The Frivolity Of Sunny Analysis

Immediately following the opening, the audience is introduced to Sunny’s nosy, elderly neighbor, Mrs. Pfeiffer, who yells at Sunny from stories bellow in the apartment’s courtyard to check clean out her window. Mrs. Pfeiffer consistently openly monitors Sunny, judging her windows, looking in her trash, and submitting a heated complaint to the building manager that she is a nuisance to the neighbors for her “loud music,” “entertaining men,” and for the “pigeon nest” under the window that Mrs. Pfeiffer had previously told her to clean. Mrs. Pfeiffer is a caricature of an older generation of Germans and simultaneously, through her intense surveillance of and attempts at policing Sunny’s lifestyle, represents a feeling of being watched that was
She has styled herself very distinctly with bold, metallic eye makeup and thin drawn on eyebrows, which she is shown applying multiple times throughout the film, highlighting the effort involved in creating the image she wants to portray. The frivolity of Sunny’s makeup and various clothing choices, like brightly colored high heels are a stark contrast between her and the bleakness of her environment. Within her outfits she often contrasts very casual elements with more formal pieces, such as wearing her bright, metallic high heels with a pair of fraying cutoff denim jeans. Pieces like her jeans, a leather jacket and an oversized buttoned down shirt, along with her cropped hair cut add a masculine, or at least androgynous, edge to her persona. Even in her performance outfits, which tend to contain materials associated with femininity like lace or sequins, she is always wearing pants. While by 1980 a woman wearing pants would not be seen radical, it still adds a sense of modernity to her wardrobe when compared to the other musicians she performs with. This effect is exaggerated when Sunny is engaging with the other female characters in the film, like her other female band mate, who sports long flowing hair and low cut tops or the other female singer they tour with who is shown performing in a long pink gown. While she styles herself this way during the time-span during which
While this initially appears as just teasing, Sunny is shown practically costumed as Liza Minelli in a sequined fringe top, her red hair pulled back and obscured in a beaded headpiece and large fake eyelashes. These additional elements make her likeness to the American performer more obvious and also fit perfectly with her already familiar look of drawn on eyebrows and dramatic metallic eyeshadow. The affect is completed when she begins singing the lyrics Ralph wrote her into a dimly lit cabaret. Sunny’s most memorable performances, this one in the cabaret and her one in the opening sequence are of songs written in English. Even the presumably self given title “Sunny” she requests to be called rather than her birth name Ingrid, and subsequently the tittle of the movie itself, is in English rather than using an equivalent German word like “sonnig.” By dressing in a way that emulates the American musician Liza Minelli while singing her theme in English, she gives the impression that perhaps her style and music are not just creative forms of self expression but in some ways an intentional separation from and denial of her