Dark Knights, Pilgrims, Ass Kickers, and hit Girls more

“Dark Knights, Pilgrims, Ass Kickers, and Hit Girls: The Border Crossing Genre of the Comic Book/Video Game Adaptation Action Movie” John Alberti Professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies Department of English Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights KY 41099 alberti@nku.edu 859.572.5578 Over the last quarter century, a new hybrid subgenre of action movie has emerged, one that reflects the increasingly destabilized borders between national cultures, mass media, and gender identities: the comic book/video game adaptation action movie. This subgenre represents a convergence of three related and mutually influential globalized media—movies, video games, and comic books/graphic novels—that have created a cultural space for experiments in redefining obsolete genres of narrative gender identity. My presentation, drawn from two chapters of a longer study of the transformation of contemporary genres of gender in contemporary cinema, uses four examples of the comic book/video game adaptation action movie — Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2009), Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill diptych (2003; 2004), and Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass (2010)—to illustrate some key aesthetic and thematic features that define the subgenre: • A postmodern oscillation between realism and parody that combines the tentpole Alberti 2 blockbuster and the auteurist indie movie • An effort to both expand and maintain the traditional audience base for action movies, a process parallel to concurrent developments in video game culture • A confrontation with increasingly obsolete and pathological constructions of masculine identity combined with experiments in redefining genres of masculinity • The emergence of new hybrid genres of female identity that attempt to reconcile potentially contradictory gender stereotypes • The influence on both these forms of gender experimentation of Japanese video game culture, which combines its own parodic homage to “Western” genres of male action hero identity with the bright colors and “cute” feminized aesthetic of anime As I have indicted, my focus on the border crossing of narrative genres stems from an interest in gender genres, and specifically the obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculinity in contemporary popular cinema. My study began with the hypothesis that much critical anxiety about the state of certain popular cinematic genres such as the romantic comedy and the action adventure movie derives from an increasing conflict over not just the role of masculinity and characters coded as men in these movies but from their very existence. Simply put, the question I began asking was--“what use are men in these movies?”—and the answer I kept returning to was, “because the genre demands them.” But what happens when these generic requirements grow increasingly out of step with our larger cultural experiences? The film theorist Rick Altman has described genres as “regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single, unified social fabric” (195). That is, genres--both those of narrative and those of gender identity--have an inherently conservative function: to create a sense—a fiction, really--of cognitive order and cultural coherence out of what is really Alberti 3 an inherently dynamic, multiple, and often paradoxical process of social evolution and transformation. In asserting this social and ideological function of genre, Altman argues, “generic meaning depends on a correct alignment of text and audience. If the text fails to serve as a memorial both to a collective past and to a current collectivity, then it is not fulfilling a generic role" (188). Thus, generic confusion, anxiety, and instability—both of narrative form and gender identity--indicates a similar lack of consensus in the genres of our larger social narratives. In referring to the “obsolescence of masculinity,” I am really looking at the obsolescence of specific genres of masculine performance; in particular, with those masculine genres that insist on both the cultural centrality and authority of masculinity—one definition of patriarchy— and also on the unity of masculine identity. That is, the very act of suggesting that there are plural genres of masculinity threatens the idea of masculine authority and centrality, and it is this conflict I see at work in those cinematic genres most concerned with gender identity such as the romantic comedy and the action adventure movie. The action adventure movie can in fact be read as an extended cultural meditation (albeit a noisy and chaotic one) on the meaning of masculine identity and the necessity of male centrality. All of which is another way of saying that the action adventure movie is equally a meditation on the fragility and instability of male identity and centrality. This is particularly true in an era marked by rapid transformation and experimentation in performative styles of gender and sexuality, of the relation between gender identity and roles of