Babydoll’s Inner Mastery Game; Review of Sucker Punch (2011)
A friend recently remarked that she loved this film, and I knew I had seen it years ago. I didn’t remember it, though, so I watched it again. Wow. Zack Snyder was way ahead of the feminist curve. It was poorly received by the critics, apparently, and that was partly because Snyder et al. made so bold as to address the matter of feminine empowerment, using a sexualized setting; a brothel of women. Of course there are other kinds of brothels, with children and men and who knows what else. Lots of the women wear somewhat skimpy duds and heavy makeup, too, so that could add to the uproar. I even saw a review that claimed the film encourages submission to monarchical governmental structures. The analysis sky’s the limit, I guess, when you do something bold in the big budget pop film genre.
Wildly paranoid interpretations also happened with Fight Club, if I recall correctly. Because the two films share an important characteristic- important in my book, anyway; poetics, symbolism. One reason Snyder’s offering was misinterpreted is that SP is allegorical, archetypal, alchemical, symbolic, metaphysical, metaphorical, multidimensional, etc.. It’s the sort of story I do symbolic interpretations of; alchemical stories that offer information on wisdom development. SP gives us a view of the story type Joseph Campbell made popular, the hero’s journey- only SP has a female protagonist so it’s a heroine’s journey. The hero’s/heroine’s journey is an integration experience, in the sense that it works on both the inner or nonphysical level, and the everyday physically based “known world”, as it’s designated in the chart below.
Campbell’s angle is now outdated, if for no other reason than it’s malecentric, but he spread the word in a big way; human beings actually have lots of personal development to do besides figuring out how to pay the rent. SP does indeed make more than enough obvious points to the personal development aspect, without dumbing the whole thing down.
So the film is focused on protagonist Babydoll’s growth experience, but in the metaphorical sense, everyone’s. We can all do this hero/heroine’s journey, and many do quite naturally, never knowing anything about the archetype. The reason we use symbol and metaphor in these stories is, in short, that symbol and archetype tie everyone’s experience together. Much symbolism and archetype is the same anywhere on the planet. Chinese poetry and English poetry use lots of the same metaphor(s).
There’s a long lecture at the end of SP, for example, that lets us know we’re talking personal development here. What does this sound like to you? “Who decides why we live, and what we’ll die to defend? Who chains us, and who holds the key that can set us free? It’s you…” How much more pointed can we get, that this film is not about enslaving women, or monarchical governments, but about self-empowerment- for women? I find it a bit sad that Snyder et al. did their best to support women, and their best was misconstrued enough to result in some level of failure. But such are the vicissitudes of life, and especially high profile media productions. The wise artist is often left preaching to the choir.
Well, most folks have no frame of reference for the game of inner development; I get that. They don’t care about their inner life; many are not even aware of the concept. Specifically, many can’t see beyond the simplistic media promoted, socially directed, gender ordered perceptions of masculine and feminine. The gender words are ‘male’ and ‘female’, by the way. That’s not quite what symbolic story is talking about with the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Indeed, most Americans see themselves and others only through the lens of gender and other conditioned social role playing. But symbolic story, including SP, teaches that all humans are half masculine, half feminine. Symbolic story’s objective is consciousness expansion, including enhancing our ability to innate joy, abundance, and wisdom.
As one of the members of the choir who gets it, this is my wee tribute to Snyder, Steve Shibuya (second writer), and the rest of the company that invented and then worked this tale so beautifully.
SP is rather a simple tale, on the surface. A young woman, Babydoll (Emily Browning), is bullied and otherwise abused by her stepfather, and he commits her to a psych ward so he can get her inheritance after her Mom dies. The common interpretation of what happens next in the film is that, after ending up on the ward, she “retreats (sic)to an alternative reality as a coping strategy, envisioning a plan to help her escape.” (from IMDb) The “alternate reality” is a brothel- of sorts. From the metaphorical perspective, the brothel scenes are not just an alternate reality, but more specifically, a depiction of Babydoll’s INNER reality. The brothel reality is not a “coping strategy”, which is a psychological term. Contemporary mainstream psychology’s scope is almost completely limited to the behaviors of the conditioned personality, and therefore doesn’t address soul and spirit. It’s changing, maybe.
