 Back in 2016, David Ayer's Suicide Squad was such an epic, all-time disaster of a movie that it should be studied in film schools as a model of what not to do. Almost everything about it, from the insanely rushed script to the aggressive studio meddling to the truly awful editing and music choices, is a masterclass of filmmaking failure. The only thing I'd say the movie got right at all was the casting of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, and maybe even Jai Courtney as Captain Boomeray. Of course, some of the other casting choices were, well, a joke. All this is to say that when DC announced that they were going to do a sequel or a soft reboot just a couple years later, it seemed like a completely idiotic idea. But then director James Gunn signed on, and my opinion started to change. Most people probably know James Gunn from his work with Marvel on Guardians of the Galaxy, but I was first introduced to him through his comedy shorts at Spike.com and Trauma in the mid-2000s, and from fantastic movies like Slither and Super. So, at the very least, I was excited to see what he'd do with the Suicide Squad. And while there are a few flaws in the movie, I'm pleased to say that it was one of the first solid superhero movies I've seen all year. It's not really the most cerebral film of all time, but the very concept of a secret government agency running a Black Ops team comprised of expendable supervillains for entirely nefarious purposes is exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about on this series. So gear up for an extended look at the seedy underbelly of government spy craft, nation building, and real-life mad science experiments, all built around the idea that the state's supposedly noble ends can justify the most horrific means on today's episode of Out of Frame. There's no way to avoid it, but this episode is going to be full of spoilers. And not only for this movie and its predecessor, but also for some of the storylines in the comics and DC's animated films like Batman Assault on Arkham. Fortunately, you can watch the Suicide Squad right now, and if you haven't done so, check it out and come right back. Done? Cool. The story of the Suicide Squad is, in some ways, refreshingly simple. A coup breaks out on the island nation of Kortomaltes, which is reportedly home to a secret Nazi research facility called Jotunheim, where a dangerous experiment called Project Starfish is about to fall into the hands of the new regime. Ruthless government agent, head of Argus and sometimes head of Project Cadmus, Amanda Waller, assembles a colorful team of convicts to infiltrate the island and destroy the facility, compelling them to participate in the off-the-books mission by installing bombs in their heads and threatening to murder their families. The main team includes the Assassin and Mercenary Bloodsport, King Shark, Polka Dot Man, Ratcatcher 2, and possibly the most important person to our discussion, the rather ironically named Peacemaker. Nothing like a bloodbath to start the day. They call you Peacemaker. I cherish peace with all my heart. I don't care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it. Once they're on the island, they meet up with Rick Flagg, played by Joel Kineman, reprising his role from the David Ayer movie. Flagg introduces them to the leader of the Resistance, Sol Soria, who helps them sneak into the capital city where they capture the thinker, who is the mad scientist running the project at Jotunheim. And they learn that Harley Quinn is also on the island, imprisoned by the current regime. After the boys mount a thoroughly unnecessary rescue mission, the fully assembled Suicide Squad makes their way to the research facility where a whole lot of chaos ensues. In addition to the way it really leans into its R-rating, with some inventively absurd violence and how weird and unique the characters are, there's a lot I really like about the film. It doesn't pit people with low to mid-tier power levels against gods or monsters, they'd be ludicrously unequipped to handle. It doesn't overcomplicate a simple Black Ops mission plot with too many side quests or surprises. The script clearly establishes each of the characters, who they are, what they want, and what they can do. And it even manages to find time to give me reasons to care about a crew of anti-heroes who would normally be irredeemable without making me feel like James Gunn is confused about the fact that they're all still bad guys. It's not going to make it into my top 10 or anything, but I've watched it twice now and I'll probably see it again. And beyond all that, The Suicide Squad gives us an absurdist allegory for something that is actually a really big problem. Unaccountable and entirely immoral government action. Perhaps the least surprising aspect of The Suicide Squad is that Amanda Waller can't be trusted. Anyone familiar with any of the comics, movies, TV shows, or cartoons will know that this is a constant theme of her character. She represents the highest and most corrupt levels of government, often reminding us that the greatest threats to the world are not only criminals and monsters, but governments themselves. Waller in particular is one of the more notoriously horrible characters justifying any action, no matter how evil, because she's been empowered by the state to protect the world at any cost. Hey, uh, all that stuff about his daughter, you wouldn't really do that, right? You don't know half of what I would do, John. Of course, in practice this often means that Waller is just protecting herself and her bosses from people who would expose their illicit activities. In David Ayer's Suicide Squad, she employs the