social and economic authority, and of media convergence and transformation in the age of digital globalization. One marker of generic instability is reflected in the first of my bullet points, the oscillation between the registers of “realism” and “parody.” By “realism” and “parody,” I refer to codes of representation rather than any idea of verisimilitude, even as the assertion of Alberti 4 “verisimilitude” is inherent to these codes. In my work on romantic comedies, for example, I look at how the sub genre of the “bromance” manages to assert claims of realism through exaggerated performative styles that likewise register as parody. The popular critical reaction to movies such as Knocked Up, Superbad, and I Love You, Man similarly express interpretive confusion over whether to read these movies as subversive or reactionary, as evidence of the evolution of the romcom or harbingers of its demise. The comic book action adventure movie is likewise defined by this instability between the registers of realism and parody, between generic unconsciousness and self-consciousness, and finally between male centrality and obsolescence. Of course, comic books themselves, along with video games, embody this cultural instability, as graphic narratives acquire a cultural capital and literary appreciation that belies their historical dismissal as juvenile, immature pop culture. The very term, “comic book,” suggests exaggeration and simplification, the very opposite of “realism.” The “serious” comic book, as a result, indicates a cultural moment when the registers of social reality, the “memorial” to a “current collectivity” that Altman refers to, are radically in flux. And comic book superheroes embody these same anxieties over genres of masculine centrality; in fact, in the evolution of the masculine antiheroes such as Spiderman in the Marvel comics of the 1960s and the transformation of Batman into the Dark Knight of the 1980s graphic novel, comic books anticipate current cinematic concerns with male gender identity. Rather than simply a hypermasculine backlash against a contemporary society where the ideal of male vigilantism seems increasingly pathological and irrelevant, the comic book action movie can be read as part of that progressive evolution as well. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a movie that might be described as a “neo-realist” Alberti 5 comic book, embodies both the impulse to romanticize the gender genre of the hyperviolent male vigilante and to undermine this genre at the same time, to combine realism and parody. Building on the noir-influenced turn within comic books represented by Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Nolan’s movie abandons the overt camp elements of Tim Burton’s comically noirish Batman (1989) to create a paradoxically “serious” Batman movie. Gone is Burton’s playfully neo-expressionist mise-en-scéne of Gotham City, a fantastic city where the elaborate costumes of both Batman and his hyper-stylized criminal nemeses match the Metropolis meets Wizard of Oz construction of their urban battle ground. The Dark Knight instead places Batman’s hypertrophied and fetishistically masculine molded body armor within a recognizably contemporary American city, complete with familiar corporate logos. Both Batman’s suit and his equally fetishized accessories ironically contrast with the Joker’s shabby costume and cheap make-up. Unlike Batman’s, the Joker’s weaponry is markedly quotidian and unadorned—Uzis; rocket launchers; gasoline bombs—and the fierce intelligence of Heath Ledger’s performance suggests the movie can be seen as an action adventure character study. The Dark Knight further signifies this uneasy combination of parody and realism through the growing practice within contemporary comic book action movies of pairing an auteurist director with film projects commonly thought of as commercially exploitative appeals to the adolescent male market. Indeed, the confusion between “adolescent” and “adult” genres of male gender and performance is a key marker of the obsolescence of masculinity in contemporary genre cinema. In the comic book action hero, this confusion relates not just to an unwillingness —driven by marketing concerns over alienating the target fanboy audience—to represent “adult” genres of masculine identity but to a widespread lack of cultural consensus over what such “adult” genres would look like. Alberti 6 Invested with the contradictory cultural capital of the tentpole blockbuster and the auteurist indie movie, The Dark Knight registers as a movie about duality, ambivalence, and contradiction. One of the most striking aspects of The Dark Knight is the degree to which its very reason for being becomes an explicit theme of the movie. From the beginning, characters carry on an ongoing debate about the purpose and need for superheroes in particular and heroes in general. They even maintain a scrupulous record of the human damage inflicted as a consequence of vigilantism, as both Batman and the Joker keep careful track of the body count throughout. And this anxiety over the superhero is specifically