“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”? Tracing the implications of a song in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

ABSTRACT

When Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) dressed as Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) from 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes performs “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Cathy Yan’s 2020 film Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), links are drawn between 70 years of film history and women’s representation on screen. In this article, I put various iterations of “Diamonds” into dialogue to explore how this moment in Birds of Prey might be understood. I consider this scene as central to understanding Quinn’s “emancipation,” with the representation of women’s security and control over their lives key themes in the history of this scene. The return to this song throughout the histories of film and video enables a sense of solidarity across time, acknowledging the systemic problems that remain unresolved, and contemplation of this can alter the ways we understand characters and texts, past, present, and future.

KEYWORDS:

• Intertextuality
• film
• superhero
• popular culture
• feminism

Introduction

Forty-one minutes into the action blockbuster Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Birds) (Directed by Cathy Yan 2020) antihero Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) imagines herself performing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” (“Diamonds”). “Diamonds” first appeared in the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Gentlemen) stage play performed by Carol Channing,¹ but the song is particularly associated with Marilyn Monroe, who played Lorelei in the 1953 film directed by Howard Hawks. As a musical number, the Birds performance of “Diamonds” stops the narrative. Moments before this performance, Quinn bargains for her life by promising to help the villain “Black Mask” (Roman Sionis played by Ewan McGregor) find the diamond his flunkies lost. In a scene dominated by tones of grey, Quinn is a bright spot dressed in a fluorescent pink crop top with her blonde pigtails haloed by the light behind her. When Sionis hits her, she appears woozy but looks directly at the camera as the film shifts to a subjective fantasy where she sings wearing a pink pantsuit. However, her performance is brought to an abrupt end when Sionis hits Quinn again. By intertextually referencing “Diamonds,” a song that has been referenced in a range of popular culture, this performance bridges seventy years of film and video history. Considering this performance as repeating the past in the present, I argue that the continual return to “Diamonds” through histories of film and video enables a sense of solidarity across time, acknowledging that those performing iterations of this song experience systemic problems that have not been resolved in the intervening years.

Theories of adaptation are valuable in contemplating iterations of this song. Defining adaptation as both “process and product” Linda Hutcheon (2013) includes media such as “song covers” with adaptation acknowledging a source text beyond a mere “allusion to” or a “fragment” (9). In Birds, this adaptation “transposes” the performance of “Diamonds” in Gentlemen, creatively interprets it, and engages with variations of the song over time. Adaptations, Hutcheon notes, hold appeal and produce pleasure “from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise” (2013, 4). In repeating these texts, over and again, layers of meaning are built. As Hutcheon (2013, 6) points out, adaptations are “inherently ‘palimpsestuous’ works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts.” This haunting inflects the texts that come after, as Alice Te Punga Somerville writes, so that it becomes “impossible to engage with any one account … without noticing—and even being distracted by—the many layers of history underneath” (Te Punga Somerville 2014, 159). These layers are cumulative, developing meanings over time. As I will explore, Birds represents one of many layers since the 1950s.

In addition to the layered effects of adaptations, as a musical number, “Diamonds” holds additional connotations. Musical numbers in film produce “utopia through the form of entertainment” with tensions “resolved” through dance and song (Susan Hayward 2018, 276) and are seen to stop the story and present the star’s persona (Michael Charlton 2012). Musical numbers that adapt and repeat previous versions produce additional meanings. Discussing the “mutating musical,” Caryl Flinn argues that changes to fragments of a film have the potential to draw attention to “a network of contradictions, conflicting intersections, and weird hybrids that do not and cannot line up into a single grand, utopian experience” (2013, 262). Contemplating the potential of the musical number in the musical television show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (which had its own variation of “Diamonds”) Jessica Ford and Phoebe Macrossan (2019) argue that musical numbers “operate as a feminist intervention into a postfeminist diegesis” (57). They suggest drawing on prior texts can illustrate the ways characters’ “struggles with postfeminist subjecthood sit within a lineage of the feminist struggles in popular musical screen history” (65). In this way, while the Birds scene may recall generations of conventionally attractive white cisgender women who dance and pose,² it also draws these prior moments and idealised understandings into question, producing a more ambivalent text.

As a moment that stops time and disrupts the narrative, I argue that the “Diamonds” performance is a moment of “affective dissonance” (Clare Hemmings 2012). Such dissonance can “disrupt … processes that promote girls’ and women’s affective investment in patriarchal, neoliberal social systems” with such moments potentially producing feminist reflexivity (Amy Shields Dobson and Akane Kanai 2019, 777). As a musical number in an action film, this performance sits at a disjuncture and this disruption encourages reflection on past variations. Indeed, this moment can be seen as what Alyxandra Vesey (2018, 74–75) calls “citational feminism:” “the act of explicitly referencing feminine and female problems of popular culture as an intergenerational expression of women’s solidarity through creative inspiration.” Vesey notes that while such material is often “ambivalent” it can enable “a cross-generational dialogue” (86) creating space for connections between people across time. Similarly, the presence of “Diamonds” in Birds acts, through a feeling of dissonance, as a reminder of past texts and experiences, bringing them and their contexts into the present and enabling the possibility of dialogue through acknowledging the connections between them.

