GIRLBOSS TROUBLE

 This CRITICAL DRINKER video was posted to YouTube in the last week. An "Open Bar" discussion followed but didn't add anything

 much.

I've followed Critical Drinker for some years now, and though I don't agree with him on various subjects, this was one of his better rants, even with the predictable, eyeball-grabbing title of "XXX IS DEAD." In many of his videos CD repeatedly complains about the offense to verisimilitude every time a female outfights a male in a way CD doesn't like. Yet until this "Female Action Movie was Killed by the Girlboss" thing, I didn't think he was very good on the history of femme-fight movies. 

Here, however, he contrasted a lot of the female action franchises of the 2000s and 2010s prior to the rise of the girlboss, such as Resident Evil, Underworld, Lara Croft, Hunger Games and (potentially) Kill Bill. He said they were accepted by mass audiences in part because none of them were trying to usurp the place of the male action movies, which is something we began seeing with increased frequency in the late 2010s. To those franchises one might also add some above-average one-shot films like Jolie's Salt and Theron's Atomic Blonde, though the latter showed up during the flood of the girlboss flicks. The Open Bar mentions how some of the nineties movies promoted actresses who clearly didn't have any command of fake-fighting, like Halle Berry and Pam Anderson. 

I hesitate to say that any particular moviemaking craze (talking here about the crazes of the moviemakers, not the viewers) kills things dead for all time. But he made a credible case for audiences avoiding reasonably competent flicks like BALLERINA and FURIOSA because audiences got burned so many times with crapfests like BIRDS OF PREY and THE MARVELS. Of course the Disney STAR WARS films were profitable even though they did what Drinker most hated-- slotting in girlbosses in place of established heroes-- but that was before we were drowned in all the MCU dreck, as well as some DC dreck as well. The new FANTASTIC FOUR movie sounds like its makers are still infected with the girlboss disease, so we'll see if it flops and validates CD's fatigue claims. 

Now I don't think this century is the first time filmmakers have overpowered female fighters. 1974's POLICEWOMEN, despite a scene in which Sondra Currie only beats Big Big Smith thanks to judo techniques, concludes with a scene where Currie vanquishes another male hulk with several straight punches and one kick. CD gives the Asian female action films a pass, but how often did chopsockies and "girls with guns" movies show women duking it out with men the same way, and not really getting thrown by a loop by superior strength blows? Only a couple hundred times, I'd say.        

Lastly, I am aware of one still successful girlboss franchise: HBO's HARLEY QUINN show, which enjoyed five seasons so far and is allegedly getting a sixth. I watched the first three seasons and thought they were all crap except for the general quality of the animation. HQ is entirely a girlboss, and the third season even has her replace Batman in the "Bat-family" of heroes. Granted, Harley earned a degree of spinoff success before HBO, and the character still seems wildly popular with cosplayers. And the HQ cartoon has an advantage over the BIRDS OF PREY movie, since the cartoon is sort of a Liberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of foul language and ultraviolence. So if HQ is the only current girlboss franchise that bucks the failures of MCU movies and of streaming shows based on the STAR WARS and STAR TREK properties, it could partly be due to other factors that the pure girlboss project lacks.

MYTHCOMICS: BATMAN: THE JOKER WAR (BATMAN 95-100, 2020)

... Joker considers both Batman and himself to be above the common breed of "civilized men," telling him, "Don't talk like you're one of them. You're not, even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak." I guess I'm fortunate Nolan didn't work in any mentions of Ubermenschen, possibly counting on audiences to interpolate the (false) idea that Nietzsche's supermen were simply strong men who ignored society's rules. -- my review of DARK KNIGHT.

 This five-issue arc appeared on the heels of two other arcs in the regular BATMAN comic, both scribed by James Tynion IV. In the first one, CITY OF BANE, Bane kills faithful butler Alfred. In the next, THEIR DARK DESIGNS, several of Batman's familiar rogues -- including the Joker, resurrected from the usual villain-death-- set up the theft of Bruce Wayne's billions, which is the main story-trope of THE JOKER WAR. In addition, during DESIGNS Tynion, in concert with artist Jorge Jimenez, introduced Punchline, the Joker's replacement for his former partner, which debut includes an inevitable "first fight" between Punchline and Harley Quinn. I passed on reading CITY OF BANE, but to put JOKER WAR in perspective I did reread DESIGNS. As on my first reading, I found that it was just a basic Bat-adventure, with the intro of Punchline being that arc's only distinguishing aspect.

