SUCKER PUNCH AND THE POLITICAL PROBLEM OF FANTASY TO FEMALE REPRESENTATION

Anna Mullins

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2013

Committee:

Becca Cragin, Advisor

Jeffrey Brown

Bill Albertini

© 2013

Anna Mullins

All Rights Reserved

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ABSTRACT

Becca Cragin, Advisor

One of the main tasks of feminism in the twenty first century is to address the way sexual fantasies of women limit the ability to achieve real world change in gender relations and gain political equality. Fantasy, as the means by which capitalism operates

(i.e., it is through the use of fantasy that consumers are convinced to buy products) dominates American popular culture and, since the female body features so centrally in these fantasies, feminism is charged with disrupting a complex system that equates women with pleasure. Sucker Punch is important to this discussion because it is a unique example of a mainstream attempt to critically address dominant fantasies about women and, using the work of Laura Mulvey, Slavoj Zizek, Jeffrey Brown, Angela McRobbie, and Rosalind Gill, among others, I explore the way the film gives important insight into the limits of successfully emptying fantasy of pleasure. I divide the film’s engagement with pleasure into two main areas: postfeminism and male desire. Ultimately Sucker

Punch offers a disturbing vision of the way postfeminist empowerment fantasies (which are broken up into empowerment through female sexuality and empowerment through violence) map onto male heterosexual fantasies that encourage and allow women to be sexually exploited. Further, the fact that that Sucker Punch was a commercial and critical failure reveals the problems inherent in critiquing popular depictions of the female body whilst simultaneously trying to sell (and thereby popularize) that critique.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank first and foremost Dr. Cragin for her incredibly helpful feedback, patience and guidance throughout this project and beyond. I likewise am very grateful to Dr. Brown and Dr. Albertini for their input and suggestions. And to all three members of my committee I thank you for your inspiring seminars that influenced this thesis greatly. I would like to thank the members of my cohort and the cohort of 2013 for all their support during the stressful times, and the laughter during the good times. To my friends in Raleigh (Jillisyn!) and England, thank you so much for helping me get to the end, and finally to my parents and my brother Edward, a huge thank you, I could not have done this without you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF NERD CULTURE AND FEMINISM ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: SUCKER PUNCH, POSTFEMINISM AND FANTASY ...... 19

CHAPTER TWO: SUCKER PUNCH AND THE VIOLENT CGI BODY ...... 41

CHAPTER THREE: SUCKER PUNCH, THE MALE GAZE, AND FANTASY ...... 64

CONCLUSIONS: CAPITALISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND FEMINISM ...... 86

WORKS CITED...... 93 1

INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF NERD CULTURE, AND FEMINISM

When I first watched Zack Snyder’s film Sucker Punch upon its release in March of

2011, I was surprised by its confusing, yet intellectually provocative content. I hadn’t closely followed its production, but had seen its trailers which flaunted the sexuality of its female cast, and had expected a mindless, sexist film that would peddle tired and shallow postfeminist ideas regarding female sexuality and empowerment whilst exploiting its female stars. I attended a screening with several male colleagues and friends who, in conversations prior to seeing the film had made it clear through pseudo-jokes that their interest centered around the women and what they looked like. Afterwards, discussing the film, almost all of the men I was with were frustrated and angry at what they had seen. They felt that Sucker Punch was ridiculous, that it blatantly preyed on male interests and fantasies, and that it sent the repellent message to women that as long as they close their eyes and pretend it’s not happening that it’s okay to be raped/ exploited. Only one of them unashamedly reveled in what he had seen, openly stating that he found the film arousing, and only two felt that the film was more complex and less exploitative than it seemed. What I saw was a film that, rather than feebly reproducing postfeminist and/or sexist ideas, seemed to be attempting to critically address them and I was surprised that this seemed to be almost entirely lost on the film’s audience. I was also surprised at the particularly hostile response that it provoked among men, since it was clearly marketed toward a male audience. Thus this project was inspired both by the content of Sucker Punch (that is, what I think the film is saying about female sexuality and performance) but also the reaction to it.

Initially, while I knew that Sucker Punch represented mainstream confusion about female empowerment, I struggled to make sense of Sucker Punch in its context, that is, in many ways it 2 is unlike any other mainstream Hollywood film (especially in terms of form), yet it also appears to serve as a hyperbolic expression of Hollywood’s brand of feminism, which is often synonymous with postfeminism (i.e. decidedly un-feminist). It wasn’t until I began reading interviews with the director and paying attention to how the film was marketed and who the audience of Sucker Punch was supposed to be that I began to realize that, while it is about female sexuality and how women are represented on film, it is really about male desire and a male understanding of female empowerment. And it is not just a general male attitude that is important when considering Sucker Punch, but in particular the attitude of male nerds towards women. In this way the film brings together two complimentary contemporary cultural trends: postfeminism and nerd culture misogyny. In order to understand how I am approaching Sucker Punch and what it suggests about gender politics in the 21st century it is necessary first to discuss how the film was generally received, how the film was marketed/hyped, and most importantly, to outline the landscape of gender politics in 2012 focusing particularly on the rise of the male nerd and his importance to feminism.

The general reaction to Sucker Punch was widespread disappointment and derision. The ratings aggregator Rotten Tomatoes confirms that Sucker Punch was, and remains, a greatly unpopular film. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 23% critic rating and a 47% general audience rating. It would be impractical and distracting to attempt to reproduce every single negative review here, so in the interest of space and brevity I have chosen excerpts from certain professional reviews which echo (albeit comparatively more eloquently) the general reaction and main objections to Sucker Punch. 3

Perhaps the most common complaint from critics is that the film is misogynist and hypocritical (i.e., it exploits women even as it proclaims to be empowering). Michael Philips for

The Chicago Tribune describes the film as a “greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale,” while A. O. Scott for The New

York Times, draws attention to the women’s sexual appearance as “garish boudoir fashions, cropped schoolgirl uniforms and the latest action lingerie” stating that “the actresses go along with Mr. Snyder’s pretense that this fantasia of misogyny is really a feminist fable of empowerment.”

The misogynist content of Sucker Punch is compounded by the poor quality of the performances (Roger Moore for The Orlando Sentinel focuses this criticism not on the cast as a whole but rather the main actresses “who give five of the flattest performances ever”) and the dull action which creates the powerless sensation of watching someone else play a video game.

Scott complains that Sucker Punch “could not quite overcome the inherent tediousness of watching someone else play” and Glen Kenny for MSN Movies states: “[b]ut surely the wackily eclectic action scenes pack some punch, no? Not really. They're largely acceptable, but hardly what you'd call imaginative, and the content that surrounds them is so labored and lame that at times you feel like you're stuck in a video game that has the worst-cut scenes ever.”

While the performances are considered flat, the plot of the film is confusing and unnecessary. Todd McCarthy for The Hollywood Reporter claims Sucker Punch “is built so as to dispense with the need for narrative logic,” which Philips echoes: “[t]he film abdicates so many basic responsibilities of coherent storytelling, even coherent stupid-action-movie storytelling.” 4

Most critics believe that Sucker Punch takes itself too seriously. Moore summarizes the film as “a humorless quest fantasy” while Kenny rhetorically asks “[a]nd did I mention the humorlessness?” It is Scott however who makes explicit the general sentiment that the film would overcome its flaws by embracing humor: “[w]ith a touch of humor — with any at all —

‘Sucker Punch,’ which Mr. Snyder wrote with Steve Shibuya, might have acknowledged the campy, kinky aspects of its premise.”

Finally, many of the negative reviews complain about the blatant attempt by Snyder to appeal to young men with images of scantily clad women. Kenny angrily writes: “[b]ut "Sucker

Punch" is so thoroughly labored, and panders so relentlessly to adolescent attitudes and fantasies, and is so thoroughly and stridently humorless, that it kind of sucks out your soul while you're watching it.” Peter Travers for Rolling Stone captures the sense of disappointment when he says that Sucker Punch “is a recipe for a raunchy R-rated hellzapoppin’ that pussies out in this PG-13 safety zone.” It is not so much the pandering to a male audience that critics object to, but rather the lack of delivery on the promised titillation.

There is certainly a bitter tone to most of the negative reviews, and it is worth noting that many of the professional reviews are written by men. All of these objections of course result in the film being unenjoyable. Pleasure is ultimately what I will return to regarding feminism and popular culture in my conclusion, but in order to understand why the issue of pleasure is important it is necessary to address the criticisms leveled against Sucker Punch, a task I will undertake throughout this project, hopefully demonstrating that the lack of, or rather confusion of pleasure in watching Sucker Punch is precisely why it works as an attack on male fantasy. 5

What also strikes me about Sucker Punch is the lack of serious critical attention it received from feminists. The media analyst Anita Sarkeesian is just one of many feminist commenters who virulently attacked Sucker Punch (via her YouTube channel Feminist Frequency she called it a “steaming pile of maggot-filled festering misogynist crap trying to masquerade as female empowerment” and angrily refused to actually outline her objections beyond generalizing) in reviews, and while I understand her perspective, she (along with others) was far too quick to dismiss the film as pseudo-pornographic fantasy without looking to see if it was actually critical towards that fantasy. It is interesting to note that it actually passes the much- utilized Bechdel test (a feminist tool used to gauge female character development. To pass the test a film must have at least two named women in it who talk to each other about something other than a man. Ironically Sarkeesian frequently refers to the Bechdel test when discussing

Hollywood films). While the impulse to get angry and criticize everything that reproduces dominant ideology is strong, it is not always productive. When something comes along that can generate discussion (as Sucker Punch undoubtedly has) it is important to recognize those moments and capitalize on them. Thus, this thesis isn’t about excusing the flaws of Sucker

Punch, but rather understanding the positive and the negative elements in its discussion of gender so that we learn more about how to address what is a concerning problem in mainstream culture, that is, the issue of how to effectively combat the sexual objectification of women in film.

The intensely negative reaction to Sucker Punch is particularly interesting given the nature of the hype prior to its release and its surface appeal to a heterosexual male audience. The hype within the so-called nerd community leading up to its release in March of 2011 was 6

overwhelming, with websites such as Total Film, Empire, ComingSoon.Net and IO9 following its

production closely months in advance to its release. ComingSoon.Net proclaimed: “Arguably one

of the bigger hits at this year's Comic-Con, Sucker Punch marks the first completely original film

from 300 and Watchmen director, Zack Snyder,” which ScreenRant confirmed with “Everything

we’ve seen from Sucker Punch so far – from our first look at Comic-Con to the the most recent

Sucker Punch trailer – has cemented the film as one of our most anticipated movies of 2011.” Its

trailer release and panel at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con made several “must see” lists (e.g.

IO9 and HitFix), and various websites built onto this hype over the following months by tracking

and reporting on updated trailers, newly released screenshots, and interviews with the director

Zack Snyder.

The nature of the hype around Sucker Punch had two distinct characteristics. First, it was

mostly concentrated to sites that attract a primarily male nerd/geek audience. Thus, websites

dedicated to science/technology (Wired), science fiction/fantasy (IO9), and film

(ComingSoon.net, HitFix, SlashFilm, Empire, Total Film, Screen Rant) were those that followed the film the closest. In addition the role of San Diego Comic Convention (SDCC), a huge gathering place for nerds (although this audience has steadily expanded via the growth of nerd culture as I will address later), was instrumental in fueling male nerd interest with director and cast interviews and trailer screenings almost a year in advance of the release of Sucker Punch.

The second characteristic of the hype is that the responses (from both journalists/bloggers, and

website commenters) to film stills and teaser videos were filled with overt sexual excitement,

giddy that it “[m]axes out the Babe-o-meter!” (Vies, MaMuvies) and repeatedly making mention

of the young attractive stars with comments such as “the girls. All the lovely girls” (McWeeny, 7

HitFix) and “[i]t just doesn't get any better than that. Dragons, dancing girls, airships, mecha fights, AND David Carradine” (Newitz, IO9). Warner Brothers even organized a set visit for journalists which generated opportunities for cast ogling as evidenced by Edward Douglas with

ComingSoon.Net who gleefully reported seeing “the lovely Jamie Chung (Sorority Row), who casually mentioned in an interview something about wearing ‘assless chaps,’ Some of the fortunate journalists found out that day that she wasn’t kidding or exaggerating either!” Given the explicit sexual nature of the anticipation for the film’s release it is worth noting the curious rejection of Sucker Punch on the grounds that it is misogynist, that it is titillation without substance. In many of the complaints about the misogyny of Sucker Punch the main complaint actually seems to be that Snyder was proclaiming the film to be feminist and about female empowerment; i.e. it is not the misogyny but the hypocrisy that angered people. This response is telling since it suggests (or rather confirms) that unmasked exploitation is acceptable. What is ultimately clear is that Sucker Punch was eagerly anticipated, particularly among the male nerd population.

The rise of the nerd as an economic and cultural force is of crucial importance to feminists and yet has largely been unremarked upon within academia (although the topic has garnered a growing amount of attention across the internet over the few years). The terminology for the cultural phenomenon I am describing is one that is unclear and disagreed upon since there are various and overlapping understandings of the pejorative terms nerd, geek, and dork. The main distinction that tends to be made is that between nerd and geek, where geek is often understood as a less intellectual and more socially acceptable nerd. The term nerd, deftly 8 summarized by Lori Kendall in her article “Nerd Nation,” describes an almost always white male who:

enjoys school and does well in it, especially math and science courses. He has a

high IQ and possesses large amounts of esoteric technical knowledge, but is

socially inept...Nerds also collect objects connected with knowledge (atlases and

maps, mathematical and scientific equipment, etc.), and are avid media consumers

and especially science fiction fans. (263)

I would argue that what has been embraced by mainstream culture is not the nerd as such, but rather nerd culture - the nerd’s tools (the technological gadgets) and creative output (comic books, science fiction, video games). In many ways we have all become closer to nerds due to the prominence technology has taken in our everyday lives, a phenomenon Kendall outlines in her articles, “Nerd Nation” and “White and Nerdy.” Computers, smartphones, mp3 players, tablets, games consoles (PS3, XBOX, Wii), etc., all of which focus around the internet are fixtures of everyday life in the 21st century. The rise of nerd culture is further evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of nerd protagonists such as Harry Potter, Chuck, Napoleon Dynamite,

Andy Stitzler (40 Year Old Virgin), Sherlock Holmes, the Doctor from Doctor Who, Freaks and

Geeks characters Sam, Neal and Bill, The Big Bang Theory characters Leonard, Sheldon,

Howard and Rajeesh, and of course the litany of comic book superhero alter-egos: Peter Parker

(Spider-Man), Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Professor X (X-Men), Dr. Jon Osterman and Daniel

Dreiberg (Watchmen), Clark Kent (Superman) and to a lesser extent Tony Stark (Iron Man) who is somewhat of a nerd/playboy hybrid. The comic book itself and the figure of the superhero have long been seen as a part of nerd culture but over the last fifteen years comic books have 9 managed to exert a huge cultural influence via film adaptations which benefit from their ability to spawn successful sequels and reboots (since the nature of the source material provides an audience that is already accustomed to serial story-telling, as well as reboots) and to develop into product franchises. Thus, since 2000 Spider-Man has had four highly successful movies, Batman has three (of which The Dark Knight is one of the most economically successful films of all time), Superman has two films, Blade has two films, X-Men has five films (including the

Wolverine spin-off, and recent reboot), and Marvel, with the 2012 film Marvel’s Avengers (also one of the most successful films of all time) managed to tie together two already existing Iron

Man films, two Hulk films, one Captain America film, and one Thor film as well as securing further sequels for Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and The Avengers itself.

Along with the incredible economic success of the films these characters have created huge marketing opportunities through their combined appeal to adults and children allowing for themed toys, clothing, games, and of course further attention to the source material, the comics.

However, this marketing phenomenon is not unique to comics. As described by Kendall above, one of the defining characteristics of the nerd is his propensity to consume and collect media.

Thus other nerd-friendly areas such as science fiction television and fantasy literature also have likewise produced hugely popular film franchises such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and upcoming Hobbit trilogy), the eight Harry Potter films, the Star Wars series currently at six films but with plans announced to extend indefinitely), the 2009 reboot Star Trek movie (with a sequel due in 2013) and the three Transformer films, all of which have dominated the box office since

2000. Similarly this trend has recently extended into television with the critical and commercial success of the Showtime produced adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire 10 series, Game of Thrones. The production of nerd-friendly material and the promotion of and capitalization on consumer-friendly nerd behavior then has had huge economic dividends.

