seriously, suckerpunch 4ever.

[recommendation]

you know what i just realized? there's no love story in suckerpunch. at no point is any woman in the movie in love with any man in the movie. there isnt some 'love conquers all!' or 'love validates who you are' storyline. it was strictly men as villains, women as saviours. and, awesomely, they were self-saviours and sister-saviours. it was all

Comments

[recommendation]

i totally hear you. i can def see it that way. i read it, not as an excuse for brothel antics, but rather, as Babydoll's view of what the asylum was like. you can read into the end that maybe the girls are being abused by the orderlies, with Blue as the ring leader, so the brothel stuff was all just a stylized (read: maybe less bleak?) way to 'talk' about that without revealing it.

i kind of hate that POV of it, so i like to think of it more like it was just the way Babydoll's mind went. maybe she could think of only 1 place WORSE than an asylum: sex slavery. and if you consider the layered worlds, theres a level of control the girls had in the brothel world; think about sweatpea freaking out about the stage show, and then passing off Babydoll's tour to Rocket. she had the ability to say no in that moment. she was being told to do something, but she got to say no because her opinion had some semblance of weight to Blue.

a feminist reading leads me to consider the brothel world as a vision of the real world. women's bodies are commodities. thats what street harassment is all about; men can see us just going about our day, and they undress us. we are performing for them even when we're not. we dont have control over that. being a woman means that you are a sexual object, and thats a hard, harsh world to exist in.

so putting it into a brothel world, an escape from the real world that also needs to be escaped from, is kind of a nice allegory for real life for (some) women. in the asylum, there was no control; in the brothel world, there was some control; and in the fantasy world, there was total control. this mimics how i feel, and maybe how some others feel, especially young girls. they have the real world, their peer groups, and then their real selves. you can easily conflate each of those with each of the worlds in SPunch.

this may not have been snyders intention (though it totally could have been... his wife was heavily involved in the film's process, as a producer and as a collaborator, so its possible that if snyder didnt put that in, maybe she did), but i think thats irrelevant. we read things how we read them, and we internalize whatever that is. but whether you go positive or negative is up to the individual.

but yeah, the story def needed a lot of work. it was kind of a puddle.

[recommendation]

oh, yeah, totally. mega agree.