Anche il NYT contro Kick-Ass

A.O.Scott si inserisce nel dibattito aperto dalla recensione di Roger Ebert sulla violenza inaccettabile di Kick-Ass ed in un articolo intitolato Brutal truths about violence, afferma:

Even before it opened in theaters on Friday, “Kick-Ass” had achieved a degree of notoriety thanks to a scene in which Hit-Girl, a pint-size masked vigilante played by Chloë Grace Moretz, unleashes a barrage of obscenities against a room full of foes. Both the provocation and the published responses to it — more or less evenly split between shock and exhilaration — had a somewhat ritualized quality. We’ve been here before: A movie pointedly tests what seems to be an established boundary of propriety, and rhetorical battle lines are drawn. “How dare they!” faces off against “Oh, lighten up.”

Scott faun excursus attraverso la violenza al cinema e l’escalation cominciata negli anni ’70, quando il realismo e l’iperrealismo di film come Gangster Story e Il mucchio selvaggio, rappresentavano il tentativo di tradurre la violenza di un paese in guerra, depresso socialmente ed economicamente.

Oggi però non è più così, non ci sono molte giustificazioni, c’è forse solo la volontà di spingersi sempre più in là,

…how far the audience is willing to go, but it is also evidence of how jaded, how inured to brutality, many moviegoers have become.

C’è il rischio di un moralismo un po’ semplice nel criticare la violenza nei film e Scott ne è cosciente:

To criticize movie violence is the surest way to be branded a scold, a moralist, a worrywart who refuses to understand that movies are not real. As someone who often revels in the visceral thrills of cinematic action and the bloodthirsty satisfactions of dramatic vengeance, I’m not inclined to fit that stereotype. But I also think that the uncritical defense of brutality on film, especially of the unimaginative, half-jokey sadism that drives this latest superhero movie, can be evasive and irresponsible.

Eppure forse in certi casi è necessario dire basta.

Everybody can share in the bloodlust, and enjoy the kinetic choreography of flying bullets and spurting arteries. It’s all in good fun, it’s all kid’s stuff, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s the conventional wisdom, in any case, which silences ethical objections to, let’s say, the idea of showing a child’s battered face as being in some way audacious. We will, I suppose, each find our own limits and draw our own boundaries, but it may also be time to articulate those and say when enough is enough.