Pastiche porn: now with newfound guilt

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 2011)

Zack Snyder directs "Sucker Punch". The plot: a young woman and her sister are sexually abused by their father. The eldest sister, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), fights back and is wrongly blamed for her sister's death. Baby Doll is then sent to a mental hospital; she will be lobotomised in five days. Whilst being operated upon, Baby Doll temporarily escapes her traumatic reality by slipping into a fantasy world nested within her "real world". Here, the hospital's operating theatre becomes a literal theatre within a brothel, whilst the hospital's evil head nurse becomes a powerful pimp.
Within the brothel fantasy, Baby Doll is forced to perform salacious dance routines for an audience. Significantly, Snyder never shows Baby Doll dance. Instead he cuts away, short-circuiting his audience's salacious desires for abuse by showing her retreat further into a string of fantasy sequences. These fantasy sequences take the form of video game levels, Baby Doll's mission in each level tied to corresponding missions in both the brothel and the hospital. For example, when Baby Doll battles a fire breathing dragon in the video game level, this is simply a means of violently staving off the dangers of stealing a cigarette lighter in both the brothel and hospital levels. All the other video game action scenes have a similar symbolic function. A cook's belt in the brothel/hospital level becomes a CGI train in the video game level, for example.
Whilst "Sucker" may superficially resemble films like "Inception", "Existenz" and "The Matrix", its granddaddy is more akin to something like "The Shining". In both films, each level of fantasy is triggered by the denial of abuse, though Kubrick offers no clear "levels" or "separations"; all reality is already fantasy.
Eventually a ray of light shines for Baby Doll, the poor girl dreaming up a pair of sisters to help her escape the hospital/brothel, one of which symbolically becomes her own dead sister. From here on. the film can be viewed in one of two ways. Either as a fantasy in which Baby Doll rescues her sister in the fantasy world, whilst she herself remains behind and is lobotomised (reversing an earlier scene in which Baby Doll's sister is raped because Baby Doll saved herself), or an equally unpleasant fantasy in which Baby Doll's sister dies in both the real world and the fantasy world, whilst Baby Doll, whose dreaming body remains behind in the mental hospital, pretends to escape the brothel as an avatar called Sweat Pea. Either way, Baby Doll's regressed to a vegetable.
Snyder attempts to critique his audience and action movie expectations. "I didn't put them in those provocative outfits," Snyder says in interviews, "you did! The audience in the brothel are us sitting in the theatre! The exploitative part of it is in the viewer! The viewer brings that!"
He's right to an extent, and it is clever the way Snyder both structures his film as a giant rape movie and revokes each of Baby Doll's sexualised dance routines before likening the unseen acts to conventional action scenes (ie action movie violence is sublimated sex). But this still doesn't change the fact that the raison d'être of the film, Snyder's entire desire to make this film, stemmed from a desire to find a narrative which allowed him to go wild with zany spectacle. The end result is a film which does exactly what it condemns; a 12A certificate film that markets the sexy spectacle of abused teenage girls for teenage boys.
Some have said that "Sucker" offers a strictly male fantasy version of female empowerment (ie, the false "feminism" of Cameron, Scott and Tarantino etc). That Baby Doll can't even escape without the help of a magical old man. This is true, but the film also has a genuine aura of tragedy. Each of Baby Doll's fantasy battles are also explicitly giant, mocking, castration fantasies, filled with deflating zeppelins, and much phallic imagery; she's a meta-aware sex object.
Today we casually accept the consented sexual exploitation of young women and typically only accept female-driven "heroism" when its sexualised or presented as fantasy. Similarly, TV and cinema are now awash with "porn porn", plots in which supposedly "enlightened" audiences are asked to "sympathise" with the "deep troubles" of beautiful women who are "horribly exploited", subjugated, raped or objectified by "bad men", acts of hypocritical sympathy which only exist to titillate audiences in the first place. In short, everything "Sucker Punch" does has long been a 21st century trend. Today, sexploitation almost always masquerades as a critique of patriarchy.
Elsewhere "Sucker" focuses on what academics like to call the effects of the "male gaze" on women. But the "gaze" does not only affect women; everyone loses autonomy when realising that he/she is a visible object, and objectification is itself a general condition or main erotic impulse of late capitalism (again another Kubrick film, "Eyes Wide Shut").
Ironically, "Sucker" is of interest primarily in the way it exemplifies cinema's ongoing death throes; its mimicking of video game aesthetics to generate post cinematic affect. What you literally have here is a film about modern film's inability to offer escape, Baby Doll forced to retreat further and further away from the brothel's sound-stage and theatre spaces and into "modern" virtual landscapes generated by the "combined" and "shared imagination" of whores who must continuously construct interactive fantasy levels, schizoid digital noise, lest they realise that both they and their audience are perpetually imprisoned. It's the kind of thing critiqued in Cronenberg's "Existenz" and "Crash" - an addiction to increasingly intense digital spaces as a form of escape and denial - though Snyder could care less. "Sucker Punch is like a video game that doesn't exist," Snyder says. "It's the game you want to play but it hasn't been made; when I drew two pages of storyboards, I rewarded myself with one game of Black Ops."
6/10 – Worth one viewing.