Important to the rise of nerd culture is the fact that this is very much a gendered (and raced) group. Nerds are predominantly male and white (almost all of the films, television shows, books, and comics I’ve listed center around white males), and, while of course not all nerds are misogynists, nerd culture is notoriously hostile towards women. This hostility has created various internet scandals over the last few years revolving around certain women active in or critical of the nerd community, resulting in harassment including threats of rape and murder, calls for the women in question to commit suicide, public humiliation (e.g., the creation of denigrating images of the women), and internet attacks (insulting Wikipedia edits, publishing private information online such as home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, a practice known as doxing). Almost all of the insults directed at women from the nerd community revolve around gender and sexuality as they are reduced to either pretty but disgusting whores or ugly virgins. Misogyny within the nerd community, in particular the gaming community, is so widespread that there are websites such as Fat, Ugly or Slutty (named after the most common insults directed at women gamers) where attacks made against women are recorded via posting screenshots of messages received from male gamers.

The most recent and publicly prominent of these attacks (but by no means the only) have been against Anita Sarkeesian, an internet blogger and journalist, Bioware employee Jennifer

Hepler, and Gizmodo contributor Alyssa Bereznak. In May, 2012, Sarkeesian created a

Kickstarter (a site where individuals propose projects to be funded by public donations) to fund a series in which she would address gender stereotypes in video games and was subsequently 11

attacked with such misogynist fervor that not only did tech-blogs (such as Kotaku) and feminist-

friendly sites (such as Jezebel) report on her mistreatment but the mainstream media (e.g., The

New York Times, The Guardian) also took note. Sarkeesian documented the attacks made against

her on her website, Feminist Frequency, in an effort to bring to light the abuse and intimidation

tactics women are subjected to merely for speaking their mind online.

Jennifer Hepler, a writer for video game company Bioware and who contributed to the

popular Dragon Age games had mentioned in an interview with Killer Betties in 2006 her

distaste for actually playing games, instead discussing her love for the story element of gaming.

Similar to Sarkeesian, Hepler was viciously and relentlessly attacked when someone in early

2011 discovered the interview and posted a reproduction of the somehow offensive comments to

the popular website Reddit. This led to an aggressive wave of attacks discussing her looks and

Hepler was ultimately forced to cancel her Twitter account because the abuse was so intense.

In August, 2011, Alyssa Bereznak wrote an admittedly shallow article, “My Brief

OkCupid Affair With a World Champion Magic the Gathering Player” for tech-blog Gizmodo

complaining about her date with former Magic: the Gathering world champion, Jon Finkel, simply because he was a so-called geek. While her article was childish and mean-spirited in nature, the response from the nerd community was again viciously sexist and mercilessly cruel.

The attacks on all three women were similar in that they centered not so much on what the women had done to offend the gaming community (which was very little at all), but almost entirely on their looks and sexuality.

Misogyny within the nerd community though isn’t just confined to attacking real life women who attempt to participate in that community, but also extends to the way fictional 12 women are portrayed in nerd culture. The problem with the depiction of women in superhero comics (to return to one of the driving forces of nerd culture into the mainstream) is well- documented. Not only are there comparatively very few female superheroes, but, whether they are superheroes, or supporting characters, their status as visual sex symbols is almost universal within the genre. The lack of female character development can be seen in most nerd-centered film and television, even that which is not taken from comic books. For example the show The

Big Bang Theory has two recurring female characters - Penny, the skinny, attractive but unintelligent blonde who functions as an object of desire for the main male cast, and Amy, who is pitifully unattractive, overweight by television standards, and socially awkward. It’s no surprise that the pretty and slutty/ugly, fat and virginal binary so often used to insult women in online nerd communities maps onto these two female characters. Similarly in the gaming community the portrayal of women is just as sexist and shallow. Very few video games feature a non-sexualized, strong female lead character, and there is a persistent trend of hyper-sexualizing women in games like World of Warcraft (in which the strongest armor for female characters is paradoxically the most revealing) and this extends to card games such as Magic: The Gathering, and role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons which feature scantily clad illustrations of fantasy women. Fantasy fiction itself is a genre that is heavily criticized for its depictions of rape and weak characterization of women. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series and the subsequent television series A Game of Thrones, despite being heralded for featuring strong female characters, are actually rife with instances of women being raped and abused and scenes of entirely unnecessary female nudity. 13

This disturbing attitude towards women (one of intense hostility coupled with sexual objectification), which is so interwoven into nerd culture is worrying when one takes into account how popular that culture has become and yet the very fact that this misogyny has come to public attention is the result of various influential women and men within that community writing blog pieces, creating discussion forums, and attempting to work with producers in the community to change the acceptance of and silence around misogynist and threatening behavior toward women. This attention towards how women are treated however is still very new and it’s unclear just how it could be successfully tackled. What does seem clear however is that, since women are viewed largely as outsiders, change must be initiated and enforced at some level from within the community.

Zack Snyder has established himself as a popular, though not always entirely respected, filmmaker who is able to traverse the line between the mainstream and the nerd community with relative ease and financial success. To date all of his films have had primarily nerd appeal with his 2004 remake of the zombie film Dawn of the Dead, comic-book adaptations of 300 (2007) and Watchmen (2010), and Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010) which was adapted from a series of fantasy novels. His next (and much-hyped) film due out in 2013 will be

Man of Steel, a Superman reboot. All of these films are firmly situated in what would be considered nerd genres (superhero, fantasy, and to a lesser extent, horror). Snyder then, is arguably one of a current generation of male directors (including but not limited to Joss Whedon,

Peter Jackson, Jon Favreau, Paul Feig, Kevin Smith, and Bryan Singer) who consider themselves nerds and are producing hugely successful, big-budget films, mostly about being a nerd or nerd interests. What is interesting about Sucker Punch is that it seems Snyder, a nerd insider, is 14 attempting (albeit messily) to address the sexist nerd attitude towards women by addressing the male audience that so strongly fosters such attitudes. Snyder has proven himself to have an incisive understanding of heterosexual male desire (his 300 managed to successfully objectify the male body for a heterosexual male audience with resounding box office success) and, given his privileged position within the film industry, if he were to turn a critical mind towards this desire he has the means to produce a wide-reaching and economically successful critique. But

Snyder’s lack of success with Sucker Punch I would argue is due to (among other things) a poor grasp on the power of spectacle, and his inability to fully commit to destroying the male sexual fantasy, because even as he makes us aware that he understands the female exploitation behind objectification, he cannot help but relish in reproducing those fantasies in an aesthetically pleasing manner. More importantly to the film’s failure though is that popular culture operates on a pleasure principle. People generally consume what gives them pleasure. Choosing to produce a film that deconstructs that pleasure is going to face problems in terms of how it is received. As a result Sucker Punch and its reception highlight the confusion that accompanies discussing male desire and dominant fantasies.

Over the course of the next three chapters I will attempt to outline the main areas where

Sucker Punch provides interesting disruptions in the typical representations of women and hopefully illuminate the strengths in addressing the unpopular in popular culture.

In my first two chapters I focus on postfeminism, which has been such a kernel of financial success in targeting the female demographic for Hollywood, and read Sucker Punch as critiquing the postfeminist mentality that self-objectification is somehow an exercise of female empowerment. I will talk about how the postfeminist vision of empowerment tends to rest on one 15 or both of two modes of representation: hyper-sexuality and/or hyper-violence, both of which take the shape of male fetishes thus furthering the link between women, sex, and control. In the first chapter I will show how Sucker Punch seems to hit all the marks of typical postfeminist representations of empowered women, but through its form and use of fantasy, and in particular its tone, it actually works to critique postfeminism, revealing postfeminism to be nothing but a fantasy of empowerment that allows women to be sexually exploited.

In chapter two I concentrate on violence and how it tends to be used in film as a demonstration of female empowerment. The belief that violence somehow equates to strength and gender equality is a line of reasoning that is revealed as deeply flawed when the violence of

Sucker Punch is read with the quality of violence and context of narrative kept in mind. I will look at three particular aspects of cinematic violence in order to explain the way Snyder’s depiction of female empowerment reveals the problems in the mainstream representation of female empowerment. I will look at: violence as a way to disrupt hegemonic ideas about gender, revealing gender as a performance; Hilary Neroni’s idea that violence can both express and elide antagonism towards hegemonic ideology; and violence as postmodern spectacle (as discussed by

Vivian Sobchack) and its relation to postmodern aesthetics. The spectacle of both the violent sexualized woman and the CGI aesthetic which is increasingly used in film (and especially so in

Sucker Punch) serve to undermine the power of the narrative’s ostensible critique of such sexualized violence. The violence in Sucker Punch is so stylized as to be pure spectacle. There is an airbrushed quality to Snyder’s film that lends it an air of artificiality which feeds into the way the film uses fantasy, but serves to disarm any threat that the violent young woman might pose to patriarchy and hegemonic gender roles. Further I will look at the extra-diegetic control over the 16 bodies of the four female leads through special effects, specifically digital manipulation, that the director wields and the ideological implications of the type of bodies that are developed. Similar to current debates over the digital air-brushing of celebrities and models in advertisements and on magazine covers, CGI adds to the male-directed creation of an unrealistic female body type.

In the latter half of this chapter I will examine how CGI technology is being utilized to sterilize and hyper-feminize the female body and, on the one hand increase the female occupation with beauty and control over one’s body, whilst simultaneously further removing actors and actresses from control over the product of their work. For women, digitalization has taken female abjection to the micro-level and I argue that Synder’s use of CGI demonstrates the lack of control women have over their own bodies, and while the use of CGI serves to heighten the criticism of postfeminist violent female empowerment, it simultaneously disempowers the female actresses.

In chapter three I focus on Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic and the male gaze. I see the experimentation with form in Sucker Punch as a test of some second wave feminist ideas as to how to challenge patriarchy via experimenting with Lacan’s idea of the Symbolic. Therefore the form is vital to understanding the main target of the film’s social critique: the heterosexual male sexual fantasy. Whereas in the first two chapters I look at how Sucker Punch uses fantasy diegetically (as a female mode of escape), in this chapter I examine it extra-diegetically (that is, the film directly addresses the assumed male viewer and his fantasies). I will be using the work of Laura Mulvey, who argues that film is essentially a male experience, one which regardless of the sex or gender of the audience, inherently positions the viewer as a heterosexual male.

Understanding mainstream film in this way I will then use Slavoj Zizek’s work arguing that 17 achieving fantasy is never fulfilling and show that by directly depicting these fantasies Sucker

Punch empties them of pleasure.

The focus of this project is fantasy and the way Sucker Punch visually connects postfeminist empowerment fantasies to dominant male fantasies of women. One of the main threats of postfeminism to achieving change in how women are appreciated culturally has undoubtedly been its overwhelming commercial success. Through movies, television, magazines, chick-lit, and advertising, postfeminist representations of female sexuality have generated a huge source of revenue. Meanwhile the ongoing struggle of feminism has been how to reach and mobilize a generation of women through the very social structures it criticizes as patriarchal. One of the interesting things about Sucker Punch is, given its hype and (at least on the surface) delivery of a textbook white male heterosexual fantasy, its commercial failure (with an $82 million price tag, the film only made $32 million domestically at the box office and currently holds a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). As stated earlier, I saw the film with a group of men who were mostly dissatisfied when we discussed it afterwards. They were uncomfortable with the use of sexual violence and fantasy and I’m curious if perhaps some of this male discomfort stems from being seduced and then arguably confronted with sexual fantasy that is exposed as blatantly degrading to women. In this way I think that Sucker Punch is markedly significant in its attempt to hold the audience accountable for the fantasies it enjoys. Yet its commercial failure exposes some of the problems in trying to even broach the subject of male fantasy as something to be interrogated by a mainstream audience. Further, given the state of Western consumerism, and the rise of nerd culture (which focuses on collecting and consuming) the issue of pleasure and the problem feminism has with creating an ideology that generates pleasure to the consumer 18 becomes crucial if feminism wants to prevent backsliding to a more conservative/traditional understanding of gender. These are problems that are important to identify if feminist scholarship is to accurately incorporate and move beyond postfeminist ideas. Even more important is the ongoing problem of attempting to popularize a genuine feminist ideology without compromising ideals or allowing capitalism (which is tied so strongly to patriarchy) to co-opt the idea of female empowerment, or worse, female subjectivity. In this way I hope to add to a body of feminist scholarship that identifies the importance of popular culture in shaping how feminism is perceived. 19

CHAPTER ONE: SUCKER PUNCH, POSTFEMINISM AND FANTASY

In this chapter I will examine the way in which Sucker Punch invokes various characteristics of postfeminism in order to expose postfeminism as an ultimately dangerous lens through which to understand gender politics. In particular this engagement with postfeminist ideas culminates in Sucker Punch revealing the disturbing relationship between utopian female empowerment fantasies, sexual exploitation and postfeminism. This chapter is divided into two clear sections: the first defines how I am using the term postfeminism and demonstrates how

Sucker Punch seems to encourage several postfeminist ideas. The second outlines the way

Sucker Punch, in various ways but particularly by constructing a narrative consisting of female empowerment fantasies that occur simultaneously with sexual and physical exploitation and abuse, works to expose postfeminist ideas as dangerous and misleading.

Postfeminism is a somewhat blurry term, used and defined in various different ways by academics and media commentators alike. For these reasons it is necessary for me to outline precisely how I understand postfeminism. Concisely I see it as an appropriation of feminist ideas by capitalist forces. It presents a fantasy of female empowerment based on the body and its objectification that is used to make huge amounts of money (especially in the beauty industry) whilst simultaneously politically fracturing women and repositioning them firmly within patriarchal ideology. In this way postfeminism is particularly pernicious and the manner in which it has been so thoroughly absorbed into the popular mindset is disturbing.

I draw my understanding of postfeminism primarily from the work of Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill, both of whom have written extensively on the topic. Gill and McRobbie understand postfeminism to be a sensibility, a collection of complex ideas that project the idea of 20 female empowerment, making the (feminist) claim that women are just as powerful and capable as men, whilst actually working to undo and dismiss feminist ideas of female equality and further the exploitation of women under patriarchy and capitalism. This is what McRobbie describes as a double entanglement. She states that one of the ways postfeminism works is by invoking feminism only to simultaneously imply its redundancy:

[F]or feminism to be “taken into account” it has to be understood as having

already passed away....Post-feminism can be explored through what I would

describe as a “double entanglement”. This comprises the co-existence of neo-

conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life...with

processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual

and kinship relations...It also encompasses the co-existence of feminism as at

some level transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also

fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated (Angela McRobbie 2003). The taken into

accountness permits all the more thorough dismantling of feminist politics and the

discrediting of the occasionally voiced need for its renewal. (“Post-Feminism and

Popular Culture” 255-256)

This postfeminist double entanglement is allowed to function through the following characteristics, each of which I will concentrate on in relation to Sucker Punch: the film’s focus on ideas of female choice, female freedom, and individualism; the portrayal of femininity as bodily and the emphasis on female sexuality as a source of power; and the importance of female subjectivity. 21

The dominant characteristic of postfeminism is that it puts an inordinate stress on the importance of female choice, female freedom and individualism. The idea that many postfeminist works project is that human life is entirely determined by the free choices one makes. Postfeminist narratives often depict women supposedly allowing themselves to be exploited, and succumbing to depression. The secret to overcoming these miserable situations

(according to these narratives) is to choose to be happy. The most recent and successful offender of this type of narrative can be found in the 2011 hit movie Bridesmaids which was heralded in the media for its all-female cast, and resulted in a multitude of (patronizing) articles about women’s ability to be funny, but which is actually quite disappointing in terms of its reliance upon and regurgitation of typical postfeminist narratives. The main character Annie, whose life is in shambles, discovers that the source of her misery is not that the man she is romantically interested in treats her awfully, or that society has rigid expectations of women to be young, attractive, and seeking marriage, but rather it is herself. Of course once Annie realizes that she is the problem and chooses to be happy she is suddenly able to celebrate her friend’s marriage and is able to enter into a romantic relationship with a man. The obvious problem with encouraging this line of thinking is that it doesn’t allow for the idea that the very way society is structured puts restraints on the choices available to women. It removes blame and anger away from patriarchy, and puts it onto the individual.

