In The Suicide Squad, The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died” isn’t just a needle drop—it’s a mission statement
Playing over the opening credits, The Jim Carroll Band’s cynical punk lamentation is The Suicide Squad at its purest
Film Features Suicide Squad
This article discusses the plot of The Suicide Squad
When James Gunn announced that he was going to be bringing some much-needed Guardians Of The Galaxy energy to the flailing (and arguably failing) DC Extended Universe, it seemed like a killer soundtrack was a given. Gunn’s poptimist approach to superhero movies had felt like an influence on the first Suicide Squad’s supposed re-edit, leading to a film filled to the brim with forced needle drops that couldn’t find its rhythm. To say that Suicide Squad missed Gunn’s wit and taste would be an understatement. DC and Warner Bros. failed to recreate the success of the director’s first Guardians film, so why not just go for the genuine article with film two?
Gunn’s ability to place pop perfection amid the carnage and bombast of superhero spectacle is one of his great talents, and nowhere is that more explicit than in The Suicide Squad’s opening credit sequence. The scene leading to the credits is a bait-and-switch. Gunn builds up energy via a standard-issue covert op beach battle, a generic superhero score, a cast of fan favorites (including Gunn company players Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker), and an on-the-nose Johnny Cash hit. But when the film’s first CGI creation, Weasel—who very easily could’ve been a breakout star à la Groot or King Shark—dives out of an airplane and drowns, the audience learns that no one’s particularly safe in front of Gunn’s camera. As each member of that Suicide Squad is torn apart, the opening credits kick in with the purest expression of the director’s vision: a graveyard of dead supervillains set to the sounds of The Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died.” No track could be more perfect. Like Carroll’s song, The Suicide Squad treats the horrors of human life and the violence of the modern world with exuberance, joy, and fun, a fitting commentary on the world-ending theatrics of superhero cinema if there ever was one. Gunn’s more willing to lean into our bloodthirsty predilections than other superhero movie directors.
The late poet, writer, and musician Jim Carroll is probably best known as the author of the memoir The Basketball Diaries, later turned into an early Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle. The Basketball Diaries chronicles Carroll’s life between the ages of 12 and 15 when he was a promising basketball player, small-time miscreant, and heroin addict in New York City’s once grimy Lower East Side. In 1980, Carroll released his first album, Catholic Boy, a raucous punk gem that found fans in Keith Richards, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. Playing on the same themes of his memoir and poetry, which mostly detailed his turbulent adolescence, Catholic Boy is sometimes referred to as the “last great punk album”—though, it’s unclear who said this or why anyone, including this writer, keeps repeating it. But “People Who Died” sounds like it could be the last great New York punk song (even though it wasn’t). “People Who Died” gave off a whiff of Taxi Driver during an era when New York was starting to smell a little different. In a 1981 review for Rolling Stone, critic Ken Tucker wrote, “[Carroll] lets the band set the breakneck pace, then speeds after them, shouting a list of the names of his comrades who’ve shuffled off this hot-plate coil: ‘They were all my friends–and they died!’ he gulps. The absence of both sentimentality and ornamental imagery lends the song an edge of shocking humor.”
The Suicide Squad is far from the first film to use the song. One of its earliest appearances came just a few years after its release when Steven Spielberg included it in E.T. While it does foreshadow the danger that Elliott (Henry Thomas) and his friends would face later in the film, the charming story of a boy and his beer-swilling alien might not be the best venue for the tune. Honestly, the song, for all its direct messaging, is rarely used appropriately. It was even wasted in the film about Carroll. The Basketball Diaries drops an abridged version of “People Who Died” into an expressionistic, rain-drenched scene on the court. Unlike Gunn, the film’s director Steve Kalevert opted for Catholic Boy’s lower-key title track as the soundtrack for the opening credits and pretty much doomed the movie as a result. Mr. Robot, a show that’s underrated in terms of its needle drops, gets a lot of mileage out of the song, using it to play over a montage of the cast burning evidence. That works best because “People Who Died” is most comfortable among mischief and murder.
Just as the song pays unsympathetic tribute to the dead, so too does The Suicide Squad. As the credits start, the guitars ring out, the drums roll, and Carroll begins to sing, “Teddy sniffing glue he was 12 years old / Fell from the roof on East Two-Nine.” Gunn’s whirling camera pans up and spins around the dead and dying bodies that litter the beach, turning the brutalization of many of the film’s supposed principal players into a house party. As the director twirls the camera around T.D.K. (Fillion), who is coughing up bubbles of blood, Gunn cuts to the office of Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), where her employees watch the massacre on console screens and give the finger to the dead supervillains, literally and figuratively. Meanwhile, Waller’s just upset that she’ll have more headaches before the mission is complete. These are people (and weasels) who died, but they are totally expendable. Gunn’s use of the song upends what audiences might think the movie will be, who’s starring in it, and what we should think of the characters. He lays out that not only are these characters disposable, but we should delight in their demise.
