This IS a Sucker Punch review: Empowerment shouldn't be so depressing

Ever since I was a little girl my id has been something of a complete dipshit. When all the other girls were avoiding the proliferation of huge tits-tiny bikinis-big swords books that seemed to flood a quarter of the comic book shelves in the 90s as sexist garbage a small voice in the back of my head would always whisper, "But they're superheroines ... they can't be that bad, right?" This may go a long way toward explaining why I grew up to make a blog called "Chicks Who Kill Things" and not something like "Enlightened Discourses on How to Further the Role of Strong Genre Fiction Heroines in Urban Fantasy, Comic Books and the Culture at Large." While I can always fault this tendency -- it's true my first comic was a Jim Balent Catwoman -- it sometimes leads to good results -- I'm really glad I started reading comics. Yet it sometimes leads to bad results, like an urge to see this movie.

Sucker Punch has gotten terrible, terrible reviews. As I write this it's got a 20 percent fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com. I can't imagine this review is the first of those you've read, but in case it is, the movie follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who has been framed for the murder of her younger sister and imprisoned by her stepfather in an insane asylum, where she's due to be lobotomized in five days. To deal with the pain, Baby Doll mentally escapes into an alternate reality where she's actually in a brothel and is due to be sold to "the high roller" in five days. In this reality the psychiatrist becomes her madam (Carla Gugino) and the head of the hospital the evil, slimy head of the brothel (Oscar Isaac). In the brothel she meets five other girls, Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). Baby Doll is also made to dance, and at the madam's urging when she dances she goes within herself to another fantasy, this one where she's a sailor suit-clad fighter in a world that crosses just about every genre well-loved by nerds. In this fantasy a wise man (Scott Glenn) tells her she and her friends can escape if they find five items: a map, fire, a knife, a key and an unknown item that will require a great sacrifice.

A lot of pixels have been spilled on how much this movie panders to a geek audience and a male geek audience in particular. Let me tell you right there that this is not why this movie is bad. This movie is bad because it has a girl and her friends cutting open samurai giants and steampunk zombie Nazis and a dragon in a castle and robots on a train set to blow up a futuristic city and yet it is totally, completely not fun. Okay, well, it's mostly not fun. When they found the fire and lit the fire in the nerd mashup fantasy world I was like, "Wow, that fire looks really pretty." That may have been the only time I had fun.

There are a couple of reasons the movie falls apart for me. The first is that director Zach Snyder seems to have spent way more time thinking up the story/visuals than the characters. Baby Doll doesn't speak for about 10 to 20 minutes of the movie and is mostly a passive presence, staring at everything with a wide-eyed, lips pursed expression of beaten down, beautiful fear. When she finally starts talking the movie is more concerned with moving the plot forward than the emotions of her or any of the other girls, who are called on to either be fighting badasses or to look scared and cry a lot. Snyder tries with the sister relationship between Rocket and Sweet Pea but that never feels like it gets to the emotional level it should. The action scenes just aren't very good, either. They're usually confused and muddled and shot through a brown filter that makes everything look the same despite the very different locales. Reviewers have compared the action scenes to video games, but that's not really fair. I felt more connection to Heather from Silent Hill 3 (which also has a plot where the character descends to an evil world and then a still eviller world, I guess) than I ever did to Baby Doll.

Even if they were great, though, they'd have an uphill battle in overcoming the nauseating "brothel" plot. Now, I will say this for Snyder, I do get the impression that however flawed the movie is, he and the actresses think it's empowering. Even though I rolled my eyes at shots like Baby Doll's high-heeled "battle" shoes and how every outfit was some sort of sexy black hell, I did feel like the film at least likes its female characters and feels sympathy with them, as opposed to something like Frank Miller's The Spirit movie which has tough female characters and doesn't seem to like them too much but thinks it can fall back on "But they can fight!" if anyone accuses it of sexism. Like the scene between the Comedian and the first Silk Spectre in Watchmen, all of the scenes of men threatening or killing helpless women are appropriately horrible. (Speaking of which, man, I hope Snyder took Gugino out to a lot of fancy but professional dinners where he said "thank you" a lot in between these two movies.) I appreciate that but I don't appreciate how much time we spend in the horrible scenes. Watching this movie I didn't feel empowered at seeing women fight monsters, I felt depressed at seeing women get killed and nearly raped by men.

Also, the even the mashup scenes of empowerment seem somewhat hollow since they're led by a man in all of it. I don't understand what Glenn's was supposed to represent or why he was there, other than to be the "good" man. I have to admit while watching the movie I made up a fake backstory where he's actually Baby Doll's real, dead father. Despite the ending, I still want to believe that bit of fanon.

