Why do I bother writing when they do it better?

[trinityvixen]

I think if I made my opinions on this post three times as long, I'd never express myself half so well as this post on Hit Girl at Jezebel. Just...wow.

One of many very important parts of her incredibly well thought out analysis:
But I do like [Shit Blows Up And A Lot Of People Die] movies as a rule, and so do about a gazillion other people, so it's probably safe to assume that liking them does not actually make you a bad person who struggles to be compassionate and non-violent in real life. It just means you can suspend your better nature for a short time in order to watch a lot of intense, terrifying shit happen to (and because of) a fictional character, provided you know that character has the intellectual, financial and physical resources to wind up safe and triumphant, and that the fictional people who get slaughtered along the way are all A) evil and B) trying to kill the hero first. Hit Girl is clearly shown to be such a character, fighting such characters. So if you can't stomach this well-established formula with her at the center of it, the obvious question is, are you usually willing to suspend empathy because of the character's resources and the good/evil thing and the knowledge that it is fiction, or because the hero usually has a dick and a deep voice?

And this, definitely this:
I like that I walked out of there with a gut reaction of "That was awesome!" immediately followed by an intellectual reaction of, "Damn, it's fucked up that I thought that was awesome." That tells me I just saw something new, if nothing else. And on further reflection, the new thing for me was not a violent, remorseless, brutalized, potty-mouthed child but a female action hero with all the agency and skill of a man, whom the audience is not supposed to want to fuck. That is a pretty awesome thing, even if it is also frankly pretty fucked up that I thought that movie was awesome.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I don't know, it seems a bit...unfair?...to frame this as an anti-feminist argument. For one, it denies people who disliked the movie of their right to dislike it, the exact same thing you were saying about people condemning those who liked the movie. This is labeling those who disliked the movie as chauvinists. Especially since, as you pointed out, Ebert liked Kill Bill, which also had a female protagonist. So I'm not seeing a clear case made here that it is the girl-ness and not the child-ness and live action-ness that is turning him in particular away.

Also, I don't think you can say one portrayal of child violence that is animated and one that is live action is an irrelevant distinction. Clearly Ebert had a visceral gut reaction, so for him, there clearly was something different about watching one over the other. You're going to have to sell me a little more to make me believe that distinction is entirely arbitrary.

As for me--I don't tend to like violence in movies. I like action--I like chases and shit blowing up and punching, but even in Terminator 2, one of my favorite movies, I have to look away from the screen when he shoots the guard's knees out. It's not an accident that I haven't seen Kill Bill, and I don't plan to, so I doubt I'd've liked Kick Ass.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think she made enough excuses in the article for people for whom this sort of movie was not their thing. If you don't like these movies generally, of course you won't like them in the specific. If you do like these movies and you didn't like this one, there's plenty you could take issue with--not funny enough, not inventive enough, etc., and that's a taste issue. Both of these objections are a far cry from the hissing and making signs of the cross against the movie like some people have done. After a certain point, reasonable objection stops and unreasonable objection begins.

That, too, alas, is a matter of opinion. It is my opinion that, short of citing contextual failings in his critique, Roger Ebert has shaded over to unreasonable objection--demands that the film include moral lessons much? I cannot identify anything in this movie that he objects to in others to the same degree except the youth and gender of the heroine. It's mostly focused on her youth, granted, but we obsess even more on female youth than male, which is why we have fifteen hundred articles about how this actress shouldn't have been exposed to dirty language and how no one should show a girl being beaten up. It's sexist to assume that that sort of thing is somehow less appropriate if it's happening to a female hero versus a male one. As the article points out, from cuss-words to cuts, this is par for the course for an action hero. We only object to it when it's Hit Girl. That's shady territory far as sexism goes.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm not defending Ebert's view specifically--I haven't seen the movie, so I can't say, and I'm not willing to see the movie just to argue about it.

However, I do object to turning this into an issue of sexism, when it doesn't seem like anyone has clearly demonstrated that that's what it is. So calling the sexism card seems like a way to feel not only justified for liking the movie in the face of such vocal criticism, but righteous for doing so.