The film’s opening credits riff on Gunn’s previous film, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2. Lauded for its soundtrack, GOTG Vol. 2 opens with Baby Groot dancing to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky” as Groot’s partners are walloped by a just-out-of-frame space monster. Where Guardians distracts us from violence with an adorable CGI creation (one based on Gunn’s own movements), The Suicide Squad does the opposite. Instead, the director revels in the mayhem he created, using “People Who Died” as a mission statement for the rest of the film. The violence is the entertainment. It’s the reason we’re watching. It’s the reason Waller’s employees are having so much fun. It’s why we settle in for another two hours. Dancing Groot is funny in the context of mayhem. In The Suicide Squad, the violence is the joke.
The Suicide Squad is at its purest when singing in showers of blood, and no place is that more true than the opening credits. As Carroll names all the teens he knew who died, turning their obits into entertaining and cathartic punk perfection, Gunn does the same. The director takes the time to introduce us to the characters, lays the groundwork for future callbacks that will never be called back, and kills them all with glee. No one is safe in his world, regardless of billing. And it’s all in good fun because we don’t necessarily want to see these people live anyway. They’re supervillains, after all. Gunn dares us to enjoy the violence for its own sake and to hope that Superman doesn’t show up to stop the madness. Then, with “People Who Die” playing on the soundtrack, he delivers an opening that kills.
53 Comments
I went to see X last week in So Cal and as the lights went up and everyone filed out, this song came on. And everyone in my section started singing it in unison! It was pretty cool. It’s one of those songs that if you know it, you know every word.
No love for his performance of the song (with a young Robert Downey Jr on drums!) in the 80s classic Tuff Turf?
Or the Against Me! version from a couple of years ago on the Songs that Saved Me comp.
It’s also in Basketball Diaries.
I would hope so, given the movie’s subject.
is it a classic though….?
The decision to omit the use of ‘People Who Died’ over the end credits of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead is thoroughly bizarre, given that it was written by James Gunn.I mean, if there would be any other use of that song in a movie that was connected to this one…
“…given that it was written by James Gunn.”Somehow never realized that James Gunn wrote Dawn of the Dead, but that explains why its the only Zach Snyder movie I really enjoyed. Also, the zombie baby scene which…..seemed a little much….absolutely tracks now that I know it was thought up by a guy who started in Troma.
I’m guessing (that like the original Romero film) there was probably a lot of humor in Gunn’s Dawn of the Dead script and Snyder cut it out or recontextualized it (e.g. the zombie baby was probably 100% a gag that Snyder played seriously).
Best Zombie Baby: From BrainDead.
Came here to say the same thing. It’s a weird miss. Bizarre might be overstating- but certainly weird.
Came here to say this!
I love the use of “When The Man Comes Around” in the opening credits.
It’s crazy to watch this and then watch anything recent Snyder’s done. “FUCK whimsy, these are SUPERHEROES.”
For me, the best drop of the whole movie was the Pixies Hey while they are fighting there in the Rain. Absolutely great use of that song, and good to hear Pixies on screen and it not be Where is My Mind
They rearranged it a little bit (the wrong lyrics followed Black’s grunting), which distracted the pedantic side of me.
They rearranged it a little bit (the wrong lyrics followed Black’s grunting), which distracted the pedantic side of me.Yeah, they did that thing that movies do where they cut a verse out of the song to make it line up with what’s on screen, which is fine unless you’ve listened to that song a million times. Then it’s weird and distracting (if still understandable).
Yeah, they must have wanted certain lines over specific shots
The Fear Street movies use a lot of Pixies too, and none of the songs are Where is My Mind. Maybe they were on sale.
This is the first thing I’ve heard about this movies that actually makes me want to watch them
I enjoyed it enough in parts, it’s very teen focused like as in for teenagers. So it’s fun, but nothing great. Well it’s great that the female lead of a horror movie is queer, that doesn’t happen much.
Used two back to back, which seems like it should be a no-no in the Needle Drop Commandments.
Must have decided “Wave of Mutilation” was too on the nose.
Honestly, just about anything from Doolittle could probably work
I wouldn’t associate this song with “poptimism”. A singer-songwriter of unexceptional vocal abilities telling an authentic story about the actual people he knew that others couldn’t logically tell is more fitting in with the “rockism” that’s supposed to oppose.
