By David Nelson Pollock
THE HOT PSEUDO-CONTROVERSY of the spring is Kick-Ass, an anti-superhero movie designed to piss off American moralists directed by a Brit named Matthew Vaughan and based on a popular comic. The film is about a male high school student (his name? I can’t even remember) who wants to become a real-life superhero for reasons that are never clearly explained. It’s not until he finds out that the girl of his dreams thinks he’s gay that he decides to risk his life in a silly green suit. This is when he meets up with Big Daddy (a droopy-faced Nicholas Cage, who is doing nothing to help his career) and his 11-year-old daughter, Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz), who are also superheroes for real, except they have a lot of guns and some ultra-violent tendencies.
For those who have happily managed to avoid the media vomit-fest surrounding this movie, the sore spot, or the tickle bone, depending how liberal you pretend to be, revolves around the 11-year old named Hit-Girl, who curses and kills. She kills a lot. And there is a lot of blood. The question critics seem to want to address is: Is it okay to glorify a child shooting a gun? A.O. Scott, for example, without laying down a judgment, asks, how far is too far? And Ebert’s outrage stems from the fact that the kids who will be watching Kick-Ass at home are in the same age group as those who are “shooting one another every day in America.”
I sympathize with Ebert, but I find it difficult to share in his outrage. Watching the comical scenes, supposedly satirical, in which an adolescent white girl shoots and mutilates grown men is equivalent to hearing your redneck cousin explain how health care reform will lead to socialism, which will lead to marshal law. The ignorance, the absurdity of the statement is so off that you can’t help but shrug. What’s fascinating about Kick-Ass, and what I have only seen referred to in passing in Karina Longworth’s Village Voice piece, are the sexual undertones of the film, which seem to be working in a forgotten cinematic tradition known as Baby Burlesks.
Baby Burlesks were American films that were popular in the early 1930s. The films were short, about ten minutes long, and featured pre-school age children spoofing adult movies. Shirley Temple got her start in Baby Burlesks; the characters she mimicked were starlets. In other words, she was a child playing adult romantic leads. These films walked a line between cute and perverse, and considering the audience to which they appealed, it seems that they wavered on the side of the latter. Theaters where Baby Burlesks were showing were normally full of grown men. Devout Catholic, novelist, and film critic Graham Greene caught onto this phenomenon and accused one Temple vehicle of taking advantage of the child’s “neat and well-developed rump.” In a classy little number called War Babies, Temple is cast as a French bar maid who is ogled by drinking soldiers.
The mainstream public has since received their elementary Freudian education. A little girl in tights uttering words of love to the screen is not about cuteness; it’s about pedophilia. If a Lolita is portrayed in a film, such as Jodi Foster’s child prostitute role in Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver, the film must contain some sense of moral outrage, gritty realism, or nightmarish satire. For a more recent example, look at Stanley Kubrick’s swan song, Eyes Wide Shut, in which a too-young Leelee Sobieksi attempts to seduce an uncomfortable Tom Cruise. Sobieski is in her underwear. The arousal evoked in the male hetero gaze is accompanied by discomfort, as is the case with most of the film’s sex scenes: its lack of sexiness is very much at the core of the movie.
So how can we exploit child actresses in 2010? Hit-Girl demonstrates the answer: graphic violence. It’s no secret that Americans are more comfortable with violence than they are with sex. Serial killers and shoot-outs populate primetime television, but nipple slips cause us to rethink our values. It’s also no secret that gore/slasher films are basically porn films with slicing and bleeding instead of sucking and fucking. It’s been a long time coming that some brilliant cinematic mind would think to have a child do the cutting and make the blood come out. In the same way that Shirley Temple played a French bar maid, or tap-danced while offering seductive, sideway glances to the men in the audience, Chloe Moretz plays a Femme Fatale: sexy and violent, not as two separate entities, but as two sides of the same coin. A fully-grown Femme Fatale can be consciously sexy while she is shooting a gun. Hit-Girl, on the other hand, has to double-up on the violence to conceal the desire she evokes in the hetero-male audience, in the same way Graham Greene saw that the doubling-up of Shirley Temple’s innocence concealed an adult sexuality.
