Kung Fu Factory

by Crimefactory

  As Lee Horsley observes in The Noir Thriller, the noir narrative often takes place as “a specific time bound struggle with doubtful meanings in a world of deliberate deceptions.” It is also a subjective genre which relies not only upon the environment and circumstances of the narrative but also the protagonist’s reaction and interpretation of the events occurring within the social space which surrounds him or her. In the world of noir, often the “utter disintegration of the human” is required in order for truths to be exposed and for the individual to either be redeemed or, more commonly, destroyed.

  These elements of noir are beautifully embodied within the “sweet science of bruising,” for what is it to feign a left jab and lure your opponent into a straight right? A feint is a lie crafted to deceive and the boxer, like any character of noir, must learn to read the lies of his opponent faster than his opponent can weave them while constantly constructing his own if he is to have any chance of leaving the ring, or in the case of the noir protagonist, emerging from the events which surround them, victorious.

  In On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates comments on how inconceivable the punishment a fighter must endure – to the mind, body and soul – is to the average person. The boxer must be geared to face the reality and consequences of this physical and mental destruction whenever he steps into the ring. He must also confront the possibility of defeat and the sometimes irreparable damage to ego that comes from being brutally beaten by another.

  Rocky illustrates all of this and many other elements common to the noir genre. The reality of the social position of the protagonist, Rocky Balboa, is that of the outsider. He is employed by a local gangster as a collector, a hired goon paid to break men who don’t repay their debts. However, the audience is expected to ignore the darker side of his character and instead focus upon his down-to-earth and kind-hearted nature. Yet even his innocent simplicity is, in part, the result of being “punch-drunk” – an obvious consequence of being repeatedly beaten in and out of the ring. Rocky brain-damaged, is forced to rely solely upon his body and his will in order to prove himself.

  Rocky’s status as an outsider is also compounded by the constraints of his poverty. His claustrophobic one-room slum apartment is permeated with his failure, stemming from his inability to utilise the only tools he has to escape his status; namely the strength of his body and his skill as a fighter. Noir as a whole is riddled with guilt and Rocky's particular guilt stems from his failure to capitalise on his talents and manifests in his lack of conviction in his ability to win.

  From the moment he is offered a shot at the Heavyweight title by challenging Apollo Creed, Rocky recognises the futility of the fight and initially refuses. Yet despite this initial reaction, Rocky knows that cannot continue the way he is – slowly decaying in his urban environment, knowing that both time and nickel-and-dime fights will soon leave him unable to fight. And without the fight, what does he have left?

  Challenge accepted, Rocky pushes his body to the limit, conditioning himself to take unimaginable amounts of punishment in order to simply “go the distance” in a fight he knows he cannot win:

  “I can’t do it. I can’t beat him...I mean who am I kiddin’?

  I ain’t even in the guy’s league...It really don’t matter if I

  lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my

  head either. Cos all I want to do is go the distance. And if I

  can go that distance...I’ll know that I weren’t just another

  bum from the neighbourhood”

  This is Balboa’s darkest hour – here, the night before the fight, he openly admits to himself and to his partner Adrian that he will be beaten.

  And he is.

  It is common for works of noir to end bitterly and, in doing so,focus upon a grim or sardonic reality as opposed to the positive and uplifting. There is no denying that the finale of Rocky is an uplifting moment but it is also a moment which, similar to most noir, subverts the Hollywood formula by rejecting audience expectations; in this case by not only having the protagonist lose, but also by having him reveal the ending well in advance.

  Rocky follows Balboa as he navigates his way through a dark and uncaring world and, like any good example of noir, it is only by confronting fear and guilt and by being broken that he is able to uncover the truth about himself and the world around him.

  Man Goes Crazy, Man Transforms, Violence Ensues

  Shinya Tsukamoto’s

  Tokyo Fist by Cameron Ashley

  In the climactic scene of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist, a main character is beaten so badly that he is rendered virtually post-human, a spurting, swollen, monstrous thing, appalling to those who paid to watch him fight. He doesn’t care- he raises his arms and bellows in triumph as loudly and clearly as his mashed, ruined mouth will allow. He’s alive in a way his audience is not. There is no vicarious thrill of the fight for him – metamorphosed by the fight, he is the fight.

