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“Birds of Prey” Is the Chaotic Sparkly Queer Misandrist Comic Book Movie of My Dreams

When Heather Hogan, who assigns most Autostraddle’s film coverage, wondered who would cover Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) for us, I jumped at the opportunity before she could finish the sentence. I think she assumed it’s because I wanted to cover the big screen debut of the Afro-Latina lesbian DC superhero Renee Montoya. Don’t get me wrong, Rosie Perez is outstanding in the role – but I had my eyes set elsewhere: You see, I love Harley Quinn.

Heather was surprised, “she seems so chaotic evil for someone as lawful good as you!” And it’s true – almost anyone who knows me would describe as a dutiful rule-follower. I want to do good and be good at it.There’s very little I hate more than disappointing people. That’s my whole vibe. But Harley? She’s a nihilist. She’ll watch the world burn, not because she felt a higher calling or purpose about it. No, she’ll literally burn everything  to ashes on a casual whim because she was bored on a Tuesday. And for a goody two-shoes like me? That shit is incredibly freeing.

Harley made her first DC Comics appearance in 1992, and when portrayed by Margot Robbie she was obviously the best thing about 2016’s blockbuster Suicide Squad. Of course it made perfect sense to build Suicide Squad’s unofficial spin-off around her, though in the film’s early production, I worried that meant being stuck with another round of Jared Leto’s horrendous take on the Joker. Thankfully, Robbie – who is building nothing short of an impressive producing career of her own, including this film, and should not be messed with – had other plans.

Recruiting rising indie star director Cathy Yan (“Dead Pigs”) for her first major studio film, along with screenwriter Christina Hodson (“Bumblebee”) for the ride, Robbie instead focuses her take on Harley Quinn in the first few weeks after her final breakup with the clown prince of crime. In so many delightfully unexpected ways, Birds of Prey is Harley Quinn’s coming-of-age story, stepping out of the oversized shadow of one of the most infamously rage-filled white men in comics lore – and that’s saying a lot. Drunk on a bender, Harley asks Dinah Lance (also known as Black Canary, played by the always impeccable Jurnee Smollett-Bell), “What is a harlequin without a master?”

Birds of Prey doesn’t hesitate with the answer: Whatever the hell she wants to be.

And if you haven’t heard yet, whatever the hell she wants to be, definitely includes bisexual. Harley has long been bi in the comics, including some special editions that have her dating a similarly famous Batman villainess, Poison Ivy. I don’t want to over hype Harley’s on-screen coming out because the moment itself is small and before the opening title card, but still it’s well worth it. In fact, between Harley and Montoya, there are only two characters who are given romantic backstories in Birds of Prey – and both of them are canonically, on-screen queer! Montoya’s ex-girlfriend is played by Ali Wong, and while she manages to get a few zingers in, given the movie’s excessive frenetic energy, one of my few complaints is that they didn’t make better use of her comedic strengths. Everyone else is refreshingly free of any romance tropes. Instead their characterizations are colored in with what I can only safely and securely describe as BIG ASS “Be Gay, Do Crimes” energy and damn, do I love to see it.

The biggest love story in the entire film is between Harley and her breakfast sandwich, incredibly relatable content to anyone who’s suffered a hangover. Halfway through one of the battles, Black Canary asks for a hair tie. In the same sequence, in between punches, Harley offers that the squad share a pizza. There’s the gay that you know because the movie says it with their words, and there’s the gay you know because you can see it with your eyes. Birds of Prey, with its neon pink and blue hues, glitter bomb grenades, pet hyenas in rhinestone collars, and car chases on roller skates, gives us both.

It’s angry and incredibly violent and despite its bright color palette – perhaps expectedly dark; it’s also cathartic and triumphant. I can’t stop thinking about it. In fact, this isn’t even the point, but even the tensions between the film’s lead villain Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) and his top henchman Zsasz (Chris Messina) are undeniably erotic. Zsasz gives massages to his master, talks less than an inch from his face, and is noticeably most savage towards any woman whom he thinks is getting between them.

