Audience Analysis
As with the three prior efforts at mini-analysis, you are continuing to evaluate writing, but in this instance, you are looking to reveal the complexity and sophistication of how an implied author, through having a narrator address an addressee, communicates to the authorial audience. The primary methodological sources for this method are Seitz and Rabinowitz (and Phelan); both provide a rich body of evaluative criteria that can only be fleshed out when applying the method to a specific text that calls for this sort of evaluation.
For instance, you might ask in your analysis how reading the narrative rhetorically could completely transform the audience's experience of the text and thus overthrow their initial evaluation of the text. This is the kind of question I pursue below as a sufficient rationale for evaluating the film Kick Ass using this method. |
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Sample audience mini-analysis
If you haven’t seen the 2010 movie, Kick Ass (and here), directed by Matthew Vaughn, and you are in the world that completely ignored its theatrical release, I hardly need tell you that the film is mostly silly, and filled with awkward, over the top acting and heavy duty melodrama.
The technical term for this kind or genre of silly is “corny.” But, the film appears to be self-consciously reflective about its own corniness, and in certain key moments, this effect actually (and ironically) redeems the film from being complete schlock. And this brings me to my “evaluative” thesis: there’s something good about the film that deserves our approval, even the approval of the audience who would hold their nose to watch this movie. Consequently, I am addressing an audience who thinks the film is funny, but in the bad kind of funny way where you aren’t laughing with it, but at it. I want this actual audience (who perhaps suffered through the film and was unwilling to "suspend disbelief" sufficiently to willingly take on the role of the narrative audience) to see an undisclosed “gem-o-goodness” here. |
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And this brings me to discuss the scene where Kick Ass and Big Daddy are getting beaten close to death on a live streaming webcast meant to persuade the people of the world that anybody who desires to be a superhero will end up being humiliated and killed.
You see, Kick Ass is a geeky post-adolescent kid who takes it upon himself to become a superhero even though there is no reason why he should be—as the genre of superhero comics/movies dictates. In doing so, he expresses the controlling value/idea of the film:
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The thing is, genre (and the values embedded within a genre) tells us what to expect. Genre guides us to read a text according to learned expectations, and that’s exactly who Kick Ass is: the ideal narrative audience for the genre of a superhero discovering his superheroness. That is, he’s the ideal narrative audience of the genre until he meets “real” superheroes that are even more committed to being the ideal narrative audience: Hit Girl and her father, Big Daddy, who are both on a mission to kill a viciously evil mob boss.
Kick Ass accidentally puts himself in over his head when he unknowingly confronts a few of the mob boss’s men, but then is saved by Hit Girl. The mob boss thinks Kick Ass did it himself, and so puts out a contract on the fledgling superhero. After failing to find Kick Ass, the boss turns to his son, a comic book fan immersed in the superhero genre, and lets him create his own superhero identity to catch Kick Ass. Playing an unreliable narrator to Kick Ass’s naïve addressee-hood, the mob boss succeeds in catching both Kick Ass and Dig Daddy, where Hit Girl is left for dead. Of course we know, according to the genre, that she will somehow save the day. Anyway, this all sets up the scene, and the few lines of voice over I want to analyze. At the point where, crying like a baby, Kick Ass is about to be set on fire on the live webcast, indeed, at the most dire and pathetic of moments, Kick Ass begins to directly address the ideal narrative audience who is deeply concerned about whether he will really die, as he himself is coming to terms with. As he lists all the EXPECTED things he’ll never be able to do once dead, he ends the list with something unexpected, but corny: he’ll never know how Lost will end up. At that moment, the narrator says:
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What just happened there? There is no other direct address of the ideal narrative audience anywhere else in the movie. What is it doing here? Well, my claim is that this line reveals the film to be self-reflective corn, rather than merely corn. First off, the narrator is asking the ideal narrative audience to become the narrative audience by making a reference that only the authorial audience would know.
First of all, the ideal narrative audience might be convinced (and so very worried about the liklihood) that Kick Ass is about to die, but is beginning to rely on the genred convention called “Any voice over is coming from a present position in speaking about the past, so be assured that if he’s still talking, the narrator will get through this imminent-looking doom.” In scolding the ideal narrative audience—who is beginning to notice the conventions of the genre as they are being broken—the narrator appears to say: “Go back to sleep. There are times when films have broken that convention, such as Sin City, where the narrator continues to narrate even through he is dead. This is just like those films.” Only the authorial audience would know that, and would then cease to question the oddity, and return to the aesthetic emotion of the scene: “oh no! He’s going to be burned! Where is Hit Girl?!” Oh the corn! Unless of course the audience continues to read this exhortation to return to the narrative as itself an indication of the narrator's unreliability, which is to say that the narrator here pleads with the emerging reflective audience, asserting that "It's not as corny as you think." That's a tough one. Furthermore, another take on this attempt of the narrator to silence the critical questionings of an emerging narrative audience is to read into it a subtle contradiction. He tells the audience to "stop being a smart ass." But only a smart ass would call himself Kick Ass. So, in essence, "don't try to be a superhero like me. Accept your fate as I am accepting mine." Works Cited
Kick Ass. Dir. Matthew Vaughn. Perf. Aaron Johnson, Nicholas Cage, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Marv Fils. Plan B Entertainment. 2010. Film. Rabinowitz, Peter. "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences."Critical Inquiry 4.1 (1977): 121-141. |