In this article, I consider the ways various iterations of the song over time (including Monroe in Gentlemen, Madonna’s music video for “Material Girl” (1984) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) write over one another to explore the intertextual implications of this scene as it appears in Birds. I start by contemplating the character of Quinn alongside Robbie, Monroe, and Madonna to understand the ambiguity that attaches to the celebrities appearing in these texts, before exploring ideas of subjectivity, sexuality, and the way looking works in this scene. I conclude by considering issues of financial security and friendship across these adaptations of the song. In a recent article discussing “Diamonds” and its various iterations, Johanna Wagner (2022) reflects on the feminist readings made of Gentlemen as an “empowering critical discourse” (2) and critiques the iterations that heavily reference Monroe as more heteronormative and less “empowering.” In contrast, I start from the iteration in Birds, considering the historical performances of “Diamonds” as ambivalent and cumulative; they cannot be read back to Monroe in isolation. In stopping the narrative of Birds to reference texts that present similar themes through this musical number, I argue that the repetition, citation, and affective dissonance enable recognition of solidarities between women across time. The women in these iterations not only share experiences, but the problems these experiences stem from are systemic.

Quinn, Robbie, and ambiguous celebrities

As a character adapted from television and comic books, there have been many versions of Harley Quinn. Originally created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, Quinn first features in Batman: The Animated Series (Batman) (1992–1995). Quinn’s representation in its various iterations has primarily been discussed in relation to her sexualised costuming and “abusive relationship with The Joker” (Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas 2019, 179) with whom Anastasia Salter writes Quinn has formed “an iconic and problematic canonical on-again/off-again couple” (2020, 136). In film, Quinn first appears in Suicide Squad (2016). Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (2019) suggest Quinn’s introduction in the film, which features the song “You Don’t Own Me,” has implications for understanding her as holding agency. Moreover, they note the ways her costuming brings together a range of references, represents “the edge between abuse and sadomasochism” (184) and draws on a “kinderwhore” aesthetic, which is associated with third-wave feminism, “a style whose intention was to destabilize and reappropriate signifiers of misogyny” (176). Birds, in contrast, contemplates Quinn’s life post-breakup with Joker as she attempts to find her way in the world, with the costuming dominated by bright colours, sparkles, and her name (rather than references to Joker). Discussing Birds, Angelica Jade Bastién (2020) writes that “the costuming … wrests the character from the male gaze that defined her in 2016’s Suicide Squad” noting that it “doesn’t shy away from showing skin, but rather than objectify, it reflects Harley’s audaciousness.” Indeed, Quinn’s changing costuming reflects the character’s ongoing development, which given constant changes over time is ambiguous, and able to be read and interpreted in a variety of ways.

Quinn’s ambiguous presence in current media culture reflects the evolving position of feminism in contemporary media. As Hutcheon writes, “adaptations make alterations that reveal much about the larger contexts of reception and production” (2013, 28). That is, we can’t read this scene without recognising the cultural context in which this film is embedded, not least the presence of feminism amid a postfeminist media sensibility and cultural movements such as #metoo. Rosalind Gill (2016, 612) comments on the “complexities of a cultural moment seemingly characterized by a multiplicity of (new and old) feminisms which co-exist with revitalized forms of anti-feminism and popular misogyny.” In recent decades, representations of young women in a neoliberal, postfeminist sensibility have been associated with confidence, empowerment, and a “can do” attitude (Dobson and Kanai 2019). But Dobson and Kanai (2019) have noted a turn, particularly in television, to representing “young women’s insecurities, anxieties, and frustrations” alongside “some reinvigorated awareness of structural inequalities” (772). Such texts, Dobson and Kanai argue, “crack the shiny veneer of girl powered neoliberal mythologies” (778). Quinn is a former psychiatrist with a PhD, however, represented as living above a restaurant where she eats cereal and watches cartoons on the couch, Quinn can be viewed alongside characters that feature “perpetual girlhood,” alienation and abjection (Rebecca Wanzo 2016, 28). In Quinn’s case, this set of characteristics is established through her “girlish” bright, sparkly attire; her hair in pigtails; her abject behaviour (on an intoxicated night out she breaks a man’s legs after he calls her a “dumb slut” and vomits in someone’s handbag); and her isolation (she leaves her friends after they refuse to believe she and Joker are over and question her capacity to “stand on [her] own”). Although Quinn displays a degree of “can-do” confidence, the character may be understood in relation to other contemporary popular cultural texts which open “space for a feminist-oriented anger and other ‘wrong,’ ‘ugly’ feelings” (Dobson and Kanai 2019, 784), with anger and aggression directed towards other (often male) characters in this film.

