'Me Martial Artist, You Jane'. Reflections on film dialogue and martial arts
'Oh, no! That's karate!': Speaking of Martial Arts (in non-martial arts films)
Paul Bowman, Cardiff University
This is a very rough first draft of a paper I am going to present at the IFVCR Conference, 'You talkin' to me?' Dialogue and Communication in Film. After reading it, if you have any further suggestions for relevant films to think about, please do let me know!
This conference is organised by the idea of foregrounding film dialogue – or, in other words, zooming in on only one component part of film's full armoury of communication techniques, elements, processes or routes.
This may seem like an unremarkable focus. We tend to think of the words of the script as being the primary element of the film text. And after all, isn't the script the thing that is written first, the thing that is sent out to agents, directors and desired star actors? Isn't it from the script that everything else follows?
This may be so, although equally it may not be so. Such a creation narrative overlooks the number of ways in which a film may have been conceptualised first as 'a look' or 'a feel', or written 'for' a particular actor, location, soundtrack or even audience, and so on.
Furthermore, once the film is constructed and apprehended, the spoken dialogue now becomes just one tiny element of the film's effects, affects, textual features and communication dimensions. So, asking us to focus only or primarily on film dialogue amounts to the same as asking us to extract or abstract a pound of flesh from a body whilst leaving in all of the veins, arteries, bones, and skin, and everything that is not technically 'flesh', or dialogue.
I perceived this most clearly when I tried to fit the orientation of this conference with one of my own ongoing concerns – which is to try to learn more about the ways that martial arts are perceived or thought about in culture and society in general. My interest therefore is not to look into the realms of anything that might be regarded as being part of some kind of 'martial arts subculture', but rather to look everywhere – anywhere – else, in order to see what non-martial artists make of martial arts.
So, in order to both fit the bill for this conference and to fit the bill for furthering my own ongoing research concerns, I ended up coming up with a very restrictive focus: Essentially, I had to set myself the task of looking at the status of dialogue about martial arts in non-martial arts films.
To borrow a phrase from a film I'm therefore not supposed to mention here (Enter the Dragon): 'a [limitation] like that could teach you a lot about yourself'. My hypothesis is that it could also teach you a lot about the status of martial arts outside of film.
In applying such a limitation to my focus, the first thing I discovered was that, other than in martial arts films and action films, martial arts are rarely discussed. They are often shown. There are often moves, gestures, allusions, visual references. But conversation about them? Not so much.
The second thing I learned is that you really have to know a lot about a lot of films to explore this kind of question. Google doesn't understand what you are asking for when you search for 'dialogue about martial arts in [insert genre here] films'. Even Americanising it all by changing the word 'films' to 'movies' doesn't help. I could not construct a search question with any mention of martial arts films in it that that led to anywhere other than sites about martial arts films.
I could find no database to run a search on, and, overall, there was simply no hiding from my own vast lack of knowledge (or memory) of films. The logic of my project – whose aim is to draw inferences from films in order to think about the status of martial arts outside of films – paradoxically requires being a proper 'old skool' film buff.
Which I am not. But I know some. So I asked online – in and around martial arts Facebook groups, and so on. And what I discovered there was pretty enlightening. Unfortunately, most of the enlightenment wasn't particularly helpful. This is because it seems that it is not just inhuman search engines that do not understand questions about dialogue on martial arts in films that are not martial arts films. It seems that the overwhelming majority of people I asked could not quite get their heads around the question either.
One or two people did, of course. Kyle Barrowman came up with some great suggestions. Many people suggested action films. Many people suggested The Matrix, for instance. However, I decided that I had to exclude action films like The Matrix because, even though people don't seem to think of it as a martial arts film, it is choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping, it is choc-full of really technically precise martial arts choreography, and (as I learned in my ill-fated Google searches) it regularly features top tens of must see martial arts films. The fact that people don't seem to recognise when a Hollywood action film becomes a martial arts film (or vice versa) perhaps says more about the porousness of these two supposed genre categories and the essential lack of a fixed and stable Hollywood martial arts film genre than anything else.
So action films were out. But that's not too much of a loss. For how many Hollywood action films with martial arts in them actually discuss martial arts, or refer to them at all in the dialogue?
