This piece appeared first on Oscilloscope Laboratories “Musings” blog, and then was published in Volume Two of their series of books, compiling many of the pieces from that blog. I had been wanting to write this piece for literally years and I am so pleased I finally was given the opportunity. Since its inclusion in the book, the piece was taken down from the blog. I publish it here in excerpt with the permission of editor Scott Tobias. You can purchase the full volumes on the Oscilloscope site.

Remember My Forgotten Women: The Dire Worlds of Sucker Punch and Gold Diggers of 1933

Halfway through my first viewing of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch—-as I tried to disengage from the negative criticism floating around the film, as I admitted I was not only getting sucked in, I was actually moved by all of it-—a confused thought drifted into my head: “Am I crazy, or is this a little bit like Gold Diggers of 1933?” (That’s a rhetorical question, although I can already hear the response.) The thought was so ludicrous it felt like a hallucination, not to mention a sacrilege, but it kept nagging at me. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes after that, there’s a scene where the evil pimp-orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac) comes into the rebellious girls’ ratty dressing room to read them the riot act. On the wall is a collage of old movie posters, and I got a brief flash of the words “GOLD DIGGERS” behind his head. I paused the film, and squinted at the screen. The posters I could make out were:

— Night and Day, the 1946 biopic about Cole Porter, starring Cary Grant. 
— Blues in the Night, the 1941 film about a guy putting together a jazz band.
— My Dream is Yours, the 1949 musical where Doris Day replaces a singer in his popular radio show.
— Thank Your Lucky Stars, the 1943 film about a wartime charity show, starring Eddie Cantor as himself.

Most notably, though, there was not one, not two, but three posters for various “Gold Diggers” films. (There were many in the “franchise”: The Gold Diggers (1923), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), Gold Diggers of 1933/1935/37—released in each respective year, and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938).) The posters created bristling antlers out of the word “Gold Diggers” flaring out around Oscar Isaac’s head.

These posters were obviously deliberate choices. Each movie is a musical about a musical, films about creating music, about putting on a show. The posters are a statement of intention. Or, at least, a statement of aspiration. They place Sucker Punch in a continuum, and, in a way, tell us how to watch.

Starting out with a shot of a gloomy old-fashioned proscenium with dark curtains, Sucker Punch is a version of the “backstage” musical, complete with dance rehearsals filled with the pressure of putting on a good show. Gold Diggers of 1933, the best of the Gold Diggers films, casts a shadow longer than Sucker Punch can ever hope to do, but the two films operate in similar ways, using dizzying artificial worlds of fantasy as a bulwark against the harsh realities of life beyond the lights. But something happens in both films: the “fantasies” also shine the spotlight onto urgent social and political concerns. They are not just escapes from reality–they expose reality. 

The four scrappy tap-shoed “Gold Digger” girls (Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, Ruby Keeler, and Aline MacMahon), trying to survive in a pitiless world aren’t dissimilar to the five scrappy leotard-wearing girls in Sucker Punch (Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung), trying to escape the confines men—-and a lunatic society—-have put on them.

The characters in both films discover escape hatches through elaborately staged “numbers”. In Gold Diggers, it’s the kaleidoscopic vision of choreographer Busby Berkeley; in Sucker Punch, it’s the alternate universes Babydoll (Emily Browning) creates whenever she dances. These numbers (both films have four apiece, another dovetail) reflect and distort the action going on just offstage. They are meta-commentaries on material that is already somewhat “meta.” 

Critics scorched the earth with their reviews of Sucker Punch, so much so that one might be inclined to tiptoe into the landscape tentatively, but this is ridiculous. You don’t have to “defend” a movie as though it’s a criminal. Beware consensus. At the time of its release, there were a handful of critics—-Danny Bowes, Sonny Bunch, Kim Morgan, and Betsy Sharkey, among them—-who wrote about the film in a way I found intriguing. In their words, Sucker Punch sounded ambitious, bold, and maybe a little bit dumb. But also interesting. Ambitious failures are often more compelling than connect-the-dots successes.

The queasily mixed messages of Sucker Punch are part of its unnerving mood. The film really gets and shows enormous empathy for the double-bind of women, the “damned if you do/don’t” realities of sexuality, the survival techniques women create to deflect how the world sees them. The film goes after the gaslighting culture where women are, metaphorically, either in a mental institution or a brothel. It is a world run by men with a vested interest in keeping women divided and conquered.