The difference between the “alternate” psychological experience and the inner is that most folks in my culture would consider the alternate reality as something we more or less deliberately imagine in our heads, though I’m not sure why Babydoll would prefer living in a weird beard brothel. Inner reality is the metaphysical stuff that’s always happening more or less below the radar of the personality. “Inner” is the reality that we enter in our dreams, in psychedelic experiences, while channeling creative inspiration, or when we otherwise shift our consciousness away from the conditioned perspective of the personality.
Inner reality is recognizable as an experience in which we are aware of no influence more important to our experience than ourselves- as soul-and-spirit-connected creatures. In English we use the word ‘inner’ to describe this shift away from outward focus of attention, to the cosmic driver’s seat of our lives.
So plotline goes, that Babydoll and her fellow psych patients morph into something like prostitutes. However, this brothel-type situation is actually more of a dance school than anything else; we never see any signs of actual sexual activity. There’s a Russian-themed dance mistress (Dr. Gorski) played by Carla Gugino who bosses the ladies around, getting them ready for dance performances. The performances are exclusively for men, and Dr. Gorski in turn is bossed by Blue Jones, whom we will soon address.
Babydoll’s character is a parody of the downtrodden female, very like Cinderella; she even scrubs floors. And Babydoll says she can’t dance; the same I-can’t-dance theme is also used in the symbolic story Cinderella. However, Babydoll’s going to be proven entirely wrong about her lack of dancing skills. For despite Babydoll’s immature ponytails and doll-like huge fake eyelashes and sexualized schoolgirl outfits, it turns out that she has tremendous inner power at her disposal. All is not as it seems. What the film wants to say to anyone who listens is that we all have super powers waiting under our victimhood veneers.
In symbolic story, dancing is using your body to express your soul, especially the individual type performance that Dr. Gorski’s dancing “prostitutes” perform. The individual soul is the general location of our inner realities.
Inner masculine-feminine relationship, or in the worldly sense male-female relationship, is the absolute foundation of SP’s empowerment instruction. The brilliance of this dance set up is that important points about personal empowerment can be made simultaneously on three levels; the soul level, inner masculine-feminine relationship, and male-female relationships acted out in the physical realm. The three are inextricably intertwined, since it’s a case of the old alchemical chestnut; as within, so without. So, the ways in which the characters relate to the opposite sex describes their inner masculine and feminine relationships, the very core of our personal power in alchemy.
The men who watch the women dance are all White suits; cigar-smoking fat cats, greedy misogynists. SP here offers us a clear parody of objectification itself, and the women are on a journey to disentangle themselves from the same. For make no mistake; objectification lives within. Not on the soul level, but on the psychological level.
The soul does not understand object relations, in fact, and that’s why Babydoll is liberated by her dancing. The soul operates from the position of oneness, and objectification requires duality; the possession and the owner thereof. Removing ourselves from objectifying relationships, however casual, as in social media interactions, requires shifting our self concept and inner experience.
Objectification is the conditioned norm in Westernized culture, and the only way out is to stop objectifying ourselves, as we were conditioned to do in an objectifying society. But first, people usually work with objectification in “the world”. We learn how it functions through experience.
The orderly of the psych ward, Blue Jones (masterfully rendered by Oscar Isaac) morphs into a pimp, basically; the go-between for the honky fat cats and the dancing troupe. The film sets up emotional tension with bullying scenes between Jones and the women. Isaac’s acting shifts from pimp violence, to snake oil salesman, to Mafia boss, to sexual manipulation, to outright adulation of Babydoll. He controls most of the dramatic tension for the show, since Babydoll’s character is generally boring; repressed and downtrodden- unless she’s dancing. Since she’s the Cinderella character in the brothel and psych ward, she has to keep that role for most of the film; the sweet, bland, victimized, objectified female, Pygmalion’s statue. In fact she will disappear in the end, like the evil stepmother in many a European fairy tale.
