Is Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” Low-Key a 3rd Wave Feminist Film?
When director Zack Snyder first started showing previews of his new film Sucker Punch back in 2011, there was a certain amount of public skepticism. To be sure, a section of the internet lit up with geeky glee at the sight of Suicide Girl-esque figures dispensing robots, monsters, and giant samurai via swords and bazookas…and looking fantastic while doing it. Similarly, there was a different section of society that had already started rolling their eyes at the film, fueled no doubt in part by that first internet section’s reaction. It was one thing when Snyder had half-naked men engaging in untold amounts of visually visceral slo-mo slaughter in his earlier film, 300. But when you switch your main eye candy characters to all young women, wasn’t there something…icky…about it?
Oh yeah, buckle up true believers, because yet another straight white dude is here to lay down the wisdom! After all, who better to talk about a female-led film and weigh its merits as feminist iconography?
Okay, you’re right. Nobody asked for this, and few people want it. As one of those boring, cis-gendered heteronormative dudes, it would be very easy to just enjoy this movie on the surface and not think anything more of it. As such, I fully realize it’s not for me to answer the question in the headline. And I’m not going to wade too deep into the waters of the different “waves” of Feminism, because:
a. it’s ridiculous to think it would be so easy to come up with a consensus of how such a large group of people viewed and identified themselves, and
b. I haven’t taken some college course on this or spent my life being female, so I am woefully under-prepared to offer deeper thoughts on this and will probably get things wrong.
Please let me know if I get things wrong. I will do better.
But hey, I watched this movie and I have thoughts and I want to talk about them dammit. But I have no film friends around because COVID and because I actively expunge people from my life that scream for the Snyder Cut and because I am a loser with no friends. So anyway, you’re stuck with my deep thoughts, such as they are, and without further ado: LET’S GET INTO THIS.
Except I lied, we do need a little further ado because this film is 9 years old now and, let’s face it, some people reading this might be too young to even remember the film well. Or maybe have been too young to have seen it at allfuckmeI’mold! Ugh. Anyway, when I first saw this film, I was in Japan (where it’s known as Angel Wars because: Japan) and went with a buddy and his girlfriend. We liked it well enough, mostly thinking how Snyder was almost mocking himself with how far he pushed the slow-motion/fast-motion/zoom/rotate action scenes. After the film, I asked his girlfriend if she had thought it was exploitative. In typical Japanese fashion, she said she couldn’t answer for other people, but personally she thought it was pretty awesome watching the women kick so much ass, and looking so amazing while doing it. Curiosity satisfied, I moved on, and only found out later what a different reception the film had gotten in the US. (It was of course, a big hit in Japan.)
I mean, you take one look at the promotional materials for the film, and it’s obvious the girls are being fetishized. Of course, sexy images on movie posters is such a common thing that you might not pay any special attention to it right away. But as the film played and the reviews of critics started to turn more and more against the film as a kind of sexist fantasy, you had to wonder if this film was a bit more guilty than the typical Hollywood movie. What was it that was so incensing some critics? PopMatters (a website which advertises itself as “women-owned and operated”) called it a “misogynistic snuff film”. Feminist Frequency called it “a steaming pile of sexist crap.” And Women and Hollywood’s editorial literally asked in their title “What the Hell is Abbie Cornish Doing in Sucker Punch?” So what the hell was Cornish doing in that movie? Why did any of these women choose these roles, and why did they come out singing Snyder’s praises instead of distancing themselves from a failed project?
When you look at the interviews with the actresses, they all talk about the sisterhood they felt on set, and what a great shooting environment it was. When it comes to how they were portrayed in the film, Cornish (“Sweet Pea”) talks about how putting on the costume each day felt like “gearing up” for battle. She found it empowering. And Browning (“Babydoll”) is more explicit in her take on the film, saying it’s about the girls “learn(ing) to own and control (their) own sexuality and… owning their own strength.”
While the film has its defenders, this did not seem to be a viewpoint that the lion’s share of reviewers had, so what was the deal? Was there something people were missing? Maybe Snyder just failed in delivering the version of the film that would reveal these deeper layers to the public? Or maybe studio executives forced a cut of the film that was more exploitative and therefore more commercial? When I sat down to watch the Extended Cut blu-ray recently, it seemed like a good opportunity to try to look at the film with a more critical pair of eyes….(obviously, SPOILERS will follow, so go ahead. I will wait for you all to go watch or rewatch the Blu-Ray and then come back because you’re clearly hanging on my every word… … Uh, hello?)
