Notes on the Green Hornet (2011) pt. 2

This is part 2 of my working paper on The Green Hornet

You can find pt 1 here.

2.

Might we consider the characterization and performance by Seth Rogen of Britt Reid in The Green Hornet as a rhetorical articulation of failure?  That is to say, The Green Hornet performs an aesthetic of failure in its attempt to meet all the political, artistic, and commercial demands imposed by the film’s paratext – the politics and discourse surrounding its production.  Rogen, while not necessarily omnipotent, certainly feels the discursive weight it attaches to his body.  After all, he is the palpable persona –co-writer AND lead actor- a veritable shorthand and reference for all the political and artistic decisions in constructing the narrative, as well as the body receiving the majority of criticism.  Despite the ostensible degree of control he has over the remake, I believe Rogen, not “Seth Rogen” but Rogen our discursively imagined auteur, acknowledges his lack of artistic autonomy in the production of The Green Hornet, which can only lead to failure.

This may explain why Rogen chooses to begin the film with a literal declaration of failure.  In the opening scene, Reid’s father, played by Christopher Waltz, exclaims to a young Britt Reid after shooting down the boy’s dream of becoming a superhero, “Why try when you always fail?”  And as we see, Britt Reid, perhaps paralleling Rogen, decides to become a superhero with the discursively constructed inevitability of failure constantly hanging over his head.  Of course, in what can be understood as an instance of visual rhetoric: Britt Reid saws off the head of a statue made in the image of his father, an act of autonomy as well as irreverence.  Much how the controversy over the casting of Kato reconfigures our interpretation of the character and characterization of Kato (What Kato could mean to us), Rogen’s Britt Reid “means” more than simply a homage or parody of the “authentic”.  Rather, Reid could be understood more as an analogy of Rogen’s conflicted position within the production of the film.

This rhetoric of failure is a productive one for the mythos of The Green Hornet because it allows Rogen to visually articulate what many fans and muted critics of the “original” could only mutter with conflicted ambivalence: Kato has always been the backbone of The Green Hornet.  This is what Asian American media critics – simultaneous fans and detractors of the mythos – must constantly grapple with – the hero that the narrative masks.  

The failure then, of the supposed protagonist in The Green Hornet is not his inability to play superhero but his inability to contain his sidekick Kato’s awesomeness and mass-appeal.  Rogen himself states in an interview (finally from the lips of our author-provocateur himself!) that the narrative and comedy of The Green Hornet comes from the shift in focus from the “Superhero” to the “sidekick”.  

Certainly Rogen is trying to reduce this phenomenon we have been discussing, the flowery and effluvious theory-nation that I am trying to tease out, into formulaic plot structures.  But like his Britt Reid, he fails marvelously and productively.  Still, let me be gracious.  Did Seth Rogen set out to simply turn The Green Hornet mythos on its head by shifting focus on to the sidekick, a move irrespective and autonomous of the film’s political, cultural, and commercial imperatives?  Certainly perceptible!  Does it do much more than that?

 

You bet your Kato-Darts it does.

Please stay tune for the conclusion!