The amnesiac Jason Bourne wonders out loud why he knows so much about situational awareness, combat and survival. But those 'in the know' know that The Bourne Identity is not an American action film – it is actually a Filipino martial arts film. Conan the Barbarian is sent to study with 'Eastern' sword masters, but it is only the extra-diegetic voice over that tells us this. There is some talk in Batman Begins (reminiscent of Highlander) of training and deception; but Batman Begins is essentially the story of a belatedly adopted subsequently 'ronin' ninja. And the Star Wars films are a kind of wuxia pian, or Chinese swordplay drama.
I have already written a fair amount about some of these films, along with things like the significance of Keanu Reeves's 'Neo' waking up from his trip into the virtual reality combat training programme in The Matrix and announcing excitedly to Morpheus 'I know kung fu!' (Bowman 2013) So I wouldn't let myself do so again here now, even if I were technically allowed to.
Equally, I'm not at all sure whether my restrictive frames mean I'm allowed to discuss the unforgettable line in the 1987 classic, Lethal Weapon, where veteran cop Danny Glover's Murtagh tries to engage his undesirable new partner Riggs (Mel Gibson) in conversation, and says '[the] file also said you're heavily into martial arts, tai chi and all that killer stuff. I suppose we have to register you as a lethal weapon'.
As Kyle Barrowman pointed out to me, these lines of dialogue are technically unforgettable in that it is from them that the film, all of its sequels and the current TV serials get their name. So they are unforgettable, even if I now realise that over the years I had come to 'remember' the key phrase not as 'tai chi and all that killer stuff', but rather as 'tai chi and all that killer shit'.
Doubtless I had this little memory warp because of the antics of another famous dynamic duo, the classic Freudian partnership of condensation and displacement. For, the other memorable line from Lethal Weapon is Danny Glover's frequently repeated complaint, 'I'm getting too old for this shit'. This is his comedy catch phrase throughout. So it seems that in my memory, I had condensed these two phrases together and displaced the word shit across from one phrase onto the other; so 'tai chi and all that killer stuff' became 'tai chi and all that killer shit'.
Now, I haven't until now thought about what my condensation and displacement might have done with the film's other famous catch phrase – whether 'I'm getting too old for this shit' might have become 'I'm getting too old for this tai chi' (which seems unlikely) or whether, on the contrary, I might have constructed some formulation in which Mel Gibson was actually too young for tai chi and that it's not killer stuff but actually shit.
I say this with the utmost respect for tai chi. I first tried tai chi during the 1990s. I started it seriously in 2001 and have practiced it religiously ever since. But I do remember chuckling to myself, occasionally, in moments during the decades following the release of this film, at the fact that Lethal Weapon depicts tai chi as 'killer stuff', or, as I remembered it 'killer shit'.
I remember thinking how hilarious it was that these words from this action film were deliberately pointing those in search of killer stuff or killer shit (such as 'impressionable youth', for instance) towards the genteel art of tai chi. I would chuckle because, even though there are tai chi practitioners who are adamant about its combat utility (I myself have held this position with sincerity in the past), there is no getting away from the fact that to acquire anything like lethal weapon status in the art of tai chi takes years, if not decades, of calm, committed, tranquil and meditative practice.
So I always chuckled at the image of some young hot-head looking for the next way to improve his fighting skills rocking up to a tai chi class and joining in with a load of geriatrics, hippies and new agers. And I loved that image. And I chuckled at the fact that perhaps the film was deliberately trying to steer hot-heads towards something that might cool their blood a little.
But I can't really discuss the dialogue of Lethal Weapon because, as an action film with martial arts in, it is too close to being a kind of martial arts film proper, and hence I think it has to be excluded. For now.
But while we are on the subject of tai chi, we could perhaps grant ourselves permission to consider another one of tai chi's filmic appearances. This one takes place in the hotel scene in 1985's Vision Quest, a film that people in the UK and Australia might know under its alternative title of Crazy For You.
Again, it was Kyle who drew my attention to this film and to one particular scene in it. Once again, it could technically be rubbing up against the limits of our exclusion zone, because the film is a teen sports wrestling film, which is all about training for a fight. So that's a problem. Nonetheless, as it's chiefly a teen sports film, I think we can allow it.
