Cinematic Reality - or, From Film Studies to Martial Arts Studies of Film

Too much of a fixation on cinematic realism can close down consideration of a perhaps more interesting proposition: the idea that reality might be in some way cinematic. Perhaps it may even have a greater chance of being cinematic than cinema has of being either realistic or realist. As curious as it might seem, a proposition like this can in fact be made, and in all seriousness, by making reference not to a theory of ontology but to a very widely affirmed theory of the subject. (In fact, theories of ontology or reality rely on an implicit theory of the subject. Consequently I would argue that a theory of the subject is more fundamental to thinking about reality than the supposedly non-subject-centred theories of ontology that sometimes circulate in philosophy.)

 

A version of this common theory of the subject operates not only in film studies discourse but also cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and so on. The constitutive ingredients relevant here need only be two: on the one hand, that the subject be regarded as constitutively incomplete, and on the other hand, as performative. Both of these ideas derive (not only but especially) from more or less Lacanian strands of poststructuralism, in which the human subject is understood as formed via processes of identification and mimesis in relation to an external object or field.

 

From here, it becomes clear that there may be no good reason to exclude TV, film and other media from the potential field of and for identification and mimesis. However, the objection may be raised that sociologists and psychologists of many stripes have long searched for ways to establish the 'influence' of external stimuli such as these, but that there has been a general inability to find stable, reliable and programmatically predictable relations and effects between, so to speak, 'cinematic cause' and 'embodied/subjective effect'. However, the failure of empirical approaches to find them does not disprove the actuality of such relations. Rather, this empirical failure might just as easily be taken to illustrate the limits of empirical approaches in the study of connections and possible 'influences'.

 

This limit arises because the hope of finding regular or programmatic predictability in relations and effects must rest on a tacit belief in the homogeneity (the regularity and programmatic predictability) both of contexts of experience and of the subjects who may or may not be having the 'same' experiences. Yet none of these things are certain. Individual histories and hence everything else thereafter can – perhaps must – be regarded as singular. There are, here and there, processes of stabilisation, regularisation, and attempted homogenisation – think of Althusser's classic postulation of ideological state apparatuses, or Adorno and Horkheimer's fears about the standardising effects on viewers of mass produced 'culture', and so on. And, of course, identifications and affective bonds can be group, mass, national, religious, ethnic, and so on. But, in a strong sense, the very occurrence of moments, periods and contexts of stabilisations of identification and mimesis continues to support the argument that subjectivity is constitutively incomplete and performed via mimeses based on identifications. The contingency and complexity of subjectivity outweighs the need to subscribe either to a 'hypodermic needle' or a 'monkey see, monkey do' hypothesis.

 

Accordingly, rather than focusing either on the questions of adjudicating whether, when and where films may or may not live up to one or more idea(l) of 'realism', or if and when 'real life' is 'influenced' by film, literature, music or other media, it seems more productive to explore the ways in which these putatively separate realms (real life and representation) supplement each other. My argument will be that, when it comes to martial arts – as both experienced in film and experienced in discourse, including, of course, the discursive experience of practicing and performing martial arts (training) – the main conduit or 'trap door' that both articulates and obfuscates the 'realms' of 'reality' and 'representation' – the point of connection, contamination or cross-fertilisation, that can 'communicate' the contents of one realm into the context of the other – is the notion of gesture.

 

Theoretically, analytically and methodologically, the key term calling out for deployment here – in the context of incompletion and the constitutive character of relations to external objects – is supplement. My understanding of the term is derived from Jacques Derrida's exploration of the peculiar status of the word in a wide range of texts of European philosophers. Derrida's reading of both the word itself (in the philosophers' arguments) and of the specific things they were discussing when they used the word 'supplement' zones in on the paradoxical marginal centrality of supplements. The supplement is deemed to be something secondary, and yet it cannot be done away with, excluded, got rid of. The supplement seems to be a secondary add on, but without it, the primary thing could and would not be what it is or becomes, by way of the supplement. Derrida finds many examples of supplements, to which we could (and should) add more: the relation of writing to speech is one of his most famous, for instance; or masturbation to sex; technology, tools or prostheses to the human; representations to reality; or indeed imagination, dreams or interpretation to reality or truth.

