I honestly was only planning to do one day on SUICIDE SQUAD and get back to people shimmy shimmying til their garters break...and all that jazz. But yesterday as I was writing about the movie the scale of the movie's achievement when it comes to backstory was really hitting me.
Let me say this: in general, in my very humble opinion, backstories generally suck. Not that every character shouldn't have one, or that those backstories shouldn't inspire their current choices. Just don't stop to tell me about it. Don't give me flashbacks, don't tell me sob stories. I mean what I said literally--backstories suck the life out of the story.
And that's for a pretty simple reason: most of the time, in order to present a back story, we have to hit pause on the present day story that we signed up to watch. And so not only does it kill the momentum, but it has the fingerprints of the writer all over it. Hey guys, there's this data I need you to know now. Ugh.
That's not to say some movies and TV shows don't do it well, but it's a lot harder than it looks, and most efforts fail.
SUICIDE SQUAD is like a primer in smart methods of doing backstory. I'm going to list five that stood out to me.
1) Reveal the backstory in the midst of conflict. This is the classic method of dealing with any kind of exposition. You reveal it in the middle of whatever shit the characters are in, and that conflict creates a sense of urgency that beats back the momentum-killing vibe of the exposition.
Or even better, you let the conflict itself be what inspires the revelation. DuBois sees his daughter, she's in trouble, his response is not at all what a dad's should be, and fighting about their relationship ensues.
Other than one other beat on the bus, that's all we get of DuBois's backstory. And it's literally all that we need. It tells us why he's doing what he's doing, and gives his story stakes.
2) Make it a mystery. This is another pretty common technique, but it's a lot more dicey than planting a backstory within a conflict, because it involves the promise that the backstory will both be worth waiting for and also that it will prove somehow relevant. That's hard to land.
In SUICIDE SQUAD, Cleo's backstory has a certain element of mystery. Gunn doesn't lean into this too hard, which has the effect of not making it too big a deal for us. It's just this question that keeps popping up--why rats?
And for the most part the question is being asked by DuBois, because he has this pathological fear of rats. Which becomes another light touch mystery of its own.
Both those mysteries get answered on the bus. And here's the thing--in a sense their reveals don't propel the story forward, and so really I should be saying they're a mixed bag. But they do propel the characters forward, both as people that we care about and as people who care about one another. That scene on the bus is the turning point in the Cleo/DuBois relationship. It gives them both a much more immediate stake in their situation, and us a great stake in them.
3) Find a way to set the backstory in the present. As Cleo tells us her backstory, the camera stays locked on her, while we see her tale play out on the window behind her. It's a lovely visual, and it quite literally makes Cleo's backstory something that is happening in the present, as they're driving to grab the Thinker.
Abner's backstory constitutes a deft version of 1, 2 and 3. Like Cleo and DuBois with the rats, Abner's powers are set up as a mystery. Even before we get to see them in action, we get these weird signs--the strange growths on Abner's face, the flash of color when he disappears into the jungle to take care of them, and his general refusal to reveal much of anything about himself.
All of which naturally leads the team to insist on an explanation, and very much for a present moment reason: they need to know that he's going to be able to carry his end, and that he's not a danger to them. And so Abner's backstory becomes a thing of necessity rather than a "Hey, let's stop and tell a story." And it's something he's forced to do, i.e. it's revealed in the midst of a kind of conflict.
Gunn takes the idea of setting the backstory in the present to such a crazy-wonderful extreme with Abner, too. At the end of his story of what his mother did to he and his siblings, it's revealed that Abner projects his mother onto everyone. Which is hilarious and disturbing and totally unique. But it also very much makes his backstory relevant in an ongoing way. She becomes his motive for action just as much as DuBois' daughter (and surrogate daughter Cleo) are his.
4) Have them tell the story while they're in motion. This seems like a very minor point, but it really seems to work. If a character reveals their backstory while they're in motion--in the case of Cleo and DuBois, on a moving bus--just the visual of them moving can create that sense of propulsion that backstories can so often kill.
5) Just don't do it. We never learn anything about the backstory on Peacemaker, other than a passing nod he gives about fucked up dads when DuBois is talking about his.
And certainly in part that lack is because Gunn has a Peacemaker TV series coming. But honestly, I think his storyline works just fine without any more information. He's a great example of how little we actually need about a character's history in order to really connect with them in a film.
Nanaue is just the same. His entire story is rooted in the present, and it's just fine. If anything, his lack of a backstory creates a kind of vacuum that naturally calls forth some kind of character-defining relationship, which becomes that incredibly winning relationship with Cleo.
Here's what I learned watching SUICIDE SQUAD: If you're going to do backstory work in your series or feature, you want it to work like a time-release capsule. It's not information that happened in the past, but something which is very much impacting the present.
