Wow, it's been awhile. Anyway, I'm back for today with an analysis of the film Sucker Punch! (Hella spoilers.)
Sucker Punch is a 2011 film
from director Zack Snyder. The film’s pitch line was “Alice in Wonderland with
machine guns”, and it certainly delivers. It’s a movie about sanity and sexuality in which five
institutionalized girls, in an unspecified but decidedly vintage time period,
battle against their oppressors in a fantasy world. Their victories and
failures in the imagined world translate to the real world; and so the film is
less an actual supernatural action movie and more a movie about image and
interpretation, where real-world monsters are explicitly framed as combat
enemies.
LAYERS
The film has three clear layers: first, the actual mental
asylum, where the girls wear dirty smocks and where the color scheme is grey
and washed out. The second layer is the club/brothel: high contrast and
glittering. The third layer is the combative fantasy world in which the girls
fight their battles.
Each reveals something about the previous. The club imagining
of the asylum reveals Blue’s sexualization of the patients; it’s implied at the
end of the movie that he’s been molesting the girls. The scene where Rocket is
assaulted by the cook also shows that the patients are subject to abuse from
the asylum staff. The club also shows the business-like nature of the asylum.
In the first layer, Blue accepts bribe money from Babydoll’s stepfather to
forge Dr. Gorski’s signature and get Babydoll a lobotomy so that she can’t rat
her stepfather out to the police.
The fantasy battleground maintains the sexualization of the
girls via their skimpy costumes, but it also is a world in which they are powerful. The fantasy world is also on the verge of steampunk, combining old-fashioned settings such as the WWII trenches and medieval castles with high-tech weaponry. In this way, the girls take down vintage ideas of femininity and sexuality with their futuristic technology. They access this world through Babydoll’s dance sequences, which are all “gyrating,
moaning and titillation” in the second layer, the club layer. The peep show
exhibitionist dancing puts women in control in the hyper-sexualized club world
(and, I think, the real world outside the film). In the fantasy world, that
control translates to weapons and strength. They are physically invincible. They
are never wounded or hurt, and rarely cornered. Even when one girl is, the
other girls are there to assist. In the fantasy world, they have the bonds they
are discouraged from forming in the previous two layers; bonds with each other,
and with the Wise Man.
MEN
There are three main male figures in Sucker Punch: the stepfather, Blue, and the Wise Man. The film gets
into some quintessential “Daddy issues.” The girls in the asylum/club have all
been orphaned, abandoned, or ran away from parental figures. The three male
characters represent three archetypal parent molds: the imagist, the realist,
and the guide.
The Imagist
Babydoll’s stepfather is the innocent, “I did my best”
parent, who claims to have been a good and nurturing father while secretly
being neglectful at best and actively abusive at worst. For the stepfather,
image is everything, because if Babydoll reveals that he was anything other
than the image he’s put forth, he goes to jail. His re-imagining as a priest in
the club layer reinforces this idea—he is pure, clean, and blameless. Except,
we know he isn’t.
The Realist
Blue takes the stance of the realist, the man who knows what
the big, bad world is really like. He tries to position himself as a guardian,
a protector, and convinces the girls that however bad life is with him, it’s
infinitely worse without him: “I try to give you all a good life. I try. I do.
And all I ask for in return is just for respect.” This is of course not actual
realism, but is very successfully defined that way thanks to just how bad it is
in the club and how bad the girls’ experiences were before being
institutionalized. What’s interesting is that Sweet Pea, the one who “never
really had a problem with Mom and Dad” and who knows that Blue is a liar, is
the one who is reluctant to escape. This is mostly for the safety of her sister
Rocket, but perhaps she’s adapted a little too well to her new life, being the
only one who really has the necessary mental ability to adapt to change.
The Guide
The Wise Man represents the good, real father figure the
girls never had. He is an older man who keeps his distance and never sexualizes
them, unlike the men of comparable ages who frequent the club (such as the
Mayor with his stogies). He doesn’t act as a guardian or claim to be a
protector, like Blue does. The girls are beyond the age where that’s what the
father should be—Babydoll’s age is said to be 20 at the beginning. What girls
this age need is a guide, someone who gives them direction and then gets out of
the way. The Wise Man is with them at the beginning of each of their missions
to offer them advice, like “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for
anything,” and even distinctly parental bits like, “Try and work together.” His
frequent “Oh yeah, one more thing”s are also reminiscent of a dad who is
constantly thinking of more things to impart.
