If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s mostly silly, and filled with awkward, over the top acting and heavy duty melodrama. The technical term for this kind or genre of silly is “corny.” But, it appears to be self-consciously reflective about its own corniness, and in certain key moments, this effect actually (and ironically) redeems the film from being complete schlock.
That is my “evaluative” thesis: that there’s something good about the film that deserves our approval, that is, I am addressing an audience who thinks the film is funny, but in the bad way of being funny where you aren’t laughing with it, but at it. I want them to see an undisclosed “gem-o-goodness” here.
And that is in the scene where Kick Ass and Big Daddy are getting beaten close to death on a live streaming webcast meant to persuade the people of the world that anybody who desires to be a superhero will end up being humiliated and killed (this is the context of a controlling value, where the purpose would be: minding your own business will lead to a long and untroubled life). You see, Kick Ass is a geeky post-adolescent kid who takes it upon himself to make himself into a superhero even though there is no reason why he should be—as the genre of superhero comics/movies dictates. In doing so, he expresses the controlling value/idea of the film: coming to the defense of the weak and marginalized will inspire all people to live heroic lives in whatever way they can.
The thing is, genre (and the values embedded within a genre) tells us what to expect. It guides us to read a text according to learned expectations, and that’s exactly who Kick Ass is: the ideal narrative audience for the genre of a superhero discovering their superheroness. That is, he’s the ideal narrative audience of the genre until he meets “real” superheroes that are even more committed to being the ideal narrative audience: Hit Girl and her father, Big Daddy, who are both on a mission to kill a viciously evil mob boss.
Kick Ass accidentally puts himself in over his head when he unknowingly confronts a few of the mob boss’s men, but then is saved by Hit Girl, who dispatches each of the men with surgical precision. The mob boss thinks Kick Ass did it himself, and so puts out a contract on the fledgling superhero.
After failing to find Kick Ass, the boss turns to his son, a comic book fan immersed in the superhero genre, and lets him create his own superhero identity to catch Kick Ass. Playing an unreliable narrator to Kick Ass’s naïve addressee-hood (the state of mind of a "true believer), the mob boss's son helps his father catch both Kick Ass and Dig Daddy, leaving Hit Girl for dead. Of course we know, according to the genre, that she will somehow save the day.
Anyway, this all sets up the scene, and the single line of voice over I want to analyze:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4jZT0CQblk&feature=related
I'm interested in the bit of voice over beginning at around 2:45 minutes, at the point where, crying like a baby, Kick Ass realizes he is about to be set on fire on the live webcast. At the most dire and pathetic of moments, Kick Ass begins to directly address the ideal narrative audience (the audience completely swept up into the narrative and who embodies the values of the narrator without question) who is deeply concerned about whether he will really die as he himself is coming to terms with. As he lists all the EXPECTED things he’ll never be able to do once dead, he ends the list with something unexpected, but corny: he’ll never know how Lost will end up. At that moment, the narrator says:
If you’re reassuring yourself that I’m going to make it through this because I’m talking now... Quit being such a smart ass. Hell dude, haven’t you ever seen Sin City, Sunset Boulevard, American Beauty?What just happened there? There is no other direct address of the ideal narrative audience anywhere else in the movie. What is it doing here? Well, my claim is that this line reveals the film to be self-reflective corn, rather than merely corn. First off, the narrator is asking the ideal narrative audience to stay "asleep," even though a textual feature of the narrative is prompting the ideal narrative audience to become the narrative audience (swept up in the narrative, but aware of the unreliability of the narrator). The narrator's chief strategy is to directly address this audience and then make a reference that only the authorial audience would know. The authorial audience has the knowledge base to catch any such references because it is deeply immersed in the genres of film and of comic book superheroes (by the way, I am drawing these categories that distinguish different kinds of audience from a 1977 article by Peter Rabinowitz called "Truth in Fiction").
First of all, the ideal narrative audience might be convinced (and so very worried about the likelihood) that Kick Ass is about to die, but is beginning to rely on the genred convention called “Any voice over is coming from a present position in speaking about the past, so be assured that if he’s still talking, the narrator will get through this imminent-looking doom.”
It’s like the narrator, in scolding the ideal narrative audience—who is beginning to notice the conventions of the genre—is appearing to say: “Go back to sleep. There are times when films have broken that convention, such as Sin City, where the narrator continues to narrate even though he is dead. This is just like those films.” Only the authorial audience would know that, and would then cease to question the oddity, and return to the aesthetic emotion of the scene: “oh no! He’s going to be burned! Where is Hit Girl!”
Oh the corn!
Unless of course the audience continues to read this exhortation to return to the narrative as itself an indication of the narrator's unreliability, which is to basically plead with the emerging reflective audience: "It's not as corny as you think."
That's a tough one.
Furthermore, another take on this attempt of the narrator to silence the critical questionings of an emerging narrative audience is to read into it a subtle contradiction. He tells the audience to "stop being a smart ass." But only a smart ass would call himself Kick Ass. So, in essence, "don't try to be a superhero like me. Accept your fate as I am accepting mine."
