What are Martial Arts Films
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Summary
In this episode, I discuss the similarities and differences between the Japanese martial arts genre and the Western cowboy film, the samurai, and the samurai film, samurai: The Ronin. I talk about the difference between the Western understanding of virtue and the Japanese understanding of violence, and how they are similar.
Transcript
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Now, despite the title of this video, I'm actually going to be talking about two separate
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The martial arts genre and the samurai genre of films, the samurai, the ronin.
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Both of them contain elements of the other, but both of them perfect one of the two elements.
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And they really highlight the difference between the Western understanding of virtue,
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And I think the best place to start is with the samurai, is with the ronin, the warrior
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The unlanded samurai, whose master no longer has a need of him, who served faithfully, but
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in this modern age, we don't need military leaders.
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The man who was built to lead armies, and has no employable skills.
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It's useful to contrast the ronin, the samurai without a lord, to the cowboy.
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Our Western perfection of the nature of violence and independence.
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Now the mythos of the cowboy, of the gun, and I am channeling heavily from the guys at Extra
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The mythos of the cowboy is that the gun establishes your independence.
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And we can see this in Western video games, the first-person shooter.
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Where it's you acquiring guns, and improving yourself, and fighting off hordes of enemies.
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The gun empowers you, and allows you to stand for whatever you choose to stand for.
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See, the gun has been described as the beautiful equalizer.
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God made all men, but Mr. Colt made them all equal.
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And to devote your life to learning how to use this weapon properly requires a lord who
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There's a higher purpose, his lord, behind the samurai.
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And second of all, the art of the samurai is an internal conflict.
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The samurai doesn't worry about whether their cause is right.
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By definition, a samurai that serves their lord well is doing the right thing.
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The samurai is simply focused on perfecting their art.
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And particularly in the case of the ronin, with nothing left to fight for, they fight
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one another because of the beauty and the glory of battle in and of itself.
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That's all they have left is pursuing their craft.
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Whereas the gun frees the westerner from the shackles of an oppressive society, for the samurai,
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They crave that society, and yet the ronin is denied it.
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And so all they have left is pursuing self-mastery.
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So, in the samurai film, the use of the sword is an internal conflict.
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It is internal mastery that matters, not external mastery.
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It doesn't matter who they're going up against.
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It's all about them mastering themselves, controlling themselves, and not giving into temptation.
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That's the true struggle of the samurai movie, as opposed to the western cowboy movie, where
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Now what's the standard plot of a martial arts film?
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That somebody killed my brother, so I must seek revenge upon them.
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See, martial arts, again, it's a thing that requires self-mastery.
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And the martial arts film doesn't involve self-defense, you'll notice.
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Often enough, the martial artist will be a pacifist, up until a harm is done against
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their household, at which point, that's when the gloves come off, and they go on a revenge
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killing spree, demonstrating the mastery that they have over this art.
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And yet the martial artist never tried to prove this mastery to anybody.
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And this is where we get into Eliezer Yudkowsky's analysis of anime.
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In anime, typically, what gives the hero their power is the fact they have something to defend.
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Whether it's a child, whether it's a principle, they have something to defend.
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And when they fail to defend that principle anymore, that's when they run into ruin.
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And we see both of these film styles being embraced in the Star Wars movies.
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First of all, we've got the Jedi, and we've got their lightsaber duels.
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But the duels aren't about who's best with the sword.
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You know, they're not a gunfight where the cowboy proves his superiority to his opponents
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In fact, the big flaw in the prequel movies was that the lightsaber duels became the whole focus.
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Lightsabers are about the people fighting the battles.
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It's about the conversation between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader.
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It's what's going on between these two characters that matters.
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And the lightsaber itself is just an externalization of that conversation
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between the former pupil and the former master.
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And even when Obi-Wan allows himself to be killed at the end,
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that's because he has obtained true mastery over the art.
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He says earlier, you know, nothing so clumsy and random as a blaster.
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He no longer needs something as clumsy and random as the sword.
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And so now he is free to retreat to the mountains and paint pictures of flowers for the rest of his days.
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We see the martial arts aspect in the second movie with Luke Skywalker.
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See, Luke Skywalker is supposed to train to be a Jedi.
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He is supposed to have a principle that he stands for.
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And yet, in the second movie, he lets go of this principle
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They do not concern themselves with outside objectives.
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They are absolutely committed to the art of the samurai.
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He starts acting like a peasant, not a samurai.
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And so he goes and fights Darth Vader to no effect whatsoever.
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In fact, he has to be rescued himself because of the whole thing.
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When he was standing up for his principle, he managed to destroy the Death Star.
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In video games, you can see this with the Mega Man character.
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Whereas the Western protagonist in a video game is always getting smarter, stronger, faster.
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Getting bigger guns to kill even stronger opponents.
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Defeating opponents that are stronger than he is.
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It's all about understanding your enemy and internalizing their methods.
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It's not about beating somebody stronger than you.
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It's about understanding somebody that fights differently than you.
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He could have fought Dr. Wily right at the beginning.
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And yet he chose to fight the eight robot masters.
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He needed to pursue the virtue of becoming a great warrior.
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And then, when he does defeat Dr. Wily, it's not even about defeating him.
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About the, the similarities and the differences.
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Between Western culture and Japanese culture.
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