A Pretty Girl is like a What?

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939) and SUCKER PUNCH (2011) both operate on the principle that beautiful young women are a threat to male sanity and are witches and insane and have cast hexes on us, especially if we're uglier, older, shorter, balder, sourer, poorer, weaker, lamer, squarer, or viler overall than the young, dumb, rich, handsome, eloquent sots these ladies tumble for. The beauty of these young women is a twisted dagger slowly turning in the base of our necks, making our face blush in shame. Such a blusher is the sourpuss Frollo (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and his adopted charge, Quasimodo (Charles Laughton), who both pine for oblivious dancing queen Esmeralda (Maureen O'Hara) in HUNCHBACK. SUCKER PUNCH instead intends to make us--its ideal fanboy demographic--equally ablush and enthralled, pining for these baby doll babes, longing to free them from the sleazy stereotypes that have them roped into a combination mental ward, inquisitor dungeon, and strip club.

Since one of these movies is an esteemed, timeless classic and one is universally reviled, why not compare them?

Esmeralda (a never-hotter Maureen O'Hara), the dancing gypsy, is actually the only object of desire for nearly all of Paris in HUNCHBACK, and those who can't compete for her love either cheer in the massive, impressively clued-in throng, or sulk... and skulk... like Frollo, a dark soul trying to be darker than he really is, who eventually frames her for his rival's murder, since she--a nothing gypsy girl!!--dared spurn him, the Marquis de Bishop of Whatever. We know Frollo isn't too bad because he saved Quasimodo as an orphan and gave him sanctuary, but he's not cool about his charge putting on airs. Any psych major will realize that running under the benevolence of the gesture is the need to not be the ugliest guy in the room. At any rate, it's still nicer than just leaving him to die in the gutter, presumably.

Meanwhile the idea of sanctuary in the church seems a strange one (has no pursued murderer in Paris ever thought to hide there? If that law existed in New York City you wouldn't be able squeeze a toe into Saint Patrick's Cathedral, or any church, ever), especially since, Esmeralda is the only one in the whole film who ever runs in there for safety. We know she's good because over a montage of sinners praying "give me this," and "I want that," she's saying "let me help" and "save my people." She's not selfish, and man that's understandable considering she's so hot she's probably never had to pay for anything in her life. It must be alarming to have such a profound effect on people, where the benevolent glance or kind word can turn any passing wastrel into an obsessive stalker. But you can't exactly pray to be less gorgeous.

The film takes full advantage of the barbarism of the era to milk suspense, and the sanctuary of the 'classic lit' rubric to protect its salacious sadism from the censors' persecutive scissor, and that means confession under torture (Esmeralda gets the rack), public humiliation, whipping, and hanging. The big gallows' rescue is one of the most electric crowd-pleasing crowd scenes ever filmed, but for me the best moment is before that, when--on returning home from his grueling ordeal outside church where he endured flogging and hooting punishment--Quasimodo takes a look at Frollo, who is equal parts anxious and indignant over his charge's punishment, and shouts that Esemeralda gave him water!!!" All the pain and humiliation was worth it, just for that one drink (on the other hand would the drink have been so great without the pain and humiliation?) It's the equivalent of a guy boasting to his roommate upon coming home Sunday afternoon after spending the night with a girl they both were after the night before. A time for basking. A bro would be happy for his friend. Frollo could be happy his adopted charge just earned his way up from whipping boy to fledgling wingman, or to get embittered and petty about it, like a murph or wally.

Either way, from then on Quasimodo won't lay off the bells. It's a problem.

That just a gulp of water can override his pain and humiliation to the point of ecstasy creeps Esmerelda out big time, of course. God forbid she give him a kiss, he'd jump off the tower to his death in a paroxysm. Frollo, meanwhile, has his power and status which makes his abject humiliation and pain over her rejection all the more unendurable.

Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH works similarly, because the lead, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), is such a blank slate-- refusing to do anything right, stick up for herself, or decide what she wants to do for a living. Naturally she ends up shanghaied by her sleazy embittered stepfather to a combination ballet school, mental institution for 'interrupted' girls, and, and sleazy strip club where she fantasizes her way into overly-designed video games where she wipes out giant samurai or steam-powered WWI Germans with apparently no effort and nothing at stake beyond loss of her quarter.

