Sucker Punch

Zach Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch is that amazingly rare movie which dares to confront one of the great unspoken truths about Hollywood movie-going: the sheer degree to which we often hate the hero-protagonists we’re presented with. Even in an agreeably well-done Hollywood spectacle piece, once you see your hero dashing unscathed through one hail of gunfire after another, or winning yet another six-on-one meelee with nary a scratch, it becomes a natural point of human perversity to start wanting to see those outcomes reversed. And, given the lamentably high number of Hollywood movies that give us hero-protagonists who are lunkheaded non-entities or outright hateful assholes – playing an unfairly rigged game against villains who are often far more sensible and/or sympathetic – this wish to see them snuffed out gains immeasurably more strength.

The number of Hollywood movies that recognize and play to this desire, however, is surprisingly slight – and the number that can actually pull it off once set upon this course is even leaner still. A case in point is Joe Dante’s film Small Soldiers (1998), an unofficial satire on Toy Story which gives us some standard-issue canon-fodder monsters – the “Gorgonites” – to identify with, against the most insufferable set of G.I. Joe-style toy soldiers ever. The premise is brilliantly audacious, but Dante bungles the execution inexcusably with his apparent belief that he needs to win his audience’s sympathies over to the Gorgonites. He thus wastes endless amounts of narrative time on explanations and pathos, when in reality we were with him from the start, and impatient for the Gorgonites to start kicking some soldier ass.

With Sucker Punch, Snyder transcends all this to a degree that astonished me the first time I saw it. The first and most crucial reason for this is the brilliant Decadence of its gender politics. The film opens with a creepy-looking man attempting to molest his stepdaughters after their mother has passed away. Displaying spirit and spunk, our heroine (played by Emily Browning from A Serious of Unfortunate Events) locks herself in a room with a window she can climb out of, and them re-enters the house to threaten him with his own gun, only for him to disarm her and have her locked away in an asylum, where she escapes into a fantasy world which gives her strength. Thus far, the film probably sounds like an even worse version of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, but whereas that film seemingly had no self-consciousness about what it was doing, Sucker Punch is only using this narrative set-up in order to get us into the fantasy world, which offers us a nice, Decadent rejoinder to Jackson’s creepy ideas about “innocence.”

Unlike Jackson’s clichéd “Heaven,” Browning’s heroine’s fantasy world takes us to an upscale private bordello peopled with gorgeous teenage girls – each one of whom is the private moll to some vice-ridden local plutocrat – and run by a pimp named Blue, played by Oscar Isaac in an even bitchier mode than as King Richard in Robin Hood. In my last post I complained about the misandry that seems to pervade so much of American animated filmmaking, presumably out of some inane sense that the masculine ideals of self-wilfulness and decisive action are not “wholesome” ones to inculcate children with. Sucker Punch is just as misandrist as your average 90s animated film, but from a diametrically opposed position. Here, all the male characters seem to have passed through masculinity and come out the other side – into realms of sleaziness, calculation, gluttony, desiccation, etc. in which there’s no room left for conventional manhood. As a result, those roles fall to the girls.

In addition to our heroine – now nicknamed “Babydoll” – the movie introduces us to four of the girls from the brothel, of whom only two take on real narrative importance: the flighty “Rocket,” who casually explains that “the club’s a front for his business – guns, gambling, medications, special favours”; and her commanding older sister “Sweetpea,” who as the star of the place’s strip show, demands “can I have something a little more commercial here?” -- a deliciously ironic line to be heard in a Hollywood spectacle like this. The other two are “Amber,” the Asian girl vaguely coded as the good-hearted one who feels sorry for waifs; and “Blondie,” the sardonic brunette who tells Amber that “no one felt sorry for you” when she arrived. All of them see Babydoll as too simperingly innocent to develop an arousing dance routine like she’s supposed to, but she then surprises them all by doing a brilliant one heavy on the gyrating and moaning.

