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The Controversial 'Kingsman,' Continued (Spoilers)

Always bring a gun to church; you'll never know when it'll come in handy
February 14, 2015

Spoilers for Kingsman: The Secret Service below.

As I noted in my reviewKingsman: The Secret Service is an extremely conservative, at times explicitly reactionary, text. This is, after all, a film that posits the liberal elite (including Barack Obama) is willing to kill billions of people as a sort of final solution for climate change and the only way to stop it from happening is by using a holdover from Ronald Reagan's (oft-derided by the left as useless) Strategic Defense Initiative. And that's just for starters.

There is, however, a scene in the film that several have pointed to as, for lack of a better term, anti-conservative. It takes place toward the end of the second act, when Colin Firth's super spy Galahad—essentially* under control of the billionaire global warming alarmist Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson)—wipes out a Westboro Baptist-style church in Kentucky.

A friend I was discussing the movie with on gchat pointed to this scene, suggesting some on the right will "take issue" with the caricature. Over at the Daily Beast, Jen Yamato** wrote, "Kingsman, which has no overt anti-Obama agenda, also takes aim at ultraconservative America by setting a brutal, madcap massacre scene within a church filled with hate-spewing fundamentalist Christians." Justin Cawthorne, a progressive, is really, really worried by the fact that he enjoyed the movie, so he constructed a (flimsy, but thorough and well-written) argument that the film is actually super liberal. (Game respect game.) One of the scenes he highlighted, naturally, was the church scene:

But there’s a significant factor here. This isn’t just any church gathering. This church is clearly meant to be a representation of the Westboro Baptist Church, or a similar gathering of hate-mongers. The scene represents a tricky moral dilemma: how can you have your hero massacre a full congregation of people without completely losing audience sympathy? Easy: have him massacre a bunch of conservative right-wingers that no one likes anyway.

I suppose it could easily be read as a revenge fantasy highlighting the violent hypocrisy of the left, but if Colin Firth is intended to be a hero of the conservative establishment then that reading doesn’t exactly work. You could suggest it’s a revenge fantasy being presented by the writer and/or director, but that further undermines the thesis that Kingsman is a deliberately conservative movie.

It's funny, Cawthorne almost gets it there at the end. More on that in a moment; let's first address the argument hinted at by Yamato and explicitly made by Cawthorne, that the church scene is some sort of rebuke of the right. That argument is predicated on the idea that the right, broadly speaking, should be particularly offended by acts of violence against the Westboro Baptist Church—that the troglodytes in the WBC are "one of us."

But that's simply not true. The left hates the WBC because of their "God Hates Fags" bullshit; the right hates the WBC for their penchant of picketing the funerals of soldiers. There is no real constituency here. And that's why the scene works. Director Matthew Vaughn was faced with something of a dilemma: He needed a setting in which a bunch of innocent people could be slaughtered with extreme prejudice while playing the moment for laughs. I can't think of a better group to unite right and left in such a manner than the WBC.

That being said, there's still an implicit critique of the left in this scene. Here we have a billionaire leftist wiping out a group of people who have done nothing illegal. They simply believe the wrong things. (And they do believe the wrong things; Firth's retort to the racist wench who throws him a side-eye for trying to leave in the middle of a hateful preacher's oratory is fantastically funny.) For their thought crimes they are wiped out. It's totalitarianism of the sort seen nowhere outside of Stalin's USSR or Mao's China. Then, as Cawthorne notes, there's the leftist hypocrisy of condemning violence while also using violence to achieve its ends, something of a running joke in Kingsman.

*The plot involves a plan by Valentine to give the masses cell phone sim cards that will allow them to use their phones for free but, at a time of Valentine's choosing, emit a signal that turns everyone within earshot bloodthirsty and murderous. 

**Yamato needs to have a chat about spoiler warnings with whoever writes headlines over at the Beast. If you put a spoiler warning in the subhed and a spoiler warning in your text, those warnings are negated by putting the goddamn spoiler in the goddamn headline.