Frank Miller.
That's who you can blame.
Let me clear; the comic book that made me want to get into comics was an issue of Miller's "Born Again" arc for Daredevil back in the '80s. While a lot of the credit may go to David Mazzucchelli for the quality of those issues, Frank Miller is obviously a giant in the genre and is worthy of acclaim despite the fact he's occasionally shown evidence that he had his brain eaten after 9/11.
The thing is, though, as he's demonstrated time and again, he has a pretty retarded viewpoint on women characters and how to make them relevant. This goes way back, back to his earliest Daredevil comics work, what with Matt Murdock's tragic love interest Elektra. See, she was a pretty, happy woman who was forced to become a grim ninja assassin after her ambassador father was murdered. She used her sexuality as a weapon, which is another way to say she liked dressing in a thong or just going around naked, because that's what you do when you're sexy. She was deadly, too, but only in the sense that she could kill some mooks in ninja costumes - once a real male threat like Bullseye showed up, she was imperiled and Daredevil had to go try and save her. He failed, of course, because she was a fallen women in many ways, and because its cooler to have a lost love than a living one.
Miller would take this same pattern and apply to just about every female protagonist he's had since; make her into an adolescent boy's sex goddess, make her a threatening, unapproachable badass, have her foolishly display her sensitivity to another character, then DESTROY her, preferably in a way that involves her dressing up in latex catsuits, leather bodices, or fishnets and doing some drugs. He did it to Karen Page, Daredevil's previously white-bread secretary turned coke whore, he did it to Catwoman in his Batman: Year One arc (another favorite of mine, also done with Mazzucchelli), making Selina Kyle a part time dominatrix in addition to being a sexxxed up cat burglar, and he created an entire populace of hot dangerous broads in the person of Sin City's odd harem of murderous hookers.
Its this latter example of Miller's fixation on killer ladies of the evening which is perhaps the clearest lift for Snyder's hallucinogenic hodge-podge of arrested adolescent imagery. You say you've got some (attractive) women threatened by the male power structure? Have them fantasize about being powerful...by becoming sword wielding, bullet dancing strippers! That'll show those chauvinist dirtbags who's boss, right?! "Get yer tits out, girls! We're going to solve our problems with ultraviolence and dick-teasing!"
To be fair, Miller was only emulating the attitudes and imagery of the pulpy hardboiled crime stories that seem to be his bread and butter. Film noir and dime novels by guys like Mickey Spillane are filled to the brim with dangerous dames who get their way by showing some leg and hiding a gun in their handbag. They are also filled with climaxes which end with the femme fatale suffering karmic justice by being beaten, humiliated, or just plain killed by the extremely manly private dick protagonist. While Elektra's fate and the fate of the hero of Sucker Punch may not be quite so 1950's in their outlook, the truth is that they're rooted in the same notions; women can only gain power by co-opting the guns/swords/other-phallic-objects of the bad, bad men and using them better. Also, they have to sacrifice themselves, because like any whore with a heart of gold since time immemorial, they can't directly benefit from their aggression - they gotta pay for being Too Beautiful And Too Deadly, preferably in a way that involves realizing they'd be better off as mommies.
Its nothing new, and if you've seen any ten movies with "strong female protagonists" in it, probably nine of them follow this pattern.
Where Miller sometimes succeeds with this gimmick, however, and Snyder does not is in at least trying to give his fantasy femmes a voice. Sure, they're mostly high-heeled cliches, but they've got Personality, they've got Perspectives, and they've got Flaws. As far as I can tell, the dangerous ladies of Sucker Punch only get close to having depth by virtue of having unique costumes and favored weapons. Everything else is style and CGI. So, while Miller could take the blame for seeding the idea of hot-chicks-with-gunz in Snyder's brain, he certainly cannot take the blame for how Snyder executed it. That's all on him, and sooner or later he's going to have to stop co-opting co-opted ideas if he wants to go anywhere as a filmmaker. Will that come in time to make his version of Superman be more than skin deep? I wouldn't hold my breath.
