Kick-Ass (2010)
I really don’t know what I was expecting from this film, but even had I gone into it expecting the worst, I doubt I could have predicted the level of racist, classist, misogynistic, homophobic, reactionary, overproduced, underwritten garbage that it actually managed to achieve. The film received a bit of controversy when it was first released, mostly centering around the gratuitous violence and profanity, much of it dished out or uttered by the prepubescent vigilante Hit Girl. But if an 11-year old saying the word “cunt” is your biggest problem with this movie, your priorities are likely as backward and your perspective of the world likely as confused as the makers of the film.
In her 1971 review of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Pauline Kael referred to it as “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.” Similar charges of fascistic-ness were leveled against 2008’s The Dark Knight. Yet although both of those works contain elements that seem to celebrate or condone brutal, vengeful bloodshed, they are also relentlessly self-questioning. They do not wrap up neatly, but leave their insides spilling out for us to mull over… frustrated, perhaps unsatisfied, but provoked. In the end, they serve as mile-a-minute ethical obstacle courses, challenging our definitions of right and wrong, demonstrating the overwhelming moral complexity of our world, raising hairy questions that remain unanswered and which may in fact be unanswerable.
Kick-Ass, alternately, questions nothing. It is firmly in the camp of films that Kael spent her whole career railing against (in sharp opposition to the violent yet smart films she loved) - the blunt, brutish, medieval, manipulative films that don’t merely call attention to contemporary fears and longings for security, but actually elevate and rationalize those fears and longings, justifying them with arrogant, unthinking righteousness. It is among the clearest examples in recent memory of a wholly unashamed right-wing spectacle - a stultifyingly simplistic fairy tale whose sole moral is “there are bad people in the world who must be exterminated” - a message made even more insidious and disturbing by the film’s cartoonish veneer and snide, knowing self-awareness.
The clearest sign that Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn’s juvenile stupidity and stunted emotional maturity is equivalent to that of his characters is the sense one gets that he revels in what he perceives as a wanton violating of taboos. This is of course a large part of the film’s appeal. But to think that anyone other than a teenager actually believes that the Tarantino-esque levels of cusswords and carnage contained herein constitute some sort of rebellious, pride-worthy threat to mainstream American values is almost too depressing to fathom. Vaughn and the family advocacy dimwits that protest him are both guilty of the exact same shortsightedness, unable to recognize that the film’s values are not in any way contrary to the values that underpin America’s institutional fabric.
“I said, ‘What are you looking at?!’” yells the thug in the midst of carjacking what looks like a very expensive automobile. The would-be superhero pauses for a second, scared, tinges of embarrassment flaring up in his mind as he thinks about the ridiculous costume he has on. Then he mans up, takes a deep breath and straightens his back. “Two cheapshit losers screwing with a car somebody probably worked their ass off to pay for.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Take a look at the above still. Yes… that is an interpretation of the cover of Ayn Rand’s libertarian capitalist apologetic novel of ideas Atlas Shrugged, hanging in protagonist Dave ‘Kick-Ass’ Lizewski’s bedroom, presumably drawn by Dave ‘Kick-Ass’ Lizewski himself. This shouldn’t be at all surprising. In a message board thread about Rand I recently read, one poster provided a timeline of the psychological development of the stereotypical Libertarian:
“Adolescent awkwardness –> social marginalization –> adoption of antisocial subcultural identity –> superficial misreading of Nietzsche –> delusions of persecution for unrecognized genius –> Ayn Rand –> projection of resentment of jocks to resentment of poor people –> libertarianism”
Perhaps not surprisingly, replace ‘genius’ with ‘gallantry,’ ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘Ayn Rand’ with ‘Superman’ (appropriately, himself a superficial misreading of Nietzsche, and originally a villain) and ‘Batman,’ and ‘libertarianism’ with ‘vigilantism,’ and you’ve got a pretty good portrait of Lizewski’s psychological development as well. He is almost too perfect a caricature of that arc. The film opens with Lizewski bleating about his boring-ness and “invisibility to girls.” It is from this pathetic, primordial longing for recognition that all his superhero impulses stem. The film on numerous occasions attempts to quite literally beat Lizewski out of his delusional and misguided ambitions. But rather than acting as a confrontation with reality, shedding light on the would-be vigilante’s dysfunctional, self-aggrandizing psychology as he forges ahead despite all concerns for his own or anyone else’s safety, the film genuinely rewards him for his dysfunction.
On first glance, Lizewski’s stated motivations may seem in direct opposition to those lauded by Rand. On closer examination though, this isn’t entirely so. The invention of Kick-Ass isn’t so much about altruism as it is about the will to power (and getting laid). Rand’s own philosophy, Objectivism, is so named because of her belief that morality is not relative, but rather an objective and universal truth to be discovered by mankind through reason and logic. Such a belief in moral objectivity must always be at the heart of the vigilante’s philosophy - they could not function otherwise.
