In Defense of Sucker Punch
A commissioned essay for Eric Rosenfield.
I will admit that I am not entirely sure how to go about constructing a defense of Sucker Punch. It seems to me a film that is its own defense . It’s intelligent, well-made, and has a clear and savage point to make – one that was important in 2011, and remains important today. Above all else, I recommend sitting down and watching it; the theatrical cut, specifically. (The extended cut has at least one change that is, to my mind, without doubt for the worse.) Certainly almost everyone I’ve pointed to has come away from the film broadly sharing my perspective on it. And yet there is a persistent vein of criticism against the film – one that seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand almost everything about it, and that is inexplicably common among people I wouldn’t normally expect such misreadings from. One of whom paid me rather a lot of money to set him straight.
All the same, defending the movie seems strange to me, simply because its critics seem to me, as I said, mostly to simply not accurately describe the film in the first place. So instead, perhaps, an explanation of Sucker Punch.
The author is of course dead, but it seems useful to start with Zack Snyder’s own comments on Sucker Punch, if only to shore up my claim that this is not some redemptive reading where I slyly read against the text, but blatantly and straightforwardly what the text is. Indeed, Snyder has talked about the way in which the film was misread, saying:
I honestly feel like a great majority of the time people just missed it — they missed the movie entirely. They missed the point of the movie. Like when I talk to people about “Sucker Punch,” they would say this is a hollow romp with these girls dressed like they’re from Frederick’s of Hollywood — and I’m like, really? You just need to watch the movie more carefully. But if zero percent of people said, it’s not a de-constructivist comment on pop culture, then I might go, you know what? I blew it.
He elaborates on this in several interviews, frequently returning to the question of the characters costumes:
Someone asked me, “Why did you dress the girls like that, in those provocative costumes?” And I said, “Well, think about it for a second. I didn’t dress those girls in the costume. The audience dressed those girls.” And when I say the audience, I mean the audience that comes to the movies. Just like the men who visit a brothel, [they] dress the girls when they go to see these shows as however they want to see them.
And, elsewhere:
…It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us.
