Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

All right, let’s discuss Sucker Punch. First, some stipulations:

1. Sucker Punch is not a good movie.

2. However, something this banal and shallow almost certainly has to be this banal and shallow on purpose or life has no meaning and I might as well shoot myself in the head right now.

In fact, the banality, shallowness, and ridiculousness of this film is very likely the whole fucking point. I’m going to assume you’ve watched it, and thus know the story, as I will not offer a summary and will offer generous spoilers.

Here’s the thing: Zack Snyder thinks he’s smarter than he actually is, and to give credit where it is due, he tried to do something remarkable here. I think. The whole thing is so incoherent this all might be some sort of Dying Dream where my brain, murdered by awfulness, attempts to create a new reality that makes more sense. I think Zack Snyder made most of his movie ridiculous and meaningless on fucking purpose.

Consider: The title of the movie, when considered after having watched it, pretty obviously signifies a trick.

Consider: The set-up to the plot is perfunctory, barely sketched. I get the feeling Snyder would have preferred to just cold-open in the asylum and not bothered explaining how Baby Doll got there. In fact, that might have been the wiser choice, for all the good the wordless set-up actually does.

And then, just as Don Draper is about to shove a pick up Baby Doll’s nose and lobotomize her, bam! We are dropped into two levels of bullshit in which nothing matters. The use of the word levels is intentional, because while the first part of this portion of the movie is just a bad, boring Caged Heat riff, the second part is best described as Extended Video Game CutScenes. In the first level of bullshit, Baby Doll filters actual events in the asylum through her imagination as she sketches a plan to break out. In the second level of bullshit, she and her fellow inmates murder hundreds of mooks in order to prosecute their plan. But don’t worry; it is specifically stated that the mooks are not human, so we shouldn’t feel at all conflicted about their wholesale murder.

That’s important.

So here, then, is the trick, the sucker punch. We’re told explicitly not to worry about the slaughter, because it doesn’t matter. And the artificiality of the bordello level appears to imply that none of the main characters will be killed. It’s falseness, stylized design, and clear implication that it’s all a dream coupled with the ludicrous nature of their bloodless adventures makes your mind wander, secure that none of the pretty girls will get killed. Maybe they’ll be in danger, as Rockett is once or twice early on. Maybe a mission will go wrong somehow. But nothing’s going to happen in these two layers, because these two layers are bullshit, and Snyder works hard to make sure you’re aware they are bullshit. And we, the audience, are familiar with the tropes that apply to these kinds of bullshit and so we think we know what’s going to happen.

And then, boom! The girls die.

That, of course, is the sucker punch of the movie. After working hard to convince you that none of the main characters is going to die, he kills off three main characters in ten minutes. Their deaths are not really heroic or beautiful. They don’t really die for anything. After spending an hour or more convincing you that the story is just cutscene nonsense, he shoots them in the head, smears blood on his fingers, and paints a question mark on your forehead with it.

I’m not sure I would have liked a successful Sucker Punch, to be honest. This kind of haughty See? You’re the Monster! kind of storytelling is dull. Yes, yes, I am desensitized because of media violence. Fuck you, Zack Snyder. However, at least Snyder tried something. It didn’t work, and maybe it sucked, but he tried. I give him that.

Let’s also consider, as a parting gift, the clear implication that Blue the Orderly has been forging lobotomy documents for years in order to rape lobotomized girls. That, my friends, is what scientists call Entertainment.

Is there anything less engaging on television than The Walking Dead right now? I mean, Jebus. This show is becoming a seminar in how to take apocalyptic zombie fiction and make it boring. Here’s the recipe, in case you’re interested in creating your own boring apocalyptic zombie story as a sleep aid for the restless:

1. Have very, very few zombies. Zombies do show up from time to time on this show, and when they do it’s usually effective. But for a world overrun by the walking fucking dead, the characters spend a lot of time sitting around, sunning themselves, with no zombies, like, anywhere near them.

2. Put your characters in stasis for long periods of time. By my reckoning, the survivors have been at the farm for sixty or seventy years at this point. The farm is magically resistant to zombie invasion, so the characters are just sitting around talking endlessly about … being on the farm. When they originally arrived at the farm I thought this was a decent idea: On the one hand, the implied security of the farm, it’s resemblance to a normal life would tempt our merry band of survivors to steal it, or force their way into it. And of course I fully expected – and still expect – the survivors to destroy the place, to lead the Walkers there and see it burned to the ground. The fact that neither of these things – or something else I didn’t predict – has happened means the characters have just been sitting around, with occasional bouts of action clearly thrown in just to jolt the audience from its nap.

For a short while, admittedly, the missing girl storyline justified this. I could get behind that. But then the girl was missing for what seemed like years, and I’d lost interest in her story long before the Reveal. The Reveal was decent enough, yes, but would have worked better if they’d snipped a lot of the intervening story out, like a tumor.

