"I'm sick of people trying to shoot me, run me over or blow me up!" (Dr. Harleen Quinzel, MD - aka Harley Quinn)
Can a villain also be an inspiration?
I have proof that the answer is yes - in my own life, at least.
That villain would be one Dr. Harleen Quinzel, MD - otherwise known as Harley Quinn.
Harley is one of those characters that I figure isn't so widely-known, so I've included here some basic details from her page at Wikipedia.
So, now that you know the story, you're possibly calling me a hypocrite.
I can almost hear the complaints before I even publish this piece.
And I can almost hear those criticisms levied against me because I've heard them levied against other comic book fans who've spoken out in defense of Harley Quinn, who have found something to admire in her.
She's an example of an abused woman, say these opponents of the character. She's been damaged by Joker's madness and cruelty. She's been battered. She's been victimized. She's a symbol of patriarchy influencing a woman toward all kinds of self-harm. She's incredibly problematic.
My response is simple: "Yep."
Then how, I'm asked, can you support the idea of women being strong and self-reliant when you're supposedly inspired by someone as battered and victimized as Harley is?
My response is, again, simple: "I'm not inspired by battered, victimized Harley."
Because I'm not.
Yeah, you're right - Harley has been victimized at various points in her life. She's been tricked, abused and poorly-treated. She's been in an imaginary, one-sided relationship with what can be safely assumed to be one of the most abusive characters in all of literature.
She's been attacked and targeted. She's been severely bruised and beaten. She's been left for dead by her enemies enough times to possibly qualify her for 007 status.
But she won't stay down for anyone.
This durability, in and of itself, is - of course - no virtue. Cartoon cats and dogs manage this feat with regularity without having something to say about the human condition.
And this durability can - as many critics claim it does in Harley's case - simply point toward the repeating cycle of violence endured by abused women.
But I don't think that's the point of what Harley Quinn represents and who and what the character has become over time.
Harley, to me, isn't simply a punching bag for abuse. Even with her first appearance in the phenomenal Batman: The Animated Series, she displays cool confidence in herself and her ability. When Bullock makes an advance on her at the party in that first episode, Harley knocks him away with a baton and proceeds without a second thought toward him, visibly amusing Montoya.
That's because Harley has decided to be there and to be doing what she's doing. She may be doing it for terrible reasons, and she may indeed be a victim of Joker's trickery. But she's not portrayed as a weak person. She's not portrayed as someone who is cowering or - worse, and too common in modern American media - "begging" to be victimized.
Rather, she appears - more than anything else - to be enjoying herself.
So, is Harley a victim? The answer, to me, is that sometimes she is.
Sometimes, we all are.
We all get victimized sometimes. We all get fooled by that person we trusted. We all want to believe in a love we think is real that turns out to be in our heads. We all want to take that deal that sounds too good to be true because it is. We all want to show strength and falter. We all want to be brave and end up taking a cowardly way out of a bad situation. We all do it, whether we admit it or not. We make bad choices, fall in with the wrong people, come to the wrong conclusions, pick the wrong path and go down the wrong road in our lives.
But Harley, to me, is a reminder that we're not stuck there. When we're victimized, we still have power. We have the power of our confidence, our willfulness, our personal strengths.
We all have the power to come out on the other side.
And this is why I don't think Harley is "crazy," either.
There are, of course, all kinds of problems and issues with how so-called modern societies treat people as "crazy." I honestly don't even like the word "crazy" except as a term to mean random-seeming patterns.
Mental illness is, of course, core to virtually all villainous characters in comics. They've had some kind of experience that drove them "over the edge" of sanity and this illness - this state of being - is expected to somehow explain all their behavior. "Oh, that person is crazy" and allow us to separate ourselves from them, as if we're not prone to their foibles or failures.
Except we all totally are.
We're human. They're human.
And - Harley's human.
Even though she's been abused by people in her past.
Because it's that exact same stigma that's applied to people who have been victimized that's applied to the so-called "crazy." And it's why it fits Harley so well as a character to be categorized as both by others.
