A look at audience and genre in the film Kick Ass

So, I just saw Kick Ass, and felt compelled to jot down a few notes about the film, and in particular, how it employs voice over narration at one particular moment to check the audience from misapplying genre to read the film.

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."

Ontological difference and Rhetoric versus rhetorics of...

Below is my response to (and more like a pedagogical cut into) McNely and Teston's blog "On the Atomization of Rhetoric," located here:

http://5000.blogspot.com/2010/02/on-atomization-of-rhetoric.html

This blog was also picked up by RSA's Blogora here:

http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/3389

Citing Scott and Brummett, McNely and Teston argue that "rhetoric is epistemic. It is ontological." They inveigh against the tendency to atomize rhetoric, to reduce the wider realm of rhetoricality into ghettoized rhetorics of this and that. This view echoes that of Bender and Wellberry's argument in The Ends of Rhetoric (1990), where their inquiry led them to conclude that our age is "not of rhetoric, but of rhetoricality, the age, that is, of a generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience." Consequently, rather than allowing the rule governed domains structured by institutions to determine what is rhetorical and what is not, rhetoricality "is bound to no specific set of institutions. It manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern world. For this reason, it allows for no explanatory metadiscourse that is not already itself rhetorical." But here's the rub:

"Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence" (25).

True, what McNely and Teston are calling for us to attend to is not necessarily new, but that does not provide an argument against the unmitigatible novely of this view, which invites us to inquire beyond our tendency to reduce rhetoric to fixed and codified objects of scrutiny and to delve more directly in an ontological domain, the "groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse." I wish to spend some time looking into what I think McNely and Teston mean by "Rhetoric is ontological," and my pathway is to regard ontology as inheretly methodological, as a relentless inquiry into the way of being or background practices that grant us access to understanding the world the way we do. The question pivots between whether ontology is the study of being or the study of beings. Heidegger calls the difference between these two kinds of inquiry the "ontological difference."

To make explicit Heidegger’s ontological difference and what impact this distinction might have on McNely and Teston's call, I begin with a somewhat simplified history of the Western philosophical tradition as following a path that diverged from the rhetorical and into the serious (a la Lanham). Following in the wake of Plato and Aristotle and their interpreters, traditional ontology involves the study of beings, of entities of various kinds, including the wide range of natural elements, geometrical figures and arithmetic formulae, abstract concepts, animals, and of course, human beings. Using the basic categories of quality (it is or it is not), quantity (all, some, or none), and modality (from actuality to possibility), the traditional ontological investigator primarily sought to delimit the morphology and etiology of a given being—he sought to reach a definitive end, the final word on the exact description of a being’s form and the most correct justification for its existence in a particular place and time. The fundamental controlling value of traditional ontology promises that the more comprehensive the investigator is in describing those aspects proper to a given entity, the closer the investigator comes to knowing the thing itself. The ultimate end of course is mastery of the physical and even spiritual universe, especially given the arduous metaphysical project to know and delimit the godhead, its qualities and modalities.

With the emergence of Cartesianism and its methodological aim to ground all investigations on the certainty of the subject’s existence, epistemology began to replace ontology as the controlling value of philosophical investigation. Instead of beginning with the object, the what, the investigator began with how the subject can come to know any object at all. Culminating in Kant’s first critique, Western metaphysics reached its ultimate boundary situation: our ways of knowing came to be understood as the ineluctable intermediary between the investigator and the thing in itself. Kant demonstrated that reason was incapable of applying traditional ontological categories to the thing in itself because these categories derived entirely from the knowing subject’s epistemology. Kant’s critique seemed to provide the death knell for traditional ontology and for the metaphysical speculations that followed from it.

By the time Heidegger began his own serious investigations (circa 1920), ontology had nearly disappeared from a philosophical scene whose members had already largely embraced a positivistic and analytical domain within which to continue inquiries guided by the Enlightenment project. Heidegger sought to reintroduce a new inquiry into the being of beings through undercutting the foundational split between subject and object that the Enlightenment project inherited from the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. In order to do so, Heidegger worked to rethink the tradition of Western metaphysics, reaching far back and behind the thinking of Aristotle and Plato to the pre-Socratics: he sought to articulate a lost but valuable path toward an ontology radically different from the traditional, an ontology that sought to elucidate our being-in-the-world, and not merely to provide accurate formal descriptions and causal explanations for beings as beings.

With a phenomenological focus (a la Husserl’s slogan: “to the things themselves”) in his seminal Being and Time, Heidegger developed a new approach termed the existential analytic. This approach requires the use of categories that greatly diverged from those of traditional ontology. Branding these categories existentials, Heidegger understood them as revealing the mostly elusive phenomenon of the being of human beings. He used these existentials to guide this different ontological inquiry into being as process, as be-ing, rather than as product, as reified essence. Instead of beginning with mere entities (the object) or with epistemology (the subject), he began with both (and thereby eluded both), namely, there-being, a literal translation of the commonplace German expression for everyday existence: Dasein. In other words, Heidegger’s existential analytic begins with everyday existence at the level of practice, the customary ways in which we understand ourselves in the world with others and with equipment, and from there the existential analytic seeks to unfold a fundamental ontology: the meaning of human being there in the world, which Heidegger terms care (Sorge). He ultimately suggests that the meaning of being there is time.

Thus the key aspect to the existential analytic involves acknowledging the ontological difference, which everyday being-in-the-world is largely unaware of because of the relentless Cartesian tendency to seek out and live with substantive answers that provide familiar avenues for living. The ontological difference involves an opening up to the question of being as distinct from beings, which is the difference between episteme and phronesis, between representation and what cannot be represented with certainty. As such, ontological inquiry is not at all defined by the traditional aim to master epistemic knowledge of entities; rather, it is a methodology that transforms the practitioner at the level of being, of practice itself.

Consequently, undergoing the process of this existential analytic includes a shift in subjectivity: beginning as a Cartesian subjectivity searching to master the unknown by bridging it back to the certain and familiar, subjectivity transforms through owning up to her Cartesian limitations and inherited customary practices. I contend that such a transformed subjectivity engages more freely with others in a groundless world of "infinitely ramifying discourse." Following the series of performative steps the inquiry requires of the investigator is all that is necessary to undergo this transformation. This series of steps I call ontological paideia , and since it begins and ends and begins again with everyday existence, with being in the world with others, such inquiry is always and already rhetorical.

Which brings us back to McNely and Teston's call, while at the same time opening the door to the pedagogical dimension to this ontological insight. How is it possible to "teach" ontology, also "known" as rhetoric, that which defies atomization?