Hot! Tub! Time! Machine! Also, less fun subjects

By adrianr, May 6, 2010

I will admit right here that I went to see Hot Tub Time Machine, paying full price at the theater. I chose Hot Tub Time Machine because of the title Hot Tub Time Machine. And I was satisfied with my movie-going experience, although when I tried to explain the reasons to someone who hadn’t seen it, all I could say was, “Well, one of the guys goes, ‘It must be some kind of … hot tub time machine!’” I like that the movie acknowledges how dumb it is, but really, especially, I like those four words together. In fact, when I started to think too hard about Hot Tub Time Machine, I discovered little good about it besides those four words together. Some parts are OK, but not good, and some parts are bad – cliché, predictable. In a movie about time travel, there’s much discussion about … the Butterfly Effect. But there are those four words. Hot Tub Time Machine.

This is where you might ask a question: Then why think too hard about it? Exactly. Isn’t some stuff just for fun?

For instance, why you gotta rain on our parade, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker? Here’s Lane on Kick-Ass, in which, among other apparently awesome fight scenes, an 11-year-old girl perpetrates a killing spree: “The standard defense of such material is that we are watching ‘cartoon violence,’ but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer – that is, to coarsen and inflame?” Because that’s why you go to see a movie called Kick-Ass, you might say eye-rollingly– coming very close to dropping the magazine in favor of a snack – to think about such things.

But then Anthony Lane gets under your skin, and you get to the end of his curmudgeonly review, and you start thinking: Really? The 11-year-old really refers to a roomful of adults as “cunts”? She wears blond pigtails and short skirts to con her way past security guards? I didn’t see Kick-Ass, because I spent all my money on Hot Tub Time Machine, but I imagine the aspects of the movie that might appeal to pedophiles might rub me the wrong way, so to speak, and make all that gratuitous violence less fun.

And this is where you might ask another question: When is it OK to be just fun and silly, and when is it not? When must a piece of artistic work meant for public consumption – and I extend that label for the sake of discussion to Hot Tub Time Machine as well as Kick-Ass – take some sort of responsibility for itself?

Lane asserts that Kick-Ass shares a “rage to provoke” with the comic book upon which it’s based. (One issue’s cover line: “Sickening violence: Just the way you like it.”) There’s nothing wrong with provocation, I say, as long as it’s actually provocative. In my mind, that means it should have a different sort of stimulating effect than would a Mountain Dew. It could stimulate intelligent questions, for instance, or offer a perspective on a subject, such as violence or childhood sexuality. It would seem that a movie like Kick-Ass has more the effect of the Mountain Dew – it gets you all worked up and drops you off without adding anything thoughtful or even anything that might lead to later thoughtfulness on the part of the viewer. Maybe this is violence just the way you like it, but it’s nothing you can’t get from a heap of sources any time of day in ways that are easier than making your way to the movie house. So, besides making money, the movie just makes more of the same noise we already have.

As does Hot Tub Time Machine. The difference is that Hot Tub Time Machine leaves us none the worse. There’s nothing there but fluff – nothing to take responsibility for. Kick-Ass is built upon violence and, in Lane’s view, kiddie porn. To me, this just sounds like exploitation – of us, of our desire for violence without having to consider it, to say nothing of 11-year-old girls. It treats social phenomena with rampant repercussions as if they had none. Which takes all the fun out of it. Darn you, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker. You’re no fun at all.