Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, and Jena Malone. Written by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya.
As an initial sidebar, why does Snyder keep getting relegated to March? This would have been a fine summer movie. Spoilers below.
I am saddened by the crummy reviews this film has been getting. I know it’s very egotistical of me, but I think this is a case where the critics are largely just wrong. I think they have missed the point. I think, to be perfectly honest, that they are too old to see what’s really going on in this movie.
The word floating in my mind through a great deal of the movie was “post-fetishist”. Although putting women in thigh-highs and heels and enormous fake eyelashes for the entirety of a movie about a mental asylum-cum-brothel-cum-various war scenarios would seem to be a sexist move, designed to assert that women are submissive to men, I think there’s something newer going on. I think the intention is to convey empowerment.
It’s a dangerous thing to say that sexy scanty outfits are empowering, because then you unintentionally draw in the idea that being a ho is empowering. I do not believe that sluttiness is in any way empowering, but I do believe that feeling like a strong and sexy woman is, and – just as an example, one I don’t think is unique to me - I felt more strong and sexy when I wore garter belts under my office wear for a time back in 2003 than I’ve ever felt since. I feel happy and confident when I wear thigh-highs and heels (even if the thigh-highs just look like pantyhose to everyone else). My movie-going partner pointed out that putting women in such sexy costumes in fact gives them power over men, making men vulnerable to their feminine wiles; I think this is a good point, too. I can’t deny that heels have the whiff of foot-binding and encumberment about them as regards women, and that tiny outfits expose women in a very obvious way that men are not subject to. But I think that what’s happening here is that the women in this movie (girls, really) are choosing sexy outfits, choosing them because they make them feel like a million bucks, not because they want to be weaker or lesser but because they want to be stronger and more.
So that’s what the costumes are about, in my opinion. And that attitude of empowerment despite appearances extends to the rest of the movie; Snyder is simply not playing by the same patriarchal rules that all prior generations of male film directors have. It seems to me that for him, women are people, and the ultimate point of this movie is not that women are doomed to be lobotomized and lost, killed, ruined, but that life sometimes sucks. Sometimes you’re a decent person and still, your mom dies, you get stuffed into a mental institution by your murdering stepfather, you try your damndest and do everything Scott Glenn says, and still, you are granted freedom by way of an icepick jammed into your frontal lobe. That’s human life, not just the hard luck of the second-class gender.
This reviewer pointed out aptly that the “male gaze“, a staple of cinematic interpretation for half a century, is simply not at work in this movie. I agree. I pointed out to my movie-going partner that, as belied by the costume thing, women are the subjects rather than the objects in this film. I wanted to be up there kicking ass on clockwork Nazis in my schoolgirl outfit and high-heeled Mary Janes along with the rest of them. I did not see as how I was supposed to be identifying with the male characters; I think that even men viewers of this movie would be identifying with the female characters, instead of the male ones as the way has always been. Part of the reason for this is that apart from Scott Glenn’s sensei, the male characters, to a man, are awful; only the lobotomy doctor shows the glimpse of a soul. The rest of them are active destroyers. To me, this adds to the sense of this movie as a feminist piece. The dudes who objectify and harm the women are evil, hence objectifying and harming women is evil too. (Also of note: the first man listed in the cast is seventh-billed.)
The critics who’ve called this a big dumb action flick aren’t exactly wrong. It’s not brilliantly characterized, it’s got just a smidge too much action and noise, and visually it’s so grand and exciting as to be a bit overblown. But they are entirely wrong about the pedigree of this big dumb action flick, and about the stuff that’s at work underneath it. I think what you’ve got here is a classic male ensemble piece, like The Wild Bunch or The Great Escape, only the ensemble’s made of girls. I think Snyder is well and truly a visionary director, an adjective I thought was a little full of itself when applied in the trailer of Watchmen, when he’d made a grand total of one movie of importance. (But he is. He wants to show us things that are awesome, and things that are beautiful, and things that are ugly, and things that are perfectly staged, like moving art photography. He thinks in comic panels, and God, is it wonderful to see.) I think seeing women act like Stallone and Diesel is pretty damned awesome. I think watching two hours of such a complex tangle of influences and time periods is sort of magical, and I think Sucker Punch has a lot of the distilled essence of what movies are all about.
