HARLEY QUINN, SEASON 1

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

In my remarks on MAD LOVE, I noted that during Harley Quinn's early appearances, co-creator Paul Dini avoided showing her commit any homicides, even when she might have tried to do so. Possibly Dini wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to do with the character. One of Dini's personal friends voiced Harley, and maybe Dini had some instinct that he might play the demented damsel as something other than just a duplicate of her murderous boyfriend The Joker. Within less than two years from Harley's television debut, Dini wrote MAD LOVE, and planted the seed that Harley might come to see her relationship with Joker as toxic, in strong contradistinction to her BFF bond with fellow super-villainess Poison Ivy.

Eventually Harley became so popular with fans-- at least partly because of her breakup with the Mountebank of Mirth-- that she got her own comic book serials, and, in 2019, her own animated show on stream-TV. The three writer-producers of the show-- I'm just gonna call them Three Guys-- not only center the first season on Harley's breakup with Joker, they justify Harley's rampages as a reaction against The Patriarchy That Keeps Women and Non-Whites Down. 

Three Guys' world is also a world in which the villains are the stars and the heroes are all a bunch of semi-competent stiffs who don't get the joke. It's an ironic reversal-of-values concept, strikingly similar to Mark Millar's equally meretricious graphic novel WANTED. As in the Millar work, ultraviolence and explicit language are the main attractions. In this world Harley is just as committed to wholesale slaughter as Joker, which, in one respect, is a logical development for a crazy woman in love with a mass murderer. The first episode of Season 1 shows Harley raid a ship full of rich pricks (who are tagged as "Whites," which means it's OK to kill them even if they're not explicitly lawbreakers). The only reason Harley doesn't kill the fat cats is because her egotistical BF intervenes to do most of the killing. This honks off Harley because she wants to establish her own super-villain rep, with the side-mission of joining the world's greatest villain-cabal, The Legion of Doom.

Joker leaves Harley in the lurch and she's confined in Arkham for the next year. Her friend Ivy tries to convince Harley that Joker's neglect shows his true lack of regard for his supposed girlfriend, but Harley takes a lot of convincing. After she finally breaks up with Joker, Harley attempts to carve out her rep independent of Joker, petitioning the Legion of Doom for membership and gathering a crew of ne'er-do-well super-crooks: Clayface, King Shark, and Doctor Psycho. Psycho, incidentally, is also used as a feminist whipping boy: despite being a villain who's committed countless crimes, he suffers societal cancellation and ejection from the Legion because he publicly uses the "c-word" for his nemesis Wonder Woman.

The level of satire here matches that of a vignette on ROBOT CHICKEN, where superhero tropes are slammed with loads of juvenile scat humor. I'm not sure how serious the Three Guys are in their condemnations of Evil White Patriarchs, but they say nothing of consequence about the subject. At times they come closer to exposing the extremes of ultraliberal rhetoric, probably unintentionally. The closest the Three Guys come to satire is when Harley visits her decadent parents in Bensonhurst, and is promptly betrayed by them, because their super-villain daughter cut off their path to social climbing.

I must admit the animation looks good both in the action scenes and in the "character moments," broad as they are. Sometimes the jokes about the comics-characters are funny, usually if they're executed quickly a la ROBOT CHICKEN, but longer sequences, like the evisceration of Commissioner Gordon, prove monotonous. I give the mythicity a rating of "fair" simply because the characters of Harley and Ivy have good chemistry even when put through a rhetorical wringer, though I found Ivy a little bit too "goody-good" compared to her comics incarnation. The mythos of this season is definitely that of irony, in which all values are mortified, as in being ground down in a mortar.