In the scene in question, Louden Swaine (Matthew Modine) is delivering room service to a travelling salesman. The salesman is practicing tai chi in the hotel room, and the two engage in conversation about it. Here is the scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f_MzPVuBq0
There is a lot that is interesting about both the dialogue and the action in this scene. But one thing that leaps out is the association of tai chi practice with homosexuality, or as a pretext to and gateway to seduction. Doubtless, part of the narrative and dramatic structuring function of constructing the tai chi practitioner as both gay and predatory in his use of a tai chi lesson as a way to grope and attempt to seduce the teen is to set up a clear counterpoint or foil. The lead character's reaction to homosexual advances serves to attempt to clarify his heterosexuality, to reassure viewers that despite his engagement in wrestling, he is not homosexual. For, as many commentators have noted in many kinds of ways in many kinds of contexts, the appearance of wrestling and grappling is always a little too similar to the appearance of amorous lovemaking for heteronormative comfort.
Personally I think that Swaine's final reaction after running away – i.e., hitting the deck and doing push-ups – undermines this attempt to safely exclude him from the realm of homoerotic investment. His panicked push-ups have an air of desperation about them – as if he has to do something – anything – to channel his intense feelings (whatever they might be) into something socially acceptable.
All of which takes us smoothly into another scene suggested to me by Kyle. Specifically, this is a scene in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Lolita, in which Peter Sellers discusses judo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX6vrnz5tJY
In this scene, we encounter martial arts combat training depicted as both heterosexual and yet somewhat creepy and uncanny – somewhere between violence and sexuality, somewhere most likely connected with a sadomasochistic relationship. The perversion hinted at here derives from the impropriety or 'un-homeliness' of the transgressing the lines of so many cultural lines and norms at once: the publicly policed borderlines between pleasure and pain, sexuality and violence, exercise, competition, health, sadism and masochism.
I have argued at length elsewhere that wrestling, grappling and ground-fighting struggle semiotically in non-martial arts contexts because they transgress so many visual and spatial norms that police male to male proximity and interactions (Bowman 2017). The situation is not helped by the fact that the most popular form of ground-fighting grappling in the world today is known as Brazilian Jiujutsu, a name that is reduced to the acronym 'BJJ'. All of this seems to render it apparently 'crying out' to become the butt of sexual innuendo and homophobic (and indeed misogynistic) sleights, affronts and verbal attacks.
Because I and others have written at length about this already, I won't dwell on it right now (Downey 2014). Instead, I will stay with the element of sexuality to segue into a spectrum of related examples.
But first, a quick recap. Our first two legitimate examples of dialogue about martial arts in non-martial arts films have sexualised it. The travelling tai chi practitioner in Vision Quest is gay. The two men discussing judo training with a woman in Lolita seem to revel in the perverse innuendos involved in talking about it.
As an aside, we can note that it was only the action films – films that either are or are very close to being martial arts films – in which martial arts are presented as non-sexually exciting and conventionally cool. Mel Gibson as martial artist is a crazy, suicidal, 'lethal weapon'. Neo gasps with excitement about suddenly knowing kung fu. The crew of The Nebuchadnezzar who watch Neo fight with Morpheus show us how to react – with amazement and excitement and delight at the combatants' skills.
So, the spectrum runs from sexual perversion to heteronormative hypermasculinity. Some films police the border between these realms. Others regularly traverse it.
Consider this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K98R2VWHCM
Here a young, modern, rebellious, non-traditional, forward-looking Elvis Presley puts paid to the old-thinking bullies by using the unexpected and new style of fighting from Japan, karate. After two attackers have been floored, the third aggressor hesitates. Elvis says 'come on!' and number three says something – which the internet tells me is 'oh no! that's karate!', but which I think is actually 'no, no: that's karate!'
Here, martial arts skill is unexpected, superlative, foreign, exotic, educated, novel, problem solving, and – most notably, I think – masculinising.
It is reasons (or fantasy promises) like these that have animated many of those who have ever been interested in learning martial arts. The desire is for potency, agency, confidence, competence, plenitude, and so on. Traditionally, this has been masculine, of course – even though, eventually, the girls have been allowed to arrive. After three 1970s Street Fighter films, Sister Street Fighter finally arrived. After three Karate Kid films, The Next Karate Kid was a girl. And so on.