You’d be forgiven for not expecting any depth from Sucker Punch when you start watching it, because the beginning is essentially a five-minute music video with almost no talking. However, it does set the stage for the film’s themes. A greedy step-father wants his dying wife’s money, and loses his shit when she leaves it all to her two darling daughters. The period appears to be perhaps late ‘50s/early ’60s US, when by the way it was still legal for women to be involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions by husbands /guardians… which is exactly what happens to our heroine. The eldest of the two daughters, our nameless teenager proves to have too much fight in her for the enraged stepfather, so he decides to take it out on her little sister. In scrambling to defend her sister, our heroine nearly kills her dear ol’ dad, and he has her ruled “a danger to herself and others”. Not that it’s needed, but a hefty bribe to the asylum’s head orderly ensures that he’ll corroborate that evaluation. Oh, and did I mention this all takes place to the tune of “Sweet Dreams”?
Well, the sweet dreams don’t actually start until the heroine enters the institution, filled with women who continue to be ordered around and controlled by men. They’re all referred to in the way such kind of men typically refer to women: “Sweet Pea”, “Blondie”, “Rocket” for a fiery redhead, and our innocent heroine gets called “Babydoll”. (Bizarrely, there’s also an “Amber”…because you need one stripper pseudonym in there?) The only woman present with any measure of power is the psychiatrist, who stages scenes for the girls to work through the issues they can’t talk about. Babydoll looks on the stage and first sees Sweet Pea, as the psychiatrist is telling her that the worlds we imagine can be just as real, and we are the ones who can control them. A cover (Browning herself sings many of these) of the Pixie’s “Where is My Mind?” starts to play as Babydoll stares at the stage…
At this point, if the audience wasn’t aware the film is deeper than a music video, Sweet Pea announces it to them. She’s dressed like Babydoll on a stage like the asylum about to get lobotomized when she breaks the roleplay to complain. The nurse and schoolgirl fetishes may be hot she says, some of this is titillating, but who’s getting off on an asylum? And a lobotomy? How sick would the audience for this have to be? She is almost talking directly out of the screen, indicting us for even coming to this movie, for participating in the subjugation of even these made-up women… for liking it. She’s interrupted by the head orderly, now dressed as a pimp, and the step-father, now dressed as another kind of false “father”, a priest. They move things along as Sweet Pea complains that this play needs to be something more “commercial” and the psychiatrist promises to “work something out”. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s the movie right there.
This is probably the point where we need to address that question about “3rd wave feminism”. And I’ll defer to the expert women in this, because it’s their comments that mostly got me thinking. A very, very brief synopsis of how Martha Rampton, director of the Center for Gender Equity at Pacific University, explains 1st wave feminism is that it was principally centered around the struggle to gain the right to vote. Some time after women achieved this in the US, the aims of feminism expanded to build on that success. 2nd wave feminism is often defined by the struggle to expand suffrage to non-white women, to improve the rights of women to work and enjoy the privilege of say, getting their own credit card, an Ivy league education, or The Pill.
As I understand it, Rampton and others say that the 3rd wave is typically characterized as a reaction to the 2nd wave. While women had never been totally unified in their pursuits of rights, it became particularly fractured during 2nd wave feminism, with some women taking hard line stances against what they saw as earlier markings of subjugation by men. One feature was that an “Us vs Them” mentality developed, with a section of feminists burning their bras and refusing to wear makeup or heels, get married or tolerate social conventions like beauty pageants or pie-baking contests. Any woman who did so was viewed by this section as a traitor, part of Them.
3rd wave feminists rejected this interpretation and saw true feminine strength as choosing your own image and how you wanted to participate in society. It’s marked by claiming ownership over sexualization and sexualized terms like “bitch” or “slut”, with women choosing to employ them with each other in a bonding or joking manner. The ’90s “Riot Grrrls” of aggressive music groups like L7, Bikini Kill, and the Lunachicks were emblematic of the movement.