Sucker Punch, clearly uses this understanding of choice as the driving force of its narrative. Babydoll, living in the pre-second wave feminist movement era of the 1950s, is assaulted by her stepfather, arrested by male police officers for the accidental murder of her sister who she was trying to save from their father, and then imprisoned in a mental institution for girls 22 which is almost entirely staffed by men and where she will receive an unprescribed lobotomy via the collusion of her stepfather and the head male orderly, Blue. Babydoll is quite clearly a victim of an unjust system that is controlled by men and yet the film, through its dialogue and particularly through its narrator, frames Babydoll’s situation repeatedly as something Baby can choose to free herself from. We see this before Baby is to perform her dance for the first time, when Madame Gorski says to Baby, “You don’t want to be judged? You won’t be. You don’t think you’re strong enough? You are. You’re afraid. Don’t be. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight” (Sucker Punch). There is a distinct focus on what Baby wants as being the key to empowerment. This rhetoric is repeated in Sweet Pea’s voiceover which concludes the entire movie, and which is worth quoting at length here:

Who is it that chooses our steps in the dance? Who drives us mad, lashes us with

whips, and crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who is it that

does all these things? Who honors those we love with the very life we live? Who

sends monsters to kill us and at the same time sings that we’ll never die? Who

teaches us what’s real and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live and

what we’ll die to defend? Who chains us? And who holds the key that can set us

free? It’s you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight. (Sucker Punch)

This speech, which breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience, holds the implied female individual in the audience accountable for everything that happens to her in her life: she is cast as her own worst enemy. Not only is this list disturbingly expansive and thorough, and the responsibility for these situations placed solely on the individual (thereby framing one’s situation entirely as a choice), but the power to change these circumstances is expressed through the 23 violent rally “Now fight” (Sucker Punch). This is a phrase that is repeated time and again by various characters to Babydoll, and again here to the audience by Sweet Pea.

Fighting however is not undirected, but rather it has one clear purpose in Sucker Punch,

Babydoll fights for her individual freedom. When Babydoll is initially imprisoned and the asylum transforms into a brothel, she is told she must dance for customers. Just as she gives her first practice dance she disappears into a fantasy world where she encounters an old man and the following conversation ensues:

WISE MAN. What are you looking for?

BABYDOLL. A way out, I guess

WISE MAN. You guess?

BABYDOLL. No, I- I know. I need to get out of here.

WISE MAN. Freedom. That wasn’t so hard was it? I’m going to help you to be

free.

BABYDOLL. What do I have to do?

WISE MAN. These are your weapons [gives her a gun and a sword]. When you

take them you begin your journey. Your journey to freedom. (Sucker Punch)

Note that in this single passage the notions of freedom, choice and individuality are all touched upon. Babydoll’s mission is to achieve her freedom, but she must, in taking up arms, choose to take on this mission. It is also important that she is alone in this fight. The wise man (who recurs throughout the film) gives her direction via her weapons and advice, but the fight is a choice, and the reason for fighting is completely motivated by individual preservation. Thus the idea of postfeminist empowerment follows the logic of Social Darwinism, since it operates under the 24 belief that survival is the individual’s responsibility which is achieved through fighting and it is the strongest individual who will survive.

The stress placed on freedom clearly reflects dominant American ideology. The political rhetoric of America explicitly revolves around democracy and freedom as demonstrated by such foundational texts of the national consciousness as the American national anthem, “The Star

Spangled Banner” which claims America to be “the land of the free,” (Key) and “The Pledge of

Allegiance” which states America to be a nation that stands for “liberty and justice for all.” (4

USC Sec. 4). More specifically though, postfeminist ideas about freedom reflect Republican ideology regarding individual responsibility which harkens back to McRobbie’s understanding of postfeminism as a double entanglement that projects conservative values as empowering.

Postfeminism then can be understood to shore up dominant ideology and it is clear that Sucker

Punch demonstrates the idea of postfeminist empowerment, an idea which is psychological (one simply has to decide for change to occur), individual (as one has only oneself to rely upon), and, in the case of female action heroes, physically violent and deeply conservative in nature in a way that protects patriarchal society from any responsibility for the misfortunes of women.

The second area where I see a strong projection of postfeminist ideas in Sucker Punch is through the sexualization of the female body. Postfeminism focuses on the body in various ways, but in particular it stresses the idea that femininity is an embodied quality (i.e. it’s something visual and tied to the body as opposed to a cultural construct) and the power that comes from female sexuality. Gill states: “in today’s media it is possession of a ‘sexy body’ that is presented as women’s key (if not sole) source of identity” (“Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a

Sensibility” 149). Thus in postfeminist films the femininity of the female protagonist is made a 25 visual (if not narrative) focal point. This focus on the female body explains a recurring feature of the postfeminist narrative, the makeover. The makeover not only transforms the exterior appearance of the woman in question, but her interior, her personality, as well. Shy, passive unattractive women by virtue of a makeover become confident, aggressive and sexy. The makeover reveals the importance postfeminism puts on being heteronormatively sexually attractive. Being sexually attractive, we are told through these narratives, does not only feel good, but it holds tremendous power. This process of transformation and the power it brings is discussed by Joan Riviere whereby she describes femininity as a sexual performance by which women are able to manipulate men and conceal their power (or masculine identity as Riviere understands it). She states, “[w]omanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it” (306). Postfeminism encourages women to sexually objectify themselves (to choose to be sexual objects) as an effective method of “working the system” all the while denying that the “system” i.e. patriarchy, exists.

In the action heroine genre the makeover is unnecessary because the heroines, by virtue of their status as heroines (heroes being individuals embodying ideas of human perfection) have never needed a makeover to understand the power of their own sexuality. That female action heroes locate their power in their sense of sexuality however is unquestionable. The women of

Charlie’s Angels (2000), Lara Croft (2001), and the young protagonists of Sucker Punch all use their sexuality to accomplish their goals. In Sucker Punch this goal is initially just to stay alive, as Madame Gorski tells Babydoll as Baby struggles to give her first dance: 26

If you do not dance, you have no purpose. And we don’t keep things here that

have no purpose. You see, your fight for survival starts right now. You don’t want

to be judged? You won’t be. You don’t think you’re strong enough? You are.

You’re afraid. Don’t be. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.

This speech of course echoes Sweet Pea’s conclusive narration over the end of the film. Here though sexuality (through provocative dancing) and weapons are directly equated, and presented to the young woman as something she can use against men. Merely using their sexuality however is not always enough, and in Sucker Punch the outcome of the narrative hinges entirely on the successful use of female sexuality. The only reason there is any hope for escape for any of the young protagonists is due to Babydoll’s sexual appeal and ability to seduce. Her dance (which is never depicted on screen) is appreciated by Blue and the patrons of the brothel as hypnotically sexual, and by Babydoll as a weapon. Sweet Pea’s initial reaction to the dance is disgust at its cheap sexual nature and she criticizes Baby:

SWEET PEA. She wasn’t impressed. All that gyrating and moaning. The dance

should be more than just titillation. Mine’s personal. It says who I am. What

the heck does yours say?

BABYDOLL. It says I’m going to escape from here. That I’m going to be free.

Not only does this dialogue demonstrate the very sexual nature of Baby’s dance (which the audience never sees), but it also shows that ultimately the only power the women have is their sexuality, as Baby explicitly identifies it as the reason that she will be free.

As if to compensate for becoming a sexual object, postfeminism features a focus on female subjectivity, in particular the idea that women are not merely sexual objects but are 27 subjects that should choose to be sexually desiring and desirable. This emphasis on subjectivity allows for the illusion of choice, a position Elcye Rae Helford in her article “Postfeminist Action

Heroines” concurs with, stating that women “are not just convinced they can act out their

‘choices’ through individual (heroic) effort, they want to recuperate the ‘choice’ of wearing high heels” (5). Helford then positions the postfeminist choice of expressing her sexuality as a stance against earlier feminists and their supposed anti-sexuality attitude. Gill’s objection to this practice illustrates the dangerous consequences it has for women:

It can be argued that this represents a higher or deeper form of exploitation than

objectification – one in which the objectifying male gaze is internalized to form a

new disciplinary regime. In this regime power is not imposed from above or from

the outside, but constructs our very subjectivity. Girls and women are invited to

become a particular kind of self, and endowed with agency on condition that it is

used to construct oneself as a subject closely resembling the heterosexual male

fantasy that is found in pornography. (“Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a

Sensibility” 151-2)

It is of course much more personally rewarding to believe one is choosing to be sexually objectified than to face the reality that objectification does not take into consideration the issue of choice. One cannot really choose whether or not to be sexually objectified, since the entire point of sexual objectification is to ignore the subjectivity (and therefore wishes and choices) of those who are being sexually objectified. Gill makes an even more important observation though in that the choices women are encouraged to make via this constructed subjectivity are ones that would align their appearance and behavior with a heterosexual male sexual fantasy. To put it 28 more bluntly, women are encouraged to fantasize about being male sexual fantasies. In Sucker

Punch this self-objectification is portrayed when the women, although imprisoned, still choose to offer themselves as sexual objects (there are no instances of objection and they willingly partake in dancing classes that enhance their desirability), demonstrating their supposed control over their own bodies. But perhaps the best demonstration of this constructed subjectivity is in the fantasy sequences that occur when Babydoll dances. These moments are supposed to be female fantasies of empowerment, the content of which is determined by the dreamer i.e., Babydoll. It is strange then that in these fantasies, in which the women are repeatedly in battle and would benefit from practical clothing, Babydoll and the four other women are still dressed in sexually provocative tight clothing, with thigh high stockings, high heels, revealing tops, heavy make-up, and even suggestively suck on lollipops. There is very little different in their appearance (other than their weapons) between these action scenes and the brothel scenes clearly showing that given the choice, these women choose to appear as male sexual fantasies, thereby clearly having internalized the “objectifying male gaze” (151) as Gill puts it.

As I’ve demonstrated, the heroines of Sucker Punch, especially Babydoll, are through their attitudes, behavior, appearance, and as revealed through Sweet Pea’s narration, undoubtedly postfeminist in character. However, through the film’s use of tone, its approach to romance, its narrative conclusion and the actual construction of the narrative itself Sucker Punch ultimately functions to undermine the ideas these women represent, and in doing so, critiques postfeminism.

In her article “Post-Feminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” Rosalind Gill notes the heavy use of irony in postfeminist work to convey a light-hearted tone which she sees as diffusing any potential threat that the concept of “girl power” might pose to patriarchy, and 29 almost allows for pre-feminist behaviour to return. Gill states, “most significantly, however, in postfeminist media culture irony has become a way of 'having it both ways', of expressing sexist or homophobic or otherwise unpalatable sentiments in an ironised form, while claiming this was not actually 'meant'” (159). This explains the prevalence (particularly in the 1990s during the backlash to feminism and emergence of men’s rights movements) of sexist jokes which harken back to pre-second wave feminism and which refer to women’s subservience to men, or which reduce women to sex objects in an exaggerated manner. These politically incorrect jokes “work” because both parties involved “know” that this kind of attitude is politically incorrect. The amusement comes from a jarring indifference to social expectations. Yet, there is something deeply unsettling about this use of humor. It is laced with male aggression, and almost a sadistic streak which refuses to acknowledge feminism at all. Indeed, Terry Eagleton notes the internal tension that irony can indicate between social expectation and personal belief: “we can, perhaps, be ironic about our deepest commitments, acknowledging their arbitrariness, but this does not really slacken their grip upon us. Irony does not go as far down as belief” (After Theory 59).

Eagleton’s observation touches on one of the main problems with subversive comedy techniques.

That is, often the audience may laugh, but the underlying belief supposedly being attacked (in the case of postfeminism the performance of femininity) is not truly challenged. Irony and humor then can often be methods of dismissing ideas or beliefs that challenge our own.

The use (or lack of) humor is one of the key differences between Sucker Punch and almost all other postfeminist films since it is absolutely devoid of humor, or a knowing sense of irony at the way it addresses gender. Films such as Charlie’s Angels (2000), Spice World (1997),

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Miss Congeniality (2000), and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) are 30 infused with a campy and ironic sense of humor that lends them a playful mood and ultimately gives them a utopian tone. This pushes the idea that it is wonderful and playful to be a sexy powerful woman as if being a woman, in particular a very feminine, overly sexual woman, is something incredibly easy and natural (and altogether safe), and that being empowered is not only attainable, but expected. Sucker Punch by contrast really demands to be taken quite seriously and this is the key element in determining what Sucker Punch is ultimately saying about female empowerment. Whereas in light, comedic postfeminist films the idea of female empowerment is laughed off and associated with the ridiculous via their over-the-top plots, the dark tone of Sucker Punch, and its subject matter (the story of abused young women trying to escape a mental asylum), does not undermine the idea of female empowerment.

Similar to its lack of a light-hearted tone is the lack of any type of love interest for the women in Sucker Punch. This is particularly unusual in postfeminist work which tends to, while projecting the idea of confident, independent working women, also manifest the solution to all of her problems in the form of a loving relationship with a man. Thus in Bridget Jones’ s Diary

(2001), Bridget is not truly happy (and the film does not actually end) until she has united with

Mr. Darcy, despite the fact that prior to uniting with Darcy she has attained professional success and independence. Similarly in the more recent Bridesmaids (2011), though the film appears to center around the protagonist Annie Walker’s conflict and subsequent resolution with her best friend Lillian, the film does not end with their reunification but rather it does not (can not?) end until Annie has (like Lillian) found true love with a man. In the action genre the necessity for a heterosexual love interest is a staple of the genre, since the female lead’s physical agency carries the potential threat both to male dominance (a love interest then serves to reassert male 31 dominance) and to heterosexual dominance (a love interest then serves to assure the audience of the heterosexual status of the lead female). Thus all of the angels in Charlie’s Angels (2000) have at some point a love interest, as does Tomb Raider’s (2001) Lara Croft, Aliens’ (1986) Ellen

Ripley, The Terminator’s (1984) Sarah Connor, The Long Kiss Goodnight’s (1996) Samantha

Caine, Miss Congeniality’s (2000) Gracie Hart, The Hunger Games’ (2012) Katniss Everdeen, and the list goes on and on. Sucker Punch then is unusual, not only as a postfeminist film, but as any mainstream Hollywood film featuring female leads in its complete and total ignorance of love. Conversely, the film presents male heterosexual desire as the problem with which the protagonists must face. Narratively (although not visually, an issue I will discuss in chapters two and three), Sucker Punch vilifies sexuality. This of course can be seen as a problem in general terms of representing women on film as by making the heroines asexual they are purified, made to fit the virgin side of the virgin/whore binary. Nonetheless, even the typical virginal female character tends to display romantic desire for a man despite being chaste. Thus the total lack of female desire for a man, as is the case in Sucker Punch, in an action film is still very unusual, and strays from one of the core elements of postfeminist ideology: that a woman’s life is organized around her romantic status.

While the serious tone and attitude towards romance serve to distance Sucker Punch from postfeminist ideas, the narrative resolution, Sweet Pea’s character, and the construction of fantasy worlds function to directly critique postfeminism. In the final fifteen minutes of the film

Babydoll (the presumed protagonist), who has led the four other girls (Sweet Pea, Blondie,

Rocket, and Amber) through various fantasy worlds as she has fought to escape the asylum is, in the end, lobotomized. It should be noted that Babydoll really is the representative of most of the 32 postfeminist ideas throughout the movie. It is her individualism and commitment to freedom and choice that drives the plot, and she is the character that directly locates her power in her sexuality, a sexuality that mimics heterosexual male fantasies. It is Babydoll’s commitment to her sexuality that turns out to be her downfall as by being desirable she is unable to find escape, and instead sacrifices herself to ensure Sweet Pea’s freedom and returns to the asylum. With the film’s narrative resolution not only does all of Baby’s fighting essentially come to naught but the film directly equates postfeminist female empowerment with the literally mindless fantasies of the mentally mutilated. Leaving the postfeminist heroine as a lobotomized patient in a mental home, a patient who has been sexually exploited and completely controlled by all of the men in her life, is perhaps the most explicitly damning message the film could project about the dangers of postfeminist thinking.

While Babydoll is narratively punished, the character and fate of Sweet Pea provide a juxtaposition that sheds light on where the film stands in terms of gender politics. Whereas

Babydoll consistently and naively espouses the virtues of individualism, choice, freedom, and sexuality, Sweet Pea (other than in the voiceover monologues that open and close the film) consistently disagrees with Babydoll on each of these areas. It is revealed through various snippets of dialogue that Sweet Pea ended up at the asylum not because of abuse she was suffering, but to protect her sister, Rocket, and throughout the film Sweet Pea’s main concern is the safety of Rocket and the other women. She repeatedly warns the women of the dangers they are facing, and is the only reluctant participant in the escape plan. Her grasp on individualism, choice, and freedom is tempered by realism and practicality. Sweet Pea is not prone to the types of dangerous fantasies that the others are, a fact that Babydoll recognizes when she helps Sweet 33

Pea escape saying: “Go out and live a normal life...You’re the strongest. You’re the only one of us that ever had a chance out there”. Sweet Pea’s stance on sexuality is also more reserved, arguing that the dances they perform should mean something to the dancer, and not just be for the sexual pleasure of the viewer. Sweet Pea’s understanding of female sexuality is revealed as particularly astute in a speech she gives at the very moment the asylum changes into the brothel.

