With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.
Fifteen years ago, Zack Snyder set out to end geek culture sexism forever. He’d already made the ultimate male power fantasy in 300, adapted the unadaptable Watchmen, and brought to life The Owls Of Ga’Hoole to boot. Why couldn’t he be the one to finally solve the problem of hypersexualized female characters in the action genre? All it would take would be a high-concept original premise, another man to help him write it, and a cast of…five hypersexualized female characters.
This is the conundrum of Sucker Punch, a movie that was roundly mocked when it debuted just as fourth-wave feminism was about to explode, but has enjoyed an unexpected cult resurgence over the last 15 years. Some have even argued that Sucker Punch is an underrated feminist critique of sexist fanboy culture; an idea Snyder himself has long maintained was his true intent behind dressing up a quintet of women in corsets and thigh-high stockings and handing them machine guns and machetes. But while I’ll grant that Sucker Punch is a more interesting failure than a lot of films of its ilk, it’s a little hard to swallow Snyder’s assertion that Sucker Punch is a “protest movie” in which he didn’t dress up his female cast as sexy babies, “you did.”
Given that Snyder is first and foremost an aesthetic director, it’s easiest to critique Sucker Punch for its aesthetic failings, which mostly derive from its failure to use its premise in an interesting way. The layered story exists across three planes of reality: In the first, a young woman dubbed “Babydoll” (Emily Browning) suffers under the hands of her abusive stepfather and is committed to an insane asylum to be lobotomized. Once there, she processes the experience by reimagining the asylum and its residents as a high-end brothel-cabaret. And to escape the trauma of that brothel realm, she then imagines herself and her fellow dancers in a sci-fi steampunk world where they reclaim their agency via elaborate action set pieces that double as fetch-quests for the items they need to escape their prison(s).
It’s a fun, Inception-style setup with some potentially intriguing ideas about how mental resistance can be just as important as physical resistance. But what’s immediately noticeable is that in all three planes, Babydoll rocks the exact same pigtailed, pouty-lipped look—like Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn meets Playboy Bunny Holly Madison. Though the film literally takes place inside multiple layers of a woman’s psyche, Snyder can’t imagine a visual contrast between who Babydoll is, who she imagines herself to be, and what she could become if she were truly empowered. She’s wearing false eyelashes to the insane asylum and high heels to trench warfare.
That, more than anything, is what makes the film’s purported feminism feel so hollow. It’s not that Snyder doesn’t understand the power of contrast. In fact, he deploys it perfectly with his central villain Blue Jones (an impressively committed Oscar Isaac)—who’s a creepy, possessive orderly in the insane asylum but a dashing, confident, mustached mafioso in the bordello. It’s just that Snyder can’t conceive of his female characters being multi-faceted in the same way. Other than the fact that their outfits get a little sexier and their actions more generically “badass,” Babydoll, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) are pretty much the same no matter which realm they’re in. There’s no moment where they exist outside of the male gaze, even in their own heads, which is the sort of idea that sounds interesting on paper but amounts to nothing onscreen, because ironically depicting the male gaze is too close to endorsing it.
Though Snyder claimed that “Sucker Punch is a fuck you to a lot of people who will watch it,” it’s remarkable how unchallenging most of it is. The five leads are all familiar, palatable female archetypes. Babydoll reclaims her agency by learning to embrace her sexuality. (The go-to move for male directors who want to have it both ways with their female representation.) And Snyder actually goes out of his way to clarify that even in the action world, the girls only ever kill non-human enemies like orcs or steampunk zombies or robots. Even in their fantasies, they can’t hurt abusive men.
In that way, Sucker Punch is basically aping 1970s women-in-prison films, only with less radical politics. Like those films, its desire to tell an empowering feminist story butts up against its desire to exist as softcore porn. Only where that flawed dichotomy was interesting and understandable in the context of a burgeoning indie film movement during the rise of second-wave feminism, it feels far less so in the context of a mainstream blockbuster in 2011.
Of course, this being a Snyder project, he does claim there’s a better, more challenging director’s cut living in his head. The film was subjected to a whole bunch of studio notes to cut it down from an R to a PG-13. And while Sucker Punch got an extended cut with 18 more minutes of material, that’s apparently still not the full extent of what Snyder wanted to say in his “crazy, sort of, commentary on genre films and what is sexuality and why the girls are dressed like that.”
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.
Perhaps because Snyder is so detached from his heroines, the film’s most interesting swing is one of detachment too. By the final act, Amber, Blondie, and Rocket have been killed, leaving just Sweet Pea and Babydoll to try to make their escape. That’s when Babydoll realizes she has to sacrifice herself to save her friend, stepping out of the protagonist role and handing it over to Sweet Pea instead. “This was never my story,” she explains. “It’s yours.” In an ending you can take as literally or as figuratively as you want, Babydoll is then lobotomized while Sweet Pea rides off into a happier future of independence.
It’s a bold bit of cynicism in what could otherwise be a very simplistic girl power story—although the fact that the villainous Blue is then almost immediately arrested so that the more magnanimous Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino) can take over the asylum makes it all feel pretty neat and tidy. (For some reason, Blue’s fellow guards suddenly have a change of heart that abusing women is wrong, damnit!) Still, the Babydoll-to-Sweet-Pea handover at least leaves viewers with something to chew on. In a video from 2013, YouTube essayist Adam Quigley makes an interesting case that the film never depicts the “real world” at all; Babydoll is just a figment of Sweet Pea’s mind trying to process its own lobotomization. But regardless of the specifics, there’s some juice to the meta idea of a female character who’s been denied agency literally empowering another female character to claim her own.
The problem is, that’s just a fragment of an idea rather than a true thesis. As is, the central five characters don’t work as three-dimensional people, they don’t work as imagery, and they don’t really work as satire either, even if Sweet Pea gets a funny moment to call out the “sexy little schoolgirl” shtick the film is deploying. Instead, we’re left with a collection of fun, pulpy action sequences that bring video game fantasies to life: What if we used a Vietnam-era fighter plane to go slay a dragon? What if there were a train robbery in space?
It’s not hard to imagine ways in which Sucker Punch could be a better, more compelling, more intentional movie. But as is, it mostly makes Snyder’s career a helpful primer on the male gaze. One of the “gotchas” people sometimes use to defend half-naked female action heroes is that movies like 300 also dress men in capes, underwear, and little else. But what that argument misses is that when Arnold Schwarzenegger is swinging a sword shirtless or Sylvester Stallone is slinging a gun shirtless or Gerard Butler is slo-mo kicking someone into a pit shirtless, those aren’t sexual fantasies for straight women—they’re power fantasies for straight men.
More so than maybe any other film genre, action is fundamentally built around the male gaze, which is why its depiction of women has been so thorny for so long. On some level, Snyder understands that. The problem is he doesn’t quite understand it enough to actually deconstruct it. Like a lot of male directors, he thinks provocatively empowering his sexual fantasies—having women consent to their lobotomies—is enough.
Next time: Tamara Dobson created her own James Bond in 1973’s Cleopatra Jones.
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