By: Eldon
I can only hope you’re reading this in some far flung and prosperous time when it won’t make a lick of sense why I’ve just watched each and every one of The Street Fighter movies back to back.
But if you’re reading this in the unfortunate present, you probably get it.
That’s right, it’s because they fucking rule and I will accept no arguments to the contrary.
But before I spend too much time somewhere nice, I’m going to spend at least a moment discussing Todd Phillips’ Joker.
Joker is a movie about an angry man doing an impression of mental illness that will probably age just as well as Cuba Gooding Jr’s star turn in Radio.
It is two hours of beloved actor Joaquin Phoenix making strange faces, riding public transit, and occasionally murdering people while the syntax of the movie oscillates between half-heartedly criticizing our violent society but also providing all sorts of reasons why the dead people probably kind of deserved it.
Joker earned several Oscar nominations after scoring full marks for two of the most important Oscar criteria: “White guy in it” and “Portrayal of disabilities that will render this unwatchable to future generations.”
Those two are a tough combination to beat. But all the same, Joker ultimately lost the Best Picture award to Parasite, a movie so good you don’t even need to go into it with the fleeting hope that Batman might show up in order to enjoy it.
This likely baffled all five of the Fox News hosts who were almost certainly ordered to yell about it the next day on various shows with words like Angle, Edge and Protrusion somewhere in the title.
Luckily, I have both the free time and the pluck to explain to them why Joker is a mediocre film that we’ll someday regret praising in any capacity.
And I’ll do it using a series of films that came out way back when the majority of their viewers were just confused rather than elderly and confused.
The Street Fighter series and Joker have only one thing in common, but it’s an important connection. Both are about villains, and the era in which they were released greatly informs the villains they portray.
Now you might already be thinking “Joker isn’t about a villain! It’s the complex tale of a man, one man pushed too far by the hustle and bustle of modern society. A man unsure of his place in the world. Unsure even what jokes he can laugh at now that social media…”
And that right there is precisely the problem.
Joker is part of a larger trend in popular 21st century storytelling characterized mostly by the overbearing and avaricious desire to wring the story minutia out of any character that audiences are the least bit fond of until at long last, hundreds of millions of dollars later, they no longer are.
It’s the same reason that you unfortunately now know (and can’t unknow) that Darth Vader, the guy in cool armor with the spooky voice and the red laser sword from your parents’ favorite movie franchise, was once a small child, entirely devoid of a second notable characteristic.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen those movies, he might also like pod racing and yell loudly about that a couple times, but I can’t be certain.
Terry Tsurugi, Sonny Chiba’s character and the eponymous street fighter in The Street Fighter isn’t bound by any of that.
He is for the majority of the series a relentless, angry, inscrutable man who solves every problem with punches and spends the rest of his time creating problems.
Every plot revolves around the fallout over one of the times Tsurugi began paid criminal undertakings for a person or syndicate and then immediately decided, usually before the jobs were complete, that he hates that person or syndicate and they would look better punched.
Even when people are being unreasonably kind to him, Chiba does a magnificent job of showing you through body language that Tsurugi is seething with quiet rage and waiting for any excuse to murder whoever he’s talking to.
The only thing you learn about him over the course of six hours of films is from a brief flashback of his father being killed that he uses to summon the courage necessary to recover from a tremendous beating and kick an overweight, middle-aged Karate teacher in the neck.
Like most of the fights in the series it’s a fight that he started for no reason and could end at any time by simply apologizing, but instead he thinks about the time his dad died and channels it into more senseless, beautiful violence.
It’s hard for me to overstate the degree to which these movies rule.
This is largely because The Street Fighter answers to an older, simpler and far less restrictive formula for movie villains: Look good in black, Do horrible stuff, Beat up the good guys.
And when you stop to think about it, which of these is ultimately more realistic?
Arthur Fleck spends the first 45 minutes of Joker doing what is probably an insensitive impression of Tourette’s syndrome and gesticulating wildly at his troubled past before he ever gets around to killing anyone and then when he finally does you can practically see Todd Phillips hovering over his head, reminding the audience “See! It’s because of that bad stuff that happened to him. That’s why!”
This presents the illusion of narrative depth and realism, but unless you’re reading this on your third day of being alive, you know that’s not how the bad people in our daily lives actually are.
Bad people start their public lives out doing awful things, usually from a young age, and their behavior is refined and reinforced by the rewards they reap for their horrible behavior and nurtured by the fact that our society turns a blind eye to most forms of evil as long as it fits uniformly into a comfortable and well trod pattern.
Behind most of the worst people in history there is not a long trail of hard times that they tolerated until they were finally pushed too far, but rather a long trail of times in which they could and should have been stopped but weren’t because their various misdeeds hadn’t yet become inconvenient to the right people.
That’s largely the reason that the prevailing conventional wisdom of society is that bullies and rapists will always exist, but terrorists can and must be stopped at all costs.
That is not to say that bad things never happen to bad people, bad things happen to everybody. And sure, Johnny from Karate Kid probably had some stuff going on at home, but most of us have some stuff going on at home and only a small sliver of people who experience trauma channel that trauma away from art and music and future success and into kicking Ralph Maccio in the dong before gym class.
The sympathetic villain is one of the most overused, overrated tropes in modern storytelling and like bullet time and 90’s hacking sequences I’d argue that it has run its course now that the villains in our daily lives have become so cartoonish, unrestrained and obvious.
In the first twenty minutes of The Street Fighter, Tsurugi punches a man in the heart, kills his brother and sells his sister to the Yakuza. Then, when that same man shows up looking for revenge later in the film, Tsurugi is genuinely shocked and immediately plays the victim.
I don’t think you can honestly tell me that doesn’t sound like the exact moral arc a serial killer or your congressman would take upon doing something horrible and being confronted by its clear and obvious consequences.
As an aside, I should note that I did watch the original dubbed American releases of The Street Fighter, which is like having a disinterested man with a Japanese-to-English dictionary shout plot points at you from the window of a moving car.
There are several moments in the film when Tsurugi asks for “A sum of money” which I can only assume is because 1970’s translators were worried that anyone in the theater who heard the word “yen” and wasn’t just there to masturbate in the dark would angrily demand their money back after being tricked into watching “A Communist Karate picture.”
This is all to say that I might be getting some of these plot points wrong, but I saw Joker once over six months ago and stopped giving a fuck about it halfway through, so I think that about balances out my recollections.
I don’t want to suggest that realism is the hallmark of a successful film.
There are loads of movies, The Street Fighter films included, that rarely trade in reality and are still a delight.
Fiction obviously isn’t designed to bring us realistic depictions as much as it is designed to bring us depictions that feel realistic based on what we’ve experienced while simultaneously
providing us a window into many themes, events and feelings that reality could not.
The problem arises when some goob makes a film championed for its realism and down to earth aesthetic that merely mimics the well established fictional realities we’ve come to know, but with all the fun taken out to make it appear more serious.
At the end of it you’re not going to be even an inch closer to understanding what makes rotten people tick and you’re going to wish that you spent an afternoon watching Sonny Chiba punch strangers for the obvious crime of getting a massage near him. In 20 years, movies like Joker will seem every bit as silly anyway.
Splorchtown 