Madame Gorski is having the women enact various roles on stage when Sweet Pea, enacting the role of a girl about to be lobotomized suddenly erupts into a tirade. Tearing off her wig and walking off-stage she says:

This is a joke right? Don’t you get the point of this? It’s to turn people on. I get

the sexy little schoolgirl. I even get the helpless mental patient, right? That can be

hot. But what is this? Lobotomized vegetable? How about something a little more

commercial, for God’s sakes? You gotta help me, I’m the star of the show,

remember?

Sweet Pea reveals in this speech her awareness of not only the commercial value of sexuality, but more importantly that female sexuality consists of roles that are determined by commerciality.

Female sexuality for public consumption is not a matter of individual choice or expression (that is, there is no postfeminist subjectivity), but is dictated by outside forces that are associated with profit. But this speech is best understood as a direct address to the audience of the film, as Sweet

Pea breaking the fourth wall and making the audience aware that this is a film which is consciously playing with ideas of female sexual objectification and commodification. Through this speech female sexual objectification and its commercial value is made the very subject of

Sucker Punch, making a commentary about the nature of the film industry itself, that it is to 34 sexually objectify women in return for money. Further, Sweet Pea directs the audience’s attention to the disturbing nature of sexualizing a lobotomized young woman, making the audience aware of how it looks at Babydoll (who the audience has just seen lobotomized in the montage leading up to this speech) throughout the film. Sweet Pea thus serves to undermine Babydoll and the postfeminist values she stands for, a stance the narrative supports in the end when Sweet Pea escapes while Babydoll offers herself to a gang of men outside the asylum.

Beyond narrative resolution and character juxtaposition though, the most critical element in terms of bringing together the film’s serious tone and subject matter is a narrative technique which exposes the exploitative nature of postfeminism via a reliance upon simultaneous narratives and the use of fantasy worlds. The idea of fantasy is central to Sucker Punch, and the protagonist Babydoll engages in episodes of fantasy repeatedly throughout the movie. The gender politics of Sucker Punch can only be understood if we look closely at the film’s combination of fantasy with reality. The table below outlines the three levels of experience that are at work during the movie. It is important to note that everything that happens in the second fantasy level happens simultaneously with events in the first fantasy level.

Experience Reality Fantasy Level 1: Fantasy Level 2: ➡ Female Sexual Exploitation Female Empowerment

Time Assault and imprisonment ⬇

Mental asylum Brothel

Baby’s 1st dance Japanese

Baby’s dance for Blue (map) WWI steam punk zombies 35

Experience Reality Fantasy Level 1: Fantasy Level 2: ➡ Female Sexual Exploitation Female Empowerment

Mayor’s visit (fire) Medieval dragons

Seduction of the cook (knife) Sci-fi train heist

Rocket’s death (by cook)

Lobotomist’s arrival High Roller’s visit

Amber and Blondie’s death (by Blue)

Blue stabbed (by Baby)

Babydoll is lobotomized Babydoll sacrifices herself Sweet Pea is free Sweet Pea is free

There are basically 3 levels of experience in Sucker Punch. The first is the reality of the narrative: this has Babydoll as its protagonist who accidentally murders her sister while their father attempts to rape them and she is imprisoned in a mental asylum to be lobotomized in a week. The film then shifts to a second world where the asylum is transformed into a brothel in which Babydoll and the other young female residents are stripper-prostitutes imprisoned by a pimp, Blue. Every character in the first reality exists in this second reality although they occupy a different role (e.g. Babydoll’s stepfather is a priest in the second reality, Blue is an orderly in the first reality, and a pimp in the second, Gorski is a doctor in the first reality, and a dance instructor and mother-like figure to the girls in the second reality). Babydoll and her friends plot to escape the brothel. They need several items in order to do so (a map, fire, a knife, and a key), and they have Babydoll dance in order to distract Blue and other men with power over them. 36

Each time they steal the items the film shifts to a third level of fantasy which is completely separate from reality, that is, only the five young women transport into the third reality, none of the other characters occupy this third world.

With each shift away from reality there is a shift in the way the women are understood in terms of their agency and their level of sexualization. The further away from reality, the more artificial and fantastical the women become visually, whilst simultaneously gaining narrative control through violence. Thus we see in the diegetic reality of the asylum the young women wear dirty looking uniforms that cover the majority of their bodies, and their hair and make-up is, relative to the fantasy sequences, very understated and unglamorous. In the first fantasy level

(the brothel) the girls conform to real-world sexual fetish-types. This is most notable with

Babydoll who embodies the slutty schoolgirl fetish with her ultra-short pleated skirt, and her formal yet tight and revealing shirt. Her hair and make-up are much more visible and vibrant, the pig-tails taking on a more sexual connotation when coupled with the school-girl outfit. The remaining four girls wear corsets and stockings and likewise are much more conventionally feminine in appearance through their makeup and styled hair. In this first fantasy level the women have almost no agency. They are held prisoners (at times the corridors and barred doors give the brothel the appearance of a jail) and are made to perform and entertain Blue’s guests.

Whilst there is no mention of prostitution, it is clearly implied when Rocket is taking Babydoll on her tour of the building. The first place they stop is a room with a heart-shaped bed in it and

Rocket explains to Babydoll: “These are the rooms where we take the clients. There’s fresh towels in all the bathrooms...Blue owns the club. And we, my dear, are the main attractions Ta- da. The club’s a front for his business. Guns, gambling, medications, special favors. He brings in 37 his clients, and we gotta make them feel, you know...special”. The women’s existence in this level is purely for the sexual gratification of the men. Even further though, these women are part of a business operation, they are commodities that are a key element in Blue’s economic model.

In the second level of fantasy the women become even more fantastical in appearance.

The sexual fantasies the women embody in the first level are realistic in that they could be (and are) performed by women outside of the movie. The second level fantasies are entirely unrealistic and find their origins in video game fandom. Babydoll, still donning the schoolgirl outfit becomes militarized and is now able to defy gravity as she leaps and flies through the air.

The four other women are, similar to Babydoll, now armed with guns and a variety of body armor (yet as with most video games this armor does not provide any adequate protection since it is cut to enhance the shape of the female body, accentuating breasts and hips and exposing areas of the body that are often sexualized such as thighs and midriff). This deep-fantasy is inhabited by mythical/fictional creatures (dragons, samurai giants, robots, steampunk zombies) and its landscape is an unstable collage of the real and fictional, the past and the imagined future, none of which bears any connection to the asylum where the women are imprisoned. In this second fantasy the women have a powerful presence, violently battling scores of enemies to complete their goals.

A comparison between these two fantasy levels reveals the disturbing heart of postfeminism. The key to understanding the implications of these different levels of fantasy is the simultaneity of the events. The fact that while Babydoll is choosing to offer herself as a sexual object (when she dances) she switches to a fantasy in which she and the other women trapped in the asylum are completely empowered is important because it makes two statements 38 about postfeminism. The first is that agency is tied directly to, and expressed only through, sexualization and violence. Second, and more importantly, through this use of simultaneous narratives female empowerment through self-objectification is revealed as a complete fantasy of empowerment: it is not real, but rather is a front for the exploitation of women. There is no agency, nor is there any empowerment involved in objectification, whether it is thought to be by choice or not.

Sucker Punch presents a postfeminist heroine and her companions and places them in a misogynist dystopian world. Not only does the context in which these women exist not allow for any humor, but it also serves to test the postfeminist sensibility which they represent, and the use of simultaneous narratives exposes postfeminism as a delusional and exploitative fantasy that only furthers patriarchy’s aims. Yet, as was conveyed in the negative reviews previously mentioned, not many people interpreted the film this way. It was overwhelmingly seen as a misogynist, shallow attempt to portray female empowerment. While it is positive that the film was objected to on these grounds, I see the negative interpretation of the film as a sign of the problems feminism faces in how women are represented and understood in popular culture.

Much of the criticism of the film focused on the way the female stars looked, and didn’t address what the film was actually trying to say about the female image. As provided throughout this chapter, there are numerous examples of ways the film addressed female sexualization in a critical manner, yet it would appear that the sexualized female image has been negatively politicized in a manner that almost precludes its discussion. Marlo Edwards, in an analysis of the film Barb Wire makes a similar observation. Edwards explores the contradictory and resistant ways Barb’s body operates in claiming female agency. She concludes her argument though 39 lamenting the fact that the complexities Barb offers the viewer are left ignored by feminist academics due entirely to her appearance:

But, it is precisely Barb’s recognizability and familiarity – her ubiquity as a

mental image – that has served to exclude her from serious consideration by

feminists. Because women are, and have been historically, defined within

patriarchy as primarily “sexual” beings, it continues to be difficult to incorporate

sexual desire and specifically traditional markers or “desirability” into feminist

models of female agency. Barb Wire’s appearance/performance in the film – and

her position as a character portrayed by Pamela Anderson – thus causes her to be

categorically dismissed. (46)

Like Edwards I see a missed opportunity and a worrying inability to move past the female image in the response to Sucker Punch. This is even more so concerning because even though within academia postfeminism has been analyzed and criticized for the manner in which it exploits women, there hasn’t been a mainstream representation of these criticisms or confrontation with postfeminist ideas. To the contrary postfeminist ideas seem to have been very much widely accepted into the popular mindset, a job helped no end by the huge and continuing success of the romantic comedy and beauty industry. It is important therefore that popular culture seek to address the problems with the associations between freedom, choice, individuality, sexualization and empowerment. In this respect Sucker Punch, while it was a by all accounts an economic and critical failure, stands out as an example of a film which attempts to portray the complex way women are exploited through postfeminism, and which does not reproduce the sexy powerful 40 woman kicking ass and succeeding, but rather uncovers the seedy underside of the postfeminist fantasy. 41

CHAPTER TWO: SUCKER PUNCH AND THE VIOLENT CGI BODY

In chapter one I argued that Sucker Punch tests and exposes postfeminist ideas of empowerment and demonstrates them to be wanting; it does so by juxtaposing postfeminist models of empowerment with a serious rather than ironic tone and by marking the important difference between fantasies of empowerment and the realities of exploitation. Something which neither Rosalind Gill nor Angela McRobbie address, but which is particularly interesting, is the coincidence of postfeminism as a popular culture discourse and the emergence of the female action heroine. In the late 1980s-early 90s, just as third wave feminism peaked, and the postfeminist movement began to take hold, the mainstream female action hero, established with the characters of Ellen Ripley (in the 1986 film Aliens), and Sarah Connor (in the 1991 film

Terminator 2), began to rise in both visibility and popularity, shifting over time from these two more masculine representations to much more sexualized, feminine heroines. In part due to this telling correlation, and in part because of what the action heroine has frequently represented, I read the action heroine of mainstream Western cinema as, more often than not, a vehicle for postfeminist ideas about female empowerment. Thus, what happens in films like Tomb Raider

(2001) and Charlie’s Angels (2000) is a female protagonist expresses her individual empowerment through committing acts of violence with an overly feminine and overly sexualized body. It is the body of the action heroine that wears and enacts the ideology that she represents, and in this chapter I focus on the way the female body is constructed in Sucker Punch but paying close attention to what that body actually does (as opposed to merely what it looks like) and the political implications of computer-generated imagery (CGI). I again return to the 42 fantasy/reality dualism that is so central to the film’s narrative and demonstrate how it tempers the potentially empowering violence enacted by the female bodies of Sucker Punch.

This chapter is split into two sections. The first will discuss the violent female body and its occurrence in action films and put that violence into context, taking into consideration the quality (and therefore power) of that violence. I will focus on the reading of action heroines that locates strength in their sexuality. I will then put the female bodies of Sucker Punch into their diegetic context and discuss the film’s use of fantasy and CGI as a method in which the potentially threatening violence enacted by hyper-feminine women is neutralized by the location of that violence in a pure fantasy world. In the second section I will outline the problems CGI presents to women as it works to both control the female body, offering unrealistic visions of female beauty, as well as removing control from the female actress, alienating her from her own body and allowing her likeness to be manipulated by a more than often male group of technicians.

The female action hero has generated much debate within feminist film studies primarily because she offers one of the most recognizable challenges to Laura Mulvey’s now seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey contends that traditional Hollywood film is structured around a gendered binary which positions men as active lookers, and women as passive objects to be looked at. Film reflects this gender binary back onto its audience thereby reinstating itself on the viewers with men identifying with the male protagonist and women internalizing the role of passive image. Mulvey therefore believes that mainstream film plays a vital role in constructing gender identity and relationships. 43

In a somewhat perverse categorization, the action heroine herself is often read through a gender binary. She is either seen as butch and masculine (e.g., Sarah Connor in Terminator 2) or hyper-feminine (e.g., Barb in Barb Wire). Both of these heroine types have been read in contradictory and complex ways by academics but these arguments can be simplified here for the sake of brevity. On the one hand there are those who argue that a woman embodying traits and behavior commonly associated with a man (such as muscles, aggression, independence, intelligence) functions to disrupt the gender binary, providing visual evidence for Judith Butler’s powerful argument that “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Gender Trouble 140). That is to say gender is not tied to the body but is rather nothing more than a performance which attains stability through repetition. A woman performing masculinity therefore destabilizes the common perception that gender is a fixed category. On the other hand, as Jeffrey Brown states it,

“muscularity is so essentially linked with the ‘natural’ superiority of men in power relations that it semiotically overwhelms biological identity. The muscular woman is seen as a gender cross- dresser” (“Gender and the Action Heroine” 62). Thus despite being visual evidence that gender is a performance, the signifiers of masculinity (muscles, aggression, etc.) overpower the knowledge of the female body wearing them resulting in the masculine female action hero being interpreted as nothing more than a man in drag who serves to confirm the value of male traits rather than challenge the way society evaluates gendered behavior.

Conversely the hyper-feminine action heroine has been viewed as positively demonstrating that not only do female traits and behavior not compromise strength, aggression, etc., but instead that female traits themselves can be a source of power. This, according to Brown 44 actually works to disrupt our understanding of gender since “the image of a petite, pretty woman in a dress kicking ass denies the narrative logic that allows viewers to deride the heroine as a butch or as a woman trying to be a man” (“Gender and the Action Heroine” 63). This view has been criticized however since the hyper-feminine action heroine tends to be unrealistic and therefore unconvincing in terms of presenting women as powerful, but more importantly the hyper-feminine action heroine almost always relies on her sexuality as a source of strength. This only reinforces the idea not only that women are sexual objects but also that their sexuality is threatening and dangerous. Since postfeminism is obsessed with women not sacrificing their femininity for the sake of feminism (rather women supposedly can “have it all” according to postfeminist fictions) the postfeminist action heroine is always the hyper-feminized heroine. It is therefore this latter type that I will be focusing on in this chapter.

