Sucker Punch

Saw Sucker Punch. It made a small splash a while ago when it was accused of being sexist only for the director, Zack Snyder to retort that no, it is actually feminist because this film is a clever skewering of sexist tropes. Well, that sounds like a challenge, Mr Snyder. Let's see if we can tease this question apart. It was with this spirit that I undertook this film and after watching it myself... I still have no idea who's right.

Let me explain: the film is about a girl who is sent off to Crazy Acres because of an inheritance scheme. There, she is scheduled for lobotomy by shish kebab. At the moment of penetration, she escapes into a fantasy where she is a newcomer in a whore house. The whore house is pretty clearly a fantasy-version of Crazy Acres though and everyone has double roles. The head doctor becomes a choreographer, the crooked orderly who forged her papers is the pimp of the house. In the whore-house she has the power to entrance anyone who watches her dance. When she dances, we audience see visions of epic nerd-bait badassitude. In one vision, she and the other whores slice their way with katanas through hordes of steam-powered WW1 Germans, all to a remixed version of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. It's incredibly stupid and incredibly fun. This is allegory inside of metaphor though, so the going quickly gets tricky.

The interpretive dances are exploitative, definitely. They deal in the kind of babes-n-guns, bikinis-are-best-armour, strong-female-character pandering we're used to receiving from video games. They have a self-serious tone which I assume is a joke (anyway, it would be really hard to take steam-powered people seriously so I'll be ingenuous) and lots of clever ties to "reality" which I dug. The girl seems to make her sexiness and pathos into a distracting, fascinating weapon. This is interesting and an idea that's not usually brought up in modern film, but mainly because it's been kind of done. The idea of a person being so purposefully helpless that their oppressors look like monsters in contrast is as old as the Age of Martyrdom and the idea of women demurring their oppressors to death is a mighty hard sell. I like the idea of making weaknesses into weapons, but I don't really believe it (not that sexiness is a weakness anyway... hmm.)

Then again, the film deals heavily with fascination and self-delusion. Particularly men's fascination with women and the self-delusion of those women. Could it be that the girl sees herself as the object she's being treated as? She's a tough fighter in her fantasies, but these are only fantasies and they anyway most closely resemble the fantasies of Rob Liefeld. The dazzling nature of the fantasies is thematically appropriate then because it suggests she has been deluded as we and her audience are too, by overwhelming amusement.

I'm kind of drifting off into navel-gazing nonsense here, but then I'm ill-equipped to wade into gender politics. I'd like to repeat that this film is tremendously fun. There's a lot of grist for a spirited sexist-not-sexist debate (and lots of phallic symbols. We are definitely dealing with gender politics here.) At worst, the film is sexist junk-food. At best it's junk-food with some kind of buried triple-negative feminist message. So come for the lovely junk, stay for the mind-games.