Coal and der switches: JINGLE ALL THE WAY

When it comes to holiday entertainment, nothing tops the "heroin-smuggling nuns" episode of the BIONIC WOMAN that played Xmas eve back in the 70s and has never been seen again. But we must settle. Mom wants the CHRISTMAS STORY marathon on TNT ("you kids loved that movie as kids, remember?") My brother and I roll our eyes since we endured high school with co-star Scottie Schwartz. My brother Fred likes BADDER SANTA but that kid grosses me out. I vote for the Pagan Solstice celebration of THE WICKER MAN! There's no kid at all in that, just evil Celtic children snickering at a cop's befuddlement, which is badass. We settle, always, for them all... and just wince whenever 'good' or 'normal' kids are present. Sooner or later they all remind us some kid who annoyed us in school, either on purpose (Scotty) or by accident (everyone else).

Bridgewater-Raritan HS's Scourge

Then there's a second problem with Xmas movies, the classic example of which is in SCROOGED when Bill Murray starts his lengthy rant about how we should all sing soul music together because he's finally learned the meaning of Christmas. My friends, this is nothing more than Münchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the Xmas version, which I call Coal and Switches Syndrome: it's that thing where an egotistical workaholic proceeds to create pointless disasters so that Xmas is almost ruined, all so he can race in at the 11th hour and save it. Beside Murray's Scrooge, there's Nic Cage in The FAMILY MAN (2000) and Arnold Schwarzenegger in JINGLE ALL DER WAY (1996).

To get back to the kid's thing. If kids could have any wish, could be anything they wanted, more than anything they'd want to be adults. They don't ever imagine themselves as kids. There wasn't a single kid in STAR WARS because Lucas understood this (but then forgot it).  Boys especially want to see themselves as men, not as wide-eyed kiddies. Misunderstanding this fundamental rule of viewer identification processes led to the idiotic decision to create sidekicks like Robin and Superboy and all those movies where we don't just see what a kid would imagine, but a kid imagining it.

I mention all this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those men children want to be. His overly muscular body is almost a burlesque of how kids confuse muscles with prowess; we love his comically stern accent; his straightforward way with a catch phrase, wherein you can't tell if he gets the joke or not. But in JINGLE, Arnold is just an ordinary gym owner/personal trainer and largely absentee father, avoiding his son's karate performance because (subconsciously) it would mean some other athlete getting the applause. Arnold thinking he can get away with being an average suburban dad in the first place makes him suspect. He's like a reverse superhero alter-ego with no superhero to turn into but also totally unconvincing as a normal person.

Arnold needs to realize he is not, and has never been, an average dad figure. He is not all-American Joe material, if he was, why would we bother paying to see him? In the symbolic structure of the film, though, being unaverage is a crime tantamount to neglect and he must atone by finding an unavailable/sold out super hero action figure for his emotionally blackmailing son, the superhero itself a burlesque of impotent male (child) rage. Arnold wants to be his son's action figure, but such a character is defined (in a child's mind) by his absence. And in the guilt trip nanny state PC 90's a absence is tantamount to neglect, so he has to bow down to a plastic imitation of himself because his son prefers the totemic imitation phallus to his dad's genuine absence. It's a bit like Jesus being told he's not a good messiah unless he buys all his disciples Christmas presents, for his own birthday.  

JINGLE has hints of turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself (which Guy Debord dubbed détournement - often expressed via subversive graffiti on advertising or re-word ballooning comic strips): the film digs a canal into the rotting roots of the American capitalist frenzy Xmas tooth, only to fill it at the last minute with souvenir gift items available for purchase in the lobby. Like any good capitalist product, JINGLE knows how to incorporate its critique against itself within itself.