Hit-Girl is dressed to kill. And by “kill” I mean fuck. Her outfit is made of leather, perhaps not as tight as an adult woman would wear, but suggestive enough to get the point across. On her head she wears a bright purple wig. Her cute black mask is a perfect fit for an S&M club. She’s a real acrobat, too, jumping and flipping through the air: she has the same kind of cartoonish sex-appeal that Uma Thurman has in Kill Bill, except for, of course, the curves.
And what about Hit-Girl’s character? There is no character. Ladies and gentleman, Hit-Girl is a sex doll. Like a porn star, a sex doll loses its charm the moment it has a feeling (with the exception of pleasure-pain, which is simulated for the enjoyment of the audience). She is a three-dimensional Japanese body pillow, the kind of adolescent caricature James Franco falls in love with in a relatively recent 30 Rock episode. She kills enough men to satisfy the taste of any gore-fest connoisseur, and she doesn’t ask any questions. She doesn’t suffer any trauma. She doesn’t even ask her Big Daddy if killing is wrong. She was born to kill like a porn star is born to screw, a machine with a function.
The scene in which we’re introduced to Hit-Girl, her Big Daddy is shooting bullets at her chest (she wears a bulletproof vest); he is training her to be a superhero. Hit-Girl is resistant, but not any more so than if she were being forced to eat her vegetables. At the film’s climax, after Big Daddy is killed, Hit-Girl goes through the motions of being upset so that the film can progress to its natural conclusion. It’s revenge time. She is ready to kill harder. Much harder. Using the classic porn film arc, the film’s end finds Hit-Girl ready for the gang-bang where the big guns come out. This is the orgy. To excite the audience, she gets into the bad guys’ apartment building (where the orgy will take place) by pretending to be your classic Lolita , wearing pigtails and a short skirt. We all know what the innocent girl next-door really wants, however, and she’s back in the leather, mask, and wig in no time. Each of the men get a shot at her, and they all get screwed.
Kick-Ass does have its fans. User comments on review sites feature such gems as “that little girl goes hard” (yep, I know). Critics who are afraid to look like squares praise the way in which the movie satirizes superhero tropes. I don’t want to engage in this discussion because I don’t find it particularly interesting. On a purely formal level, the film is a failure. In a strange instance of self-awareness in the film, however, two 17-year-old boys are watching Hit-Girl do some hardcore killing on the Internet. One young man says to the other: “She’s eleven years old, but I can really see myself with her.”
Can we see this as proof that the film is so self-conscious that it’s even aware of its Burlesk nature? To some degree, yes, but it’s not enough to denounce the film’s perverse sensibility and turn it into commentary. The aforementioned scene of self-awareness occurs toward the end of movie. By this time, more than an hour has passed since we first saw Hit-Girl in her crusader uniform, and we have already seen her in action. If anything, this “wink-wink” on the film’s behalf shows what pleasure it’s taking in being bad; the film smiles seductively at itself in the mirror and comes off as vain and not nearly as smart as it wants to be.
Early in the film, the title character, Kick-Ass, a wimpy teenage boy who practically vanishes to irrelevancy, asks Hit-Girl and her Big Daddy how he can find them if he needs them. In a play on the Batman story, the nymphet, Hit-Girl, responds that the mayor has a way of calling them in: he shines a light in the night sky that’s “in the shape of a giant cock.” As she says “giant cock,” there’s a close up of her face. Her lips are ruby-red and parted. She wears a mask around her eyes. The men in the audience are welcome to laugh. But it’s always been Batman’s depressive impotency that’s made him such a dreary bore in need of a madly hedonistic Joker. (Bruce Wayne can have sexual obsession, but he’s not really supposed to have sex, at least not pleasurably.) Hit-Girl, on the other hand, has a sense of humor, and she also knows what comic book nerds like once they’re old enough to incorporate adult-oriented material into their daily reading. When she criticizes the pathetic Kick-Ass’ weapon for being “one gay-looking tazer,” it’s a call from the Femme Fatale to her male audience to stand erect and act like men.
David Nelson Pollock is a contributing culture editor for The Ithaca Post. He is also an editor of and contributor to the literary journal Essays & Fictions.