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!