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Now The New Yorker Condemns Kick-Ass
Daily Mail, we could expect. Fox News, it was going to happen. But what about the New Yorker? Surely they will take a little more laissez-faire attitude towards a film that is after all, just a…
"Kick-Ass" is violence's answer to kiddie porn.
Oh.
You can see it in Hit Girl's outfit when she cons her way past security guards—white blouse, hair in pigtails, short tartan skirt—and in the winsome way that she pleads to be inculcated into grownup excess.
You know I really thought she was a young girl dressing as a young girl. I mean, if you thought that was sexual than maybe…
That pleading is the dream of every pedophile, and I wonder if Goldman paused to examine her contribution to the myth. (Note what the script does with mothers: Dave's expires at the breakfast table, causing no blip in the rhythm of his life, and Hit Girl's was dead before she was born. Thus is any trace of tenderness expunged before our tale begins.) Goldman would presumably say that it is violence, not sex, that our pre-teen heroine learns, but that is a cowardly distinction—although, to be fair, it is a cowardice shared by everyone from the M.P.A.A. down.
Whoa. Christopher Tookey, meet your cross-Atlantic counterpart in Anthony Lane.