And this is where we come back to the film. The world in the beginning of the film is not different than the world that 2nd wave feminists existed in, where they were technically equal in the eyes of the law, but …come on, not really. Men still occupied all the institutions of power, and women weren’t going to get very far without some old white man as an ally.
And this is the world Babydoll starts fantasizing having control over as “Where is My Mind?” plays. Just on her way into the institution, she picked up on most of the pieces of a plan to escape, but it’ll only work if the women can unite against the men in control. Even in her fantasy, this is still an issue, as she envisions them all as strippers forced to work in a brothel. You could evaluate the symbolism of this from many angles: how organized religion makes you a slave, how mental “health” institutions are exploitative, or even just how most of the girls have existed in this system for so long that they don’t think there’s another way. Some of them are often complicit in their own captivity. You might say that Babydoll’s fantasy is still pretty real.
But within that fantasy the psychiatrist plays a madame, and the therapy sessions become dance sessions. Remember, these are the times when the girls “have control”, and Babydoll does indeed completely control the men who watch her dance. She and the other girls realize this and decide to take advantage of the situation, capitalizing on the men’s unbridled lust to outwit them when they’re not thinking with their big heads. I humbly submit to you that 3rd wave feminists would totally approve.
And yet, we don’t actually witness the dancing, because as Sweet Pea suggested at the start, wouldn’t enjoying the act (however much Babydoll was subverting it for her own empowerment) just be a little sick? Instead, when she dances, we’re treated to yet another level of Babydoll fantasizing, each dance becoming a world of supreme geeky glee where her and the other girls are super-heroically capable of “a bit of the ol’ ultra violence”, as Alex DeLarge would say. Instead of the bit of forced salaciousness, we do indeed get something much more “commercial”. The girls are each done up in various Riot Grrrl fashion, both sexy and intimidating, and each is a profound ass-kicker in their own right, taking down samurai men, monster men, undead men, and robot men. There’s enough fantasy dressed on top of all these scenarios that we don’t have to feel bad about how viscerally these not-men-but-still-men are being taken down by the women (often to the tune of White Rabbit, itself referencing Alice going down the rabbit hole…)
But honestly, I kind of got all that the first time I watched the film, and that alone may not be convincing for some viewers. What might really sell this interpretation is how the film ends, and how an MPAA ruling against a scene caused the film to lose a key point in the story. This is of course, the impending meeting with “the High Roller” in the bordello fantasy level. In our heroine’s real world, the guy coming in with all the power is the doctor who is licensed to perform a good old-fashioned lobotomy. (ECT didn’t become widespread until the ‘70s… JFK’s own sister was given this kind of “icepick” lobotomy.) We don’t see much of him in the theatrical version, but in the Extended Cut it becomes clear why Jon Hamm had to play this man.
When Babydoll can’t avoid her meeting with the High Roller, she finds he is not exactly what she expected. Both her fake father and mother figures (the orderly and the psychiatrist, or “Blue” and “Madame Vera” in the fantasy) have set her up to meet him and pushed her into it. But he tells her he will not, can not force her to do anything. He appears with other women and symbols of status… wealth, power, respect, immaculately dressed, charming and handsome. He’s well-spoken, kind, and honest. He’s exactly the kind of man that women are supposed to want.
Speaking again almost directly to the audience, he stresses that Babydoll has to choose to give in to him, but that he is confident she will. Because he will provide security, comfort, safety, and acceptance. He calls it “freedom… from loss…pain…responsibility…” But it’s clear that this is only freedom from a certain point of view. The room she finds herself in is not like a bordello, but almost like a richly appointed home, which he refers to as “a gilded cage”, and says he has spent a small fortune getting her in it. And now she is supposed to give herself to him. And she does.
That was too much for the MPAA, who couldn’t stomach this young girl participating in turning herself out. That scene alone would’ve upgraded the film to a Restricted rating, making it less “commercial”. Without it: a PG-13. See, in the theatrical version, we only see that Babydoll sacrifices herself so that Sweet Pea can get away (with the help of one old white man as an ally against more institutions of oppression: the police.) But what we miss is the parallel of Babydoll giving herself to the High Roller, and if you didn’t catch it, in her fantasy that means she did what was expected of her…she stopped fighting…she settled into her gilded cage and got married.
