The New York Times had a story the other day about a 13-year old film actress by the name of Chloe Grace Moretz who has landed the lead role in a film called “Kick-Ass.” In the film she plays, according to the piece, “a mysterious vigilante who leaves a trail of bullet casings and body parts wherever she goes.” The character Ms. Moretz plays is called Hit Girl.
We learn more: “The Internet went wild this winter for an R-rated trailer in which Ms. Moretz enunciates an obscene word that little girls are definitely not supposed to say, right before she slices and dices her way through a room full of drug dealers.”
As one would expect, the young woman’s parents are singularly unconcerned about allowing their daughter to play such a role. And the article does, albeit tepidly, bring up the subject of the appropriateness of the enterprise.
“…Ms. Moretz and her character raise a recurring question about what limits, if any, should be placed on young actors involved in adult storytelling, and to what extent these performers understand the roles that they are playing,” writes Dave Itzkoff in the piece.
But the central question to me, which the article does not raise, is not whether a very young woman ought to be playing such an adult role but rather why anyone would go see it. What is the demographic for such a film?
To think there are people older than the age of 17 (the only people theoretically allowed in to an R-rated film) that would pay $10 to see what is clearly a repellent pubescent fantasy is really the creepiest, most disgusting, thing of all.
