Current Watching
Ginger Yellow wrote:
AO Scott in the NY Times, and Anthony Lane--neither of whom are prudes--have really laid into Kick-Ass for its violence. Here's Lane's review:
Ginger Yellow wrote:
Saw it on Sunday and, yeah, it was great fun. I found it intriguing, as well, that it was this film that really brought home to me the normalisation of violence in modern cinema. I mean, it really is, by Western standards, an astonishingly graphic film. And, sure, a lot of the humour plays on that - an 11 year old girl going all Kill Bill, the juxtaposition of expectations of cartoon violence with equally cartoony, but in some sense realistic violence - but, still, I couldn't help but think back to when Total Recall was deemed an extraordinarily violent mainstream film. It looks like children's fodder compared to Kick Ass, let alone Saw and its ilk.
Kick-Ass wears a cheap wetsuit and gets nowhere, until one of his pathetic attempts at justice is posted on YouTube, at which point he becomes a star. It is hard to see where the plot can go from here, so Goldman and Vaughn come to its aid by introducing a pair of real crime-fighters, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz). The twist is that they are father and daughter, perhaps the closest duo since Oedipus and Antigone, though, unless you have a particularly corrupt text, you will not find Antigone greeting a roomful of evil men with the words “O.K., you cunts, let’s see what you can do now.”
This line has already plunged the film into a froth of infamy, and, if you really think that Vaughn and Goldman (both of whom are British) planned it any other way, you are behind the times. A film casts its bait, and we bite. Vaughn knows that the vulnerability of the young is a more tremulous issue than ever, so he switches things around, leaving grownups vulnerable to their juniors. Hit Girl is eleven years old, and schooled by her father to slaughter and maim while displaying no emotion other than fizzy glee. Her first mass murder, of a drug dealer and his posse, is a flurry of cartwheels and gougings, backed by the theme tune from “The Banana Splits.” Many viewers, no question, will be jazzed up by the sensory sugar rush of this, but it’s worth asking, once the movie has calmed down, whether we have witnessed a silly mismatch of innocence and experience, to be relished for its gross-out verve, or a formidable exercise in cynicism.
“Kick-Ass” is violence’s answer to kiddie porn. You can see it in Hit Girl’s outfit when she cons her way past security guards—white blouse, hair in pigtails, short tartan skirt—and in the winsome way that she pleads to be inculcated into grownup excess. That pleading is the dream of every pedophile, and I wonder if Goldman paused to examine her contribution to the myth. (Note what the script does with mothers: Dave’s expires at the breakfast table, causing no blip in the rhythm of his life, and Hit Girl’s was dead before she was born. Thus is any trace of tenderness expunged before our tale begins.) Goldman would presumably say that it is violence, not sex, that our pre-teen heroine learns, but that is a cowardly distinction—although, to be fair, it is a cowardice shared by everyone from the M.P.A.A. down. “Kick-Ass” is rated R, which means that adults are free to take children to watch a child hurting adults: a neatly wrapped package, like “Home Alone” on growth hormones. The standard defense of such material is that we are watching “cartoon violence,” but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer—that is, to coarsen and inflame?
If you find your enjoyment of “Kick-Ass” unclouded by such issues, good luck to you. The rest of the movie feels pretty secondhand anyway, as a heavily British cast tries teeth-grindingly hard to be American. Aaron Johnson, in the title role, is the only one who doesn’t show the strain, and it’s a pity that his early goofiness is cut short; by the end, as Kick-Ass pilots a jet pack, armed with Gatling guns, around the New York skyline, any claim that the film could be spoofing, or lightly humanizing, the usual overkill of the comic book has long since been wiped away. Back to fantasy, then: just the way we like it.
This line has already plunged the film into a froth of infamy, and, if you really think that Vaughn and Goldman (both of whom are British) planned it any other way, you are behind the times. A film casts its bait, and we bite. Vaughn knows that the vulnerability of the young is a more tremulous issue than ever, so he switches things around, leaving grownups vulnerable to their juniors. Hit Girl is eleven years old, and schooled by her father to slaughter and maim while displaying no emotion other than fizzy glee. Her first mass murder, of a drug dealer and his posse, is a flurry of cartwheels and gougings, backed by the theme tune from “The Banana Splits.” Many viewers, no question, will be jazzed up by the sensory sugar rush of this, but it’s worth asking, once the movie has calmed down, whether we have witnessed a silly mismatch of innocence and experience, to be relished for its gross-out verve, or a formidable exercise in cynicism.
“Kick-Ass” is violence’s answer to kiddie porn. You can see it in Hit Girl’s outfit when she cons her way past security guards—white blouse, hair in pigtails, short tartan skirt—and in the winsome way that she pleads to be inculcated into grownup excess. That pleading is the dream of every pedophile, and I wonder if Goldman paused to examine her contribution to the myth. (Note what the script does with mothers: Dave’s expires at the breakfast table, causing no blip in the rhythm of his life, and Hit Girl’s was dead before she was born. Thus is any trace of tenderness expunged before our tale begins.) Goldman would presumably say that it is violence, not sex, that our pre-teen heroine learns, but that is a cowardly distinction—although, to be fair, it is a cowardice shared by everyone from the M.P.A.A. down. “Kick-Ass” is rated R, which means that adults are free to take children to watch a child hurting adults: a neatly wrapped package, like “Home Alone” on growth hormones. The standard defense of such material is that we are watching “cartoon violence,” but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer—that is, to coarsen and inflame?
If you find your enjoyment of “Kick-Ass” unclouded by such issues, good luck to you. The rest of the movie feels pretty secondhand anyway, as a heavily British cast tries teeth-grindingly hard to be American. Aaron Johnson, in the title role, is the only one who doesn’t show the strain, and it’s a pity that his early goofiness is cut short; by the end, as Kick-Ass pilots a jet pack, armed with Gatling guns, around the New York skyline, any claim that the film could be spoofing, or lightly humanizing, the usual overkill of the comic book has long since been wiped away. Back to fantasy, then: just the way we like it.
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