The representation of anger in Birds is accompanied by a context that connects women across time, particularly the other performers associated with “Diamonds.” Although the dominance of a postfeminist sensibility in the media has been read by theorists as erasing histories of solidarity among women (Gill 2016; Vesey 2018), in referencing past iterations of this song, Birds’ “Diamonds” reflects on key ambivalent star symbols Monroe and Madonna (Will Scheibel 2013; Marguerite van den Berg and Claartje L ter Hoeven 2013). These women have been linked to cultural understandings of sex and sexuality and the restrictions on such representations. For example, Will Scheibel (2013, 12) comments that Monroe is associated with both “liberated sexuality” and sexuality that is “policed by institutions of power” and Richard Dyer notes the ways she is presented as “unthreatening, vulnerable” often “taken advantage of or humiliated” (2004, 44). That is, while Monroe challenged conventions, she was also “trapped” by the multiple discourses that surrounded her and which continue in the present. While Wagner discusses what she calls the “reductionist, heteronormative, hyperfeminized, and [hetero]sexualized, celebrity persona of Monroe” (2022, 4), Ellen Tremper (2006, 189) discusses Monroe as “camp” and suggests she “complicated and subverted the films and the unidimensional roles she was assigned,” concluding “the stereotypical picture of an innocent, needy, malleable, dependent and neurotic ‘sexpot’ hardly explains the extraordinary interest she continues to excite” (218). For van den Berg and ter Hoeven (2013), Madonna’s association with Monroe early in her career left her perceived as “subordinated” to men at the same time as such performances of femininity were read as deconstructing gendered ideas (148). By continuously placing the line between the real and their personas in question, and presenting multiple stereotypes and contradictions, readings of Monroe (and Madonna) and the characters they perform are “destabilised” (Charlton 2012, 11). Robbie joins these performers, with her performances illustrating similar complexity.

Like Monroe and Madonna before her, many of Robbie’s roles have emphasised her blonde, white, conventionally attractive appearance. Irina Aleksander (2019) suggests Robbie “entered Hollywood being typecast” with examples such as “the bronzed, gold-digging beauty in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.” When Robbie first took on the role of Quinn in 2016 she had featured in a handful of Hollywood films in roles noted for nudity as the sexual/love interest. But Robbie has rejected the label of “bombshell” stating, “I hate that word. I hate it—so much” (Aleksander 2019). While on the surface Quinn in Birds repeats this trend, Bastién (2020) argues that in Quinn “Robbie has shirked the bombshell image by embracing the opposite: the unruly woman, a type exemplified by Harley Quinn” with the film drawing attention to “misogynistic encounters.” Indeed, more than a “disposable tool” or “lesser-known actor” that does not “distract” from the action character they play (Wilson Koh 2014, 495, 487), by 2020 Robbie had become a key attraction (Bastién 2020; David Crow 2020), echoing the tensions established by actors before her.

Such histories are central to understanding the iteration of “Diamonds” in Birds. Arguing that the “Diamonds” scene is “thematically the heart of the movie” Crow (2020) explores Monroe’s experiences and “fight for credibility” as significant to understanding Quinn, arguing that just as Monroe “struggled for legitimacy and respect as an actress,” Quinn struggles for recognition beyond her relationship with Joker. Just as Monroe can be perceived as “victim as sex object” and “in rebellion against her objectification” (Richard Dyer 2004, 56), the character of Quinn attends to such binaries: both “a hyperbolic oversexualized and stereotyped character … catering to the male gaze” and “a transgressive figure that expands visions of femininity” (Geczy and Karaminas 2019, 185). In this way, Quinn repeats and challenges such understandings, illustrating that they continue into the twenty-first century. In the next section, I analyse the Birds “Diamonds” scene in relation to histories of looking and subjectivity in film, to argue that the ways women are looked at and look back in these texts establish solidarities between women across time.

“Diamonds,” looking and subjectivity

The Birds iteration of “Diamonds” and its context gestures to histories of looking, made obvious when Sionis sits with a bucket of popcorn to watch Quinn’s potential mutilation. But they also centre Quinn’s subjectivity as viewers are privy to her imagination in this musical number. In the moments before the performance, Quinn, who is tied to a chair, promises to find Sionis the diamond, proclaiming “you can kill me later. Pinky swear, cross my heart, hope to fart … ” as he backhands her. The next shot, a close up of Quinn’s face, is backlit haloing her blonde pigtails, while a fill shows the features of her face with her makeup smudged. Her head lolls. The close up shot is positioned straight on Quinn’s face and doesn’t move, even as Sionis grabs her chin and directs her face to himself, instructing her to be quiet and listen. As he concludes “you’re going to get me my diamond” Quinn makes eye contact with the camera. The sound moves from the diegetic to share her mental subjectivity: a reverb alters Sionis’ voice and the music is suggestive of a music box or carnival. The word “diamond” echoes. Holding the gaze of the camera Quinn grins, red (blood or lipstick) smeared on her teeth, before her head drops down. As her head lifts in the fantasy space her face continues to be framed in close up, with similar lighting, but she stands in front of a red background, bright in contrast to the grey that preceded it. Her makeup and hair are impeccable, and Quinn stares directly at the camera and begins to mime the song as the camera slowly pulls back to reveal her in a long shot surrounded by suited male dancers as in Gentlemen and “Material Girl.” This shot lasts for 25 seconds, the time it takes Quinn to sing much of the first verse before it is broken by a man opening machine gun fire on the performers and the shots become quick and fragmented.

