Warning: SPOILERS for The Suicide Squad.
In 2021’s The Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) escapes from her Corto Maltese captors with arguably a liberal application of flower power. The movie continues the character development that began with David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad and Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). The Suicide Squad sees the result of her move away from the Joker as she becomes a stronger and more independent person, but is still a little crazy.
After being captured by the Corto Malteseans at the start of The Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn is first partnered with President Silvio Luna. However, when she kills him because he has shown the red flag of wanting to kill children, the new president has her held captive, tortured, and interrogated. Taking her chance to escape, she kills the guard, breaks free, and proceeds to kill every member of the Corto Maltese army that stands between her and the exit. As she guns men down with dual machine guns, colorful flowers, petals, and birds begin to appear around her and her victims giving the whole scene a surreal feel.
While the movie is full of strange abilities and visuals (most notably Polka-Dot Man), this visual choice is not a new power for Harley Quinn. James Gunn is now famous for his use of strange music and strange visuals in Guardians of the Galaxy, and he has carried that across to The Suicide Squad. The scene serves as a visual representation of how Quinn herself sees the world and her actions within it. The flowers hint at an element of whimsy that is in stark contrast to the blood being shed around her. Additionally, the inclusion of a couple of small yellow birds flying around is likely Gunn providing a counterpoint to the grisly character of Savant (Michael Rooker) who is introduced with his killing of a yellow bird with a tennis ball for no discernable reason.
This surreal depiction of Harley Quinn’s perception of the world is actually not new. The scene serves as a callback to a scene in Birds of Prey where Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) and his goons are torturing Harley to get her to do what he wants: retrieve an expensive diamond. As Quinn gets punched in the face, the film cuts to a musical scene focused on Harley Quinn singing “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” that parodies Marilyn Munroe’s performance of the song. The performance then breaks down to become distorted and include Sionis before, with another punch, she is snapped out of the vision and given an ultimatum.
These scenes serve an important purpose for the characterization of Harley Quinn. While some adaptations of the character have written her off as Joker’s ditzy sidekick, the DCEU and the animated TV show Harley Quinn have maintained her background as an intelligent psychiatrist. In Birds of Prey, she clearly disassociates as a way of coping with the torture that she is going through. In The Suicide Squad she sings as she is tortured in a similar way, and then her brain provides her with surreal visual stimuli that mean she doesn’t have to face what she is really doing to these people. This explains how she can be so quirky and also so unapologetically violent, and her separation from reality may also explain her extended relationship with The Joker.
