The Karate Kid (

1984

) ½

In many ways, The Karate Kid serves as an excellent counterpoint to Footloose (1984), which was released in the same year on a few months distant. Both are essentially stories that revolve around a stranger coming to town and disrupting the normal flow of events there. However, Ren from Footloose arrived in town in full possession of all the skills and abilities he needed to eventually win over even his harshest critics and detractors. All he needed was the opportunity to either dance, fight, talk, or seduce them into seeing his point of view. As a result, the story is less about his trials and tribulations and more about the ripple effect his arrival has on the other inhabitants of Bomont Oklahoma. In sharp contrast, The Karate Kid is also about a young man coming to a new town with Daniel LaRusso moving from Newark New Jersey to Reseda California. However, Daniel, unlike Ren, is no shining exemplar. Indeed, he’s a lot closer to the opposite. Daniel is just a regular shmuck and the only thing special about him is a few Karate classes he took at the YMCA. Tellingly, he spends the first third of the movie getting beat down, humiliated, and bullied. His story is a “zero to hero” affair where he begins the film as a hapless dweeb and through grit and determination emerges on the other side as a bonified badass.

This goes some way towards explaining why I have a marked preference for The Karate Kid over Footloose (1984). I just love this kind of story. This is why I’m a bit upset that our cultural overlords have decided that wanting to see a leading character struggle and fail before their ultimate success is sexist. Since this has become such a hotly contested cultural flashpoint thanks to the latest Star Wars trilogy, we can rest assured that I won’t see a movie following this particular template anytime soon. Fortunately, the ability of cultural tastemakers to erase or eliminate the past is still in its infancy, and only especially problematic films like Birth of a Nation (1915) or Gone with the Wind (1939) can be targeted with any degree of success. So for the time being we still have Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid.

Daniel’s problems start because of a girl, Ali with an I, who Daniel meets at a beach party shortly after arriving in Reseda. They hit it off in short order, but unfortunately Ali’s ex-boyfriend Johnny Lawrence turns up and is understandably pissed to see some pip-squeak muscling in on his girl. Johnny is the star pupil at the local karate dojo: Cobra Kai, and he is easily able to knock Daniel into next week. Daniel enjoys getting the shit kicked out of him in front of a girl he likes about as much as any teenage boy would, but unfortunately, this is just the start of things for him as Lawrence and his friends from Cobra Kai are going to make his time at his new school as unpleasant as humanly possible, going so far as to run his bike off the road and down a steep hill.

After a series of public beatings and minor humiliations, the more cynical viewers in the audience may begin to wonder why Ali would still be interested in Daniel. There’s only so many times a girl can watch a potential boyfriend get the snot kicked out of him or run away and cower from a band of bullies before she’ll move on to somebody a bit less pathetic. It doesn’t help that Daniels’ tough guy, East Coast hood rat style of flirting is more aggravating than endearing. Though I suppose there’s no telling when you’re dealing with matters of the heart like this, and Ali remains interested in Daniel despite constantly watching him get his teeth kicked in by the Cobra Kai students.

Not that Daniel doesn’t dish it out in addition to just taking it, indeed it’s his constant needling of Johnny and the other Cobra Kai students that eventually brings things to a head on Halloween night. Daniel catches Johnny in the bathroom rolling up a joint, and sensing a moment of vulnerability uses a rubber hose to dump water on his head. At this point, Johnny has had enough of Daniel’s shit and proceeds to pound him into the dirt with a series of blows that will probable leave Daniel either dead or crippled. Luckily for Daniel, the superintendent at his apartment building, an Okinawan immigrant named Mr. Miyagi, has taken a liking to the boy and is looking out for him. Even luckier is the fact that Mr. Miyagi is a karate master who is easily able to defeat not just Johnny but the whole gang of Cobra Kais he brought with him.

As is surrogate father-figure, Miyagi takes it upon himself to help Daniel through this trying time and goes with him to the Cobra Kai dojo to speak with Johnny Lawrence and his psychotic sensei, John Kreese. Maybe Miyagi was under the impression that a karate master would be reasonable and inclined to check the worst impulses of his students. This is not the case with Kreese though, if anything he seems to encourage his students to be feckless bullies, feeding them a militaristic philosophy focused on the pursuit of victory at all cost and utter contempt for those weaker. When told that his students have been beating up Daniel regularly Kreese does little more than shrug. Miyagi is only able to get Kreese to call off the Cobra Kai goons by agreeing to train Daniel and offering a fair fight in the upcoming All Valley under-18 Karate tournament.

Daniel is happy to have martial arts training as well as a couple of months without bruised ribs and black eyes, but at the start, it seems like Mr. Miyagi is less interested in training Daniel and more interested in getting him to do chores around the house. He has Daniel wax his (very impressive) collection of antique cars, sand his deck, stain his fence, and paint his house. Just when he’s fed up with Miyagi’s unorthodox training technique and is ready to quit the whole program Miyagi reveals that he has been training him how to block this entire time. From there the karate lessons get more traditional, with Daniel learning the fundamentals of balance, and finally how to throw a punch. However, he’s got his work cut out for him in the All Valley tournament since none of the Cobras are going to go easy on him.

