The Kick-Ass Movie is Not Feminist (and Neither is Hit-Girl)

(In-depth spoilers for the movie follow.)

I do realize I'm late in discussing this, and the reason is because for a long while I didn't want to see this movie. I'm not a fan of Mark Millar. His Marvel Knights Spider-Man was okay but he never seemed to get the character's voice completely right and I really hated Wanted (although, to be fair, more of that has to do with the art than his writing) . I haven't read the Kick-Ass comic, either.

Yet I eventually changed my mind after I read essays and exclamations proclaiming Hit-Girl as a feminist character. This did not sound convincing to me: a young girl who is superheroing because her "Big Daddy"has groomed her to be a killer is inherently a character without agency and thus not feminist. Still, I decided to see the movie for myself and found my opinion changed from "That's not feminist" to "No, really, that's not feminist."

I can see why people would want to think it is, and why people would like Hit-Girl. She beats up a bunch of bad dudes, does it better than most of the male superheroes in the story, makes semi-clever quips while doing it and does it (ostensibly) wearing clothes that don't sexualize her. I can see where that appeals to the id brain of most female superheroine fans, and I will admit I'm not totally immune.

But as I said in my last post, sometimes the way to tell if a work is feminist is not how the story treats its heroine, but how it treats the other women in the story. So we're going to talk about them before we even get to Hit-Girl.

The movie begins on a bad note for women. It starts with our hero, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson), describing his life as a comic book-reading loser who can't get girls and who masturbates all the time. Dave gets explicit about the latter point, describing how he fantasizes about his teacher: an older, buxom white woman. The film then shows Dave's fantasy wherein the teacher urges Dave to touch her breasts, and then takes off her shirt and unhooks her bra. The film cuts away before she can take reveal her breasts, but has no compunctions about cutting to a photo of two topless African tribal women on Dave's computer. In his voiceover narration, Dave explains his interest in the black women by saying, essentially, that he'll masturbate to anything -- with the clear implication that for anyone to find such women sexy is unthinkable. Essentially it's anti-feminist on two levels -- for one, it upholds the offensive double-standard that "white women's breasts are pornography, black women's breasts are anthropology" and also specifically codes an interest in black women as less desirable than an interest in white women.

Then there are the girlfriends in the story, Dave's girlfriend Katie and her Asian-American friend, who becomes a girlfriend for one of Dave's friends. Neither of these girls are real people, but are a male geek-specific fantasy of how some male geeks hope girls will act when they start dating them.

Katie is a beautiful blank slate of a girl, the type imagined by the myriad and maligned "How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Comics" essays. Her one unique interest (if you don't count "lattes") -- working at a methadone clinic, only serves to code her as "kind" and to connect her to the main plot of Dave fighting the mafia. Other than that, her role is to breathlessly state how amazing it is now that Dave is introducing her to the amazing world of comics. "I love Scott Pilgrim," she says breathlessly, "but I'm not into that superhero stuff." Although it's okay, after she's read what are considered the "girlfriend bait" comics, there's a scene later where she tells Dave "I really enjoyed those Ditko-era Spider-Man comics you gave me" as he rubs self-tanning oil onto her nearly-naked body.

An aside: There's a subplot too complicated and offensive to explain right now about how Dave is able to hang out with Katie because Katie thinks he's gay. Yet no intelligent straight woman who has respect for her gay male friend would ask him to rub tanning oil onto her body. Most gay men will see it as a cheap, titillating ploy for a girl to get an attractive guy's hands on her but make it "okay," and will ditch her for a woman who sees him as a real person and not as a handbag or a living slash fanfic fantasy posthaste.

Anyway, eventually Dave tells Katie he's straight and he's Kick-Ass, and unlike in the comic they get together. In their first love scene, Dave and Katie share a kiss, and then, like a romantic, he goes straight for the tits. Because that's what geek romance is really about, right? The guy finally getting to touch the breasts that have eluded him for so long. You may think I'm being pedantic or a prude about this, but nothing else happens in the scene. Katie doesn't try to touch him -- she just basically smiles like she's doing him a favor. The scene is not about two people who love each other getting together. It's about how Dave gets to touch tits -- that's its entire point.