my attempt at a detournement

One way Arnold tries to become the action figure phallus-fetish is through the aforementioned Coal-Switch Syndrome: He creates drastic emergencies for himself, crises anyone who's lived in suburbia for more than five minutes would easily avoid. But he's an adrenaline junkie who rides suburban angst the way Charlie Sheen rides air currents in MAXIMUM VELOCITY. He ignores his secretary's notes that he needs to go to his kid's karate practice just so he can speed down the emergency lane at the last minute; he combs through every toy story in town on Xmas Eve like a maniac as he realizes his son's asked-for toy has been sold out for months; he asks for help and invites contemptuous laughter on himself so that he can throw a fellow dad into a toy display; an inability to get a call through to a radio station giving away one of the dolls leads to him smashing up the DJ booth; his son's Xmas wish gives Arnold the sanctified excuse he needs to push and shove old ladies and children, resist arrest, trash a kid's jungle gym in the mall, willfully commit legions of traffic violations, impersonate an officer, terrify innocent pedestrians, break into and rob his neighbor's house, punch out a reindeer and inadvertently interfere with a bust on a bootleg toy factory (run by carny schemers dressed as elves and Santas in the film's funniest bit).

In short he is the worst thing about American foreign policy, the living embodiment of America as perceived by Communist and third world countries, so frenzied in our consumption and desire we trample every country who gets in the way, barging in wherever we smell oil and trampling any ecosystem that dares gets in the way like it's some slow-moving old lady shopper.

I imagine we're supposed to sympathize with Arnold's amok American dad, but the only ones who could possibly relate are the Hollywood elite who aren't off their cell phones more than a few minutes a year, and would be as dumbstruck as Arnold is if they suddenly had to do their own Christmas shopping (fine in itself, but don't expect our sympathy). It would be more believable if Arnold was a toy come to life, fresh out of the box, believing his own cover story, like a Buzz Lightyear or post-Recall Quaid than how it is here, where he's supposed to have been present at this family suburban house since you know, before his kid was even born.

When all his feigned ignorance and willful bull-in-a-china-shop methods fail, Arnold eventually solves it all by becoming the real life version of toy, by positing himself as the kind of father who's not afraid to use a jet pack to trash an African American family's living room as they're sitting down for Xmas eve dinner, praying, Arnold missing their heads for their heads are lowered in prayer, the only mention of God or Jesus anywhere in the film --all to prevent another African American from stealing the toy he's (unfairly) awarded to his own son by endangering the lives of pedestrians through his unauthorized flight. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 and now his behavior seems more unnerving than comical, like showing your son you love him by leaving unmarked black suitcases around an airport. We don't need satires and jet packs any more to point out the monstrosity of consumer-driven Xmas, just look at this:

Who is to blame for this madness?

1) TOY MARKETING STRATEGIES: Perhaps it makes sense from a PR standpoint for toy companies to deliberately limit production on certain popular toys to drive the demand up, but in a country like America where everyone's self-worth hinges on providing their child with whatever they 'wish' for, it can create real stress on the national fibre. There's no reason that the most productive country in the world (China) can't meet the demands of the most demanding country in the world (U.S.) so the blame becomes personal. Movies themselves do this all the time. Disney lets their classic titles go "into the vault" to drive up resale value and ensure higher sales during releases / promotions, and certain rarefied cult director iconoclasts insist on releasing their own films on their own label, like David Lynch or Russ Meyer, ensuring the price never gets too low and avoiding middleman and PR fees. But kids don't understand supply and demand. They only know that if they don't get the toy they want, there is no Santa, and so they may as well become a derelict drug addict.

2) MEASURING-UP ANXIETIES: I don't have kids so I don't quite understand, but from movies like JINGLE I glean a certain fear of measuring up to some paternal ideal that, to be honest, I don't remember seeing when I was a kid in the 70's. Parents once looked after their own good time first (as on MAD MEN) and got us some, not all, presents we wanted. To get us all was considered bad form, 'spoiling' us. Overall we were much more bored than kids today. We had no internet or cell phones. But, in knowing our father didn't need us to feel validated, we at least felt secure. We could hate him with all our might for not giving us a certain toy, but he made sure the electricity stayed on, and our beds were warm and there, ready for sleeping in. Arnold's kid might get the toy he wanted but pays for the luxury with a great deal of collateral anxiety. If the son says he wants a jet ski, for example, and the next day one is waiting in the driveway, what a great dad! But then the kid feels guilty because he sees dad's car is missing, clearly having been sold to pay for the jet ski. Now the kid can't even get a ride to the lake to use it. The indulgent yet largely absent father figure granting consumer good wishes at the cost of security and genuine nurturing, using presents the way moviegoers use their coats to hold their place while they go get popcorn.

