Happy Sunday, everyone! A little bit of academic writing never hurt anyone, so today I’m posting yet another one of my old essays I wrote for a film class back in university. The essay focuses on Kingsman: Secret Service (2014), offering an academic view on the use of dark humour, satire, and self reflexivity in the film, and how it created a successful movie. Enjoy!
The British-American movie Kingsman: Secret Service, directed by Matthew Vaughn, is characterized as an “action-comedy spy film”, starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson, and Mark Strong. The film both embraces the classical Hollywood style of narrative as well as the typified spectacle of action from the 1990s onwards. Kingsman also employs the use of parody (most notably in reference to previous spy films, such as James Bond) and dark humour, a mode made more popular in the 1960s during a time of political turmoil. Kingsman delivers an inimitable self-awareness through its dialogue, which allows the often outrageous and unbelievable spectacle of the film to translate into exactly the “action-comedy” hybrid genre that it is labeled. This essay will seek to outline some of those features, which include plotline, characters, camerawork, the way violence is portrayed, soundtrack, and vein of humour.
The Kingsman are an intelligent agency, created by “wealthy British individuals who had lost their heirs during World War I” (Matthew Vaughn). Intense action and chase scenes that are unafraid to involve death, violence, and high intensity are shown straight away. The first scene shows an interrogation. Very soon after, the man being interrogated reveals to be a suicide bomber, and one of the interrogators jumps on him in order to save his comrades. We discover, once the interrogators reveal their faces from their masks, Colin Firth and Jack Davenport’ characters (at the moment, unnamed). Firth’s character exclaims, “Shit! F**ing missed it. How did I f**king miss it?” in regards to the suicide bomber. He looks longingly onto his dead comrade, although his use of profanity has already somewhat diffused the tragic situation. The text Dark Comedy states that “death has often been used to comic effect in films”, which we see continually throughout the film. Scott Higgins notes that Wheeler Winston Dixon contrasts “the ‘economical style’ of classical cinema with the ‘excess running time, excess budgeting, excess spectacle’ of contemporary features”. Surely, Kingsman uses its action sequences as its major selling point – the narrative is rather straightforward in itself, mirroring any skeleton of its action-adventure predecessors. However, the action sequences carry context with it, as Geoff King suggests of contemporary action films. Galahad’s church massacre scene for example – a handheld, sequence shot – is important in realizing the consequences of Valentine’s plan, and sets the tone for revenge once Galahad is killed. The action sequence is visually stimulating, especially as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s amped up “Free Bird” plays and causes viewers to revel in the video game-like quality that is Galahad’s killing spree. However, once the spectacle is over, the concept finally sinks in: Galahad had absolutely no control over his violent urges. The result of his cutthroat fighting skills is an entire church full of dead people. The sequence is exciting, yet tragic; comical, yet dark. This is precisely what dark humour, and its cousin ‘satire’, aims to achieve – truths within society that are revealed through the use of humour. Timothy Corrigan notes to be wary of the way realism is depicted in films, noting that the level of reality is “constructed for a purpose”; an important factor to be considered when watching a film such as Kingsman.
While the genre of action film has often been credited as “lacking narrative”, many writers including King refute this statement and claim that in fact, “spectacle is rendered meaningful through context” (and thus, through the use of its narrative structure). Narrative is by no means neglected in this film. As outrageous and unrealistic as some of the plot points in the film might be, the end goal is clear: to save the world from the destruction of the tyrant, who in this case, is named Richmond Valentine (played by Samuel L. Jackson). However, Valentine is hardly menacing in anything other than intention: he speaks with an exaggerated lisp, is ironically squeamish at the sight of blood, and dresses flamboyantly. There is no inherent iconography of a villain in Valentine’s appearance, the way that there is blatant “spy” iconography in the bespoke suits, polished oxfords, and spy gadgets that the Kingsman boast. The truly frightening, underlying factor of Kingsman lies beneath the jokes, and sometimes within the jokes. Valentine’s intention essentially lines up with that of a person possessing a God complex; even scarier is that he vehemently believes he is doing the right thing, and possesses the financial ability and access to weaponry to do so. The classicist aspect of Valentine’s culling, as well, can hardly be overlooked – the world’s most prominent and affluent leaders are either locked up in his cells or protected from the neurological waves by implant chips, while the rest of the world, hapless to the plan, are meant to suffer violent deaths at the hands of each other.