In Birds, “Diamonds” draws on Hollywood techniques and traditions, particularly those relating to lighting and reproducing whiteness. The backlighting haloing Quinn’s blonde hair combines with a high key fill to echo the appearance of Monroe, Madonna, and other blonde starlets. As Dyer writes, “idealised white women are bathed in and permeated by light. It streams through them and falls on to them from above” (1997, 122). In this fantasy sequence, Quinn’s skin becomes so white that at times she appears to be luminous. While artificial, Dyer writes that “platinum (peroxide) blondness, is the ultimate sign of whiteness” often “associated with wealth” (2004, 40). This moment, in which the lighting and styling echo Monroe, reproduces cultural understandings of desirability, and illustrates the racially motivated tradition, repeated throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of perpetuating hierarchies in which white women are “highly prized possessions,” both possessed and holding superiority over others (Dyer 2004, 40). Quinn’s white skin situates her within this history, and yet, her position as an antihero adds complexity, as her history, accent, and the wedge of regrowth where her hair parts imply a working-class status. At the same time, Dyer comments that “variations on the image are witness to its hold on imagination” (1997, 140). Its repeated presence here illustrates that it continues to hold cultural power.

As Birds launches into the “Diamonds” sequence, Quinn’s clothing and appearance echo Lorelei/Monroe and Madonna. Quinn wears a pink strapless jumpsuit with a giant bow at the back. While this costume includes trousers rather than a skirt, it is reminiscent of Lorelei’s costume in Gentlemen and Madonna’s dress in “Material Girl,” accessorised with high heels and diamond necklaces. In contrast, however, Quinn’s tattoos are visible, including “Daddy’s lil Monster” above her left breast. The traces of Quinn and Joker’s relationship remain on her skin, reflecting the codes and rules of sadomasochism with Quinn as the submissive (Geczy and Karaminas 2019, 176). But the tattoo can also reflect Gentlemen, in which Lorelei calls her love interest Gus Esmond (Tommy Noonan), “Daddy.” Such elements position Quinn as submissive and coy, but her behaviour in this musical scene is aggressive. As she sings this variation’s opening line: “a kiss on the hand might be quite continental” a single black hand emerges from the white hands that wave around her as though to be kissed and she bites the outstretched finger. While in “Material Girl” Madonna bites her finger seductively as she looks directly into the camera, Quinn aggressively bites this hand³: the desirable white woman might not be as demure or inconsequential as she seems. Indeed, against the black hand, Quinn’s extreme whiteness is emphasised. While “celebration of iconography associated with feminine glamour and decontextualized images of retro nostalgia” can “deny or erase historically grounded images of women of color” (Vesey 2018, 76), this bite reminds viewers of the whiteness of this image.

As with Madonna and Lorelei/Monroe before her, Quinn is central in “Diamonds,” looked at and looking back. In this way, the scene speaks to, and places in question, decades of debate regarding Laura Mulvey’s 1975 theory of the male gaze. Indeed, Mulvey herself argues that Gentlemen complicates her theory with “the erotics of the male gaze … a central focus for comic role reversal” and “a site of impotence” in this film (1996, 224). In Gentlemen, both the audience and Lorelei’s fiancé Esmond watch her perform. And yet Esmond is not an “ego ideal” the audience identifies with (Mulvey 1996). Although as a star, Monroe might be “an object of the male sexual gaze” (Dyer 2004, 20) and is displayed “as erotic object” for both characters and the spectator (11–12), the shots are angled down towards Esmond, while the camera is angled up towards Lorelei, suggesting that within the narrative she holds a measure of control. Scheibel (2013, 8–9) argues that Gentlemen works to “playfully undermin[e] the patriarchal viewing economy:” although Lorelei/Monroe is watched, this is not the only way the film may be read.

This history complicates the readings of looking in iterations of “Diamonds” that come after. In Moulin Rouge! courtesan and aspiring actress Satine (Nicole Kidman) is suspended above the predominantly male audience in a swing. Here the male ego ideal seems clear: Christian (McGregor) narrates and progresses the story in the scene while Satine halts it as the men watch her descend. But the men in the audience, including Christian, are also the dancers that in Gentlemen and “Material Girl” accompany the women. While the audience within the film watches Satine, before Satine descends a subjective shot looks down on the audience, and in extreme closeups, she makes eye contact with the camera as she sings. Indeed, the camera consistently shifts perspective throughout the scene. Similarly, in “Material Girl” the opening shots of the music video foreground two men watching a recording of Madonna’s performance dressed as Lorelei, a moment that can be read as either perpetuation or a pastiche of the male gaze (Barbara Bradby 1992; E Ann Kaplan [1987] 2017). Throughout the clip Madonna has an audience: the camera, as well as the men watching the recording, one of whom also discretely observes her on stage and in her dressing room. However, discussing the “Material Girl” clip, Kaplan argues that the varying perspectives from which the scene is shot disrupt the conventional gaze, “allowing enunciative confusion” (2017, 123).