3) NO ONE LEARNS THE RIGHT LESSON FROM CAESAR MILAN: If you don't assert your dominance over your dog, your dog assumes you are weak and thus feels he must take over as pack leader, which makes your dog a nervous wreck --how can a dog take care of a family when he can't even open the front door?  Kids with needy parents wind up in the same position. Adults are able to navigate the social order and assess dangers far better than dogs or children. But if they are too weak-willed to be stern and authoritarian when need be, then the children or dogs feel, however unconsciously, that they have to step in. This is why the red states are so unnerved when Obama bows and scrapes before other dignitaries. They know that if a leader is too skittish to make big tough unpopular decisions, if he is dependent on constant validation, then we can't chillax knowing he's got it covered.

Arnold in JINGLE is just such a weak pack leader, illustrated perfectly when he calls his wife to tell her his car is totaled in pursuit of the doll, and Hartman answers the phone saying he's eating Arnold's wife's cookies while she takes a shower. Arnold shouts into the phone: "Put that cookie down! Now!" It's gone on to become quite the meme and gives Arnold the quid pro quo revenge excuse he needs to Grinch up Phil's tree :

While we're expected to root for Arnold, it's actually rival doll-seeker and uncouth mailman Sinbad who is the most complex and the only one worthy of sympathy: first he's the only one at the store who doesn't sneer at Arnold's confusion over the absence of Turbo Men. He even offers to join forces, an offer which Arnold coldly rejects. As we're treated to then-relatively unusual sights like people macing and tazing each other over items at the department store, what's most amazing and sad is how completely oblivious Arnold is to the idea that he is not the only dad in the world who waited too long, that he is just another dopey sucker paying capitalism's harshest price for waiting to buy but buy. He genuinely believes it's his right as an American dad to use excessive force in pursuit of his individual needs, never questioning the rightness of his Coal and Switches Symplex. Even having a coffee with Sinbad, his only friend, guarantees nothing: Arnold shoves the poor mailman aside to be the first caller into a radio station then seems genuinely shocked and hurt when Sinbad does the same to him.

But I adore that, after he hits bottom, Arnold shares a beer with the reindeer he knocked out the previous shot. It's his moment of alleged redemption, making up for decades of bad blood between him and the animal kingdom from when he drunkenly punched out a camel in CONAN. And even if it skirts around being a total anti-consumerist parable, I applaud the film's brutal satirization of the consumer mindset and the Coal Switches Syndrome, even while endorsing each in the end. That's the unique problem of a country with a free press, namely that once an institution incorporates its own critique, it nulls all criticism by depicting the critic criticizing it, of having the thing itself critique its own thinghood. There's nothing left to say because it's already been said, like the kid who punches himself in the face so the bully doesn't get him first. Arnold wouldn't know about that, because he would never punch himself in the face, but can only fight big guys and have it be fair....just like Rock Hudson has to wait until the end of GIANT before he finally finds someone in his same height and weight class. (Sinbad comes close, as does this guy:)

The point is, fatherhood's integrity takes a bullet in the name of commercial fetishization and makes us wonder: who is it that thinks kids most want to see parents suffering indignities on their behalf? The same idiots who think kids want to see kids seeing at all? Arnold's kid is an emotional blackmailer --he NEEDS to have his father not get him the action figure; he needs to feel that terrible sting and get over it, it's part of the maturation process. But this is a kid's movie for kidswho don't understand that emotional blackmail only hurts themselves in the end. Adults like Arnold in JINGLE are not avatars of how boys want to imagine themselves, but stooges, cautionary tales, figures of revenge. Comical, neutered, pleading, desperate, pissing themselves in vain attempts to win their children's fickle favor. Ideally, kid audiences should should be sickened by this horrible reversal. A kid trying to impress his father is natural and helps both parties grow, but a father trying to impress a kid is unnatural and stunts the world, for the kids now have nowhere to grow but down. This is what feminism, the nanny state, equal rights, maternity leave, and anti-smoking legislation hath wrought; they have taken the balls from out the father and then kicked him where they used to be, saying 'if they were there, man that would hurt, so you're welcome!'

A very handicapped man once said "we let 'em smoke, vote and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what do we get? Russian roulette on the highway, a Democrat in the White House, you can't even tell male from female.... unless you meet 'em head on."

