Today I went to see the movie Sucker Punch with friends Scott and Andrea. Man, whatta depressing movie -- aren't these manga/anime-based (or -inspired, in this case) 'magic girl/superhero girl' fantasies supposed to have upbeat, or at least hopeful, endings? I think the real sucker punch was how it betrayed audience expectations.
I suppose it could be seen as a valid aesthetic exercise in playing with genre conventions, but the sudden switch of narrative perspective introduced in order to make it possible was jarring and left me feeling a little cheated. Just my two cents' worth.
I think somebody was inspired by both the biography of Frances Farmer and the 'Normal Again' episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (to be sure, though, this escapist fantasy vs. reality thing is hardly rare; I remember walking home from school one day when I was little, uncomfortably wondering: What if all this is a hallucination -- what if my comfortable life, the high score I earned on the exam, this walk home, it's all just a fantasy and in reality I'm a mental patient stuck in a miserable dark hole somewhere, dreaming this pleasant life?). Walter Mitty, anyone?
That's all I'm going to say about the movie itself, but here's something notable: in earlier posts I noted two apparent instances of precognitive dreaming -- the Bill Nye, the Science Guy dream (02/21/11) and the Dark City dream (08/28/10). Well, today marks the third one. In one of the key scenes in Sucker Punch, a villainous character blows smoke rings while smoking a cigar. The camera, naturally, follows one of the smoke rings as it rises higher and higher without dissipating. When I saw that I remembered that last night/this morning I dreamt that I could blow smoke rings with ease. In the dream I blew one and watched as it kept going and going without dissipating. In waking life I never learned to blow smoke rings.
Each of these incidents, taken by itself, is a trivial event, just like the verbal synchronisms I continue to tally up here on this blog, and could be dismissed as a simple coincidence (although you gotta admit that the images are pretty unusual -- or at least the first two are, anyway -- #1. a goldfish carried in one's cupped hands; and #2. a big heavy weight like a bowling ball or a mini wrecking ball on a chain swung at someone's face). Taken as a group, however, there is a clear pattern. In each instance I saw something remarkable in a dream, then during the following waking period, saw the same thing on TV or in a movie. How fitting for someone raised amidst the pop visual culture explosion of the latter decades of the 20th century.
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