  On the surface, it’s a pretty simple, oft-told story: milquetoast, attempting to win back the girl he’s lost, mans-up in the face of greater, more imposing masculinity. Pretty much as formulaic as it gets. However in Tokyo Fist, writer-director-actor-practically-everything-else-too, Shinya Tsukamoto brings his particular thematic preoccupations to this well-worn plot and creates arguably the most unique and twisted piece of fight cinema ever.

  Tsukamoto is best-known for the bizarre industrial body-horror of the groundbreaking Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). A post-humanist’s wet dream, Tetsuo features body modification on an epic scale, bizarre fetishism, man-machine melding, an industrial score and relentless breakneck editing. Endlessly influential, Tetsuo was followed by Tetsuo II: Body Hammer in 1992 and several lesser-regarded efforts before Tsukamoto returned to form with Tokyo Fist in 1995. Although superficially a boxing movie, Fist contains all the Tsukamoto hallmarks – the body modification, the fetishism, the industrial score. In fact, in his review of Tsukamoto’s 2009 Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (found here: http://www.beyondhollywood.com/tetsuo-the-bullet-man-2009-movie-review/ ) Todd Rigney compares the similarity of Tetsuo 3 to the original by saying, “Man goes crazy, man transforms, violence ensues,” but this is a thematic pattern not just limited to the Tetsuo movies. Flesh may slam into flesh instead of metal, but Tokyo Fist is very much a product of the same mindscape as its maker’s preceding work.

  It’s a film that’s themes allow it to also fit snugly next to the work of David Cronenberg and JG Ballard. In fact, Tokyo Fist is, in many ways, a Japanese Crash with fists instead of cars and fights instead of fucks.

  Opening with the sound of punches rattling off a speedbag, hinting at the industrial beat to come, the film’s first image is of perhaps a dozen fighters together in a dimly-lit ring, shadow-boxing like pistons in some great machine.

  Tsukamoto himself plays Tsuda Yoshiharu, an insurance salesman who’s not only watching his father die but is also worried that something is physically wrong with himself. A typical salaryman, everything is an insult to Tsuda’s manhood: he’s bossed around by his office-dwelling superiors, his girlfriend Hizuru (a brave performance by Kaori Fujii) flaunts her sexuality in magazines (whilst their own relationship is sexless) and insists that she can continue working after their impending marriage to support them both. Hobbled by his existence, Tsuda is constantly trapped in tiny interiors. His exteriors are always framed against a backdrop of glass and steel or broken down industrial sites. He’s bored and lost and dehumanised by the landscape and his need to function within it.

  A chance encounter with a former high school junior, Kojima Takuji (played by Tsukamoto’s own brother Koji), propels the plot forward. Kojima, now a boxer, takes an interest in Hizuru and, faced with this odd man with his hard, strong body, Hizuru responds to his advances.

  Interestingly, at the gym, Kojima himself is out-manned and ridiculed by his trainers for being “soft” (a label Hizuru applies to Tsuda after feeling Kojima’s firm muscles). After his first scuffle with the now-jilte
d Tsuda, however, Kojima is transformed into a monster of ripped-muscle and sinew, empowered and energised through this conflict. It’s a sudden, surreal, metamorphosis -- suggested by mood and acting rather than special effects -- and gives us perhaps the first real glimpse of the twin realities at play in the film; the “dream world” created by the city and the “embodied” world created through pain and violence, rage and conflict.

  In an interview with Mark Schilling (found here: http://japanesemovies.homestead.com/tsukamoto.html), Tsukamoto says:

  “... I was saying that this body of ours is not a dream in the concrete city, that it really exists. I was stressing the feeling you get in boxing, of being hit. When you get hit the pain is not a dream -- you know you're alive! I was into violence, into people who are looking for proof that they were alive in the city by experiencing suffering and pain.”