This is a concept that really needed to either go campy or needed a Tarantino-like touch to work. It needed to either be big and ridiculous like a Russ Meyer or John Waters film so its uglier moments could go down easier, or the characters needed more time to talk and grow inner lives like they do in most Tarantino films -- admittedly I'm thinking more the Tarantino of Kill Bill than the Tarantino of Death Proof, where the talking goes nowhere, but that's another story. At any rate, though, the movie needed to be big and fun, the movie needed to be worthy of a name like Sucker Punch.

I will throw the movie a bone, though. I didn't hate the ending as much as some people did. HUGE SPOILERS BELOW.

At the end of the movie, which comes after all the non-blonde heroines are dead (sigh), Baby Doll realizes in the "brothel" layer of the plot that what she has to sacrifice is herself, and by doing so she'll allow Sweet Pea to live. Her decision has repercussions in the "insane asylum" layer of the plot, where she gets lobotomized. The lobotomy was supposed to be authorized by Gugino's character and when she discovers this she has Isaac's character, who forged her signature, arrested. So the implication isn't that Baby Doll gains freedom through a lobotomy, but that she's sacrificed herself so that not only Sweet Pea will live but that life in the asylum may get better for the inmates. It's not a story of self-empowerment (at one point Baby Doll explicitly says it's not her story), but the story of the empowerment of others. It also has a degree of symmetry, as Baby Doll failed to save her sister at the beginning of the story but manages to save another girl who's lost a sister, as well as many others.

Granted, I would have felt better about this if they'd given Baby Doll a stronger personality from the beginning though, maybe making her a sort of McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest to the other girls. So I can't help but feel depressed at how it all went. Very, very depressed.

No, it's not "Twilight for Boys." Scott Pilgrim and the Bizarre Comparisons.

(Watch out for spoilers!)

Hello blogosphere! I apologize for being away for so long. I got a new job in June and so even the minuscule time I had put aside to build this blog was flushed away. Hopefully things will even out and I'll get back to posting on a semi-regular basis.

So, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie has come and hopefully will still hold on in theaters for another week or two. Personally, if it doesn't, I say "que sera." Some seem to be upset about the low box office, but I'm not. I don't really see why the low box office is such a tragedy, at least for fans. Sure, it's upsetting for everyone who made it, but I don't think there's anything fans have to lose by it. It's not like Serenity, where the low box office meant the fans wouldn't see the story continue (at least not with real actors moving around and stuff - there's always comic books), or with The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, where the low box office meant the later books in the trilogy wouldn't be adapted. The Scott Pilgrim movie adapted the entire comic book series. The story is complete in book and movie form. There's nothing more to wait for. The only thing it could possibly affect is O'Malley's chances to get another work adapted if he makes another work worthy of adaptation, and I think by that point there may be enough X factors that the movie gets made, anyway. (I think Edgar Wright is popular enough not to be affected in the long run by this.)

Anyway, I liked the movie very much. I started reading the comic book series after the first trailer hit, but I had heard good things about it previously. It's a lot of fun. It's a series that takes the standard everyplot of a video game - male character fights baddies to save female character - and overlays it in an indie-comic style romance to awesome effect. Also, despite its plot's origin as a chauvinistic trope, the comic book has awesome female characters.

O'Malley makes a huge step toward mitigating the sexism of the original trope by not having the only female character be "the princess." We see all of Ramona Flowers' (said girl) ex-boyfriends and her ex-girlfriend, who Scott has to fight. Yet Scott also has his own exes to contend with (albeit not in a battling way) in Envy Adams and Lisa Miller, both of whom have unique goals and personalities in addition to their story function to throw Scott's hypocrisies in sharp relief. There's also ex-girlfriend and Scott's bandmember Kim, who is the character in the series I would have wanted to be a few years ago: not at the center of attention, but nevertheless a sarcastic commenter on the action -- the one who has the clear picture of the whole situation. Sister Stacey Pilgrim has a similar role, but nevertheless a different personality and she remains distinct from Kim. The series also doesn't stop from having a lot of minor women characters who don't do much and have more one-note personalities, like Julie Powers, but no more or less than characters like Joseph or Kim's friend who Scott can never remember. At any rate, there are many women "outside" the standard video game plot, many of whom are retained in the movie and ensure Ramona isn't "the girl character, so naturally she must be rescued."

And there are also two main characters in the movie and comic I haven't even discussed: Knives Chau, Scott's most recent ex/sometime stalker, and Roxy Richter, because even in the 90s you usually had at least one female villain in a video game. Both of these female characters are crucial to the plot, and deserving of full blog posts on their own.

