Empowerment? Or not?

On the other hand, though it's fetishistic and personal, I like to think that my fetishes aren't that obscure. Who doesn't want to see girls running down the trenches of World War One wreaking havoc? 

- Zack Snyder, director and co-author of Sucker Punch 

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

The Wiseman, Sucker Punch

Over the last decade, there's been an increasing interest in movies that examine the relationship between reality and the mind.  The Matrix is the flagship for this concept, supported by films like Pan's Labyrinth, the undervalued Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell, and most recently Inception.

The newest entry in this category is Sucker Punch, directed and co-written by Zack Snyder, which will premiere in March of 2011. The trailer portrays Sucker Punch as a hyper-kinetic anime-influenced action and martial arts extravaganza which deals with an orphaned teenage girl in the 1950s, who is imprisoned in an insane asylum by her stepfather after her attempt to kill him to prevent being raped.

Once in the asylum, she discovers that it's a front for a brothel, and that she's going to be lobotomized in order to be a more willing prostitute. In an attempt to escape her unhappy reality, she enters an internal fantasy world, where she discovers that her actions there, aided by her companions from the asylum, can aid them in achieving freedom in reality.

The trailer shows the fantasy world as a wide-reaching combination of disparate environments and influences, ranging from Chinese temples to the trenches of World War One, with futuristic cities, zombie soldiers, dragon-guarded treasures, mirror finished androids and steampunk battlesuits.  This extravagant dream landscape is alternated with, and in some ways paralleled by, the stark brutality of the real world.

On the face of it, the film looks like a winner for the box office sweepstakes in 2011. Based on the trailer, Zack Snyder has taken his experience in adapting other people's visions from 300 and The Watchmen and successfully applied it to his own vision.  However, I'm a little concerned by the way in which the heroines of the story view themselves in their self-generated dream world.

In the real world there are very obvious reasons for the decision to make a movie featuring attractive young women dressed in stayup stockings, mini sailor suits, fishnets and lots and lots of tight leather,* and I'm sure those reasons will be reflected by the box office turnout.  However, within the context of the movie itself I find myself looking for a reason that would explain why teenage girls exploring a self-created fantasy world would decide to dress themselves in this fashion, especially in what is apparently a 1950s setting.

In a contemporary piece, it would make sense to me. After all, current iconography is thick with portrayals of female action characters dressed in exactly this fashion, ranging from Sailor Moon and her ilk from the world of anime, Lara Croft, almost everyone that Milla Jovovich has ever portrayed on screen, innumerable comic book characters, and so on. I suspect that a lot of people placed in that situation might well look like their World of Warcraft characters (and suddenly discover how impractical those outfits really are).

In the 1950s?  Hmmm…a girl in her late teens might see herself as, I don't know…Faith Domergue from This Island Earth? Wonder Woman? Wearing some variation on Marine battledress, perhaps - we are talking about the decade after WWII, after all. For that matter, they might look like Dale Arden based on some vague memory of the Flash Gordon serials from their childhoods, or perhaps even Joan of Arc.

And, to be fair, there are echoes of these elements in the outfits that the girls give themselves in the landscape of their fantasy - goggles, bits of medieval armour, military caps, and so on. But for the most part, their outfits seem to be designed more to titillate than to protect - as Mr. Snyder admits, "fetishistic".  Why would these girls make that decision?

The entire question of female empowerment is obviously one which I can't comment on from a position of authority, in spite of my affection for the Spice Girls, so my apologies in advance if my interpretation is somehow lacking.

As I understand the concept, female empowerment allows for a woman to wear revealing and provocative clothing.  The choice of clothing is celebratory:  "I dress this way because I think that I'm beautiful and sexy, and this is my way of expressing it."  The flip side of this is the non-empowered woman, who wears sexy outfits out of a desire to please and/or arouse the opposite sex:  "I dress like this because my husband/boyfriend/man likes it."  The subtext here is that there is an externally imposed imperative: "YOU HAVE TO DRESS THIS WAY FOR ME."

The problem is simple:  to the external viewpoint, the results may well be indistinguishable.

So, as is so often the case, we have to turn to intent and choice. The woman in the first example is empowered, as I understand it, because she is in control of her decision - she has chosen to dress in a certain fashion because she thinks that it expresses her beauty.  The non-empowered woman in is dressing in a certain fashion because of someone else's opinion - she is fulfilling their desire rather than her own.

On that basis, I can't find it in myself to empower the girls in Sucker Punch. In fact, I think they're sort of sad, these drab trollops recruited from an insane asylum, who can't even escape from being dress-up dolls for men in their shared fantasy. It's like finding out that even in their dreams, slaves still wear their chains.

Obviously it's not only reality which is a prison.

- Sid

* It's difficult to see the sales pitch to the studio having to go very far after "lots and lots of tight leather".