Since Mulvey’s argument is concerned with how film contributes to real world gender politics one of the main concerns of academics in studying the action heroine has been how she affects audience identification and the power inherent in identification. Brown explores the tension around male viewer/female protagonist identification with the feminine action heroine in his essay “If Looks Could Kill: Power, Revenge, and Stripper Movies” in which he concentrates on films featuring violent strippers as their heroines. Brown makes the argument that it is precisely their clear femininity and over-sexualization which marks these characters as women thereby preventing the possibility that one could mistake characters such as Pamela Anderson’s

Barb (in Barb Wire), or Emily Browning’s Babydoll as men in drag, or stand-ins for a male viewer. But in Brown’s study he points out that the stripper action heroine’s hyper-femininity and clear status as a woman is the central point of tension around which the entire plot of the violent 45 stripper film is structured. These films are not violent films featuring women; they are films that are about women being violent. This is an interesting observation that can be applied beyond just stripper-revenge films. For example, in G.I. Jane, Jane’s status as a woman is the entire point of the film, and in Miss Congeniality, Gracie’s performance of gender again becomes the focal point of the film. Similarly in Sucker Punch, because of the sexual nature of their confinement it is not about prisoners trying to escape their captors, but about women escaping the control of men. The narrative foregrounding of gender in this way focuses audience attention on the heroine’s status as a woman. According to Brown, because the stripper-revenge films are about gender and sexuality the violence enacted by the female protagonists via weapons and aggressive attitudes is not in and of itself the threat that the male viewer perceives, but rather the threat comes from the agency involved in their power to seduce. He states:

unlike other genres that highlight avenging women, the stripper movies ascribe

the women’s true power as the very quality that at first glance seems to

disempower them. In other words, their seductive desirability is the real weapon,

the phallic symbolism of the guns is just an external marker of the ‘activity’ that

can result from their inherent power. The real threat to male observers is not the

masculine qualities that these women have taken on in defense of themselves and

as a result of their objectification, it is the castrating power that they wield as

seductive objects. (67)

The stripper is able to use her sexuality to disarm the male viewer, and then uses that opportunity to commit violence against those voyeurs, which of course bears out the threat of castration that her sexuality posed in the first place. Brown states: 46

What interests me here, though, is the character of the stripper. Though she is the

ultimate object of a sadistic male gaze, her to-be-looked-at-ness is used as a way

to advance the plot while simultaneously stopping the narrative. These films

confound the traditional logic of voyeurism both within the narrative and for the

male viewer in the real audience. In other words the masculine gaze is

renegotiated in stripper movies to reveal the underlying control exercised by the

object of the gaze. (53-4)

Brown’s analysis of stripper-revenge films maps quite neatly onto Sucker Punch since the women in the film are stripper/prostitutes and when Babydoll dances (her method of seduction) she literally renders the men powerless. She even states this fact to Sweet Pea: “As long as I’m dancing they won’t even know you’re there.” (Sucker Punch). It is then, in these moments when the men are hypnotized by Babydoll that all of the action sequences happen, when the women are able to make progress in their plan to escape, and the plot moves forward. All of the female agency is witnessed at the same time that they sexually perform for the men. While Brown reads this as revealing an interesting power dynamic to the way the gaze operates (that is, it is not as simplistic and one directional as Mulvey outlines it), in the case of Sucker Punch this interpretation is significantly complicated. In the stripper-revenge movies that Brown discusses the viewer is actually given the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing the women dance/perform their sexuality. In Sucker Punch this pleasure is completely denied. Instead in the moment when the audience would be privy to Babydoll’s anxiety-increasing sexual dance, the film switches to the action empowerment fantasy in which she is now armed with weapons and a deadly killer. In one way this reinforces a postfeminist reading of Sucker Punch since it confirms the direct link 47 between sexual performance, being watched by men, and female agency as expressed through violence. Female sexuality is being presented as an avenue (perhaps the only avenue) for female empowerment. And yet, in the absence of actual sexuality, the viewer does not perceive the threat of that sexuality. Whereas Brown locates a potentially disrupting understanding of power and sexuality in the stripper, the women of Sucker Punch are never able to demonstrate the ability for female sexuality to deliver on its threat of castration. Instead their power is expressed in a mimicry of male power, via guns and traditional violence.

So far I have confined my discussion of action heroines to the parameters so often adhered to in academic considerations of these women, that is, to their bodies and their narratives. Whether it is a muscular Sarah Connor, or a feminine Buffy Summers, these women tend to be analyzed in terms of what they look like, asking the question of how they visually challenge our understanding of gender, and then looking at their stories, asking if they behave like stereotypical women. Focusing on action heroines in this way unfortunately ignores the actual action aspect of their unique roles. In order to evaluate the impact female action heroes have there has to be a focus on the violence they enact. Hilary Neroni attempts to address this void in the academic discussion by expanding her focus on action heroines to include the implications of violence itself. Neroni argues that film violence erupts where ideology fails.

Violence expresses a problem with dominant ideology that is then followed with a period of attempted restoration, paradoxically through more violence. Coming at this from a simplistic perspective concerned with female empowerment this makes sense – a woman who tries to assert agency would result in violence since she is challenging dominant patriarchal ideology. The violence is a way to physically act out this tension and, with the action heroine, can be 48 understood as restoring a new order, a revolutionary one that establishes women as empowered.

Neroni however, is also astute in her understanding of how violence operates, that is, it is not always revolutionary. She states:

My argument emphasizes the way that film’s deployment of the violent woman

can both elide and express antagonism. I argue that the representation of violence

—and specifically the representation of the violent woman—is either ideological

or revolutionary on the basis of the relation it takes up to antagonism. Its relation

to antagonism is the key to understanding the political valence of violence.

(10-11)

That is, Neroni argues for contextualizing violence in relation to dominant ideology. But violence doesn’t merely operate on a narrative level; there is a visceral, aesthetic quality to violence which carries its own meaning, which can be separate and even contradictory to the meaning of the narrative. This is what Neroni means by the representation of violence, and it is in the way that

Sucker Punch depicts violence that it ultimately functions to criticize postfeminist ideology.

My aim is to try and show how the quality of violence totally reshapes our understanding of the action heroine. In order to do this it is useful to look to the work of Devin McKinney who separates violence into two groups based on quality. Strong violence is emotionally affecting, brutally visceral, and makes pains to depict the consequences of violent acts. Indeed, McKinney states: “as much as anything, it is this grasp of consequence that distinguishes strong violence from the weak” (17). Weak violence does not move the viewer, but rather stays “on the surface.

One identifies with neither the victimizer...nor the victim...and is thus put in the position of the most passive, disinterested of observers. This is the limbo that weak violence inhabits: empathies 49 are not engaged, commitments are not brought to bear, ambivalences are not acknowledged, neutrality is the currency” (21). Weak violence I would argue is exactly what Vivian Sobchack is describing when she outlines postmodern violence in her essay “The Violent Dance: A Personal

Memoir of Death in the Movies.” Sobchack states: “Today, most American films have more interest in the presence of violence than in its meaning, There are few attempts to confer order or perform a benediction upon the random and senseless death, the body riddled with bullets, the laying waste of human flesh” (120). She is objecting to the moral vacuum in which highly stylized, emotionally flattened violence is committed on film. This is obviously the type of violence that is happening in the third fantasy level of Sucker Punch, and since this is the level that is associated with what are supposed to be moments of female agency (because this is when female sexuality is being used to paralyze the men in the film) the threat of this female agency is totally undermined. In short there is absolutely no sense of power in these scenes, no sense of consequence. A common complaint from viewers of the film is that they felt completely detached from these scenes, often comparing watching the film to watching somebody else play video games. This was an experience noted both by professionals (several of the reviews I quoted in the introduction to this thesis mention the passive video game sensation as something they objected to) as well as ordinary viewers, as demonstrated here in IMDB user Zetes’ review of

Sucker Punch:

Snyder really thinks we want to watch people play video games on the big screen.

The worst thing was, after I experienced the abject horrors of how boring this

could possibly be the first time, I realized I was going to have to sit through this

same thing four more times. Oh, these sequences are beyond awful, with these 50

girls fighting through dozens of not-very-great-looking CGI Nazis, robots, orcs,

whatever.

Zetes mentions the use of computer-generated imagery in the depiction of action (violent) sequences, and I think this is important. Neroni makes an interesting observation in her discussion of femme fatales and their use of guns and how they operate to undermine female agency which could be applied to the use of CGI. She states:

This weapon also allows the femme fatale to continue looking beautiful when

committing violence. She doesn’t need to sweat, grunt, move into awkward

positions, or even mess up her hair while killing someone. Hence, her violence

doesn’t completely disrupt the traditional gender categories; on the contrary, it

leaves much of femininity intact. (26)

There is a direct correlation in the distance which using a gun provides the femme fatale from the ugliness and brutality of violence, and the use of CGI when depicting violent women. By using

CGI to represent almost all of the successful violence initiated by women, Snyder weakens the way his action heroines are read. The images depicted in the fantasy sequences are completely detached from the real world, and the violence the women commit is never actually against men

(the actual threat to the women), but rather CGI giants, zombies, dragons, and robots, i.e., fantasy creatures that do not emote or experience pain. Further, through CGI the hallmarks of

Western femininity – smooth unblemished skin, no blood or dirt or sense of physical exertion, beauty, tame hair, made up faces, sexualized bodies – remain entirely intact for the female stars.

The CGI rendering is further distanced from the real via extensive use of slow motion.

Stacey Peebles, to the contrary, outlines the way slow motion, as used in films such as Bonnie 51 and Clyde (1967) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) increases the realism and impact of the violence being committed. She states that the use of slow motion “highlight[s] the bloody, destructive power of gunshots and counter[s] the prevailing image of an actor clutching his chest and quickly falling over” (45). She is correct that in the instances she describes slow motion enhances the strength of the violence. It draws out the brutal consequences of the violence being done. However, in Sucker Punch, because of the total lack of realism in the setting of the action sequences, and the lack of blood, or emoting of any kind by either the perpetrator or the victim, the slow motion merely serves to further empty the scene of horror and brutality. The slow motion of Sucker Punch is used almost entirely in the fantasy sequences when the women are killing CGI creatures. Slowing time in these instances serves to alleviate the impact of the violence. Instead, the violent scene becomes one of beauty, and the female body is lingered upon as she flies through the air attacking her victim. She is no longer a threat to be avoided, but an object to be admired. Slow motion eroticizes and objectifies the active female body, and removes any of the kinetic energy she once had to inflict pain.

The result is that what should be the strongest moments of the film (if it were empowering and challenging dominant ideology) are the weakest, and the postfeminist idea of sexuality and violence as agency is totally undermined and revealed to be nothing more than a fantasy that allows for visual exploitation (since the entire time Babydoll and her friends are playing action heroines in their fantasy world, in the real world they are at the very least being forced to dance provocatively for the men in the brothel, and at the most they are being raped).

When the examination of violence extends beyond that enacted by the women in Sucker

Punch a pattern emerges in terms of quality (strength/weakness) of violence committed, who is 52 committing violence, and distance from reality in the narrative. While the female empowerment fantasies have the women in control of the violence, that violence is incredibly weak. The brothel fantasy on the other hand can be understood as a male sexual fantasy, and features much stronger violence committed by male characters against female characters. Among the various antagonists

Blue is the principle (but not the only) violent offender: Blue chokes and sexually threatens

Madame Gorski, shoots and kills Blondie and Amber point blank, and then attempts to rape

Babydoll. These scenes of violence are not rendered in attractive slow motion CGI, nor are they couched in outrageous and unbelievable fantasy (in fact because of the very small amount of screen time the asylum reality gets the brothel often feels like the reality of the film). The violence in the brothel scenes is claustrophobically portrayed, often utilizing close-ups and enclosed spaces that allow for the registering of facial expressions and remove focus from the body, for example, when Blue attacks Madame Gorski we see a close-up of their bodies as his hand tightly grips her neck. Unlike the fantasy battle scenes these close-ups clearly show the emotions involved with violence: Blue’s anger and aggression and Gorksi’s fear and vulnerability. Most importantly though the consequences of the violence in the brothel scenes are played out for the audience to see, perhaps the best example of this is the scene in which Blue shoots and kills Amber and Blondie. While the camera never shows the dead bodies, the audience is left with the horrified screams and crying of the witnesses in the room. This type of horror is never displayed during any of the empowerment fantasies, which are lifeless and flat in comparison.

The strongest and most important act of violence in the film is Babydoll’s lobotomy, which occurs in the asylum reality. As previously stated, this lobotomy serves to demonstrate the 53 total lack of choice and freedom the postfeminist heroine has as everything she has worked for comes to naught. But there is more to the reality scenes than just their operation as a framing device to criticize female sexualization. There are only a few snippets of reality shown in the film – the opening scene between Babydoll and her stepfather, her introduction to the asylum, the montage of her time at the asylum, the final scenes after she is lobotomized and taken to the basement by Blue and the other orderlies, and finally Sweet Pea’s escape – but these repeatedly demonstrate the power the men in the film have over the women. Stylistically, as with the fantasy realms, these scenes are linked by their grim aesthetic and lack of glamour. The one exception is the opening scene in which Babydoll’s stepfather attacks her and her sister, which is filmed in the style of one of the empowerment fantasies (with its obvious use of CGI, slow motion, and the intrusive soundtrack) and therefore feels very out of place from the rest of the film. Even bearing in mind the presentation of the opening however these scenes are incredibly disturbing in the way that men are depicted. Similar to the brothel fantasy the placement of power through the use of violence is still clearly with the men, but unlike the brothel fantasy the men are not depicted as glamorous, socially powerful, wealthy, or emotionally powerful. The men in the asylum reality are sexually frustrated, unattractive, jealous, poor, lack social standing, and are emotionally weak. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final scenes featuring Blue as he has Babydoll in the basement. Even lobotomized she clearly exercises power over him via the unattainability of her sexuality. Earlier in discussing Brown’s “If Looks Could Kill,” I mentioned that it was important that the film’s audience never sees the erotic dances done by the women as it never lets the audience see the power of their sexuality. This is again important in looking at how the men are portrayed. Since the audience is never seduced like the men in the film, there opens up a 54 distance between the male protagonist’s gaze and the camera gaze which prevents identification between the male characters and the audience members. Instead of understanding how the men feel, the audience merely sees sexual desperation and violence without provocation and is repulsed.

Brown discusses the portrayal of men in stripper-revenge movies, similarly arguing that they are rendered pathetic. He states:

Interestingly, the fetishization of these women obviously and directly connects to

the punishment of the male voyeur and the vindication of the female object. The

objectification of women in the cinema is not new – it is at the core of their to-be-

looked-at-ness. Men’s obsessive looking at women on display is the catalyst for

the entire plot of the stripper movie. At least on the surface, the traditional power

relationships between the sexes is cut to its most basic elements. But rather than

portraying the voyeur as the bearer of power, as the one in control, he is shown as

pathetic. (“If Looks Could Kill: Power, Revenge, and Stripper Movies” 61)

Brown concludes that this demonstrates the power the object has over he who controls the gaze.

Perhaps this is so, but this is not a power that originates from the woman, it originates with the man’s desire. She merely reflects his unfulfilled desires back onto himself. Even more importantly, in the case of Sucker Punch, the woman doesn’t want that power, but since she is an object and not a subject, she has absolutely no choice as to what desires are projected onto her body. Power necessitates some measure of control, and as is clear throughout Sucker Punch, there is little control that the women have over how they are looked at. 55

The relationship between power, violence, and sexuality, as depicted in Sucker Punch is incredibly complex. The place where power is located via the depiction of violence is in the male brothel fantasy and the asylum reality, and in the hands of the male characters. Yet this violence is not seen as admirable or (paradoxically) as empowering, particularly in the asylum reality, where the violence can be seen as an expression of emotional and moral impotence. On the other hand where we can interpret the female action heroine’s ability to seduce (and thereby render powerless) male characters/viewers as her power, through the use of weak violence the female hero doesn’t deliver the threat of castration that her sexuality poses, but only serves to eroticize and objectify her further, and even more disturbing, eroticize the violence she commits. Her action is never perceived as something threatening because it’s never perceived as real. The varying qualities of violence in the different realms of reality in Sucker Punch then only reinforce the understanding that violent power is male, and expose postfeminist ideas of agency as a front for sexual exploitation. This is a film that in its depiction of violence ultimately denies power both to the male voyeur (who is rendered pathetic and powerless) and the postfeminist heroine (whose sexuality is excised from the film, whose violence is anesthetized, and whose figurehead is lobotomized).

