Personally, I didn't actually find this all that problematic -- though I should mention that I'm not a very strong believer in the ethical duties of art (I'm also a hypocrite.). Furthermore, The Professional (very different movie, very different genre, but drawing on a similar concept and drawing in similar outrage) is one of my favorite movies of all time, precisely because it pulls back the soft, frilly curtains of girlhood and exposes the wrathful steel rod at the center of anyone who has ever felt small, weak, and defenseless. Of course, where The Professional was more or less anchored in a realistic portrayal of the damage done by a vicious cycle of vengeance and violence, Kick-Ass goes the way of gratuitous wish-fulfillment, allowing the small, weak individual the chance to actually fight back. What both features have to offer, I would argue, is, first of all, a revealing look at the nuanced and often contradictory patriarchal relationship (the young female protagonists of both films are enthralled with the "stronger" male, not the "weaker" female side of the father-daughter equation -- precisely the side that is unequivocally glorified as the hero in any major Hollywood production). And, second, both films present a counter-narrative not just to the popular misconception of young girls as delicate little princesses, but also to the other popular portrayal of young girls in Hollywood, the demonic dead-eyed Scary Child. While both Natalie Portman and Chloe Moretz are involved in some pretty monstrous activities, neither of them is herself a monster whose demise we cheer, precisely because these are, at heart, deeply recognizable, deeply sympathetic human archetypes.
What was interesting to me in the critical fracas about the film was the way that the pro-Kick-Ass camps were split: on one side, those who loved it and found within it an empowering feminist message, and those who were okay with the (stylized) murder and mayhem but objected mainly to the word cunt coming out of the mouth of a 10-year-old. What everyone seemed to agree on, though, is how cannily the director managed not to sexualize Hit Girl... because, presumably, that would take away from the whole feminist empowerment thing. While I'm certainly no fan of the rote approach Hollywood takes when presenting a woman onscreen (hot, skinny, white), something about this abhorrence of sexuality made me do a double take. It seems that while we've crossed some boundaries in our ability to imagine a fictional reality in which a pre-teen girl can take down a roomful of aggressive armed thugs, we obviously feel differently if that girl were, say, posing as an underage prostitute to do the same thing. That movie simply could not be made in any of today's major film studios, because... a 10-year-old seeing a penis is so much worse than a 10-year-old seeing the decapitation of a drug dealer?
The visceral cultural ick-factor was also in play during the release of The Professional, which had to be split into an American version expunged of all suggestive content, and a European version called Leon, featuring a controversial and highly suggestive scene in which Natalie Portman discusses her blooming love/lust for the titular foreign hit-man. Again, I didn't really see the problem -- the scene added meat to the exploration of the dark side of patriarchal relations, problematizing the squeaky-clean father-figure role and adding a nice Aristotelian edge to the drama. But, again, to reiterate the most boring and overused criticism of Hollywood -- violence is okay, sex is not. And the younger the protagonists of films get, the more that formula seems to hold true, with no real critical self-reflection. To quote the director of Kick-Ass: "She wasn't sexualized, it wasn't gratuitous, it was fun and she comes off as a great, fully realized female heroine." Hmm. "Fully-realized" indeed.
2 comments:
I'm mostly in the camp of not being incredibly concerned with the ethical duties of art, but there's one difference I would note between the young female characters in the two movies:
In The Professional, the "daughter" figure seeks out the "father" figure to show her how to be strong and take on the world in a similar way. The "father" figure is actually not incredibly proud of being a hit man, and he at least starts out trying to keep her away from that.
In Kick-ass, the "daughter" figure is essentially forced into her role as a crime-fighter (at a much younger age, I might add) by her actual father because of his desire for revenge and out of being overprotective of her. At the point we see them in the movie, she has warmed up to it some and seems to enjoy it, but you can still see her reluctance to do things like the studying he wants her to do. It's definitely debatable how much she would have wanted to go into that on her own, but I'm quite certain that he didn't really wait for her to develop that interest on her own before leading her down that path.
In conclusion, I can separate myself from the fiction in both movies, and I enjoyed both movies a great deal. I don't have any problem with their depictions of these characters, but I could definitely make a case for criticizing Kick-Ass and not criticizing The Professional (even leaving out the whole sex vs. violence issue).
Real talk.
But, I'd also note that the father figure in Kick-Ass is pretty thoroughly pathologized (as is pretty much any character Nick Cage plays these days...), and half the plot of the movie revolves around Hit Girl breaking loose from her bondage to her father's psychotic obsessions and learning how to be a regular person, not a superhero (in a nice reversal of Kick-Ass's story arc, which proceeds from his being a regular person to fake superhero to real superhero). So, the only criticism I could level here is audience-directed -- we don't actually want her to become a regular person, because the character is so cool, a.k.a., we're all beholden to Hollywood hero worship just as much as dear old dad.
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