team to not only rescue her from danger, but also to prevent anyone from learning about the fact that she essentially created the threat from Enchantress in the first place. She's so committed to the cover-up that she murders her entire staff. Something fairly similar happens in Batman Assault on Arkham. In that movie, Waller sends that version of the Suicide Squad into Arkham Asylum to recover a thumb drive with sensitive information about her agency and the Suicide Squad itself, which had been stolen by the Riddler. The sole purpose of their mission was covering up the existence of the team, and in the end, Riddler escaped and Joker nearly detonated a nuclear bomb in Gotham. The Suicide Squad has the team illegally operating in a foreign country on behalf of the US government with the initial goal of destroying the facility because supposedly it would prevent dangerous technology from falling into the wrong hands. That's how Waller gets non-insane soldiers like Rick Flag to sign onto the mission. It's also how he persuades Sol Soria to help them, even after Bloodsport and Peacemaker murdered most of her compatriots. The predictable problem with all this is Waller lied. Jotunheim is a secret laboratory that houses an incredibly dangerous experiment that could threaten the lives of people all over the world, but it wasn't run by former Nazis or a tin pot dictator. It was a project of the United States government. Anyone familiar with Amanda Waller should have seen this coming a hundred miles away, but for some reason Flag is still surprised. It's easy to think that this kind of heel turn is something that only happens in the comics, but Amanda Waller's character is believable, in part because governments all over the world have always had lunatics using paper-thin utilitarian arguments to justify grotesque and brutal actions. Warning, what I'm about to talk about gets pretty horrific, so if you're squeamish, you might want to skip ahead a bit. I don't think anyone will be too surprised to learn that the Nazis did all sorts of insane things, all supposedly in the name of the greater good, at least for Germany. But I think a lot of people would be shocked to learn the details. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Nazi scientists like Josef Mengele, Erebert Heim, Edward Verth, Karl Klauberk, and Hans Eppinger conducted innumerable human experiments. For example, at Dachau, they starved 90 Roma gypsies and forced them to drink nothing but seawater. At virtually every concentration camp, the Nazis infected prisoners with diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever, or they just subjected them to toxins and poisons like mustard gas or silver nitrate. They used x-rays and injections of iodine to forcibly sterilize Jewish men and women. In some cases, they just burned prisoners or blew them up with bombs to see what would happen, but that's not even the worst of it. A Nazi doctor named Hermann Steeve studied the effect of stress on the reproductive system by raping women and telling them when he was going to murder them. And at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele studied 1,500 sets of twins, 3,000 people over a two-year period. He would amputate their limbs, inject their eyeballs with poison, and he even sewed some of them together in an attempt to conjoin them. When one twin died, he'd kill the other one in order to conduct matching autopsies. And I mean, sure, most of us already know that the Nazis were unusually evil, so it's not like a lot of this is going to blow your mind. But this kind of depravity isn't actually limited to fascist states. Communist the world over did an awful lot of the same things. In 1921, the Soviet secret police opened a laboratory under the direction of Ignady Kozikov, which pulled prisoners from the gulags and experimented on them with mustard gas, ricin, cyanide, and whatever else they could find in order to develop a tasteless, colorless poison that could be used against the enemies of the state. By the 1930s, that lab was overseen by the head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria. Poisons developed in that lab have been used against heads of state and dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. You had guys like Ilya Ivanov, who spent years trying to create an army of human chimpanzee hybrids or Vladimir Demikov, who cut the heads off of dogs and tried to transplant them onto other dog bodies. Trophim Lysenko's insane theories on horticulture and genetics led to the starvation of millions of people. And while he was at the USSR's Academy of Sciences, he had virtually anyone who ever questioned or challenged him executed. In North Korea, defectors and former prison guards like Kwon Hyuk shared stories of doctors performing surgeries on prisoners without anesthesia and subjecting entire families to gas chambers. There are multiple reports of the Cuban government using psychological torture and electroshock against political dissidents. Almost 60 years after Mao's murderous great leap forward, China is still doing a lot of the same stuff today, complete with concentration camps, forced sterilization, imprisoning critics of the Communist Party, and more. They're even currently running a legit super soldier program. We're talking about mad scientists working on behalf of tyrants and thugs who stop at nothing to discover new ways to increase their power. All this stuff feels like it's been ripped out of the pages of a comic book, but I don't think anything that's ever been written in fiction is worse than what those governments did to people. At the core of this horror show has always been the idea that the ends justify the means. People