Sucker Punch

Zach Snyder, director of 300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch, and the forthcoming Man of Steel, has a terrific eye but a shallow mind. His adaptation of Watchmen is exactly the soulless, ham-fisted misinterpretation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ novel which I might have made had you put me in the director’s chair when I was nineteen years old. His adaptation of 300 managed to take the implicit fascist sensibility of Frank Miller’s novel and make it worse.

A while back, I succumbed to curiosity and caught his film Sucker Punch, a stylish, bizarre mishmash that’s sort of about hot chicks in fetishy outfits getting into cartoonish action movie battles … and sort a horror story about a young woman trapped in an insane asylum. It is a strange film. It is not a good film.

For obvious reasons, it has taken a lot of criticism for its sexism. On the other side of that link, the wonderful Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency says:

Sucker Punch is nothing more than a steaming pile of maggot-filled, festering, misogynist crap trying to masquerade as female empowerment.

I agree with Ms. Sarkeesian that Sucker Punch is indeed a steaming pile of maggot-filled, festering, misogynist crap. But, unusually for me, I disagree with her about something important. She’s wrong about what the film tries to do, and so she’s wrong that it there is nothing more to it than its misogyny. Sarkeesian also says:

Snyder is nothing but a parasite trying to leech of the gains of feminism to satisfy his own personal, pornographic, adolescent boy fantasy, which just serves as another example of the male driven backlash against women.

I understand and respect the heck out of that reading. It’s an easy conclusion to reach, given the film. And obviously I have no love for Snyder. But I think that it’s dead wrong about his intentions.

It was vividly apparent to me, seeing the film, that Snyder was sincerely trying to make a film critical of the misogyny it manifests … but utterly failed at that project due to his limitations as a filmmaker, his male privileged boneheadedness, and his general stupidity.

Now even if I’m right that Snyder had some positive intentions, I don’t want to claim that the good intentions I imagine for him redeem the film. They don’t, either in terms of its sexism or even as an artwork. But if we do want to talk about the film Snyder was trying to make — and I think that is a conversation worth having — then we should get it right. Indeed, if I’m right that Snyder was trying to make an actual feminist statement but screwed it up and produced the opposite, it should be very interesting to talk about the disjoint between the intended effect and the actual effect.

I’ve never had the patience to try to assemble the argument about the movie Snyder was trying to make. So it’s a good thing that Bob “MovieBob” Chipman (formerly at The Escapist) has come along and done it much better than I could have.

If you have ever suffered the misfortune of seeing Sucker Punch, I cannot recommend highly enough checking out what MovieBob has to say. And if even if you haven’t, you may want to look at Mr. Chipman’s work in general. I’m a fan.

Update

A friend points me to Caroline Siede’s commentary after 15 years, Sucker Punch is still swinging at air, which accepts Snyder’s account of what he was trying to do and breaks down his failings in detail. It picks up on something I am embarrassed that I had not properly registered.

Indeed, what’s fascinating about how Snyder discussed Sucker Punch at the time of its release is that he almost always talked about its male audience, as if he couldn’t even conceptualize that women would ever watch it too. Back in 2011, he complained that the film was poorly received because fanboys “can’t have fun with the geek culture sexual hang ups.” And he argued that people missed that the whole film — which begins with curtains opening on a stage — is supposed to be a metaphorical critique of male voyeurism: “The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us. The men in the dark are basically me; dorky sci-fi kids.” Yet it feels telling that even in a film with five female protagonists, Snyder is identifying with the audience.

I find that particularly interesting because it parallels one of the moves I admire Tarantino making in Inglorious Basterds: the movie theater full of Nazis yukking it up over a brutally violent film, pointedly compelling us to ask why his audience enjoys his films. But Tarantino for all his faults is a much more sophisticated artist than Snyder. Significantly, Basterds does a lot of work to get us to identify most deeply with the people brutalized by Nazis.

I think that I think that Sucker Punch is a bit less bad than Seide concludes. I have seen women with histories of abuse talk about how the film captures something about traumatized dissociation. It is legit gutsy of Snyder to call attention to the history of lobotomies performed on women.

But it is very bad.

This brings to mind Patrick H. Willems’ characteristically smart video-essay reviewing Snyder’s whole career. I wish Willems had dug deeper on 300, but his read of Synder’s bizarre animated feature Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is suprisingly enlightening, supporting the conclusion that Snyder is sincere in wanting his work to oppose sexism and fascism … which is ruined by Snyder reliably stumbling into imagery with cultural politics he just does not understand.

I think Snyder needs to embrace his dumbness. The one film of his which thoroughly achieves its ambitions — which I genuinely enjoy without reservations — is his zombie action-horror film Army Of The Dead. The action rocks. The zombies are compelling and scary. There are great hammy performances, including an astonishing tuff-guy turn from … Tig Notaro. And most importantly, it has a tone of enthusiastic pulp shlock arriving at an ending of perfect, punchy Richard Matheson Nihilism.

Keep his hands off of superheroes and sexy ladies. Have him give us more of that.