Tae Kwon Do is for faggots
Spin Kick is a
stupid, shitty movie; anyone who tells you differently is just trying to show
themselves off as a jet-setting cinecoteur enthusiast who’ll tell you his
top-ten-list of all the good Korean movies made before Better Luck Tomorrow regardless of whether you want to hear it or
not. I know that I’ve got a bad habit of finding meaning in shitty, stupid
movies, but this isn’t one of those cases – a cigar isn’t necessarily a marital
aid, y’know. I’ll gladly admit that I had a fine time watching Spin Kick, of course, but when I keep
comparing a movie to BASEketball and
finding that it comes up short in a lot of ways, it won’t do anyone any favors
to pretend we’re dealing with quality here.
Of course, I did watch it all the way to the end, and there were a bunch of times when I was duly impressed, and there were even a couple of moments when I can unashamedly say that Spin Kick totally got me. The story behind the movie (rag-tag assemblage of Sporting Misfits has to come together for the sake of Team and Institution) is older than dirt; structurally, the only difference between Spin Kick and Major League is that the former is about Tae Kwon Do instead of baseball. What’s interesting, and I’m completely willing to accept that this is the kind of thing that’s only interesting to me, is that I was able to understand Spin Kick at all. Going into the film I knew as much about Tae Kwon Do as I knew about baseketball going into, well, BASEketball, and there was never a time when I felt like the drama of the film had gone over my head.
We in the Western world (or Western-influenced world, which
in terms of culture studies is pretty much the same thing) have kind of a
skewed perspective on how movies like this work. Major League, for instance, works for us because the drama gets
played out in terms of baseball – can Charlie Sheen summon enough character to
strike this guy out? can Wesley Snipes actually back up all his shit-talking?
can a team be so totally repulsed by a woman that they’re actually motivated to
win? Movies like this work because we’re all so inured to the institution of
baseball by this point that we don’t even have to try to see how character
comes out in the actions of the game –we’ve even got a parallel news industry
at least partially devoted to explaining how this happens. More importantly,
however, we can safely assume this understanding isn’t privileged information. If
they partake in
But imagine if you’d never heard of baseball – or better yet, that you’d heard of it, but had no understanding of how it worked. It’s a pretty safe bet to say that you’d have a prohibitively harder time unlocking the mysteries of Major League. And yet this is never a problem with Spin Kick, in spite of the fact that the movie plays heavily off of how Tae Kwon Do works as both an institution and a sport. Of course the movie left me serially befuddled – I must have thought the movie was over about three times before it was actually over – but I never felt oblivious to what was going on in the film; I could always tell when the characters were stepping up and when they were getting totally crushed, and I was generally able to fill in most of the emotional blanks in between.
I think Korea may be the most interesting place on this earth about whose culture I know absolutely nothing. I mean, I know they’re a gigantic economy and that they’re way ahead of the curve technologically (I seem to recall someone telling me that South Korea has more per-capita high-speed internet connections than anywhere else in the world, although I’m far too lazy to google that fact for backup), but I can understand facts like that only in an American (or “global”, if you’d rather) context; if you asked for my opinion on the state of affairs for the lower-class Korean woman, I’d be only slightly more helpful than your average Godsmack fan. As a result, I find South Korean movies fascinating because, well, I find them fascinating, even though I can’t make a single claim as to why I should know what’s going on. Either these movies are just flat-out well-done or my psychosis isn’t funny anymore.
By way of explaining this, I have to talk about music a little bit. You may have heard of M.I.A. by this point, as the tidal wave of hype she’s currently riding is starting to carry her into the pages of Spin and Rolling Stone. What you might not know, however, is that the discussion that’s been raging on around her for the last year and change has yielded one of the more interesting categories of music that I’ve come across recently: post-rap. M.I.A.’s music, you see, takes a lot of cues from things like dancehall music and British hip-hop and Timbaland, but doesn’t necessarily demonstrate any particular loyalty to them; her music sounds like what you’d get if you asked someone with her taste who’s also really, really good at making music to make an album that sounds cool as all fuck to them. The problem, of course, is that these are all things that have deep meaning for other people, and nobody wants to see the things they keep dear held out to everyone for a nice Blueshammering.
I won’t bore you with the details of how the argument’s playing out, but I will say that at some point, someone described her sound as “post-rap world music”, and I just about fell out of my chair in envy. It’s totally defensible to talk about M.I.A.’s music in terms of rap or dancehall just like it was totally fine to talk about Remain in Light in terms of African polyrhythms; you just have to be willing to admit that it’s a work of appropriation. Arular is not a rap album, or a dancehall album, or a whatever – but it does work like that, and that’s all that matters. It’s music that works because we all know how rap works. <>
I think, then, that it’s fair to say that my attraction to South Korean cinema is so profound because it’s as close as we’ve gotten to “post-cinema”. It’s worthwhile to watch movies like Spin Kick (or better yet, good Korean movies!) because we can use them as Rosetta Stones to figure out exactly how cinema works and where we stand in relation to that. I’ve found that the best Korean movies are easily sold to other people in pop culture terms; if you know someone who likes Se7en or Kill Bill, you know somebody who wants to see Oldboy even if they don’t know it, etc. By this point, we’re all so familiar with how cinema works – both the West and South Korea – that we don’t even have to worry about making something comprehensible; we’re all fundamentally speaking the same language.
Critics have been talking about the “death of cinema” since the French New Wave ground to a halt, arguing that the medium of cinema has been steadily losing its vitality as the shock of the new wears off. It’s hard to disagree, really; by this point all we definitely know about cinema’s relationship to the world is that it can choose to either reflect reality or not reflect it at all, and there aren’t a lot of directions to go once you’ve exhausted those particular possibilities. But I categorically object to the idea that there’s nowhere left to go. I think that cinema may be uniquely equipped to give us the kind of perspective rich parents hope to instill in their kids by sending them to public schools, the kind that teaches us that simply because we’re all the same doesn’t mean we’re not very different too (and vice versa), and I think that’s a far more relevant lesson about the world and the people that inhabit it than some pedantic work of bullshit like Ray. Movies may not be able to show us anything new, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t show us anything at all. One would think that that would be the point of cinema.
Again, I don’t want to attach any undue significance to Spin Kick; I may have enjoyed it, but it
didn’t really send me anywhere (or at least that’s not the point). My guess is
that if I weren’t totally sick in the head for ontology, I would have returned
it without a second thought. It’s just that it’s rare to find a foreign movie
which you can deal with so thoroughly like a domestic one, and even rarer when
you can analyze it without being beholden to its quality; it’s thrilling to
deal with cinema as the object of a cipher rather than as a cipher itself. The
dialogue between the movies and the audience has reached the point where we
know what’s up when one of the young punks in Spin Kick says “Tae Kwon Do’s for faggots”; regardless
of what country he’s from, you know he’s a mouthy little shit who’ll end the
movie with a newfound respect for blah blah blah. We get it, thank God.
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