WAR is more complex than DESIGNS, for this third Bat-arc partly builds upon, and partly rejects, Christopher Nolan's quasi-Marxist interpretation of Joker. Some might aver that Nolan's above line about Batman and Joker being members of some elect group had already been suggested by assorted comics-writers, not least Frank Miller, but Nolan certainly popularized the concept. On the third page of WAR's first section, Tynion takes Nolan-Joker's sentiments and takes them in a similar direction, as Batman relates to an imaginary Alfred in his head:

I'm the only other person in this world he thinks is alive...

 

At the same time, Nolan-Joker shows utter contempt for money, while Tynion-Joker enjoys having access to the Wayne fortune, even if his main purpose is to use filthy lucre to defeat his destined enemy. That plan revolves around using money to prove Joker's view that Gotham City, the cynosure Batman has devoted his life to protecting, is really more in line with Joker's philosophy than Batman's.

 

One of Joker's opening gambits is to exacerbate the hero's already de-stabilized state of mind by having Punchline expose Batman to a toxin that makes him hallucinate in far more gross ways. Harley Quinn, anxious to keep Joker from turning Gotham into his own crazy town, seeks to aid the crusader, though her ultimate goal is to bring the Clown Prince's reign to a permanent end.

Harley manages to take Batman to a hideout, giving him a counter-agent to the toxin. Under this chemical bombardment, the hero begins to "trip balls" as Harley calls it, which includes another vivid dialogue with Alfred. (Actually, it sounds about the same as the toxin-less hallucination Batman has at the opening of the story.) Imaginary Alfred adds an element that obviously couldn't appear in the Nolanverse, having Alfred claim that Joker "mocks love and family by pulling his acolytes close to him. Making a joke of your family, your relationships. But he'd just as soon put a bullet in their heads if that gave him the upper hand against you." Alfred's subsequent statement about how the number of Joker's victims matters far more to the hero than to Joker, however, sounds largely like a restatement of a similar point in Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

While the crusader trips out, Joker and Punchline enjoy the high life, with Joker commenting on his supposed early life (which of course could be a total fantasy on his part). Punchline mentions that some of their men have been slain by a new vigilante, Clownhunter. Though Joker gives the order to have Clownhunter "crucified" as an example, the villain is pleased to see the rise of an avenger who doesn't obey Batman's no-killing principles, because that confirms Joker's view of Gotham as a "kill or be killed" cesspool.

A little later, Punchline invades Harley's hideout and tries to kill both Harley and Batman. In terms of gender politics, Tynion must tread carefully here. Since the original Harley-Joker relationship of the nineties Bat-cartoon was denounced as toxic, Harley can't be seen as merely jealous of Joker's new female partner/girlfriend. For that matter, Punchline makes clear that she's not into Joker for reasons of passion, but because she admires his unswerving devotion to chaos. And Tynion largely succeeds in making the catfight about how each female projects, or has projected, her desires under the empty vessel of the Clown Prince. Tynion even throws in the irony that "there's nothing in the world that [Joker's] ever going to care about more than that stupid bat."

Back in Batman's seething brain, Alfred adds a fairly original wrinkle, stating that "Batman is a child's dream, that you can travel the world and learn every possible way to save everyone"-- but also adding that the dream is important for that very reason. Earlier Punchline has already claimed that Batman, not his kid-associates, is the one who gives his tools their childish names, and a recovering Batman indirectly confirms Punchline's hunch in a funny scene with Harley. 

Not too surprisingly, Joker too echoes the insight about a "child's fantasy," though he calls it "selfish and strange" because Batman has sought to alter Gotham from its true corrupt nature. But Batman has one advantage: a whole Bat-family invested in his dream, and with the help of that family Batman turns the tide against Joker's army and recovers the Wayne fortune. Bat and Clown meet at Ace Chemical, the place where most versions of Joker were clown-ified, and though the result of this never-ending battle is inevitable, Tynion concocts a reasonably original climax. 

Harley shows up while both combatants are on their last legs. She attaches one bomb to the tied-up Joker and another to herself, then runs away, forcing Batman to choose to save her life or Joker's. Batman makes the right choice, though naturally the villain escapes via his own resources, though not without a little humiliation. An epilogue shows Batman perform an "intervention" for the vigilante Clownhunter, trying to persuade him to give up his unholy fixation on killing.