It is this kind of promise that drives the 32 year old layabout Kip to want to check out a local martial arts club that he has seen advertised on TV in Napoleon Dynamite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzh9koy7b1E
In this scene, and others, we see martial arts and martial artists treated not as calm, cool, collected and hypermasculine; but rather as a bundle of neuroses. Rex's voice is gravelly in the extreme. He shouts like a drill sergeant. He is arrogant, self-aggrandising and abusive to his potential students. And his demonstration contains a large number of clichés and classic one liners.
I am not sure if it was this scene that led people to refer to naff martial arts demonstrations as 'grab my arm demonstrations'. But, certainly, if you were to say to a martial artist that a certain demonstration was a 'grab my arm demonstration', they would most likely understand what you mean – a kind of old-fashioned, discredited demonstration involving unrealistic scenarios and unrealistic techniques.
Unfortunately, such demonstrations still abound. They are still being given, to this day, and posted on YouTube. And indeed, Rex is a kind of composite character made up of stereotypes that actually exist in the world. As Rex explains, martial artists must discipline their self-image. And martial artists do. Rex wears stars and stripes pantaloons. But it is much more common to see martial artists wearing either silk or proletarian Chinese clothes simply because they are doing kung fu, or white pyjamas, or whatever, even though they may be white or black (or Asian) westerners who have no connection with Asia.
Rex has disciplined his image in a very particular way. The gravelly voice and drill sergeant shout is of course a comedic affectation. It smacks of the military. And the stars and stripes clown trousers he is so proud to be wearing reinforce both that militaristic jingoism and add to it the even more widely ridiculed bodybuilder image. (There was a long running fashion for bodybuilders in the 1980s and 1990s to wear incredibly baggy elasticated pantaloons, not too dissimilar to those made famous by MC Hammer.)
In fact, Rex is a composite of images of American rednecks, rockers and vain jingoistic tough guys of the 1980s, all coming together into the character of a gaudy insecure jingoistic militaristic thug
Although Rex and his martial arts of Rex Kwon Do normally draw all the attention, in actual fact the entirety of Napoleon Dynamite can be read as a film that is deeply and thoroughly infused with an awareness of the status of ideas of martial arts in American teen culture. At the start of the film, Napoleon tries to impress the new kid, Pedro, by telling him that there are a lot of gangs in the school and that some of them tried hard to recruit him because he has pretty decent bo-staff skills. Later on, he asks Deb to collect some items that he has been looking after because, he claims, he can no longer fit his 'num-chucks' [sic] in his locker.
In fact, the 16 year old Napoleon is quite heavily fixated on the bo-staff and 'num-chucks' (or nunchakus). His elder brother, however, is more taken by the call of the cage: he tells Napoleon early on that he is in training to become a cage fighter; and it is he to asks Napoleon to pull him on his roller-skates to Rex's 'Rex Kwon Do' club in town.
Both of these fantasy fixations start to wane as the characters become involved in real relationships with girls. Kip stops discussing cage fighting when he hooks up with the black LaFawnduh, and he switches instead to focusing on developing a black ghetto sartorial style. Napoleon stops fretting about bo-staffs and num-chucks when he discovers dancing and his relationship with Deb grows.
So, martial arts in Napoleon Dynamite are fantasy resolutions to problems. Napoleon tries to impress Pedro and Deb by claiming bo-staff and nunchaku skills. But later on he laments his lack of them. In a memorable scene, Napoleon sets out his answer to the question of 'what girls want': They want 'skills'. And he feels he doesn't have any. Pedro asks what he means by skills, and Napoleon answers: 'Nunchuck skills… bowhunting skills… computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!'
Kip gave his answer to the same question earlier, saying: 'Napoleon, don't be jealous 'cause I've been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know that I'm training to become a cage fighter'.
And, of course, Rex famously challenges everyone with the belligerent rhetorical question 'You think anybody thinks I'm a failure because I go home to Starla at night?' – Starla being an extremely masculine-looking bodybuilder.
Martial arts in Napoleon Dynamite are refracted through extant cultural imagery derived from film and TV: Napoleon is interested in the idea having skills in Japanese weapons (the bo, the nunchaku), Kip is taken by the idea of cage fighting, and Rex seems to be saturated in imagery derived from the incorporation of Asian martial arts in US military training. Think of the drill sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman, who trains the officer cadets in hand to hand combat; or Sensei John Creese in The Karate Kid, whose dojo is run like Marine Corps basic training – and is also adorned with images of Sensei Creese himself when he was on active service in the marine corps.