in power have always rationalized deeply immoral actions that steamroll people's individual rights as being necessary for one reason or another. Perhaps they're trying to save their society from an imminent physical threat like a meteor or a contagious disease. Maybe they're looking to stop an invading army. On the other hand, maybe they're trying to stop unacceptable, destabilizing ideas from spreading by silencing their critics or simply trying to take down a political enemy who they believe would destroy their culture or their economy. There will always be reasons to violate other people's rights because doing so paves the way for people with power to get what they want through what is usually the most direct path, coercive force. There are always Amanda Wallers out there willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals because they believe their goals to be noble and righteous. Never mind who they have to hurt or kill along the way. One of my favorite things about The Suicide Squad is that it doesn't romanticize anyone in power. At one point, Harley Quinn is captured by the new president of Cordo Maltese, Sylvia Luna. He tells her that his people view her as some kind of anti-American hero and tries to marry her. That's kind of hilarious all by itself because, much like the Joker, Harley is essentially an apolitical agent of pure chaos, and she even seems to be a little confused by the whole thing. But she rolls with it, and there's a great moment where President Luna reveals what he knows about Jotunheim. I love this part of the film, because in a movie where the real villain is Amanda Waller, it would be super easy to make the third world despot into some kind of hero, simply for being an enemy of America. But James Gunn chose the more realistic path, showing us a dictator who is every bit as evil as the regime he just overthrew. It's moments like this that really make the movie work. Harley Quinn is a bad guy, just like all the other members of The Suicide Squad, but she's not that bad. No one on the team is that bad. Harley, Bloodsport, Ratcatcher 2, Nanaue, and Polka Dot Man all get little opportunities for redemption, even before they have to make the choice to save the whole world from Jotunheim's monster at the end. None of this absolves them of their various crimes, but it gives us something to root for in a movie full of bad people. In fact, the only person who isn't redeemed is Peacemaker, a man who completely embodies the idea of the ends justify the means in every way. Peacemaker is presented as some kind of lunatic, pro-liberty patriot, willing to go to any length to support his warped vision of global stability. He sees himself as a proper superhero, but in reality he's the perfect tool for someone like Amanda Waller to use on a mission to cover up her own government's wrongdoing. When actual soldier and team leader Rick Flag learns the truth about Jotunheim and America's role in Project Starfish, he chooses to disobey Waller's orders. Instead of destroying the data he plans to expose it to the world. There's that rationalization again, as long as he acts in the name of some good, stated ideal, he can do horrible things to anyone and still see himself as a hero. Unfortunately, people like Peacemaker are more common than they seem, and there are a number of instances of the US government employing people like that to do all sorts of surprisingly terrible things. Historically, the US government has declassified a lot of wild stuff over the years that, if we didn't know it was true, would totally seem like crazy conspiracy theories. The various MK programs run by the CIA, like MKUltra or MKDelta, are probably the most obvious examples. These projects involved a ton of human experimentation, sometimes using subjects that didn't even know what was happening. The government studied the effects of different toxins and drugs, sleep and sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock, and even physical and sexual abuse in order to develop new techniques for interrogation and torture. The people who were brought into the program often came from prisons, colleges and universities, drug companies, hospitals. Over 80 institutions in total, usually convinced to participate by people working for fake cover organizations created by the CIA. They even did experiments on dogs involving behavior-altering brain implants. Seriously, the program ran from 1953 until it was decommissioned 20 years later in 1973. And when I was a kid and people would bring it up in the media or characters would talk about it in movies or TV shows like The X-Files, they were always presented as conspiracy theorists and nut chops. And even though details about the program were eventually declassified in 2001, we don't really know the full extent of it because CIA director Richard Helms ordered all of the documentation around MKUltra to be destroyed. Something like 20,000 surviving documents were discovered in 1977, but that was just a fraction of what once existed. We have learned a few things about the program since, though. For instance, as part of the MKUltra program, Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron developed a method of torture called psychic driving by experimenting on Canadian citizens who thought they were agreeing to treatment for anxiety disorders. Many of those people ended up suffering permanent damage, but here's the thing that's really going to shock you. At the same time as he was running those experiments, Donald Cameron was the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association and the president of both the APA and the CPA. If all that doesn't make you skeptical of some of these