Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH Confuses Exploitation With Empowerment

Though I'm certain this will come as news to Sucker Punch writer-director-producer Zack Snyder, his latest work has left me convinced that he does not hold women in particularly high regard. Sure, he likes to look at them and all but they do not appear to have any use other than as glossy eye candy in Snyder's world. While there are many reasons to dislike Sucker Punch - Snyder's complete failure to string together anything approaching a coherent narrative or even a single character that has any depth at all beneath the glossy veneer ranking very high on the list - most troubling is Snyder's public insistence that this is a 'female empowerment' film. And if Snyder sincerely believes that, if he honestly believes Sucker Punch is sending out a positive message to women, then he must view women in a phenomenally bad light.

[Yes, there are spoilers below.]

Consider the following.

Sucker Punch declines its primary characters even the basic dignity of giving them actual names. Instead the five central characters are all given - and willingly adopt - new names by their malicious captor. We never hear their actual given names ever. The charitably minded might call these new names 'pet' names. I call them what they actually are: Hooker names. Names designed to make them appealing to the men they are being sold to. And more than that, they're given hooker names that would only really appeal to the pedophile crowd. Not only do all involved casually accept names that transform them into objects but Snyder goes a step farther and denies them even the chance to be objectified as women. He likes 'em young, apparently, and so saddles them with distinctly childish identities despite the fact that with ages ranging from 22 - 29 these are all grown women.

On a more direct plot level, consider the basics of Babydoll's story. Mom dies and 'helpless' girl - note that her character is actually aged 20 - is attacked by her evil step father who, deciding that she'll put up too much of a fight, goes to rape her younger sister instead. When she puts up a fight? It's off to a mental institution with her. Once there it's off into fantasy land until the end comes in the form of a frontal lobotomy. A lobotomy that is played as a happy ending.  There's a message for you, girls. Resist and be crushed. Sounds like empowerment to me.

As far as other characters go, take a look at Sweet Pea. The only one of the five girls who survives is also the only one of the five who did not actually want to escape and openly advocated staying where they were and 'servicing' the men. How about Carla Gugino's Dr Vera Gorski? The only woman to actually have a real name in the movie is nothing but an amped up version of the sexy librarian fantasy whose treatments are completely ineffective and who is, to put it bluntly, so stupid that she doesn't realize that her orderlies are abusing her patients and having them lobotomized. Carla Gugino - who actually is a smart, sexy, empowered woman - really should have known better than this. Again, this is empowerment how?

Snyder's portrayal of women here is consistently, overwhelmingly negative. They are foolish and weak, any inclination to resist or fight for themselves in any way met with crushing response. Their only option - their only outlet - is an escape into fantasy but whose fantasy is this, exactly? The message is for girls to conform or be crushed. The aesthetic is clearly designed to play up to geeky teenage boys. How this empowers women I have no idea.

There are those who argue that what Snyder is doing here is deconstruct the typical presentation and use of women in film, that the banality of Sucker Punch is actually a cleverly disguised satire. But at this point I've seen little from Snyder to suggest that his banality is ever anything but banality. He's an excellent technician, no doubt, but he has never brought an ounce of character, soul or intelligence to a script that wasn't put there by another writer in the first place. Reading Sucker Punch as satire gives him far too much credit, I fear.

But even if you want to go there, even if you want to argue that this was his intent you need to ask whether it's even possible to use male fantasy to criticize male fantasy. Because Sucker Punch is very definitely engineered from the ground up to be exactly that. This is nearly two hours of non-stop fan service, laced with up-skirt shots and plentiful skin, with a marketing machine built to exploit exactly the same elements that some suggest Snyder is criticizing. If you want to criticize the treatment of women as nothing but objects of desire to be all dolled up and manipulated for male pleasure, can you really do so by dolling up a group of young women and manipulating them for male pleasure? If knocking shallow fan service was Snyder's aim then going about it this way is roughly the equivalent of feeding a class of teenage boys Kool Aid spiked with LSD and then telling them not to do drugs once all the pretty colors have faded away.

If Snyder had presented Sucker Punch as simply a shallow bit of fluff, nothing but a piece of entertainment, it still wouldn't be a good film but at least it would be an easily disposable bad film. But by insisting that it is something more Snyder has put himself in a position where there are really only two interpretations. One: He tried to create a satiric deconstruction of women in media and failed pretty miserably. Or, two: He is such an incredibly shallow man that he believes giving a girl a short skirt and putting a gun in her hand is sufficient to then call her 'empowered', he has confused fetishizing women with empowering them. Either way he has demonstrated pretty clearly that he should never again be left free to write his own scripts.