I have often described Sucker Punch as an anti-empowerment fantasy, and in many ways, it feels like the film was critically and commercially derided because of it. On the surface, Sucker Punch is a film about women trying to break free from the structural oppression of their circumstances. What’s fascinating about Zack Snyder’s film, however, is that these women are not successful. One escapes, while three die, and the fifth is lobotomized. The fantasy action sequences that Snyder utilizes as a metaphor for the degradation of these women’s bodies through the male gaze feel futile in their cruelty. We watch a young woman visualize the sexualization of her body through these elaborate action set pieces that allow her to feel in charge of her own body, yet they all end where they started through a transition shot that can’t help but remind us of the cage she has been placed in.
Snyder has described the film as his critique of geek culture, dominated by a male perspective that can only view women through the prism of its own titillation. Women hold no value if they are not performing specifically for the men that dominate these spaces. A decade later, after witnessing GamerGate and the discourse that surrounded films like Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey, and Captain Marvel that angered fanboys because the women weren’t interested in performing specifically for them, Snyder was on to something. What Snyder attempted with Sucker Punch was to tap into that very specific aspect of geek culture, and explore the toxicity of this kind of entitlement; — in essence, inviting young men to the movie by promoting it as an anime-inspired action spectacle from the director of 300, then pull the rug underneath them. Instead, they are given a film about the prison they cast upon women through the fetishization of their gaze, and how they have managed to build the structures of this geek space around their own inherent misogyny. Snyder uses this very specific lens to create parallels between the geek space and the real world, and how they mirror one another.
Sucker Punch opens up on a literal stage, with the Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures logos imposed upon these red curtains, that slowly open to reveal a young woman sitting on a bed facing away from us. The camera slowly churns forward, past the auditorium seats, and we find ourselves on the stage — thus the tale begins. The film, from its opening frame, makes the audience complicit in its storytelling, and the characters we are introduced to will fight tooth and nail to break free from the oppressiveness of our expectations of them, to no avail. We are introduced to Babydoll (Emily Browning) sitting on the bed with porcelain skin and a name that matches her aesthetic as she receives the news that her mother is dead. Through an exquisitely designed five-minute opening sequence, we watch Babydoll deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death as she attempts to protect her little sister from an abusive stepfather. This entire sequence is wordless, save for the voice-over from Sweet Pea (Abby Cornish), and a haunting rendition of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of These),” sung by Browning herself. The music slowly overtakes the picture as the action on-screen advances, culminating in a moment where Babydoll accidentally kills her sister with a stray bullet she shot through her stepfather’s arm. She is brought to a mental institution, where she is to be lobotomized in five days, thanks to a forged signature from an orderly.
This is what I refer to as the first layer of the film, or the real world. Once at the institution we enter a second layer of reality, which is a brothel that helps Babydoll visualize her circumstances in a way that she can process. But more importantly, it visualizes her circumstances more succinctly for us, the audience. It is important to remember that what we are watching is taking place on a stage, and everything we see is specifically for us. While Babydoll introduces us to this brothel, where she meets up with four other women to hatch an escape plan, where she visualizes the lobotomist as a high roller buying her virginity, and where she visualizes an orderly as the man who runs the brothel; this is all for us. It is Snyder making a conscious choice to make us complicit in the dehumanization of these women, and their failure to escape lands squarely on our shoulders. We are holding them prisoner.
We are introduced to the brothel level through a transition shot from the perspective of the hammer and nail used in lobotomies. We are closed in on Babydoll’s face with the nail pointed and hammer pulled back, and then as the camera pulls back, we transition to the brothel, where Sweet Pea is on a stage, with Amber (Jaime Chung) holding the needle, imitating a doctor, and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) as her assistant. It is a clever way to switch from one reality to another, but it also allows Snyder to switch the focus of the story. Snyder draws these parallel images between Babydoll and Sweet Pea that feel purposeful, and it will all come full circle at the end. Jena Malone’s Rocket, Sweet Pea’s sister, gives Babydoll a tour of the brothel, where she explains how every girl does a dance for patrons, enticing them to spend money, while Blue (Oscar Isaac) runs the brothel. Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino) is their instructor, who is in charge of putting on these shows.
The third and final layer is the fantasy action spectacle, the layer where we get to watch these women take control of their bodies and fight back against their patriarchal oppressors. We transition to this layer through the eyes of Babydoll, as she begins her titillating dance. Instead of watching her physical performance, we transition to exquisitely designed battlefields defined by a specific mission.