Of course, there's also Ramona, who isn't just a princess ... or much of a princess at all. In addition to helping fight some of the evil exes herself, both in the comic and movie, she also has her own emotional journey to go through. Ramona is my favorite character in the series, and the one I, in the end, find I relate to the most. I like how in the comics one of the main points is how she's revealed to not really be a perfect dream girl, but sometimes an ordinary person who has to go to work and has annoying roommates and sometimes an outright bad person who makes hurtful decisions. Scott has to forgive her, but, just as Scott has a bad self to defeat - literalized in the nega-Scott, Ramona has her own past to get over - literalized when she breaks the shackles holding her to Gideon. Her victory is Scott's victory, but also their victory, and something that cements them as a couple. It is, unfortunately, something I believe the movie muddles at the end where Knives fights Gideon with Scott, but some of it at least gets in, and the movie does a good job at bringing out Ramona's good and bad sides.

I hope what I'm getting at is coming through - this is a franchise that isn't perfect, but it has a lot to offer to female geeks in its characters. So it's mystifying, and somewhat frustrating, to see this "Twilight for Boys" comparison to come up.

It's tempting to scream out, "But Scott Pilgrim is good and Twilight is not!" but these things are, of course, relative, and that's not helpful. It's not even why the comparison irritates me.

It irritates me because even if you go by the basest, broadest stereotypes of what male and female readers like in comics, Scott Pilgrim is for boys AND girls.

Before any Twilight fans jump on me for this (any more than they would have for saying the series is bad), I just want to say that yes, I know Twilight has some male fans - my brother likes the series far more than I ever will (and yes, he recognizes the problematic elements of the series). Yet, going by broad stereotypes, most males won't read a heavily romance-based story with a female protagonist where the men do most of their fighting off-stage.

On the other hand, let's look at the broad stereotypes of female comic geeks. First, most girl geeks read manga. Hey, Scott Pilgrim is in a manga-sized format! Most girls like romance. Scott Pilgrim is about romance! Girls like pretty clothes. O'Malley said in an interview with the now-defunct Comics Foundry that he puts a lot of care into how his female characters dress, and most of them wear hip, trendy clothes that usually aren't all about showing skin. Girls' first introduction to anime was usually Sailor Moon. Scott Pilgrim has a reference to Sailor Moon!

Honestly, there was a reason that when Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass first got his blank-slate girlfriend into comics he did it with Scott Pilgrim. It's the type of comic - like Sandman or Blankets or Strangers in Paradise or any other popular comic without superheroes - that is traditionally considered girlfriend-bait. This status is so well known it was used in a movie that, while I disliked it, had a larger box office than Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the reference to it was intended to send a specific message to its adolescent audience: "girls will like this comic."

So why don't the book's critics get that? Older critics can be excused from not knowing the intricacies of fandom but younger, geekier critics have no excuse. It's frustrating, and I feel like it's another sign of how female members of fandom are often unacknowledged by the mainstream at large. Even something that has all the stereotypical signs of being ours is not any longer.

Yet now that I've covered the "for Boys" aspect, it's time to go back to the "Twilight" aspect. I've talked about this a bit with MadMarvelGirl on Twitter and, yes, I can see it in the broadest sense. There's a love triangle at the center with one character who the protagonist perceives as perfect and another, younger character who the protagonist will never be in love with but doesn't want to hurt their feelings. There's wish fulfillment involved. It may be hard to see what the perceived "perfect" character sees in the rather ordinary protagonist.

Yet I still find these comparisons rather superficial, and more based in the fact that we as a culture have Twilight on our minds than anything else. It's like how fanfic writers somehow seem to draw connections between their favorite character on a television show and the latest Top 40 hit. The world gets colored by our obsessions, and whether we like or hate it we're obsessed with Twilight as a culture.

I do not think the biggest criticisms of the Twilight series apply to Scott Pilgrim at all, anyway. Twilight has been criticized for not being conscious of its genre ("Stephanie Meyer hasn't read Dracula! The vampires sparkle!"), whereas O'Malley is a consumer of comic books, manga and video games and peppers his work with references. Twilight has been accused of not treating the appalling actions of its characters as abusive or controlling and rather as "just fine" or not the big deal that they should be, whereas Scott's dating of a high schooler is criticized by all his friends and most of the characters have to deal with the consequences of their poor actions. Twilight usually fades out before any action scene but Scott Pilgrim revels in the action scenes and usually expends most of the creativity on them. Plus, both stories deal with very different types of inner angst - Twilight is about the rush of first teenage love whereas most of Scott Pilgrim's early twentysomething characters have all been burned by romance in some way, and all the characters in the triangle - Scott, Ramona and Knives - reach the end of their journey when they earn self-respect. Twilight's characters win when they find the only one for them - their victories are contingent on another person and Scott Pilgrim's characters' victories are contingent on themselves.

So to critics from a girl geek fan: Scott Pilgrim is not Twilight, and Scott Pilgrim is for us, too. Although that doesn't mean all girls like Scott Pilgrim ... or Twilight, for that matter.