More re Controversial Films

Anthony Lane at The New Yorker writes as negative a review of Kick-Ass as Roger Ebert did, but with a somewhat lighter touch:

[The film introduces] a pair of....crime-fighters, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz). The twist is that they are father and daughter, perhaps the closest duo since Oedipus and Antigone, though, unless you have a particularly corrupt text, you will not find Antigone greeting a roomful of evil men with the words “O.K., you cunts, let’s see what you can do now.”

This line has already plunged the film into a froth of infamy, and, if you really think that [Matthew] Vaughn and [Jane] Goldman....planned it any other way, you are behind the times. A film casts its bait, and we bite.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane

But do we bite? Although, in a neck-and-neck race, Kick-Ass ultimately nosed past How to Train Your Dragon as the weekend's box office champ, it nonetheless significantly underperformed expectations. The bulk of the audience was under 25 and male, the fanboys who could be expected to buy into the concept -- but a lot of other people stayed away. What gives?

My analysis, one of many possible, is that the controversy attending the film did it more harm than good, and for this reason: To extract "cultural capital" from a controversial film, you don't actually have to see it.  I can discuss Kick-Ass quite as vigorously as anyone who got out to the theater, because I have followed the controversy and know all the talking points. The actual film is a superfluity. Any film or book that, however serious its "message," can be encapsulated in such a way runs exactly this risk. I mentioned in an earlier post that upon seeing Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, I concluded that it was a fine -- in fact, great -- film. But most people who read the coverage of the movie know simply that it includes a nine-minute rape sequence, and that is all they will ever know about it. The controversial fact trumps the celluloid evidence: Noe is hoist by his own petard. The "gross-out" factor that Stephen King discusses intelligently in his critical study of horror, Danse Macabre, got precisely the attention it might have been expected to get, but at the cost of potential viewers dismissing any need to experience the film that Noe directed.

This happens time and again. I know all about Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart, for example, and specifically that its "money shot" involves someone throwing up into someone else's mouth. I'm done! I've seen the film! -- although, of course, I haven't. I can describe whole scenes from Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo to you, and I'll bet my descriptions would be quite accurate, but I haven't seen that film, either. And these are films with purportedly "serious intent," that I could make a case for seeing (which is how I persuaded myself to see Irreversible). I can't even be bothered to try making an argument for my seeing most of Takashi Miike's work; Ichii the Killer will probably never darken my Netflix queue.

My point being, in the pursuit of attention, a director can overplay his hand. I think that Gaspar Noe and Lukas Moodysson are profoundly serious men. But they need not have gone quite so far in their visualizations as they did, to achieve the same artistic effect; and going as far as they did cost them a huge chunk of their audience (even if those same potential viewers lapped up the verbal descriptions). Even the makers of a pop entertainment such as Kick-Ass can run into the same wall: that the descriptions of the movie are enough, and in fact displace the movie.