Smart in Name Only

Film is an art, wrote psychologist (and the first film theorist) Hugo Münsterberg, because it is not reality, because it is a re-articulation of the human mind.

And that is exactly what Sucker Punch is.

Like Inception (kind of), the narrative is split into layers of fantasy. We have:

1) “Reality” – our protagonist, a young woman we only come to know as Baby Doll, is incarcerated in a mental hospital where she is due to be lobotomised.

2) Baby Doll imagines herself instead in a brothel instead, where she is set to be de-flowered. She plans to escape.

3) The escape requires the theft of a series of items by Baby Doll and her fellow conspirators – these play out via several unique, genre-based action sequences as Baby Doll dances in layer 2.

Still aboard? Ok, so re-articulation is what each subsequent layer is about. Characters, events, fears and tensions are re-presented in a variety of fantastical forms. This isn’t new – films like Pan’s Labyrinth spring to mind, and arguably it’s what most arts are based on – but, boy, the film does it in its own way.

The first layer 3 sequence is a clear reflection (or refraction) of the layers above. Giant samurai match the imposing male figures in layers 1 and 2 – they’re actually framed to emphasise their giant relative size compared to Baby Doll. She fights the samurai with two weapons: a sword (with which she cuts one’s neck) and gun (with which she shoots another). The former is clearly based on the prior scene in layer 2, as Baby Doll saves her contemporary (Rocket) from the barbaric cook by holding a knife to his neck. In the fantasy, she follows through. The latter is a manipulation of the tragedy that opens the story as Baby Doll inadvertently shoots her sister in the attempt to prevent her rape by their stepfather.

I found myself wishing the subsequent layer 3 sequences would be as tightly linked to corresponding real events as in Pan’s Labyrinth, in which Guillermo Del Toro skilfully balanced reality and fantasy, asking you to directly compare and contrast them throughout, but I came to realise that Zack Snyder’s artistic vision was not the same. Instead, it’s about interpretation.

But before we get into that, I’d just like to address a point that many critics have made that is, in fact, moot. Supposedly, because the action sequences are not based in reality, the danger to the girls is non-existent and therefore we have no emotional stake. Bollocks. Double, fat, sweaty bollocks.

It’s clearly established that the events in the action sequences are linked – even if this link is sometimes murky – to reality. If a girl dies in the fantasy, it’s because she’s died in reality. Sure this could’ve been rubbed in our faces to make sure everyone understood, but what’d be the point? We’ve had The Matrix. We – the Hollywood-saturated audience – know this setup. And as for the emotional stake, well, that runs much deeper than standard hoping-the-goodies-live-to-win.

Ok, so, interpretation. It’s key, it’s the key, to Sucker Punch. Thematic, rather than literal, interpretation is what’s truly important.  Snyder intends us to interpret what’s going on in reality based on its censored, or else manipulated, presentation in fantasy. But in turn, this reality remains largely obscured from view, so the broader implications of our interpretations go centre-stage.

Question: Why is the film a mish-mash of pop culture? Why does the soundtrack contain songs (such as a cover of The Pixies’ Where is My Mind) from beyond the film’s 1960s setting? And likewise why are the protagonist’s fantasies so full of genre influences and technology that someone from the period couldn’t possibly imagine?

Are the giant robot samurai, Nazi zombies, orcs, dragons and robots there simply to pander to a valuable teen market? Maybe as far as the studio is concerned. But they serve an artistic function, since pop culture is culture. A somewhat obvious statement, but considering how it’s employed in Sucker Punch can we not approach it as we would culture in terms of its relation to society? The complex images, myths, ideas through which society is constituted – ideology.

The focus in the film’s ideological cross-hairs: women in the 20th century. The 60s setting foregrounds a period of shifting gender relations. But the film is not a celebration or a retelling of second-wave feminism. One of the last lines of the film: “we have a long way to go”. Sucker Punch – and this is where the title comes into play – boldly confronts us with the fact that we do not live in a post-gender-defined society. The most obvious example of how it does that is by being a self-aware example of women’s screen role as fetishised object.