an anxiety over the male superhero, who along with his doppelganger male antagonist suffers from the unresolved Oedipal conflict that is a staple of the construction of masculinity in American cinema of all genres. In a movie marked and marketed on the basis of its action sequences, The Dark Knight shares with the even more self-consciously auteurist Quentin Tarantino (a pioneer in the unstable mixing of parody and realism) an unusual level of talkiness for the genre. Bruce Wayne endlessly agonizes over continuing as Batman with his two surrogate father figures, Michael Caine’s Alfred (with the implied subtext of the actor Christian Bale comparing his ambivalent role as male action icon with Caine, an avatar of 60s and 70s neorealist crime thrillers) and Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox. Lieutenant and later Commissioner Gordon debates the utility of Batman and the need for patriarchal male heroes with the city’s mayor and crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent. Even or maybe especially the Joker--a character that combined with Ledger’s Method performance exemplifies the combination of realism and parody--periodically interrupts his nihilist rampage to conduct existential Socratic dialogues about the futility of the search for ultimate meaning and purpose. Alberti 7 In fact, these recurring and often quite complex arguments along with the movie’s general verbosity encapsulate this anxiety over the potential obsolescence of genres of masculine centrality. Again put simply, is Batman a joke or what? Consider the final scene in the movie, where first Batman and Commissioner Gordon and then Gordon and his young son construct both the dénouement and a narrative linkage to a possible sequel. [PLAY SCENE] The complexity and obscurity of this supposed resolution leaves the viewer wondering how seriously we are to take this explanation—that is, if we think we understand it fully. Take the chiasmus used to contrast the social roles of the competing mythologies of the “White Knight” Harvey Dent and the “Dark Knight” Batman: “Not the hero we deserved but the hero we needed” versus “Because he's the hero Gotham deserves. But not the one it needs right now.” Now, as practiced film explicators we can offer various explanations of just what kinds of distinctions are being made here, but the combination of postmodern cynicism and atavistic sincerity, the tendency for characters to speak in pronouncements, shows that the turn towards the comic book action movie isn’t a simple matter of regression, but an expression of a larger social anxiety over whether we have any non-parodic genres of masculine performance. In the last part of my presentation, I want to contrast the generic end game of The Dark Knight with some examples of different comic book action movie hybrids that represent alternative experiments in generic border crossing. Edgar Wright’s equally artistically ambitious if less financially successful Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), an adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s postmodern graphic novel/comic book series, takes the obsolescence of all genres of masculine centrality as a given, abandoning the ideal of either the “hero we deserve/need” or even “the silent guardian” from the start, along with the narrative genres of the action movie Alberti 8 dependent on these gender genres. The movie combines action hero parody with indie romcom realism to create a crossover between the physically underdeveloped slacker hero of the bromance and the hypermasculine action superhero, a version of the gender genre hybrid “boy/man” as pervasive in modern cinema as the sculpted hardbodies of the comic book action movie. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World represents another kind of hybrid as well, the globalized media hybrid of movies and video games; in particular, Japanese video game culture, which combines its own parodic homage to “Western” genres of male action hero identity with the bright colors and “cute” feminized aesthetic of anime. Of course, the influence and crossmarketing of video games can be seen throughout contemporary cinema, in action set pieces featuring geographically specific quests that involve defeating repetitive clusters of carefully spaced opponents. These sequences either are designed for ease of transition to a gaming format or duplicate the gaming environment from which they derive. Scott Pilgrim takes an immersion in gaming culture—especially the Japanese gaming culture of Nintendo and Sega—as a given among its viewers, and the entire movie structures its action sequences with the visual signposting of video games, including multiple levels, status bars, and the Nintendo-style awarding of coins for victory in battle. The cross cultural translation of Japanese gaming culture into a “western” action adventure context creates an especially complex parody of the action movie, as video games such as Nintendo’s Super Smash Brothers series, radically problematize the question of whether these games—and the graphic novels and movies derived from