Meet Cathy Yan: the first Asian American woman to direct an American superhero film

Chinese American filmmaker Cathy Yan recently became the first Asian American woman to direct an American superhero film with the newest installment in the DC Extended Universe, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). Yan’s first and only prior feature-length project, Dead Pigs, drew star and producer Margot Robbie, along with other producers, to choose Yan to direct the DC film. It’s easy to see, however, how Birds of Prey is rooted in Dead Pigs; the two films share a colorful absurdity portrayed through a distinctive visual style and impart a similar message: The moment characters — especially women — in both films can truly claim their independence in an oppressive system, the absurd happens.

It’s no wonder that Dead Pigs — a cutting multilingual satire bursting at the seams with reality-stretching storylines — premiered at and went home with a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Acting at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. In a world where corporate capitalism is growing rampant, a ragtag bunch of financially struggling people are brought together when thousands of dead pigs clog up Shanghai’s waterways.

Birds of Prey also features an ensemble of vastly different characters whose lives collide when forced to confront a mutual enemy: Black Mask (played by Ewan McGregor), who seeks fortune and power via cruel and violent methods.

Yan’s ultimate achievement is using absurdity as a way through which characters assert their independence and emotional strength. When characters’ lives begin to fall apart, they have no choice but to become larger than life, acting out against the stricter societal forces against them. In Dead Pigs, beautician and small business owner Candy Wang (Vivian Wu) resists corporate eviction from her childhood home by publicly breaking into shrill fits before returning home to calmly feed her prized pet pigeons. In Birds of Prey, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) combats Sionis’ ultimatum by busting into a police station in a pseudo-babushka get-up and proceeding to knock her way through the building with a grenade launcher that shoots firework-style impact rounds, making quips the whole way.

In Dead Pigs, Candy pep-talks her employees by making them stomp and scream a rousing chorus of “I am the best! I am talented! I am unique! I will succeed!” before starting the day. In Birds of Prey, Harley Quinn displays similar outbursts of emotion, including a memorable scene when her beloved egg sandwich flies from her grasp in slow motion before she turns to throw a pile of roadside trash at the perpetrator, just so happening to kill two people and injure multiple others in the process. By toeing the line between reality and absurdity, Yan frees her characters of the cinematic bonds in which drama trumps comedy, conventional trumps experimental, and heteronormative trumps queer. She permits the characters to break free of their own in-story narrative shackles.

The filmmaker’s directorial style allows the camera to act as a sort of watchful narrator. It follows the story alongside us, complementing deadpan dark humor with an ironic stillness and painting jittery strokes when the film dives into more sensory stimuli. In Dead Pigs, the camera lingers on the neon lights of the Shanghai skyline and highlights the hidden spaces in which characters can grow into their absurdist selves; its stillness also allows the viewer to take in the specks of blossoming rebellion like Candy. She, in particular, is the visually — and emotionally — colorful centerpiece of the ruined farming landscape, her brightly colored teal house and multicolored scarf gleaming out of the bleak surroundings, the camera slowing dollying in as she scolds corporations while on television.

In Birds of Prey, Yan creates a vastly different portrait of the famous DC Universe city than many other films, with Harley Quinn providing these Dead Pigs-esque neon splashes of color amid a gray urban sprawl. An abandoned amusement park, in particular, becomes Harley Quinn’s playground: the absurd is where she — and the rest of the women — can thrive, as they’re no longer bound by the rules of the bureaucratic urban space. In Dead Pigs, the characters are a different type of contemporary underdog, shunned in some way by society, whether it be socioeconomically disadvantaged or otherwise parted from supportive relationships. The moment they can truly claim their independence in an oppressive system is when the absurd happens — the dead pigs appear.

Birds of Prey might instinctively lend itself to absurdity, with Harley Quinn’s distinctive over-the-top, stereotypically “crazy” personality as a key feature of her character in DC media. However, it’s only when her environment — and Yan — gives her the space to run rampant by matching this colorful energy does she finally reach true independence — and multidimensionality. In Birds of Prey, Harley Quinn laments that a harlequin’s “role is to serve” — yet, in the traditional Italian theatrical form of commedia dell’arte, the harlequin is also a clever, colorful trickster and a foil to the everyman. These are two sides of the same coin, one being the view of “the masters” and the other being that of the character’s true inner traits. These distinctive roles are also unleashed in different spaces, and Harley Quinn is able to shine when she’s released into the less-than-realistic.

There should be no wonder why Yan was selected as the director for Birds of Prey. Yan has stated that the film’s emphasis upon the eponymous “emancipation” was, in fact, a crucial part of her pitch. By literally breaking the believable reality of a world identical to our own, her characters begin to break free of the sterile, strict world of a patriarchal, capitalist system.