In popular film analysis, many of Robbie’s roles have been understood in terms of objectification, with Birds identified as signifying a shift in such representations. As Salter notes, the marketing for Suicide Squad (2016) depicted her “wearing very little” (Anastasia Salter 2020, 141) and Robbie herself describes her costume in Birds as “less male gaze-y” (Aleksander 2019). Significantly, the language of the gaze has become part of popular discussions, “used to describe sexist and or sexualized representations of women’s bodies” (Susanna Paasonen, Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith 2021, 29). In Birds, director Cathy Yan takes a different approach, explaining “it was less, ‘I’m going to unpack and reject the male gaze of every director who’s come before me’ and more of an unconscious, innate reaction about what feels right” commenting on the importance of faces to telling the story (Anderson 2020). Such an approach accords with the intimate closeups of faces in each of the iterations of “Diamonds” I have considered so far. As a film directed by a woman of colour, with a diverse female cast, Birds has been regarded as an example of a film that goes some way to addressing sexism within the industry, echoing Paasonen and colleagues“ 2021 comments that debates of sexism in film need to go beyond the “tired debate about whether women are active or passive, empowered or undermined when they engage in sexual representation” (133).

Quinn sidesteps such debates in the Birds “Diamonds” performance in two ways: firstly, she breaks the fourth wall to look at the camera throughout the scene and secondly, the audience shares her mental subjectivity. Quinn’s eye contact with the viewer is consistent with Lorelei in “Diamonds” and Madonna’s “Material Girl” as well as other roles Robbie has taken. For example, parallels can be made with Robbie’s role in I, Tonya (2017) where Robbie plays the role of Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding. Both Tonya and Quinn share difficult histories of domestic abuse. In press for I, Tonya, Robbie described breaking the fourth wall during moments of violence as a way of “emotionally disconnecting” (Tom Lamont 2018), and Quinn similarly disconnects in “Diamonds” disappearing into this fantasy musical number following a close up stare into the camera. Similarly, throughout “Material Girl” in close up Madonna smiles seductively directly at the camera. Indeed, Kaplan suggests Madonna presents “a direct rapport with the camera filming the rock video, and therefore with the TV spectator, deliberately playing for him/her rather than for the men in frame” (2017, 122). Not only does Quinn stare at the camera in “Diamonds,” repeated close ups of her face in the grey space and her laughter are intercut with dancing to “Diamonds,” reminding viewers that we share her subjectivity and daring us to look away. In contrast to Madonna’s seductive looks at the camera, Quinn accompanies staring at the camera with violence, looking up after smashing two men’s heads together, a shot that is repeated more than once. By reinforcing throughout this “Diamonds” performance that viewers share Quinn’s subjectivity, it is made clear that there is no audience in the diegesis to watch her dance and sing.

This combination of subjectivity and escape sees the film move beyond a focus on objectified sexuality to contemplate the violence and misogyny in Quinn’s interactions with Sionis. Quinn’s former lover Joker does not appear in Birds (other than in animated form at the start of the film), a significant fact given their historically abusive relationship. Instead, Birds explores the implications of their breakup, her consequential loss of his protection, and her “emancipation” as she finds her way alone. Violence is present throughout Birds’ “Diamonds” performance. At one point, a silhouetted man in the foreground shoots the backup dancers, recalling Lorelei’s refusal of the men at the start of Gentlemen’s “Diamonds” where the men mime shooting themselves in the head, “dying for love.” Here one man shoots the others, and just as Lorelei continues singing, Quinn dances, seemingly unaffected. Such moments are intercut with Quinn dancing with Sionis and fragmented shots of a stylised fight between them. As I will illustrate, in this scene Sionis stands in for the Joker, enabling critique of the prior relationship,⁴ particularly when, to the distorted sound of the line “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” Sionis kisses her hand then slaps her, abruptly ending the musical number.

Sionis’s links to the Joker are made clear as the “Diamonds” scene concludes in the grey space. With Quinn conscious, Sionis stands close and states “I’ll give you ‘til midnight and then I’m going to peel off that pretty face and pickle it. Kay?” before smiling and walking away. This threat to “peel off” her face, aligns with Joker’s similar threats in comic iterations (Salter 2020), while the “kay” brings to mind the Joker in the animated Batman television series referenced in the opening to the film. As Sionis threatens her, Quinn grimaces as in voiceover she comments “call me old-fashioned, but I always thought the guy was supposed to get the girl the diamond.” While Quinn’s words are sarcastic, they are suggestive of a romantic relationship. Indeed, their interaction here, combined with Sionis’s costuming in the grey space, replicates Dyer’s (1997) discussion of the representation of the white heterosexual couple through light: Sionis appears to be illuminated by Quinn, his skin is slightly darker, his clothes more sombre and covering more of his body (he wears a dark grey striped suit and t-shirt), and less light falls on him. As Sionis whispers threats, he moves closer to her, “intrud[ing] into, yearn[ing] towards” Quinn’s “angelic” light (Dyer 1997, 135). Such lighting conventions can reinstate “romantic” heteronormativity, but this is undermined by Sionis’s sinister threat. Like the diamond he has lost, Quinn is regarded as a possession to be obtained and disposed of. Earlier, upon realising that Quinn is no longer with the Joker, Sionis commented, “if she doesn’t belong to him, she belongs to me.” This statement of ownership echoes Satine’s experiences within Moulin Rouge! where The Duke and Christian spend the film contesting their right to her.⁵