them--are meant to be taken seriously. And Scott Pilgrim further extends the definition of “action” sequence from the specific fights he must win against the “seven evil exes” of both genders who challenge his new relationship with Ramona Flowers to virtually Alberti 9 every aspect of his daily life. Even more, the interactivity of the video game experience involves moving beyond simply identifying with fictional characters to performing as these characters, a process that further divorces gender identity from gender performance. And it’s not just a matter of allowing girls and young women to inhabit roles of masculine performance, as when they play a hypermasculinized first-person shooter such as Call of Duty, or even of the creation of women action heroes ala Laura Croft (a subject I will return to in relation to Kill Bill and Kick-Ass below), but of creating “action heroes” such as the diminutive plumber Mario, the wide-eyed balloon character Jiggly Puff, the ultra-girly fighting machine Princess Daisy, or the rakish Sonic the Hedgehog, that deliberately upset the iconography of the masculine action hero. Ultimately within Scott Pilgrim, the most difficult challenge faced by the protagonist is the redefinition of gender within the heterosexual romance plot (the concern of generic instability within the romantic comedy), not the physical violence of the action sequences. If The Dark Knight foregrounds the question of the need of and purpose for men in the action movie (and therefore of the action movie itself), Scott Pilgrim connects that generic crisis to a similar issue within the romantic comedy. In this movie’s final scene, for example, after Scott defeats evil record company owner Gideon Graves—with help from his love interest Ramona and his own ex, the teen-aged Knives Chau—Scott must apparently confront his own Joker-like alter ego, Mega Scott, in an Oedipal battle that seems to evoke the same crisis over masculine pathology that haunts The Dark Knight. The resolution in Scott Pilgrim, however, is decidedly different. <PLAY SCENE> Now, the most economical explanation for the difference in resolution and tone here Alberti 10 points to the fact that, unlike The Dark Knight, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a comedy, and we therefore expect a subversive deflation of the solemn pretensions of the action movie. But the very confusion over the comic and the solemn, the apocalyptic and the trivial is exactly the point of the generic border crossing of the comic book/video game action film, now by extension including the comic book/video game romantic comedy (another way of understanding the bromance, featuring as they do comic and video game fan boys as their protagonists). Scott Pilgrim vs. the World connects the anxiety over the pathology of the male vigilante superhero with the parallel anxiety in the romantic comedy over the pathology of the heterosexual male love interest. In fact, the question of comedy in Scott Pilgrim, as a product of the tension between the realism and parody within the comic book action movie, is really the larger question of whether it remains possible to create “serious” action movies, a question literally embodied in the development of the female action hero. The female action hero represents a new hybrid genre of female gender performance that not only reflects conflicting attitudes—both positive and negative—towards the changing social roles of women but that also serves as a functional alternative—functional in the sense of maintaining the cultural validity of the action movie as both narrative genre and as an ideological construction of social power and authority—to the pathological and potentially obsolescent gender genres of the male action hero. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill diptych (2003; 2004) and Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of the graphic novel/comic Kick-Ass (2010) combine comics, video games, and the increasingly globalized nature of the action movie in ways similar to Scott Pilgrim’s self-mocking experiment with the male action movie hero to create a new seriocomic genre of female action hero. In the main character of The Bride, the Kill Bill films mix gender genres from two almost diametrically Alberti 11 opposed narrative genre traditions—the men’s action/revenge movie and the women’s melodrama—to create a narrative arc that develops in the opposite direction of the increasingly alienated lone wolf heroes of The Dark Knight. A relentless killing machine bent on both fulfilling and redefining the role of nurturing mother, the wryly named Bride constructs a female-identified gender genre that combines contradictory representations of reactionary gender-based objectification and progressive gender-based agency. Battling a world dominated by pathological genres of masculine identity that she seeks to eradicate (hence, “Kill Bill”), the Bride represents Tarantino’s obsession with images of both destructive and reproductive female power. Rather than the apocalypse that remains the underlying logic of the pathologized male action hero, the conclusion