On the Feminism of Sucker Punch

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I have a new article over at Alternate Takes about the much maligned and misunderstood Sucker Punch. I think that there have been few more fascinating Hollywood blockbusters, so I was very pleased to be able to delve into this movie - both its strategies, and its reception. An extract from the piece:

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Sucker Punch seems to me to be one of the most widely misunderstood films of recent years. By this I don’t just mean that it’s underrated - though in my opinion it is also that. I mean that an alarming number of commentators (i.e.: almost all) somehow seem to have failed to grasp its basic aims, and thus haven’t been able to assess it appropriately.

Other than the many complaints about the lack of narrative tension and rounded characters (neither of which, as I suggested in my short review, need necessarily be seen as significant problems), the main objections to the film have, of course, tended to be made on the grounds of its sexual politics. I want to address this matter head-on, looking at some recurring complaints about the movie’s approach to gender, and argue that most of them stem from a fundamental misperception of what the film is trying to do. I should also say that I’m certainly not going to argue that the film is unimpeachable - only that it’s far more interesting than it has usually been given credit for. My point is essentially that, before we call a film a failure, we first need at least to be sure what exactly it is failing at.

The thing that seems to drive people crazy about Sucker Punch is that it appears to offer “faux feminism” but in fact constitutes a “fantasia of misogyny”. Yet I think that the film, far from offering something like lipstick feminism, does in fact genuinely strive to be a rather forceful and angry feminist film, and comes closer to earning the title than most have acknowledged. The thing is: its attempts at feminism aren’t to be found in the areas where people have generally been looking. Stated briefly, this film is primarily about itself - that is, it’s about the problems involved in trying to find positive images for women within the kind of popular culture which it itself embodies. Of course, given that this strategy naturally involves irony and flirting with having-your-cake-and-eating-it, this is a difficult and dangerous game to play - and one that Sucker Punch is perhaps only half-successful in. But it is frankly bizarre that so few people seem to have noticed that such a game is even afoot - preferring to say that the movie’s problems stem from stupidity rather than over-cleverness (which would be closer to the mark). But this is to get ahead of ourselves...
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Read the rest of the article here. Hope you enjoy!
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Twilight: New Moon and the joys of Face Punch

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There are many potentially interesting things to be said about New Moon and the staggeringly successful vampire-romance saga Twilight more generally. For instance: have we ever seen a romance movie (let alone a romance movie series) more unwaveringly committed to showing a woman who wants so badly to simply jump someone’s bones? Say what you will about the anti-feminist message seemingly inbuilt into Bella’s relentless hero-worship of her lover Edward (and I would argue that last year’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife was far more guilty in this regard: she waits lovingly at home while he tours across the months and years? This is the old settling/wandering, passive/active, division of gender roles written offensively large)... The combination of Twilight’s central premise (Edward’s inability to let himself become too passionate with Bella for fear of killing her) and Kristen Stewart’s absurdly lustful performance style (seldom has an actress bitten her bottom lip more licentiously, nor more frequently) have meant that these films offer images of unremitting (though frustrated) female sexual desire the likes of which are very uncommon in contemporary Hollywood cinema. We can, and should, obviously debate the films’ sexual politics beyond this structuring principle, but this fact alone makes the saga at the very least interesting, and surely goes a long way towards explaining its popularity with a female audience so starved for cinematic depictions of what happens ‘when the woman looks’.

This isn’t what I want to talk about here, however, because – aside from areas of interest like this – what New Moon also happens to contain is something that I simply cannot let pass without comment: perhaps one of the most bizarre, hilarious, and spectacularly ill-judged incarnations of the convention of the film-within-a-film ever committed to celluloid.

Asking what kinds of films exist within the world of a film is often an intriguing way into matters of how a movie views itself and how it is asking to be viewed by us. For example: when, in a horror film, events start happening that clearly resemble other horror films (say, teenagers being killed one by one, or bodies showing up with mysterious bite marks on their necks), one question will immediately be raised: are the characters in this film’s world familiar with horror movies? If they aren’t, then this clearly separates them and their world unambiguously from ours, which in turn encourages us to view them in a different way than we would characters who express incredulity at finding themselves in situations they’ve previously only encountered in fiction. Of course, there aren’t hard-and-fast rules governing this, and a film can exploit cinematic awareness in more or less self-conscious ways. The werewolf movie Ginger Snaps, for instance, briskly acknowledges then dispenses with its character’s film knowledge: Brigitte discovers the popular lore regarding werewolves doesn’t apply to her sister’s lycanthropy, leading her to “forget the Hollywood rules,” and move on to finding different solutions. A film like Scream, on the other hand, repeatedly uses its characters’ knowledge of slasher films in order to first announce, and then either enact or buck, the clichés of its genre – all the time asking us to recognize that this is precisely what it is doing.