The link is stronger than you might think. In Rand’s journals can be found the sketches of what was intended to be her first novel, The Little Street. Its hero, Danny Renahan, was to possess “the true, innate psychology of a Superman.” And who was this Superman to be modeled after? None other than the infamous child murderer William Edward Hickman, perpetrator of “the most horrible crime of the 1920s,” who she described as being “born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.” Renahan was to be “a Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy.” Rand’s fundamental mistake is in believing that the two can be separated, that psychopathy and solipsism are not one in the same. It’s a mistake echoed by both her followers and anyone who glorifies the figure of the vigilante.
One only look at Steve Ditko, the Spiderman co-creator and Randroid whose characters Mr. A and The Question were strict adherents of Objectivism. Just like Rand, Ditko awkwardly wrapped his overwritten philosophical dialogs in flat, unconvincing pulp stories. This makes for some rather humorous reading, as every single confrontation Mr. A has with a criminal is accompanied by dry, lengthy diatribes in enormous blocks of text, so that reading the comics becomes more like being lectured by your parents (if your parents also happened to be philosophy professors). Kick-Ass doesn’t quite lecture you - his vocabulary is far too small for that - but his overbearing voiceover overlays nearly every scene, needlessly describing the very things you are watching at that exact moment, laying out his every thought and feeling, no matter how self-evident.
I would like to believe that this is all a joke; that that poster is supposed to hint at the fact that Lizewski is a prick; that the crack about the car is supposed to be head-shakingly naive. I’m sure to some extant it is. The plausibility and likeability of Lizewski’s character hinges on his naivety, after all. Maybe the bureaucratic and contestuous nature of Hollywood filmmaking managed to squeeze all the subversiveness out of this film and transform a clearly parodic work into one unsure of how seriously to take itself. But if its makers really believe that the end result actually functions as effective satire, they’re sorely mistaken.
If he is being sincere, Matthew Vaughn shares a number of key traits with the seer of selfishness herself. Both idolize the worst, most barbaric impulses of human beings, transmuting them into virtues. And both craft flat fantasy narratives to couch their virtues in, deliberately concealing their ugly consequences by aestheticizing or else rationalizing and downplaying them. Both also falsely imagine themselves to be going against the grain of a stupid, spineless society. Rand failed to see that greedy self-interest was already at the heart of the modern American spirit. Vaughn fails to see that moral certainty and the urge to enact justice is its essential counterpart.
Almost as idiotic as thinking that Kick-Ass‘ conservatism is somehow ‘edgy’ is the notion that Hit Girl, with her mix of pretty pink girlishness and vicious, unflinching brutality, is in any way an empowering female figure. Her character is ultimately just as flat and one-dimensional as the nauseating cardboard cutout of a love interest who exists only to emphasize awkwardness and longing and to function as a prize. The idea of stuffing a handful of laughably stereotypical masculinity inside of a laughably stereotypical feminine shell is the sort of faux-feminism that could only be confused with the real thing by overgrown adolescent boys like Luc Besson (whose Leon: The Professional serves as a notable pre-cursor to Vaughn’s kiddy killing machine fetishism, yet still manages to outshine him in terms of character development).
Yet, at the same time, Hit Girl, and Nic Cage as the father training her to kill (himself a self-made superhero named Big Daddy), are the definite highlight… possibly the sole highlight. Though the essential juxtaposition of cute with gruesome is a played out one, the extreme to which it’s carried out in this film approaches dizzying levels, its absurdity only heightened by the excellent acting of Cage and Chloe Moretz. The first time we witness her in action, casually wiping out a room full of “junkie assholes” with a double-ended katana-bladed staff, the sheer brutality of it all is farcical bordering on chilling. The fact that it doesn’t tip into that second camp, and never once does, is where the film as a whole falls short.
This moment is just one of many in the film in which I imagined it taking a different path. At numerous points like this one, a careful shift in tone to the disconcertingly real or the ludicrously parodic and dissociated would have been brilliance. That is to say, the basic premise of the film had enormous potential. But such a feat would have required a far more intelligent and audacious writer/director than Vaughn. In her review for the NY Times, Manohla Dargis lamented that although the relationship between Hit Girl and her dad contained a tinge of creepy incestuousness “as kinky and potentially resonant as that between Lolita and Humbert Humbert, […] you’d need a better director to pry it out.” Such what-ifs are painful to think about. Yet identifying those sites of squandered possibility are the only way of drawing any useful, interesting, or inspiring insight from the film whatsoever, and so I’ll continue with them.