Early on in An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere despatches a belligerent aggressor in a scenario not dissimilar to the one Elvis found himself in, in Roustabout, although without the cocky sass. To the contrary, Gere has repeatedly told the aggressor 'I do not want to fight you', and afterwards, despite his friends' amazement ('Did you see that guy's face?') and sympathy ('He gave you no choice'), Gere is angry at himself: 'There is always a choice!'[1]
This desire to avoid fighting emphasizes his gentlemanliness – a gentlemanliness we could trace (had we the mandate and the time) back to the gentlemanly Bartitsu and jujitsu craze of Victorian Britain, as exemplified by Sherlock Holmes having 'some knowledge of the Japanese style of wrestling', which initially appeared as a retroactive 'deus ex machina' to turn out to have saved him from Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls, and which recent film adaptations have made much of – culminating in the rather messy gentlemanly thug of Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes.
Of course, as with all gentlemen fighters, from Holmes to Richard Gere's gentlemanly officer cadet, what led to their development of skill was an earlier brutalisation (or fear of brutalisation). A flashback shows us that the childhood incarnation of Richard Gere's character was beaten up by a gang of kickboxing local kids in a crowded Asian city back street. Hence his need to develop kickboxing skills.
Full Metal Jacket gives us a different creation scenario. Two marines relaxing in town have their camera snatched by a Vietnamese thief, who, in a parting display of anger and contempt, turns and performs kicks and finger jabs and strikes in their general direction, before escaping on a motorbike. One marine turns to the other and says 'wow, did you see the moves on that guy?'[2]
It is easy to see why the West fell in love with Eastern martial arts. Of course, it is not compulsory to fall in love or in thrall with them – or with the 'moves' on the other guy.
When the Houston team are preparing for a daunting match in Tokyo against a Japanese team in Rollerball, the management bring in someone to explain that the Japanese players will be using martial arts techniques from karate and (somewhat surprisingly, the Korean art of) hapkido. The idea behind the lecture is that 'forewarned is forearmed'. But the team are cynical. Why should they care about Japanese martial arts when they can give them all a good 'ol' Houston fist in the face technique'?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUSCpZMbPnQ
In Rollerball, the martial moves of the other are rejected, in favour of sticking with the simplicity and directness of the pugilistic approach that they already practice. In many other films, the oriental otherness is fetishized, idealised, and desired.
Indeed, even when they haven't actually trained in it at all, some people realise that simply talking about martial arts and claiming to 'know' them can constitute a viable form of self-defence. Eddie Murphy exemplifies this in Trading Places:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WMErc1n6Ks
What Murphy's character invests in here is both the ways in which martial arts both look cool and might make you scary. So the verbal claims to be able to 'do' martial arts might both confer social status and act as a deterrent.
We see the other side of this logic in an early scene in The Wanderers. Again, it is someone's first day at school. Joey is introducing the new 'kid' (his new found nineteen year old friend-cum-protector) to the gang culture of his school and neighbourhood. Walking along packed school corridors Joey points to different groups and reels off their names and ethnic characteristics. Irish gangs, black gangs, Italian gangs, and then Joey points out The Wongs. Excitedly, Joey describes them like this: '27 guys all with the last name Wong, all black belts in jujitsu who could kill you with one judo chop':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzPeYdeG2co
For many years I thought little of this, other than what it is on one literal level designed to make the impressionable viewer think: that the Wongs are a cool looking and formidably tough gang of Asian martial artists. Of course, because of this and other scenes about ethnic difference in The Wanderers, the film is now held up in politically correct online charts and YouTube analyses as an example of 'Hollywood racism'. And, of course, Joey is ethnically profiling the ethnically organised gangs; and within that framework the Wongs are fulfilling their ethnic stereotype's destiny by being Asians who are martial artists.
But racial tension is part of the symbolic order of the film, and the more interesting point here is Joey's excitement at the idea of them all being black belts who could kill you with one technique.
It was only when racking my brains for filmic examples for this paper that I realised that I could make a pedantic/aficionado point about the differences between jujitsu and judo, and hence say something about Joey's ignorance. But it was only then that I thought: hang on: Wong? Jujitsu? Judo? The name Wong is Chinese, not Japanese. Jujitsu and judo are Japanese. What is going on here?
