Briefly Noted: Sucker Punch
I'd read inlovewithnight's posts about Sucker Punch when it came out, and when I asked her to elaborate on her comment about it not being for everyone, she said, in part, that "the message of the movie was about how you recover and reclaim your sense of selfhood in the midst of rape culture and misogynist culture," so I was watching it with that aspect in mind. I was also only sort of watching it for a lot of the action sequences because the video game style wasn't my thing. I think the combination of that lens and the half-attention is what made me jerk my head up and say, "Oh," when Babydoll tells Sweet Pea, "This was never my story, it's yours." That's a huge shift in what I thought the movie was about. I went and skimmed through the posts of feminist fangirl commentary inlovewithnight linked to, and I didn't see anyone else saying what I noticed, particularly in that moment and in Babydoll's realization that she's the fifth thing: you can't do it alone. There is absolutely a women supporting women theme that runs through the movie. Even Dr. Gorski is in on that in the only way she sees possible: she tells Blue, "I teach them to survive you," and it's heavily implied that she's the one who calls the cops when she finds out about the extent to which Blue is selling out girls (or, arguably, when she finds out that Blue is forging her signature and putting her on the hook for something she doesn't want to be responsible for). The other point I found interesting in some of those posts is that there's some debate about the deaths, namely whether or not the deaths - or even Blondie, Amber, and Rocket themselves - were real in the mental hospital world. I read them, particularly in the context of Rocket's first encounter with the cook, as symbolic of rapes that take place in the mental hospital and take those women out of the escape plan. Although now that I'm writing this, it occurs to me that it's probably more likely that the mental hospital analog to deaths within the action and brothel sequences are lobotomies.