In a sentence: whatever you thought of 300, you’ll think the same about this. But there’s something else there worth seeing.
(spoiler alerts) Baby Doll is a 20yo platinum blonde in pigtails who is almost molested by her stepfather and consequently sent by him to an “Asylum for The Mentally Insane.” As opposed to physically insane. More in a moment.
There’s a term for movies which are aware of their own genre and critique it, but I can’t say it explicitly here because it drives the Google bot to suicide. So let’s just say that the director, Zack Snyder, does attempt to make a point with the movie, and if he fails that’s on him but don’t say he didn’t try.
The movie takes place in three levels.
In Level 1 (reality), Babydoll is a new patient at the asylum, and awaiting lobotomy at the hands of not totally evil psychiatrists.
To cope, Babydoll creates a fantasy (Level 2) where she is, instead, a new girl at a brothel/bordello. Instead of lobotomy, she’s awaiting the High Roller who will pay for the best. Babydoll, ( and the other girls) must learn to dance for the clients and etc. She befriends four other girls.
But Babydoll wants to escape, and soon discovers that when she dances, her mind transports her to Level 3, a 300 style ninja acrobatic battles, against, in order: samurai, WWI German zombie soldiers; orcs/dragon; androids.
The synthesis is that if, in the fantasy world, she finds five objects, than she can free herself and the other girls from the brothel. This, in turn, will allow her to escape the actual mental asylum she is in. Everything is up to her.
II.
It’s simple to identify each part as a classic narcissistic fantasy. She has no special talents, of course, but in her own mind, when she is called to fight, she has every skill necessary including: kung fu, weapons, bomb defusing, skydiving without a parachute. She even knows how to hold up a fist, Navy Seals style, to signal “stop.”
She’s the main character; everyone else is supporting cast, everyone else plays a “type” to her fleshed out character. The overbearing older sister; the innocent abused younger sister; the psychopathic orderly; the heavily accented Polish Madam. etc.
And for most of the movie, it’s as expected.
But the movie is self aware. Are the women hot, like the audience would expect? Sure. Do they do ninja acrobatics as the audience wants them to? Hell yeah. Which explains why Babydoll told, in level 2, “if you do not dance, you have no purpose.” Hey, she’s right.
And self-aware means aware of the audience. Why would a 20 year old girl, to escape the horrors of a retro mental asylum, create the fantasy that she’s in a bordello?
She’s doesn’t: we do. Putting a hot girl in an asylum immediately sexualizes it– the possibility/hope that vulnerability means penetration is considered by us, and the director just makes it explicit. The prostitutes in the movie have to dance for their clients; the actresses in our movie have to dance (ninja style) for ours.
There’s a scene where one of the girls in the bordello is rehearsing a burlesque performance that she is being lobotomized. She suddenly stops the rehearsal, and says to the director/Madam (paraphrasing), “ok, look, I get the schoolgirl skirts, that’s hot, and I get the nurses and the stockings, but why are we doing a lobotomy?” Well, that’s a good question that the audience wants asked of the director: we’ll pay to see a hot chick fighting, but why do you have to make the movie so weird? Why can’t it just be what we expect it to be? The answer is in what we find weird: the constant running commentary about the audience vs. the movie. She’s doing a lobotomy scene because it’s not expected, because if she didn’t do it, we’d be bored, and the movie would be retitled Resident Evil V. Zack Snyder knows this.
Which makes the “twist” at the end of the movie unique, whatever else you may think about the movie. Babydoll has found (in the fantasy level) the missing objects needed for escape (from the bordello), and she and another girl make their way out of the asylum (reality) but– there are too many bad guys. At that moment she realizes that she’s not the main character in the movie– the other girl is. “This story isn’t about me.” And she gives herself up to lobotomization so the other girl can escape.
the main character is wearing a hood
Once you learn Babydoll isn’t really the main character, it pushes everything back a level. Now level 1 (asylum) isn’t reality either, that’s the other girl’s fantasy. We don’t know Babydoll’s backstory. We don’t know anything.
The audience doesn’t like that, not one bit. This is the girl we’ve followed as the main character, to make her after all the secondary character violates the way we watch movies. What’s next, Matthew McConaughey marries the bitchy rich girl?
The last words of the film:
“And finally, this question: The mystery of whose story it will be, of who draws the curtain, of who sets the stage. Who is it that chooses our steps in the dance, who drives us mad, lashes us with whips and crowns us with victory when we survive the impossible? Who is it that does that does all these things? It is you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight.”
