The Karate Kid

1984: it was the year Truman Capote and Marvin Gaye died, when the Macintosh computer debuted, and Foucault finally relented in his campaign to resemble Lex Luther:

Five-year-old Koko had other things on her mind. That summer, she waited through the smoggy Los Angeles evening as lean, muscular black bodies, like sculpted air, one after another exploded out of the darkness only to disappear seconds later. It was the summer Olympics, and the images of those athletes, lingering long into adulthood, branded her brain with their indelible, noiseless ideal of tired people doing stupid shit for no reason, an ideal to which, to this day, she aspires.

Earlier that summer, Koko had known another reckoning of sacrifice and the indomitable spirit. In June, accompanied by her big brother, she marveled at a young Ralph Macchio and his dour mentor. She also wanted to kick ass and be a vessel for ancient Oriental wisdom. From that moment, Koko resolved to find an Okinawan and harass him into disclosing the truths of his noble culture. That goal, so it goes, would wait ten more years to be achieved, and when at last it was accomplished, its executor would not be a shriveled old islander but a black ex-deejay from South Carolina.

The Karate Kid is a marvelous movie for many, many reasons. It develops its plot slowly and patiently. Its characters, even the hostile ones, have rich, manifold personalities with which we can sympathize. Even Johnny Lawrence, the archvillain, proves in the end to be a simple, common kid and not a pathological dick. The film's psychological arc is expertly raised, and each of the story's interconnected minor plots increases the emotional context of every other, engineering in any gesture quiet, often unnoticed responses to pressures introduced in complementary scenes. Moreover, we care for these characters. Their words, voices, reactions, desires, and situations we feel to be real, their conflicts with themselves and with each other ordinary enough to be believed but painful enough to be regretted.

The film's sense of place--the dried food on the collar of L.A. that is Reseda--is its unacknowledged soul. Even those who have never lived in Southern California will feel its hazy, industrial heaviness and post-urban ennui. Everything Daniel experiences--the whitewashed, oceanic buildings, the open soccer field, the elephantine waterslide at Golf 'n Stuff--we also experience, not broadly with our minds but specifically with our senses. With a inquisitive keenness that would impress Robert Frost, the story unravels its design within a particular place and time. Concreteness renders the plot graspable in a physical sense, allowing us, by the imagination's skill in converting observations into experiences, to share and participate in the lovely fable. Everything, even the movie's quaint racism, it earns with diligence, integrity, and above all patience. Patience. Not a common quality in popular art.

I haven't seen the new Karate Kid starring Jackie Chan as what I can only assume is a pedophile--look at that mustache--and Will Smith's androgynous spawn in a role so freshly minted you can smell the money with which he bought it. And I don't plan to. The underdog trains on the Great Wall of China. What does that tell you? Where the original Kid was modest, the knockoff is imperious; where the old was crafted, the new is manufactured. The first taught us specific lessons, while the latest sells us generic truths. How do I know? Because he trains on the Great Wall of China. With Groucho Chan.

And what is that, an umbrella? And those colors: red, white, and blue! In China! I wish I could at least lament Jackie Chan's fall from Parnassus, but considering where he started, really, he hasn't fallen very far. To the new Kid I refer you to William Hazlitt's review of The Statesman's Manual by S.T. Coleridge, published in 1817, and assign the grade disfiguring violence with an umbrella. To the original, which gave me so much and asked for so little, an A. (If you think it deserves something lower, consider the light touch with which the movie handles its drunken Manzanar episode, and the lonely, fledgling independence of the following scene.)