Leo D.M.J. Aurini - May 15, 2014


What are Martial Arts Films

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Luke Skywalker Megan Mooney Wily Darth Vader Jedi Eliezer Yudkowsky Colt
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Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

111.69

Word count

1,392

Sentence count

138

Harmful content

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Now, despite the title of this video, I'm actually going to be talking about two separate
00:00:10.400 yet strongly interrelated genres.
00:00:13.120 In fact, they both bleed into one another.
00:00:16.080 The martial arts genre and the samurai genre of films, the samurai, the ronin.
00:00:27.520 Both of them contain elements of the other, but both of them perfect one of the two elements.
00:00:33.840 And they really highlight the difference between the Western understanding of virtue,
00:00:40.300 of violence, of nobility, and that of Japan.
00:00:45.400 And I think the best place to start is with the samurai, is with the ronin, the warrior
00:00:54.740 lost in modernity.
00:00:58.620 The unlanded samurai, whose master no longer has a need of him, who served faithfully, but
00:01:05.980 in this modern age, we don't need military leaders.
00:01:10.060 We don't need heroes anymore.
00:01:13.200 Pack your bags and get out the door.
00:01:15.740 The man who was built to lead armies, and has no employable skills.
00:01:25.680 It's useful to contrast the ronin, the samurai without a lord, to the cowboy.
00:01:33.420 Our Western perfection of the nature of violence and independence.
00:01:40.900 Now the mythos of the cowboy, of the gun, and I am channeling heavily from the guys at Extra
00:01:47.020 Credits when I talk about this.
00:01:49.780 The mythos of the cowboy is that the gun establishes your independence.
00:01:55.780 The gun is what gives you freedom.
00:01:59.640 And we can see this in Western video games, the first-person shooter.
00:02:03.900 Where it's you acquiring guns, and improving yourself, and fighting off hordes of enemies.
00:02:11.560 The gun empowers you, and allows you to stand for whatever you choose to stand for.
00:02:18.720 It's all about freedom.
00:02:20.180 It's all about the individual.
00:02:24.020 With the samurai, it's quite a bit different.
00:02:28.140 See, the samurai weapon is, it's not a gun.
00:02:33.380 See, the gun has been described as the beautiful equalizer.
00:02:37.760 You know?
00:02:38.760 God made all men, but Mr. Colt made them all equal.
00:02:45.800 Anybody with a gun is dangerous.
00:02:48.540 Whereas the samurai sword requires mastery.
00:02:52.800 It requires specialization.
00:02:55.700 And to devote your life to learning how to use this weapon properly requires a lord who
00:03:05.240 will pay for you to learn this advanced skill.
00:03:11.600 So, the samurai, first of all, serves a cause.
00:03:16.420 There's a higher purpose, his lord, behind the samurai.
00:03:21.360 And second of all, the art of the samurai is an internal conflict.
00:03:30.260 The samurai doesn't worry about whether their cause is right.
00:03:36.660 By definition, a samurai that serves their lord well is doing the right thing.
00:03:43.820 The samurai is simply focused on perfecting their art.
00:03:49.640 And particularly in the case of the ronin, with nothing left to fight for, they fight 1.00
00:03:54.400 one another because of the beauty and the glory of battle in and of itself.
00:04:01.340 That's all they have left is pursuing their craft.
00:04:06.540 So, you see this huge difference.
00:04:13.300 Whereas the gun frees the westerner from the shackles of an oppressive society, for the samurai,
00:04:23.120 they crave that purpose.
00:04:25.580 They crave that society, and yet the ronin is denied it. 0.99
00:04:29.580 And so all they have left is pursuing self-mastery.
00:04:34.340 So, in the samurai film, the use of the sword is an internal conflict.
00:04:42.340 It is internal mastery that matters, not external mastery.
00:04:48.340 It doesn't matter who they're going up against.
00:04:51.700 It's all about them mastering themselves, controlling themselves, and not giving into temptation.
00:04:57.160 That's the true struggle of the samurai movie, as opposed to the western cowboy movie, where
00:05:03.280 the challenge is overcoming overwhelming odds.
00:05:12.100 Next, we get to the martial arts film.
00:05:20.440 Now what's the standard plot of a martial arts film?
00:05:25.020 That somebody killed my brother, so I must seek revenge upon them.
00:05:33.860 See, martial arts, again, it's a thing that requires self-mastery.
00:05:41.300 And the martial arts film doesn't involve self-defense, you'll notice.
00:05:45.580 Often enough, the martial artist will be a pacifist, up until a harm is done against
00:05:50.680 their household, at which point, that's when the gloves come off, and they go on a revenge
00:05:57.200 killing spree, demonstrating the mastery that they have over this art.
00:06:01.800 And yet the martial artist never tried to prove this mastery to anybody.
00:06:06.620 They were only studying it for their own sake.
00:06:14.180 And this is where we get into Eliezer Yudkowsky's analysis of anime.
00:06:22.820 In anime, typically, what gives the hero their power is the fact they have something to defend.