That a young girl (though at 20, her step father has no power of attorney over her, so the whole committed thing is dubious) can be so trapped by the male gaze that even her fantasies are not her own (do baby dolls really imagine such vivid fanboy CGI steam-punk detail?). She's not only stuck in this loony bin dance club, she's stuck having to fight giants and stuff in her "own" fantasies, which might be fun for five minutes but basically its like watching her douchebag boyfriend play Doom rather than go down on her (like he promised) while she listens to various remixed and re-recorded 'sexy' rock and pop anthems like "Sweet Dreams (are made of this)" and "Army of Me" on her iPod. She can pretend that she's not being exploited, but no amount of CGI airships can quell the unease in her gut.

I knew going in how badly SUCKER PUNCH was received, but whatever. You just have to see the grave where your dreams died. Every man who's read comic books instead of playing baseball in his youth has an inner movie he's been slowly writing as he goes along, an unfinished screenplay with lesbians and martial arts, and he sets scenes to music he likes as he mopes or fumes along the boulevards, listening to anguished rock in his headphones or on the way to work, planning and editing to the beat, each gunshot suffused with meaning that will never translate beyond his own tortured adolescent pine box. But how can he know just how little anyone else cares about these fantasies? He's too enraptured with his own sad longing, and why would he want to actually film this shit anyway, even if he had the backing? How could Snyder know his private dance floor fantasy would kill that same fantasy in the rest of us? Everything, from the infantalizing stripper-baby fashions, to the steampunk battlefield, turns to hot air in his anti-Midas touch.

Sorry, bro, he killed it. Gone, the agog rapture for the baby doll pout and the Catholic school girl uniform; gone, the yen for bustiers, stockings and stylish black heels; gone, the thrill of watching a sword cut through adamantium like butter. Gone, the kinky allure of a black lace choker or blonde Heidi braids. Gone, the concerned interest in bi-polar body mutilation. Gone, the sparkly reflection of the hot sun in the pool of cold well water cupped in Esmerelda's alabaster palms. It's all now as stale as 1980s puffy hair and neon spandex. These details once brought us from story sea to resolution port, sheltered in the hurricane eye of long straight shiny jet black hair, perfect skin, and rain-stained eye liner; the chick who soaked you past flooding and bailed fast as a mail sack picked up by a speeding train is now just a mom. On Facebook you can see her age and widen, til all that's left are pixels and dental records.

Now there is nothing, just a blue light was / my mind / but the red light ain't my baby, no more. She never even noticed, through her Vogue cover never-pay-for-her-own-food (not that she ate anything) and champagne bubble veil, the vile water line of male desire, the same rising flood line of pent-up fanboy bitterness that sinks SUCKER PUNCH. So if you want your son to give up living in a fantasy world show it to him. At least the TV he sees it on is real, allegedly.

It's a good lesson too for pretty girls everywhere: all Esmeralda would have had to do to get rid of Frollo and avoid all the agonies of his vengeance would be to hold him tight and talk about marriage and and how much she loves him and will never let him go, and how they'll be together forever, and have eighteen children, all boys, and then just keep going, clinging to him constantly and talking and shouting loud enough to burst his ear, though not even straining her loud ethnic voice, for her mama! Mama! Que largo dentes vos sos! Frollo would be instantly claustrophobic and run as fast as she first did when Quasimodo's hideous shape and crooked, needy smile came lunging out at her. Such is the abject terror when one finds their obscure object of desire has stopped running and has turned back with needy arms outspread. All that bedroom longing and tortured romantic obsession is revealed suddenly as the delusions of a hungry ghost desperate to avoid the empty stare of its own waterlogged, puffy-lipped corpse. The rest is silence, or Stooges covers... echoing through an empty multiplex.