New Moon does something very different and very, very strange with the idea of the film-within-a-film. About a third of the way into the movie we reach a scene in the school cafeteria that sees Bella rejoin her group of friends after the period of self-imposed isolation that followed her latest abandonment by her true love, Edward. Happy to see her again, Bella’s friend Mike (who has always very clearly had a crush on her) asks if she would like to go to the cinema with him. “We could check out, um, Love Spelled Backwards is Love,” he offers, “You know, it’s a dumb title, but… It’s a romantic comedy – it’s supposed to be good…” “No – no romance,” says Bella, who wants nothing less than to be reminded about her own romantic heartbreak. “How about Face… Punch?” she asks, “you heard of that?” “Well, that’s an action movie,” responds Mike. “Yeah, it’s perfect – guns, adrenaline: it’s my thing…”

So, let us rewind and pause for a minute. Face Punch. Just let the gloriousness of this made-up title roll around in your head… Face Punch.

Now turning to the rest of her friends at the table, Bella invites them along to what she obviously wants to become less a date than a movie night. “How about it – do you guys want to go see… Face Punch?" The only other boy at the table, Eric, responds positively: “Oh, Face Punch – yeah!” he exclaims enthusiastically, “We were supposed to go see that, you remember?” he asks Mike, “The trailer’s all like ‘pow, pow,’… punch faces…”

In the next scene, Mike stands awkwardly outside the cinema next to Jacob, the most recent dark and mysterious man to make romantic demands of Bella; sexual rivalry is unmistakably in the air. “So… Face Punch,” Jacob says, somewhat derisively, “You like action movies?” “Not really,” replies Mike. “I heard it sucks – bad,” offers Jacob.

Let’s mull over this title again, which the characters insist on continually repeating: this film is called Face Punch.

In the cinema, the characters are now watching the movie. We hear the following dialogue intoned in voices that can only be described as sub-sub-sub-Sylvester Stallone:

Voice 1: Put your gun down!

Voice 2: Put YOUR gun down, or I’m gonna blow your frickin head off!

Voice 3: BOTH of you put BOTH of your guns down or I’m gonna blow BOTH of your frickin’ heads off!

Voice 1: Alright, forget it – let’s DO THIS!

(Sounds of gunshots and explosions fill the cinema.)


Face Punch. This is a truly, truly strange use of the convention of the film-within-a-film. Clearly, this imagined film (and Love Spelled Backwards is Love) is intended as a satirical side-swipe at the crassness of contemporary Hollywood. But what on God’s green earth, you might ask, is such satire doing – and doing so suddenly – in a film like New Moon? In what kind of a film world might films with titles like these exist?

In Film as Film, V. F. Perkins rightly says that a film’s credibility relies upon “the inner consistency of the created world”:

In a context where people are known to burst into song on the tops of trolley-buses, with the full support of invisible orchestras, or sprint down hillsides actively pursued by bouncing boulders, or drag wild leopards up the steps of Connecticut jails (and I would be the last to suggest they cease exhibiting such fine accomplishments), the concept of credibility needs careful definition. As an illusion-spinning medium, film is not bound by the familiar, or the probable, but only by the conceivable. All that matters is to preserve the illusion.

He develops his point with reference to Hitchcock's The Birds:

It is important that we avoid confusing credibility with authenticity... We can make no difficulty about the fact that the feathered kingdom is seen to declare war on humanity. That is given. But it is also given that the attackers are ordinary, familiar birds. Nothing in our experience or in the film's premises permits them to develop intermittent outlines of luminous blue as they swoop, or to propel themselves in a manner that defies the observable laws of winged flight.

In short, as Perkins says, “the created world must obey its own logic”. The title Face Punch punctures the inner consistency of New Moon so fantastically oddly because it flies inelegantly, but gloriously, in the face of its world’s logic in a similar manner to Hitchcock's birds. In the context of the film’s created world, the existence of werewolves is entirely acceptable. The existence of a film called Face Punch is not.

This is because, other than its mythical creatures, there is little to separate New Moon’s universe from ours: in fact, the very normalcy of everyday life is constantly stressed in order to highlight how exceptional and exciting Bella’s initiation into the supernatural realm is (and, it is worth saying, the actors’ performances also feel more consciously ‘naturalistic’ here than in the original Twilight). As such, this world frankly just does not seem at all as if it is one in which a person could write, many other people could make, and many more still could go to see, a film with the title Face Punch. This title is so ridiculous as to absolutely demand a ridiculous reality.