  The city Tsukamoto presents us with in Tokyo Fist is a Tokyo stripped of its trademark neon and cartoon garishness – it is a hazy blue-grey, a drab architectural trap of concrete, steel and cyclone fencing. Tsukamoto also strips the city of much of its bustle, people seemingly only existing as shuffling salarymen, wandering shoppers on an endless commute or as ripped, shadow-boxing animals, clustered together in the tiny boxing gym, furiously sparring. It’s a world primarily populated by our trio of characters, for the most part, alone in this world as their psychotic love-triangle plays out. It is at this point, that certain similarities between Tokyo Fist and JG Ballard’s Crash become apparent – the numb, empty existence of the day-to-day world, the unveiling of a new “reality” thanks to an encounter with an unusual psychopathology, the re-territorialising of the body to suit this new reality through extreme measures, the increasing distance from, and inability to relate to, the previous “existence.”

  In fact, Kaori Fujii plays Hizuru as flickering between the kind of bored, affectless numbness that Debra Unger gave Catherine Ballard and the intense post-human freedom that Rosanna Arquette gave Gabrielle in David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of Crash.

  Hizuru, enamoured with Kojima’s physicality, attracted to the violent, embodied reality he represents, begins her own physical transformation, tattooing and piercing herself to greater and greater extremes, often in the most painful ways possible. Both Tsuda and Kojima become oddly feminised in her presence, particularly as her transformation becomes more intense. Hizuru becomes something of an emotional dominatrix, cold and aloof with both men who, in turn, want nothing more than just to please her. In her presence they are frequently weak and insecure and the further into her own transformation she goes (piercing herself with iron rods), the more this increases. At one point, Hizuru even says to a cowering Kojima (as she towers over him like something from a fetish video, hands on hips, powerful and very much alive), “You’re not scared of me, are you?”

  Both men, however, come to life at the boxing gym. Tsuda, who shows up there to train alongside his rival in preparation to destroy him, becomes so transformed by his own increasing physicality that he begins to switch roles with his rival – it’s Tsuda who slowly becomes a fistic monster, going from a man who can barely swing his gloves to a pugilistic machine of such demented focus that he utterly destroys a sparring partner, screaming “KOJIMMMMAAAAAA!” as he does so.

  As our sympathies surprisingly shift towards Kojima, facing down Tsuda, dealing with an increasingly bizarre Hizuru, having his next professional fight set up against a legitimate killer named Kumugaki, we find out that Kojima and Tsuda have more of a history than first thought.

  After witnessing the murder of a young girl, the then-high school students attempted to hunt down her killers and exact some violent retribution. The police found the killers before the boys, so Tsuda and Kojima vowed to become consummate fighters, so that when the killers are released, a better prepared and far more lethal pair will await them. It’s a vow Kojima took incredibly seriously. Tsuda, not so much, reneging and creating for himself instead a life of insurance sales and corporate drudgery, becoming, in Kojima’s words, a “nobody.”

  It’s a relationship that has been defined and contained within a context of violence from the get-go and as the blood spurts and pools like a ‘70s samurai flick and faces swell and grotesquely burst with each blow, pain becomes the only thing that all three characters truly share. The film’s violence is outlandish and cartoony, with rivulets of blood and snotty goo, yet it’s perfectly suited to the surrealistic edge the film has and at the same time it’s perfectly, typically Japanese in its extreme, over-the-top presentation. Despite the black humour, the dark irony, the fight scenes are still brutal and grotesque. People punch with either mechanical, piston-like precision, or swing wild animalistic haymakers. There is nothing graceful about these battles – Tokyo Fist is concerned with punch thrown and impact felt and resulting damage. That’s it.

  Before the inevitable showdown with Kojima, Tsuda is beaten into a thing unrecognizable by Hizuru. It’s a moment of violent catharsis and revelation for both characters. It’s also an oddly tender moment, even in its perversity – Tsuda seeks pain, Hizuru gives it to him. It’s more intimate than any other sequence featuring these two characters. Tsuda laughing as he explains how much healthier he feels these days, even though he looks like Sloth from The Goonies after Hizuru’s assault, is as honest a scene as we get from the character. Conversely, in a sex scene between Hizuru and Kojima, Hizuru simply lies there like a corpse beneath Kojima, until he yanks on a nipple piercing to such extent it causes her pain. From there, Hizuru, aroused, becomes the dominant sexual partner.

