Spoilers follow for the film Batman and Harley, out soon on Blu-Ray and DVD.
Do you remember Mad Love? It’s the seminal, Eisner Award-winning origin story of Harley Quinn, the madcap villain and sidekick-lover of Batman Big Bad, the Joker. Mad Love was written by Harley’s creators, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, and was even adapted into an episode of Batman: The Animated Series—their seminal, award-winning cartoon show.
That was the ’90s. Since then, thanks to Warner Bros. and DC Comics, Harley’s gone through some risqué changes to both her costume and character, a critically panned live-action Suicide Squad film that appeared to revel in her abuse, and now, most recently, a putrid mess of a movie titled Batman and Harley Quinn, out now from Warner Bros. Animation. The new film does all it can to put its eponymous leading lady through gratuitous sexualization, fill retrograde gender roles, and nearly sexually assault one of its main characters.
That’s right. Harley ties Nightwing down and fucks him (because “LOL?”). In case you were wondering, she also initiates foreplay by asking if he used to be a kid sidekick.
“Hey Nightwing, is it true you used to be Robin?” Quinn asks the former Boy Wonder about 18 minutes into the film. This is after she captures and detains him in her home and strips down to her underwear in front of him while commenting on how sweaty she felt after fighting him. It happens after we learn she was offered roles in porn. It happens several minutes after the film gives us its first glimpse of Quinn: a shot of her ass Nightwing sees while ogling her through the window of Superbabes, AKA Gotham City’s superhero-themed Hooters.
If it sounds like bad fan-fiction to you, it gets tawdrier. Just go to the tape. There’s a moment, captured in the GIF above, where Harley turns to Nightwing, appears to look down at his crotch and react before propositioning him:
Harley Quinn: Little Boy Wonder all grown up. [Looks at Nightwing’s crotch, reacts with wide eyes and opened mouth. Smiles.]
Nightwing: OK now, don’t be getting any funny ideas.
Harley Quinn: Too late. [Flicks off light switch.] It’s funny, I always kind of thought you and Batman didn’t like girls.
Nightwing: Wait, what?!
Harley climbs up onto him on the bed and they exchange some even-lousier dialogue before he relents after some half-hearted protestation—a groan- and eye-roll-inducing “the things I do for Gotham”—they kiss, and the scene cuts. Beth Elderkin correctly explained the interaction at io9:
Either it’s a male gaze–based fantasy, where the female character can’t help but want to bang the guy so badly she’ll force the situation, or it’s borderline sexual assault. Nightwing appears to give consent, but he’s still been rendered unable to say no. (If the genders were reversed, we’d be seeing it in an entirely different way.)
It also screams of creatively bankrupt writing, considering Quinn was created as a tragicomic character who was emotionally and physically abused for years by Batman’s most psychopathic villain. Like in Suicide Squad, the decision here to highlight Quinn’s buxom cartoon body at every opportunity appears to have been an attempt to infuse a kids’ superhero story with adult imagery and plot, accompanied by none of the grown-up thematic content to accompany it. It’s lewd fan service at best and crude fan insult at worst.
It doesn’t help that the remainder of the film—which, apart from the fight scenes, is filled with uncomfortably stilted animation—doesn’t redeem that decision. Its plot vacillates wildly between being a three-way comedy between Batman, Nightwing, and Harley Quinn and a hard pivot into dull schmaltz. One scene lines up a series of cameos to random but memorable characters from B:TAS before ending with a campy nod to the ’60s Batman television show. It’d actually be funny if it didn’t kick into gear with a Harley Quinn song-and-dance number where she further sexualizes herself for the benefit of dudes in the audience by shaking her breasts.
What’s left of the movie is a plodding, poorly written caper in which the heroes and Quinn take on Poison Ivy, who is attempting to change the world into plants, and a wannabe Groot with a dictionary. The climax of the film—after a withering fisticuff throw-down between Quinn and Ivy—very literally boils down to Quinn crying in front of Ivy in an effort to convince her not to change the world into plants, and…it works. At some point, Swamp Thing shows up and immediately leaves. What never shows up is any worthwhile critique of all the people ogling Quinn, or meaningful exploration of her sexuality from her own perspective. Apparently, that’s not what Timm and Co. seem to think their audience want.
More’s the pity, given that unnecessarily sexualizing female protagonists isn’t exactly new territory for Warner Bros. Animation. Batman and Harley Quinn is a PG-13 direct-to-video animated film marketed toward older fans, but last summer saw the release of the much-reviled R-rated adaptation of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s controversial but beloved graphic novel The Killing Joke. Also produced by Timm, it managed to treat Batgirl less as a character and more “as disposable refuse” who just so happens (presumably also because “LOL?”) to fuck Batman before the events of the movie proper. Those are events which, for those who aren’t familiar with the comics, resulted in her torture at the hands of the Joker, leave her paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.
That’s why this Harley Quinn film is such a disappointment. It may seem like a comedy when compared to The Killing Joke, but it’s 2017, and presumably men have learned to write better jokes by now. It’s also very much an anniversary film, filled with references nodding to the 25 years since B:TAS first aired and Quinn was first introduced into Batman’s dynamic rogues’ gallery. Adding insult to injury is the knowledge that this film is the first canonical entry to the DC Animated Universe since Justice League Unlimited wrapped its final season more than a decade ago.
The bottom line here is that a film that should have been a simple victory lap turned into a real misfire. It would have been a barrel of laughs to just watch a Harley Quinn solo movie, without Batman or Nightwing. It would have been a treat to instead watch a remake of a story as poignant and tragic as the first adaptation of Mad Love, which was one of the most surprising and quietly ambitious episodes of television made in the ’90s. It would have been a gift to watch a film that took a shot across the live-action DCEU producers’ bow and relished Quinn’s sexuality on her terms without the male gaze.
What we got instead was Harley Quinn fucking Nightwing and some bad jokes.
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