institutions, I don't know what will. But just to hedge my bets, I have a few more disturbing stories for you. Another CIA program, a precursor to MKUltra called Project Artichoke, studied whether or not they could brainwash people through morphine addiction and hypnosis into committing murder or assassination. There have been various cases of the military spraying chemicals or bacteria overpopulated areas, such as Operation LAC involving the carcinogenic chemical zinc cadmium sulfide or Operation Sea Spray, where the US Navy deliberately released a disease causing bacteria around the San Francisco Bay. Rather famously, the US government, in collaboration with Tuskegee University, brought 600 poor Black sharecroppers from Alabama into a program that we now call the Tuskegee Experiments. These people were promised that they would get free government-provided healthcare, when, in fact, they were unwittingly participating in an experiment to study the long-term effects of untreated syphilis. Two-thirds of the subjects had been secretly diagnosed with the disease, but they were never told they had it and were never treated for it, even though we already knew that penicillin was an effective remedy. That study ran for 40 years, during which time 128 men had died of syphilis or complications from the disease, 40 of the subjects' wives had been infected, and 19 children were born with a congenital condition. Heck, we could go all the way back to the early 20th century, where progressive supporters of eugenics forced the sterilization of 70,000 people who they deemed to have undesirable genetics for one reason or another. And that's all to say nothing of various attempted coups, illegal military actions, arming terrorists and drug lords, election manipulation, and other methods the US government has employed over the years to meddle in other countries' affairs, which they subsequently covered up and which we mostly only find out about long after the fact. So, what I'm saying is, even with a giant mind-controlling alien starfish and a talking shark man in the mix, the plot of the Suicide Squad isn't as crazy or comic booky as it might appear. Now, the reason I tell you all this is not to depress you or bum you out about the state of the world, although I'm sure I've had that effect, but to arm you with knowledge. There are endless examples of governments all over the world ruining people's lives in the name of the greater good. We've just seen another one play out in real time. The US spent 20 years supposedly trying to improve Afghanistan using its incredible military power. And look, the Taliban was, and unfortunately still is, an utterly evil institution. It's a threat to liberty for people wherever they hold power. The world would be an undeniably better place if it didn't exist. Back in the early 2000s, they were relatively easily overpowered by the US military, but in the process, almost 50,000 civilians were killed and nearly 70,000 Afghani soldiers and police officers died to free their country. Utilitarians like Amanda Waller or peacemaker might say that those deaths were worth it in order to push the authoritarian Taliban regime out of power. But a few weeks ago, when the US military finally left the country after two decades, it took all of 11 days for the Taliban to come right back. What a waste. And my concern is that while it's easy to imagine that singularly evil people like Amanda Waller are behind all the bad things, in fact, there are a distressingly large number of regular folks who support these kinds of actions because they actually agree with peacemaker's view of the world. My goal is to help you see the inherent danger whenever someone starts talking about their grand plans to reshape society. I want to empower you to think more carefully about offering your support for anyone who tells you that their end goals justify a course of action that ignores individual rights and treats people as expendable pawns, no matter how well intended those goals seem to be. Don't be someone like Amanda Waller, obviously. Be the Argus employees who finally stand up to her. Don't be peacemaker. Be Rick Flagg or Bloodsport. Be Harley. Be Ratcatcher 2, King Shark and Polkadot Man at the end of the Suicide Squad. Better yet, be someone who doesn't need the end of the world or an extreme situation to push you into doing the right thing. No matter how convenient or easy it is to rationalize hurting other people to get what you want, no matter how noble you think your goals are, the one thing you should learn from all this is that no matter what, your ends actually don't justify authoritarian means. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. What are your thoughts on the Suicide Squad? Have you ever found yourself in a position to stand against the tide of people arguing in favor of doing something you know is wrong? Let me know in the comments. And if you want to participate in even more conversation, join our Discord channel. I'm there a lot and look forward to talking to you. And if you really love what we do, consider supporting the show on Patreon or subscribe star. Supporters get access to a private channel on Discord, free swag and bonus content from our Behind the Scenes podcast, which comes out every single week. Speaking of our supporters, I also want to give a special shout out to our associate producers. To Connor McGowan, Matt Tabor, Richard Lawrence and Vega Starlight, thank you. Finally, don't forget to like, share, subscribe and hit that bell icon. Follow Out of Frame on all the social media and also join our email list so no matter what happens on YouTube, you know you'll never miss an episode. I'll see you next time.