of Kill Bill suggests generational continuity and sustainability, along with a utopian vision of a world without men, all with a tongue-in-cheek attitude more in common with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than The Dark Knight. In the smaller, more modestly auteurist Kick-Ass, the world of Kill Bill is writ small, literally in the controversial character of Hit-Girl, an eleven-year-old version of the Bride who, like the Bride and the main character of the even more recent Hanna (suggesting the emergence of this character type as a full-fledged gender genre), was raised almost from birth to be a skilled assassin. Another ultra self-aware and self-referential postmodern comic/graphic novel adaptation, Kick-Ass reduces almost all of its main characters to parody with the exception of Hit-Girl, whose genre of gender, like the Bride, represents an emergent, functional hybrid rather than the increasingly dysfunctional, obsolescent male action gender genres that can only exist in parodic form. The title character himself, the put-upon fanboy (and therefore target audience surrogate) Dave Lizewski, exhibits the same parodic approach to genres of masculine performance as Scott Alberti 12 Pilgrim. The movie hews more closely to the “serious” comic book action movie represented by The Dark Knight. In fact, both Dave and his eventual nemesis Chris D’Amico—whose own selfcreated alter ego of Red Mist sounds as much like a new soft drink as a menacing incarnation of masculine aggression--function as juvenile versions of Batman and the Joker, each selfconsciously creating superhero/supervillain identities within a plot that self-consciously foregrounds, again like The Dark Knight, anxiety over not just the desirability but the sheer logistical practicality of the superhero. Dave decides to realize his superhero fantasies through the homemade and, as the name indicates, parodic alter ego of Kick-Ass, mainly by constantly subjecting the superhero fantasy to a “realist” critique, from the difficulty of constructing a costume to the radical vulnerability of the superhero to ordinary guns, knives, and fists. Even though he nominally succeeds in exacting the requisite revenge that is the motor of the comic book action hero plot, he does so only as a sidekick to the pre-tweener Hit Girl, who instead emerges as the energetic center of the movie, representing a potential new narrative action genre combining the teen high school comedy and the Hong Kong action movie. Consider Oedipal conflict in Kick-Ass, in this scene involving Hit Girl’s assassin training not at the hands of her lover, as in Kill Bill, but from her father “Big Daddy,” an ex-cop obsessed with avenging his wife’s murder and played by an actor who personifies the realist/parodic split in constructions of cinematic masculinity, Nicholas Cage. <PLAY SCENE> Hit Girl fulfills her father’s quest with murderous determination after his death, but then rather than run off into an indeterminate future like the Dark Knight, she instead is adopted by a surrogate father figure, her real father’s more stable and domestic partner Marcus Williams and enrolls in public school, complete with backpack and pig tails (and short patience for school Alberti 13 bullies). That the movie, like the Kill Bill diptych and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and definitely unlike The Dark Knight, is as much comedy as action movie links it both to video game culture —and I’m specifically thinking of a game like Grand Theft Auto which similarly combines parody and violence—and to the critical uncertainty and unease with have met both Kick-Ass and Grand Theft Auto. Even more tendentiously, the linking of the comic and parodic with the female action hero suggests both reactionary and subversive readings, which is to be expected if we read cinematic texts not as uniform and stable semiotic texts but as complex, contradictory, and radically multiple semiotic events. In the first reading, the seriocomic nature of the female action hero movie reflects a lingering inability to accept gender genre constructions of female identity as aggressive, assertive, and intimidating. Instead, they must be relentlessly sexualized and made to seem “cute,” in the way of Japanese anime. But the equally, subversively, and to many disturbingly playful nature of these movies also functions as an ongoing critique both of the cultural logic of the action movie genre and of the obsolete genres of pathological masculine identity upon which they are based. This playfulness can be taken to mean that movies like Kill Bill and Kick-Ass trivialize violence and mayhem, but they can also be read as subjecting the action movie genre to ridicule and parody, causing us to consider whether the portentousness and operatic tragedy of the serious comic book movie isn’t really a more disturbing justification for the pleasures of action cinema. In the end, perhaps Scott Pilgrim, the Bride, Kick-Ass, and the Hit Girl might better represent the heroes we need and deserve. Alberti 14 Works Cited Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1991.