@tonys My thoughts on the movie Sucker Punch. I was not disappointed. I read the press reviews before I watched it. They sh!tcanned it. Calling it “crass, adolescent, and chauvinistic”. I think they missed the point of Zack Snyder’s movie.
The way Snyder and Steve Shibuya have written it is clever. They aren’t stereotyping women, they are saying, these are men’s stereotypes of women in a patriarchal society.
The main antagonist Blue Jones/orderly displays narcissistic traits.
When Dr. Vera Gorski says to Blue Jones, “I teach them to survive 'you'”. The mother teaches her children to be compliant and pleasing to a narcissistic father.
The fantasy worlds Baby Doll’s mind goes too while she is dancing, each battle scene with beautiful visual effects not only entertaining, but are a subtext for women’s lack of confidence and having to sellout in a power disparaging world where we have to constantly fight to get anywhere, because women’s skills, represented as weapons in the movie, are feared by men.
Sweet Pea narrates the story. The girls - Jungian archetypes, work together after Baby Doll - the Rebel, displays loyalty.
Lennox House is statement about institutional abuse including the domestic home.
Little Tommy Soldier - head bandaged boy soldier in the trench, represents another victim of toxic masculinity.
Tonys, Scott Glenn’s characters the Wise man, martial arts master, the General and the Bus Driver. Each character’s cliché advice, until you get to the Bus Driver saving Sweet Pea from the fascist troopers, reminds us of Sweet Pea’s “Everyone has an angel.”
Sweet Pea is the only character that escaped. From what my psychologist taught me, your unconscious brain and nervous system function to keep you alive, not happy. Jungian archetypes are reflex/reactive behaviours of our unconscious.
The girls that didn’t survive, I interpret as us creating new positive habits, our executive function overriding old habits that no longer serve us and creating new neural pathways in our brain.
Sweet Pea’s narrative at the end of the movie:
“Who teaches us whats real and how to laugh at lies? 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.
You have all the weapons you need.
Now Fight.”
Serves to remind us that we can control nothing except ourselves.
Tns, thank you for feeding the new wires in my brain with good food.
Hugs G