One of the best parts of Sucker Punch is the cooperation and sympathy among the women. Even when they argue, there is space for different opinions. Gold Diggers of 1933, too, doggedly refuses to pit the women against each other. Even Ginger Rogers, the only one who’s truly a “gold digger,” is treated with eye-rolling humor by the others. It’s far closer to the actual reality of “female friendship” than a catfighting-competition.

Sucker Punch pursues its targets with a CGI-generated sledgehammer wielded by a ponytailed girl in a babydoll dress. Its vision is hallucinatory and exaggerated, but the exaggeration makes its points in a refreshingly clear way. The world is one of Dickensian depravity poured through the paranoid filter of Ken Kesey.

Babydoll is thrown into an institution for the criminally insane, after accidentally killing her sister during a scuffle with their evil stepfather. Oscar Isaac, with Errol Flynn mustache, plays the subversive orderly, assuring Babydoll’s stepfather a lobotomy has been scheduled for next week. He leads Babydoll into what is known as “the theatre,” a gigantic echoing space where the other patients act out their aggressions, all under the watchful eye of Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino). Jon Hamm arrives to perform the lobotomy and Babydoll launches into a fantasy where the asylum is actually a brothel/strip club, with trapped girls “entertaining” high-rolling clients. The other girls—-Sweetpea (Cornish) and her sister Rocket (Malone), Blondie (Hudgens) and Amber (Chung)—-take Babydoll under their collective wing. In a cavernous rehearsal room, Babydoll is told by Gugino—-a den-mother who clearly started out as one of them—-to dance.

Babydoll sways back and forth and suddenly an entire world erupts, a world where she fights (and slays) a trio of gigantic samurai-robots. She is given the tools for her escape by a character who shows up in each fantasy called Wise Man, played by Scott Glenn.

When the “number” stops, everyone in the rehearsal hall is breathless and awestruck.

Babydoll is called upon to dance again and again to distract their male captors as the girls gather the items they need to break free. Each “dance” creates a different universe, depending on the item they seek: map, fire, knife, key. After the Samurai-Robot Ballet comes the Steampunk-Nazi-Battle of Leningrad, the Fire-Breathing Dragon Tussle, and the Ticking Bomb on a Speeding Train Finale.

In each, the girls transform into an Inglourious Basterds team of misfit Commandos, swaggering through danger, obliterating anything in their path. Zack Snyder’s imagination is on bombastic overdrive, and all of the actresses bring real feeling to the table. The film is Gothic horror, melodrama, and a video game, propelled by real trauma. 

The Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, with four now-classic numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, clues us in early on that this will not be your regular “let’s put on a show” musical:

“What’s the show about?”
“The Depression.”
“We won’t have to rehearse that.”

“Remember My Forgotten Man,” the explosive final number (more on that in a bit), is referenced early, by Barney (Ned Sparks), the producer of the show, who paints a word picture to the listening chorus girls: 

“That’s what this show is about. The Depression. Men marching, marching in the rain, men marching, marching, jobs, jobs, and in the background Carol, the spirit of the Depression, a blues song – no, not a blues song, but a wailing, a wailing, and this gorgeous woman singing this song that will tear their hearts out, the big parade, the big parade of tears.”

The cold wind of the grim ‘30s reality whips underneath the door of the standard musical. The three main characters—-Carol (Joan Blondell), Trixie (Aline McMahon), and Polly (Ruby Keeler)—-live in a dingy apartment, and all sleep in the same room, cramped in single beds. They steal bottles of milk chilling on other people’s fire escapes. They can’t pay their rent. When a meeting with a Broadway producer comes up, only one of them can go because there’s only one nice dress among the three of them.

This is a backstage story, yes, but the stakes are more dire than “Will I become a star? Will the show be a hit?” They want the show to be a hit because it means they can pay rent, eat, buy their own milk. When Carol calls her friends to tell them the show’s a go, she sobs the news, her sobs filled with pure animal relief. On opening night, the composer Brad Roberts (Dick Powell) refuses to fill in as the lead of the show, and Trixie scolds him in no uncertain terms:

“You know what it means if this show doesn’t go on? You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids who gave up jobs and won’t ever be able to find another one in these times? Those kids who’ve been living on nothing, starving themselves for the 6 weeks we’ve been rehearsing, hoping for this show to go on to be a success? They’re counting on you. You can’t let them down. You can’t. If you do … well, God knows what’ll happen to those kids, they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience.”

This bleak picture of what failure will actually look like, including the specter of prostitution, licks at the heels of the spunky survival-minded girls and give Busby Berkeley’s numbers an electric charge, destabilizing the cliches of the genre. The dance numbers comment on, undercut, illuminate, all of the themes and experiences of the four girls.

