sour_idealist (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sour_idealist) wrote2011-04-28 10:35 pm
sour_idealist) wrote2011-04-28 10:35 pm
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In which I finally get around to my thoughts on Sucker Punch [Spoilers]
So. I actually wrote this several weeks ago and didn't post it at the time; today I mentioned it to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
1st_eggokage on Tumblr, and she urged me to post it (and then was extraordinarily nice about it.) I swore I wouldn't start moving any significant writing to Tumblr, so I am crossposting it promptly here.
Up until now I have been - much to my shame - too intimidated by the debate around Sucker Punch to really say anything about it. And thinking about it now, that says quite a bit to me about how much of this debate has been flavored with "There is a feminist card and I am revoking yours." Because when I saw Sucker Punch I absolutely loved it. I walked into that theater feeling mopey, low, and half-wishing I'd stayed home. I walked out excited, exhilarated, enthusing about it at a thousand words per minute; I walked out feeling alive, hopped-up, capable. That moment at the end when the screen goes dark and we hear "You have all the weapons you need. Now fight," that was one of the best individual moments I've felt in a long time. I've watched a lot of movies recently that I loved, but I can't at the moment think of another film that's given me such an immediate, visceral reaction, and definitely not one that made me feel so powerful.
So I'm not going to say that this movie is empowering for everyone, but clearly this movie has the potential to be empowering.
Second. Most of the debate centers on how the women were sexualized, how it's 'all about male fantasy,' et cetera. What I haven't heard is a whole lot of people saying they were actually aroused by it. I can actually, racking my brain, think of exactly one person who said so, and the context was "As a bisexual, I even found it arousing...but as a woman, I found it insulting." When I saw it, I saw it with my younger brother, who's a straight male nerd, hormonal, basically the exact demographic that's supposedly being pandered. He walked out of that theater freaked out. The last time I saw that look on his face was after a play about serial killing and cannibalism. The next day he was still shaking his head and saying how creepy it was, apropros of nothing whatsoever.
So, I'm not going to say that people couldn't enjoy this movie sexually by objectifying the women in it, but there is definitely at least one guy who did not see "hot girls + explosions, hell yes."
There is more to this movie, more in this movie, than sexist male-based fantasy. The fact that people, a lot of people, men and women, have gotten more out of it than that should speak a lot to that effect. Male-based fantasy may or may not play a role, but it is not all that's going on here.
So what is going on here? Well, this is where we get to that key issue, the lobotomy at the end. There are a ton of different ideas about what happened there, symbolically speaking, and what impact that had on the message of the movie as a whole, and I find a lot of them interesting, some of them more than mine. However, the moment when I felt like all of that slotted into place for me was a few days later, when I remembered the following quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: "It was the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but [...] there was all the difference in the world."
That's basically the summary of the entire movie. Babydoll had two goals: 1) to win some kind of victory - not necessarily her own freedom, just a victory - over the system that did this to her. 2) To walk into that arena with her head held high. To see the lobotomy not as something forced upon her, but as something she chose in order to further her own goals. She achieved both, the first by freeing Sweet Pea, and the second by rewriting and rewriting and rewriting her reality until the lobotomy was represented by her own voluntary sacrifice, by going down fighting in order to save her friend. The motif of the line "you control this world," combined with the early part of the ending monologue about deciding who and what they were fighting for and defining the enemy, seems to back that up: Babydoll is redefining the battle until it's one that she wins, and therefore gaining some measure of control through the only thing left to her: her mind and her perceptions. The real world tries to make her into Ophelia drowning, and she turns herself into Beowulf killing the dragon. And then she tells the audience that we can choose the roles in our stories, too.
1st_eggokage on Tumblr, and she urged me to post it (and then was extraordinarily nice about it.) I swore I wouldn't start moving any significant writing to Tumblr, so I am crossposting it promptly here.Up until now I have been - much to my shame - too intimidated by the debate around Sucker Punch to really say anything about it. And thinking about it now, that says quite a bit to me about how much of this debate has been flavored with "There is a feminist card and I am revoking yours." Because when I saw Sucker Punch I absolutely loved it. I walked into that theater feeling mopey, low, and half-wishing I'd stayed home. I walked out excited, exhilarated, enthusing about it at a thousand words per minute; I walked out feeling alive, hopped-up, capable. That moment at the end when the screen goes dark and we hear "You have all the weapons you need. Now fight," that was one of the best individual moments I've felt in a long time. I've watched a lot of movies recently that I loved, but I can't at the moment think of another film that's given me such an immediate, visceral reaction, and definitely not one that made me feel so powerful.
So I'm not going to say that this movie is empowering for everyone, but clearly this movie has the potential to be empowering.
Second. Most of the debate centers on how the women were sexualized, how it's 'all about male fantasy,' et cetera. What I haven't heard is a whole lot of people saying they were actually aroused by it. I can actually, racking my brain, think of exactly one person who said so, and the context was "As a bisexual, I even found it arousing...but as a woman, I found it insulting." When I saw it, I saw it with my younger brother, who's a straight male nerd, hormonal, basically the exact demographic that's supposedly being pandered. He walked out of that theater freaked out. The last time I saw that look on his face was after a play about serial killing and cannibalism. The next day he was still shaking his head and saying how creepy it was, apropros of nothing whatsoever.
So, I'm not going to say that people couldn't enjoy this movie sexually by objectifying the women in it, but there is definitely at least one guy who did not see "hot girls + explosions, hell yes."
There is more to this movie, more in this movie, than sexist male-based fantasy. The fact that people, a lot of people, men and women, have gotten more out of it than that should speak a lot to that effect. Male-based fantasy may or may not play a role, but it is not all that's going on here.
So what is going on here? Well, this is where we get to that key issue, the lobotomy at the end. There are a ton of different ideas about what happened there, symbolically speaking, and what impact that had on the message of the movie as a whole, and I find a lot of them interesting, some of them more than mine. However, the moment when I felt like all of that slotted into place for me was a few days later, when I remembered the following quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: "It was the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but [...] there was all the difference in the world."
That's basically the summary of the entire movie. Babydoll had two goals: 1) to win some kind of victory - not necessarily her own freedom, just a victory - over the system that did this to her. 2) To walk into that arena with her head held high. To see the lobotomy not as something forced upon her, but as something she chose in order to further her own goals. She achieved both, the first by freeing Sweet Pea, and the second by rewriting and rewriting and rewriting her reality until the lobotomy was represented by her own voluntary sacrifice, by going down fighting in order to save her friend. The motif of the line "you control this world," combined with the early part of the ending monologue about deciding who and what they were fighting for and defining the enemy, seems to back that up: Babydoll is redefining the battle until it's one that she wins, and therefore gaining some measure of control through the only thing left to her: her mind and her perceptions. The real world tries to make her into Ophelia drowning, and she turns herself into Beowulf killing the dragon. And then she tells the audience that we can choose the roles in our stories, too.