We never get to see it, however, because whenever she starts doing it, the film cuts away to the digital mega-spectacle of one of four vast fantasy worlds, and it's here that Sucker Punch’s real interest begins. The first of these sequences has Babydoll nervously entering a dojo, wherein she is set upon by three giant samurai. They not only have naginata, the blades of which are the length of her entire body, but they also blast away at her with gigantic gattling guns. In a sequence of dazzling video-game-style aesthetics, Babydoll suddenly manifests limitless agility, speed, and resilience, and intuitively uses a katana and a handgun to hit each of the colossi at their one weak point. They collapse and immolate into pure white light. Coming 22 minutes into the film, it’s a bafflingly unexpected development, and leaves one with the sense that things can go anywhere henceforth.

The setting of the second fantasy sequence is modelled on a World War I battlefield, but pumped up to the outlandish scale and intensity of a Star Wars battle. The sky is filled with more biplanes and zeppelins than were probably deployed along the entire Western Front at any one time, and the location has been adjusted so that Chartres cathedral happens to be right in the line of fire – the trenches running right up to the front steps, and its famous flying buttresses collapsing beneath the shockwaves of all the exploding shells. The effect of seeing our five heroines strutting through this setting in slow-motion – dressed in fetishistic leather and sluttish makeup, as opposed to the battered khaki-clad troops on either side of them – is one of the film’s most Decadent moments: the complete divorce from any sense of human commonality on the characters’ part, and any sense of historical restraint on Snyder’s.

The ensuing action sequence is everything one would expect from Hollywood at its best – intense choreography, hyperkinetic editing, and brilliantly maintained suspense. This last is particularly interesting, given that one knows for a fact that none of the heroines are going to get it, just as one knows equally well that none of the German troops have a chance. Hence, one supposes, all of the moments when one of the girls seems momentarily overmatched, pinned down, surrounded, or otherwise threatened, are just formal exercises – there do demonstrate how impressively they can be done, rather than for the sake of any narrative uncertainty about their upshot. We’re told, moreover, that the German soldiers the girls are facing are in fact a kind of steampunk stormtrooper – corpseswhich have been made to walk again through steam power and precision gear-works. And it’s here that the film’s most intriguing aspect rears its head. Many Hollywood spectacles have a deeply problematic politics of empathy, to put it mildly. We’re totally inured to seeing hundreds of  people die horrifyingly, provided they’re anonymous enough, but routinely invited to be terrified and anguished if one hair on the hero’s best friend’s head is touched. And don’t even get one started on the trope of the cute child or dog… Sucker Punch, with the samurai automata and now these steam-troopers, is doing something different. The risk of any loss of life is now precisely zero on both sides, so empathy or concern of any sort doesn’t even enter into the equation. This, in fact, to be the film’s keynote henceforth.

The third sequence takes up the politics of empathy again, but now goes to a very different place with them. This sequence hinges on our three main heroines being dropped from a World War II bomber into the courtyard of a besieged castle, and having to descend into the bowels of the place to slit a baby dragon’s throat, in order to extract the two fire-crystals inside. All goes well, until they are surprised by the baby’s mother, who is understandably enraged. Chasing them, she emerges from the castle blasting fire, causing total mayhem among the besieging forces, before taking flight to chase the girls’ drop plane – piloted by the two subsidiary heroines “Amber” and “Blondie.”

Seeing Blondie fire one of the plane’s machine guns at the dragon, crying “Take that you ugly mother!” seems like exactly the sort of hateful moment one would expect from one of the worse kind of Hollywood designated-heroes. The previous business with the baby dragon was an appallingly callous moment on the heroines’ part, and one’s sympathy is now frankly with the dragon – a reading one doesn’t quite expect to see borne out by the movie. Except that, a moment later, Blondie exclaims that she’s lost the dragon behind one of the castle’s towers – only for it to suddenly emerge and chomp down on the plane’s gun-turret tail, sending it spiralling away downward. The sequence still obligatorily ends with Babydoll skewering the dragon in the head with her katana, but with that one chomp, one suddenly has the sense that Sucker Punch may yet be going somewhere that will surprise you.

