Screen Machine

Feature: Style as Substance: The Case of Sucker Punch

Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch begins with one of the most beautiful sequences I have ever seen in a film. A young girl sits atop a bed in the middle of a stage, her back to the audience. A female narrator begins to speak. Everyone has an angel, a guardian who watches over us… The camera zooms into the centre of the stage as the performance space turns into a bedroom and we are introduced to Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a young woman with an abusive stepfather. Following the opening monologue there is no dialogue for around twenty minutes, which leaves the music, beginning with a haunting rendition of ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),’ to propel the narrative. Baby Doll’s mother dies and the stepfather discovers that he isn’t inheriting anything. The stepfather, in an alcohol-fuelled rage, locks Baby Doll in her bedroom, leaving her to watch his abuse of her younger sister through the keyhole. She escapes and confronts the evil tyrant. A gunshot rings out and the music is interrupted by images of smashing glass, lights going out, the release of gas from a burst pipe, and a blood-stained milky-white hand. One of the things that you become aware of during this opening sequence is that music is a really prominent element of Sucker Punch. It is not something that is layered over the top for effect but is instead placed in the foreground and at times acts as the driving force of the film.

It pains me to read review after review (from many of the so-called top film critics around the world) spouting the same old diatribe that Sucker Punch is all style and no substance. This is a phrase which Australian film critic Adrian Martin condemns as “the most old-fashioned thing any of us can ever say” because of how it privileges the “hierarchy of plot and character as substance, versus style as a kind of secondary, mere elaboration, potentially useless or ignorable.” This phrase reinforces the similarly old-fashioned notion that the form of a film — and by this I mean the colour, the shots, the editing, music, the rhythm, the mise-en-scène and the lighting — serves only to express the content of the film: that is, the story, characters and themes. Martin further argues that such sentiments leave a lot of cinema “working with different economies (or relationships) of form to content out of the picture.” I have come to the conclusion that Sucker Punch is one of those films; that it works with a different economy of form to content, style to substance, from that which we may be more familiar with. Many of the reviews of the film condemn it for having no plot and shallow characters, but I think it is liberating to break free of these conventional ways of thinking about cinema. Why must all characters be three dimensional? Why must we always understand their motivations? Why must all stories flow logically? Critics have cited Sucker Punch’s fragmented, clichéd dialogue again and again as proof of poor scriptwriting. But the dialogue (the “substance” of the film) is transformed through the superficial veneer of the film’s fantastical aesthetic where every element is pushed into overdrive, to the point of near-absurdity. At this point we must all be questioning: can we ever break free of these semantic shackles?

But we must remember that there are occasions when this hierarchy of substance over style, content over form, is not employed as part of the vernacular of modern film criticism. Musicals are one genre in which style, at least for a brief amount of time, is allowed and even expected to supersede substance. Most critics don’t care that Tracy Turnblad has no depth of character or that her relationship with Link is entirely unrealistic, because Hairspray is about the fabulousness of the musical numbers and the feel-good nature of the story. We aren’t expected to seek deep and/or meaningful cinematic experiences from Mamma Mia, Oliver, Singin’ in the Rain or Moulin Rouge in the same way that we might seek them from apparently more serious films. Musicals are typically considered ‘pure entertainment,’ which apparently makes it okay for them to abound in style and thus lack substance. However, to consider the musical genre in this way again reinstates that problematic hierarchy of style/substance. I think that Sucker Punch initially challenges this hierarchy and the value judgements inherent within it, in that, despite most critics having presented it as an action film that aspires to depth (and supposedly fails), its structure in fact more closely resembles that of a musical. We can see this particularly in the way that the large-scale fantasy sequences often work by suspending the film’s narrative entirely.  But Sucker Punch is not a musical, is it?

The case for Sucker Punch as musical can be emphasised further by paying attention to the prominence of music throughout the film and the music video aesthetic of the fantasy sequences. The first three songs, all performed by Emily Browning, occur before she speaks a word of dialogue. The first two begin with a kind of rhythmic humming that reminds me of the noise that sometimes escapes from deep within your soul when you go to take a breath. And then the lyrics begin and we hear the sweet melancholy of Browning’s voice for the first time: Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? she asks. Her disembodied voice stresses, Some of them want to use you…Some of them want to abuse you, before quivering over the ultimate question:  Where is my mind? The third song in this opening sequence begins with the faint sounds of squeaking swings before moving into a haunting rendition of ‘Asleep’ by The Smiths. These songs prove to be a haunting aural entrance into the workings of Baby Doll’s mind before it is visually rendered in the fantasy sequences. These sequences, too, are entered into via music, they are propelled via music and much of the action occurs rhythmically with the music. This is not music employed as a background element, something placed over the image in order to emphasise dramatic moments. No, this is music that literally screams at you as the world crumbles rhythmically around it.