And I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that an eleven-year-old girl killing people graphically is a great triumph for feminism.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

I don't know that anyone is arguing that an 11-yr-old girl graphically killing people is a triumph for feminism so much as being particularly pearl-clutchy about it BECAUSE she's a girl IS, at best, biased behavior.

(Note, I also didn't see the movie, nor did I actually read the review in question, so this is a total sideline viewpoint.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

What you said!

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

This may be an odd thing to say, but I thought the film actually walked a suitably subtle (considering the subject matter, obviously) line in regards to Hit Girl in that she was able to retain her gender as a character without it being used as a weapon against her while still being able to take hits like a true super-hero.

Does anyone want to count the number of times Wonder Woman has been "restrained" by captors in the comics? Or the number of times rape is threatened or implied when a super-heroine is in trouble?

Not saying that can't be done right (but it pretty much never is), but for whatever reason it's something that was completely avoided with Hit Girl without compromising the character, and I think that's notable.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

What you're noticing is a lack of sexualization of the character, something the author of the Jezebel post outlines very well. Part of what makes Hit Girl so shocking is that she isn't sexualized. There's even a joke about her behaving like a sexualized girl when she tells Big Daddy she wants a Bratz doll--those dolls are extremely sexual dolls, more so than Barbie. But, of course, Hit Girl doesn't really want them.

This lack of pointing out that she's a girl, and therefore an up-for-grabs sexualized object, is only really possible because she's underage. We sexualize EVERYTHING these days. They make high-heeled baby booties. The only way for a woman NOT to be sexual is to not be physically developed enough to be considered sexual. So, sadly, the only way to escape being ogled or threatened with rape is to have no breasts, to be barely sexually identifiable as female. Our society might not like that Hit Girl is being regarded as awesome, but our society makes it impossible to regard grown women as awesome because, as the post points out, the second a woman has breasts, the film will exploit this breast-having condition. It's really sad.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

This wasn't a SBUAALOPD movie, though, it's only masquerading as one to build that expectation and heighten its effect. As soon as Kick-Ass is stabbed it stops being a simple action movie and becomes a movie about consequences which demands to be viewed that way. Everything from that point on is real, however cartoonishly it might be displayed, every character is a person, and every death is a nasty and brutal demonstration of hate at work in the world, disguised as symbols of childhood heroes. The vigilante isn't an upstanding force of justice, but a lunatic with a greater disregard for the world than the criminals at the other end of the gun. You're not supposed to hold disbelief, but instead take in everything as it is... you're just given enough rope as it goes on to hang yourself with, so to speak.

While I see that the author is coming at the general argument as directed towards the typical fan of action movies and with a particular and broader thesis in mind, she glosses over and dismisses the "child" part of Hit Girl's character too quickly. The paragraph that starts out with that response immediately goes into a rant, never to return. To say that an 11-year-old girl represents a non-sexualized female more than she represents a child is taking the idea too far. Children can very easily just be children, victim or heroine. I don't think people would be less upset by an 11-year-old boy in her place - I know my stomach would still turn. (I think of a cherub-faced Sixth Sense Osment in there and it almost feels worse) It's about innocence, and the lack thereof in this case. The switch is from an adult making decisions to act (however terribly) to a child who's been raised to act... a vicious, remoreseless zealot where there should be joy. There are deeper issues of choice and the good or evil nature of humanity at play here, and they're not playing nice.

I liked Kick-Ass, but mostly because it got uncomfortable and forces the reality of "superheroic" action into the light. Both Hit Girl and Big Daddy struck me in an uncomfortable way. It's good to be handed that experience in film from time to time, but it's not a flavor everyone's going to accept and enjoy.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

This wasn't a SBUAALOPD movie, though, it's only masquerading as one to build that expectation and heighten its effect.

I'm going to have to disagree, but the fact that I can see how you would think that this was a "serious" movie points to the unevenness of the tone of the film, which I did notice, too. Kick-Ass being stabbed, Big Daddy dying horribly--these are things that beg to be taken seriously. I don't think anything quite took the wind out of the sails as Kick-Ass being stabbed. So, yes, it got quite serious there.