Because we so often treat people who have been victimized as if they're as likewise "tainted" as the people we call "crazy."
We, ourselves, as members of civilized society, often seem to feel that people who are "crazy" or who have been victimized are suffering from some kind of invisible, cancerous malformation in their lives - a growth that somehow has been added to the whole of their being. We categorize them as having this terrifying "extra" element - where they are human plus victim - and we're desperately afraid it's catching. And it makes us behave toward victims like they're somehow unclean, somehow diseased. We don't want to acknowledge them. We don't want to be connected to them. And we certainly don't want to touch them.
Thus, we flee from examining the real situations that create victims. We work very hard to ostracize the victims. We work very diligently to give them places of "outreach," never confessing the reality that in order to have to reach out toward someone we have to first acknowledge that we've created a distance.
And we do create that distance in so many ways, and not just in terms of patriarchy. There are all kinds of societal structures that do this, even within feminism itself which purports to help women who are victims of abuse.
People say they want to help the victims, but so much of this so-called help consists of distant advocacy and not the welcoming embrace that's needed. We push those we claim to care about away at the times they most need our help and our love.
To me, Harley is a reminder of all these things, manifest as a character who also has the strength and resolve not to let herself succumb or surrender to victimization.
To me, Harley's mistakes in action and judgment make her stronger. They're what lead her to becoming the unstoppable force she is in any given moment.
Yes, she's been a victim. But she's no different from the rest of us in that. We all have our flaws and obsessions.
So is Harley's path the path I think people should take? It certainly isn't. Harley is a fictional character in a world where consequences are only as meaningful as editorial continuity forces them to be - and even that's not terribly consistent.
So what's appealing to me about Harley?
It's her incredible capacity to love.
Key here, despite the Bruce Timm picture above, is that I'm talking about Harley's capacity to love as an abstraction. I'm not even talking about a specific person.
And chief among all the many loves of Harley Quinn is her capacity to love herself - who she is and what she is.
She loves herself in spite of her mistakes. She loves herself in spite of her victimhood. She loves herself in spite of her past. She loves herself in spite of how others treat her. She loves herself in spite of herself, sometimes. She loves herself at the best of times, and she loves herself at the worst of times.
Now, as I've said, continuity in modern comics is a bit of a mess. Nobody's really sure what's "happened" and what "hasn't happened" in the current continuity of the universe where Harley Quinn lives and loves.
But, to me, I see Harley as always existing in that precise perfect moment after she has overcome Joker's trickery and has decided to set off into the world, to become her own person.
I don't put her back with Joker. I think of her as having achieved that freedom - though she still clearly has tragic affection for him despite his wickedness.
Harley isn't perfect. She is, after all, a villainous character who's out to defeat Batman, who is ostensibly the hero of most stories featuring Harley. The editorial staff of DC Comics do work hard to eliminate the possibility of Batman being the hero, but they haven't ever been able to succeed at that despite their best efforts.
But I think that Harley's limitless capacity to love is to be lauded, even as we condemn her choice of lover. That paradox is essential to the character, and it's essential to love as it exists in the human heart.
People mess up. They choose to be with people who are terrible for them, and it gets them very badly hurt. This much is absolute fact in the real world. But I don't think we can turn our backs on people who mess up like this. We can't just abandon them. We have to help them. I think we have to help them most of all. They're the ones most in need. And I keep saying it, and I'll keep saying it over and over: they're human beings human beings human beings human beings, no matter how many mistakes they've made and even if they've gone back to their abusers.
We can be angry about it. We can rail against abuse. But we cannot - not even once - deny the humanity of people who are victimized because of their victimization, or because of the mistakes they make. This is crucial to me.
We have to love them as people even as we work to get them the advocacy they need to escape the abuse.
And that's why Harley is heroic to me.
She escaped the abuse. She got out. She did it, and she loves herself. She's achieved the goal, and found hope and confidence and power. She's found strength and friendship and has become part of the world again.