There are four main action set pieces. The first is Babydoll entering a dojo and being met by a character who is referred to as the Wise Man (Scott Glenn). The Wise Man provides Babydoll with a Katana before giving her a list of five items to collect: a map, fire, a knife, and a key, with the fifth item is a mysterious sacrifice. During the first action sequence, where Babydoll is given the instructions to her quest by the Wise Man, she is tasked with fighting these giant samurai warriors who bleed light when you cut them. The next action set piece is set in World War II, this time with Babydoll fighting alongside Sweet Pea, Rocket, Amber, and Blondie. This is where they fight steampunk zombies as they trek behind enemy lines to retrieve a map. Back in the brothel, Sweet Pea sneaks into Blue’s office to steal a map of the facilities while he is distracted by Babydoll.
The next action set-piece takes place in a fantasy world where the women are dropped into the middle of waging war as they are tasked with slicing open a baby dragon’s neck and retrieving two crystals that create the most beautiful fire imaginable. Back in the brothel, while the mayor is distracted by Babydoll’s dance on stage, Amber retrieves a lighter from his breast pocket while she is sitting on his lap. The next, and final, action set-piece takes place on a futuristic train, where these women fight through a horde of futuristic robots as they try to disarm a bomb before it reaches a major city. Back in the brothel, Sweet Pea is tasked with stealing a knife from the chef while he is distracted. This is where their mission fails. The radio that they were using to play music short circuits which pulls Babydoll out of the dance and pulls the chef out of his daze. He then grabs the knife they were stealing and lunges towards Sweet Pea, leading to Rocket diving in front of her sister and taking the knife right through the gut.
These action set pieces are where Snyder’s reputation as a visual stylist catches up with him as he attempts to frame the action through a metaphorical lens. Snyder creates a direct link between Babydoll’s dance for the patrons in the brothel and the way action functions as an extension of that dance, putting the audience into the position of the men who are objectifying Babydoll’s body. However, Snyder himself has a very masculine gaze as seen in his Watchmen adaptation and 300, filming action with a hyper-stylized visual aesthetic. The human body is a sculpture to Snyder, and he positions his actors within the frame as if he is creating his own Renaissance art piece.
The difference between Sucker Punch and some of his other work is the way in which he minimizes his gaze in Sucker Punch. If you look at 300, there is an eroticism to the action and every decision Snyder makes heightens that eroticism. With Sucker Punch, that eroticism is gone, and Snyder is no longer interested in the architecture of the human body. Instead, he dresses the women up in anime-like outfits and invites the audience in to impart their own gaze upon them. While Snyder is not directly sexualizing the women through his filmmaking, he is giving the audience the opportunity to do the work for him, hoping that they can connect the metaphorical dots.
However, because he still uses slow-motion to accentuate the physicality in the performers while creating immense battle sequences that feel so elaborately draped in his specific style, the metaphor gets lost in the grandiosity of its presentation. The critical reception to the film speaks to the dissonance between intent and reception. At the beginning and end of each action set piece, Snyder brings everything full circle by reminding us of the metaphor, but in between those two points we get lost in an action spectacle to the point where it is easy to push the metaphorical significance to the back of our mind. We should not be enjoying the action, because Snyder is making it a point to show us how the action itself is a prison, and yet it is still impossible not to enjoy it because of how well-staged it is. Personally, I find his approach to be effective specifically because every time we return to the brothel after an action set piece, Snyder always reminds us not only of the danger we’ve returned to, but he also reminds us of the gaze from which we’ve been viewing these women. He is, in essence, sucker-punching us into getting lost in the action before reminding us of the dance, which reminds us of the male perspective from which we entered the action in the first place. Snyder walks a fine line in creating immersive action while never failing to remind us of the context from which the action sprouts from.
