Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass is a new addition to the ever growing corpus of works in the superhero celluloid genre, and I must say that it is one of the best and most original superhero movies ever made. It is actually a metanarrative in the tradition of Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction or A History of Violence: that is to say, the kind of narrative that steps outside its own genre in order to reflect upon that genre’s conventions and presuppositions. It is simultaneously a superhero narrative and also a film about superhero movies. It is also incredibly violent.

The film starts out in the genre of the alienated teenager, like Napoleon Dynamite or Rushmore, and at first glance, has the feel of an independent production which is a sober and realistic examination of what would happen if somebody decided to actually try and be a superhero. That is exactly what teenager Dave Lizewski sets out to do: he orders a costume off the Internet, puts it on, names himself “Kick Ass,” and sets off into his neighborhood to fight crime. The first thing that he encounters is a couple of hoods trying to steal a car, and when he confronts them, ends up getting stabbed and then hit by a car. He winds up in the hospital for a while, but soon, he’s right back out on the street and at it again. This time, his attempt to intercede in gang violence ends up being filmed by bystanders and shown on You Tube, thus making him instantly famous, although no one has any idea who he is.

By this point, the film begins to veer slightly away from its realistic premise, since it is unlikely that Dave would have survived an encounter with three vicious hoodlums who would, in reality, have beaten him to death or shot him. But, on his next adventure, when he approaches a gang leader on behalf of his girlfriend as part of an attempt to get him to stop harassing her, he is just about to have the life beaten out of him, another masked vigilante shows up and saves his life, we are no longer in reality at all, for this superhero is an eleven-year-old girl who calls herself “Hitgirl” and immediately kills everyone in the room, thus saving Kick Ass’s life. The film at this point has now reentered the bracketed *reality* (to borrow from Husserl) of the superhero universe, the laws of which are most certainly not those of the real world, but rather of the realm of myth and folklore.

The narrative, it turns out, is not a realistic analysis of what would happen to a sixteen year old kid who took the superhero myth literally and tried to live out his fantasy, but rather a superhero narrative of a very special and unique kind, one in which its superheroes do not exactly have superpowers per se, but yet are protected by the conventions of a viewer’s expectations of what a superhero should be able to accomplish: namely, to triumph over bad guys.

For an individual to attempt to literally put on a mask and go out into society and try to imitate the deeds of a superhero would be a form of misplaced concreteness, a way of reading poetry, let’s say, as prose. Superheroes are a form of urban mythology, and as such are not meant to be taken literally, except by the mentally ill, for they are metaphoric of human potentialities in the modern world. Once a character dons a mask and goes out looking for trouble, he or she has left the three dimensional world, together with all its laws, behind and entered into the archetypal realm of myth, a realm which, in contradistinction to the real world, is actually made out of subtle matter, not gross matter. The figures of myth are made out of the same stuff as those of dream, and it is a kind of subtle matter which is self-radiant and weirdly bioluminescent. The forms of the physical world, on the other hand, have to be illuminated by an external agency, such as the sun or some other light source. They are not self-radiant and they are subject to the same laws of causality which governs all the physical matter of the universe. Anyone who attempts to put on a mask and leap from the top of a skyscraper is going to wind up dead,  no matter which way you turn it. That’s just the type of world we’re living in. In the realm of myth and dream, on the other hand, we can imagine any scenario we want, and often do.

These images are not random, though, no more so than are the images of our dreams. The specific images that occur in popular narratives come up for very specific reasons, reasons not usually very well known to the conscious mind, whether of the artist who dreams them up or the public who serves as his audience. The images are attempts to make invisible environments visible, to put it in the language of McLuhan or even Heidegger.

Right now, for instance, the invisible environment we’re living in is that of a crudely banal and vulgarly violent society, one similar in its sensibilities to that of ancient Rome in the time of the Colosseum. Our narratives, consequently, are so violent because we are so violent, not the other way around. Violent images in the cinema do not, as is sometimes assumed, cause or influence a society to become even more violent than it already is: they are actually indexes of just how violent that particular society is at the particular moment in time when the narratives are created. Thus, the plays of Seneca are filled with atrociously violent images because the time of the Caesars was a time when civility was beginning to break down and give way to the practice of violence as a problem solving measure even in the politics of a supposedly democratic society. Notice that in the heyday of Classical civilization, Sophocles and Aeschylus keep the violence, for the most part, off the stage. Seneca has no such reservations, and neither do we, for a people’s narratives are that people’s essence dramatized in story form.

