The Faulty Feminist Experiment of “Sonnie’s Edge”
The first episode in the first volume of Love, Death, + Robots, “Sonnie’s Edge” is an 18-minute ride to an alternative cyberpunk future where people engage in genetically-engineered beast fights underground. The protagonist, Sonnie, has a beast named Khanivore who has yet to be undefeated. Before she joins another fight, a bourgeois man named Dicko attempts to bribe her to lose the game, but she refuses and proceeds to win the game against a male opponent.
After the fight, Dicko’s assistant Jennifer (whose name is mentioned only in the credits) pays Sonnie a visit. They talk about Sonnie’s success and how Jennifer is staying with Dicko for security. An erotic scene ensues, but Jennifer suddenly kills Sonnie by piercing the latter’s face with her long razor-sharp claws. Dicko enters and watches Sonnie writhe until she’s unconscious. The final plot twist immediately follows, when Sonnie is revealed to be in Khanivore’s body and only controlling the human body as a shell. Before the credits roll in, it is implied that Dicko has a sure death in her hands (or claws).
Articles ranking the show’s episodes usually show “Sonnie’s Edge” at the top five, some lauding it for being feminist. As a woman who has read enough papers and participated in discussions pertaining to representation, the glaring detail as to why I disagree that “Sonnie’s Edge” is feminist is because I did not feel an inkling of proper representation in the episode. There are several reasons why.
Retribution or Unnecessary Trigger?
Like how other portrayals of empowerment involve the victim using the tools of the oppressor as retribution for the latter, Khanivore is shown to get back at her opponent in the game through several sharp tails unfurling from her body in the middle of the fight as she approaches her opponent strategically. The scene is not unlike a gang of rapists drawing closer and closer to their victim.
While the scene is definitely strong, it might actually trigger audience members with how graphic it is. Instead of making it appear like Sonnie has successfully used her oppressors’ tools against them (something another Love, Death, + Robots episode, “Good Hunting”, at least successfully executed), it tends to look like an unnecessary sexualization of a fight scene. A review written by Kelly Williams in 2019 breaks down the scenes during the fight that make it fall short of its retributive quality. In one part of the fight preceding Sonnie’s promise of winning, the scene is deliberately built up and framed to look like a penetrative sex scene. For female viewers who expect an action movie-like scene, discomfort is the only possible feeling.
In one of my classes, we discussed how trauma should be shown on film and television (it was on psychoanalysis and film, but for the life of me I have yet to remember if there was a specific theorist). I learned from our professor and her examples that showing the aftermath of the trauma rather than acting it out again (like the pagsasadula portion in Rated K) will not “stain” the memory of the incident and will rather make its weight more palpable. “Sonnie’s Edge” did not do a pagsasadula of the gang rape, which is admirable until it mimicked that same act to show how the protagonist will never again go down without a fight.
The Villainess and the Queerbait
With the first part of the episode, the antagonist is clear right off the bat. It is a rich man named Dicko (which, by the mere mention of his name throughout the episode, makes his character seem like a farcical antagonist instead of appearing threatening). But the real threat, or at least the villain who does the dirty work, in the movie ends up being a woman.
Accompanying Dicko is his mistress who looks like she stepped out of a James Bond movie (though her character looks closer to Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby) with her metallic yellow ensemble: a blonde woman named Jennifer. A subtle tension lingers in the air at her first meeting with Sonnie.
After the fight, Jennifer approaches Sonnie and after a brief conversation on her success and the former’s reason for staying with Dicko, an intense makeout session develops. Ample screen time is given on Jennifer’s nipples, and the audience is made to expect anything but the next scene: Jennifer’s fingers extend into long, sharp claws that puncture Sonnie’s face. Sonnie is then struck repeatedly by Jennifer’s foot until her body becomes unconscious. This scene is linked to her answer on staying with Dicko for security, since it is actually her who is protecting the man.
In essence, Jennifer is a femme fatale. Femme fatales in the history of film and television mostly seduce men. Using her as a way to seduce Sonnie in this episode might appear like a development in the character trope, but it gives queer women a bad image. As a queer woman watching the lesbian scene unfold, it was offensive to be baited towards a faux queer narrative. There are also instances where the femme fatale serves as an empowering figure for women, but there is nothing empowering with the end Jennifer eventually met in this episode. She was killed by her own victim, rendering her a flat character and a tool by her male boss until the very end.
The Male Gaze, Ultimately
The lesbian scene is evidence of scopophilia (theorized by Freud and applied to cinema by Laura Mulvey) being successfully utilized by the creators of the episode, but for the wrong reasons. It does not break the popular and traditional portrayal of lesbians as pornographic despite Jennifer’s character abruptly ending the male fantasy through killing Sonnie’s human form. The episode still feeds into the scopophilic tendencies of the male viewers, providing them a cyberpunk dystopian steamy scene.
There is a certain satisfaction that cisgender heterosexual males will feel upon watching the truth unravel. In the first place, they were never meant to identify with any of the characters. Dicko is male, but since he was blatantly introduced as an antagonist from the beginning there is no way there would be a bit of empathy for him. Upon his implied demise in the end, any viewer will rejoice with Sonnie. Here is where the comparison with a queer viewer enters. The sexual tension in the beginning induces anticipation, and Sonnie’s conversation with Jennifer induces exhilaration (yay for WLW representation!). This hope is eventually quelled at the end (nay), when the queer viewer feels betrayed by the antagonistic nature of who they expected to be one of the two characters they could empathize with. If this were meant to be an empowering episode, why is it that it’s the hope for representation of queer female viewers that is crushed and heterosexual male viewers leave the episode unscathed?
When it comes to the plot twist and the theme of retribution, “Sonnie’s Edge” deserves its praise. The execution of the story, the graphic quality, and the unadulterated queerbaiting, however, makes it a failed experiment at empowerment. Majority of the Love, Death, + Robots episodes for its first volume leaves women with an anxious feeling throughout and after watching, and this episode is worse as it specifically targets queer women into this fear.