An interesting fan theory emerged a while back that posited that Daniel was the real bully of the Karate Kid story, constantly antagonizing Johnny and inviting Johnny’s reprisal. While the fan theory in question goes a bit too far in the way it argues this point, the video does contain a seed of truth. Both Daniel and Johnny pour fuel on the fire of their rivalry, each one upping the ante in turn. Daniel is no meek little wimp that wants nothing more than to be left alone, and though he stands no chance of beating Johnny in a straight fight for 90% of the movie he still constantly starts fights with him.

I expect this characterization of our ostensible hero as a querulous, egotistical, jerk may throw some viewers through the loop even leading some to come to the absurd conclusion that Johnny did nothing wrong. It’s a natural byproduct of the Manichean way contemporary society looks at bullying. We see bullies as irredeemable monsters and the bullied and poor hapless saints with no character flaws or shortcomings beyond perhaps an unfortunate deformity. Yet there is a very good reason why Daniel is something of a jerk at the start of Karate Kid, and that’s because this film is not just about him gaining the power to crush his enemies, but also a story of him gaining the wisdom needed to use that power. Mr. Miyagi’s school of karate focuses on the idea of “balance” both in the obvious martial way of keeping your balance on your feet but also in the more abstract philosophical of keeping balance in one’s life. Balance here meaning something akin to keeping everything in perspective. When something bad happens, you feel sad or angry, but never to the point where these negative emotions consume you. Likewise, it means never prizing a material object above it’s worth, as demonstrated again and again by Miyagi’s almost compulsive generosity. It means always fighting to win but never centering your whole life around a desire to fight and a desire to win.

If Daniel was morally flawless from the start, then he would have nothing to learn aside from how to kick ass, but his journey is more complex than that. He needs to be, at the very least, a hot-head who picks fights with guys that outweigh him by fifty pounds or the kind of guy that flies off the handle after he was tripped in a game of soccer. It’s his flaws rather than his strengths that make Mr. Miyagi take an interest in him and decide to train him because with a kid like Daniel there are only two real outcomes: Either he’ll get his skull caved in by Johnny after pissing him off one too many times, or he’ll go out and learn how to fight from somebody who will teach him the techniques of violence without the philosophy of balance to control himself. In the former case, it will be a waste, in the latter case, it would be letting a monster loose on the world.

We see this play out on small scale in Daniel’s story but there’s plenty in the Karate Kid that suggests that the stakes are much higher than a high-school karate rivalry. Indeed, we have to look no further than the boys’ masters to see just how important Miyagi’s lessons about balance are. Both Mr. Miyagi and John Kreese have tremendous darkness lurking in their past. Kreese is revealed to be a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran, his obsession with winning at all costs stemming from his frustrations at losing the war of his youth. Mr. Miyagi is also a veteran, having served in WWII and even having earned a Congressional Medal of Honor. In the peak of government absurdity though his pregnant wife was shipped off to an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Because if there’s anyone I worry about carrying out wartime espionage then it’s heavily-pregnant wives of Medal of Honor recipients! Even worse, owing to complications in labor and a shortage of doctors, both Mrs. Miyagi and her baby died in childbirth. Both men have a life that is in no small part defined by the traumas and tragedies of their youths.

Yet where Kreese is a deranged lunatic who is a danger not only to himself but to any young boys unfortunate enough to enroll in his karate class, Mr. Miyagi is a patient and virtuous man who seeks to put Daniel on the right path. The difference here is that Kreese has allowed himself to be fully consumed by his trauma. The frustration of not winning the Vietnam War giving way to a monomaniacal obsession with victory that he carried with him into his Karate teachings. Miyagi is obviously devastated by his loss; what man wouldn’t be? Yet he does not allow this tragedy to define the rest of his life. The deep sorrow he feels stays with him, even decades later but it does not warp his character because at the center of his teachings is a philosophy that keeps his emotions in check. This is precisely what he’s trying to teach to Daniel, less the teenage hothead turn into another Kreese.

Admittedly, the specifics of Mr. Miyagi’s backstory strain credulity a bit, and the pedant in me feels the need to call it out. The medical facilities at Manzanar and other internment camps were primitive and spartan but the camps did have sufficient, albeit sometimes less than optimal, medical staff as a disproportionate number of Japanese-Americans had been medical professionals before their internment. In the camps trained medical professionals were allowed to continue their professions, albeit at greatly reduced pay. Indeed, given the number of medical personnel that were conscripted into the armed forces during WWII, there was a decent chance that civilians who were not interned would have had more difficulty seeing a doctor than those that were. Moreover, the internment camps naturally concentrated the population closer together, meaning nobody could stray very far from the camp hospital. Were they to say that Mrs. Miyagi and her son died from communicable illnesses like Tuberculosis (a disease that was aggravated by the close confines of the camp) it would be a far more believable story. Still, this is definitely a minor nitpick at worst and does little to undermine the merits of the film.

The other minor nitpick with Karate Kid is the ending. Sure, it’s great to see Daniel beat Johnny Lawrence with a last-minute crane kick to the face, and even better to see Johnny approach him and congratulate him on his victory in a hitherto unhinted display of sportsmanship, but then the movie just abruptly ends. It feels like there should be something more here to tie up Daniel’s story and something to resolve the lingering menace of Kreese as well as Daniel’s own hot-headed tendencies. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought so because Karate Kid 2 (1986) opens with just such a scene, taking place mere minutes after the conclusion of the first film. That scene sticks out a bit in the sequel, and it probably would have been better placed right here at the ending of the first film. Though with this film already stretching out to the 2-hour mark, I can see why the filmmakers wanted to wrap things up quickly.