So Kick Ass is a very violent film, there’s no doubt about it, but it is the same kind of absurdly exaggerated violence that we find in the average Tarrantino movie: the violence is a commentary on the history of violence in cinema, and it is full of conscious allusions to the films of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, who were pioneers in pushing the envelope on cinematic violence back in the 1960s. Now, there is no longer any limit to how far it can be pushed, and consequently, the violence has gone over into the violence of the hyperreal: nothing in reality could be as violent as the imagery that forms the climax of Kick Ass. As Baudrillard would say, it is more violent than violence.

If we postmoderns could ever actually see a real dinosaur, it would be a disappointment to us, because we have already seen the hyperreal dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. No dinosaur could ever be as impressive as the special effects dinosaurs of Hollywood, and likewise, the violence of the real world couldn’t hold a candle to the ultraviolence in a film like Kick Ass. Real violence, by comparison, is boring, especially because we are so violent as a people that it is a structural feature of our culture that is largely subliminal to us.

But the hyper-violence of a film like Kick Ass makes violence visible for us as a phenomenon of American culture: we are a society that was built with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, and violence, for Americans, is not only a mere way of life, but an actual form of redemption. We don’t ever quite feel anything even remotely resembling a religious catharsis until it has passed through the purgatorial fires of a cleansing by blood. The shedding of blood, in fact, has a peculiarly salvific feel to Americans. It makes us feel fulfilled in a way that no mere baptism by conventional means can.

That’s a chilling fact about the American psyche, but the thing is that it doesn’t bother any of us. We’re willing to live with it, since we settled everything by means of the gun, and as a result, the gun has a religious aura about it. It is a sort of sacred relic of American iconography, and films like those of the kind made by Arthur Penn, or Sam Peckinpah, or nowadays Quentin Tarrantino serve to remind us of this. Americans do have an official religion: it is the religion of violence, and participating in its mythos via celluloid spectacle is the closest thing to a modern sacrament that we possess.

I walked away from Kick Ass feeling very sastisfied by the way the plot resolved its peculiar knots with such a bloodbath.

I guess that worried me a little.

But on the other hand, I haven’t had this much fun at a movie in a long time, and Kick Ass with all its allusions to the history of blood and guts cinema, serves to remind me of why I go to the movies in the first place: the printed page is simply not designed to deliver this kind of spectacle. The graphic novel can do it to a limited degree, but never as thoroughly or gleefully as celluloid. The printed page creates a mental phase space that is always already cerebral, no matter what its content, but cinema, by its very nature as a pictorial medium, is always already visceral. It activates, you might say, lower chakras than those of the printed page.

Images are more disturbing, and immediately upsetting than words. This is why iconophobic traditions, such as the Byzantine Iconoclasts or Islam have come into existence as objections to the manipulation of the lower chakras by means of visual imagery.

America was settled by gun-toting Protestants, but in its redemption through cinematic violence by means of the Vatican of Los Angeles, it is being redeemed by sensibilities which are closer to those of the Catholics which produced all the broken and bleeding saints that decorate their iconography.

In the beginning was the Word, says the John Gospel, and it was the power of the Word disseminated by the printing press wed to Protestant science that built America as a country. Now, as we are nearing the end of history and beginning to slip over the edge into a new Dark Age, it is the Icon that is serving to dismantle and rupture the very cognitive structures that built up American civilization.

Old fashioned literary blogs like this one are part of an attempt to retranslate the Image back into the power of the Word so that we can discover what motivated these particular images in the first place.

But by this point I am going too long for a blog–though the length of this review would be considered too short to form the chapter of a book–and I’m beginning to leave the film behind for other pastures.

Let’s just say that Kick Ass is a wonderful film and very much worth watching if you like superhero mythology at all. Go see it.