That's who you can blame.
Let me clear; the comic book that made me want to get into comics was an issue of Miller's "Born Again" arc for Daredevil back in the '80s. While a lot of the credit may go to David Mazzucchelli for the quality of those issues, Frank Miller is obviously a giant in the genre and is worthy of acclaim despite the fact he's occasionally shown evidence that he had his brain eaten after 9/11.
The thing is, though, as he's demonstrated time and again, he has a pretty retarded viewpoint on women characters and how to make them relevant. This goes way back, back to his earliest Daredevil comics work, what with Matt Murdock's tragic love interest Elektra. See, she was a pretty, happy woman who was forced to become a grim ninja assassin after her ambassador father was murdered. She used her sexuality as a weapon, which is another way to say she liked dressing in a thong or just going around naked, because that's what you do when you're sexy. She was deadly, too, but only in the sense that she could kill some mooks in ninja costumes - once a real male threat like Bullseye showed up, she was imperiled and Daredevil had to go try and save her. He failed, of course, because she was a fallen women in many ways, and because its cooler to have a lost love than a living one.
Miller would take this same pattern and apply to just about every female protagonist he's had since; make her into an adolescent boy's sex goddess, make her a threatening, unapproachable badass, have her foolishly display her sensitivity to another character, then DESTROY her, preferably in a way that involves her dressing up in latex catsuits, leather bodices, or fishnets and doing some drugs. He did it to Karen Page, Daredevil's previously white-bread secretary turned coke whore, he did it to Catwoman in his Batman: Year One arc (another favorite of mine, also done with Mazzucchelli), making Selina Kyle a part time dominatrix in addition to being a sexxxed up cat burglar, and he created an entire populace of hot dangerous broads in the person of Sin City's odd harem of murderous hookers.
Its this latter example of Miller's fixation on killer ladies of the evening which is perhaps the clearest lift for Snyder's hallucinogenic hodge-podge of arrested adolescent imagery. You say you've got some (attractive) women threatened by the male power structure? Have them fantasize about being powerful...by becoming sword wielding, bullet dancing strippers! That'll show those chauvinist dirtbags who's boss, right?! "Get yer tits out, girls! We're going to solve our problems with ultraviolence and dick-teasing!"
To be fair, Miller was only emulating the attitudes and imagery of the pulpy hardboiled crime stories that seem to be his bread and butter. Film noir and dime novels by guys like Mickey Spillane are filled to the brim with dangerous dames who get their way by showing some leg and hiding a gun in their handbag. They are also filled with climaxes which end with the femme fatale suffering karmic justice by being beaten, humiliated, or just plain killed by the extremely manly private dick protagonist. While Elektra's fate and the fate of the hero of Sucker Punch may not be quite so 1950's in their outlook, the truth is that they're rooted in the same notions; women can only gain power by co-opting the guns/swords/other-phallic-objects of the bad, bad men and using them better. Also, they have to sacrifice themselves, because like any whore with a heart of gold since time immemorial, they can't directly benefit from their aggression - they gotta pay for being Too Beautiful And Too Deadly, preferably in a way that involves realizing they'd be better off as mommies.
Its nothing new, and if you've seen any ten movies with "strong female protagonists" in it, probably nine of them follow this pattern.
Where Miller sometimes succeeds with this gimmick, however, and Snyder does not is in at least trying to give his fantasy femmes a voice. Sure, they're mostly high-heeled cliches, but they've got Personality, they've got Perspectives, and they've got Flaws. As far as I can tell, the dangerous ladies of Sucker Punch only get close to having depth by virtue of having unique costumes and favored weapons. Everything else is style and CGI. So, while Miller could take the blame for seeding the idea of hot-chicks-with-gunz in Snyder's brain, he certainly cannot take the blame for how Snyder executed it. That's all on him, and sooner or later he's going to have to stop co-opting co-opted ideas if he wants to go anywhere as a filmmaker. Will that come in time to make his version of Superman be more than skin deep? I wouldn't hold my breath.
