A Sucker Punch Apologia (Sorta)
Added 2024-03-01 15:00:17 +0000 UTCI don't have all the answers, but ... I can say that being hot and having a sword is undefeated.
🗡️Voice Overs By:
Maggie Mae Fish
Jessie Gender
F.D. Signifier
Dan Olsen
Angelina Meehan
🗡️Music:
Alec Slayne -- Stimuli
spring gang -- Segersta
🗡️Links, Sources, and Further Reading:
📌"Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper""by Paula A. Treichler [https://www.jstor.org/stable/463825]
📌Sucker Punch Reviews: [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sucker_punch_2011/reviews?type=top_critics]
📌Interview with Steve Shibuya: [https://www.8asians.com/2011/03/24/sucker-punch-co-writer-steve-shibuya/]
📌Prevalence of a history of sexual abuse among female psychiatric patients in a state hospital system [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3356438/]
📌Abuse Is Found at Psychiatric Unit Run by the City [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/nyregion/06kings.html]
📌"The Mako Mori Fan Club" by Cait Coker from Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction
Isiah Lavender III (ed.) [https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/17163/chapter-abstract/174532084?redirectedFrom=fulltext]
📌Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton
📌The dark history of gay men, lobotomies and Walter Jackson Freeman II [https://www.attitude.co.uk/culture/sexuality/the-dark-gay-history-of-lobotomies-and-walter-jackson-freeman-ii-419069/]
📌'Sucker Punch' and the Decline of Strong Woman Action Heroines [Note author's deadname is still up at the source [https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/03/sucker-punch-and-the-decline-of-strong-woman-action-heroines/73090/]
📌Ten Days In a Mad-House BY NELLIE BLY [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html]
📌ELIZABETH PACKARD [https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2013/01/elizabeth-packard.html#google_vignette]
📌The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/03/11/the-trouble-with-charlotte-perkins-gilman/]
📌"The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1952]
Comments
i loved this sm! but what’s your eyeshadow?! i need it princess!!
Brit Wigintton
2024-03-12 20:17:33 +0000 UTCamazing! ive always liked suckerpunch (tho potentially not as much as you) and i really connected with it in a similar way to you. i hadnt heard of the short story you mentioned when i saw the movie in theaters but like...i still got it 🤭. but this whole vid was great!
Mizz Mack
2024-03-02 22:36:01 +0000 UTCi love being hot and having a sword and having a team. i think there was a kind of "hot girls in a group" thing i loved as younger person because it was a combo of "power in numbers" and "the intimidating tricks of glamour". i think a certain style of beauty is just another sword that can be utilized against the male gaze when needed, when studied correctly, when deployed with wisdom. i love weaponized hotness. i love a group of women being like "we could hurt you and we can win because we are together and Maria over there specializes in axe throwing but I'm more of a grappler. so you might think you can take me but you can't take me bc WE'RE A TEAM!" i always felt like being "center of attention single special hot girl" was a dangerous position but "group of inseparable girls" was a powerful one and i took it wherever i could get it in any media ever. i'd been in a psych hospital as a teen three times a few years before suckerpunch came out and i think it might have been the first piece of media that actually got me to talk to people around me about my experiences, especially with creating survival mechanisms of fantasy. i remember having conversations like "well it wasn't THAT bad where i went but the feeling of being powerless and trapped was---like HERE's whats true of 2000s hospitals in comparison to stylized 1960s ones" or whatever. I found any movie with any kind of asylum to be a way of opening doors about my experiences. even really really imperfect ones. i could watch sucker punch a LOT of times because of swords fantasy but "girl interrupted" only once because it was too heavy. these crazy gonzo fantasy things are so much easier for me to engage with in order to be open about my experiences.
sirathena
2024-03-02 19:54:15 +0000 UTCI used to gently defend Sucker Punch as the best action movie you'll ever see about a lesbian escaping from an insane asylum (though, as mentioned, Birds of Prey is the "good" SP) but that's me reading "sisters" the same way Haruka and Michiru are "cousins" Couple interesting thoughts that popped up for me: you quoted Doyle's article and discussed sexual violence in previous films including the original Alien, which is interesting that their critique is an increase in sexual violence when the original Alien is easily read as an extended metaphor for sexual violence Also, and this is like my one thing that I still support SP for, but all of the layer 3 Fantasy segments are really obvious vagina dentata metaphors (even if the dragon is 'motherhood' it's still killed via a long neck being trapped in a gateway and stabbed to death. The Act 3 turning point is the train going into the city and whoops it blows up both of them instead of just the train). Love to have an action movie with repeated motifs of phallic things getting destroyed by girl power
Kate Danae
2024-03-02 18:08:42 +0000 UTCOooh your hot take about SP being more feminist or at least having more real world politics than Barbie is sad but true! Barbie tells you it's political but *Thor voice* is it? But SP is, in fact, political.
Dora Mercedes
2024-03-01 18:06:04 +0000 UTCI went into Suckerpunch thinking I would truly enjoy it - As a fan of literally all the things you mention, my icon is a scene from BtVS for crying out loud! I remember thinking immediately after I saw it that I felt as if I had been suckerpunched, lol. I agree with you that the execution is what made me physically angry. The exploitation made me think that the film was telling me I was trash because I idolized the fantastical characters when they were going through the worst things any woman could at the same time. It didn't feel celebratory. It felt like I was the jerk for wanting to like the scantily clad blank slate action ladies fight monsters - Oddly, my favorite character, who I thought was more than a 2dimensional representation of pandering, was the villain, Oscar Issac's Blue Jones. I appreciate that you love this one though! I think it has a time and place in the journey of feminine fantasy out of hardships. PS - I still listen to the soundtrack, it's my favorite thing from this film and will continue to love it for much longer, I assume.
Jynice Archen
2024-03-01 16:07:00 +0000 UTCMust be some kind of Mandela effect because I could have sworn Suckerpunch came out before Legend of the Guardians.
SwamplingLvr
2024-03-01 15:44:09 +0000 UTC