Jones also has the responsibility of offering an explanation for objectifying behaviors in the film’s obvious monologue, spoken during a scene where he pulls back from a physical sexual encounter with Babydoll. The monologue reminds me of a monologue in The Dark Knight, the Joker explaining his facial scars, though I’m sure that type of psychologically baring monologue is not rare in the drama industry.
Jones tells Babydoll he’s been thinking about “all that money you’re gonna make me”, and how one would think that would give him pleasure- “I mean, I’m in the BUSINESS of pleasure.” But, Jones then goes on to describe a feeling from childhood; a little boy, “sitting in the corner of the sandbox, while everyone gets to play with my toys.”
In case that’s not clear, he’s saying he experiences women as possessions, objects, and that’s his baseline for experiencing relationships in general. He’s telling us objectified relationship can never bring him pleasure- not really. Because while he is imagining a future nirvana of wealth, he is still tied to an outdated childhood relationship with it. Simply put, if he believes the pleasure proceeds from his ownership, it’s tainted by the need to defend it and the fear of losing it. How does one truly enjoy something they are afraid of losing? Fear and pleasure are not usually the same. Jones’s character is nothing if not controlling; it’s his preoccupation throughout the film.
Of course Jones’s personal sandbox cameo is not meant to describe everyone’s objectifying behaviors. What it does show the audience is that greedy manipulation of others is born of our personalty’s insecurities, whether we identify as man or woman. The monologue does not excuse the bad guy’s behaviors.
It’s also pointing out the healing truth that it’s typical for us to objectify the bad guy, too. In other words, the bad guy trope is as oversimplified as Babydoll’s innocent, downtrodden character type. The usual conditioning in my culture is to hate the bad guy, and root for the victim…
On the internal level, it takes two. We have both an inner victim and an inner bad guy if we’re playing this game of objectification in “the world”. The two need each other to exist. My society is so awash with victimhood, that it can’t imagine a world without this dualistic game. Good old-fashioned healing drama a la Aristotle’s catharsis asks that we should identify to some extent with all the characters before the ending, and Snyder et al. obviously know that much.
When Babydoll dances, she enters her soul-ordered inner landscape and meets the archetypal characters who help her play out her inner power games. Dancing helps her find her inner masculine power right away. She lands in a fungible Asian religious temple courtyard and walks in to meet her inner kung fu master. Scott Glen plays the character, named just Wise Man, a pointer to the fact that he’s not a person, with a name, but an archetype, basically. He is a masculine and male form of her inner knowing, her soul deep wisdom- her empowered and balanced masculine-feminine option. He is a man, but he is a WISE man. He’s helping Babydoll and the other ladies discover masculine powers lurk inside, waiting to be used.
I bet some race-and-gender-sensitive people complained about this white man savior character, because it’s theoretically reinforcing women’s helplessness to be “saved” by a man. However, in symbolic story, the female identified person with male-female issues must deal with their masculine side. Within us all we have a priest and a priestess, a king and a queen; and it just so happens that the woman Babydoll is teaming up with her divine masculine aspect today, in order to move out of conditioned powerlessness. What better teacher on the divine masculine, her other half, than a man? A wise one, of course. Though the lame-o people in our lives actually teach us a lot.
Wise Man presents Babydoll a type of task such as is common in symbolic stories, and adventure fantasy games; acquiring a map, fire, a knife, a key, and something that is a mystery. The map is a common way of depicting everyone’s soul journey to empowerment. Fire, blades, and keys are archetypally masculine. And mystery is again, soul; the inner experience. Soul is usually considered feminine, so the three masculine objects are bookended by the feminine.
I loved the soundtrack; apparently Emily Browning sings three songs. The graphic novel style cinematography used for the dance scenes is very useful for shifting us into the inner space. Apparently there was negative criticism about the special effects, but that doesn’t matter with a home viewing. The film has a lot of fighting, but it’s not gory. Snyder and Shibuya are wise men, themselves, for they know some of the typical “key” elements of liberation for lots of women. One such key is described in a scene where Babydoll says she has a way to get out of the hospital, and the other women are discussing whether they want to participate.
