The creator of Suicide Squad’s
cultural evolution of “Daddy’s l
WORDS CHRIS HEWITTstandout onthe
itttle monster”PAUL DINI, THE man behind Harley
Quinn, can pinpoint the moment when he
knew his creation had truly made it. It was last
October, in fact. The Saturday before
Hallowe’en, a time for most Los Angelenos to
have a massive hooley. And then Dini peered out
of his window. “I saw a roving gang of Harley
Quinns going down the street,” he laughs. “There
was a schoolgirl Harley, in a red-and-black outit
with the mask, a steampunk Harley, and the
regular movie Harley. They were everywhere. I
looked at my wife and said, ‘Well, there’s Daddy’s
little monster.’”
Yes, 24 years after Dini, then a writer on
Batman: The Animated Series, irst introduced
Harley Quinn, it’s fair to say she’s having
a moment. A zeitgeist-piercing surge that can
be traced back to that “regular movie”, Suicide
Squad. David Ayer’s wildly successful caper ($745
million worldwide) brought together a bunch of
the DC Universe’s baddest bad guys, including
Will Smith’s Deadshot, Jai Courtney’s CaptainBoomerang and Jay Hernandez’s El Diablo,
and watched them cede the spotlight to
Margot Robbie’s colourful, capricious take on
the Joker’s mad, bad and dangerous-to-know
girlfriend.
She gets almost all of the best lines.
She gets the meatiest story, as she begins
to establish an identity away from her
psychotic paramour. And the lion’s share
of the ilm’s key moments. And in the new
Extended Edition version of the ilm, the
bulk of the additional 13 minutes restored
to Ayer’s ilm involve Harley.
There’s a deeper dive into the twisted
mechanics behind her relationship with
Jared Leto’s Joker: a lengthy scene in which
a distraught and pre-transformation-in-vat-of-
acid Harley chases down the Clown Prince
Of Crime and, pausing only to kill a passing
trucker, demands at gunpoint that the Joker
fall in love with her. “A heart scares you and
a gun doesn’t?” she asks. And then there’s