Entertainment Is the New Campbell’s Soup Can

When I was a kid, saying “damn it” would get my mouth washed out with soap.  I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons because Bart said “hell.”  My friends and I were careful to keep our Megadeth and Pantera tapes in our backpacks or sock drawers because, well, if Mom saw skulls or the phrase “Trendkill” on an album cover, you can bet those tapes would go straight into the trashcan.  Mom might grudgingly allow time spent with Mario, Kirby and Tetris, but Doom?  Close the bedroom door.  Put on my headphones.  Have my finger hovering over the “Esc” key at all times.  And if she comes in and asks what I’m doing,  I am “working on this thing for school.”

When I was a kid, entertainment wasn’t just entertainment.  Entertainment was how you defined yourself.  You couldn’t play football and skateboard.  You were a jock or you were a freak.  You couldn’t like Tupac and Biggie.  East Coast and West Coast were mortal enemies; we all knew this.  You couldn’t have a Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis.  After all, Genesis does what Nintendon’t.  And these distinctions were important.  They drew clear lines around our identities.  They were how we labeled ourselves and how others labeled us.

When I was a kid, Entertainment was the flag American culture waved at the rest of the world, far more powerful, alluring and intimidating than any stars and stripes.  Entertainment was how American society defined itself.  Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie were offensive because they weren’t simply a cartoon, but rather a representation of the American nuclear family, and many American nuclear families didn’t enjoy looking in a mirror that made light of child abuse, of religion, of responsibility.  Sure, everyone’s kids cursed.  Sure, every parent lost his or her temper from time to time.  But that was best kept behind closed doors.  As a culture, we wanted to put our best foot forward.  We wanted to show up to the job interview in a suit and a freshly pressed Brooks Brothers button-down, not in torn jeans and a t-shirt.  And our culture was collective; how one group presented themselves reflected on all of us.  If you were lucky enough to have cable TV, you might have 30 or 40 channels, but most original programming appeared on the networks, so we all watched the same shows.  What was on those shows stood for your values.  What was on those shows stood for my values.  What was on those shows stood for our shared values, and we all had to agree on what was programmed on those channels because we were all exposed to and affected by what was on those channels.  We were deeply, personally invested in what Hollywood and Madison Avenue sold us, and we fought to ensure that what we were sold closely resembled what we wanted to be.

Well, I’m not a kid anymore.  I’m 29 years old and on Thursday, March 15, I went to go see Kick-Ass on opening night.  And when I walked out of the Arclight Sherman Oaks two and a half hours later, I was a little bit dizzy because I had just witnessed something amazing.  I had just witnessed Kick-Ass, and Kick-Ass is amazing.

What’s so amazing about Kick-Ass is the way it treats narrative structure as fluid, effortlessly shifting from explicit first-person omniscient to implied third-person limited to first-teddy-bear limited.  What’s so amazing about Kick-Ass is that despite the inevitable comparisons to Tarantino films, Kick-Ass is not really Tarantino-esque so much as Kick-Ass arrives at the exact same destination as a Tarrintino film but by a much more intelligent and technically adept process.  What’s so amazing about Kick-Ass is that director Matthew Vaughn could give aspiring videogame directors a master-class in how to create a compelling first-person shooter.  What’s so amazing about Kick-Ass is the savvy way it acknowledges that we live in a post-post modern society where quoting other works of art and/or entertainment – whether it’s a 13 year-old posting his latest fanfic video to YouTube or Seth MacFarlane making James Woods jokes on FOX during prime-time  – is art and/or entertainment in and of itself.  What’s so amazing about Kick-Ass is that it paints entertainment as entertainment’s subject matter, deconstructing and flat-out demolishing the ridiculous morals our comic book heroes purport to represent while giving us the care-free, surface-deep, confectionary enjoyment we get from those same comic book heroes.  What’s so amazing about Kick-Ass is its ability to be rebellious and subservient, arrogant and self-effacing, self-aware and careless…all at the same time.

But for all the positive things that Kick-Ass does, what ultimately makes Kick-Ass so remarkable is the fact that the film is pretty much unremarkable.  Despite the critical buzz and fanboy acclaim, Kick-Ass is largely culturally irrelevant.  And that’s what makes it truly amazing, that Kick-Ass is not being discussed in the context of its relation to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde, that the violence and mayhem that 11 year-old Hit Girl enacts on a bunch of gangsters while making her way down a hallway in the film’s epic penultimate scene is not being discussed as an interesting role-reversal of Travis Bickle’s famous hallway bloodshed in defense of 12 year-old Iris in Taxi Driver’s penultimate scene, that the title of the movie is Kick-Ass and yet there is absolutely no protesting from conservative parent groups, religious leaders or Fox News talking heads about the fact that the movie has profanity in its title.

Violence and pre-teen girls in film

The conversation has moved on.  As a culture, we’re more interested in important things like health care and the ongoing global economic recession than we are in any given movie’s impact on youth culture.  After all, just give the blogosphere 15 minutes and the hype will die down; Kick-Ass will be forgotten. Jonah Hex is due out soon, and hell, that has Megan Fox in it.  And if Prince of Persia isn’t the next Biggest Movie Ever, then Iron Man 2 certainly will be. Entertainment is not God, it’s just commodity.  It isn’t a flag that 300 million of us are waving; it’s a product that two million people purchased over the course of a spring weekend.  It doesn’t define you or me.  It isn’t a lifestyle.  Your opinion about it is just that: your opinion.

My opinion?  I liked it.  Some of my friends liked it.  Others didn’t.  But none of it matters.  For the first time, really, it doesn’t matter at all.  The reviewers gushing that Kick-Ass is better than The Dark Knight don’t matter.  The studio heads who refused to finance Kick-Ass because they thought that the subject matter couldn’t be made profitable don’t matter.  The people offended by all the violence and bloodshed Kick-Ass so graphically depicts don’t matter.  Because Kick-Ass isn’t a cultural phenomenon.  It isn’t a box-office smash, or even a failure.  It’s a small film with limited appeal, a film that will make a modest profit and launch the careers of a couple of kid actors.  Some people care about Kick-Ass.  Most people don’t.  Kick-Ass hasn’t changed anything, it’s simply another stone in the path of the continuing commoditization of art.  And it really doesn’t matter.