Kick-Ass Audience Responses

Kick-Ass uses many different way to make the audience identify with characters, and despise others, it also convince the audience to take the preferred reading to the text. The audience see Dave as he is a geeky teen who cannot talk to girls or seem to get himself a girlfriend, he is struggling to stand alone and cannot shake the fact that he is a typical high school nerd that has no powers of his own so has to essentially be a fake superhero. The audience are forced to sympathise with Dave and his friend Tod instantly as when they leave the comic book shop they are mugged and the audience are told that this isn’t the first time that it has happened. The audience also feel worse as even Tod’s comic books are stolen from him no questions asked. This encourages the audience to want him to succeed as her hero as the audience feel that the superhero suit will make him somebody when in reality he is nobody.

As an audience we are also manipulated emotionally through the exploitation of Hit Girl, when the film begins we see her as no more than a vulnerable child wearing all pink and her hair in bunches, but as the story moves along we no longer see her as the innocent little girl and are lead to see her as a calculating and cunning little girl with a foul mouth and anger and violence beyond her years. When the audience are introduced to Hit Girl and Big Daddy’s background we are once again emotionally stunned that Hit Girls mother died huring labour as the audience sympathise with the little girl as it is unimaginable how hard it must be for a young girl to grow up without a mother and a father as he was in prison as she was growing up. This is a very relatable things as many people will have lost a love one so therefore audience members are able to feel the emotion they felt in their past so can empathise with the little girl, however to lose a mother at such a young age before you are even able to comprehend the loss is rare which would make the audience even more emotionally connected as a child needs a parent to care for them making the audience want to be that parental figure to Mindy.

The audience’s emotions are also manipulated by Frank as we see him have a fight with Hit Girl, however this isn’t a normal fight, we see Mindy pinned down against a table as she is punched repeatedly in the face and thrown against walls and the floor. This instantly shocks the audience as child abuse is not tolerated nor is it glorified within films so for the audience to experience this breaks all generic conventions of films as well as social norms and makes the audience react in one of two ways; disgusted by his action or incensed to help save the young girl from an abusive man. The audience are encouraged to seek revenge for the young girl and become enraged by the scene unfolding in front of them.

On the other hand not all audience members took the preferred reading some took an oppositional and or negotiated reading to the film, “here the hero leans nothing, except that extreme violence against criminals is cool” – Christopher Tookey Here the preferred reading hasn’t been taken as although they have understood the intensions of the film they felt it did nothing good, this review by Christopher Tookey was one of the most scathing reviews of all time and showed a completely different view on the film saying that Hit Girl was the “most disturbing icons and damaging role-models in the history of cinema”. In addition to this audience members felt that the film was simply a want to be superhero movie that failed and was simply an action movie with a childish feel to it.

Overall Kick-Ass was a successful film and shows that a lot of the audience did take the preferred reading, however in every media text there are audience members who take the negotiated or oppositional reading and dislike the text due to other factors, one of these factors in particular was the exploitation of the character of Hit Girl.