the dysfunctional kick-ass world

Last April, I watched the movie Kick-Ass (directed by Matthew Vaughn) and I really loved the movie; I even did a post here. For me, it was rock music of film, having the same elements of poetry, enigma, violence, intensity, and in this movie, subtle rage. It was “rated R for strong brutal violence throughout, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and some drug use - some involving children.”

I failed to see why I loved the movie, why it kept lingering on my mind up to now, and why I encouraged people to watch it. I thought it was because of the hard-core action and the unexpected satisfaction I got from it. But it was more than that. I remembered reading Watchmen in 2008 and elicited the same response as what I have now. The comic book got me into contemplating and trying to understand the complexities of life. My thoughts were shooting out from all directions, and it was chaos that I was trying to understand. I tried to rest my mind by putting these on paper. For some reason, a walking contradiction was one of my favorites, and it has little to do with the comic.

The movie Kick-Ass featured a world that seemed surreal to me. It was like Gaiman’s world where cats talk and fish fall from the sky. In the movie, a little girl kills, and a father teaches a daughter how to. But more than the usual representation of a “violent world out there”, it got the message completely across to me - bull’s eye.

Perhaps what attracted me most to the movie was the dysfunctional world they have, with all the dysfunctional lives of the characters. They were all like characters from a novel, or characters from a dream. You have a beautiful girl dating “broken” people, a teenaged son “dying” to be like his kingpin father, a father desensitizing his son with crime, a high school kid wanting to save (even just a silly cat), a father training his daughter to kill, and a child killing without remorse. You see, not only the people but also the relationships are dysfunctional. Each of them is an anomaly, like an outdoor fireplace in the streets of Binondo.

My eyes sometimes look at the world and see it as dark. Perhaps I got that from watching too many world news, if not from personally watching darkness in other people’s lives, or people’s eyes. I cannot help but think that the movie’s dysfunctional world was really our world magnified. Maybe little girl assassins are not the norm yet, but we sure have children doing “dirty” jobs. How many times have we seen young boys holding arms for the cause of their political organization, whatever that is (they call it freedom), and inheriting the ideology of their parents, whatever that is (they call it rebellion). Now, I am wondering if this is the kind of world that kids should grew up in. Well, it’s still safe - for now - but not in some places. Again, I am wondering if it is wrong to “open” the eyes of children early (ie, bring them to the fold) and whether shielding them from the hatred consuming the world was the right thing for a parent to do.

I empathize with the characters in the film, especially Hit Girl and Big Daddy. I feel sorry for the child who had already lost  people a little too early and for the man whose sole goal was to save people from crime but never really got to protect himself and his family. Theirs was such a violent world. And in this world, I can only imagine that somewhere out there, there are really little children losing family and losing lives, from hunger, sickness, violence (political or otherwise), poverty, and most especially, from madness. There are really people who could never really get out from the man-created net of tragedy thrown at them.

My heart aches for Hit Girl’s seeming inability to grasp the concept that it is not natural to kill people, even if you hate them, or even if your father hate them so much. But probably the most painful of all was this 11-year-old girl’s inability to grieve, even to his father’s death. All you see in her eyes was determinate revenge.