JOKER WAR, though it's a better than average Bat-myth, is certainly no classic. There are too many segues in which Batman encounters zombies of some sort, both imaginary and brought about through some obscure Joker-science, and the Alfred-delusions would have made more sense if all of them had been triggered by the toxins. (There's a loose excuse that even before getting dosed, Batman was injured in the previous arc, but it's not a convincing reason for his fantasies.) There's a nothing subplot about Gotham's other villains trying to profit from the chaos, but it just takes up space. To my eye Jimenez resembles a more rough-hewn version of Jim Lee's work in the celebrated HUSH storyline, giving maximum moxie to even minor villains and to briefly seen members of the Bat-family. 

"MAD LOVE" (BATMAN ADVENTURES, 1994)

I've already done a short review of the animated adaptation of this one-shot comic here and gave that episode a strong mythicity rating. While a number of beat-for-beat adaptations don't necessarily duplicate the myth-discourse of their originals, both original and derivation are equally good at depicting the psychological morass in the mind of Harley Quinn.

Harley's co-creator Paul Dini has stated that he had no notion that the girl in the jester outfit was going to become one of the most enduring characters of nineties comics. Originally Dini only meant to give Joker a female henchwoman loosely akin to the molls who accompanied many male villains on the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. However, even the few molls who patterned their attire after that of their male leader were usually just there to look pretty. Even though Harley was not intended to appear more than once, Dini had her voiced by his college buddy Arleen Sorkin, and even in that one episode there was more back-and-forth between Harley and Joker than one ever found in a 1966 Bat-episode.

Since Harley's character evolved organically, it's possible that Dini never really thought about the Harley-Joker relationship changing in early episodes. However, MAD LOVE shows the writer, teamed with artist/co-creator Bruce Timm, finally decided to portray that interaction as fundamentally toxic. Joker was, after all, a manic killer, and it may not be coincidence that in her animated episodes Dini didn't actually show Harley callously killing anyone, however often she fought with Batman and his allies.

So LOVE starts out showing Joker and Harley trying to knock off Commissioner Gordon. Batman prevents this, but Harley is instrumental in stunning the crusader so that the two criminals escape. (Note: the cartoon improves on the Joker's farewell line, having the villain say, "may the floss be with you.") On the same page, though, Joker is seen to be completely ungrateful for Harley's help.

Batman then converses with Alfred, musing on Harley's origins. Two details that were omitted from the cartoon: that Harley got into college on a gymnastics scholarship, and that she apparently used sex to pad her college resume.

Meanwhile, Joker is taking it hard about getting defeated again, and he's so desperate for a new Batman-slaying scheme that he starts reviewing old schemes he already discarded. After being maltreated by her "puddin'" once again, Harley almost has a moment of clarity about her rotten love-life. 

This leads to an extended flashback, in which she goes to work at Joker's perennial prison, Arkham Asylum. She's secretly hoping to garner big-time secrets from some of the celebrity inmates in order to write a best-selling tell-all book, But Joker sees in Doctor Harleen Quinzell a mark to be played, and he plays her so well that she abandons all her small-time ambitions, making her into what she believes to be the perfect "Clown Princess of Crime."

But at the end of her flashback, Harley ends up blaming Batman for all of her troubles. She uses Joker's discarded piranha-fish death-trap and traps Batman in it. Batman's only hope is to play on her psychological vulnerabilities, in a more honest manner than Joker did, by convincing her to call Joker in to witness his eternal foe's demise.

Joker comes. Joker is not pleased that his girlfriend trumped him.

So Harley's reward for patterning herself after a clown-themed stone killer is almost getting killed. Batman escapes thanks to having brought Joker into the mix, and Joker seems to "die" in his own big fall. At story's end, Harley returns to Arkham but as an inmate. This time, she almost comes to terms with her own egotistical follies. But Dini wasn't quite ready for Harley's reform, and LOVE ends with her re-descent into the best known "amour fou" of the superhero genre.

But she didn't stay lost in that delusion, and over time Harley became the poster girl for women working their way out of toxic relationships with men, as seen in the 2016 SUICIDE SQUAD. (No one seems interested in whether her girl-on-girl friendship with Poison Ivy might prove equally-- or even literally-- just as toxic, but -- baby steps, baby steps.)