Perhaps not perfectly done, but done nonetheless; and to take a chance like this with a big budget action flick is brave; this isn’t John Favreau. The movie is generally criticized for being a comic book, an adolescent fantasy, but it does force us to ask an important question: what did we expect it to be, and why would you be upset when you get it?
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I guess we don’t do spoiler alerts anymore, huh?
Did he ruin the film for you?
I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t say for sure. But I highly doubt it. I’ll let you know!
Second paragraph.
OK, now do Rango.
I know, I know, your teenage son wouldn’t be caught dead watching a cartoon. I think he’ll live, though, if you let him go off and watch just one action movie without you leaning over and breathing the n-word into his ear every five minutes. So let him watch Vin Diesel’s biceps exploding without supervision, while you take in Rango.
Really.
I’m ever so curious what you’ll make of a movie that pretty much exists specifically to reproduce your entire Narcissism-Is-The-Problem spiel, complete with “how do you fix it” and “why would you bother”, in a movie for kids, with catchphrases and music and everything.
“At that moment she realizes that she’s not the main character in the movie– the other girl is.”
This is fucking awesome. Similar to a false protagonist.
Ironically, if the main character fails while her contemporary succeeds, doesn’t that make it more like real life?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DecoyProtagonist
Alternative theory: Snyder couldn’t figure out any way to resolve the story. Gives up on protagonist and swerves toward spotlighting a minor character to save himself the effort of thinking through his plot.
Your description makes it sound like she’s the protagonist but not the point. I haven’t seen the movie so I don’t know. Or, rather, like a sneakier version of the dynamic in Children of Men…o wait, the dynamic pissed people off in that movie, too. nvm…
So on the one side you’ve got “it’s a movie that challenges expectations on purpose in order to ????” and on the other side you’ve got “it’s a bunch of pseudosexual animu bullshit because Zack Snyder doesn’t have any balls.” Guess that means I need to see it? I don’t really want to though.
This seems like the most tiresome sort of lazy writing going under the cover of “irony” or “postmodernism.” Snyder probably subscribes to Moe Syzlak’s definition of postmodern: “weird for the sake of being weird.”
“Well, that’s a good question that the audience wants asked of the director: we’ll pay to see a hot chick fighting, but why do you have to make the movie so weird? Why can’t it just be what we expect it to be? The answer is in what we find weird: the constant running commentary about the audience vs. the movie. She’s doing a lobotomy scene because it’s not expected, because if she didn’t do it, we’d be bored, and the movie would be retitled Resident Evil V. Zack Snyder knows this.”
Aslo: doing what’s “not expected” for the sake of the audience is expected now. And boring. Using little nods toward postmodernism is a just a device that allows the same 1-dimensional characters (not even characters; stereotypes, even.) to go through the same mindless action flashery while shrugging off critical thought. If you don’t like it, it must be too “edgy” for you. Yawn.
Counterargument: this type of movie actually feeds narcissism.
Now I don’t have to worry about the impending narcissistic crisis resulting from the fact that I see myself as the star in a movie but work in a cubicle. You see, I’m the pivot. Sure, there are tons of people here that are wealthier, more powerful and better looking, but I’m the only important one. It’s only the stuff I do that matters.
Power to the worker bees!
“The movie is generally criticized for being a comic book, an adolescent fantasy”
Sucker Punch wasn’t criticized for being an adolescent fantasty, it was criticized for being a terrible film, with those reasons tacked on as easy ways of saying “this sucked.” The idea was there, but the execution was complete shlock.
I couldn’t make it through any ten minutes of 300, but Suckerpunch was great. So I guess all I saw was the something else there worth seeing?
I was actually content with the movie’s explanation for why a 20 year old girl would create the fantasy that she’s in a bordello, but being able to answer that question doesn’t take away from the observation about the projected male audience. (Though this movie actually did possess a projected female audience as well.)
I completely agree that by the ending we don’t know anything, though I think it would be worth reinterpreting the significance of the two sisters.
I also completely agree that this constituted a big spoiler – precisely because the ending was unexpected, those cheesy final lines came off pretty well in theater, to anyone who hadn’t already stopped enjoying the movie.
PS – If you really want to write up a RomCom that takes a different turn, forget Matthew McConaughey, and try out _Timer_ – I’m still trying to figure out who the projected audience of that movie was intended to be.