The aforementioned outrageousness of the film can perhaps best be described as camp, a theatrical term that is defined as “favour[ing] exaggeration, artifice, and extremity”. The deliberateness of camp plays a large part in Kingsman’s self-aware and self-reflexive quality. As this film is loosely based on a graphic novel (which is simply entitled The Secret Service), one can certainly note the ways in which action scenes in the film mimic its comic-like counterpart. The movie oozes with CGI, and moments of violence straddle the visual tension of slow-motion to its fast paced normal speed, where the slow-motion often pokes fun at its own outrageous aesthetic. For example, in a scene that shows Galahad employing his expert fighting skills in a bar fight with Eggsy’s abusive stepfather’s gang, we see a tooth knocked out of one of the thug’s mouth and the slow-motion reaction of another as the tooth flies towards his face. Crashing beer glasses, an umbrella that shoots bullets and acts as a shield, and renowned dramatic actor Colin Firth in a suit engaging in hand-to-hand combat? Viewers are left as incredulous as Eggsy is. The characterization of “dark comedy” (also called “gallows humour”) might not be explicitly applied to Kingsman’s humour, though it touches on it through the use of crude and often boundary-pushing jokes as a means of comedy, sometimes dealing with death itself. Dark comedy made its more permanent place in film in the 1960s, where it “became almost a mainstream genre in itself”, which employed a “cheerful nihilism, as if the world they projected was simply too absurd to exist; [however] in the 1970s, and beyond, that nihilism had become the stuff of everyday life”. With the close of the 1960s, the film world looked more towards an “artificial optimism”, though still paired with the “withering social criticism” that parodic forms brought. Kingsman sums up these sentiments quite well, employing both the aforementioned “cheerful nihilism” in an absurd world, and contrasted with very real issues such as classicistic hierarchy and global warming.
Scenes of violence that display nonsensical notions of reality are deliberate in Kingsman. Jack Davenport’s short-lived character, Lancelot, is split perfectly in half by Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), Valentine’s lethal assistant with swords as prosthetic legs. One easily determine that it would likely be a much messier, gorier process to be cut in half were it to mirror reality; thus, Davenport’s dumfounded expression as we hear the slicing of swords before he dies is darkly comical. Similarly, a scene at the end that depicts Eggsy and Merlin setting off the implant chips that Valentine has inserted in his selected group of people, meant to protect them from the deadly neurological wave, resulting in their heads exploding. Instead of gruesomely witnessing blood and brains, in their place we see colourful fireworks explode while the grandiose, orchestral “Pomp and Circumstance” plays. These displays are clearly meant to be shocking and spectacular, yet unrealistic and comical. Through its comical and frenetic cinematography, dramatic yet hardly melodramatic soundtrack, and use of daylight for almost all the scenes, the film never possesses the gravitas or grittiness that action films such as The Dark Knight series, the Bourne series, or the new Bond films do. Barry Grant notes that “genre films. . . are made in imitation not of life but of other films.” Relating to the more new age action films of the 1990s, Kingsman surely employs the use of the ‘everyman’ hero as opposed to the military bodybuilder type of the 1980s. Colin Firth, who was aged fifty-four when Kingsman came out, is by no means characterized as an action star. Taron Egerton, a relative newcomer at the time, plays the unemployed Eggsy who lives in a lower class project in London. In this aspect, viewers can relate to the action film being presented, even if the storyline of an independent British secret service and neurological waves that can turn humans into killers are not relatable or realistic.
The nature of the outrageous plotline is addressed head-on halfway through the film: in a discussion between Valentine and Galahad, Valentine asks, “[Do] you like spy movies?” Galahad responds, “Nowadays they’re all a little serious for my taste. But the old ones . . . marvelous. Give me a far-fetched theatrical plot any day.” Valentine agrees, “The old Bond movies, oh man!” This back and forth dialogue is not only metatheatrical in nature, but also calls to a certain nostalgia for the past. Kingsman is not only an action-comedy because of its frenetic camerawork, its often dark or vulgar humour, and spectacle. It fits into this hybridized subgenre because it is unashamedly aware of its status, transforming the film from a merely funny action film into a parodic, satirical movie that comments on the past, present, and everything in between.
~ Z ~
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
Works Cited: Dixon, Wheeler W. Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.
Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. Ninth eg. New Jersey: 2015. Print.
Grant, Barry Keith, eg. Film Genre Reader II. Austin: U of Texas, 1995. Print.
Higgins, Scott. “Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative and the Contemporary Action Film” Project MUSE. University of Texas Press, 2008. Web. 15 Oct. 2016.
Pike, Karen. “Bitextual Pleasures: Camp, Parody, and the Fantastic Film.” Factiva Inc. Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company, 2001. Web. 16 Oct. 2016.
King, Geoff. “Spectacle and Narrative in the Contemporary Blockbuster.” Contemporary American Cinema. By Linda Ruth. Williams and Michael Hammond. London: Open UP, 2006. Print. (from CIN212H1-F Cinema and Sensation I: Action Course Reader)