3. Revert to SitCom character stability. I think we get it by now: Rick is moral, indecisive, and prone to lengthy sermons on This Is How We Live Now. Shane is angry and unstable, prone to violence. All of the characters now have a schtick, and by gum they are steady. Any time the show flirts with the possibility that Rick might grow a little less conflicted, or Shane might restore some of his humanity, or Dale might stop being the nagging, ineffective Voice of Timid Reason, they find a way to write their way out of it. God forbid a character actually evolve, because that would mean they’d have to find something else to write instead of another scene where Shane rants and raves about how he’s the only one capable of keeping everyone safe.

This is, of course, can be easily corrected, and likely will be by the end of the season as they ramp up a spectacular finale. In the mean time, I’ve stopped watching. If I read some reviews that urge me to reconsider, I’ll be happy to. until then, I’m sick of the Hand Wringing Zombieless Zombie Apocalypse Gang.

This Guy. Damn.

So, in our continuing series of Jeff Complains About Other Writers’ (Mainly TV & Movie Writers) Missteps While Wholly Ignoring His Own, what should I complain about? That while Boss is a good TV show comparisons of it to The Wire are ridiculous and make me want to smash my television in righteous anger? That I am wondering just how long the electricity and other utilities, not to mention fresh bread, will be online in the universe of The Walking Dead? (I mean, it’s been weeks or months since the epidemic destroyed civilization, right — and yet they are STILL USING THE POWER GRIDS).

No, let’s discuss Boardwalk Empire and why you’ve got to resist SitComming your stories.

SitComming, in Somers Parlance, refers to those static situation comedies where you cannot ever actually change the situation, the balance of circumstance and characters you’ve created. Every episode has to end with the characters back at square one. Sometimes, for Sweeps or something, you can introduce some chaos, but by the end of the cycle, everything is back where it was. This makes sense in a Sit Com, as that is entirely the point of such shows. But for a drama, especially a drama that is supposed to be multi-layered and complex (like Boardwalk Empire), part of the appeal is the fact that things will change and evolve.

One of my biggest complaints about The Sopranos, after all, was that it struggled mightily to keep Tony in exactly the same position week after week. The show would have been much more interesting if they’d sent him to prison, or witness protection, or simply had his empire crumble beneath him. The show flirted with these ideas, but it never actually followed through, and it weakened an otherwise excellent show.

In its first season, BE established the universe and the ground rules and the characters: Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson was a smart, sharp-dressed political boss with a dangerous Dragon as his right-hand man (Jimmy, who rose from schmuck to a cold-blooded killer pretty awesomely) and all the clout in the world. Season One was fine, if not brilliant. I enjoyed it, and I looked forward to Season Two. I was encouraged, incredibly encouraged when Season Two immediately established that Nucky was in serious trouble: He’s abandoned by his Dragon, his brother, and all of the Ward Bosses with any brains. His income dries up, his influence disappears, and everything is up in the air in a delightful way. I was hooked. I knew that Nucky would probably end up on top again at some point, but how were the writers going to do it?

By SitComming it, apparently.

Nucky’s Dragon, Jimmy Darmody, is seduced over to the opposition. This leaves Nucky without a capable killer on his payroll. Nucky himself is not intimidating. He’s Steve Buscemi, after all, and while I can believe Nucky slitting a throat in the dark, he’s not a guy to walk into a building with a shotgun and murder an entire family. That was Jimmy’s job. Removing Jimmy from Nucky’s team was the engine that drove my interest in the storyline — Nucky’s a political operator who’s gotten into the organized crime game, not the other way around. How would he handle himself? What surprises would the character hold for me?

None, because the writers wasted little time in introducing a replacement Jimmy for Nucky, a mysterious Irish immigrant Nucky is asked to give a job to. The new guy, Owen Slater, observes Nucky’s businesses for a bit and then marches into Nucky’s office and announces he’s a man who can get people to stop doing things. With a nod from Nucky he goes off, beats up some of the opposition’s guys, and establishes that Nucky has some muscle again.

In other words, Nucky’s situation is nudged back towards the center. He loses his Dragon, and thus his ability to translate his will into violent action … then he gets a new Dragon. Yawn.

Now, It’s still interesting, and well-written. And I’m curious what the New Dragon’s real motives are, whether this will turn out to be something more or different. For the moment though, I feel like the writers just couldn’t think of a way for Nucky to fight his way out of the current situation without someone like Jimmy/Owen to kill folks for him, so they surrendered to practicality and brought in the new character to redress things. It’s kind of disappointing.

The WWI veteran who wears half a mask to hide his shell-destroyed missing face? THAT GUY is awesome. I want a spinoff show about him.