This is then borne out in the fourth fantasy sequence. This one takes us into the realm of science fiction. We find ourselves on a terraformed Titan, beneath a yellowy-beige sky, above which Saturn and its glorious rings almost entirely fill the horizon. We’re above a futuristic bullet train, which has been rigged by terrorists with a bomb, set to explode when the train reaches the futuristic megalopolis on the horizon. The girls must fight their way through the innumerable robot guards stationed throughout the train in order to deactivate and extract the bomb. After the opening rounds of the melee play out Matrix-style – with the girls’ bullets and blades shredding the robots in slow-motion – however, the film cuts back to its second level of reality, in the brothel, where the escape plan goes wrong and Rocket gets stabbed. Cutting back into the fantasy sequence, the tide abruptly turns, and Babydoll is sent sprawling into some cargo crates in equally tortuous detail. Sweetpea’s shotgun is smashed out of her hands similarly emphatically, and Rocket takes an incapacitating punch to the face in a positively fetishistic slo-mo close-up. In short order, one of the fallen robots resurges long enough to reactivate the bomb, and their mission ends in failure, with Rocket trapped on the train to be blown to atoms along with the city (Snyder paying homage to his own work in Watchmen). The drama of invincibility has mutated into that of martyrdom in only a few moments.

After this, the film returns to the brothel-reality, with Blue shooting Amber and Blondie in the head, and Babydoll and Sweetpea having to make a desperate break for it on their own. And it’s the one huge, defining disappointment of Sucker Punch that this climax plays out wholly in the brothel-reality rather than in a fifth fantasy sequence that brings the remaining girls to total apocalypse. The film’s ultimate conclusion is so unexpected that it deserves a mega-spectacle analogue like what we’ve seen so far: it turns out to be Sweetpea that gets out and Babydoll that stays behind to sacrifice herself. This plays out via a rapid montage through three different layers of reality, in the course of which she has inflicted upon herself two of the same fates – being shot in the head point-blank, and having her brain skewered – which she’s dealt out so cavalierly throughout the preceding sequences. There’s a satisfaction to this that, as I said, one is very rarely afforded in Hollywood movies. In most, when you are presented with a meek, blushing, young heroine who insists that we must all work together to escape from the clutches of our nefarious captors; another young girl who believes in her right away; and an older girl who attempts to kibosh her idealism with phrases such as “too risky” and “what makes you so special?” then it’s a no-brainer to guess which two are going to survive until the end. The fact that Snyder has flouted that logic, even more than all the amazing digital fantasy spectacles on offer, is what makes Sucker Punch so amazingly revolutionary a film, and demonstrates once again that being mainstream entertainment is no excuse for infantilism.

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

George Orwell once wrote of H.G. Wells that “the energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions – racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war – which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.”

Here, Orwell is almost uncannily describing a great deal of North America’s animation output over the years. The emotions he mentions, which rest basically on the atavistic worship of strength and the thrill of feeling oneself on the winning side, have been resolutely inadmissible into the Disney paradigm that shapes so much of what our culture feels is acceptable and/or appropriate for children. Any figure that seems to embody such a mindset is invariably caricatured by animated films’ narratives as a mean, stupid bully to be worsted at the end, or a delusionally blustering idiot, or a crusty and unfeeling survivalist who will realize the error of his ways, or a damaged/misguided figure who will repent and be forgiven, or simply the “evil” villain. The putative “hero,” on the other hand, always has to be some sort of muscular Christianity figure, for whom right makes might, and somehow seems to possess the strength and courage to win through at the end without really wanting or valuing the fact. Or the narrative must simply be arranged so that other forces are at work which will ensure the victory of the good without much egregious action from our hero/ine at all, and the implication will simply be that it was their purity or heart and spotlessness of soul that brought all the stars into alignment. It’s probably not a coincidence that a lot of animated films have either female protagonists, or strong heroines juxtaposed with somewhat de-masculinized or irresolute heroes. Even beyond the obvious princess canon at Disney, there’s the decades-long Secret of NIMH/Last Unicorn/Fern Gully/Once Upon a Forest/Thumbelina/Anastasia/Quest for Camelot/The King and I/Titan A.E. history to prove the point. This indicates a general sense that any whiff of decisive masculine action will bring the film into the territory of the “atavistic emotions that actually shape the world,” which we of course know children are innocent of and must be protected from.