I describe the film as an anti-empowerment fantasy in the opening paragraph, which primarily has to do with the futility in the action scenes mixed with the metaphor of the audience, using us as stand-ins for those who objectify Babydoll with their gazel. The action itself is impeccably designed and crafted. And yet, there is a futility to the spectacle because Snyder always returns us to the same place: a brothel, trapped in the gaze of a male oppressor. When we watch action sequences where we are meant to root for a given character’s success, their triumph becomes our triumph. Our emotional investment in them feels like it has earned the payoff once we arrive at the conclusion. There is inherent excitement built into the genre because we do not yet know the outcome. With Sucker Punch, however, every action scene begins and ends the same way, back in the brothel. While yes, maybe Sweet Pea was able to retrieve the map from Blue’s office, or maybe Amber was able to retrieve a lighter from the mayor’s pocket while he was distracted by Babydoll, but at the end of the day, we are still stuck within this brothel with a dangerous presence lurking. The fantasy action spectacle is just that: fantasy. During the final action set piece Rocket sacrifices herself for her sister, and we cut back to the brothel to watch the slob of a chef stab Rocket as she jumps in front of Sweet Pea, it feels inevitable. Snyder was not interested in making a movie that simply gave us the instant gratification of an empowerment narrative that dissipates the second we left the theater. Sucker Punch is more of a conversation piece, drenched in a dreary atmosphere with a guttural sadness radiating from its pores. Our problems are so deeply entrenched that a simple pop culture entertainer doesn’t really matter for our collective psyche.
Now the ending, which is a fascinating beast in and of itself because of the behind-the-scenes drama that forced Snyder to remove a pivotal scene in order to adhere to a PG-13 rating from the MPAA. By forcing the removal of this scene, the MPAA was the catalyst for the recontextualization of the film and the way in which our society views any form of female sexuality. The scene I am referring to is one with the Highroller (Jon Hamm) in the brothel level of the film, only available in the extended cut on home video. At this point in the film, three of the women have died and Babydoll has been captured after helping Sweet Pea escape. Babydoll’s “sacrifice” that the wise man alluded to was herself. In the theatrical version of the film, when Babydoll is captured, Snyder cuts back to the mental institution and we watch Babydoll’s lobotomy. The extended cut however has a pivotal scene with the Highroller, the man who paid a small fortune for Babydoll’s “body” —essentially her virginity. During this moment in the film, the Highroller doesn’t want to take Babydoll forcefully; he offers her a trade. He will offer Babydoll freedom, and in return he wants Babydoll to willingly give him her body. And as they begin to kiss, we cut back to the mental institution and watch Babydoll’s lobotomy.
The Highroller himself and his purpose within the larger narrative speaks on the value we put on a woman’s virginity and the purity of a woman’s body. This specific scene shows us the way in which Babydoll is contextualizing her lobotomy. To her, this will help her be free. It is in many ways a tragedy because to a woman who has been abused in the way that Babydoll has, the fact that she has to twist her lobotomy into a form of freedom is imbued with despair.
The scene and its behind-the-scenes drama also helps recontextualize the rest of the film and the way Snyder uses violence as a stand-in for the objectification of Babydoll’s body. This Highroller scene is not explicit in its sexuality. There is no vulgar language, no nudity, and no real sexual content. There is however the implication of sex, and this scene is also the only time in the film where Babydoll has control over her own sexuality, yet the scene was cut because the MPAA thought it was too suggestive. If we look at the film, and how Snyder used the action sequences as the dance for the audience, we get the feeling that if he didn’t cut to an action scene, the film would have been slapped with an R rating because the MPAA doesn’t know what to do with a woman’s sexuality. So instead of a dance, we are treated to elaborate action set pieces that include knifing through giant samurai, gunning down steampunk zombies, slitting a dragon’s throat, and fighting futuristic robots.
Once we deal with the Highroller and cut back to the institution where Babydoll is lobotomized, Snyder attempts to recontextualize the entire narrative by switching protagonists. Up until this point, even though the entire film has been framed through Babydoll’s eyes, Snyder has purposefully been drawing parallels between Sweet Pea and Babydoll. The film might open with Babydoll on a stage, but it is Sweet Pea’s voice that overlays the visuals, speaking about guardian angels. When we enter the brothel, it is through the eyes of Babydoll as she is about to be lobotomized, but when the camera pulls back into the brothel it is through Sweet Pea’s eyes that we are introduced to this new world. Sweet Pea is a protective older sister who left home when her sister Rocket ran away, but she couldn’t save Rocket from the reality of the brothel, paralleling Babydoll’s own failure to protect her sister.
When Babydoll was captured by the Highroller, she purposefully sacrificed herself, acting as a distraction for Sweet Pea’s escape. The ending, once we return to the mental institution, is where this escape comes back into play. After her lobotomy Babydoll is led through the corridors of the institution by Blue, who is just an orderly here. As she is guided by the shoulders we come to the understanding that what happened in the brothel level also happened in the institution level. We walk past a corridor that was clearly lit on fire, mirroring Babydoll lighting a fire to set off the alarms in the brothel. The chef is missing a knife as Babydoll walks past, just like she stole the knife after Rocket was killed in the brothel. We also hear Madame Gorski, who in the institution is a psychiatrist, tell the lobotomist that Babydoll helped another girl escape, alluding to Sweet Pea.