About Katie's friend, all I can say is she and Dave's friend get together, even though Dave's friend sniffs her hair like a creepazoid when she's not looking. Later, he says "I'm going to explain comics to you" and she sits next to him and listens with wide eyes as if she's a five-year-old. Later she's hanging off him.

So, really, that's how the Kick-Ass movie treats its adult women: as blank objects of desire to be filled by geek males with their own interests, or freaks.

And now (finally) Hit-Girl. As I mentioned earlier, she's capable and strong. I liked her. She and her father are the best parts of the movie, and Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage put in really funny performances. If the tone of the movie didn't wildly vacillate between a humorous dark parody of superheroes and a "serious" exploration of what superheroes would be like in the real world, I might have liked them better. But the movie wants you to see Hit-Girl's story as one of a child who isn't allowed to be a child by her revenge-driven father who makes killing a game to her, but also be gleeful about a child brutally murdering mobsters. It wants to eat the cake and have it, too.

Some will say I don't get it, because they mistake this hypocricy of tone Millar employs as satire or a joke on the reader. No. It doesn't work. This movie doesn't work. You can't claim this is a realistic movie and then have the hero fly in to save Hit-Girl on a jetpack.

Defenders of the movie have also said critics of the movie are only offended because Hit-Girl is female, and they would be fine if a young boy was brainwashed by a parent or parental figure into being a superhero. For one, I would not be. For two, the problem for me does not lie so much in the concept but, as I mentioned before, how it's presented. One of my favorite DC characters is the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, who was raised by her father to be a killing machine from a young age, but that story had a consistent tone -- Cassandra's upbringing is explicitly exploitative in the text, and her father is considered a supervillain, not a superhero like Big-Daddy. Also, what makes Cassandra a superheroine is how she eventually struggles to be independent and have her own agency (consider that her father took away her power to speak and she has had to fight to win it back). Hit-Girl does not have this agency.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that Hit-Girl has to become traditionally heroic to be a good character. I also do not necessarily need every superhero to be a good person -- I love Watchmen's Rorschach. If Hit-Girl were just an exploited child with an incomplete set of morals and that was seen as a horrifying thing, I'd probably be fine. But, like I said, the movie thinks what happened to her wrong but also thinks she's the coolest, and that's just messed up.

I also want to address a common claim I've heard: Hit-Girl is feminist because she's a child and thus can't be sexualized. I've heard this a lot and it is ridiculous. How low are our standards for superheroines that "she doesn't show cleavage" is the dealbreaker? And how does having a character too young to have cleavage solve that problem? It's like slash fanfic writers who say what they write is feminist because they can have romance without women characters and thus without gender differences. It's not solving or fighting the problem, it's sweeping it under the rug.

And it's not even true. Society has certain expectations for what little girls are supposed to look like and how they are attractive to adults, and Hit-Girl meets those expectations. Her superhero outfit has a skirt. When not in costume, she wears her hair in pig-tails with bows. She's constantly smiling and speaks in the cheerful, adoring voice of a good little girl. At one point, she dresses up to fight bad guys wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

I am not saying that any of those things in of themselves are bad or that this movie is somehow obscene or pedophiliac for presenting Hit-Girl this way, but I would also argue that cleavage and women looking sexy in of themselves are not bad, obscene or pornographic. I'm just saying it's there, and it is what it is.

One could also say that Hit-Girl defies these expectations by being tough and using profanity, but while I like pretty, dress-wearing warrior princesses (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie is underrated), you could argue that buxom women in spandex beating people up is also defying some expectations. Honestly, they're both rather ordinary at this point.

But for those unconvinced, I offer up a scene with Dave's before unmentioned second friend. At one point in the story he sees a video of Hit-Girl fighting and declares, "I want to marry her!" When Dave's first friend reminds the second friend that Hit-Girl is 11, the second friend says, "I'm going to save myself for her."

Think about that scene and tell me again Hit-Girl isn't sexualized.