For it to be credible, the world of New Moon would probably need to resemble something like the hilariously dumbed-down future U.S. imagined by Mike Judge’s satire Idiocracy, in which big Oscar contenders have names like Ass, and the number one television show is called Ow! My Balls! Both Idiocracy’s world (an exaggeratedly stupid future) and its genre (absurdist satire) admit these kinds of jokes with ease; those of New Moon – a relatively naturalistic present day placed in the context of a moody teen romance/horror crossover – plainly, obviously, emphatically, do not.


What is perhaps going on here is an appeal to the film’s core audience of young readers/viewers, who (it seems to be assumed) might be flattered by joining in the mockery of a ‘dumb’ mainstream culture they can enjoy feeling superior to. They are, after all, watching a ‘sensitive’ film about doomed love that has already made an appeal to tragic status by quoting Romeo and Juliet (Bella is studying it in school); New Moon, the film seems to be implying, is no Face Punch. Yet this is also, lest we forget, a film featuring gigantic werewolves fighting one another, and moments like Bella complimenting Jacob on how warm his body is by telling him, “You’re like your own sun”. To aim stones at the loopiness of popular culture from within this glass house seems a very risky strategy.

If the film does still want to do this, though, it would need to be done with a modicum more subtlety than Face Punch affords – a gag as smack-you-in-the-face obvious as the very thing it’s parodying. For one thing: this isn’t even a throwaway moment – we’re forced to contend with the troubling concept of Face Punch for a good five minutes of screen time. Equally – and this is particularly difficult to accept – the scene at the cinema serves a number of important narrative functions: that it’s an action film continues Bella’s adrenaline addiction; that she goes with both guys shows her split between ‘normality’ (Mike) and the supernatural underworld (Jacob); that Mike is made queasy by the film reinforces his (and normality’s) unsuitability; that Jacob enjoys it and clashes with Mike develops his aggressive side, and so on. The fact that these narrative developments all rest on the shoulders of something as weird as Face Punch gives the joke far more significance than it could ever hope to withstand: we can’t just laugh and move on – we have to keep thinking about it, asking again and again, “Really? Really…?!”

It somehow makes the whole incident yet more odd that the characters themselves are shown to be aware of how absurd these names are: Mike acknowledges the terribleness of Love Spelled Backwards is Love (honestly, Mike: “dumb” doesn’t even begin to cover it – “unthinkable” would be closer to the mark), and Bella gives an absolutely precious faltering pause in between “Face” and “Punch” the first time she hears herself about to say the words out loud. While this should in theory probably make the titles feel more credible, it actually has virtually the opposite effect, making it instead seem almost as if the characters are either (a) making them up on the spot, (b) suddenly struck by the weirdness of living in a world that could allow such titles to exist, or (c) channeling the embarrassment of the actors who suddenly find themselves in the unenviable position of being contractually obliged to vocalize these names.

However – while we can talk about this little slip of genre/world/register as a failing all we like (and it most assuredly, most unambiguously, is a failing) – I can’t help but feel very happy that Face Punch managed, against all odds of good taste and common sense, to somehow make it into this movie. (That’s another thought: how many people had to give the OK to this little joke in order to ensure it was included in the final draft of the script, rehearsed, shot, and kept in the finished movie?! The mind boggles…) This isn’t just any old failing: this is the kind of magisterially beautiful blunder that can actually enrich our viewing experience with its idiosyncrasy, creating little shocks of indefinable feeling, encouraging the mind to wander in directions it otherwise wouldn’t have done. The value of such failures is that they can’t be explained away or resolved, but rather remain stubbornly, productively confusing. If the film-within-a-film had been called, say, Firefight, New Moon would certainly have felt rather more coherent, but it would also have missed this golden opportunity for such confounding, disorientating, delicious oddness. As a fan of cinema that has the power to surprise me and make me consider matters important to the medium, I can finally only be truly thankful for this quite monumental lapse in coherence – a lapse that, coincidentally, does indeed feel rather like a (particularly enjoyable) punch to the face.
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Notes on Paranormal Activity, Antichrist, and Andrew Britton

' Paranormal Activity and Antichrist ostensibly come from entirely different filmmaking traditions and seem to implicitly address themselves to different audiences. This has meant that, as we would probably expect, they have been received in very different ways by the critical fraternity. The former has tended to be treated as an arthouse picture steeped in a symbolism considered to be either intellectually profound or emptily provocative (depending on the reviewer), while the latter has largely been regarded as an ingenious, but ultimately functional, genre exercise designed to elicit scares and nothing more. There are, however, undeniable parallels between the two films which demand to be engaged with – particularly given they were released within months of one another. I’m nowhere close to reaching any conclusions on these parallels, but the fact that they are so clearly there, combined with the fact that (as far as I am aware) no one seems to be noticing them, is interesting enough to require a few words. 