WATCHMEN Dig My Earth

There's something undeniably--yet deliciously--wrong about all the Dylan and classic rock used in Zach Snyder's WATCHMEN. The music of WOODSTOCK and Z-100 FM is corrupted, harnessed to images of superheroes doing Bad Things. Using Dylan's "Times they are a Changin'" over a montage of aging superheroes dying and drinking is akin to Alex's conditioners using his beloved Ludwig Van played over the atrocity footage in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Kubrick's film--like WATCHMEN--doesn't give you too many people to root for in this decayed new world, just the weird feeling that everything worth saving about humanity has long been jettisoned, leaving just universal blandness and its underside: wild violent hooliganism. Nothing is clear cut, just bloody, brusied, and muddy, like the black/white morality of DIRTY HARRY was thrown into a blender and doused with CGI and motor-oil.

One of the trailers that played before WATCHMEN was for TERMINATOR: SALVATION and it looks great, the industrial wasteland-scape recalling the outback world of THE ROAD WARRIOR. But all the complicated sun-bleached CGI rubble doesn't add up to much after awhile. While CGI and mega-budgets let today's Hollywood minds create sci fi worlds our 1980 George Miller could never hope to duplicate, I'd still rather watch young pre-nuts Mel Gibson tangle with the dreaded Humongous (shown in WATCHMEN amidst a wall of TV screens) than all the gray day burnt-out cityscapes CGI can muster. No matter how intensely detailed it gets, CGI is always just a step and a jump short of anime' (when Sally Jupiter and the all-CGI Dr. Manhattan have their long dialogues together, it feels as phony as Jar Jar and Liam Neeson talking in PHANTOM MENACE). All MAD MAX 2 needed was a real car and a real gun and your heart was leaping in your throat. But everything is disposable today, so the heart leaps not - just  goes crumbling into pixels: the guns are melting in the rain like Dillinger soaps. Nothing survives at the cineplex for long except for the sexually frustrated howl of young male hormones; Humongous still lives, but reproduced in a post-modern ground zero simulacrum, on TV at the bad guy hideout at the end of the earth. Like all the Dylan and Hendrix, he's there as a cultural touchstone that's been licensed and co-opted, bottled...stacked and canned.

Did you know that if a sex offender comes into the hospital begging to be castrated, they would never do it? Why is this foul sex drive so highly regarded? It's the real culprit here, not greed or ambition or hatred; sexuality curdles everything with its corrupting touch. The whole comic book superhero world is born from this dishonorable discharge, this rape-ening of the world that turns innocent young men into Michael Landon (left) and women into something we never wanted to see them be: sexually voracious sadomasochists.

I'm always thrilled to see my misanthropy shared in a film's subtext; aren't we all full of secret ambivalence about mass destruction? Our world is a vile cesspool, like our friend Rorschach is always writing in his little TAXI DRIVER journal. Hey, we're reading it aren't we? Put the gun down, George, wait til it's time.

While WATCHMEN might be a cult classic in a decade or two, like STARSHIP TROOPERS, I wish they'd gotten a real artist like Alex Grey (left) to step in and bring some art director cohesion, the way HR Giger brought it to ALIEN (1979). As it is the big blue naked man is ridiculously uninteresting, like something between an out-of-focus anatomy book projection on the wall and a gay porn star (replete with effeminate, vaguely smarmy voice)

But I mean seriously, they play Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" in one scene, and I'm all like... again? Are they still reading the same old (2002?) market research report that suggested James Brown's "I Feel Good" be included in every single comedy trailer? And "All Along the Watchtower" for every 1960s montage?

It's a great song, but by now it's beyond cliche. I first noticed the Watchtower issue awhile ago when enduring the trailer for CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR: Phillip Seymour Hoffman pimped out as a congressman slow mo walking through a 1970s disco groove club. The Hendrix plus the glitter signifies the two-decade span, the hazy morass of Vietnam and acid that was 1965-1974, approximately (Sweet Jane). It's all they need. I squirmed in my theater seat in mute horror. Hendrix+Dylan now equaled Tom Hanks. All was lost. And now--relentlessly, murderously--the corporate plowmen continue to unironically, retournement-ally paste the song in everywhere over montages of slow motion Nixonism. Of course I'm sure it's encoded into the Watchman mythos that it's all self-aware Godard-style to its own comic book bloodlust. So why not go all Heavy Metal about it? Black Sabbath or Earth, Wind and Fire? It's a feelin', baby. Just because your budget allows for all these A-list rock classics doesn't mean you have to use them all.

