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

[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.