All this has the very obvious strike against it that it runs totally against human nature, and the perversely pre-moral nature of young children most of all. But animated films are made for children, not by them, and the adults that make these films must balance their concern over what they think children will like with what they think is appropriate for children, and what the parents required to take the said children to these films will think themselves. All this, however, is rooted in the belief that “animation = for children,” and must thus reflect the most bigoted idea of what is appropriate for children. It requires only a moment’s thought to realize that this belief is arbitrary – in fact quite absurd – but it has nonetheless taken invincible root in much of the West, and movie studios, accountable to the stockholders of their corporate oligopolies, have to work with that fact.

Thus, the crucial fact that DreamWorks Animation was only taken public as a company on October 27^th, 2004. Before that, it was simply a part of DreamWorks SKG – a private company owned by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, incorporated with their own money, and subject to no interests but their own. Thus, any kind of animated movie they wanted could be produced there wholly at their own discretion. 2002’s Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, was one of the results.

DreamWorks’s inaugural animated film, The Prince of Egypt – an epic re-telling of the Book of Exodus – showed that Katzenberg had not yet fully shaken off the habits acquired as head of animation production at Disney, where he was the architect of the studio’s Little Mermaid/Beauty and the Beast/Aladdin/Lion King renaissance. Accordingly, The Prince of Egypt was still structured around periodic musical set pieces where the characters spontaneously break into song, and the overall tone of the film was tainted with an appalling moral falsity. The first sequences shove lurid images of toiling and anguishing slaves in our faces, as if just to make sure we get the point that this is bad. Zipporah’s characterization as an obnoxious, violent, loudmouth is supposed to represent some sort of pop feminism, and so she’s never contradicted or punished by the film. Aaron and Miriam’s incredibly annoying and milksop-ish (respectively) characterizations  are likewise supposed to be funny and endearing. Whereas Pharaoh – both Patrick Stewart’s Seti and Ralph Fiennes’s Rameses – seem like maturely dignified figures, well-apportioned to the kingly exercise of power and force. We are thus supposed to hiss and boo. The Prince of Egypt was a visual masterpiece, no doubt, but its underlying sensibilities were as appalling as always.

Coming four years after The Prince of Egypt, with the moderately-recalibrated The Road to El Dorado in between, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron – a revisionist western about a wild mustang named “Spirit” who is captured by the US cavalry, and forced to go on an odyssey through the human world – is that astonishing film that reflects filmmakers actually making the radical 180° turn needed. Properly read, the film constitutes an almost point-for-point rebuttal of the paradigm of kiddie animation described above. First and foremost, Spirit is a film that jettisons the feminized passivity of other animated films, and glories in the masculine values of strength, courage and indomitability of spirit. Captivity is not something to be bemoaned and waited for rescue from, but something from which to exert all your energies to escape. The chance to toss your opponents around like rag dolls is not something to be avoided, or done only regretfully out of necessity, but to be seized with full sadistic enjoyment. And the conscious drive necessary for great feats is – rather than an antisocial element needing to be corrected – ultimately the only way of establishing mutual respect between adversaries. The dispensing with the usual childish clichés reaches such a point, in fact, that Spirit is probably nigh-unique in Hollywood history in that when the hero shouts (or neighs the equivalent of) “Get away! Leave me!” the other character is sensible enough to actually do so.

Although the film does not eschew anthropomorphism of animals, it has the remarkable courage to forgo the talking animals trope of so many animated films, and simply convey our equine hero’s emotions through facial expressions and body language, supplemented by a spare voice-over track by Matt Damon giving us Spirit’s inner monologue when absolutely necessary. The film also does not shy away from relying on horse-speak at times. A sample “dialogue” scene, I kid you not, plays out thus…

-- nickers

-- snorting

-- nickers

-- nickering

-- whinnies

-- chomp

-- neighs warningly

-- nickers determinedly

The refusal of talking-animals anthropomorphism is for the very good reason that our hero is characterized from the very first as an über-equus, whose strength, speed and fortitude have made him undisputed leader of the herd, and will enable him to survive trials which would break a lesser horse. Any suggestion that this is really just some human in animal’s clothing, as in Wind in the Willows or a Beatrix Potter novel, would destroy the film completely. We absolutely need to feel Spirit’s full-on straining, snorting, virile stallion aspect for the film to work.