And - to step outside of continuity and discuss my favorite incarnation of the character - she even goes so far in some iterations as to become an ambassador of love.
You got that? She was a victim. She found the strength of loving herself, and got out - and she decides to try to spread that love to others to give them the strength they need.
In fact, what other people call "crazy" about Harley, I don't see as "crazy" at all.
Rather, I see her as a character possessed of an incredible joi de vie - that capacity of love I talked about, that transcends everything else.
Most of all, I see Harley as someone who loves herself and her life, even with all its wild twists and turns and her many flaws and the mistakes she's made. She understands that love of oneself and of life aren't about appreciating some abstract perfection. They're about appreciation for who people are and what life really is.
And that's why I had so much of a problem with the out-of-nowhere portrayal of Harley Quinn as killing herself in DC Comics' recent talent search.
Here's the copy from the talent search page:
Break into comics with Harley Quinn!
A lot of people were offended by this contest, and I'm counting myself among them.
Now, I understand from what I've read since the contest started that the intent of the panels was to bring back the invulnerable Looney Tunes Harley that I've always adored.
And fans of Harley Quinn know the character often throws herself into extraordinarily precarious situations in the name of achieving her goals.
But that's not the point here - not to me.
The point, to me, is that suicide isn't something that seems to fit the Harley character I know.
She's full of too much passion, too much of that aforementioned joi de vie - possessed of too much zeal to survive and thrive and flourish to be portrayed as suicidal without context.
It doesn't make sense without that context, at all, and simply becomes one more example of comic books sexualizing death and suffering for its women. Add the recent "damaged Goth girl" reimagining of Harley for the so-called "New 52" and you've got a recipe for this contest being seen as eroticizing a suicidal person's demise.
My Harley - the Dr. Harleen Quinzel, MD that I have come to love - wouldn't put up with those kinds of attitudes.
That's not the approach to life she advocates. It's not how she thinks or behaves. It's not part of who and what she is.
And Harley is strong enough any more - in my view of the character - that she doesn't tolerate people forcing her into any situation that goes against what she wants out of life.
Now, I understand from what I've read since the contest started that the intent of the panels was to bring back the invulnerable Looney Tunes Harley that I've always adored.
And fans of Harley Quinn know the character often throws herself into extraordinarily precarious situations in the name of achieving her goals.
But that's not the point here - not to me.
The point, to me, is that suicide isn't something that seems to fit the Harley character I know.
She's full of too much passion, too much of that aforementioned joi de vie - possessed of too much zeal to survive and thrive and flourish to be portrayed as suicidal without context.
It doesn't make sense without that context, at all, and simply becomes one more example of comic books sexualizing death and suffering for its women. Add the recent "damaged Goth girl" reimagining of Harley for the so-called "New 52" and you've got a recipe for this contest being seen as eroticizing a suicidal person's demise.
My Harley - the Dr. Harleen Quinzel, MD that I have come to love - wouldn't put up with those kinds of attitudes.
That's not the approach to life she advocates. It's not how she thinks or behaves. It's not part of who and what she is.
And Harley is strong enough any more - in my view of the character - that she doesn't tolerate people forcing her into any situation that goes against what she wants out of life.
Harley has evolved from that first appearance, like so many comic book characters do when they touch upon something essential about the human condition.
And for me, what Harley touched upon was all our desires to do whatever it takes, though it be thought mad, to achieve a dream.
For Harley, that dream is to see the entire world in love.
So Harley plays that role as ambassador of love for the world. And she plays it to the hilt.
Now, sure - those plans to help others on the path of love often ended with ridiculous disaster. That incarnation of her solo comic book was intended, after all, to be comedic. But the message, to me, is very clear. Victims have to learn to love themselves to get out, and if we want to be heroes and help others not be victims we have to work every day to spread that love, even to people who frustrate or discourage us, even to people who are victims themselves.
What could be more heroic than that?
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