He’s even re-garbed as a bus driver, a guide, at the end. But
when it comes down to it, he still knows his fatherly duty to protect his
daughter from predators: like at the very end, when he saves Sweet Pea from the
troopers. To reinforce the fact that he does not sexualize them, he doesn’t even
touch Sweet Pea when she gets on the bus and he comfortingly tells her to take
a seat near the back and try to get some sleep.
THERAPY
Therapy is the treatment of a disorder. In the first layer,
the asylum, Dr. Gorski uses music to help the girls evoke the memories of their
abuse so that they can discuss the damage, get it out. In the second layer,
that therapy becomes each girl’s dance, where Madame Gorski again provides the
music. Their therapy then becomes their peep-show performances.
A frequent post-feminist claim is that women hold power
through their sexuality. In the club layer, this is true. Men are transfixed by
Babydoll’s “titillating” dances, which Sweet Pea calls impersonal. As I said
earlier, the dance sequences become the fantasy world in which the girls hold
actual, qualitative power: they are skilled with weapons and physically
invincible. Even Rocket’s death takes place outside the fantasy world. The
fantasy world is a place where there is no male supremacy. Babydoll is even
able to cut an enemy’s sword in half in her first battle, symbolically severing
the phallic weapon being used against her.
In the club layer, Gorski says to Blue, “I teach [the girls]
to survive YOU.” She’s referring to the dances she teaches them and the show
that she directs. She teaches them to use their sexuality, to own it, because
it gives them some small vestige of control when they otherwise would have
simply been the victims of the men who abuse them. In a very, very twisted way,
being in touch with themselves as sexual beings allows the girls to participate
in the club and keep a measure of themselves intact. Not recommended, but in
certain situations I suppose you have to work with what you’ve got.
In addition to the dance/therapy issue, there’s the framing
of lobotomy as paradise. A lobotomy is a procedure that consists of “cutting
the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex” of the brain and was used as
treatment in the first half of the 20th century for the violently or
untreatably insane. In Sucker Punch,
the lobotomy turns Babydoll into a vegetable, rendering her unresponsive and
placid. Blue refers to that state as “paradise.” Babydoll no longer feels pain
or indeed, experiences anything, This is a throwback to the idea that women are
happiest when their lives are simple, when they are sheltered and restricted to
the home and don’t participate in any grand or complex ideologies. It’s a
farce, clearly; Babydoll’s lobotomy has rendered her effectively dead, and so
are similarly sheltered women. Even in the club layer, with that weird measure
of sexual ownership, Rocket says “We’re already dead,” as in dead inside and
dead to the world.
“AND FINALLY. THIS QUESTION.”
Sweet Pea narrates the end with the following monologue
(emphasis added by me):
“And finally. This question. The mystery of whose story it
will be, of who draws the curtain. Who is it that chooses our steps in a dance?
Who drives us mad, flashes us with
whips, crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who is it
that tells all these things? Who honors
those we love with the very life we live? Who
sends monsters to kill us, and at the same time sings that we'll never die?
Who teaches us what's real, and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live,
and what we'll die to defend? Who chains us, and who holds the key to set us
free? It's you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.”
There are lots of things to talk about in this, but I’m
focusing on the two bolded lines. The obvious reading is that humans can put
themselves through ridiculous and contradictory psychological torment. This
makes sense with the final line, where Sweet Pea says that “you” are wholly
responsible for your experience of the world.
However, it is also possible to read these lines in terms of
the contradictory male reactions to femininity. I wish I still had the library’s
copy of The Rise of Enlightened Sexism
to quote (thanks Chels :P), but this kind of thing is easy to see in real life
and extrapolate. Men seem to worship the female: her body, her charms, her
love. Like Sting says, “Every little thing she does is magic.” Yet politically,
female empowerment is a terrifying thing to some male leaders. Look at the
recent political attacks on Planned Parenthood, the persistently lower wage
earned by women for the same jobs as men, and the attempts in the media to
strip female political figures of their legitimacy, either by de-feminizing
them (as with Janet Reno) or by hyper-feminizing them (as with Sarah Palin). In
the former case, for example, Janet Reno was allowed to be a capable political
figure because she was seen as mannish. In the latter case, Sarah Palin was NOT
allowed to be a capable political figure because she was seen as simultaneously
sexy and motherly, not to mention her airheadedness.
So clearly, based on these and countless other examples I’m
sure you can pull from your own lives, men love women but are also scared of
women. So the lines, “Who drives us mad, flashes us with whips,
crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who sends monsters to
kill us, and at the same time sings that we'll never die?” can take on a new
meaning. Think about it.