I’m certainly not saying it’s wrong to view these films in the ways I’ve described – indeed, in order to retain perspective and context it is necessary on some level to do so. Antichrist of course is the latest in a long line of intentionally controversial and formally inventive works by the international art cinema’s leading provocateur, Lars Von Trier; likewise, Paranormal Activity certainly is a pleasantly creepy updating of the ghost movie and a fun night out at the cinema. But such categories, dictated by production, mode, and marketing, can sometimes blind us to more deep-rooted similarities that are grounded more in matters of narrative (and, as a consequence, ideological) convention. One immediately obvious, and broad, convention shared by the films is the horror genre: in Antichrist this genre is viewed through the lens of art cinema, and in Paranormal Activity it is tweaked via the style of recent ‘found-footage’ horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project (1999). Another shared tradition is that of the male/female ‘two-hander’, since both films are focused almost entirely on a heterosexual romantic couple. Beyond this, though, another more specific convention that I think both films clearly engage with is what Andrew Britton has called the "persecuted wife melodrama" (and elsewhere the “Freudian-feminist melodrama”). Britton set out his case for this cycle of films in the essay ‘A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager, and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film’ (which can now be found in the indispensible Britton on Film). 

Put very simply, Britton describes the persecuted wife melodrama as being focused on a female protagonist who is married to an impressive and overbearing man, and who (for reasons that vary across the films) comes to feel hysterical, threatened and trapped in both her marriage and her marital home. The narrative tends to see the husband exert considerable control over the woman, to the point at which he may either be revealed as the cause – or at least as standing in the way of the cure – of his wife’s distress. Depending on the film, the narrative will conclude either with the expulsion of the husband or the revelation that the woman misunderstood his malevolent intentions towards her. This is a tradition Britton sees as indebted to the image of women in Gothic 19th Century literature (particularly Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw), and which found expression in classical Hollywood in films such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Minelli’s Undercurrent (1946), Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949), and Ophuls’ Caught (1949). Bringing the cycle slightly further up to date, I would suggest that another key movie is Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – a film that brings the tradition’s conventions directly into contact with contemporary horror, and which can thus be seen as a necessary stepping stone on the path towards the cycle’s presence in 2009 with Antichrist and Paranormal Activity. 

As I have said, I don’t have a final reading on the significance of the inflections these films play on the persecuted wife melodrama. The fact is, though, that its conventions are undeniably present, and they ensure that both movies (not just the one explicitly concerned with gendercide) are as much about sexual politics as they are about ‘horror’. In the absence of a more in-depth analysis (which may well come at a later date), I will for now restrict myself to simply quoting a few of Britton’s points regarding the cycle and suggesting briefly how they manifest themselves in each film. [NOTE: If you haven’t seen one or either of the films and want to avoid spoilers, then read no further.]

The marriage takes place at the beginning of the narrative, the rest of which is concerned with the bloody aftermath of “the happy ending”.

Neither film begins with a marriage, but the relationship in both is already well under way by the film’s start. This is fully in keeping with the famously disconcerting trend (embodied perfectly in the persecuted wife melodrama) that, in Hollywood cinema at least, a story about courtship is a comedy, while a story about marriage is a melodrama.

In some cases, though not in all, the film emphasizes the Oedipal aspect of the heroine’s love [by stressing that] her husband is older than she is and/or her superior in social rank.

This is certainly more obvious in Antichrist, where Dafoe’s character is both clearly older than Gainsbourg’s and seemingly a successful (judging from the couple’s apparent wealth and the fact that Gainsbourg doesn’t work) psychotherapist. In Paranormal Activity too, however, Micah is surely the earner in the household, given that Katie (like, in fact, Gainsbourg) is a student. In both films the male partner is also very strong-willed, and certainly perpetually behaves as if he were his partner’s superior.

Enter “the house” – archaic, marmoreal, labyrinthine, patriarchal: the prototypes are Brontë’s Thornfield Hall on the one hand and Poe’s House of Usher on the other.

