistry.** If James Bond needed a reason to go out, Craig is maybe the only person who could’ve sold us on it.
*I, briefly in the theater, thought the nanobots he had been injected with would kill anyone, rather than just being designed around the DNA of his loved ones. And honestly the idea of Daniel Craig wishing goodbye to a franchise that he grew antagonistic towards while leaving Bond incapable of screwing, let alone touching anyone still makes me cackle.
**For being love of each other’s life, Bond and Swann are incredibly wooden around each other.
Cate on The Suicide Squad
I’m not ashamed to say that for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the inescapable glut of superhero films that have dominated the movie landscape for the last decade. Between Marvel and DC, the quality has varied, with Marvel pulling well ahead. But DC has had its own successes and seems to be steadily improving as it goes. Unlike many if not most of its predecessors, The Suicide Squad is a largely enjoyable film with entertaining moments and great character beats, but in the aggregate it left me cold. There is so little that is new or surprising in this genre, that it takes true innovation to get anywhere close to the inventiness that makes these films truly sing. That said, more than the colour, lightness and fun of the film — in contrast to the films that came before it — what stuck out to me most was how the script treats the character Amanda Waller.
In The Suicide Squad, our titular heroes are tasked with destroying data that proves the US government is complicit in the exploitation of and experimentation on innocent people on the island nation of Corto-Maltese. Now that the nation has fallen into the hands of anti-American rulers, the United States wants to eliminate any evidence of past cooperation, and seed dissent as punishment for the country’s changing political alliance. It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill American-intervention-as-contemporary-imperialism ploy.
Now, the entire premise of the the suicide squad is that a group of villains are commanded, on pain of death, to complete black ops missions at the pleasure of the US government. It is built in that the protagonists are the de facto bad guys and the pleasure of the story is watching morally flexible people be pulled into the light against their own will. We get to watch villains become heroes, and the journey is the point.
But Amanda Waller — played here by Viola Davis — is the agent in command of the squad, nicknamed “Task Force X.” Dark-skinned and a villain herself, she’s the only “bad” character who never gets redemption. Instead, she’s singled out as the one true villain of the story.
It’s a curious choice to make a dark-skinned black woman the face and true agent of American imperialism. Without detailing the history of how Black people arrived in the US, it should be a given that having a black woman side with the state is a loaded choice — it’s the same reason we don’t fuck with cop shows anymore. But what makes this stand out is that Waller is not the only black woman in the cast. She’s not even the only dark-skinned character. But she is the only dark-skinned black woman, and that calls attention to the stereotypes often used to denigrate women who look like her.
Bloodsport, played by Idris Elba, is a felon who initially reisits Waller’s plan to recruit him into the task force, but relents when she threatens to throw his 16 year old daughter — played by Storm Reid — into prison. From the very beginning, the audience is given a reason to sympathize with him and forgive him. He’s only doing this to save his (light-skinned) daughter. Waller however stands in contrast to them both. She repeatedly threatens Elba’s character with his daughter’s imprisonment in order to keep him in line. And to add salt in the wound, she also has an explosive device implanted in the base of his skull in the event that he disobeys her orders.
Throughout the film, Waller is seen directing the squad from a control room staffed with other workers who monitor the villains and help them with the surveillance needs of the mission. The team is mostly white, but does also have another light-skinned black woman on staff. Throughout the film they are shown to be uneasy with Waller’s supposed bloodlust and tentative to carry out her kill orders. And at the climax of the film, they revolt, with the light-skinned black woman knocking her unconscious so that she cannot kill our heroes.
Again, this plot development is not a problem in a vacuum. All films have antagonists against whom the heroes must rebel. But the movie squarely lays the blame for the destruction of Corto-Maltese (by a giant alien starfish???) at her feet. Once American interests are protected, she has no concern for civilian life. Innocent people are not her purview. The members of the suicide squad are all given the opportunity to earn their humanity by defying her orders and saving the city. But Waller is left snarling and angry that they will not simply let civilians die. She is left as the character who cannot be redeemed, despite the well established body counts of the rest of the cast.
If there were other women who looked like her in the cast, Waller would be free to be as evil as desired, because the pressures of being “the only one” would be eliminated. But as it stands, of the three black women in the cast, only the dark-skinned one is evil, and it is a light-skinned black woman who “defeats” her. That fact unintentionally creates a dichotomy of “acceptable” black womanhood in which dark-skinned black women do not appear. They do not get redemptions. They are the root of the story’s evil.
When it comes down to it, Marvel and DC have largely been subscribing to the Disney model of fixing one mistake per movie. So I have no doubt that the next film in this saga will at least have a more nuanced take on Waller than simply making her a stoic psychopath. But it would be nice to have these things taken into consideration before the films are scripted and produced. Small blunders like this rarely ruin a film, but they can certainly make them a tad less enjoyable.
Assorted Internet Detritus
ZOSHA: Overthrowing self-care in favor of community care. A comprehensive guide (with graphs!) to ‘90s Dad movies. Behind the certified AITA boom. Actually Kirsten Stewart has always been a good actor. Rethinking “cool” gunfights in the age of gun violence. Should a tree be able to sue the state?
CATE: Why media loves labour movements now, Kristen Stewart’s journey from Twilight to Spencer, statistical evidence of Christmas creep, how the Superbowl wardrobe malfunction undid an icon, investigating who Colin Kaepernick’s new show is actually for, and a look at Passing and the practice that inspired it.
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Zosha + Cate <3
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