Of course, it remained serious only as long as it took him to put the costume on again. From there, it returned to being over-the-top because we met Hit Girl, a character who is most definitely a superhero in a mundane world. You have Kick-Ass actually winning an improbable fight by fiat and being a YouTube sensation. Even when the movie takes a turn for the serious again with the unmasking scene, the villain, contrary to all sense, tries to kill two people while the world watches. It's an inherently ridiculous, cartoonish undertaking, and nothing really comes back from that, least of all when Hit Girl takes on an entire floor of bad guys by herself or when Kick-Ass dons a gattling-gun jetpack.

It's about innocence, and the lack thereof in this case. The switch is from an adult making decisions to act (however terribly) to a child who's been raised to act... a vicious, remoreseless zealot where there should be joy.

The post at Pink Raygun I linked to previously actually did a good job about pointing out exactly why it's not right to assume there is no joy in Hit Girl's life. The Jezebel post makes a note of the same basic thing, too: though we cannot in good conscience support making this girl into a killer, there is no doubt that we find it entertaining and that should be disturbing and it is. But to jump up and down, as Ebert did, about how immoral it is is to demand the film espouse some kind of serious moral code and it never set out to do that. Also, just because the ends to which the father-daughter interactions were put were bad doesn't mean that there wasn't true love and compassion between Big Daddy and Hit Girl. Hit Girl shows none of the needs-to-be-protected stunted growth that someone who's forced into an action would have. She enjoys what she does. That's fucked up, sure, but it's nothing that we need to worry protecting a) a fictional character, b) the obviously savvy and well-looked-after actress, or c) any film audiences from.

This "lack of innocence" argument is quite obnoxious, really, because it supposes that children are less resilient and should be treated as such all the time instead of trusting and explaining to them. I think that is what the poster at Jezebel (and I) object to most in the outcry against Hit Girl. There's an assumption that kids can't handle this, and it's bullshit because the kids in the movie--that is to say the characters--aren't real and whatever morals they fail to have don't really affect anything. And the kids who made the movie are all proving to be well adjusted and mature beyond the critics screaming foul. The assumption of the innocence of children is belied by the behavior of actual children and by the enduring power of misbehaved fictional children. (There's a reason works like Lord of the Flies still resonate.) It's infantilizing instead of being reasonably protective.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with kids being the characters or being the actors or even with children seeing the film (though I don't think I could recommend it). Coming at it from that angle would be ridiculous and anyone who's really making that argument is quick on the uncomfortable trigger finger. It's not about the child actors or some traumatized young viewers. The disturbing part is what the nature of the character is showing about humanity. It's very similar to Lord of the Flies, which still resonates because it's still nasty. The children involved are shown to be less resilient, not emotionally but ethically - they're moldable either by design or by circumstance into something terrible because they haven't had the chance to form a sturdy foundation. It's not that children can't handle ideas or situations, they just can't always handle themselves. There's only shades of difference between Hit Girl and a child soldier being raised in Palestine. That's a definite loss of innocence in a literal, criminal way, well beyond the standard euphemism, and it's a little too real for a lot of people out there. Not too hard to see how it could push a lot of buttons.

That first scene with Hit-Girl felt more grisly than exciting, mostly because of the sudden escalation of violence from thugs being thugs to mechanical death-dealing. It instantly dehumanized the scene, resolving from awkward and threatening to bloodbath almost as a way to break the tension. It finished like an over-the-top action scene, but it wasn't set up that way. At some point you're expected to make the switch in your own head, but there isn't preparation. It felt like the scene from Pulp Fiction when Mavin gets shot in the car... or maybe that whole wrath of god scene.

I thought the film was supposed to be a sort of commentary on we the audience - how easily we can slip into a desensitized and comfortable perspective on violence if it's candy-coated and plays off just enough off of the standard tropes. It wasn't uneven, it was purposefully moving between tones to highlight the difference and to show that we can be pushed and pulled at whim (which I think is the joke with the night-vision display). I'll admit, I had a lot of fun with the later action sequences, but I definitely felt this movie looking back at me a lot more than most of it's ilk.