In both films the uneasy domestic setting is key, and is where most of each film takes place. In Antichrist ‘Eden’, the holiday cabin, is clearly central to the drama and partly represents the malevolent forces at play in the narrative, both being wracked by storms like those that bedevil Poe’s House of Usher (resulting in the hellish falling acorns), and containing hidden secrets like Brontë’s Thornfield Hall (Gainsbourg’s thesis notes, the photographs). In Paranormal Activity we are told that the apartment is not the reason for the haunting, which would likely accompany Katie wherever she leads; yet the film nonetheless takes place entirely in the couple’s shared home, and the supernatural occurrences are initially only manifested in and on the fabric of the apartment (objects moving, lights and televisions switching on and off, unexplained noises [again, see: Usher and Thornfield]).

The marriage bed becomes the site of the heroine’s ultimate terror and humiliation and of the displacement of her sexuality into hysteria.

This most certainly describes the function of the marriage bed in Antichrist, since Gainsbourg’s guilt at having been unable to save her son is tied so intimately with sex, causing her to initially engage in sex obsessively and later to punish herself through a horrific and permanent disavowal of sexual pleasure: the circumcision. This theme is less overt but still present in Paranormal Activity via Katie’s refusal to let Micah film their lovemaking, and the fact that the great majority of the hauntings happen in the couple’s bedroom, where they set up the camera each night (guaranteeing that the image of the couple being frightened in bed is probably the most representative image of the movie – and also the film’s poster).

Masculinity, as the Freudian-feminist melodrama perceives it, is driven by an obsessional horror of lack, [represented in] the husband’s profound conviction of his impotence [which in turn results in] a corresponding project of domination.

This is where the conventions of the persecuted wife melodrama are felt most strongly in each film. Both Dafoe in Antichrist and Micah in Paranormal Activity are shown to be deeply threatened by the fact that they cannot rationally explain what is happening to their partners. They therefore engage in an extended process of domination over both the woman and her problem that is putatively presented as attempts to ‘solve’ them. In Antichrist this situation is exacerbated by Dafoe’s profession as a therapist, which causes him to take Gainsbourg away from the specialists treating her because he believes he can cure her himself. Micah also rejects offers of help from others (the psychic) in favour of solving Katie’s problems in his own way. Indeed, both are obsessed with handling their partners’ problems themselves in their way (despite many contrary pleas from the women in their lives), betraying assumptions of ownership and mastery (see Micah’s line, “I'm not having something coming in my house and fucking with my girl...”). In Antichrist the chosen tool of the indomitable power of male reason over the ‘irrational’ female is psychotherapy, in Paranormal Activity it is the video camera (at the film’s opening we learn Micah has bought the biggest, most expensive camera on the market – a purchase that it is certainly not especially difficult to read in Freudian terms). In both films there are veiled and not-so-veiled power battles going on in virtually every exchange the couples share – battles that the man, initially at least, wins every time.

She is exemplary for the passion and intensity with which she has internalized the desires, fantasies and ambitions which the culture encourages her to have.

This is manifestly the case for Gainsbourg, who – it emerges – has (at least following her son’s death, and probably earlier) internalised patriarchal culture’s most extreme misogynist attitudes, ultimately resulting in her belief that womankind as a whole is inherently evil. Has Katie perhaps taken on less pronounced assumptions regarding female passivity and male power, which cause her to allow Micah to so thoroughly dominate her?

The powerful female energies which the male protagonist has sought to disavow erupt, the house is destroyed, and the patriarchal line is extinguished.

In both films repressed female energy certainly eventually erupts, and violently, but with rather different consequences. In Antichrist Gainsbourg exacts a terrifying reign of violence upon Dafoe, only for Dafoe to recover and finally feel justified in killing her. Does Von Trier’s desire to provoke in this respect actually result in him forfeiting some of the more radical potential of the persecuted wife conventions? In Paranormal Activity, a more modest genre film, Katie is ultimately taken over fully by the demon and disposes of Micah, escaping to ‘whereabouts unknown’, thus enacting a destruction of an embodiment of patriarchy that earlier examples of the tradition could only begin to hint at. Perhaps one of the things to be learned from comparing these films is that genre movies still retain the potential to express ideas that would prove unacceptable in other forms – even perhaps in the form of the ‘shocking’ art film…? These are very preliminary notes on the subject and, as such, the questions above are not rhetorical. I think there is a great deal more to be said about the relationship between these movies and the tradition to which I am arguing they relate, but this will have to wait till a later date. One thing at least that I hope is clear, though, is that assumptions about mode, production and implied audience need not necessarily blind us to potentially telling similarities between the ideologically-charged conventions used by seemingly disparate films.