MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT!!! DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU HAVE NOT READ WATCHMEN AND SEEN AND/OR READ KICK ASS!!! AND IF EITHER OF THOSE ARE TRUE, GO OUT AND READ/ SEE THESE FILMS/ COMIC BOOKS! THEY ARE AWESOME!!!!
Watchmen is the ultimate deconstruction of the superhero myth. Alan Moore took the archetypes that we were meant to idolize and worship as paragons of purity and justice and ripped back the layers, asking, "What kind of person really would dress up in a ridiculous costume and mete out vigilante justice," and "What would it be like to be an actual superhuman on a world where there's no one else like you?"
His answer was that these people would be sadists and fetishists; lunatic fascists and naive yet violent idealists; individuals who, believing themselves to be above the normal laws and limits of society, take the safety of others into their own hands and personally decree what is best for humanity.
The problem being, where do you draw the line? Is fighting purse-snatchers enough when you're not doing anything to stop the poverty that drove someone to be a criminal? Is stopping a local "super-villain" any different than killing a brutal, foreign dictator? In Watchmen, problems and solutions arise because the "heroes" decide that there is no line, that there is no limit to what they can and should do. Dr. Manhattan averts the energy crisis by using his powers to create the parts needed to make all-electric cars, powered by publicly-available electric hydrants (in the comic, not the movie); he also serves as a one-man nuclear deterrent and wins the Vietnam War (along with The Comedian, who's really just there for the fun of it); and then there's Ozymandias, who decides to take all the problems of the world and solve them in one broad stroke that just so happens to include killing millions. And it works.
Ozymandias effectively saves a world on the brink of nuclear holocaust by tricking world leaders into thinking that an alien invasion is imminent (again, comic not movie). It just so happens that his method to doing this requires him to kill most of New York City. But, again, it works. The comic which is somewhat an attack upon what kind of personality it would take to really be a costumed vigilante, upholds the methods those same flawed personalities use by having it all work out in the end.
Kick Ass does a similar thing. While Kick Ass the character is a satirical joke at the expense of every geek who ever dreamed of putting on a costume and fighting crime, Hit Girl isn't. Hit Girl and Big Daddy are Punisher-style vigilantes out for brutal revenge, with some of The Comedian's sadism added in for good measure. However, unlike Kick Ass's laughable attempts at heroism, Hit Girl and Big Daddy's uber-violent approach to crime fighting actually accomplishes something. In fact, Kick Ass isn't really much of a hero at all until he joins up with Hit Girl and copies her "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" tactics.
While one can argue the long-term affects of Kick Ass's costumed vigilantism (Red Mist's Joker moment at the end of the film is clearly an homage/ allusion to the end of another Batman film, Batman Begins), one can't argue that in the short-term, the bad guys have been defeated, the good guys won, and all is right with the world.
So while both Watchmen and Kick Ass ask the question of what kind of person would believably put on a costume to save the day and come up with some horrifying and ridiculous answers, the heroes in each save the day nonetheless.
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But I think they also ask at what cost and would that cost be too high? Clearly both of the pop culture events that you spoke of said that the cost of saving millions (Watchmen) and riding the town of its main crime boss (Kick Ass) is worth a few lifes in the end, no matter what degree of innoncent they were (Hit Girl and Big Daddy did just kill people invovled in the crime world in some capacity). But it does leave you thinking, would that work in the real world, or would it create a new set of problems, like it does for Batman and in Kick Ass's world, that it allows for the rise of the supervillan (I believe that if they have a sequel to Kick Ass, that Red Mist will become The Mother F---er). That if the "good guys" raise the stakes, will the "bad guys" follow suit? Good food for thought from both events, and you can even through Hancock in there (I know, it was an awful movie, but a good idea in theory). Do we want some super powered person there to clean up all our problems, or would they just create a new set of problems by being there? We are human, after all. We always find some way to f--k it up in the end
ReplyDeleteIt is worth noting that there have been numerous vigilante organizations throughout history, recently one in England even began donning ski masks as they went about working "justice." I don't know exactly how that ended, but I do know they ended up having run ins with the police. So maybe that would end any escalation as in the Batman films and presumably the second Kick Ass film/ comic, if the police stepped in and said, "Hey lunatic, assault's agianst the law."
ReplyDeleteAn interesting difference between Kick Ass and Watchmen that has occurred to me since writing the post is that while Hit Girl and Big Daddy only focus on the short-term, small problem of one gangster, Ozymandias's conversion comes when he begins to think larger and decides that in order to save the world he has to shift his tactics. His focus is large, their's is small; he saves the world by killing civilians, they stop one gangster by killing all his men, and it's Ozymabdias who seems to be doing more for the world.