That old man was played by Stuart Lancaster, and the movie was the Russ Meyer's 1965's FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL! It's currently out of print, but if ever there was an Xmas movie worth running someone over for it's this one. RIP Haji... you were some kind of a woman... and ballsier than most men.

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Lyon in Winters

Where I come from, home for the holidays means dying lawns, cloudy suburban skies, foil-covered crock pots brought unwillingly from the car to the front door; chattering hellos from perfumed relatives; ceilings slick with condensation from ever-baking turkeys and boiling rutabagas; football and the voice of Sam Elliott extolling guts, glory, Ram, from the living room; a barrage of women nattering from the kitchen. It's a time to go to school reunions and movies just to get out of the house. Hometowns leave their mark, like a lash of sameness, slash of lameness you'll never paint over... but is it that bad? What if you come from a family rife with divorce, guilt, skeletons, incest? Pedophile freaks subverting the family dynamic? Lolita cousins coming onto you while aunts and uncles look at you harshly but you're too drunk to resist? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

I had a fine podcast discussion with Jamey DuVall at Movie Geeks United for The Kubrick Series' -- and so I've been thinking of LOLITA all day. Let me share it with you as we close the holiday down:

Laws dealing with minors and corruption are tricky things. A kid (under 18) who rapes his cousin can get off with just a flick on the wrist, but a guy who sends one of his prostitutes home for Xmas on a train can go to jail, just for buying her a ticket that takes her across state lines. This all goes back to 1910 and a law meant to catch white slavers that was amended as the Mann Act in 1948 largely due to the newspaper headline case of Frank LaSalle, a an old pervert dragging a naive shoplifting minor named Florence Sally Horner, off on a two-year cross-country spree. The constant travel making it hard to discern the unkosher relationship kept in place by blackmail (he saw her steal a notebook from a five and dime and played copper). This was a vile case, a shot heard by journalists around the world, and the headlines have never been the same, for better and for worse. They made laws designed specifically to catch evil men like Frank (and Humbert). Good for them.

Kubrick's film LOLITA, as well as Nabokov's original book, seems to take the Horner backlash as a challenge to depict the corruption of a minor in a non-hysterical manner, with trans state-line travel galore. I've seen the film and read the book numerous times, but never thought of that strange but valuable law... suddenly, this past viewing, it was all I thought about.

My dad has a terribly long and ornate joke dealing with this law, involving transporting immortal porpoises over staid lions. The point is, it's a law designed specifically to counteract the moves of people like Humbert, himself an evil user of pretend morality. Humbert's flabbergasted relationship with Quilty is an ultra-cool mirror of the moral code (the cinematic version of that Horner law) challenging Kubrick to both adhere to and defy the "How could they ever make a movie of Lolita?" marketing catchphrase.

Over the years this film's been many things to me, but this last viewing it seemed to be about art vs. censorship and the way the promoters of 'childhood wonderment' and the Peter Pan 'if you can dream' aesthetic--the Norman Rockwell fishing boy logo of Dreamworks and the mouth agape wonderment of E.T.-- are the both the critics of and culprits who bring us the hyper-awareness of pedophilia. The two are entwined, a double exposure of exposing, like a cobra with the head of a tail-eating mongoose. The more you pine for and prize a 'perfect family' the more pressure-cooker force you put on those latent incestuous, pedophile dark desires. Pedophilia is the ultimate evil, after all, the kind of thing even the other prisoners will kill you for (in jail); it goes deeper than Oedipus, down into the murky swamp behind the Bates Motel, and it is embedded in the fabric of our modern trend towards the deification of children and their 'innocence.' Is it any accident that the two main architects of this hypocritical saintly children-izing in the early 1980s were Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg?