Yet, Quinn challenges Sionis’s threats to possess and kill her. Despite being trapped, Quinn non-violently negotiates, bargaining for her release. She combines toughness with the performance of “girl” in her promises: “pinky swear, cross my heart.” Her business card, which she produces as evidence of her ability to find the diamond is reused, handwritten, and covered in pink glitter combining contradictory sparkles and violence: “Harley Quinn Hit(wo)man/Bounty Hunter/Dog Walker/Mercenary/Finder of lost things/Life coach.” Quinn is the “confident, fun-loving girl” of postfeminism, espousing a sparkly pink girl power (Dobson and Kanai 2019, 772–73) but this upbeat register is accompanied by frustration, violence, and anger. Quinn’s portrayal is further complicated by her position as a villain within DC Comics which Salter (2020) suggests “is filled with women who are most visible as victims;” this positioning of Quinn means any suffering she receives can be seen as “deserved due to her own ‘evil’ status” (138). However, her association with these prior texts indicates the dismissal of women, based on their appearance and profession (Lorelei as a chorus girl, Satine as a courtesan as well as Monroe and Madonna) throughout history is based on misogyny. Quinn deliberately challenges and questions Sionis’s misogyny, and in connecting to scenes and characters in prior texts across time, she shares experiences with these past characters.

The repetition of these shared experiences of misogyny across time establishes that it is systemic. Indeed, the association with Kidman’s Satine recalls Robbie’s role immediately before Birds in Bombshell (2019), where she plays a young, attractive, and ambitious employee at Fox News, sexually harassed by her employer, alongside two older generations of women (one of whom is played by Kidman) illustrating systemic abuse within the media industry. These characters and stars might be figures of fun, (white) femininity, and glamour, but they also represent ambivalence and critique, with such anger and frustration “accessible” given their white, conventionally attractive portrayals (Dobson and Kanai 2019, 780–81; Wanzo 2016). Quinn’s grimace as McGregor/Sionis threatens to peel off her face reads as “affective dissonance:” anger at the “outdated men and powerful patriarchal systems” that remain (Dobson and Kanai 2019, 780). Indeed, they suggest that such “dissonance … can produce a politicisation, a movement towards affective solidarity in occupying an orientation towards social transformation” (777). I argue that the Birds “Diamonds” scene produces such affective solidarity: the sparkles and bright colours are fun, suggestive of these past texts of white femininity, while the combination of violence and Quinn’s subjectivity encourage further thought and critical analysis.

Finding security and friendship

This fun “girlpower” aesthetic is central to Birds with the film heralded for its representation of friendship: “a female-driven action film” depicting “positive, supportive relationships” between women (Kayti Burt 2020). Although its female characters only work together in the final quarter of the film, they are not isolated from one another: throughout Birds Quinn develops a connection with child pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Brasco) who stole and subsequently swallowed the diamond Sionis is trying to find and Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett) who works at Sionis’s club and looks out for an intoxicated Quinn when men attempt to abduct her. This emphasis on support and friendship recalls Gentlemen, where the friendship between women “maintains its place firmly in the emotional centre of the story” (Mulvey 1996, 224) a factor not often present in Hollywood films. Although Gentlemen ends with best friends Dorothy (Jane Russell) marrying a poor man and Lorelei marrying a rich man, recognising the “material” role of money and beauty in marriage and relationships, the final mid-shot prioritises friendship: Lorelei and Dorothy stand side-by-side, their grooms outside the frame. In the final battle of Birds, the five central women in the film put aside their differences to defeat Sionis, with their camaraderie key to their success. And while the film ends with Quinn selling the diamond to fund her own business with an official business card, Quinn does not end the film alone. Instead, she drives off in a convertible with Cain, her new apprentice. Just as in Gentlemen Lorelei and Dorothy end the film wearing matching wedding dresses, here Quinn and Cain have matching hearts on their faces and coordinating sunglasses. That is, Quinn “secures” her future outside a relationship and through friendship. Although the “Diamonds” lyrics ostensibly preclude the need for friendship, I argue that Quinn’s closing comment in the “Diamonds” scene, “call me old-fashioned, but I always thought the guy was supposed to get the girl the diamond” draws connections between the precursor texts. More than a comment on women’s experiences of love and security, it illustrates the systemic issues of power embedded in tradition, and by referencing other iterations, draws connections and similarities between these characters’ experiences.

Throughout Gentlemen, Lorelei manipulates men to establish a sense of security in ways that anticipate Quinn in Birds, although their object of security differs: Lorelei’s focus is on expensive gifts and financially successful marriage. On a ship to France, Lorelei meets Piggy, owner of a diamond mine, and after she prevents him from being blackmailed she convinces him to give her the diamond tiara she covets: as she notes “a kiss on the hand might feel very good, but a diamond tiara lasts forever,” a sentiment that is repeated in the first line of “Diamonds” sung in Birds. But there are layers of irony to Lorelei’s performance: viewers who have watched the film know the tiara was not “forever.” When Piggy’s wife realises the tiara has gone, he declares it stolen and Lorelei is approached regarding its whereabouts. Alongside this, Lorelei’s relationship with Esmond is persistently placed in question by the presumption she is an unfaithful gold digger. The Gentlemen “Diamonds” performance conveys anger at this assumption: Lorelei embodies (and justifies) the gold digger character with lyrics that reflect a desire for financial security (romance and gestures are insufficient; there is rent to pay and clothes to launder) and advocates for not being taken advantage of: she looks directly at the camera as she tells the women around her to “get that ice or else no dice.” As a young woman with limited means to get ahead, Lorelei acknowledges that part of Esmond’s appeal is his father’s money, analogizing money and beauty: “you might not marry a girl just because she’s pretty, by my goodness doesn’t it help?” As the “dumb blonde,” Lorelei is continually underestimated, and this reflects the contradictions and ambiguity that imbue this character. Just as in the novel the play and film are based on, humour is established through “this question of Lorelei’s agency, and the related one of her actual intelligence” (Hegeman 1995, 534). Indeed, Mulvey argues that “Lorelei’s attitude to life zigzags between calculation and naivety, so that, combined with her intensely spectacular sexuality, the instability of her persona becomes inscribed into the comedy” (1996, 226). The consistent underestimation of Lorelei exposes persistent sexism with emphasis placed on appearance. These zigzags are similarly found in Quinn whose intelligence is juxtaposed with her ditzy and girlish presentation. Seventy years on from Gentleman Quinn is also underestimated, a fact former police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) acknowledges at the end of the film, “I’m used to it” Quinn shrugs, moments before stealing Black Canary’s car with Cain.

Alongside this underestimation is the significance of friendship to Gentlemen and Birds. In this respect, it is important to note that in Gentlemen Dorothy also performs “Diamonds.” When the police arrive to collect the tiara after Lorelei’s performance, she discovers it has been stolen and donning a blonde wig Dorothy is arrested in Lorelei’s place. In the courtroom, Dorothy parodies Lorelei’s performance, providing a distraction and enabling the situation to be resolved and the tiara returned to Piggy (who had stolen the tiara himself). While diamonds and the wealth and security they imply can be only trusted as much as the people who gift them, Dorothy supports Lorelei. Part of the irony of Lorelei’s “Diamonds” performance is that Dorothy is her best friend, undermining the song’s materialistic lyrics. It is Dorothy’s parody of Lorelei’s performance that Satine in Moulin Rouge! emulates, her costume suggestive of Dorothy’s silver and black fringed leotard and black gloves. Like Dorothy who marries for love, Satine, named “The Sparkling Diamond,” “tr[ies] to find real love” (Charlton 2012, 9). But although Satine may “love” Christian, she is “trapped” by circumstance with security out of her grasp: Satine is perceived as an object whose body can be exchanged for money.⁶ In contrast, Lorelei seems pragmatic about such matters. These films thus raise debates around romantic love, and the disadvantages it can pose for women in a capitalist society: there is compromise attached to both choices. Within Birds, having swallowed the diamond, Cain represents the diamond that could be exchanged by Quinn for her own security. But this exchange is a false promise: it requires sacrificing friendship and Cain’s respect. As viewers are reminded in Birds’ animated opening, in Quinn’s past such exchanges have not been in her best interests: Quinn is shown to steal and present a diamond to Joker, only for him to take the credit and ignore her. In an alternative iteration, the animated television show Batman, Quinn steals the Harlequin diamond to demonstrate her independence, an act that leads to friendship and teamwork with Poison Ivy. While in “Diamonds,” promising Sionis to find the diamond prevents Quinn’s untimely death, friends are allies, not objects to be exchanged, and questions are raised about the choices she is offered.

In this way, while Quinn’s motivation is shown to be her desire for “emancipation,” and “a chance to be my own woman,” the film is ambivalent about her choices, reflecting the conflicting ways iterations of “Diamonds” have been read. Both Gentlemen’s “Diamonds” and Madonna’s “Material Girl” present contradictions between lyrics, visuals, and plot. The “material” focus of society and the tensions and contradictions that accompany this are prioritised in the “Material Girl” video where Madonna, tired of expensive gifts, accepts the advances of the man who watches her and learns to bring her daisies rather than diamonds, intercut with a performance that emulates Monroe/Lorelei. While Bradby discusses the ambiguity of this clip (1992), Kaplan describes Madonna as “the postmodern feminist heroine” suggesting she is “out for herself” and “combines unabashed seductiveness with a gutsy kind of independence” (2017, 126). The contradictions present in this video have created difficulties for commentators, with Bradby noting the scene opposes “women’s positioning as dependent objects … and a position of female independence and control over both men and money” (1992, 89). Watching “Material Girl” today, it is unclear whether Madonna is manipulating/being manipulated (Bradby 1992). Situating the watching man alongside Madonna, who constructs her image and can choose not to care about money, highlights the “trappings” of fame: the independent Madonna wants a partner who doesn’t just want her for her fame/money. This is analogous to Lorelei with the song reflecting people’s expectations of her: while Madonna sings “I am a material girl,” the video indicates that it is more complex. The representation of these competing lyrics and video is reflected in Birds where Quinn weighs up competing motivations. As the film proceeds, Quinn initially sells out Cain to Sionis in exchange for her own security. The scene is shot in tones that emulate the grey space of the “Diamonds” framing scene and acts as a point of affective dissonance. A sustained thirty-second shot starts with a midshot of Quinn and Cain, slowly pulling into a close up of a tearful, smudged Quinn. In voiceover, Quinn comments that “this next bit ain’t very pretty,” and then with her eyes averted from the camera in the diegesis Quinn states “business is business.” The length of this shot indicates this is a moment of reflection for Quinn. She quickly regrets this choice and the loss of Cain’s trust, realising Sionis intended to kill them both and that diamonds are more than material possessions to be sold to pragmatically survive; in a competitive, neoliberal world, working together with other women is the only way out.

