Kick-Ass And Superheroes

So I ventured into the mainstream this weekend, taking in a show of Kick-Ass - and came out surprisingly happy. It's an awfully clever movie that pulls enough from the right sources to almost do justice to them - a post-incredibles superhero movie, a post-Kill Bill John Woo homage, probably a lot of other post-'s I'm missing for ignoring comics and TV for the last decade - none of it up to the sources, but none of it insulting... Ya got a normal guy who reads too many comics and thinks, why not dress up and fight crime? So he does it, with disastrous consequences - but he keeps doing it, and probably would end up dead except a real superhero turns up, in the form of an 11 year old girl (and her father, Nicholas Cage in a home made Batsuit and handlebar mustache channeling Adam West...) So - this makes him famous, and draws the ire of a local gangster, who has a son who also reads comics and so dresses up as his own superhero, to lure the others in... it all ends in blood (fire, explosions, brutal beatdowns and Joker quotes...) In the end, Hit Girl goes to school (woe to the bullies) - sequels are promised....

I've seen a certain amount of angst about the premise - the little kid making like Chow Yun-fat, the little kid getting the shit kicked out of her (which she does), the little kid calling people cunts - but I can't get too worked up about any of that. Movies are make believe, and this is particularly obviously make believe - and enough about the process of making believe to make something thematic of it. And kids - even 11 year olds - make believe things like this - blood and guts and fake violence and extravagant horrible fears and dangers overcome in the most hyperbolic ways possible - who didn't make up stuff like this? I did, and I was as tame a lad as you can find... It's tempting to get woo woo about it, about how it's a fairy tale (complete with absent mothers and monsters to defeat and dark night journeys and all the rest) and all - so I might as well. I think, as far as superhero movies go, it does a better job than almost any at getting at something Walter Chaw says in his review - "this superhero game makes perfect sense for kids feeling their way around a budding moral sextant, navigating their twisted, confused straits--but not so much adults, who need to find a better way through." I think he's hit it on the head there - this one plays its adolescent material straight - the underlying themes are acted out in the film. It's not as good a film as The Incredibles (to name one), but it has the same kind of sneaky seriousness...

The question of comic book movie seriousness has become something of an internet meme this week, thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz' subtly titled article at Salon - Superheroes Suck! Responses abound - Jim Emerson, The Telegraph, Pandagon (going outside the movie world) - with plenty of comments hashing it all out... I'm not sure how much I can add, but some things have been running through my head... I can't say I disagree with Seitz - most superhero films do suck - or, maybe better, are drab, formulaic crowd-pleasers, disposable and harmless... I disagree with him on a couple specifics - I liked Kick-Ass quite a bit, as you might be able to guess - and I still love the two Burton Batman films, especially the first one - though that's partly down to the experience of seeing it (twice the first two nights - a great urban showing, packed house, everyone cheering everything - Jack, Prince, Burton, the Batman, the Joker, Vicky Vail - absolutely wonderful... and the next night in a suburban theater with a crowd sharply divided between black kids cheering for the Joker and Prince and white kids cheering for Batman and, for some reason, booing Prince; complete with a fist fight before the show and a stabbing in the parking lot during the show... Exhibit A in why I'll take cities over suburbs any day of the week....)

Where was I? Oh yes - one of the problems with Seitz' article, I think, is that it looks like he's saying - Superhero movies can't be great films... when what he really presents is, No Superhero movies have been great films. He does not make an argument (not a convincing one anyway) for why superhero films can't be great films - maybe he doesn't mean to, but given the sweeping terms of his complaints - it looks like that's what he has in mind....

A second problem is - he doesn't quite define his terms. What is he talking about? You can, I think, parse out what he means, looking at his examples, at what he leaves out (The Incredibles?) He seems to mean - Mainstream American films adapted from mainstream American Superhero (or masked hero) comic books. It's an interesting definition though - because it seems to me to rather conveniently define around the superhero films that have the best claim for being "great" films - or at least, substantially interesting, individualized, imaginative films - films with the ambition and substance of the zombie films he praises. Let me name names - take these four: The Incredibles; Kill Bill; A History of Violence; Ichi the Killer - make it five - Big Man Japan. None of them fit - 2 Japanese films; an original story; a manga adaptation, and a fairly mainstream, non-superhero comic adaptation. That seems important to me - first, that to exclude films that don't suck, you have to do quite a bit of definitional shuffling - but also, that you can construct a pretty well defined type of superhero film that - to some extent - sucks... But I think what makes those films suck is that they are, in fact, mainstream adaptations of mainstream superhero comics. They are adaptations of long established characters and stories - that are guarded rather heavily by their owners and fans. It is difficult to make films out of them that go against the desires of their owners and fans - they have become very beholden to whatever the current vogue is for superhero comics.

The truth (as I've written about in the past) is that I have a soft spot for the more ridiculous kinds of superhero stories - Burton's Batman films, and even more, the 60's Batman. Even the Schumacher Batmans (which really puts me in a minority.) Camp, surrealism, ultraviolence (all coming together in Takashi Miike's films) - these things have been drained a bit from the superhero genre, but they have been there in the past, and can be again. (See Chris Stangl's comment on Seitz' article.) It's harder to do at the center - the big budget, high prestige properties - easier to do at the margins - smaller comics, smaller budgets. That might be why Kick-Ass is better than most of the other recent superhero films - its striving to be part of the mainstream might be why it still doesn't measure up to those 5 exceptions I named.