00:06:36.820 Whether it's a child, whether it's a principle, they have something to defend.
00:06:43.240 And when they fail to defend that principle anymore, that's when they run into ruin.
00:06:53.020 And we see both of these film styles being embraced in the Star Wars movies.
00:06:58.280 First of all, we've got the Jedi, and we've got their lightsaber duels.
00:07:07.560 But the duels aren't about who's best with the sword.
00:07:11.880 You know, they're not a gunfight where the cowboy proves his superiority to his opponents
00:07:18.540 by outfighting them in a gunfight.
00:07:20.940 No, it's not that at all.
00:07:23.680 In fact, the big flaw in the prequel movies was that the lightsaber duels became the whole focus.
00:07:31.540 It became all about skill, size, and power.
00:07:35.000 That's not what lightsabers are about.
00:07:39.480 Lightsabers are about the people fighting the battles.
00:07:43.260 It's about the conversation between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader.
00:07:48.180 It's what's going on between these two characters that matters.
00:07:51.840 And the lightsaber itself is just an externalization of that conversation
00:07:57.260 between the former pupil and the former master.
00:08:02.940 And even when Obi-Wan allows himself to be killed at the end,
00:08:07.020 that's because he has obtained true mastery over the art.
00:08:12.660 He does not need anything.
00:08:14.640 He says earlier, you know, nothing so clumsy and random as a blaster.
00:08:19.400 He no longer needs something as clumsy and random as the sword.
00:08:23.360 He has found the true nature of sword combat.
00:08:28.880 And so now he is free to retreat to the mountains and paint pictures of flowers for the rest of his days.
00:08:37.020 We see the martial arts aspect in the second movie with Luke Skywalker.
00:08:47.120 See, Luke Skywalker is supposed to train to be a Jedi.
00:08:51.180 He is supposed to have a principle that he stands for.
00:08:54.020 And yet, in the second movie, he lets go of this principle
00:09:00.000 and starts pursuing venal, emotional desires,
00:09:06.160 which is not befitting a samurai.
00:09:08.500 A samurai fights because a samurai fights.
00:09:12.640 A samurai seeks self-mastery over the art.
00:09:15.860 They do not concern themselves with outside objectives.
00:09:19.860 They are absolutely committed to the art of the samurai.
00:09:24.200 And yet, Luke Skywalker, he wavers.
00:09:30.020 He pursues the venal, the base, the emotional.
00:09:33.500 He starts acting like a peasant, not a samurai.
00:09:39.640 And so he goes and fights Darth Vader to no effect whatsoever.
00:09:43.820 He fails to rescue his companions.
00:09:46.120 In fact, he has to be rescued himself because of the whole thing.
00:09:50.100 Because he stopped defending his principle.
00:09:53.020 When he was standing up for his principle, he managed to destroy the Death Star. 0.60
00:09:58.180 But now that he's forgotten why he fights,
00:10:01.980 he fights for nothing.
00:10:04.280 And he loses all power.
00:10:07.480 In video games, you can see this with the Mega Man character.
00:10:12.400 Whereas the Western protagonist in a video game is always getting smarter, stronger, faster.
00:10:21.280 Getting bigger guns to kill even stronger opponents.
00:10:26.000 Defeating opponents that are stronger than he is.
00:10:29.880 In Mega Man, it's all about the art.
00:10:32.860 It's all about understanding your enemy and internalizing their methods.
00:10:39.820 Mega Man isn't about winning.
00:10:42.960 It's not about beating somebody stronger than you.
00:10:46.340 It's about understanding somebody that fights differently than you.
00:10:52.640 And about internalizing their powers.
00:10:55.400 And improving the art of combat.
00:11:02.360 Mega Man fights eight robot masters.
00:11:05.240 And then he fights Dr. Wily.
00:11:07.900 He could have fought Dr. Wily right at the beginning.
00:11:11.260 And yet he chose to fight the eight robot masters.
00:11:16.340 Because he needed to understand combat.
00:11:18.760 He needed to pursue the virtue of becoming a great warrior.
00:11:24.020 For the sake of becoming a great warrior.
00:11:28.100 And then, when he does defeat Dr. Wily, it's not even about defeating him.
00:11:32.740 Because he always rescues him at the end.
00:11:42.540 Martial arts films and samurai films.
00:11:45.780 Those, those can tell you a lot.
00:11:50.680 About the, the similarities and the differences.
00:11:54.820 Between Western culture and Japanese culture. 1.00
00:11:58.900 Greeny out, folks.
00:11:59.920 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:17.040 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:18.820 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:19.240 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:19.540 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:20.460 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:20.880 GoREAMers.
00:12:21.600 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:22.780 Greeny out. 0.94
00:12:22.940 Greeny out. 0.94
00:12:23.780 ��´ toe.
00:12:24.760 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:25.200 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:25.920 Greeny out, folks.
00:12:26.740 Greeny out, folks.