In this respect, when Quinn states “call me old-fashioned, but … ” she references this series of iterative ambiguous versions of “Diamonds” in which women navigate gendered ideas of love, friendship, and hopes for financial security as they attempt to control their image and survive in a patriarchal world. Such versions perhaps culminate in Beyoncé’s ad for Cartier, where Wagner argues that as “the very antithesis of the dumb blonde” Beyoncé has the means to purchase diamonds herself (2022, 11). Together these iterations challenge tradition, illustrating the competing expectations women navigate and the importance of friendships. Viewed together, they highlight structural systems and restrictions which historically and presently render women insecure in society and engage in challenging the limited expectations of others.

Concluding with “Diamonds” (2020)

As Quinn and Cain drive off into the future, and the credits roll, “Diamonds” (2020) plays. Performed by Megan Thee Stallion and Normani, the song samples Monroe’s performance and was sampled in Birds “Diamonds” scene. As Vesey comments, “citation reproduces the world around certain bodies, and necessitates a critical eye toward the potential and limits of their assembly” (2018, 86). Quinn’s whiteness pervades the film and her performance reiterates the white glamour that can reinforce the slim blonde beauty ideals it conveys. But to read this scene only in this way is to underestimate these characters. Performed by two Black women, this closing version of “Diamonds” (which has its own music video) has the last word. In the music video, the women drive a convertible reminiscent of the end of Birds, and they perform in similar corseted costumes to those of Dorothy, Lorelei, and Satine. Normani, swinging in a rhinestone aerial hoop, echoes Satine’s aerial performance and dances with an all-female group in matching black costumes.

Repetition encourages us to reflect, and by returning to these moments through film and video history we can consider what has remained the same and what still needs to change. In Yan’s Birds, this emphasis on friendship and security speaks volumes. Not only does it reinforce the roles of the women of colour in the film who have worked alongside Quinn to defeat Sionis and the misogyny he represents, in ending with “Diamonds” (2020), Birds brings together debates around objectification, looking, and sexual representation, and explores them in relation to Black women. Black women in music videos have persistently challenged understandings of the gaze, with this a complicated and nuanced space: as Rana Emerson (2002, 133) writes, “the themes of returning the erotic gaze and reappropriating the Black female body … [show] how Black women may use the sphere of culture to reclaim and revise the controlling images.” Indeed, Kyesha Jennings notes the ways that Megan Thee Stallion helps to develop “a nuanced understanding of sex-positivity” and “reject all derogatory views of black women as it relates to their sexuality” (Jennings 2020, 60, 65). Not only do these women dance and twerk with enjoyment, but the lyrics reflect this pleasure: “And I be doing me, I ain’t never tryna please “em.” This performance makes clear that sexism should not simply be conflated with sexual representation, as “sexual representation can open up and sustain the agency of female bodies in discovering pleasures, in connecting with other bodies and in making sense of themselves” (Paasonen et al. 2021, 136). Performing together, Megan Thee Stallion and Normani echo the friendship of Gentlemen while taking this further: “I don’t need you, I got flooded out baguettes.”

Reading with and through seventy years of representation of “Diamonds” in this current cultural moment illustrates systems that have and continue to impact women, at the same time as these are questioned and critiqued. As a citational performance in which layers build upon one another, the variations on this song illustrate the various ways stories can be told and the iterative possibilities of adaptation alongside the complicated and contradictory positions and choices these characters negotiate in hostile spaces. Not only do the iterations reflect their context, cumulatively the affective dissonance of Birds’ “Diamonds” and the song that runs over the credits assist us to recognise the challenges these women face are not individual but systemic. Despite these optimistic performances, such issues continue in the present.

Acknowledgment

Thank you to my postgraduate students for many excellent discussions about these texts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Significantly, Carol Channing “whose parodic construction of white, blonde femininity was central to her star image” (Shetina 2018, 153) was a biracial performer. While beyond the scope of this article, for discussion of Channing, race and performance, see Michael Shetina 2018. “Snatching an Archive: Gay citation, queer belonging and the production of pleasure in RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 3(2): 143–158.

2. There are iterations of “Diamonds” that have featured women of colour, including Carol Channing, Janet Jackson, Beyoncé, and television show Glee where Black transwoman Unique sings with her peers.

3. Black hands are associated with Sionis: imagery of black hands adorn his club and he wears black gloves throughout the film. Such imagery can foreshadow that Quinn will doublecross him.

4. This is exacerbated by McGregor’s role as both Christian in Moulin Rouge! and Sionis in Birds, characters who raise questions about jealousy and abuse in relationships.

5. Just as in Gentlemen, there is an ongoing discussion between Dorothy and Lorelei whether to marry for love or money, within Moulin Rouge! Satine debates whether to save the theatre and her friends by having sex with The Duke or act on her love for Christian.

6. The events of Moulin Rouge! are reminiscent of Loos’ novel and its sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, where Hegeman suggests questions remain as to “whether it is Dorothy or the mercenary Lorelei who has the better approach to relations with men” (1995, 530).