To shift topics slightly I want to return to the issue of CGI, because I have mentioned that

CGI in Sucker Punch is vital to undermining the nature of a postfeminist vision of empowerment, but it has two distinctly worrying and negative ramifications which, given the rise in use of CGI throughout the film industry should be considered here. CGI has the potential to affect two connected areas of Western culture. The first, and more obvious is that CGI falls into the same troubling realm of how Photoshop has been adopted by advertising companies, in that it 56 is increasingly used to create and adjust images of human bodies that are then widely proliferated via the mass media and contribute to an unrealistic standard of beauty. As Nina and Andre

Czegledy write of digital imaging technologies: “The notion of bodily malleability in which such imaging processes are rooted has important culture considerations with respect to our social desires to conform to beauty stereotypes by way of bodily adornment and, in the more extreme cases, actual alteration” (112). This phenomenon is not restricted to the female body, it encompasses both sexes, but it is much more established and accepted as a standard way to police and thereby control the female body and how it is accepted within society. Susan Bordo traces the ideological implications of the way women are portrayed in popular culture, focusing on areas such as advertising, the beauty industry and such practices as airbrushing and skin- lightening. Of digital technologies she writes:

Virtually every celebrity you see – in the magazines, in the videos, and sometimes

even in the movies – has been digitally modified... This is not just a matter of

deception – boring old stuff, which ads have traded in from their beginnings. This

is perceptual pedagogy, How to Interpret Your Body 101. These images are

teaching us how to see. Filtered, smoothed, polished, softened, sharpened, re-

arranged. And passing. Digital creations, visual cyborgs, teaching us what to

expect from flesh and blood. Training our perception in what’s a defect and what

is normal. (Unbearable Weight, xviii)

Bordo traces the connections between medical disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia to a popular culture that promotes a specific female image (young, white, thin, beautiful), and she reveals that the most disturbing effect on women is psychological. The pressure to conform to 57 social standards moves from an external force to a self-administered, internal force that polices the individual’s behavior. This self-policing is a characteristic the postfeminist subjectivity, as identified by McRobbie and Gill. Thus while the use of CGI to feminize the women of Sucker

Punch operates to undermine the violence they commit, it also serves to offer an idealized female body for women to imitate. To return to Neroni’s understanding of violence erupting where ideology falters, the fantasy of physical, violent female empowerment that could be antagonistic towards dominant ideology is actually elided via CGI, to offer instead a fantasy of sexuality that aligns with dominant ideology. Further, these digital technologies are more often than not geared towards making profit. Nina and Andre Czegledy observe that, “[t]he advertisement aptly illustrates how the human body has not only become transparent, even remote, due to recent technologies – but that it is presently being used as visual spectacle for blatantly commercial purposes” (108). Postfeminism is very much a capitalist co-option of feminism in order to make profit, and digital technologies, such as airbrushing, Photoshop, and CGI are among the arsenal with which to sell impossible ideals that women will spend endlessly trying to achieve.

Beyond merely contributing to the increasing use of digital technologies to sell an idealized female form, as Nina and Andre Czegledy state, it contributes to the continued spectacularization of the female body in a manner that aligns with the description of Western culture given by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. Douglas Kellner summarizes Guy

Debord’s understanding of the spectacle: “It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events” (2). The image is the center of the capitalist society of the spectacle as people consume, understand and appreciate the world around them in terms of appearances rather than in any tangible way that 58 relates to their lived lives. The image is both the language and currency of consumer capitalism and it is the abstract, ethereal quality of the image that seduces the consumer. Similar to (and actually an extension of) Marx’s position on the role of religion and the Frankfurt School’s position on the effect of popular culture, Debord saw the preoccupation with the image as a means to distract workers from the powerless nature of their lives. Kellner writes, “[f]or Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a ‘permanent opium war’ (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life – recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice” (2-3). The female body, historically objectified, has been valued primarily as an image. It has always carried a to- be-looked-at value (as Mulvey notes) and its role within consumer capitalism has been both as a sexual distraction and a means to sell consumer goods. There is perhaps no better example of the direction the relationship between the female body, the society of the spectacle, and the increasing use of digital imaging technologies is taking than the Japanese sensation Hatsune

Miku. Miku began as a vocal synthesizer program created by Yamaha and Crypton Future. In an effort to increase sales, a personality and the image of a female body (which, similar to Babydoll takes the form of the fetishized young anime girl, including obscenely short skit and pigtails) was created and used to market the program. Miku has since become a virtual pop star, a holographic program that performs live for thousands of adoring fans via high-tech projection devices that create the illusion of her presence on stage. Miku is the logical extension of the way Photoshop is used to perfect celebrity bodies on magazine covers, and the way CGI is used in Sucker Punch.

The use of CGI to perfect and create an idealized version of the female body, as it is in Sucker 59

Punch, further reduces the female body to pure intangible image and entrenches the female body in the realm of spectacle.

The second potential effect of the increasing use of CGI is perhaps more subtle but just as detrimental to women considering some of the historically most contentious issues regarding women’s rights have been those concerning work, and as far as what I am interested in here, work in the entertainment industry. The constant complaint about a lack of lead roles for women, and even less for women over 40, in the film and television industry has become almost necessary background noise to the release of almost any female-centric production (the media frenzy surrounding the 2011 film Bridesmaids serves as a good example here). Martha M.

Lauzen, working out of The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film reveals the lack of female roles in her study “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of

Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2011” that “females accounted for 33% of all characters in the top 100 grossing films” and further that “[i]n 2011, females comprised an 11% of protagonists” (1). A lack of available roles for women forces those who are attempting to make a living as actresses to accept roles that perhaps they would not if they had other options.

Young, up-and-coming actresses are particular prey to this predicament, and it is not much of a surprise that the young actresses in Sucker Punch are all in the early stages of making names for themselves, and do not have the reputation or the clout of more established actresses. Not only is there lack of female roles in the film industry, but women occupying behind-the-scenes jobs is an even sparser situation. Lauzen notes in her study “The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes

Employment of Women in the Top 250 Films of 2011” that “[i]n 2011, women comprised 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on 60 the top 250 domestic grossing films” (1). Female directors and producers – arguably the two most important jobs in terms of shaping film content and distribution – are incredibly few at 5% and 18% respectively. Given the male control over a large portion of the film industry, the use of

CGI should be greeted with great caution. Computer-generated imagery falls into an area of expertise, computer programming, that is both considered nerdy and male-dominated. In a relatively recent study Allen et. al. revealed that “[t]he percentage of women, however, earning bachelor’s degrees in computer science dropped from 37% in 1984 to 25% in 2004” (501), a rather disturbing set of figures given that in encompasses the birth and rise of the internet and therefore the power of the computer. This increasing reliance on CGI therefore shifts a measure of control over female appearance and representation to men. Not only this however, but CGI strips all actors and actresses of a significant amount of control over their labor. When clips of

Sucker Punch were shown at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con none of the female actresses had actually seen any of the final product of their work. This isn’t entirely unusual in the film industry, since editing which controls how a film will be presented, is done post-filming. But with Sucker Punch, particularly in the fantasy sequences but throughout the film in general, the actresses had been performing most of the time in front of green screens. Thus while the women had an idea of what the narrative would be having seen the script, what they would finally look like and the world they would occupy was almost completely out of their control, and in the hands of a collection of men. Jena Malone, the actress who plays Rocket, verifies this when answering the question: “What was it like acting without the CG backgrounds?” She responded with: “We weren’t shooting in a vacuum. We had the ultimate resource which was the interior of

[the director’s] mind. It was all there. As much information as we needed. Of where to go and 61 what to shoot and what everything looked like” (Lesnick, “SDCC: The Sucker Punch Press

Conference”). She reveals in her answer the complete dependency the actresses had on their male director.

The distance between the actress and the product of her labor can be directly linked to

Marx’s understanding of worker alienation. Marx outlines the manner in which capitalism disempowers and disenfranchises workers via the alienation or estrangement of the worker from the products of his/her labor. The worker lacks control over what he/she makes (it is designed by someone else), and lacks control over what it is worth (its price is determined by someone else).

Further, since the product bears no relation to the worker and his/her labor, and since the worker merely constructs pieces of a whole, the work is alienated both from him/herself and other workers. Marx describes the alienation of the subject from the product of his labor as “the loss of his self,” (74). Terry Eagleton helps elucidate this idea further by tracing the etymology of the word “proletariat.” He states that, “[t]he proletariat in ancient society were those too poor to serve the state by holding property, and who served it instead by producing children (proles, offspring) as labor power. They are those who have nothing to give but their bodies. Proletarians and women are thus intimately allied” (After Theory 42). Considering the effect of CGI with this in mind, the idea of one’s body being digitally manipulated and then sold to millions of people while exercising almost no control over the final product or where it is sold, could be considered the ultimate loss of self, since it is the loss of even the body and the labor it enacts. This loss of self for the actress subjected to heavy CGI treatment is put into a wider context of Western culture’s increasing dependence on technology by Donna Haraway. Haraway’s influential essay regarding technology and feminism, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, takes pains to warn feminists of this 62 potential for technology, for the cyborg (the meshing of human and technology) to disempower women:

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of

control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars

apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of

women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another

perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in

which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not

afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The

political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals

both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.

(276)

While technology and the cyborg to Haraway offer both threats and opportunities, in a spectacle- laden action movie such as Sucker Punch the threat of the rise of the male nerd (who is so closely tied to computers and technology that he could be considered a cyborg himself), and the use of CGI, highlight the risk of technology appropriating “women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war” (276). With the continuing over-dependence on CGI in films and video games the potential for women to be increasingly alienated from their bodies in films and video games is very much a risk.

This chapter has outlined the manner in which CGI and a postmodern approach to violence serve to undermine any threat the violent woman in Sucker Punch poses to dominant 63

ideology. Taken with the conclusion of my first chapter, it functions as a representation of the

futility of postfeminist fantasies of empowerment. But more, this is a case for contextualizing the

action heroine in the quality of violence she enacts. Too often academics tend to focus on the

representation of the female body in action movies, and not enough on the type of action she

performs or the action performed by those around her. More and more in contemporary film we

see the use of CGI, and with most films sticking to a PG13 certification (since it guarantees a

greater audience and therefore a greater potential for more money), this produces a very clean

body, and very clean violence. This anesthetized violence loses its power to move the viewer,

and at the hands of the female action hero serves to remove any sense of threat to dominant

ideology that she might pose. While in Sucker Punch I locate this weakness as adding to the strength of the critique of postfeminism, I am not unaware of the cost. The real-world implications of CGI in the representation of women are very disturbing, and add to problems of presenting idealized female bodies as models to mimic. In terms of labor, the potential for CGI to further alienate women from their own bodies is a risk that warrants more attention since often men are in control of the production of these images. 64

CHAPTER THREE: SUCKER PUNCH, THE MALE GAZE, AND FANTASY

In the previous two chapters I have demonstrated that through its use of fantasy sequences and the type of violence located in these sequences Sucker Punch can be seen to be at odds with postfeminist ideas and fantasies about empowerment. In this chapter I will discuss the form of Sucker Punch and the way it can be seen to align with second wave feminist ideas regarding the deconstruction of Lacan’s Symbolic order, and discuss how the psychological mechanics of fantasy are manipulated so as to contribute towards stripping the male gaze of pleasure.

One of the most important ways Sucker Punch in creates meaning is through its form.

Unlike typical Hollywood narratives which adhere very much to Mulvey’s now forty year old analysis “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and which arguably encourage audience passivity, Sucker Punch is structured in a way that resists traditional audience-protagonist identification and narrative predictability. Before fully elucidating the importance of form to feminism, I will briefly outline what it is about the structure of Sucker Punch that sets it apart from most other mainstream Hollywood films. These differences can be summarized as: the simultaneous realities without narrative explanation, the instances in which the fourth wall is broken and the narrative mirrors itself, and the lack of a clear protagonist.

In the previous chapters I outlined the way that reality and fantasy shift, and blend in terms of cause and effect. There are three simultaneous timelines that each have apparent implications for the main characters (e.g. Rocket is killed in the fourth sci-fi train fantasy, as she is fatally stabbed in the brothel fantasy, as she dies in the asylum reality). Multiple timelines as a narrative technique is not in and of itself an entirely unique feature. It is definitely not 65 conventional, but there are plenty of films that play with reality, perhaps the most recent and successful example being Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). Unlike Inception, however, which goes to great narrative lengths to explain how and why reality is being played with, Sucker

Punch does not provide any diegetic logic for these switches, or even as to what these fantasy realms are, and it is here again that the film is found wanting and confusing by its critics. When

A. O. Scott in the The New York Times describes it as “a fantasia of misogyny” he is focusing his ire at the free-form style of fantasy, as well as the content. Sucker Punch refuses to provide any explanation for its deviation from traditional filmic/narrative form.

The method of breaking the fourth wall is, again, in itself not an unusual narrative technique. Hugely popular films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), and Annie Hall (1977), feature characters breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the audience of the film.

Sucker Punch though utilizes a kind of implied direct address whereby the fourth wall is broken but in a less obvious manner than an audience is perhaps used to. There are only three moments of what I would describe as implied direct address and mirroring in Sucker Punch but they are absolutely crucial in terms of how the film presents itself. The first is the very first scene of the film. The screen is black, the narrator (Sweet Pea) gives a speech in which she states that, “[i]t’s every one of us who holds the power over the worlds we create” and the lights come on to show a theater stage. The stage curtains are pulled up to reveal a young girl with her back to the audience dressed in peach pajamas sitting on a bed. The camera moves into the set, closer to the girl, swings around her to reveal her as Babydoll, and the proscenium arch through which the camera entered is now the wall of Babydoll’s bedroom. From here the movie commences as if it had not acknowledged or indicated to the audience that it is a staged work of fiction intended for 66 an audience. Thus, via the camera, the audience is guided into the narrative literally through the fourth wall. This opening scene is mirrored almost ten minutes later when Babydoll is first brought to the asylum. She is taken into what the orderly Blue calls “the theater” - a large room with tables and chairs in the foreground and a theater stage in the background. Here the camera takes on Babydoll’s gaze and looks over at the stage and shows us Sweet Pea who sits on a bed on stage exactly as we had seen Babydoll minutes earlier, while Dr. Gorski, loosely echoing the narrator, tells her: “You control this world. Let the pain go. Let the hurt go. Let the guilt go. What you’re imagining right now... that world you control? That place can be as real as any pain.” It is as if Babydoll were watching herself on stage, as we had just watched her.

The second instance of direct address and mirroring occurs only two minutes after the first. There is a montage of Babydoll’s time at the asylum doing various chores and, the camera once again taking Babydoll’s perspective, focuses on the four items that will later become so important to her escape: a lighter, a map, a knife, and a key. The entire timeframe of the film

(from Babydoll’s arrival to five days later when she is to be lobotomized), including the ending, is played out during this montage. At the end of the montage Babydoll is strapped into an operating chair and a lobotomist enters the scene, pulling a curtain down behind him. As the lobotomist strikes the hammer onto the needle that will penetrate Babydoll’s brain the scene suddenly changes and we are taken back in time to Babydoll’s first appearance in the asylum, only now it has inexplicably become a brothel. The audience sees Sweet Pea back on the theater stage but now she is strapped into a chair, dressed up to resemble Babydoll, complete with blonde pigtails, about to act out receiving a lobotomy from fellow female captives. This is again, a set of mirrored scenes where Sweet Pea mirrors Babydoll while Babydoll watches. It also 67

marks a disruption of the up until now linear narrative since the film has shown its audience

exactly where the film is going (via the montage) and then jumped backwards and out of reality

into a fantasy realm that runs simultaneous to reality. This mirroring scene ends with Sweet Pea

removing herself from the patient’s chair and gives the following speech, mentioned previously

in chapter one:

This is a joke right? Don’t you get the point of this? It’s to turn people on. I get

the sexy little schoolgirl. I even get the helpless mental patient, right? That can be

hot. But what is this? Lobotomized vegetable? How about something a little more

commercial, for God’s sakes? You gotta help me, I’m the star of the show,

remember?

While this is not strictly an instance of direct address I would argue that because it is so out of

place and since it serves no real diegetic purpose – nothing comes of this speech, Sweet Pea seems to be given a long amount of screen time and a loud voice for no apparent reason, and the content of the speech has more application to the real world audience than to Gorski (whom she is addressing) – I consider this a moment of, if not breaking the fourth wall then of pushing hard against it, forcing the film’s audience to consider the matter of female sexualization for commercial gain (arguably the true subject of the film).

The third moment of breaking the fourth wall through direct address comes in the form of the narrator who speaks directly to the film audience. Narrators draw attention to a work’s status as a story from an individual’s perspective. That is, a narrator reminds an audience that the story they are hearing is being filtered through an individual: it is subjective. The narrator (Sweet Pea) breaks the fourth wall as she explicitly states that the implications of her story have direct 68 consequences on the viewer in the audience. While Sweet Pea has two instances of narrator direct address, it is her final speech that it becomes clear that the story she has told is intended to have real world implications on its audience:

And finally this question. The mystery of whose story it will be, of who draws the

curtain. Who is it that chooses our steps in the dance? Who drives us mad, lashes

us with whips, and crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who

is it that does all these things? Who honors those we love with the very life we

live? Who sends monsters to kill us and at the same time sings that we’ll never

die? Who teaches us what’s real and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we

live and what we’ll die to defend? Who chains us? And who holds the key that

can set us free? It’s you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.

It is made clear that she is directly addressing the film’s audience in her third to last sentence when she states “it’s you” after the screen has gone black so that there is no one left to hear

Sweet Pea other than those in the movie theater.