Mark Millar, the author of the comic book on which the film was based, says that he was inspired to begin writing comics after meeting Alan Moore as a teen. Having not read Millar’s original, I can’t say whether Moore’s brilliance never rubbed off on him in the first place, or if it was merely lost somewhere along the path to the big screen, but it’s certainly nowhere to be found here. Kick-Ass seems written not by a comics fan, but by someone with a simplistic, half-century old conception of what comics and superhero stories are like. Vaughn and his collaborators ignore decades worth of work by people like Moore to legitimize comics as an art form by introducing ethical complexity to the medium. Lizewski’s hero persona, and the world he inhabits, have all the depth of a golden age story, as thin as the paper it’s printed on.
Moore’s own Watchmen, and his character Rorschach, provides a pitch-perfect counterpoint against which to examine Kick-Ass. As Tim O’Neill writes, “Rorschach is a parody of a type - a particular brand of urban vigilante that became an object of undeniable, grotesque fascination during the 1970s. […] Moore bends over backwards to frame Rorschach as a demented goon, a far right paranoiac stuck to an juvenile code of ethics, the inflexibility of which promises not merely danger but complete ruin. […] Rorschach can’t be anything but a stone killer, a sociopathic serial murderer whose only saving grace is that his chosen victims are not attractive blonde joggers or lonely hitchhikers, but presumed criminals.”
Rorschach is in fact based on the aforementioned Mr. A and his successor, the less ideologically heavy The Question. But in Moore’s characterization, he more acutely resembles Travis Bickle. His insanity is not made to appear rational as Rand and Ditko would have it, but revealed for what it is. Kick-Ass, on the other hand, is not a parody of a type, he IS that type.
“Kovacs pretending to be Rorschach.” This is Kick-Ass. He is not yet the cold blooded murderer that Big Daddy is. But not for not trying; not for the sake of empathy; not because he is “soft on scum.” Only because he’s weak, unskilled, clumsy. Lezewski/Kick-Ass’s ‘origin story’ and modus operandi even mirrors that of Kovacs/Rorschach. It is the murder of Kitty Genovese, raped and stabbed to death while dozens of bystanders did nothing to stop it, that causes Walter Kovacs to don a mask. Kick-Ass utters similar reasoning early on, as he’s stared at and filmed with camera phones while combating a group of lowlifes. “The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what’s wrong with me?” The difference between Moore and Vaughn, of course, is that the latter attempts to justify and exult that logic, the former reveals it to be sociopathic.
That same scene is also a curious one, in that Kick-Ass’ coming to the rescue of that “one guy” is completely arbitrary, with no context ever given for his attack, and none ever desired. Why are we to differentiate between Kick-Ass’ brand of extrajudicial retribution and the variety being dished out by “three assholes” on someone he only assumes is just some poor sap? This ignorance points to the most dangerous and reactionary component of the film’s logic, the glue that holds it together, which is the same thing that is dangerous and reactionary about all right-wing spectacle, both on the screen and off: a sort of myopic vision which focuses intently on details and symptoms but which is completely blind to their relationship to the bigger picture. In the exact same way that conservatives view all social plight as merely a problem of individuals, the vigilantes here seem blissfully unaware of the whole of social, economic, and political infrastructure which produces their victims. Nearly all of the movie’s goons are in some way players in the illegal drug trade, and in many cases it is this association alone that is enough to label them “bad guys.” Ironically, the film’s callow simplicity also makes its reasoning all too easy to dismantle. Though I suppose a kid wanting to “fix” the world and then proceeding to campaign for an end to the drug war for an hour and a half wouldn’t make a very entertaining flick.
But Vaughn and the rest of his team can’t possibly be blind to those concerns, and their attempts to tip-toe around unavoidable issues of race and class make this abundantly clear. The group of mainly African American thugs Hit Girl first slays, for instance, is given one or two white guys, insurance commercial-style, so as to pre-empt charges of racism. It’s a patently dishonest trick. In this context, when it is obvious that the film’s makers are painfully, prudently aware of the issues at play, such a conscious, totalizing dehumanization of the film’s many “baddies” is reprehensible.
Were it honest with itself, and were it actually interested in real provocation (and not merely the inane, toddler-like deviancy and imaginary taboo breaking it wallows in), the film wouldn’t attempt to bury those issues, but rather tease them out, where they could be examined. Humanizing its thugs, even just to a minor extent, allowing us to see their pain and the terror on their faces (without being reduced to a slapstick gag), would be profoundly unsettling. It would also disrupt the illusion the film works hard to enforce, which is why it’s not permitted.