In “We’re In the Money,” the opening number, Ginger Rogers, in gigantic closeup, sings those sarcastic lyrics with a huge smile on her face, dressed in an outfit made up of gleaming coins, with a huge coin over her crotch area.

That’s not subtext. That’s text. 

The “Pettin’ in the Park” number is racy, considering what “petting” meant in the lingo of the era. It’s not just about sex, but public sex.

Everything is hunky dory, with couples of all ages and races canoodling in the park, but then when they disrobe after a rainstorm Billy Barty (dressed as a lascivious baby, to creepy effect) ogles them, to the degree that the women all put on corsets of tin, safe from the handsiness of men. In the final moment, though, Dick Powell whips out a can opener and pierces the tin on Ruby Keeler’s back!

“Pettin’ in the Park” starts as totally sex-positive, and then Barty shows up and things get creepy. Sex isn’t fun anymore. Society is the bed of Procrustes again. The corset tin of the double-bind.

“The Shadow Waltz” is a dream of beauty and escape and art for art’s sake, the exact opposite of the reality for our four main characters. Seemingly hundreds of women, playing violins that glow with neon tubes, float through pitch blackness. It is pure fantasy, made piercingly sad by the reality of the offscreen life of these dancers.

The lack of escape from their unattractive options leads to embracing the reality of Reality–cold and harsh–in the famous final number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.” All fantasy vanishes. The world is too serious for that now. The number is a head-on confrontation with tough truths, political and social, followed by a vision of powerful unity and collective mourning. It is a furious indictment of a society sending boys and men off to war and then abandoning them when they return, traumatized and clogging up the bread lines. 

The number explodes all that came before it, and the reverb continues today. (Jack Warner hadn’t planned on closing out the film with “Remember My Forgotten Man,” but once he saw it he knew it couldn’t appear earlier. Nothing could follow it.) The film bursts its seams. All of the personal stories in the film (Why doesn’t Brad want to go onstage? Will J. Lawrence Bradford get the stick out of his ass? Will Carol and Trixie’s stunt go too far? Will the show be a hit?) are obliterated into dust by “Remember My Forgotten Man”’s vision of endless ranks of “men marching, marching in the rain, men marching, marching,” with Joan Blondell (and Etta Moten, in the beginning of the song) crying out in mourning and anger.

Filmed in possibly the most harrowing year of the Depression, “Remember My Forgotten Man” is what Gold Diggers of 1933 is actually about. Everything else was just prologue. In that final number, Gold Diggers of 1933 throws open the doors, lets in the winter wind that’s been howling all along, and tells us what’s really on its mind. The number ends and so does the movie, leaving you blasted apart.

Matthew Kennedy, in his Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes, calls it “perhaps the most socially urgent song ever conceived for an American musical film.” Indeed. 

One doesn’t expect a backstage musical to indict an entire society, especially not in the final number. And one doesn’t look to a Zack Snyder movie for social commentary on the plight of women. But there you have it. It happened anyway.

It should go without saying that Gold Diggers of 1933 is a masterpiece. Sucker Punch is not. But Sucker Punch floats in the same territory, attempting to bring the real world into the dreamworld, exposing exploitation, human trafficking and enmeshment. In its darkness and gigantism, in its over-stylization and mood-poem montages-—Sucker Punch is not entirely in control of itself and Zack Snyder is not entirely in control. This is a good zone for him. He was onto something with Sucker Punch and he knew it.

In a lot of ways, Sucker Punch wants to have its cake and eat it too. (Although: Why would you hand me a piece of cake and then get mad when I eat it? Isn’t cake there to be eaten?) The sexily-dressed girls are both damsels in distress and avenging angels. They parade in front of men in their babydoll dresses, and their solidarity helps them survive. Both and all are true. Scott Glenn and Jon Hamm as the lobotomist represent the good men who see women as human and want to help. Sucker Punch‘s gloomy grandiosity is appropriate to its subject matter. The film even reaches profundity, especially when the narrator shifts suddenly in the final sequence.

It turns out Sucker Punch is not Babydoll’s story after all. The story starts with Babydoll, but it ends with Sweetpea. It was Sweetpea’s story all along.

And it turns out that The Gold Diggers of 1933 is not about the backstage adventures of Trixie and Carol and Polly and the rigors of putting on a Broadway show.

It’s about all those “forgotten men,” clamoring right outside the door.