The film’s six heroines are almost always scantily dressed. And as if that wasn’t enough to attract the male gaze, Snyder seems to encourage it, giving us gratuitous slow-motion shots of said scantily dressed women doing nothing more than walk. We’re invited to inspect the women as sexual objects, just as in layer 2 the girls perform burlesque dances to appease their male audience. This voyeurism is standard. The fact that our attention is drawn to it so thoroughly in a Hollywood film is certainly not. It’s bizarre and worthy of celebration that such a feat was achieved.

Another particularly un-Hollywood feature of Sucker Punch is its use of montage. We’re not talking Hollywood scriptwriting-shortcut montage here. We’re talking something that is akin to Soviet Montage Cinema. Snyder has been widely praised for his use of montage in the opening titles sequences of his Dawn of the Dead remake and Watchmen. The opening sequence of Sucker Punch has no dialogue – only music – and some critics have commented that the film is like a series of music videos. Rather, I think Soviet montage theory is being overlooked. Consider the famous example of the bull scene in Strike.

We are shown striking workers being attacked and, out of nowhere, this is intercut with a bull being slaughtered. The bull has no narrative, temporal or spatial relation to the workers, but in an example of what came to be known as intellectual montage we understand it as representing the workers. This interpretation is unambiguous, and yet on paper there’s no reason to believe the technique would work. While there is no direct intercutting of the same sort in Sucker Punch, what links the shots of the workers and the bull is what links the different layers of fantasy and reality in Snyder’s film. And through this link there is the potential for meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts*.

The film is linked by a high degree of psychosexual imagery and symbolism. It’d make for a field day for psychoanalysis. For cognitivism… not so much. I found myself fascinated by this imagery much more than I enjoyed the action sequences in a conventional, visual sense (even though it was technically outstanding). Perhaps this is a fault of the film. Perhaps it was intended that its audience simultaneously appreciate the scenes both in terms of intellectual links and as entertainment. The murkiness of the fantasy-reality link made the action’s motivating force unclear, and usually this is something I’d rip into – after all, I despise Raiders of the Lost Ark – but here it’s unclear, not absent.

Sucker Punch is Zack Snyder’s Shutter Island. Don’t lazily wait for the big reveal to explain everything, because it won’t. Instead, it’s an uncompromising case of the more you put in, the more you get out. It’s a wild, beautiful, imperfect** beast unlike anything you’ve seen before. The tagline was right – you will be unprepared. Most of the charges levied against the film by critics betray a certain ignorance, but more than that a lack of effort. Most reviews don’t even begin to consider how the film functions, let alone what it’s truly about. But their greatest sin is failing to acknowledge the wealth of talent the film displays: its excellent soundtrack, its visual effects and excellent direction – in the first layer 3 sequence you really feel every blow against Baby Doll, much more so than in the shaky-cam world of Bourne, for instance. As I hope I’ve begun to communicate (though my review only scratches the surface), the film is densely meaningful – and meaningful in a wholly cinematic way. It’s as if Fellini was working in Hollywood. And the cinematography by Larry Fong is absolutely sublime – mindblowing, incredible, impossible.

Really there’s no way I can’t give Sucker Punch my full recommendation. Go see it ASAP. I’ll be seeing it again soon. Just make sure your brain’s turned on and look, link, interpret.

 

*And my god I’ll have sleepless nights cogitating the thematic summoning of Watchmen at various points in the film.

**A third-act betrayal seemed to come out of nowhere, which bugged me momentarily, but I’m hoping the lost 18 minutes that’ll make it into the Director’s Cut will flesh this out. Apart from this, I had no issue with the apparently “thin” characters. We’re never sure that they’re real, so as with Scott Glenn’s helper role they didn’t need to be expanded much beyond their roles as Proppian functions. Which, thinking about it, is perfectly suitable.