Thinking of Sucker Punch as a kind of musical allows not only consideration of the music and the narrative structure of the film, but also perhaps something more. One of the key characteristics of a musical is the way it negotiates the opposition between reality and fantasy. In The Hollywood Musical, Jane Feuer writes that “[t]he ultimate synthesis of the musical consists in unifying what initially was imaginary and what initially was real. These terms are always relative to each other within a given musical. But in the film’s unfolding, the boundary between real and imaginary may be blurred.” Furthermore, we may think of the musical in terms of the opposition between reality and a kind of musical utopia, as Martin Sutton does when he notes that “the musical is essentially a genre that concerns itself with the romantic/rogue imagination and its daily battle with a restraining, ‘realistic’ social order. This battle grows out of a tension between realistic plot and spectacle/fantasy number.” That is, the dichotomy of reality and musical utopia is played out in the alternation between narrative and musical number. In Sucker Punch, this dichotomy is expressed through the alternation it enacts between different narrative levels or planes.

The utopia of Sucker Punch is presented within its fantasy sequences. Once Baby Doll is sent to an asylum, the film splits and the story begins to play out on three levels. The first is the gritty reality of the asylum, which we don’t see very much of. The second is a filter of reality in which Baby Doll and the other inmates are imprisoned in a brothel where they are forced into performing (both on a stage and in the bedroom) for the pleasure of men. The third world is an imagined escape from the brothel that we enter whenever Baby Doll dances. It is a high-fantasy dreamscape full of guns, samurai warriors, German zombies, dragons and kick-ass girls that consists of missions to be completed in a series of set battlegrounds. This level of the film is governed by a kind of video game logic where a guide informs the characters of their situation and of how they must progress in order to reach their goal. We may consider these sequences as instances of Baby Doll undergoing treatment in the asylum; that is, acting out her trauma on the stage in the middle of the asylum for everyone to see. On the brothel/filter of reality level, this treatment or performance becomes the hypnotic dance that entrances the orderlies. In the fantasy world, this dance becomes the fight sequence and thus evidence of Baby Doll working through her emotional turmoil with clear goals. The demons that she battles are her own personal ones. She regains power over her body, her mind and the world around her. In the reality and the filter of reality the women are abused, but in the fantasy sequence they reclaim their sexuality. The motifs of steam, blood, the disappearance of light and the smashing of glass that we were introduced to in that incredible opening sequence are transformed in this dream reality into non-human enemies that Baby Doll must destroy or overcome in order to achieve her goal of freedom. 

Thinking about the utopia of Sucker Punch allows us to question what freedom truly is. We assume at the beginning of the film that freedom equates to Baby Doll’s physical escape from the asylum. When Baby Doll first enters the fantasy sequence she speaks with a guide who asks her what she’s looking for, and she says “a way out.” But within the fantasy world (that which may represent the workings of Baby Doll’s mind), both escape and freedom could mean many things. The utopia of Sucker Punch can thus be read not as physical freedom (i.e. freedom from the asylum) but rather as psychological freedom and/or control. By the end of the film we come to realise that Baby Doll’s freedom is by no means physical (even if she did escape, what would she return to?) but is rather freedom from the burden of knowledge; having worked through her most traumatic experiences throughout the film, she willingly accepts this. As Dyer notes, the musical film “does not… present models of utopian worlds, as in [those] of Sir Thomas More, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organised.” If, within the world of Sucker Punch, utopia is freedom, then I think freedom is embodied in the feeling of control – a feeling that is denied to the characters and which Baby Doll must search deep within her own psyche to uncover.

Considering Sucker Punch like this — in terms of its musical structure — allows for an understanding of the film that encourages moving beyond the criticisms that prompted me to write this piece. The film clearly does have a lot of substance, but it also has a lot of ambiguity. Unlike a film such as Inception, where the exposition-heavy narrative constantly holds the hand of the viewer, explaining away every single moment and minimizing ambiguity (except for that strategic final shot), Sucker Punch does not hold anyone’s hand. Snyder drops his audience in the deep end and commands them to swim. Perhaps he understands that there is pleasure to be found in reading and interpreting films. Does Sucker Punch make a case for style as substance? At the very least I think it makes a case for taking the time to think about why style must always be subservient to substance and why form must solely serve to express content. Perhaps we can achieve freedom from those semantic shackles after all.  

References:

Dyer, Richard. ‘Entertainment and Utopia,’ in Genre: The Musical: A Reader, ed. Rick Altman, London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. 2nd ed., University of Indiana Press: Bloomington, 1993.

Martin, Adrian. ‘There’s a Million Stories, and a Million Ways to Get There From Here,’ in Metro Magazine: Media and Education, No. 142, Autumn 2005.

Sutton, Martin. ‘Patterns of Meaning in the Musical,’ in Genre: The Musical: A Reader, ed. Rick Altman, London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Whitney thinks that cinema is rad. She is currently undertaking a PhD on queer teen temporality in film and TV at Monash University. In addition to writing for Screen Machine, her work has been published in the journals Jump Cut and Colloquy.

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