Abstract
The authors open their volume Theorizing Stupid Media with a brief discussion of Zack Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch, and they elect to book-end the volume by returning to it. As a concluding exercise, the authors explore the different ways in which Snyder’s film might be considered stupid. Sucker Punch is unapologetic in its staging of spectacles: adapting the Hollywood vernacular, as well as the gleeful exhibition of fetishistic imagery. Sucker Punch also draws on a menagerie of different genres (or forms): the music video, chambara/samurai movie, war movie, fantasy film, western heist movie set in a science fiction world. It is unclear about whose story is being told, and this introduces an element of narrative dissonance. All told Sucker Punch is exemplarily stupid.
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Notes
- 1.
Eric Shaefer, “The Obscene Seen: Spectacle and Transgression in Postwar Burlesque Films,” Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2 (Winter, 1997), 53.
- 2.
Alexander Sergeant, “Zack Snyder’s Impossible Gaze: The Fantasy of ‘Looked-at-ness’ Manifested in Sucker Punch (2011),” in Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye, eds. Gilad Padva and Nurit Buchweitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 136.
- 3.
Shaefer, 55.
- 4.
Ibid., 55–56.
- 5.
See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 384.
- 6.
Commenting on the doubling, or the displacement of fetishistic imagery Oscar Moralde notes, “The General (Scott Glenn) speaks almost entirely in platitudes like ‘If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,’ and any dialogue that doesn’t directly drive the action forward is the type of one-liner audiences have heard in countless action films before this one. Like the fetishized imagery, the dialogue is pushed to such an artificial extreme that it approaches self-parody, detached from concerns of narrative tension—just like how the battle sequences mostly dispense with the labored process that many action films go through to justify why the heroes need to slaughter their enemies, and instead relies on the audience recognizing that zombies and orcs need to be destroyed because that’s what happens in these sequences. The battlefield layer is pure decontextualization composed of setpieces extracted from other action stories and sutured into this one, worlds constructed entirely of surfaces.” Oscar Moralde, “Sucker Punch and the Fetishized Image,” Slant, April 5, 2011, accessed November 10, 2018, https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/sucker-punch-and-the-fetishized-image/.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Drawn from Stork’s petulance (cited in our introduction), “Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.” Matthias Stork, “CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking,” IndieWire, August 22, 2011, accessed November 10, 2018, http://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-essay-chaos-cinema-the-decline-and-fall-of-action-filmmaking-132832/. Bold text in original.
- 9.
Moralde . Italics added. Sergeant comments on this same scene: “In this shift from reality to Babydoll’s imagination, an off-screen negotiation of eroticism is now placed on screen and, rather than spectators watching theatricality, we become spectators watching fantasy spectators watching theatricality who, like Sweetpea, are aware of our role in the process. Žižek’s impossible gaze of fantasy is made apparent, and the spectator’s own role in masking that impossibility is thus made equally apparent.” Sergeant, 133.
- 10.
Moralde.
- 11.
Sergeant, 134.
- 12.
Ibid., 129.
- 13.
Ibid., 276.
- 14.
Salim Kemal, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction Second Edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 34.
- 15.
Robert Musil, “On Stupidity,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, eds. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 278.
- 16.
Ibid., 278–279.
- 17.
Ibid., 285.
- 18.
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), 70–71.
- 19.
Ibid., 72–73.
- 20.
Ibid., 119.
- 21.
Michael Bay cited in Shaviro, 119. See Armageddon DVD Review, https://www.michaelbay.com/articles/armageddon-dvd-review/.
- 22.
David Denby cited in Carl R. Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 85.
- 23.
Carl Plantinga productively complicates “identification.” Plantinga instead suggests that “engagement” offers a more nuanced approach, but is rooted in the end to emotional involvement in the narrative: “Character engagement is the trajectory of mental activities and responses viewers have in relation to film characters. Viewers sympathize with, have antipathy for, are conflicted about, and are indifferent to various characters. Engagement involves cognitive assessment, viewer desires for various outcomes, and sympathetic and antipathetic emotions in response to a character’s situations.” It’s the narrative, not simply characters that invites any sort of “identification” as such. Emotional engagement or identification, especially in the Hollywood tradition, is steered: “the audience cares deeply about a character,” but this is because the spectator “also has deeper concerns about the unfolding narrative.” Plantinga, 111.
- 24.
Maria Bustillos, “It’s Adventure Time,” The Awl, April 15, 2014, accessed November 10, 2018, http://theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com/.
- 25.
See Chap. 2 “Prehistory: The ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’” in Linda Williams’s Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California, 1989).
- 26.
See The Good Old Naughty Days (Michael Reilhac, 2003), a collection of explicit films dating between 1905 and 1930.
- 27.
Megumi Komiya and Barry Litman note that, “From the inception of the prerecorded videocassette industry, adult-orientated movies have been a substantial component of sales and rentals.” Megumi Komiya and Barry Litman, “The Economics of the Prerecorded Videocassette Industry,” in Social and Cultural Aspects of VCR Use, ed. Julia Dobrow (New York: Routledge, 2009), 36. Sony’s failure with Betamax was in part driven by the tape-length, running an hour, while VHS boasted 2-hour run time and eventually developed tapes that could hold 6 hours of content. “What were people watching on these early videotapes? The early home video rental stores, the outlets that drove Betamax from the market, were almost exclusively pornographic, drawing on the same clientele as early nickelodeons. The same was true of home video sales. It was not until the mid-1980s that first, local video rental stores, and next, national chains like Blockbuster entered the field with videos for the mass-market. By then, porn had shown the way. Thus, the victory of VHS over Betamax, and the triumph of video rental and purchase over time-shifting, is a rare example of pornography specifically adopting a product and a method of retailing that drove its competitor from the market.” Peter Johnson, “Pornography Drives Technology: Why Not to Censor the Internet,” Federal Communications Law Journal vol. 49, no. 1 (1996), 222.
- 28.
“One of the first uses of pay-cable was pornography: people would pay to watch X- and R-rated films at home.” Johnson, 221.
- 29.
Ibid., 223.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), 11.
- 32.
John Lanchester, “Is It Art?” London Review of Books vol. 31, no. 1 (January 2009): https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/john-lanchester/is-it-art.
- 33.
Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 85.
References
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Musil, Robert. “On Stupidity.” In Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, 268–286. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
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Sergeant, Alexander. “Zack Snyder’s Impossible Gaze: The Fantasy of ‘Looked-at-ness’ Manifested in Sucker Punch (2011).” In Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye, eds. Gilad Padva and Nurit Buchweitz, 127–139. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Shaefer, Eric. “The Obscene Seen: Spectacle and Transgression in Postwar Burlesque Films.” Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2 (Winter, 1997): 41–66.
Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. London: British Film Institute, 2011.
Stork, Matthias. “CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking.” IndieWire, August 22, 2011. Accessed November 10, 2018. http://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-essay-chaos-cinema-the-decline-and-fall-of-action-filmmaking-132832/.
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Kerner, A., Hoxter, J. (2019). Conclusion: Well That Was Stupid. In: Theorizing Stupid Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2_6
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