  Tsukamoto’s skill at weaving all his conflicts and complex relationships together, building the tension and deferring the inevitable conflict is masterful and as the film builds to its somewhat surprising final bout, the blood gets thrown about in buckets, leaking faucet-like from wounds on misshapen heads, and our characters’ metamorphoses are completed.

  If you haven’t seen Tokyo Fist, do. It looks like it was made for about ten dollars, it’s initially off-putting and jarring in both style and content, but persevere, let it into your head and you will be surprised by its power, how way ahead of its time it was and how it twists an old fight plot, and its characters, into something strange, new and post-human.

  Author BIO’s:

  Christa Faust, the Currently undefeated Women's Flyweight Pulp Fiction Champion Christa Faust is the author of eleven novels, including the Edgar and Anthony award nominated MONEY SHOT and the newest Angel Dare book CHOKE HOLD, forthcoming in Fall of 2011. She lives and fights in Los Angeles.

  Anthony Neil Smith is a twenty-fourth level master of the martial arts technique known as "Lazy Punch". In it, the warrior uses the power of his own slovenliness to stay out of fights altogether, thus winning through avoidance--and his big ass mouth. Yeah, you heard him. Want to test the Master? Cool, yeah, let's do this. Aw, too bad he'll be out of town for, like, ever. (See? Masterful. But at the higher levels, one can do the same thing without even articulating an excuse!) He's pretty sure it started in New Orleans in late July, when the air is so thick that all battles are fought in the mind, with shrimp and cold beer. Check out his website: http://anthonyneilsmith.typepad.com, and his sweet labor of love http://plotswithguns.com. Buy his books. Do it, or he will sooooo defeat you in his mind.

  Garnett Elliot: Mr. Elliott lives and fights in Tucson, Arizona. Recent two-fisted stories have appeared in Beat to a Pulp (including the red-hot anthology Beat to a Pulp: Round One), Plots With Guns, Thuglit (the final issue), and Yellow Mama.He's not as bad-ass as he looks. Which is to say, he's not bad-ass at all.

  Jimmy Callaway lives and works in San Diego, CA. His lifetime fighting record is 1-3. Please visit attentionchildren.blogspot.com for more.

  Michael S. Chong has loved martial arts since he first saw old Shaw Brothers wushu films as a child (Five Deadly Venoms anyone?). Although he has never mastered any martial arts, stereotypical views from ignorant bullies (Asians all know it) have saved his ass on more than on
e occasion.

  Matthew J. McBride has known first hand the cruel unforgiving fists of sucker punching cocksuckers. He’s been beaten, heard his bones break. If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s never leave the house without a murder weapon.

  When he’s not being attacked, he lives on a farm outside the rolling hills of Hermann, Mo, with his wife Melissa & his bull Hemingway. He’s written two unpublished crime novels.

  Frank Bill was born and raised by the southern Indiana Lotus Society and trained in the arts of Black Tiger and Ng Family Chinese Boxing. His first of two books, Crimes in Southern Indiana, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2011. Check him out at Frank Bill's House of Grit.

  Duane Swierczynski was trained in the art of "Mad Monkey Kung Fu" from birth. No, literally, from the moment he was plucked from the womb, and the doctor attempted to slap him, and the infant Swierczy used the umbilical cord to trap the doc's wrist before delivering a powerful blow to the man's Adam's apple. (He was able to continue delivering children, but was unable to speak in anything other than a hoarse whisper, which gave him the reputation of being the calmest obstetrician on the East Coast.) Swierczynski gave up a life of mayhem-for-hire to settle down and write violent crime novels, including EXPIRATION DATE and the forthcoming FUN & GAMES. He lives in Philadelphia. Possibly.

  The Bruce Banner of noir, Cameron Ashley cries during movies, loves Morrissey and makes a delightful vegetarian lasagne, but don't make him angry, you won't like him when he's angry...