CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
A Philisophical Critique of Boondock Saints

Thursday, March 05, 2009

this entry brought to you by the dodos, "joe's waltz"

if you've never seen the movie boondock saints, don't bother with today's entry-- this is written not as a movie review, where i try to write it for the audience of someone who hasn't seen it. my actual review is here . this is more of a critique of the movie's content, which is meant more for people who are familiar with the movie in general.


I have been thinking a lot about Boondock Saints, and after I wrote my review for it I went and Googled "Boondock Saints sucks" or "hate Boondock Saints" to see if there was anyone in the world that agreed with me about that movie, and I found, to my joy, that these people do in fact exist. I really needed that affirmation, because I didn't just dislike Boondock Saints the way I disliked The Brown Bunny. The Brown Bunny was an awful movie, but it didn't personally offend me. I found Boondock Saints to be completely loathsome, and I also found it hateful and completely without merit, both on a technical and a thematic point of view. I thought it was an awful movie from a "hell yeah, these dudes are shooting dudes!" point of view, but also from a point of view of what the movie is trying to say, and I really needed to know that there were other intelligent film viewers in my age group that weren't professional movie critics, that didn't go to film school, but still fancy themselves film buffs that disliked it, because I certainly couldn't find that in my day-to-day life.

I was reading a blog written by someone who came from the same view point as me. They agreed on all the issues that I discussed in my review, but they also focused much more on the morality of the film, what the movie was trying to say, much more than I did. In fact, as a critique of a film, it made me jealous, and almost made me want to go back and rewrite my review to put some of those more intelligent thematic discussions in it. I was really happy with what I was reading, nodding my head in agreement, slobbering over the writer's eloquence, but at the end he grouped Boondock Saints with other similarly morally bankrupt movies, and he lumped Fight Club in there, which really bothered me. I feel like he's certainly allowed to dislike Fight Club as a movie, and certainly he can loathe the Fight Club Fan Dude in much the same way someone who loves Tool or Nine Inch Nails can hate their fans. But I felt like Fight Club not only didn't belong grouped together with Boondock Saints, but I also felt that it was a movie that was very easy to defend, one that is poignant, in fact.

Fight Club is a clever movie in that it pretends to embrace the very things that it completely rejects in its final act. Meatheads who love Fight Club don't get that the movie is a criticism of the very things that they love about it, much in the same way a leisure suit wearing lunkhead would ignore the "Disco sucks!" lyrics to a song because it had a good disco beat back in those days. Fight Club is a male empowerment fantasy that, in the end, goes horribly wrong-- and in the end, the main character ends up embracing what he should have been embracing the whole time, something that actually makes him more complete, more of a man. Here we have a guy who, at the beginning of the movie, wonders what kind of couch would make him more of a man. This dissatisfies him, so he lashes out at society, and lashes out at himself, in a hope to become more of a man-- and that doesn't work either. What makes him complete at the end of the movie? A relationship with a woman. He's a child who can't face women, who is afraid of women, who is this complete fuckface jerkwad, can't stop being a child, knows he's a child but doesn't know how to respond to it, and then realizes-- oh my god, a woman is what makes me a man. That's not morally bankrupt. That's a completely wonderful story, one that's easy to defend despite its nihilism. Its nihilism is a red herring, something to draw in the immature male in you before smashing it in the face when it all goes horribly wrong.

So then we have Boondock Saints. After my viewing of the movie I didn't initially think that it was necessarily morally bankrupt. I felt like it was an immature male fantasy, but I enjoy other male fantasies so I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. As I started thinking about the movie more as a whole, instead of just a collection of different things, I began to realize it's the definition of morally bankrupt. The scene that really clenched it for me was at the beginning. The brothers who become the heroes of the story are working at a meat packing plant, and they are training a butch lesbian, taller and beefier than they are. One of the brothers mentions the term "rule of thumb", and the lesbian starts going off about how "rule of thumb" has sexist implications, there's a brief argument, and she kicks one of them in the balls. In retaliation, one of the brothers punches her in the face. I didn't enjoy this scene, but it was within the first few minutes of the movie, so I was willing to see it out, again, to give it the benefit of the doubt, to see what ramifications this might have later. After having watched the entire film and thinking back on it, it was obvious that it has absolutely no reason to be there, and has no pay off. It seems to be there simply to say "You know how feminist dykes are always getting up in your face? Wouldn't you just love to just totally punch her?" It has no reason to exist in the film, it doesn't move the plot forward whatsoever, and there is no retribution. Granted, she kicked one in the balls, and perhaps someone could argue that she deserved being punched. But in what way did that scene have anything to do with the rest of the movie, other than to stick it to dykes who are always, like, in your face and stuff?

The problem with Boondock Saints isn't that it's a male fantasy-- the problem is that as characters aren't compelling. Ultimately, something like Batman is a male fantasy as well, just like Boondock Saints. The brothers in the movie are badasses who do awesome shit in the name of good. Batman does awesome shit in the name of good as well. But what Boondocks Saints lacked was any sort of character, depth, or morality. What makes Batman work is exactly his morality. Setting aside the fact that he doesn't kill people-- let's just pretend that he did to make an equivalent argument-- what makes Batman work is how conflicted he is about what he's doing. Well, check that-- he's not conflicted. He knows exactly what he has to do, and why. But he's still a conflicted character, a person constantly holding back, yet also a person constantly pushing himself, a very complicated person who you get to know very, very deeply without much dialog from the character. Batman doesn't have to tell you, the reader, why he's a deep guy. You can just tell by his actions. You can tell that Batman is aware that once he beats up a bad guy and, instead of killing them, he puts them in jail, and will be back on the streets eventually, this time with a vendetta against Batman, with more determination to stop him. This is the crux of Batman. He's more than just a badass doing badass shit. He's a morally complex character.

But even from the standpoint of a male fantasy, Boondock Saints has flat characters. They weren't compelling or interesting, they were just fantasy, like something out of the mind of a 14 year old. A 14 year old goes "Wouldn't it be bad-ass if these two brothers just said 'fuck it' and just started fucking killing badguys? That would be bad-ass!" A 14 year old doesn't think of the complexities. There is nothing wrong with juvenile male fantasies-- a lot of classic stories that resound through the ages are juvenile male fantasies. I mean, think about it. Basically even the story of Moses is a juvenile male fantasy. What if a dude were the son of a king but he didn't know it, and he saved his whole race of people, and he was a total badass and he killed the first born of the bad guys and totally split the ocean? There's nothing wrong with these concepts if they have something to make them more compelling, if they evolve past that starting point and become something richer. Boondock Saints feels like a juvenile fantasy that was then executed right then, at the moment of juvenile conception, without the magic that makes something like Batman or Fight Club compelling. It is just there.
-----



with love from CRS @ 8:04 AM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment