Femininomena

Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.

Here is Argento on Suspiria (the original Suspiria, not the compromised second draft): “In Suspiria I wasn’t primarily interested in the theme of motherhood but, rather, in women’s lives. In fact, if you want to give a deeper reading of the film, it can be seen as a vaguely lesbian story; where lesbianism has a certain importance, or, more precisely, where the relationships between women are sometimes of a lesbian nature and are characterised by power struggles.” (My best friend read a version of this quote where that last part goes “a world where the relationships between women” etc. and just said “so, any world with women in it.”) And here he is on Phenomena: “When I was thinking of Phenomena, I imagined that between 1940 and 1945 there had been a very serious incident, the war, and that the Nazis had won. After thirty-forty years, the people had wiped this dramatic event from their memories and didn't talk about it anymore. In reality though, the Nazis won the war, and life therefore has a totally different vibe, it's a world where the Nazi order won. If the movie is watched attentively, then it is obvious that, from that perspective, whoever made it was working from this principle.”

Phenomena is a movie that I like a lot, and I like it in part for the same reasons others don’t, starting with the diffuse and meandering plot (what does the knife-wielding chimp have to do with Jennifer Connelly’s insect powers? What do either have to do with the serial killer’s motive? Why is Connelly’s character, who is also named Jennifer, the daughter of a famous Italian-American actor? What’s with the extraneous argument about the Bee Gees partway through? Who knows? It’s called Phenomena, not Phenomenon!). There are, as Umberto Eco might put it, no privileged causal chains in this movie’s universe, because privileging a series of events and attempting to clarify exactly how one leads to another would, if the characters were to do it, inevitably lead them back to the Ishiguronian “buried giant” they’re all avoiding. Jennifer wears a high-fashion blinged-out Iron Cross as a statement piece and has never heard of Passover despite having a Jewish lawyer, who in turn is (rightly, as it turns out) extremely reluctant to come pick her up in Continental Europe when she’s getting tormented at her boarding school. None of this seems to bother anyone; it also oftentimes doesn’t seem to bother anyone in real life that Donald Trump and JD Vance are running a supposedly-populist political campaign enthusiastically supported by the richest people in the world, or that various Nazi and/or Stalinist and/or pedophiliac and/or wife-killing thinkers are still titans of Continental philosophy despite these things having been widely known about them for decades. (I’m not entirely innocent of this last example; I haven’t fully figured out how to account for some of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s more repellent behaviors around adolescent boys in my reception of Pasolini’s intellectual and artistic remains.)

The movie’s intense ableism, where deviations from the norm are approved or deprecated by the protagonists based on cool and special they do or don’t make someone, so angered Daria Nicolodi that she divorced Argento and vowed never to work with him again (although she would end up in Opera two years later). Yet in the Buried Giant account of what the movie is doing, this too makes perfect sense; the preteen with trisomy 13 who incites his serial killer mother becomes somewhat akin to the main character of Wright’s Native Son. At one point Jennifer sleepwalks around muttering “I must wake up!” So must everyone around her, from Donald Pleasance’s paraplegic entomologist (who explicitly spells out, at his own expense, the movie’s hypocrisy about difference while trying to make Jennifer feel better about herself) to much less sympathetic characters like the bullying schoolgirls and the serial killer headmistress and the various fascist cops.

Opera is a movie that Argento specifically did not want to be viewed as a companion piece to Phenomena, but I still think this movie informs that one in some ways. Argento respects animals more in Opera than he does in some of his earlier work; the slasher kills animatronic ravens whereas in earlier Argento one sees things like real lizards getting killed onscreen. Indeed the last shot of Opera has the heroine, Betty, freeing a lizard that is trapped under a piece of undergrowth. Phenomena required so much animal work, both with the Jennifer’s insect powers (a scene of a firefly leading her to a murder scene is a standout; this is a real firefly with a nylon string tied to it!) and with the chimp, that it’s hard to imagine it not permanently changing its director’s understanding of nonhuman life. Betty’s sexuality in Opera doesn’t fully return to the vaguely communicated lesbianism of Suspiria, since she sleeps with men and by the end of the movie is implied to have started enjoying it. There is, however, still a bloody-minded anti-civilizational separatism to the movie’s final moments, when she dissolves psychologically into a mountian meadow after everyone she loves has been murdered and her career as a dramatic coloratura probably irrevocably derailed, as indeed there is to Jennifer embracing the chimp in the final shot of Phenomena when every other character in the movie is dead.

Argento understands gender and particularly women in an interesting way, and it’s hard to tell why. He likes to present dark-haired young women escaping peril, but only just barely. Once again much like with Ikuhara, it’s impossible to really understand what cocktail of, to name just a few potential contributing factors, dysphoria, feminist sentiment, and prurience motivates this. Argento almost certainly fucked up the task of raising his daughter, enormously and sometimes in publicly knowable ways, like by casting her as Christine Daaé in his Il fantasma dell’opera. Whatever is happening with Argento Sr. and gender, or sexuality, or both, might well also be happening with Argento Jr. and through her with the late Bourdain. On the other hand, it’s perhaps best not to speculate too much about this, because I don’t actually know any of these people and there is almost certainly a lot about the lights and shadows of the famiglia Argento that would surprise me very much if I somehow learned it. In any case, gender in Argento is not done in a style that served him well in the 90s, a magical time in which beautiful young women could become famous singers for screaming vulgar threats onstage (hi, Courtney Love!; hi, Aikawa Nanase!). After a certain point he just stopped making movies that were good. Phenomena and Opera, though, individually or as a diptych, retain an odd sort of power around sex, death, and fascism, especially for people who like horror movies and can deal with almost-cartoonish gore.

Mr. Miyagi’s America

The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.

            The points of continuity and points of rupture become a little easier to identify if one allows oneself to consider some of the cliches, which, after all, are cliches precisely because they are widespread conventional wisdom. As I write this there is in my own apartment a whole stack of books on Japanese subjects from the mid-to-late twentieth century, after World War II and the Occupation but before the anime-focused Cool Japan boom of the 1990s and 2000s. We have The Inland Sea, Donald Ritchie’s travelogue about the waterways and coastal towns between Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu that presents Japan as a land of precariously-surviving tradition semiconsciously negotiating with globalized modernity; The Tale of the Shining Princess, an adaptation of Taketori monogatari whose title seems intended to imply a connection to Genji monogatari; The Makioka Sisters, the English translation of Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki, whose English paratext and reception history emphasize the same things as The Inland Sea despite the novel also containing a great deal of political content and Tanizakian cultural hobbyhorses; and The Golden Naginata, a pulp fantasy novel about Tomoe Gozen that I have not read yet, which is by an author named Jessica Amanda Salmonson and is dedicated to, among other people, Kaji Meiko.

            I have a lot of these kinds of books because I do like this visual and storytelling approach, even though I’m aware of the many things that are the matter with it. I always have liked it; as a child it sparked a lot of my earliest interest in Japanese society, before anything anime-related did. That being the case, it is surprising even to me that until recently I had not seen The Karate Kid.

            I’m going to be discussing the first three movies here, made in the 1980s and starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita. There’s a fourth movie with Hilary Swank, a remake from around 2010, and the recent TV series Cobra Kai, but these were made in somewhat later periods in terms of US-Japan cultural exchange. The first movie, which came out in 1984, is down-to-earth and in fact semi-autobiographical. Macchio’s character, Daniel LaRusso, moves from New Jersey to a Southern California community full of affluent beachy assholes; he gets bullied; then an aging Japanese handyman, the iconic Mr. Miyagi, teaches him to use karate to stand up to his bullies. At the end of the movie Daniel wins a local karate tournament and earns the respect of his main bully, whose harassment of Daniel is established to be downstream from his own karate teacher’s abusive treatment of him. Nothing in the movie is that implausible, and it’s an interesting and surprisingly intimate portrait of a certain sector of mid-80s West Coast life, even though the events on which it’s based took place decades earlier.

            Nothing about the movie necessitates sequels, but it did well enough to get them anyway—and more, as we’re seeing with the fact that Cobra Kai is still on the air almost forty years later. The sequels, as is often the way, go a bit off the rails. The stakes are higher, the characters less plausible, the conflicts continually mediated through a karate tournament for Californian teenagers. The third movie has an evil billionaire waste disposal executive who is just as invested in youth karate as everyone else is, to the point of personally backing the first movie’s evil dojo. (A lot of eighties movies have evil property management and utilities executives, a needed counterweight to the view held widely elsewhere in American society at the time that a property management or utilities executive was a type of culture hero.) The second movie, which is set mostly in Okinawa, is a bit more grounded than the third, but there are still serious problems with it that that original Karate Kid lacks, most of which boil down to the old “is this a sequel that needed to happen?” question. The Karate Kid Part II is a so-so movie; The Karate Kid Part III, a bad one (in, do not get me wrong, a very fun way, and one that continues to have a sound emotional and thematic heart slathered in ropey balderdash).

            Even watching a mediocre movie from 1986 like The Karate Kid Part II is, however, an inspiring and convicting experience after fifteen-odd years of box offices being dominated by half-billion-dollar exercises in copyright trolling that seek to resemble movies. Watching it I kept noting things that filled me with blindsided joy: what considered acting and directing! What a human touch even in the corny, implausible villains! What a shrewd decision to make the August Karate Room of Old so obviously important to Mr. Miyagi, so that even if the audience only ever spends one scene in it, they’ll care about its destruction because they care about him! This is competent moviemaking in late-twentieth-century Hollywood. Not even always that, as with the villains, although I wonder if perhaps viewers in Okinawa find it more plausible that someone who teaches martial arts to American military police could use Evil Karate to dispossess and kill people with impunity than do audiences and critics in the United States.

            With this USFJ base issue, as with other of the more geopolitical and (thus?) more moral aspects of Japan’s relationship with the United States, the Karate Kid movies take a stance that is subtle, at least for this series, but present and difficult to stop noticing once one starts. Mr. Miyagi is a World War II veteran; he served in the US Army and won the Medal of Honor, even though given the facts of his biography we are to understand that at the time of Pearl Harbor he had been in the country for very little time and possibly only slightly legally. This decorated veteran of the 442nd, a bona fide World War II hero if there ever was one, is humble or even dismissive about his war record; indeed, Daniel learns about it while Mr. Miyagi is drunk, trying to sleep, and in great emotional pain. The emotional pain is more than understandable considering that, while Mr. Miyagi fought for the United States against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, his young wife died in childbirth at Manzanar! John Kreese, the evil sensei from the first and third movies, is, conversely, an arrogant white Vietnam veteran about twenty years Mr. Miyagi’s junior. Ostentatiously self-confident, he insists on the style “sensei” despite not seeming to speak Japanese and insists on teaching a highly aggressive, deliberately unmerciful style of karate to his mostly high-status white students. World War II and Vietnam are tacitly depicted not only as different but as poles apart, opposite ends of the movies’ moral universe.

            Yet America’s role in postwar Japan isn’t presented as straightforwardly good in the second movie, as we see with the villains, who are intimately tied up with the American military presence, and with the constant presence of American military aircraft in the backgrounds of otherwise idyllic scenes. There’s a great scene early on where Daniel, reading a book about Okinawa on the plane to Japan with Mr. Miyagi, turns to him and excitedly, guilelessly says “did you know that Okinawa has the largest US air base in the Pacific?” Mr. Miyagi barely responds; of course he knows that, even though the movie makes it clear that this is his first time going home in forty-five years. It’s practically impossible to follow Okinawan affairs and broader Ryukyuan issues at all without knowing that. It’s a decisive issue in most prefectural elections, and as of this writing there has been a decade-long dispute between the prefectural government and the all-Japan government in Tokyo over moving the US base, because the prefectural government and the vast majority of the prefecture’s population want it gone entirely. So Mr. Miyagi—and Daniel, who adopts his perspective on Okinawan issues after spending time there with him—are men alone, at least within the movie’s framework; they’re American patriots who don’t always side with America, aficionados of things Japanese and Okinawan who believe that Japan and Okinawa were at one time badly in the wrong.

            Mr. Miyagi’s relatives, and most other older people in his village—not necessarily younger people or residents of the relatively large city of Naha—are presented mostly as cowed, intimidated normies. They stand up to the villains but only to an extent, in part because these are economically powerful people on whom their community is dependent. Even when Sato, the relatively-reasonable uncle, starts demolishing the entire village until Mr. Miyagi agrees to fight him in a duel, there’s only so much they feel inclined to do about it. Yet one somehow doesn’t get the sense that this is a commentary on the qualities of Okinawan people; the aesthetic of Japanese “submissiveness” is almost completely absent. Even in a scene in which Daniel and a young woman named Kumiko share a kiss over a sort of tea ceremony, we do not really get that sense. This scene could very easily have descended into a Miss Saigon-esque creepy fantasia of Oriental femininity (especially since in real life this sort of thing tends to happen with sake, not with tea; but this is the Reagan 80s, when moral panic about underage drinking among American audiences is at its height). The fact that it does not is mostly a testament to the acting, which is good in general and excellent for this type of movie.

            The demoralization that most of the supporting characters in the second movie feel may not be a commentary on the so-called Japanese character, but it certainly works as a broader commentary. Indeed most people in political situations like that on Okinawa are cowed, intimidated normies, just like most civilians in violent dictatorships, most civilians in non-violent non-dictatorships, and even people who are “caught in the middle” in our own society here in America. We could name not-particularly-pro-Israel Jewish students on college campuses throughout this great land as an especially pertinent example, one that would currently be very high-profile if the media had any interest in understanding them or knowing what they have to say. There is moral significance to this experience of things just as there is to fighting forthrightly for some side or cause or another.

            Mr. Miyagi does not need to be or for that matter want to be some kind of historical protagonist in order for his relationship with Daniel and his relationships with other Okinawan people to have a moral weight to them. He does not need to be in order for his Medal of Honor to have a real significance to it, either, even though the significance is not to him—it is to Daniel, who would have grown up on straightforward stories of World War II heroics and who clearly does not see any reason to doubt the benevolence of Reagan’s America until well into the second movie. The villains in the third movie at first use Mr. Miyagi’s war record to ingratiate themselves to him, then, later, mock it to his face. It should be noted that John Kreese is back in this movie, and that his backer Terry Silver, the above-mentioned evil businessman, was with him in Vietnam. They actively bring up World War II in conversation, to manipulate and belittle someone who fought in it. Daniel brings it up less, and Mr. Miyagi deliberately downplays it; their relationship the subject, conversely, is presented as straightforward, grateful, and, bluntly, morally sane.

            Albert Camus’s novel The Plague has a lot to say about the concept of heroism. Camus is suspicious of it, and for that matter he is as suspicious of saints as he is of heroes. I don’t share the suspicion of sanctity, which, as an abstract concept and as an ideal reality to be lived out (or lived into) I do believe exists, but with the Karate Kid movies’ treatment of war and politics I think that there is an admirably Camusian refusal to advocate going around as a self-ordained moral superman, even if you’re one of the few people in your world who’s taking a consistent moral stance on things. Mr. Miyagi’s nonfatal karate leaves people, crucially, free to make up their own minds and, when possible, see the error of their ways, even if it can sometimes seem implausible when some characters, like Sato in the second movie, actually do so.

            I am Catholic and the belief in a transcendent, abstract, absolute moral law is therefore not optional for me. But when morality becomes concretized between human persons—and little can possibly be more concrete than a martial arts movie, where moral significance is applied literally and directly to specific postures and movements of the human body—a sort of reverse alchemy happens to the moral principles that are commended to us from somewhere on high. It becomes possible for a moral decision to show greater or lesser fidelity, not only to the abstract moral law, but to the concrete human person as such. Anything that gets treated as an edge case in Kantian ethics is likely to be something of this kind. So too is the set of ways in which something like America’s military and political history during World War II can be so admirable and worthy an object of national myth-making on some levels and yet so squalid and unedifying on others. It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that the fascinating food for thought in these movies comes alongside a great deal of phoned-in, Orientalist, or just plain schlocky material. The storyline and tone of The Karate Kid and its immediate sequels support the thematics even in the trilogy’s moments of full-tilt campy hokum, not just when it is grounded and its verisimilitude is assured.