“I try to give back to violence that what it truly is: pain, injury to another,” writes Michael Haneke. What if Kick-Ass were to take a few cues from Funny Games? It already dips into sly, fourth-wall breaking territory on occasion. Why not extend that into full blown, audience-baiting sadisticness? There is a moment toward the end of the film in which Hit Girl for the very first time shows pain, vulnerability and fear. But why is this moment glossed over? I would prefer that it were stressed - her sheer mortal terror and realization of imminent death approaching the same levels of empathy Haneke so skillfully pushes his actors to exude. And then what? Why bother saving her? “There’s this unspoken rule that you can’t harm animals,” Haneke reminds us, “What do I do? I kill the dog first thing. The same with the boy.” Kick-Ass would like to pretend that it is breaking rules and violating sacred cows, but in the end, it has the signs of impotent Hollywood risk-management written all over it.
This sort of direction would not, of course, sustain the entire film. Nor should it. The element of absurdity is essential, and that gritty realism would be pointless without a fantasy to rub up against. Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer provides a perfect template for that kind of a contrast, even containing the same child brainwashing and comic nerd turned superhero-styled psycho killer motifs as Kick-Ass.
The discomfort one experiences while watching Ichi stems not so much from the mind-boggling level of violence and gore on screen, which though nauseatingly excessive, comes off as mostly humorous. Rather it is the psychosexual tensions bubbling underneath that is truly disturbing. Ichi very deftly situates its bloodbaths in the context of larger issues of masculine anxiety. In contrast, though Kick-Ass is unabashed in its portrayal of rabid teenage male sex drive and insecurity about sexual orientation, it isn’t smart enough to relate this to anything larger than itself.
Miike also plays with Mulvey-esque, audience-as-voyeur critiques, though via entirely different means than Haneke, relating them back to the sado-masochistic elements that drive the film’s plot. As one reviewer writes, “[the sadistic voyeur Ichi’s] arousal at the sight of any aggression offers an uncomfortable reflection of Miike’s own audience. The film dramatizes how easily violent acts are learned, imitated, and misdirected, engendering endless cycles of vengeance where real satisfaction becomes impossible and disappointment inevitable.” Considering that sort of intelligent, thematic complexity, Kick-Ass is on another planet entirely.
From what little I’ve seen, the art from Millar’s original comic seems to approach something closer to Miike’s approach - blood quite literally dripping from every surface, at once both comic and unsettling. Big Daddy wearing an actual Batman costume is excellent in that it hints at his loose grip on reality and essentially, at his patheticness. But why do we never see him looking anything like he does below - some unholy cross between medieval executioner and slasher film serial killer, chainsaw and all?
Obviously asking for a Peckinpah or Moore or Haneke or Miike film is a bit unfair - desiring something that Kick-Ass, at heart, is not. But it wouldn’t take such drastic changes to make the film “work.” Even just a number of minor changes, mostly shifts in mood or tone, could have saved it completely. A little more gore here, a bit more of an exaggerated smirk there, a little bit of dirt and grime, a few less reassuring explanations in the voiceover, and a color palette that wasn’t so god damn day-glo clean all the time.
The carjacking retort would be better were it made more ridiculous, more out of touch; the saving of the random beatdown victim better if its arbitrariness were played up; the repeated failure of Kick-Ass, and his repeated perseverance, better if it emphasized his detachment from reality more and more with each successive time. The music, already emotionally manipulative, could have been brought closer to breaking point, made more obvious. Hit Girl’s “brainwashing” by her father, briefly touched upon in one scene but otherwise ignored completely, could have been highlighted, adding a troubling, even sad undertone to her character. Most importantly, though, the absurd cartoonishness of Hitgirl and Big Daddy would shine infinitely brighter were it contrasted more with a grim sense of reality and less with the mawkish corniness that characterizes Lizewski’s cookie cutter high school movie existence.
Herein lies the main problem. Despite some rather gruesome gore-porn style violence and exceptionally dark gallows humor, everything in the film mostly hovers around the same high note of implausibility and self-aware, thrice-baked referential clichedness. Ultimately, what Kick-Ass lacks… the one thing that it hints at again and again but fails to ever really grasp onto… is friction: a friction between the surreal, oversimple optimism of Hitgirl and Big Daddy (an optimism shared by Lizewski only in delusions of grandeur) and the terrifying, incomprehensible messiness of the actual world which they all inhabit. We only get tiny flashes of that friction in moments that disappear from the screen as quickly as they came. Some may argue that these flashes are enough to warrant interpreting the film as satire or parody. Indeed, Vaughn himself may even feel this way. But when examined in context, they are not enough. In the end, they are buried and suffocated by a flood of unironic, violent spectacle that represents, at face value, precisely what those brief moments serve to subvert. Not fantastic enough, but not real enough either. Not enough discomfort, and so comfortable, safe, unoffensive.