I confess, to try to learn more, I had to turn to the visuals, not the dialogue, to try to clarify the ethnic situation here – in particular, by turning to the final fight of the film – the huge gang fight on the football pitch. And, to my eyes, it looks very much like the Wongs are practicing a Chinese martial art, rather than anything Japanese.
Of course, now I could be accused of ethnic stereotyping. But I think it is more interesting to think about the ways in which the film – in the form of Joey – cares not a jot about the actual specificities of whether the Wongs and their martial arts are Chinese or Japanese.
Even if the disjunction between the family name and the ethnic attributions are a knowing joke on the part of writers, the only thing that the film cares about is the fact that true martial arts skill in a non-martial art context – especially a teen context – make the martial artists seem fearsome and cool to the other.
Films often seem to present a problem with the fact of aspiring to become fearsome and cool yourself. Unless it is a martial arts film involving large doses of training montages, the desire to become a martial artist seems very easily to very quickly transform into becoming presented as ridiculous.
One can 'be' an adept fighter. One can 'be' a martial artist. But if there is desire and training and aspiring, it seems that this is most easily depicted as comic, eccentric, perverse, weird.
Some non-martial arts films can occasionally articulate martial arts training with higher cultural values. At the end of Once Were Warriors, the central characters of a mother and two brothers come together as a family. The film is set in a poverty ravaged Maori community, and several forms of violence have been horrific throughout. The older brother has embraced a close knit gang community and is covered in Maori tattoos. By contrast, by the end of the film the younger brother has found a kind of salvation in traditional Maori martial arts training. In an affectionate scene, the older of the brothers asks the younger whether he'd like some similar tattoos. 'No thanks', says the boy, 'my tattoos are on the inside'.
But even higher cultural values can be mocked – especially if there is any kind of ethnic, racial or cultural cross-dressing involved.
If the last vestiges of all-but-lost Maori arts are presented as a symbol of a tiny glimmer of hope for the ravaged community in Once Were Warriors, any kind of cross-ethnic cultural performance of another culture's art is always going to raise eyebrows and questions. Hence, Gaylord Focker's father, played by Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers practices capoeira. Capoeira is an afro-Brazilian martial art that has a great deal of cultural and political significance as a postcolonial practice, and its practitioners and the academics who study it invest heavily in its cultural significance.
In Meet the Fockers, capoeira is reduced to the term 'dance fighting':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srV41k0NWgo
It is not 'proper fighting'. It is 'dance fighting'. The white man who invests in it is obviously a certain 'type'. What kind of type? As I have argued about this before, in the words of the song 'Pretty Fly For a White Guy', the white cultural cross-dresser or cross-performer is always going to be regarded as a 'wannabe'.
Fight Club states it plainly. Even though we see Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden practicing with nunchakus and making Bruce Lee screams; and even though we see Edward Norton's unnamed narrator character doing sit ups; even though both of them have agreed that any kind of training or exercising is a kind of lie or distraction or even masculine death; and even though Durden strikes many Bruce Lee movie poses in his final fight with Norton; even though all of this and more: the first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.
This is because doing so is emasculating. Man is action. Man is deed. Man is not words or thoughts or lack or trying and failing.
This is perhaps a large part of the preposterous attractiveness of Clarence in True Romance. For Clarence not only talks about how much he loves certain things, what those things are is overwhelmingly 'nerdy': Elvis, martial arts movies, Sonny Chiba. And yet Alabama falls for him.
Of course, if Clarence couldn't put his money where his mouth is and 'do', then the scenario of getting the girl at the outset could easily have descended into farce. But in True Romance, Clarence embodies the ultimate comic book collector film buff fantasy: Clarence gets the girl apparently because of his obsession with comic books and martial arts movies.
We can easily, quickly and tritely psychoanalyse much of this, of course – just as Fight Club does ('who would you most like to fight?', 'I'd most like to fight my father', and so on). And we can easily, quickly and tritely psychologise True Romance as being, for instance, a fantasy dramatization that amounts to the writer's own fantasy redemption of his solitary (maybe even onanistic), quite possibly boyish, quite possibly trivial, quite possibly unintelligible-to-most-girls obsession with comic books and martial arts movies.
But what is interesting to me at this point is the fact that the person that Clarence first, foremost and enduringly fantasizes about is Elvis. He says that he is not gay but if he absolutely had to fuck one guy, he would choose Elvis.