The difference in the pre-ET 70s was that no one wanted the Norman Rockwell 50s 'childhood wonderment' thing anymore, so there was less to repress, and what you don't repress you don't have to 'act' out in sexual transgression. The pedophiles and flashers were still around in the 70s but parents' intense fear for their children's safety didn't seem as ubiquitous. The Don Draper cultural rubric didn't include constant monitoring of playdates. The kids were left to roam the house, yard, or neighborhood while parents smoked, drank, swapped, played bridge, and carried on. We kids knew not to get into cars with strangers or take their candy, and above all we knew when to stay out of our parents' way and when was the right time to creep downstairs and steal from the Peanut M&M dishes. We knew when the bridge games would devolve to the point that our presence would be greeted with hilarity and welcome instead of stern reprimand; we knew the tartness of our parents' whiskey sours and Tom Collins' kisses; we learned to mix drinks with the powdered packets of whiskey sour mix. Adulthood was virile in the 70s... there was no clear line to cross. Sometimes, it just reached out and grabbed you. You felt safe around it, yet knew that it was, itself, unsafe. You know, like life?

The sad thing now for an old rager like me watching LOLITA is to see the inexorable passage from mom to daughter to daughter-mom in Sue Lyon, as it so preternaturally predicts the arc of America's cultural mores, from repressive 50s-early 60s, (Shelly Winters) to liberated late 1960s-70s (Sue Lyon) to repressive 80s (Lyon-in-Winters). Elaborating the transformation is Sellers as the liberal trickster elite and James Mason as the outflanked conservative imposter. Just as the most vocally anti-gay politician is inevitably found drunk in a gay nightclub, so does Humbert Humbert hide, like a scoundrel at his last refuge, behind the outrage of conservative wagon-circling.

The message was clear and simple to a generation for whom Freud was like Oprah: the more concerned you are over your child's well being the more suspect you are. I was more or less Lolita's age when I first saw LOLITA, and my perspective and identification with it has changed a bit now that I'm Humbert's age, or rather Quilty's. It's the Quilty character who dominates now, more, for me. The vantage point from which art--through its transparency and deliberate digging for dirty truth--looks down upon dull, corporeal expression of desire. To paint a nymphet, like Degas with his ballerinas; to film a nymphet like Rollin with his vampire women; to write of one, like Nabokov, is to effectively sublimate the desire to corrupt them in the real. The artist has 'already' tasted such forbidden fruit in this sense and found he much prefers using the desire and rapture as a inspiration, a springboard into art. rather than actual tawdry seduction. Artists understand that sexual gratification means an end to the dance, a sudden return to shame and self-consciousness, a hasty, guilty retreat through the parking lot. Instead of making art you made a 'situation', a guilt trip, a baby, or a messy crime scene.  The trick is not to 'grant' the sleazy pay-off... and thus avoid orgasm's desolate attic. Compared to the divine rapture of creation, which is eternal, it's just a negative chalk mark on your karmic blackboard.

Kubrick's film is also a fine metaphor for art vs. censorship, with Lolita as the muse, dragged down too soon into the tedious abyss of mortality (i.e. getting knocked up, moving to Alaska, where maybe she'll grow up to be Sarah Palin!), and Humbert the bourgeois authority that proclaims things art or pornography according to his own licentiousness (he makes things -- Lolita herself -- forbidden to the masses [not letting her in the play] so he may enjoy en toto under the pretense of protecting her morals) and Sellers is the artist, the Bugs Bunny  who actually controls the stuff of 'real' art, for he knows what's really going on... and that is the primordial jazz of constant persona dissolution.

The moral to all this? Family ain't perfect, but you can trust its imperfection a lot better than you can trust the TV that tells you a true family is perfect. TV gets its messages from the Quilty/Humbert elite and they don't have your best interests at heart, and never did. In the 1980s, before SSRIs were popular, some of us had to kill ourselves just to convince our parents we needed therapy. In the 1990s it's reversed, but the same principle of fear and gray flannel blending applies. Therapy was once taboo, now the attitude that it's taboo is itself taboo. We've got to get the Lyons back out of the winters and free the immoral porpoises. If we can wise up to the fact that our desire is inherently unfulfillable then we can wise up to the double-edged sword of desire, and just hang it on the wall rather than wield it and in the process cut our soul to ribbons. The only exorcism of desire that truly fulfills and heals that soul is art. Humbert can shoot up the Quilty art museum all he wants, but he's already lost the war.

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The Return of the Great 70s Dad: Nicolas Cage in KICK-ASS

I thought the age of great 70s dads was done, but that was before I saw KICK-ASS (2010), in which a truly cool father (Cage) manages to slide past the doting widower daddy ("mommy's in heaven!") morons of Hollywood to finally do what Batman should have been doing all along: using firearms, gutting mobsters with exotic weaponry, and teaching his 11 year-old daughter to be a pint-sized killing machine.