One woman, who’s apparently the senior performer there, says “None of us want to hear about your plan.” Which is certainly a kind of “no”. But then another finally admits, “I just can’t be here anymore.” This is what I call a “great big no”, essential to reclamation of personal power. At some point we KNOW in capital letters that what we are enduring is not going to just “get better”. We realize that our suffering is a skipping record, that we are done waiting, that death would be better than our current slavery to personality or other, that we are plain exhausted with playing the game, and we can’t do it anymore. The film offers a well known MASCULINE heroic wisdom solution; nobody’s gonna do it for you.
The archetypal feminine or yin being the passive principle, it’s often easy for women to wait for something to change. And the feminine is also interconnected, meaning, it’s hard to stand alone. Feminine is afraid of burning bridges, which is great for holding groups together, for weaving and maintaining group connection. But the fear of saying no can morph into a haunting fear of worldly consequences in general, especially in a malecentric society. Life comes across as one big onslaught, like Churchill’s “One damn thing after another.” And we stay as close to the hearth as we can. We bow our heads, like Babydoll in the beginning of the film, and keep taking it.
The “great big no” (couched from the Lemonheads’ song) is archetypally masculine also in that the enforced “no” is always a line that has been drawn. ‘Enforced’ meaning, that we stand up for our decision. We follow through on what we have realized.
The masculine draws lines, and then stands up for them, defends them. That’s how we get wars. We don’t want wars, but internally, this masculine “no” is very important for everyone in their personal power development. Most of us couldn’t really say “no” and enforce it in our childhood and youth, and lots of folks live their lives without removing themselves from that old way of experiencing. We become perpetual yes men or women. Not Babydoll!
And yeah, the fighting is masculine, too. Admittedly I am not excited about battles unless they are awesome martial arts scenes; too feminine, I guess! My brain glazes over. However, from the internal or symbolic perspective, fighting scenes get reduced down to a general paradigm; the masculine line-drawing principle of maintaining one’s freedom, one’s integrity, one’s values, one’s vibration, one’s love of self, etc. etc., despite any opposition from within and/or without. We decide to “stand for something”.
For example, if we take the issue of objectification, our investigation reveals the line between objectification and soul connection, internally and in “the world”. Connection is soul, the heart; objectification is the essential job of the intellectual mind. There is a line that gets crossed when an experience shifts in nature from one of unity (archetypally feminine) into one of objectification (archetypally masculine). We pay attention to words that we tell ourselves, words that we hear. We learn how to identify the feeling of the words. We identify the signs of objectification in our minds, in our hearts, and in our behaviors. And other people help by acting out the game with us.
It’s often easier to learn how stuff like object relations shows up by watching others, thus the cathartic effect of formal drama.
Once we have parsed objectification vs connection, we decide what to do about it. A certain amount of non-participation is the obvious and simple choice, because if we start fighting with self or other about objectification, we are perpetuating the game of objectification. No game is real unless you are a player- or an avid lover of said game. Ultimately, the wisdom game on objectification usually means we make as much peace with it as possible, so that we become relatively nonreactive to objectification triggers.
If we’re still reactive, and can’t let go of the drama enough to get back to feeling strong in ourselves, it means we are still in the game- whatever the game may be. If we can bring compassion to all the players within a fairly short time frame, we are more like the audience, and out of the game. We’re not acting it out all the time anymore; it’s happening around us. Of course we can also be way too involved as audience, like people who name their road after a famous Green Bay Packers quarterback. Then we get our vicarious kicks by cheering and booing everyone else’s dramas. Lots of that on the internet.
If everyone drops out of the game, then the game itself is relegated to the past, gone and forgotten. Games exist because people want to play them, consciously or unconsciously.
The possibilities for understanding on our wisdom journeys are, of course, many. SP gets us all started on knowing we are the boss of us, and that we can remove ourselves from the unhealthy games we learned in our society. Snyder et al. encourage us to find the love within, instead of searching for it in all the wrong places. And that, my friends, is solid gold. And so it is.
Led Zeppelin! What???