As Detective Renee Montoya, Rosie Perez brings swag to the screen that left me positively weak behind the knees. Her inescapable “Call Me Daddy” aura is complete with her aviator sunglasses and brass knuckles and steel toe boots. She’s done with the men around her who take credit for her work and have driven her to a drinking problem. I’d watch a movie starring Perez’s Montoya and Black Canary at any time. The entire cast is great, and for what’s a relatively thin plot, each character still feels distinctive enough to stand on her own. What makes Black Canary stand out from the pack is Smollett-Bell’s commitment to the small moments – it’s the way she holds her body like a street fighter, the tomboyishness she finds underneath Black Canary’s performative high femme exterior. It’s the single tear that falls from her eyes as she watches the Black Mask force a woman in his club to dance on the table while he rips off her clothes (I warned that the movie got dark; this is worst of its sexual violence). That’s when she ultimately decides to double cross her boss and join the girl gang, already in progress.

Keeping it real, my only significant problem with Birds of Prey is that it takes too long for the women to finally get together on the same side. If I come for a team-up where the women quite literally kick the ass of the men around them, then I expect that to happen before the third act. Luckily each actress dazzles in her own right, so watching them in separate plots ultimately isn’t much of a burden. And the fight scenes throughout are part of where Yan excels, full of staggering, close up hand-to-hand combat that’s beautifully shot and focused within the over the top glimmering chaos surrounding it; an attention to detailed choreography all too missing in most modern superhero stories.

I could try and explain the rest of the plot, but really there’s no point. Birds of Prey zigs and zags, criss-crossing timelines at a dizzying pace, with very little consequence. It’s probably best watched with your eyes a bit glazed over. That’s not to say the movie isn’t smart! Only that its intelligence is instinctual instead of plotted. It’s Kill Bill by way of Deadpool with more than enough Tank Girl to spare – written, directed, produced and starring women, for women. An irate, sparkle laden, middle finger in the air to a society that otherwise cowers to the angry whims of men and the glittery gay misandrist comic book movie that we more than deserve. Who the hell wouldn’t sign up for that?

Pop Culture Fix: Harley Quinn is Confirmed Gay in “Birds of Prey”

A Pop Culture Fix upon you, friends!

+ Confirmed gay!

https://twitter.com/meganfoxasivy/status/1224346665840205824

+ This SNL sketch where Kate McKinnon’s Elsa comes out as a lesbian is amazing — but stop it immediately after that.

+ The trans actors challenging outmoded ideas of masculinity.

+ Netflix’s Chip & Potato now has two zebra dads and gender-neutral bathrooms.

+ Did Roxane Gay write a feature for The Cut about Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuture? Mmm hmm. She sure did.

+ The L Word: Generation Q‘s Rosanny Zayas on Sophie’s season finale move.

+ Brooklyn Nine-Nine is launching a podcast before the season seven premiere.

+ Evan Rachel Wood says that season three of Westworld is “unlike anything we’ve ever done.” 

+ This made me laugh so hard.

+ Nikohl Boosheri is playing gay again, this time in Alia’s Birth, an indie drama that explores “a rocky relationship between a female couple that forces them to spend the night apart.”

+ Home and Away cut out a lesbian kiss in Australia due to “human error.”

+ Disney presents: Hamilton. With The Original Broadway Cast!

+ Female characters dominated animated movies in 2019.

+ IT’S ALL HAPPENING.

5 Things You Should Know About Latina Lesbian Superhero Renee Montoya Before “Birds of Prey”

This weekend, when Birds of Prey lands in wide release, we will finally see Renee Montoya on the big screen, where she deserves to be! Not only is Montoya the first Latina lead and lesbian lead in a DC film, she also has an iconic history, including being one of the first and most celebrated lesbian comic book characters of all time. Here are five things you need to know about her before you hit the theater.

1. Renee Montoya was invented for Batman: The Animated Series in the early 1990s.

There are countless iterations of Gotham City in the Batman canon, but one pretty standard fact about Bruce Wayne’s hometown is that the police force is corrupt as hell. Batman: The Animated Series conceived Renee Montoya to stand in stark opposition to the casual extortion and bribery and perpetuation of crime that took place inside GCPD, even partnering her with Harvey Bullock, who was originally a foil for Commissioner Gordon. Montoya is a fresh-faced officer in the animated series, and one of the few allies Batman has within the force. She’s also a serious badass, able to fend off multiple foes singlehandedly and unarmed! She even has a character-defining Éowyn moment in the episode “P.O.V.,” in which Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy — self-proclaimed “Queens of Crime” — claim that no man can capture them, and in fact no man does. It is Renee Montoya who brings them down.