This is the kind of film where you see something genuinely subversive -- kids as instruments of lethal vengeance-- and know instantly that a dividing line will form between film critics that are cool (i.e. they get intentional subversion of the treacly overprotective cinema status quo) and the dull self-appointed moral guardians (i.e. status quo dogma-eating suckaz) as easy to demarcate as a scroll down the rotten tomato meter. My old editor at Popmatters, Cynthia Fuch's discusses for example the one-note presence of Marcus, Nic Cage's old cop buddy who raised Hit Girl while Nic was in the slammer, framed for his wife's murder :

Marcus serves one purpose here, to deliver the film’s not-so-earnest injunction against Big Daddy’s monomaniacal exploitation of his daughter: “You owe that kid a childhood!” With that done, the movie can proceed apace, exploiting her in every way it can think of. Serving as Kick-Ass’ mentor, savior, and inspiration, she’s abused and abusive, horrified and horrific, tearfully vulnerable and ingeniously cruel. (4/16/10)

Hahah! Well, frankly, if there wasn't some uptight backlash against all this "exploitation" the character wouldn't have nearly enough subversive zing, so I'm glad at least some critics felt the need to jump on this, like they have to make sure we know it's wrong WRONG WRONG to train our daughters to be assassins. "You owe that kid a childhood?" Really? What's a better childhood than not having to go to school and spending all your time hanging out with your cool superhero gun nut father? What is she missing? Facebook chats? Sexual subjugation and elementary school belittlement? Tedium in front of the TV? Wasted hours playing with dolls and engaging in clique-y slumber party backstabbing?

Even more inflammatory is a review by someone named Prarie Miller:

... let's just say that it's reached the point in movies where pedophiles could conceivably launch a movement protesting that double standard filmmakers get away with all sorts of exploitative behavior with children in movies that would land predators in the real world in handcuffs. It would seem that we're talking a line here between reality and fantasy, with the emphasis on a different kind of graphic at work, and a line that has been seriously crossed (Newsblaze)

 Yeah, Prarie, let's just say that... wait, what? Are you seriously using the phrase "in movies" redundantly in a sentence? Do you even know where the line between reality and fantasy is? It's not in a comic book movie, anywhere! Ever!  Don't you see that this girl assassin is a direct and intentional affront to your hypocritical projecting? More than anything, we love Hit Girl for the very reason that we know she will get you all up in arms; we know that some serious standing-up to nervous industry suits must have gone on to prevent their meddling with the script and turning her bullets into, say, tranq darts. Hit Girl is a triumph for the very reason that she kills her victims without qualms! She's an emblem for child empowerment rather than for child victimization mentality, which the Praries of the world prefer, and misread as saintliness.

Of course, as I say, without the whack-job moral guardian fringe ringing their alarm bells, you wouldn't wake up to realize that finally something genuinely ballsy is happening in a superhero movie -- a gleeful finger in the eye of the still-lingering remnants of the Hollywood moral production code and the whole "Won't someone think of the children" hysteria of films like Cage's "worst dad" film, KNOWING. Actually, Hit Girl's the first 'free' kid I've seen since 1979 and OVER THE EDGE, or the other cool kids I wrote about last week in my slam against Michael Cera (since amended), like Tanner from THE BAD NEWS BEARS!

I'm also reminded of one of the story threads in D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1919), wherein a moral crusader matron is out to rescue the exploited children of the slums, so she can drag them away from their loving mothers and throw them into a giant orphanage where they can be safely ignored in long rows of cribs by uncaring city employees. I think any girl who had the choice to be raised by Nicolas Cage and trained full time in the art of killing vs. being forced to go to some dumb public school and then come to a distracted babysitter while a single righteous mom works double shifts would choose the former. Watch fucking BLUE CAR and see how bad it could be.

Hit Girl is lucky she gets to spend all her time with a cool, loving father and when you consider (as I've written about in SALT) the usual back story of female assassins--their cruel schooling and tough surrogate parents--Nic's kindly Tod Browning-ish scheme of vengeance is a breath of fresh cool air.  He even takes his daughter to get ice cream after shooting slugs into her bullet proof vest and gives her cool butterfly knives in a big swanky box. This was the first film I've seen since about a single father-daughter pair bond that didn't make me want to wretch, and even makes me want to be a father if I could ensure I had a daughter into knives and not a dorky son into superhero comics.