These moments of breaking the fourth wall, direct address and mirroring are important for several reasons. The first is that they disrupt the film’s narrative and break the traditional suspension of disbelief necessary for an audience to become immersed in the story they are being told. Instead, repeated moments such as those described here call attention to the film’s status as a work of fiction and create a critical distance in the viewing experience. Having Babydoll and

Sweet Pea linked in their strange narrative loops is also disruptive and creates a sense of mystery around who they are and their significance to each other. This mystery forces a more analytical viewing experience from the audience as they try to make sense of what they are watching. And 69 finally, through Sweet Pea’s speech addressing the motivation for sexualizing a girl who is lobotomized, the film asks for its content to be considered in terms of how we look at and sexualize women both on film and in the real world.

The instances of mirroring and repetition cause disruptions in developing a clear protagonist of the film. Establishing a clear protagonist is a staple of story-telling, whether it be oral, literary, or filmic. Protagonists give an audience someone to identify with and, as Mulvey

(among many others) writes, this is important in providing an audience with a point of view throughout the narrative: a character with whom to identify. When the film opens, Sucker Punch appears to have a clear protagonist in the form of Babydoll, but as she is introduced into the asylum and the various realities shift a significant amount of ambiguity is introduced in terms of who the protagonist turns out to be and how then to retroactively read Babydoll and Sweet Pea.

While the film appears to be structured around Babydoll and her quest for freedom this is transferred in the end to Sweet Pea who escapes from the asylum and to freedom. Further, it is

Sweet Pea who narrates the film’s opening and closing scenes (thereby claiming authority over the story), and Babydoll even tells Sweet Pea in their final moments together, “[t]his was never my story. It’s yours. Now don’t screw it up okay?” This shift towards the end disrupts audience identification as the audience is forced to reconsider how they have interpreted both characters up to this point. Add to this there are a number of parallels in their characters – they both have younger sisters that die because they are unable to protect them, they both have mothers that they love(d) and absent fathers, and they are both favored by Blue (Sweet Pea is acknowledged as

Blue’s favorite until Babydoll replaces her). 70

It is, however, the aforementioned moments of mirroring that do the major work in disrupting the identity of the protagonist. The scenes in which Babydoll and Sweet Pea mirror each other serve to confuse the audience in terms of how they are supposed to read the connection between the two characters. Coupled with the unexplained shift into various fantasy realms, there is a significant amount of doubt as to who and what is real versus the fantastical creation of someone else. There is enough uncertainty in how to read these two characters for conflicting theories about their significance resulting in much debate on internet forums and comment threads over whether Sweet Pea is a figment of Babydoll’s imagination or vice versa.

The very fact that these interpretations can be entertained is a testament to the ambiguity created around the protagonist. What is clear is that the film does not do anything obvious to indicate to the audience how they are supposed to understand either Babydoll or Sweet Pea in its resolution.

In terms of conventional, mainstream, mass-marketed story-telling this type of refusal to commit to a protagonist is highly unusual.

The way that Sucker Punch experiments with form brings to mind techniques espoused by playwright Bertolt Brecht, specifically that of distantiation. Distantiation refers to methods that serve to distance the audience of a performance from the process of falling into a suspension of disbelief. Elin Diamond explains distantiation is “the technique of defamiliarizing a word, and idea, a gesture so as to enable the spectator to see or hear it afresh” (84). The aim of distancing an audience from a performance for Brecht was mainly to force that audience to be able to see and question dominant ideology. Primarily driven by Marxist ideas, Brecht saw art as an important tool for exposing dominant ideology and thereby creating a new consciousness in his 71 audience, one that would hopefully revolt and change social structures that relied on the exploitation of others. Diamond applies Brechtian theory to gender representation, stating:

When gender is “alienated” or foregrounded, the spectator is enabled to see a sign

system as a sign system – the appearance, words, gestures, ideas, attitudes, etc.,

that comprise the gender lexicon become so may illusionistic trappings to be put

on or shed at will. Understanding gender as ideology – as a system of beliefs and

behavior mapped across the bodies of females and males, which reinforces a

status quo - is to appreciate the continued timeliness of Verfremdungseffekt

[distantiation], the purpose of which is to denaturalize and defamiliarize what

ideology makes seem normal, acceptable, inescapable. (85)

While the form helps to bring critical distance to the viewing experience, for Brecht’s ideas to apply to gender the performance of gender must be, as Diamond stresses, alienating. In the case of Sucker Punch I would then add to the formal elements I’ve already described, the use of shallow characterization and hyper-feminization of the female leads which serves to highlight the artificiality and status of gender as a performance. Each of the young women’s names (Babydoll,

Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie, and Amber) is, in the same manner as stripper names, cheaply feminine and sexually provocative. Like strippers, these women are performing femininity, and garishly so. Their heavy make-up, inappropriately revealing clothing, and their hollow delivery of empty dialogue about unity and women fighting together further draws attention to the abnormality of the hyper-sexualization of women which dominant culture accepts as normal, as well as the bizarre nature of postfeminism which encourages such self-sexualization while claiming empowerment. Even the empowerment fantasies, as I discuss in chapter two, are over 72 the top and due to the heavy use of CGI entirely artificial in appearance and tone that they make a mockery of the idea of female empowerment, leaving it as nothing more than a pretty but hollow fantasy.

I have outlined various ways Sucker Punch plays with filmic form, and, via Brecht, I have alluded to the importance of form in changing the way an audience might think about what it is watching, but in order to truly understand why the form of Sucker Punch is so important in challenging dominant ideas about gender it is necessary to understand the work of Lacan and the

Symbolic order and second wave feminist ideas regarding how power is structured into the

Symbolic.

Lacan divides the human psyche into three parts – the Real, the Imaginary, and the

Symbolic – which he describes using the path of human mental development. When a human is born he/she exists in the Real, a kind of psychological primordial soup from which individuals emerge, but to which they cannot return. As individuals slowly mature they enter into the

Imaginary Order. This is a pre-lingual state of confusion for the infant who finds images of others, and him/herself in the mirror as a place of identification and solace, and yet also a source of unhappiness since the image provides a fantasy/expectation of unified completeness which the individual does not experience. The male child recognizes himself in the mirror as he also recognizes his separateness from his mother – he possesses the phallus, whereas she lacks it. This lack is loaded with the threat of castration for him. The child, who fears his mother, also longs for reunification with her via sexual desire. This sexual desire is thwarted or forbidden by the father who, via language, proscribes incestuous desire. At this point the young child enters the

Symbolic order. The male child then learns to seek an alternative female for sexual unification 73 and accepts his place within the patriarchal order where he commands language. He passes from the Imaginary order into the Symbolic order of language, the patriarchal law of the Father.

The female child obviously does not experience the same split from her mother, as she is not confronted with difference, but rather notices a similar lack in herself. Because she does not recognize a defining difference, the female child’s passage into the Symbolic isn’t necessary, or a fully conscious transference. When she transfers her affections onto the father who, as with the son, prohibits incestuous desire, she does not do so from the place of fear and understanding that the male child does. She is forced into the Symbolic, the masculine realm, by the law of the father. The female child then enters the Symbolic order not as a subject of language, but an object of language. Rosemarie Tong summarizes the situation for women with regards to the

Symbolic order as such:

On the one hand, we conclude that women are virtually excluded from the

Symbolic order. On the other hand, we conclude that women are repressed within

the Symbolic order, forced into it unwillingly. A man with a predilection for

contradictions, Lacan seemed to draw both of these conclusions. He thought that

because women cannot totally internalize the “law of the father,” this law must be

imposed on them from the outside. Women are given the same words men are

given: masculine words. These words cannot express what women feel, however;

masculine words can express only what men think women feel. Lacking feminine

words, women must either babble outside the Symbolic order or remain silent

within it. (154) 74

The sexed subject/object position of the Symbolic order is vital to understanding gender politics since all humans enter the Symbolic and it is the Symbolic, the masculine language, that organizes or makes sense of the world around us. The male/female split is therefore a power split resulting in a series of binary positions that map onto it: masculine/feminine, subject/object, powerful/powerless, mind/body, active/passive, intellect/emotion, culture/nature. This split also applies to desire where the male is the subject of desire, and the female the object. Desire is especially important in analyzing Sucker Punch because, as I will discuss shortly, fantasy is the space of desire, and fantasy is an important part of the form of Sucker Punch.

The idea of the Symbolic order was a central focus of the French second wave feminists, particularly Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixous, and in England, Laura Mulvey. This collection of women saw the feminist mission as in opposition to the masculine Symbolic order, seeing experimentation in literature and film as a method of exploring the potential to challenge the

Symbolic. Taking as a template the method of approach Freud and Lacan used, these feminist academics took sexuality and sexual development as the foundation for understanding social relationships and sought to change the current patriarchal structure of these relationships. Rather than focusing on male sexual development since it results in defining women solely in terms of lack (as in, lack of the phallus), they focused on the nature of female sexuality as the key to opposing the Symbolic. Since Lacan’s model essentially traces a movement from pre-language

(Imaginary) to language (Symbolic) there is a strong focus on the idea of a feminine language

(mode of thought and expression) among the French feminists, which, using Mulvey can be applied to film. 75

Irigaray’s feminine language, and Cixous’ concept of l’ecriture feminine are very similar proposals of how women’s sexuality can reshape language and thereby oppose the Symbolic.

Irigaray and Cixous both argue that the male sexual experience stemming from the penis is,

“singular, linear, and teleological” (Tong 157) and as a result the Symbolic order operates in a singular, linear, teleological manner. Cixous, focusing on language, describes the way the

Symbolic has shaped writing in her essay “The Laugh of Medusa”: “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism” (879). And she describes the importance and mission of a feminine writing therefore as:

It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of

speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women

in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a

place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They

shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem.

(881)

While Cixous focuses on how language is determined by male sexuality and urges the development of a female language, Irigaray concentrates on the nature of female sexuality so as to better picture what that language might look like. She argues that female sexuality is based, not in the vagina or the breasts, which serve male purposes, but in the labia. The implications of this understanding of female sexuality on the notion of a feminine language are in complete opposition to the Symbolic. Irigaray states: 76

You may perhaps be able to see that when one starts from the ‘two lips’ of the

female sex, the dominant discourse finds itself baffled: there can no longer be a

unity in the subject, for instance. There will always therefore be a plurality in

feminine language. And it will not be the Freudian ‘pun’ i.e., a superimposed

hierarchy of meaning, but the fact that at each moment there is always for women

‘at least two’ meanings, without one being able to decide which meaning prevails,

which is ‘on top’ or ‘underneath’, which ‘conscious’ or ‘repressed’. (83-4)

On the contrary, the Symbolic order (or masculine language) organized by the male sexual experience is expressed in a series of either/or binaries (e.g. right/wrong). A Symbolic order based on female sexuality would be one of simultaneous meanings. While Sucker Punch could hardly be considered an expression of female sexuality, the manner in which its form resists traditional narrative logic evokes parallels with Irigaray and Cixous in the understanding that form is just as much an expression of ideology as content. Further, Sucker Punch does bear some hallmarks of Cixous’ and Irigaray’s visions of an alternative consciousness. I have already established its jarring use of simultaneous narratives without the provision of a narrative logic that would help the audience make sense of what they are seeing. Sucker Punch also resists a linear reading, and seems to switch narrative viewpoints so that the audience is left without a concrete understanding of who the protagonist of the film is and what is real and what is fantasy.

The result is that the viewer is left with the feeling that they need to re-watch the film in order to decipher the narrative. The disjointed form of Sucker Punch then can be seen to challenge the

Symbolic order via offering its audience an alternative narrative experience, one that attempts to 77 revel in pluralities and multiplicities of pleasure. Sucker Punch is best understood as a film that experiments with form in a way that challenges the Symbolic.

Cixous’ and Irigaray’s ideas about changing the way we tell stories (that is, if we agree with Lacan’s ideas about maturation into the Symbolic, then changing how we tell stories means to learn to understand the world around us differently and therefore to resist the Symbolic) tie in neatly with Mulvey’s call for a deconstruction of the male gaze. Mulvey firmly established the connection between psychoanalysis and the development of feminist film theory and introduced an element of analysis that is implied in the work of Irigaray and Cixous, but which isn’t necessarily the focus. Irigaray and Cixous were interested in what might best be described as the syntax of the Symbolic, that is, the way humans process experience in the Symbolic, which is the linear, rational, binary nature of the male libidinal economy. Mulvey adds to this an analysis of the semantics of the Symbolic. That is, the Symbolic, being male, values male and female bodies significantly differently, and Mulvey outlines the way that mainstream cinema reproduces and thus reinforces the prerogative of the male gaze. It is here that I will address the widely held idea that Sucker Punch is misogynist, and show that to the contrary, the film, through its form and the way the camera looks at the women, exposes and empties the male gaze of the desire it is usually loaded with.

Essentially Mulvey argues that every time a person watches a mainstream Hollywood film he/she is being re-trained to the logic of the Symbolic, to subject women to a gaze that is sexualizing and an attitude that is degrading. One of the ways to challenge the Symbolic according to Mulvey is to adjust the film experience: “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to 78 free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment” (18). Mulvey believes that emptying the viewing experience of pleasure by adopting different narrative and visual techniques is the key to challenging the

Symbolic. There is of course an obvious parallel here with Cixous and Irigaray who also argue for changes in how stories are told in order to break free from phallocentrism.

Mulvey argues that watching a mainstream film in a cinema plays upon voyeuristic pleasures and replicates the gendered power split of the Symbolic in two ways: narratively and visually. According to her, film narrative revolves around a male protagonist who the film audience is encouraged to identify with and to whom their understanding of women as sexual object is aligned. Her theory of audience identification has since been debunked, as various audience studies have demonstrated that identification is not monolithic (that is, audience identification is fluid, in constant flux and not tied to a single character at any one time), nor is it bound to the gender of the viewer (that is, the idea that men cannot identify with a female character and vice versa is fallacious). Having said this, Mulvey’s analysis has been hard to shake given the prevalence of male protagonists in film versus the sparse number of female protagonists and the struggle of female leads to bring in box office numbers, as well as the open reluctance of men to watching so-called “chick-flicks” (the primary vehicle for female protagonists). What can be taken from Mulvey’s analysis however is the pleasure that comes with audience identification, and its necessity for narrative success. Sucker Punch not only lacks a male protagonist with whom the audience could identify (according to Mulvey), but the female protagonist is problematized in two ways. As I’ve already outlined, the issue of who the protagonist is in the movie is unclear since this seems to change at the end of the movie from 79

Babydoll to Sweet Pea. One could argue though that this doesn’t really matter since identification is an experiential process; that is, it happens as an individual watches a film, and since Babydoll is presented for most of the film as the protagonist, it would be fair to assume that she is the figure with which an audience would identify. Identification with Babydoll however, is obstructed by the manner in which she is hyper-fetishized. Babydoll’s shallow characterization

(she is given no backstory other than the events preceding her incarceration), bland dialogue and the hollow performance by Browning don’t encourage sympathetic or empathetic emotions towards her. Similarly Babydoll’s flat visual presentation and flawless fantastical looks also serve to distance an audience that is, like all humans, filled with blemishes and flaws. But it is

Babydoll’s embodiment of the catholic/Japanese schoolgirl sexual fetish that perhaps does the most work in alienating her from audiences. Fetishization, according to Mulvey, is a method of neutralizing the threat of castration that the female body poses by objectifying that body entirely.

By fetishizing Babydoll, then, the audience is being directed to objectify her, thus distancing her from the viewer and preventing identification. The same can be said of all of the female characters in Sucker Punch since they are all in fact presented as shallow sexual fetishes.

Ironically the only character given any emotional depth is Blue and yet to identify with him means to take on the role of abuser and a character that is powerless against his desires. The lack of characters with which to identify generates a powerless feeling among the audience of passively watching a story in which the audience has nothing at stake. This (along with the visuals and quest-heavy plot) helps to explain the repeated complaint from reviewers that they felt as if they were watching somebody else play a video game. As far as Mulvey is concerned, 80 identification is about the pleasure of power, and this is not an experience Sucker Punch offers narratively.