Perhaps the cool masculinity of Elvis in his fight in Roustabout speaks volumes about the status of martial arts at a certain point of time in American post-war culture. Maybe a great deal is condensed and displaced in the desire for Elvis and the desire for a certain kind of progressive internationalist masculine potency at a certain period of time. And maybe therefore, the shifting status or value attributed to Elvis in American popular culture might be indexed somehow to the shifting status of Asian martial arts in that culture.
Or maybe we can't tell. Maybe it is now well past time to remove our self-imposed blinkers, and say, ok, if we want to learn anything about the status of martial arts in any time, place, discourse, field or context, what we absolutely need to do is broaden our frames.
This is a proposition I wholeheartedly agree with. However, unlike many of the perplexed people that I asked online, I would maintain that it will remain most informative and most instructive to insist on blocking out anything that presents itself as being a 'martial arts text proper'.
Much as what becomes visible when the moon blocks out the sun in a total solar eclipse is totally different to what you can see when the sun is shining brightly, I think that there is much heuristic value in blocking out 'martial arts proper' in any exploration of the cultural status of martial arts. For, then we can be allowed explore adverts, songs, music videos, video games, newspapers, holiday brochures, comedies of all orders and mediums, discourses of science, health and sport, and so on, up to and including – perhaps particularly – children's cartoons (which I am starting to think are a kind of cultural furnace that constantly fuels children's interests in martial arts, guaranteeing the continuing simultaneous interest in and ridiculing of martial arts. We were all enjoined to love martial arts when we were kids, but in thereby becoming 'kid's stuff', they become something to be grown out of.)
But this piece has been written for a conference about film dialogue, so film dialogue is what I have tried to focus on.
However, I must confess, I have almost certainly mis-quoted several times. In a film dialogue conference, this is surely a serious crime. But it can happen so easily – even when quoting directly after viewing a scene, or even when copying and pasting from a movie quotation site, or otherwise trying faithfully to follow and work out and transcribe pieces of dialogue directly from films.
As mentioned before, I'm not even entirely sure whether the quotation in my title is correct. I'm not at all sure whether the actual line from the film is 'oh no, that's karate' (as it says online), or 'no, no, that's karate', which is what I think I hear, and what I think makes most sense in the context.
Also, as I confessed before, I am keenly aware of the capacity for my memory of dialogue to deceive me. So what is my excuse for any misquotation here? And am I right to be wondering now about how many other famous quotes and pieces of dialogue have been mis-remembered, mis-quoted and, hence, mis-read or otherwise mis-taken?
I think I recall that in his 2005 book, Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages (Mowitt 2005), John Mowitt reflects at length on the widespread belief that many people hold that at some point, somewhere, Tarzan says 'Me Tarzan, you Jane'. (Of course, true to form, I think that in my own head, this went wrong somewhere, sometime, long ago; so I may always have been in danger of believing the line to be 'You Tarzan, me Jane'… Make of that what you will.) But I think that Mowitt goes on to demonstrate that 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' was never in fact said in Tarzan films or serials. And I think that he moves from this into a reflection on the linguistic and cultural ramifications of this enormous and widespread misquotation or invented memory.
For Mowitt, if I remember correctly (it now seems wrong, or against the spirit of this rumination, to look up the exact argument here and now), the point had something to do with Western biases about the linguistic capacities (i.e., supposed incapacities) of colonial natives, and by extension anyone who 'goes native', such as the infant Tarzan.
So what might it mean for film buffs or film fans to mis-hear and mis-record dialogue from an Elvis film? Or me from Lethal Weapon? What is the difference between 'oh, no' and 'no, no'? Or between 'killer stuff' and 'killer shit'? I would say that it depends. Depends on what? Depends on the context. And what is a context and how is it to be demarcated? At the risk of being vertiginously tautological, I would say that in this context the context seems in large part to be in the mind. But whose mind? And, to quote from Fight Club quoting from The Pixies, 'where is my mind?' But I'm not even sure if the closing words sung as the end of the film proper and beginning of the theme music at the end a film technically count as 'film dialogue', even though I feel very strongly that these words are really saying something (even if it's not what The Pixies ever intended, if they ever intended anything) and that they are indeed 'talking to me', or even, now, talking through me.
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