For an example of the latter, let's examine another case of superhero childhood with (in this case surrogate) dad and no mom, HELLBOY.

Now, I liked the first HELLBOY which involved the origin of an adopted demon child by a squad of rough and tough American GIs in WW2. The child demon grew up a cigar-smoking badass, as if he'd been raised by Sam Fuller. But then in the insipid sequel we get this treacly homespun flashback of Hellboy as a goofy nerd, watching Howdy Doody with his glasses and buckteeth and wearing his jammies and getting tucked in by a loving and responsible... zzzz, I turned it off right at that moment. What the hell happened, "Hell" boy? Prarie got to you, didn't she?

Then there's the drably hypocritical "clean" conscience of heroes like Batman--on whom Cage's Hit Man is cheekily based--who would never, say, shoot a real gun at the Joker or something, because "killing is wrong," -- no guns, Alfred! So he has to invent all these bizarre non-lethal weapons so he can wipe out whole blocks with collateral damage (chasing the Joker around Gotham, he totals dozens of cars and I'm sure incurs a lot of fatalities), but as I've written before, he's as "innocent" as our precision bombers over Baghdad - though to their credit at least the military's not squeamish about shooting a bad guy up close.

Anyway... as Hit Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz is a revelation. Fresh air finally becomes breathable once you see an 11-year old girl eviscerate a room full of thugs and do so with a convincing air of detached cool and scary intellect we haven't seen since Anna Paquin in THE PIANO. QT had to do it in anime with the Lucy Liu backstory in KILL BILL, but that was all dark to be begin with. The juxtaposition of the day-glo highschool coming of age shenanigins in the dorky comic book guy side of things and the colorful costumes make the bloody merciless killing of KICK-ASS's pint-sized avenger all the more striking. We're just not used to it, it's original! Hollywood has this unofficial policy that good girls don't shoot guys - that's why Jamie Lee Curtis has to drop her Uzi before it's allowed to shoot everyone in TRUE LIES.

It's so liberating. One wants to go back in time and rescue Patty McCormack from her mom in THE BAD SEED and teach her to fight crime-- an army of bloodthirsty children stalking the streets! Pedophiles dying right and left. If Nic Cage's Hit Man could become a role model for all the dads of tomorrow, what a blood-stained, crime-free world we would have.

Moretz is next scheduled to appear as the vampire kid in the remake of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (above). I can't wait to read the uptight film critics' anxiety that seeing blood-sucking children onscreen sends the wrong message to parents everywhere: "Children are meant to be locked in their rooms with bibles and homework, not allowed to kill adults willy nilly!" Yeah, you wish, downpressa!

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Great Dads of the 1970s: Lee Marvin in THE BIG RED ONE (1980)

Sometimes a "period piece" tells more about the period in which it was created than the one it depicts. Fuller's grand war saga THE BIG RED ONE is such a film, with Fuller's unique mix of sentiment and vulgarity being the ideal commentary on the 1970s mindset, at least how I remember it. You could almost say that Fuller's aesthetic came to mesh so perfectly with the 1970s that at the time--and especially edited to nearly half it's intended length--THE BIG RED ONE was almost invisible even in plain sight. For a WW2 movie, it blended so well into 1980 you could barely see it, like camouflaged commandos at the drive-in.

If you're a WW2 fan you know that Fuller's films are all pretty accurate, with scuttlebut about Patton corresponding to the movie PATTON and so on. Why? Because Fuller was there; a lot of the dialogue is no doubt straight from Fuller's sharp journalist memory, with Marvin leading a rifle squad through North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and finally Germany. Most of it was filmed in an around the actual locations of the battles, with Fuller's journalist memory no doubt recreating it all better than any squad of Spielberg advisers ever could.

