(1/3/10)
Harley’s Holiday is the final installment in the trilogy of Harley screwball adventures. Harley and Ivy treated her relationship to the Joker with the lightheartedness of a sitcom couple, albeit also with a heavy dose of dysfunction. Harlequinade was a much blacker comedy, ironically commenting on the sick grotesquerie of the couple’s relationship through an irrational comic conclusion. Finally, Harley’s Holiday gets rid of the Joker altogether to treat Harley as a person in her own right. The recent theme among episodes has been to explore the idea of reformation, and the hope of reform is no better communicated than in Harley’s individual escapade through Gotham on an admittedly bad day.
The episode begins with her release from Arkham; we are to assume that she has undergone intensive psychological therapy and is freed from the shackles of insanity. She is surprisingly enthusiastic about her newly acquired normalcy, though it doesn’t take long to understand that while she has apparently lost a susceptibility to amoral violence, she has not relinquished her over-the-top idiosyncrasies. The opening scenes communicate a societal rejection of Harley, not because she is believed to be dangerous, rather because she is a nonconformist. Naturally she becomes Harley Quinn again, and yet it is out of frustration at this social divide instead of a willingness to return to chaotic villainy. Indeed, the remainder of the episode has her acting with the best interests of her hostage, Veronica Vreeland, in mind, certainly willing to reject the life of a criminal.
From the moment the automobile chase is conceived, Dini cleverly masks his deft commentary about Harley’s place in society by lathering on the comedy. The running gag of Bullock’s crashing into cars and fire hydrants is classic slapstick fare. General Vreeland careens down narrow Gotham city streets in a comically cumbersome tank. Sharp lines of dialogue and cleverly planted kisses are peppered throughout. And yet the more over-the-top and hectic the chase, the more rational Harley ends up. The wry social commentary that takes root in the department store scene balloons with the rest of the action. As in Fritz Lang’s M, the seemingly respectable social institutions of law and military are associated with that of the mob, each one made out to be irrational and on some level insane.
This domino effect is driven to its naturally inflated, chaotic conclusion, and all the while we recall Harley is a victim of circumstance who never willed any of it to happen. The point seems to be that if the world is this insane, why is Harley the only one who’s going to be locked up for it? And yet Batman and Robin remain the beacons of empathy and sanity that pursue Harley with the conviction that she is not to blame. The Batman and Harley dynamic is no longer adversarial; though she lashes out, he plays the role of her understanding benefactor. The climax takes place amidst a jungle of neon signs that reflect Harley’s internalized confusion and dramatize her potential fall back into criminal madness.
What makes Harley’s Holiday a masterpiece is its ability, through both Dini’s written characterization and Altieri’s visual characterization, to individualize Harley. It is tense in its depiction of a woman so close to mental liberation, tragic in that she returns to lunacy, and yet ultimately optimistic by suggesting a possible deliverance for Harley. It ends without any sense of lamentable defeatism, suggests hope for the future, and is ultimately fulfilling in its stance against the series’ established cycle of villainy.
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