And unless I read Snyder’s intentions wrong, there’s the final feminist commentary. What happened to all those feminists in the ’60s who burned bras and protested for equal pay? Well, a whole lot of them settled down. They got married. They had kids. They’re not still out there fighting, but it’s because of their sacrifices that the next generation could be free to keep fighting. The kids, little sweet peas dressed in babydoll school uniforms… these mothers see themselves in their daughters, and they sacrificed to give them their chance at freedom. Babydoll thinks it’s too late to save herself (three quick cuts equivalate her loss of innocence in the bordello, her lobotomy, and her incident with her step-father at the start), but she comes to see Rocket and Sweet Pea as the stand-ins for her sister and herself. Babydoll can still save Sweet Pea, and she finds meaning in that sacrifice.
And then we come up one meta-layer again, when Sweet Pea narrates to the audience as she escapes. Her final speech may have been stultifying and confusing to the general audience, because it’s filled with juxtapositions. But generally she’s saying you can honor someone just by the way you live. You can hurl monsters at someone knowing they’ll beat them. Snyder seems to be saying, “You can put girls in fetish costumes and hellish situations knowing that they’ll own them and turn it to their advantage.”
Sweet Pea is giving the audience permission to enjoy the film. The actresses are sacrificing in the fantasy world so that women can fight where it counts, in the real world. They all seem to be saying, “this is just fantasy, it’s a harmless way to blow off some steam. But there’s important messaging we’re passing along here. Now it’s up to you to carry it out.” Basically, the actresses are willing to be sexualized if it means they get to make art that has a message Russian-dolled inside the commerce. It’s a pithy sacrifice that gives their work meaning, echoing Babydoll’s decision in the film. She figures she’s just stuck in a role, but at least this way it has meaning…. It’s a final mission statement that not everyone seemed to get, or agree with. And that might be the nail in the coffin that seals this as a 3rd wave feminist film. Because right around the time it was being made is when the 4th wave arrived.
As many problems as there are with the wave labelling, and there are many, everyone seems to agree that the current state of feminism is the most eclectic and ambiguous yet. It’s hard to pin down exactly what separates 4th wave feminism from previous waves, but there are two pretty common elements, and they’re very relevant to Sucker Punch. One is that whatever real world activism there is, it is primarily conceived and propagated online. Sometimes ideas end up in a phenomenal Women’s March, sometimes it stops at a hashtag. But it makes it that much easier to fill review sites with backlash at a perceived misogynist film. And the other main feature is that this now seems to be reacting to many elements of 3rd wave feminism. So, for example, “yes, women can dress however they want!” But also “no, stop posting your selfies about your “fitness journey” when you’re already conventionally beautiful. You’re feeding into a cycle of body-shaming!” This is the kind of thinking that views the women of Sucker Punch as …misguided at best.
That Sucker Punch was received so poorly by many in the very circles it seems aimed at is a real tragedy. After watching this cut of the film, I’m convinced Snyder thought he was really making a pro-woman masterpiece that would work on both superficial and deeper levels. I think a lot of people found the ending too cynical and sadistic, but Snyder’s films all end with Pyrrhic victories. His films are all about what it costs to “win”, and I don’t think this one is especially different. It probably simply rubs some people especially raw to think of what happens to these pretty young women. That might be a whole ‘nother sexist issue to look at if those same people don’t get choked up at the manly men of 300 being torn apart. But I’m no Snyder apologist. I don’t even like some of his movies, and I’m sure not going to demand that anyone else does.
For my part, I think that at least there are nothing but good intentions in this film. Despite the complete willing acceptance of my friend’s Japanese girlfriend to just enjoy this on a superficial level, I think there’s a lot more underneath the hood than some people expect. It’s really a question of how well this vision was realized. I suspect someone who identifies with 3rd wave feminism would find a lot to get on board with here, if they thought about it. Someone that’s involved in the 4th wave might still find it problematic, even with the new scenes. But I’ll tell you one thing… I can’t wait to show it to more women I know and listen to what they think about it. If film success was measured by how much debate it generated, this one would be a real knockout. Or a… sucker punch.
Sorry.