The thing I admire about WATCHMEN is it does explode the mythos of America's Stockholm syndrome (reflected in Silk Spectre's falling for the Comedian after her attempted rape); pointing out we love watching our country get screwed over via slow motion handshakes behind flag country curtains, as "All Along the Watchtower" plays. We're letting them plow our earth and drink our wine, confident that none of them / along the line / know what any of it is worth-- and we cut back and forth to a television with that monk burning himself alive in protest for Vietnam. I've seen that footage being played on 1960s TVs since the 1960s (PERSONA, Bergman's 1966 film, used it first, to my knowledge, and before this I last saw it in I'M NOT THERE. It's become linked to the horrified female gaze via TV).

I'm not saying the footage isn't fascinating, just that it's embedded in WATCHMEN so deep the post-modern overuse angle is lost in the morass, just as all the other symbolic-historical tchotchkes in this film, from the overused smiley face button on up to the Egyptian artifacts, all trying to archly point in several directions at once and so end up like the Scarecrow on the Mount: "Of course you could go both ways!" America the violent, the beautiful, the beautifully violent; the Leni Riefenstahl by way of Roger Waters violent, italics and ironic quote symbols fall from the sky like rain on our ever-staining Rorschach blots. The feeling you get is that Zach Snyder has gone the reverse direction of the way Paul Verhoeven interpreted Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. Where Verhoeven exploded out in dry-docked self awareness, Snyder loses his arch via over-reliance on hokey touchstones, the way a Tom Hanks Movie would. With Snyder, self-reflexivity and political satire are absorbed as dogma, the way biblical metaphor becomes cold hard fact in the minds of the congregation.

Just how conscious was the fascism in TROOPERS we do not know, but it's a great look forward and a refracted glimmer of what could be a very real truth about our culture. Fascism is able to encompass its own fun house satirical reflection, i.e. it survives its own satirization, even thrives on it: hipster irony begets ironic fascism begets "the new sincerity" and onwards into neo-Puritanism, and that's why it works in dealing with grey aliens as well as hormonal suburban teen alienation-- the ticket and annual double-size issue buying kind. Irony learns to be as twisted as how a teen sees himself in the mirror. If we distort your reflection enough to get you to think you're ugly, maybe you will buy more skin products. It's worth the gamble that you won't go all Columbine on us. (though we secretly hope you do; a senseless killing sells papers!)

"It's because I'm ugly that I do ugly things," is how Boris Karloff put it in THE RAVEN (1933). But you just looked ugly, to yourself, like the pot calling the pot in the mirror black, and not even realizing its white the whole time. Celebrate the times, come on! Sincerity is the new insincerity but please please please! Leave Jimi out of this. The dead will soon return and when they eat my brains and drink my wine, I want Hendrix to be someplace far away and safe, drifting on a sea of forgotten teardrops / on a lifeboat / sailing ho-o-ome.

Even original WATCHMEN creator Alan Moore knows the Yanks aren't ALL violent sociopaths; too bad he forgot to tell Snyder. The maniacal rage of the Spartans in 300 had a definite heroic purpose; the rage of The Watchmen eats itself, like a clock swallowing its own tail. Snyder stands there getting all the details right, hoping--we presume--that the meaning will come.

Maybe it will; WATCHMEN is surely the APOCALYPSE NOW of its decade. It will take many viewings to truly "get" all the details and even more viewings than that to determine whether or not this warrior's journey to the heart of darkness actually goes anywhere, or just blows a lot of thing up, hoping you wont see how fat Brando got in all the smoke. I've sen APOCALYPSE over 30 times and I still can't tell.

P.S. I turn you also to Kim Morgan's uncompromising and refreshing take on the film here.