A lot of the onscreen action can get confusing, but then again, war was like that, and you can see where Godard--a true-blu Fuller fan--got ideas for his own narrative-melting 1980s works like CODE NAME: CARMEN from various scenes such as one where Lee Marvin wakes up in a North African hotel-turned hospital that's so full of both Germans and Americans in and out of disguises as they try to figure out which side is in control,  or the squad's sneaky infiltration of a Nazi-held mental asylum with its now cliched moments such as an inmate grabbing a dead German's machine gun and shooting everyone in sight,shouting "Look, I'm sane like you!" Whoa! War is full of paradoxes! You know why this cliche is forgivable? Because Fuller did fight in an asylum and probably saw it actually happen. It feels like  Fuller's been carrying some of these scenes in his head since he was in the war. They have the callow comic book simplicity of youth unfiltered.

But now comes the 1970s aspect - the jetzt-verboten political incorrectness, regarding "whores" and scenes such as one extraordinarily uncomfortable bit in which Marvin's squad delivers a French peasant baby in the moist confines of an abandoned German tank. With the boys all gathered around and holding down and spreading out her legs as she screams in pain, a guy mentioning he's getting horny while using condoms on his fingers as gloves and a cheese cloth as a surgical mask, what's evoked is soldier-on-peasant gang rape, right up to Marvin whispering "puuu-say" into her ear to get her to push the baby out. Later Robert Carradine blows a thousand bucks on a party to get Belgian whores for the night and make them do "whatever weird stuff we always wanted," which includes freaking out a Belgian hotelier with the ridiculous request of a recently dead fellow infantryman, to have a big-assed woman "put 'em on the (freezing) glass."

The thing is, man, being occupied and half-destroyed by bombs and occupation has probably made half the young women in Belgium into prostitutes, just to survive and feed their families, so this broad drunken objectification carries a weird depressing aftertaste, especially if you've seen UGETSU. Then again, is being a prostitute that much more tragic and demeaning than being a soldier? (As Dietrich said in MOROCCO: "There's a foreign legion of women... too...")

I don't mean to knock the film or Fuller with this thing, quite the contrary, to show how no one likely even noticed or thought twice about these possible readings makes the mix of raunch and reproduction all the sweeter (as in old-fashioned sweet, not "vengeance is"). Back then men didn't have to constantly affirm they were NOT rank misogynists. And if a guy got his nuts blown off, we didn't mollycoddle him and race to sew them back on like they do now in movies like TEETH and HARD CANDY; we tossed them to the dogs with a smirk and then forgot about the matter, even if he was our best friend.

Marvin's '70s dad skills include his ability to stand back during downtime and let the boys in his rifle squad do their own bickering, boasting and teasing. He listens, and grins wryly or walks away in feigned disgust, but he rarely interjects or tries to compete. He doesn't need to, and he knows these kids do need to. You almost never see him interrupt or censor a conversation no matter how offensive, but when he calls your number to run up and die trying to bring a Bangalore torpedo across a heavily defended beach, you better move ass or he'll shoot you where you cower. The best you can do is just trust and love Lee Marvin. Do what he tells you and rely on him to not get you shot.

Marvin only smiles in a close-up/medium shot once, when he finally loses it and starts laughing with joy when they successfully deliver that baby. A man who's been doling out death for years suddenly brings in a little life. "We all felt pretty good about it" Carradine notes in the film's voiceover; completely unnecessary, as it's all there in Marvin's hangdog expression as it finally overflow its borders, exploding with a hoarse grinning laugh and a palpable joy as unsentimental in its genuine sentiment as a Hemingway novel, then just as quickly back to business.
 
According to Gary W. Tooze (DVD Beaver, his excellent screenshots stud this post) "It isn't hard to figure out why Mark Hamill affectionately calls him (Fuller) Yosemite Sam, or why Lee Marvin simply says he's D.W. Griffith." Marvin is dead-on right about that. In the land of no morality and bullets flying overhead, it's a man like Fuller you depend on to deliver the sense of security that a strong, good man is holding the tent up, even if he's just acting to keep the children from crying. No wonder the kids love Marvin and follow him around all throughout RED (and why Fuller was such a popular fellow, becoming lifelong friends with everyone from Godard to General Omar Bradley). In the end, the kids getting blown to bits come and go, but it's Marvin you depend on for direction in the film, it's Marvin you come to love, even as he sends you to your death with a silent pointing gesture.

More from the Great 1970s Dad series (including Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson, Jon Voight, and Burt Reynolds)

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