This is where we travel down two diverging roads. On one hand, we have a lobotomized Babydoll in a mental institution who is taken to a private room by Blue so he could sexually assault her. Except, because her mind has escaped and her eyes have this glossy sheen that shows how she isn’t there anymore, he gets upset and he can’t do what he wanted to do. To a man like Blue, the gratification of sexual objectification and assault comes in the form of the women struggling against the imposition of his power. To men like Blue, it’s not about sexual attraction. It’s about imposing themselves onto another being who is struggling against them and feeling the gratification that comes with wielding that power.
The second road we travel down is that of Sweet Pea who we see escape the brothel and board a bus as her voice-over asks us to reconsider who’s story this truly is. When she boards the bus, the bus driver is none other than the Wise Man who is only seen in the fantasy action sequences, alluding to how we are inside Babydoll’s head and her solace comes in the form of Sweet Pea escape. This ending is then left open to interpretation. Over the course of the movie, Snyder draws clear parallels between Babydoll and Sweet Pea, using a filmic language to create a connection between the two, which allows us to look at the ending as framing the entire film as a complete fantasy, where none of the other settings were real. The entire movie can be viewed as an exploration of trauma through the perspective of an abused young woman, and helping Sweet Pea escape at the end was this woman freeing herself of the guilt that is associated with trauma. Babydoll was described as a guardian angel in both the opening five minutes and at the end via Sweet Pea’s voiceover, recontextualizing the story as her own while she urges the audience to fight back. In this interpretation of the film, Babydoll isn’t real. She is Sweet Pea’s guardian angel, helping Sweet Pea navigate the trauma of her life while giving her the tools to fight and live. Babydoll is Sweet Pea’s defense mechanism, helping her find peace.
You can also view the film through a more literal lens, and Sweet Pea escaping on a bus driven by the Wise Man can be viewed as Babydoll taking solace in the fact that she helped Sweet Pea. Even though that specific detail of the bus is a fantasy as it takes place inside Babydoll’s own mind, the film makes us aware that everything Babydoll and the women did in the brothel also took place in the institution. We can draw the conclusion based on the information presented that Babydoll used the knife, fire, key, and map to hatch an escape plan, and it worked, to an extent. Whatever your interpretation of the ending, there is no denying the ending is about the emotional echoes of its despair intermingled with catharsis. What we feel matters more than what we think.
Sucker Punch is a film that is at war with its own ambitions. A steampunk action fantasy soaked in a feminist lens, and yet, it was made by a white male filmmaker with an overtly masculine perspective. On its surface, it is a throwback to the women-in-prison exploitation genre as a group of women attempt to break free from a cage-like structure. Underneath its skin, the prison is also metaphorical, as Snyder interrogates the male gaze and its toxic perspective on the female body. Gone are the action sequences with the eroticism of 300, as Snyder tries to mute his own masculine gaze, aware of the contradiction that arises when a male filmmaker attempts to write and direct a movie about women. Regardless of how close he comes to authenticity, he will never get there because he does not have the experience that would lend the authenticity to him, and his past history with action filmmaking created a reputation that preceded Sucker Punch. This was Snyder’s downfall, where he had so much worth saying, but the perspective he offered was in question, leading to the film being dismissed and labeled as misogynistic.
When a movie this ambitious arrives at our doorstep with so many ideas in its head as it wrestles with its own thematic construction, it opens itself up for a fascinating conversation. I would rather we have that conversation than outright dismiss its merits. Movies are more of an emotional experience instead of a logical one, and the reason that the themes of Sucker Punch have resonated with me so much is because of the immense sadness that overtakes me as I watch it. That immense sadness offers me the opportunity to explore the movie on a deeper level. It was through that emotional rabbit hole where I discovered my love for the film. I don’t think it’s possible to watch the movie and not be overtaken by an emotional response, whether that response is a negative or positive reaction to the film itself, and whether your own emotional rabbit hole leaves you loving or hating the end result. Do I think Sucker Punch is a misunderstood masterpiece? No, because I don’t need everyone to look at the film through my own specific lens. However, I do feel like we owe the film a re-examination, through the context that time provides, separated from its initial reputation.