Speaking of superhero entertainment with great needle drops, I just started watching The Boys. Three episodes in and they’re spot on, like “Cherry Bomb” by The Runaways and “Stop” by Jane’s Addiction.
The first episode of Legion uses Jane’s Addiction to good effect, as well, with “Up the Beach”.
As for Mr. Robot, no musical moment was more perfect than Bleach’s “The Head That Controls….” at the start of S2E10, where Joanna very calmly gets dressed and puts on makeup to the soundtrack of Japanese hardcore.
Angela karaoking “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” should’ve been too on the nose, but they pulled it off really well. Might help that I love kinda out of tune vocals tho.
I dunno dude, this was pretty awesome too.
Suicide Squad was better in this respect (and all others) than the GotG films but man does Gunn get way too much credit for his bland song choices. The GotG soundtracks are indistinguishable from any AM Gold hits collection and about as exciting as the Shrek soundtrack (the fact that this boring ass mix tape is actually a plot point in the film makes it even more galling). He picks songs that have been used in a thousand movies before and are only slightly less on-the-nose than Snyder’s eye-roll worthy picks. Glad he got to make a fun splatter-fest, though, and it’s always nice to hear the Pixies turn up.
Catholic Boy is one of the greatest albums ever released and a must-listen for anyone who claims to love rock and roll.Yeah, that’s all I got.
I love that album, but it also amuses me how padded some of the songs are, like how People Who Died and Three Sisters repeat verses.
Just as the song pays unsympathetic tribute to the dead, Unsympathetic?
Yeah, the author’s interpretation of the tone of the song is baffling to me.
Unsentimental, I would have said.
It’s postpunk, a genre full of upbeat songs about really dark topics. The whole look is seeming like you don’t give a shit about anything when you’re scared shitless Reagan’s about to blow up the world. I don’t think it’s unsympathetic at all, frankly, what I hear is Carroll portraying himself as aloof and pretending not to care but really overwhelmed, unable to process the terror and weight of so much death in his young life. An explosion of real emotion is just barely being held back and that’s what makes it such a compelling song. My take at least.
I feel the exact opposite. Gunn’s predilection for aligning the lyrics of his Hot Topic playlist with on screen action has always struck me as ham-fisted and only serves to pull me out of a movie.
Because Spirit in the Sky and Hot Topic go together.
I had similar feelings about the music used in a different movie. I enjoyed the recent Black Widow movie, but the cliched slowed-down melodramatic version of Smells Like Teen Spirit in the opening credits sent my eyes rolling straight out of my skull. It would’ve been a lot less corny if they just went with the original version. Hell, it would’ve been less cheesy with the excellent Weird Al parody.
yeah that definitely was a needle drop that made me hold my breath in terms of expecting something waaaaay worse than what we got…the movie was better than the trendy ethereal baby doll vocal cover intro.
For the most part, I don’t mind cover songs, many are just as good if not better (see “The Man Who Sold The World”), just not in this form. The most egregious one in recent memory is a GODAWFUL cover of “I Can See Clearly Now.” I love the Jimmy Cliff “Cool Runnings” cover, but holy moley, whoever did this one recently thought going back and forth between whispery baby-voice and belting while presumably passing a kidney stone was a good idea. Not. A. Fan.
Nice edgy take and attempt to be counter culture, but holy shit labeling the GotG soundtracks as even remotely Hot Topic-ish is just buffoonish.
Best version of “People Who Died” is actually Gwar’s version of “West End Girls”.
RIP Oderus.
Best version of “West End Girls” is actually Flight of the Chonchords’ version of “Inner City Pressure”.
I love this song! Hey man, I just want some Muesli…
FUN FACT: “People Who Died” was originally a poem by Ted Berrigan that was intended as a poem that everyone could write their own version of. Jim Carroll set his to music and the rest is history…https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56127/people-who-died
Naw, it’s just a needledrop. Remember when they used to make original music for movies?
I was pleasantly surprised to hear “People Who Died” in the movie. I bought “Catholic Boy” in a used record store in the 80’s. Loved that song ever since.
Strange to be talking about music to The Suicide Squad when Suicide Squad used about 20 different licensed tracks within the first few minutes of the films opening.
Gunn is a better Zach Snyder than Zach Snyder is.
Nothing could get me on-board with a movie faster than this fakeout cold open leading into the opening chords of a song so near and dear to my heart, and one who so sharply announces that the movie has arrived.
There’s nothing like a soundtrack that knows how to use a punk song properly, and this one is up there with Doom Patrol’s use of the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” a moment which basically got me to jump off my couch cheering.