 

In my own analyses of martial arts discourse, this notion of the supplement has enabled me to reconcile the idea of cinematic or other forms of representation, or fictional/dramatized performance, with that of 'real' martial arts discourse – whether that discourse take the form of practical exercises in training, such as formal drills or free sparring, or whether it take the form of spoken or written words about martial arts, as well as online how-to 'documentaries' and instructional videos. My sense is that the separation of these realms (the fake/filmic from the real/actual) is conventional (indeed, what Derrida would call metaphysical) and that to maintain such a separation is to miss the crucial interplay of elements from each side of the screen – specifically, the fact that both discursive contexts evoke, allude to, challenge, elaborate on, contest, explore, comment on, and just generally supplement each other. To echo the subtitle of one of my books on this subject, film-fantasy supplements fighting-philosophy, and vice versa, in ongoing unpredictable dialogic relations. Put bluntly, my contention is that martial arts and action film representations of fighting are informed by (and formed from) martial arts discourse, at the same time as they propose models of what real fighting might really be like, which provokes or stokes martial arts desires, fantasies and discourses; such that the reality of martial arts practice can be said to be in some sense constituted by the cinematic.

 

Examples I have discussed before range from the impact of 1960s and 70s martial arts choreography on the uptake of the practice of Asian martial arts the world over to the impact of the fight choreography of films such as Batman Begins, the Mission Impossible films and Jack Reacher on the uptake of the new martial arts that were featured therein – what was first univocally called 'Keysi Fighting Method', but which then fractured and fragmented into 'Keysi', on the one hand, and 'Defence Lab' on the other. Other cases include the once subterranean but recently more visible influence of Filipino martial arts in Hollywood choreography, via the work of Bruce Lee's student Dan Inosanto, and especially his student Jeff Imada; the Fight-Club-ization of martial arts and films in the wake of Fight Club, which itself came in the wake of the Ultimate Fighter Competition (the UFC), and the increasing incorporation of obviously MMA-inspired fight choreography into blockbuster productions, such as, for instance, The Expendables, which incorporates many techniques recently popularised by MMA competitions, such as the arm-bar and the guillotine. At the other end of this spectrum, 'real' Fight Clubs have emerged (bars and nightclubs where patrons can engage in hand to hand combat); and there have been famous cases of MMA fighters in competitions such as the UFC incorporating cinematic techniques into their competition fighting, from spinning elbow strikes taken from Ong Bak to flying kicks propelled by bouncing off the cage wall, inspired by The Matrix, to one famous knockout kick copied directly from the famous 'crane kick' that is used at the end of the original Karate Kid film.

 

In all cases, the logic is gestural and performance is mimetic. Every move has a semiotic value, in a discourse that is equally and ineradicably (even if ambivalently) wedded to the aesthetics of ambivalence – ambivalence about reality, perhaps, and about the place of action fight choreography within it, certainly. Dramatic techniques like those seen in the movies are equally valued and disdained. A knockout spinning kick in the ring, cage or octagon is rightly deemed 'unbelievable' – in the double sense of being amazing because rare, and hence simply unbelievable in the sense of not credible – not reliable, not predictable – not something you would want to assume would always work 'in reality'.

 

One can discern a precise, albeit ambivalent, and conflicted, grammar of values. Female MMA competitor Ronda Rousey's devastatingly fast and unequivocal win by throwing, holding and repeatedly punching her opponent into knockout in the 2014 UFC is regarded as realistic and yet always somehow inferior to her win by throw and arm-bar in the 2015 UFC. This is because the arm-bar has the discursive status of 'pure', 'clean', 'technical', 'safe', 'reliable', etc.; whereas the rapid pulverisation of her opponent the year before has the status of 'brutal'. Similarly, UFC knockouts by high kicks, especially jumping kicks, are regarded as 'spectacular' precisely because they have the discursive status as both high skill and high risk. In the current configuration of martial arts discourse – a configuration that has been consolidating itself since the first UFC competitions in the early 1990s, when the Gracie style of Brazilian Jiujitsu began to prove itself in 'reality martial arts' competitions – grappling and ground fighting is hegemonic. It defines the common-sense understanding of what fighting is 'really like', and, in its orbit, no number of knockouts by flying kick or head punch seems able to shake its literal and metaphorical stranglehold.

 

Even as and when this discourse moves and modifies – which it always does – the point I want to make is that every move, no matter how 'real' or 'unreal', has, first and foremost, a semiotic value. That value has been constituted in a discursive network that skips freely from film to formal training and from format to format. Thus, just as the UFC questioned the need for strict demarcation and rules in martial arts competition in the early 1990s, so we might question the need for a strict demarcation of 'film studies' from 'cultural studies', especially in the discourse of martial arts, which easily and arguably always traverses supposedly separate realms, such as fiction and reality.