2. But she didn’t become a fully realized character until Gotham Central in 2002.

Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker created Gotham Central to explore an “honest” unit of the GCPD that worked with the same morality as Batman to fight crime in the city. Rucka pulled Renee Montoya off the sidelines and gave her the most universally lauded story arc in the book’s run (and, honestly, in the non-superhero DC canon). “Half a Life,” which comprises issues #6–#10, fully pulls readers into Renee’s life, and not just her cop life. Renee is a closeted lesbian with a super religious family. In “Half a Life,” she’s outed, shunned by her fellow officers, disowned by her family, and kidnapped by Two-Face.

The way the book is written and drawn is all empathy for Montoya, and unapologetic villainizing of every homophobe she runs up against. Her breakdown in her girlfriend Daria’s car after she’s outed is, to this day, a visual kick in the guts. Rucka’s portrayal of Montoya was, at the time, the most nuanced and sympathetic storytelling any LGBTQ character had ever received in a DC or Marvel book. No small feat, as the effects of 1954’s Comics Code Authority — which forbade “Sex perversion [gayness or transness] or any inference to same is strictly forbidden” — are still rippling out in storytelling, from comic books to TV to big screen films, to this day.

Renee leaves GCPD and it’s corruption behind at the end of “Half a Life.”

3. Renee Montoya is famous for being Kate Kane’s girlfriend.

When Kate Kane came out to audiences as a lesbian in 2006’s 52 (issue #7), she did so by running into her ex-girlfriend, Renee Montoya. When Renee realizes she’s going to have to question Kate about a case she’s working on, she showers multiple times (using fancy soap), shines her boot, irons her shirt, and broods about how good they were at “pushing each other’s buttons.” From that point on, Batwoman, who’d been literally erased from the Batverse since 1985, outstripped Montoya in popularity — taking over Detective Comics, getting her own GLAAD Award-winning book (with a foreword written by Rachel Maddow), and ultimately going on to star in her own solo TV series. With very few exceptions, Montoya is Kate’s go-to girlfriend in comics and on-screen.

4. But she was a lesbian superhero before Batwoman!

Renee Montoya may start out — and be reborn repeatedly — as a GCPD cop or detective, but she also almost always quits the force in protest. In Greg Rucka’s 52, she is aimless and depressed in the wake of her decision to leave her job as a detective. She doesn’t know who she is. But she runs into a masked vigilante named The Question (aka Vic Sage), repeatedly, and agrees to help him take down the Religion of Crime. When Vic dies of Lung Cancer, he asks Renee to carry on his legacy. “It’s a trick question Renee — Not who you are — But who you are going to become? — Time to change — Like a butterfly.” And she does.

5. Renee Montoya has been on-screen a lot — but never had her due.

Unfortunately, and despite her lauded story arcs over the years in DC’s comics, Renee has never been given the respect she deserves on-screen. She appears in the 2016 DC Universe Animated Original Movie, Batman: Bad Blood, but only as a romantic interest for Kate. She was a regular character on Fox’s 2014 live-action series Gotham, but she was pigeonholed as Barbara Kean’s ex-girlfriend and then unceremoniously dumped from the show without reason or explanation. When Birds of Prey announced that they’d cast legend Rosie Perez in the role, I had — and still have! — high hope that the role will finally get the levity it deserves on-screen.

Perez would love to suit up as The Question eventually. She told Heroic Hollywood: “That would be amazing. I think that being of a certain age I could bring a lot of gravitas to that. Once she becomes The Question, it seems that all of the childhood trauma that she’s still holding on to and the anger from it of being betrayed, outed and passed over with that mask that she puts on…. she’s able to just break free and be fearless. She’s fearless already, but it would be a heightened level. That would be amazing.”

It sure would! Until then, Birds of Prey opens in wide release this Friday, February 7.

The Final “Birds of Prey” Trailer: Lesbians, Bisexuals, Misandry, Oh My!

The final trailer for Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) landed today and it is everything I hoped for, including (finally!) some good footage of Rosie Perez as Gotham PD Detective Renee Montoya. The swagger, the sunglasses, the casual disregard for any man trying to tell her what to do! It also potentially maybe hopefully indicates that The Joker is dead??? Goddess bless! Renee Montoya is, of course, one of the most famous lesbian characters in DC comics and Harley Quinn is canonically bisexual — both of those things better come up in this movie. For now, enjoy this brilliant introduction to the Birds of Prey set to Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.”

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) hits theaters Wednesday, January 29th.

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