Visually, Mulvey argues, the camera becomes the male gaze, so that the film audience is forced to see the film world and experience the film events through a male perspective. The way the camera moves and looks, particularly at the female body, is the same as the male gaze. The woman’s purpose in a traditional Hollywood film is to aid the male in revisiting the Oedipal complex, reworking castration anxiety, and ultimately reassuring the male of his power and of the woman’s subjugation to him. Mulvey states:

Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active

controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally

signified...The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration

anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating

the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation,

punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of

the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a

fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes

reassuring rather than dangerous. (13-4)

Fetishization of the threatening female body is supposed to alleviate the threat of castration. As it is loaded with images of the fetishized female body, Sucker Punch should be, by Mulvey’s estimation, a pleasurable viewing experience for the male viewer. But Sucker Punch has a very complicated relationship to her ideas. On the one hand Sucker Punch reproduces the male gaze, as the camera languishes on the fetishized female bodies of its stars. On the other hand however, 81 the film’s experimentation with form turns the gaze back on itself such that, rather than eliminating anxiety with sexual pleasure, anxiety is increased via a narrative that undermines the male/camera gaze.

In order to understand the way in which the male gaze is stripped of its pleasure in Sucker

Punch it is necessary to understand the connection between fantasy and film. Where Mulvey argues that film aims for a level of verisimilitude (so that the audience sutures itself to the protagonist and his narrative) it is important to note that she also argues that film reproduces the experience of Lacan’s mirror phase where the infant sees a fantasy version of himself in the mirror. This moment of identification instills in the child a lifelong sense of lack since he/she always seeks to become that fantasy reflection. Susan Hayward supports the understanding of film as a place of fantasy, stating,

Fantasy is inextricably linked with desire, which, according to Lacan, is located in

the Imaginary – that is, the unconscious. Fantasy, then, is the conscious

articulation of desire, through either images or stories – it is, then, the mise-en-

scene of desire. In this context, film puts desire up on screen. The film industry is

the industry of desire, Hollywood is the dream factory. (109)

But the manner in which fantasy is consumed is contingent upon a measure of obscuration. In his essay “From Reality to the Real,” Slavoj Zizek interrogates the mechanics of desire and fantasy.

He states, “[f]antasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness” (336). Zizek illustrates this idea by describing a scene in the Patricia Highsmith story,

“Black House” in which, after hearing a collection of personal stories about an old black house 82 from a group of old men in a bar who had not returned to the house since they were young, a young man goes to the house to investigate, finding nothing but an ordinary building. Zizek states:

The ‘black house’ was forbidden to them [the old men] because it functioned as

an empty space on which they could project their nostalgic desires, their distorted

memories. By publicly stating that the ‘black house’ is nothing but an old ruin, the

young intruder reduced their fantasy space to an everyday, common reality; he

annulled the difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of

the place in which they were able to articulate their desires. (“From Reality to the

Real” 337)

Zizek understands fantasy as a place where desire is staged, but the nature of desire is that it can never be satisfied, and when the fantasy is interrogated, it is found to be disappointing. Fantasy then, as the place of desire, is particularly fragile in that it must be consumed at a distance, or as

Zizek states, the gaze that we fix upon our fantasy must be awry. Without distance, and without being obfuscated, fantasy (and thereby desire) is found to be without substance. Zizek then links the unsatisfactory nature of desire with the experience of anxiety, stating:

That is to say, the realization of desire does not consist in its being ‘fulfilled,’

‘fully satisfied,’ it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its

circular movement...We can in this way also grasp the specificity of the Lacanian

notion of anxiety: anxiety occurs not when the object cause of desire is lacking; it

is not the lack of the object that gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary, the 83

danger of getting too close to the object and thus losing the lack itself. Anxiety is

brought on by the disappearance of desire. (“From Reality to the Real” 336)

If the nature of fantasy is that the conditions of its consumption/staging must be under a certain agreed upon artifice, then it follows that film also must be consumed under these conditions. The before-mentioned suspension of disbelief that is a traditional aspect of watching a film aligns directly to this idea of Zizek’s; it is an agreed unwillingness to interrogate our places of fantasy.

In chapter one I discussed Sucker Punch in terms of what it might mean for a female audience, but because the fantasy of postfeminist empowerment aligns almost exactly with a dominant heterosexual male sexual fantasy of women (ultra feminine, sexually confident), the film can be understood to address both fantasies. Sucker Punch, through the simultaneous narratives I discussed in chapter one, reveals the exploitation behind postfeminist visions of empowerment and behind male sexual fantasy. Both levels of fantasy – the brothel and the empowerment – are underlaid with a reality of sexual abuse. This is implied in the closing moments of the film, when the group of male orderlies has gathered in the basement with

Babydoll. While there is no explicit mention of sexual abuse (although one orderly revealingly states “I’m not hurting these girls anymore”) there is little other imaginable reason for this type of gathering provided for the viewer other than for sexual purposes, and the sexual nature of the brothel fantasy supports the understanding that the young women are being sexually abused in the mental institute. The simultaneity of these three narratives allows for a collapse in the distance between reality and fantasy and, in Zizek’s words, “Depriv[es] the men of the place in which they were able to articulate their desires” (“From Reality to the Real” 337). That is, by putting the female body (the place where men articulate their desires) into its true context, as an 84 object of sexual exploitation, and thus looking at her clearly, the true nature of the male heterosexual fantasy comes into focus and is revealed not as arousing, but as repulsive. What

Sucker Punch arguably does, which is different from, say, making a film detailing the sexual exploitation of women, is present the viewer with an image of a woman he/she is well- accustomed to seeing (the fantasy), and then changing how she is to be looked at via the structure of the narrative. The young, scantily clad, skinny female is ubiquitous in Western popular culture and the three realms/roles Babydoll occupies are also familiar in popular culture (the abused young girl, the sexy prostitute, and the female action heroine), yet, juxtaposed with one another these are revealed as complimentary and disturbing male fantasies. The form of Sucker Punch then works to strip the male gaze of its pleasure and increase the anxiety of the viewer by directly looking at dominant fantasies about women.

The focus of this chapter has been the way that form is a vehicle for ideology. Brecht, and second wave feminists Irigaray, Cixous and Mulvey offer theories of how to challenge dominant patriarchal and capitalist ideology by changing the way an audience consumes a piece of art.

These theories however are not without flaws (l’ecriture feminine in particular is widely criticized for taking an essentializing approach to gender and sexuality) and the failure of Sucker

Punch commercially stands as a testament to the problems experimenting with form faces: that is, such forms are often not pleasurable for the viewer. The destruction of pleasure in the way women are filmed was Mulvey’s goal, but it’s not a viable method of popularizing a critique.

And since challenging the Symbolic in the manner of l’ecriture feminine involves avoiding traditional linear logic, the critique gets lost in the free-form of the narrative. The critical reception of Sucker Punch demonstrates that its potential to cause its audience to reconsider 85 dominant fantasies and how women feature in them was largely lost as reviewer after reviewer focused his/her discontent on the disconnected sequences of overly-sexualized young women and not on the possible reasons for the form. That a film resisting the dominant way we read film would be unpopular is hardly a revelation. What I hope is interesting in this study however, is understanding why such a work as Sucker Punch might be an unpleasant viewing experience, which is a question that I don’t think is asked very often of popular culture’s failures. I propose that the problem is twofold: first, that the film is difficult to understand due to its unconventional form, which demands for a more active viewing position than a traditional Hollywood film. And secondly, the film questions the very fantasies the West has built its culture around, that is, the sexualization and control of young women, whilst stripping those fantasies of the pleasure that customarily accompanies them. The problem remains for feminism to explore means to popularize such an experience. 86

CONCLUSION: CAPITALISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND FEMINISM

I began this project by putting Sucker Punch into its context as part of a growing wave of mainstream nerd culture products that take advantage of a popularized postfeminist ideology.

The rise of nerd culture, I argued, is important here for two reasons: because it tends to overly objectify women (it reinforces white patriarchy), and because it is incredibly consumerist in nature (it reinforces capitalism). Thus the rise of nerd culture can be seen as a threat to feminism because it is ultimately conservative in nature. I also outlined the dominant way that Sucker

Punch was received by its audience, which was largely negative and critical of the film’s content and form. In short Sucker Punch was widely disliked because it was seen as confusing and misogynist. Over the course of the three chapters of this thesis I have demonstrated that Sucker

Punch is a much more complex film than has been widely accepted, one which repeatedly demonstrates the problem of discussing the visual spectacle and sexualization of women in a creative manner, which presents its audience with the hypocrisy of dominant culture’s sexual fantasies, and which serves as an example that popular culture’s failures reveal just as much about a culture’s character as its successes.

Fantasy is the recurring theme of this thesis. It is both the form and the content of Sucker

Punch. It is also deeply embedded in nerd culture, which is filled with fantasies of ideal men

(with whom young males can identify) and ideal women (whom they can objectify). If one of the messages of the film is that our fantasies are a flawed mechanism by which we try to define ourselves, then the backlash to the film suggests that people don’t like to be confronted with the reality of their fantasies (women don’t like to think that when they are being sexually provocative they are actually being exploited, and men don’t like to think they are harming 87 anyone with their own sexual fantasies). Fantasy has always been a difficult problem for feminists because women have historically been the object of sexual fantasy. Indeed, one of the main tasks of feminism has been to pull women out of a fantasy realm and into reality in order to move closer towards political equality. It should be clear from the preceding chapters, which repeatedly demonstrate the manner in which the film attempts to critique dominant fantasies about women, that where Sucker Punch is most difficult for audiences is in the serious and shameless reproduction of these fantasies embedded in a narrative that renders them negative and disturbing.

Fantasy, it should also be noted, is the bedrock of consumer capitalism. Commercials and advertisements are filled with fantasy identities and lives that products promise to deliver.

Dreams and ideals are displaced into the products we buy so that fantasy fuels consumer economy. Where capitalism and feminism intersect is what I want to concentrate on in this conclusion, because capitalism has been one of the main stumbling blocks for feminism.

Capitalism is an economy of ideologies – one has to look no further than advertisements to understand Western values – and feminism has been a particularly difficult set of beliefs to sell.

Postfeminism is unfortunately the closest feminism has come to the mainstream, and yet it is a capitalist co-opted brand of feminism, a way to corner a market of young independent women with disposable income while at the same time selling products that reduce women to their looks.

Consumer capitalism, or late capitalism as Frederic Jameson terms it in his highly influential essay “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism”, is deeply bound to postmodernism, and it is this particular shape of dominant culture (global consumer capitalist, 88 postmodern), that poses problems, not just for feminism, but any political movement seeking to change the status quo.

Postmodernism, according to Jameson, involves a drastic shift in the way the individual subject relates to and understands the world around him/her. Where once time was the primary means by which humans organized their understanding of the world, in a postmodern world space has become dominant. The result of this shift is more than just the rise of the spectacle (as

Debord describes it) but a breakdown in the way we communicate. Jameson uses the notion of the schizophrenic to relate the changes in perception. In his understanding of schizophrenia

Jameson refers to Lacan, who transposed Saussure’s linguistic model of the relationship between signifier and signified onto the Freudian Oedipal theory of development, producing the Law of the Father, the realm of language, which dictates the Symbolic. Jameson sees the rise of the dominance of the image as breaking the signifying chain of language. He states: “With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers, or in other words of a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (72). Language and the Symbolic then are framed as temporal constructs. The significance this holds in the context of this project is that one can understand postmodernism as challenging the Symbolic via the collapse of temporal coordinates with which one would use to orient oneself, and as I discussed in chapter three, challenging the Symbolic has been one avenue feminists have considered in challenging patriarchy.

Disorientation is the key element in terms of understanding the political paradox of postmodernism/challenging the Symbolic. The problem with postmodernism, according to

Jameson, is that it has collapsed the distance between the social and the cultural so that 89

“everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and as yet untheorized self” (87). All this is to say that postmodernism is disorienting. He states:

That distance in general (including ‘critical distance’ in particular) has very

precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged

in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now

postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone

theoretically) incapable of distantiation. (87)

Without critical distance one cannot gain perspective on what is wrong, and how to change something. This means that while postmodernism seems to destabilize the Symbolic, it actually prevents political action because it is isolating and confusing.

Although approaching it from a different perspective (feminist, not marxist), Susan Bordo likewise objects to postmodernism and for a similar reason. She criticizes the permissive effects of valuing the subjective. The shift in understanding the world as objective to subjective has given validity to every single opinion, so that no such opinion may be meaningfully discussed.

She calls this a “postmodern conversation” (258) and describes it thus:

All sense of history and all ability (or inclination) to sustain cultural criticism, to

make the distinctions and discriminations that would permit such criticism, have

disappeared. Rather, in this “anything goes” – and any positioned social

critique...is immediately destabilized. Instead of distinctions, endless differences

reign – an undifferentiated pastiche of differences, a grab bag in which no items

are assigned any more importance or centrality than any others. (258) 90

She concludes of attempts to take any stance on social/cultural patterns that these are

“[i]ncreasingly difficult to sustain in a postmodern context, where we are surrounded by endlessly displaced images and are given no orienting context in which to make discriminations” (259). And so like Jameson, Bordo highlights the disorienting nature of postmodernism.

The paradox then with postmodernism, which arguably attempts to deconstruct the

Symbolic, to take down the framework of reason, the “law of the father,” is that it creates an

“anything goes” culture within which patriarchy, via capitalism, is able to reinstate itself completely unchallenged. Bordo demonstrates this via her examination of advertisements promoting specific female body types. In a postmodern interpretation, there is nothing wrong with promoting a blond, white, skinny body, because of the assertion of the individual subjective power of the consumer, that is, it’s up to the individual to decide what she decides to do with her body. The blond, white, skinny body then becomes depoliticized. That advertisements – the art of capitalism – are referred to over and over again in Bordo’s book Unbearable Weight demonstrates the way capitalism and patriarchy operate symbiotically.

The real-world problem this poses is one of political unification and mobility.

Fragmentation and individuality prevent people coming together to activate any change to the system. To put it concisely, tearing down the Symbolic doesn’t leave us in any better of a position; it results in anarchy. It is irresponsible, and doesn’t change the power structure; if anything it allows it immunity from attack. It is also, as in the case of Sucker Punch, doomed to failure, since the non-Symbolic is incomprehensible (disorienting) and open to misunderstanding

(highly subjective). 91

Jameson’s answer to the problem of postmodern disorientation is cognitive mapping. As discussed above, Jameson understands the disorientation of postmodernism in terms of how the subject relates to space. He argues that space has evolved, via the explosion of the simulacrum and the embrace of the spectacle, which does not allow us to see/perceive reality, and that “we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace” (80). The solution he proposes is to orient the subject via a cultural model which “foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture” (89). In short, the method by which to position the subject within this postmodern, global capitalist system is through politicizing the products of that system itself. Cognitive mapping, his proposal, is artwork that would orient the subject and provide them with a political understanding of the world around him/her, thereby tackling the disorientation created by the postmodern condition. Cognitive mapping put to the service of feminism would reposition the subject in the Symbolic, presenting a view of reality that illustrates the dependence, in Western culture, on the visual subjugation of women for entertainment.

Cognitive mapping is an interesting, if not a vaguely outlined idea, but it could be usefully correlated with Mulvey’s call for a film form that causes “passionate detachment” (18) in its viewer. Both aim for the introduction of critical distance into postmodern culture in order to allow for political resistance, but Mulvey’s oxymoronic term “passionate detachment” betrays the central issue at hand for feminists (as well as other political groups aiming to challenge dominant culture) and that is the issue of passion or, one could alternatively term it, pleasure.

While Jameson is quick to define postmodernism as a culture of commodity, he fails to address how cognitive mapping might rival or graft onto the pleasure of the commodity. Mulvey of 92 course addresses the issue when she states: “There is no doubt that this [the destruction of traditional film form] destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest,’ and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms” (18), but Mulvey forgets that mainstream film (the form of which is what she is addressing in her article) is primarily a commodity. Its development is largely shaped by how it sells, and sales are not determined by moral sway, but by pleasure and desire. Capitalism functions not through intellectual appeal or morality: most of us are, most of the time, completely unconscious consumers, or, worse, we consume against our better judgment. We all buy products (food, clothes, electronics, etc) knowing that the conditions of their production are morally abhorrent, but desire dictates our actions. And fantasy is built not only to accommodate but also to encourage giving into desire. Nerd culture in particular is driven by intense desire and fantasy, which, as I’ve mentioned, given its hostility to women, should be very concerning for feminists.

Mulvey’s advocacy for the destruction of traditional film form (one that reinforces the

Symbolic), while logical, is impractical. The issue for feminists seems to be how to provide pleasurable resistance to dominant culture. Slavoj Zizek argues that the focus for those who want social change should be dominant fantasies stating that “[i]f we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality.” (“Avatar: Return of the Natives”). Sucker Punch and its failure represent the problems inherent in challenging these fantasies. 93

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