Suicide Squad and cultural boganism

Suicide Squad isn’t a very coherent or reflective film, but rather is relentlessly noisy and colourful. There is not much plot to speak of – the film is more in the nature of a spectacle, a lurid sub-opera with gestures and flourishes though without the singing or much in the way of noble sentiment. The characters aren’t believable people, more like effigies on which to hang a few outlandish tics, cartoon emotions and sharply defined looks.    

We shouldn’t be surprised that a distinctly bogan character like Captain Boomerang has been included in a raucous film like Suicide Squad. For better or worse, bogan culture is integral to the image that the rest of the world has of Australia even as it is looked down upon by many people in Australia itself.

Our biggest cultural exports – AC/DC, Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee – are all essentially bogan in ways that are either positive or negative depending on your point of view. Captain Boomerang is the dark companion to the affable blonde bushie Mick Dundee, whose preferred weapon is also a deadly blade albeit handheld rather than thrown.

As a comic supervillain, Boomerang is a kind of dayglow version of Mick Taylor, the outback psychopath in the Wolf Creek movies and TV series. Mick Taylor appears in turn to have been inspired by the crimes of real life serial killer Ivan Milat.   

Boomerang is a remarkable instance in Hollywood of an Australian character being played as such by an Australian actor who onscreen, and apparently off screen as well, is loud and proud about being in touch with his inner bogan.

Perhaps, as with Mad Max, Captain Boomerang will inspire cosplay by Suicide Squad fans around the world who have never met a real bogan, much less been to Australia.