Interestingly, because Spirit has broken with most animated filmmaking before it and decided to ennoble masculinity, it also ends up able to respect the feminine principle that much more. The movie does, alas, still incorporate some of the ersatz pop feminist aspect where it’s cute “girl power” for the heroine to smugly denigrate and humiliate the hero, but here it’s both truncated, contradicted, and karmically punished by the narrative. A great improvement. Beyond this, however, the film is striking in that the hero’s birth isn’t signified by the sort of loving pieta scene familiar from Bambi and The Lion King. Here, we actually see Spirit’s mother foaling, in full sweaty maternal pain, after which we see him take his first suck at her teat. The father is nowhere to be seen in this scene, or the film’s whole cosmogony. We are introduced to the adult Spirit as leader of the herd, which one throw-away line of narration alludes to his father having been before him, but nothing more is ever made of this. A depressing number of animated films adopt a Catholic-style aesthetic of pater filial piety in which the father may be tyrannical and wrong, but is still the unanswerable temporal power, while the mother is sanctified out of all earthly relevance. Spirit rejects this, and makes the mother a figure of full temporal authority – apparently Spirit’s deputy leader while he’s around, and his replacement in his absence.

No animated film that I can think of has ever gone as far as Spirit in trying to be simply an epic film, which just happens to be realized through animation. Ultimately though, Katzenberg & Co. remained aware that they were still subject to the preconceptions about animation held by North American audiences, and still had the modulate things somewhat. As with the Disney films of yesteryear, Spirit makes you do some interpretive work to get to its full thematic import, having cloaked this in an aesthetic that initially seems diametrically opposed. But whereas with Disney back in the early 1940s it was simply a thuggishly infantile and parochial moral sensibility, here in 2002 it’s a pop aesthetic that seems aimed squarely at twelve-year old girls. After that remarkable foaling scene, the next few scenes are devoted to Spirit back when he was an impossibly cute little colt, doing things like neighing earnestly at a kindly and indulgent herd of buffalo, or trotting along with exaggerated dignity and nonchalance after getting his tongue stuck to a huge icicle, which he now has to carry around in his mouth. On top of all this, there’s a Bryan Adams soundtrack that even wholly sympathetic viewers like myself must admit doesn’t add all that much to the proceedings. And ultimately, there are a number of images (see above left) which, although brilliantly executed in terms of visual density and detail, are perhaps just the slightest bit too “awww, how gorgeous!” in their affect.

 

The film’s contradictions are perhaps best exemplified in a third-act sequence where Spirit is press-ganged into a team of horses which are being made to haul a locomotive over a mountain which the Pacific Railroad is tunneling under. Upon reaching the crest of the hill, and seeing the vista beyond, there’s a dramatic moment where Spirit finally understands that the humans are trying to extend their dominion into “his homeland” – a realization that reawakens all of his inner reserves of strength and courage. Pretending to fall down dead from overwork, he’s taken out of his harness, at which point he resurges and thunderously gallops back to the prow of the locomotive. Rearing up and drawing upon all his super-equine strength, he smashes his hooves down full force on the couplings to the horse teams, and staves them in. The other horses are free, and the locomotive begins to slide back down the mountain, gathering momentum as it does, finally smashing into the depot at the bottom of the hill, causing a ferocious explosion which starts a violent inferno, the firestorm quickly engulfing the railway construction yard and spreading to the treeline, as Spirit gallops furiously away from it. And behind him, at the edges of the frame, you can see that the DreamWorks animators have cannily made sure that we notice that all the cute squirrels and rabbits and deer in the forest are getting away too.

This sort of thing notwithstanding however, Spirit is an amazing intervention in animated filmmaking. It features a fetishism of the phrase “my homeland,” a Braveheart-worthy emphasis on “freedom,” and a running visual motif of aligning Spirit with a soaring eagle – purged here of its connotations of full-on military nationalism and imperialism, but still symbolizing his strength and indomitability. A moment in the film’s denouement has a Lakota brave he’s befriended reveal the etymology of the movie’s title – by giving him the tribal name “Spirit-Who-Could-Not-Be-Broken.”