Babydoll

A sailor suit and a katana, subtlety, thy name is Snyder

Recently, I went to see the movie Sucker Punch with my friends. I did not have particularly high hopes for it, and had my best friend not been planning to go with his fit mate, I would not have tagged along.

 I started watching with the assumption that the movie was about a young woman who had been sectioned against her will who was trying to escape. This belief was further cemented by the opening montage of her life before the asylum.

 Before I go into any more detail here, I am going to make one thing clear; I like Babydoll. I think she’s determined, clever and caring. Well, up to a point, and this is where the problem lies.

 The montage about Babydoll’s life before, and eventual admittance to, the asylum gives us an impression about her character and about the plot. The reason it give us this impression is because after the death of her mother, her step-father murders her younger sister and pins the murder on her. Understandably, I got the impression that her desire to leave the asylum was partially based on the desire for revenge and/or justice. Especially as with her out of the way, her step-father wasn’t only going to get away with murder, but also inherit her mother’s fortune.

 There is also one other thing that gives us the impression that she’s going to escape and get some form of revenge on her step-father.

 She’s going to be lobotomised in five days.

 Yes, not only has he murdered her sister, robbed her of her freedom and denied her of her rightful inheritance, he is essentially going to kill her too so he can cover his own ass.

 So, when we get into the brothel sections of the movie, we get into a massive problem as Babydoll in this Rugrats-esque alternate imagining of events is given a totally different back story and the threat is changed from being lobotomised to being deflowered by an attractive gambler. Not to say that this threat isn’t genuine, being sold for the express purpose of sex is demeaning and it is totally understandable that she would want to escape from it, but it isn’t being lobotomised.

It definitely isn't being lobotomised. Still bad though.

  At one point she asks, ‘how bad can the high roller be?’ and this just drives home the fact that it’s not being lobotomised. In fact, that question makes it sound like she is totally unaware of what is going to happen to her. Which, considering the unbelievable decision she makes at the end of the movie, is really the only vaguely satisfactory conclusion to draw.

 Also, as her back story has changed to being handed over to the brothel by a Catholic orphanage (your guess is as good as mine) it appears that the montage we were given at the beginning of the movie was, in essence, completely pointless.

 On the other hand, I actually kind of like the idea that she’s so far into the fantasy that Dr Gorsky encourages her patients to go into that she has lost her grasp on reality all together. Mostly because it’s an interesting direction to take a character in and would be a great angle for a story in its own right. The problem is that it leads this particular character to make a self-destructive decision that leaves a plot thread with no resolution and leaves the audience unsatisfied.

 Think about it, what she does is for the benefit of a woman she has known for a grand total of five days, and in the last twelve minutes of the movie we are expressly told that this wasn’t really about Babydoll; it was really about Sweet Pea.

 No, it was about Babydoll.

 I can tell because we know how Babydoll ended up there. Sweet Pea gets the vague explanation that she went after her sister and that somehow led to her being sectioned, but that’s all. As much as I like Sweet Pea, I am far more emotionally invested in Babydoll.

 That said, there is one more thing that makes it abundantly clear that Babydoll is the main character and not Sweet Pea.

 As part of the brothel delusion, there are other smaller Rugrats-esque sections. These are the characters taking part in interesting action scenes as a far more exciting analogy of what’s happening in the brothel. These include Babydoll fighting giant animate statues, Babydoll and the gang beating up steam powered German zombies in World War I, Babydoll and the gang beating up orcs, knights and dragons and Babydoll and Co fighting robots on a train.

By the way, putting this woman in a giant robot is not okay, Mr Snyder.

  These are framed by Babydoll dancing, in the first case she does it because Gorsky tells her to. The next three she is distracting people. She isn’t stealing the map, lighter or knife herself.

 So why do all three of these sections have her doing the brunt of the awesomeness?

 Poor writing, probably, but the kind of poor writing that causes people to make the main character the most awesome and important person there.

 Think about it, when have you ever seen anything that has a secondary character doing all the work and being the main focus throughout?

That doesn't count and you know it.

  So, in essence, I don’t really hate Babydoll as a character, I hate the way she’s been executed. Especially what she does at the end of the film.