Apologia for Jaden and Willow Smith, Part 1: Emotional review of one scene in THE KARATE KID (2010)

In THE KARATE KID, Jackie Chan is a broken man because he killed his wife and son in a car accident while he and his wife were arguing (though I don’t think Jackie Chan says explicitly that they are his wife and son, and indeed he talks about them with a kind of reverent distance as if he had been the woman’s secret lover and the son’s secret father, which is not the sort of thing one is exposed to in what is supposedly a children’s movie).

Throughout the film Jackie Chan gives Jaden Smith looks that I knew carried more, far more, than fatherly affection or mentorly pride. Looks of practiced self-loathing and real curiosity, and yearning yearning yearning most of all.

In one of the first scenes we see Jackie Chan’s face, framed in a window. Jackie Chan is gazing at Jaden Smith in the foreground with one such look.

For me, the relationship between the two could have become something like Jean Reno and Natalie Portman’s relationship in LÃ-ON.

In the scene during which we find out Jackie Chan’s secret pain, Jaden Smith comes across Jackie Chan in his house. Jackie Chan is drunk. He is smashing the car he has been fixing throughout the movie, the car that has been lodged in the screen like a tumor all this time, the car that has been like the Chekhovian gun, whose appearance in the first act foretells a disaster in the third.

Having smashed the car quite well, Jackie Chan limps into the driver’s seat. Jaden Smith gets into the passenger seat. Jaden Smith looks at photographs of the dead woman and the dead boy and the original smashed car. Jackie Chan says he has been restoring and destroying a car for years.

Endless reproductions of the trauma. Copies of the trauma. Knock-offs of the trauma. Made in China.

I know the device of the unrecoverable wife, the unrecoverable child, is used too often, satisfying the need to sacrifice unimpeachably virtuous or unimpeachably evil women (and children, though I am less bothered by the sacrifice of children) on the altar of masculine pain (Hello, INCEPTION), leading to successful redemption, self-forgiveness and resumed productivity.

How many women and children have to die to make him “sensitive,” “complicated.”

And it is used that way here; I cannot defend it, it beats me, too.

Jackie Chan starts to talk about his pain. It is all very moist and awkward. Jackie Chan is really crying. The lines he says are not sophisticated or poignant. In fact they are full of messy cliche and groping and bad ways of saying important things and failures and his life as failure and gushing. His face is covered in not-entirely transparent snot. He even starts clumsily singing a song that his dead wife or lover used to sing.

We do not want to see this scene in THE KARATE KID and I am astonished to see this scene in THE KARATE KID without knowing exactly how to explain my astonishment. I am astonished, and happy, to see someone who is so damaged and so embarrassing and so sticky in THE KARATE KID.

Happy, perhaps because this is Jackie Chan, who is such an icon. (Though part of his iconhood is his own clumsiness and gleeful self-sabotaging, so it isn’t that dramatic a shift in image, I suppose.)

Perhaps also because it sort of seems as though Jackie Chan has been wanting to do this for a while—there is something in the eagerness and ease with which he starts weeping. He is really going for it. I suppose that is a trope, too; action heroes who show their tender sides, only to cast into greater relief the pre-established toughness, virility, restraint. Still, Jackie Chan’s performance is shabbier, more abject, and carries in it far more ardor, than, say, Schwarzenegger smiling gently at his daughter Alyssa Milano in between firing rocket launchers.

The only other action star I can think of who really understands the abject is Jean-Claude Van Damme. For more, please read this article, “Van Damme and the Action Stars”, by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. I still have to write an emotional review of JCVD.

Throughout THE KARATE KID, Jackie Chan walks around like some kind of Quasimodo, limping and hunched and near-mute. He almost certainly smells, like “weird exotic food,” like fermented and oversalted things. He is the handyman in the building in Beijing—“Beverly Hills Luxury Apartments;” American kitsch in Asia; a fresh prince; the passing down of a scene in which a young man quick with a joke steps out of a taxi before an intimidating building—where Jaden Smith and his mother now live. And as the building handyman Jackie Chan brings up all sorts of unfair associations with perverts, pedophiles and weirdos. He also sports a ragged moustache, which adds gravely to this impression.

Jackie Chan is nearly always dressed in a denim shirt, jeans and newsboy cap ensemble which looks very much like the outfit worn by CCP members (and occasionally old Chinese men); the Mao jacket, the hat. The person I watched the film with said that the outfit was branded with Adidas. But I did not notice this.

Jackie Chan seems like a ghost during the whole movie, an embarrassing, creepy ghost with real mucus in his ghost orifices.

The movie is two and a half hours long. The glut of it is also astonishing.

After telling his tragic story to Jaden Smith, Jackie Chan folds over onto the steering wheel and now begins to sob freely into his hands—we now realize he was restraining himself before—with all sorts of inelegant gasps and moans and sniffles. Jaden Smith wipes at his face and seems ill at ease. We are all ill at ease. People in children’s films aren’t normally this sloppy-wet, are they? And certainly people of color in children’s films do not have this many feelings. Especially when they are the stars. But the film does not look away once.

Suddenly Jaden Smith leaves the car and for a moment I think he is just abandoning Jackie Chan there, in his icky wretchedness, to go home. And I am horrified and ashamed by the harshness of American youth.

But then two small rope bracelets come in from the right side of the screen to hook over Jackie Chan’s fingers on the steering wheel. Jackie Chan looks up in bewilderment. Jaden Smith is there, with two bamboo poles fitted at the end of with rope bracelets. In a previous scene Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith used these poles to practice. The practice was meant to train Jaden Smith on how to connect with another person’s movements. How to be beholden to another person. How to be unable to move without moving another a person. How to know the violence of your body in the world, your body as it acts upon another body.

And so Jackie Chan is drawn as if in a trance out of the car. He does not seem to know what is happening or where he is going and we do not know what is happening or where he is going. The light in the scene (the car’s headlights) already makes everything in the scene look submerged in water, so it is as if Jaden Smith is drawing Jackie Chan out of his own drowning. The movie has really gone this far.

Jaden Smith has a solemn expression on his still-wet face as he walks backwards, to guide Jackie Chan, as he stumbles forwards. Jaden Smith looks old and unbelievably tiny and fearful and determined to be kind.

I can imagine as a young girl it would be possible to fall in love with Jaden Smith for this look alone.

Jackie Chan is still sniveling, he has to wipe his eyes and cheeks several times. It is all so moist and untidy. Pat Morita would never look like this. Jet Li would never look like this. Someone would shoot the scene again and again until it was perfect. Someone would say, as the director of FANTASTIC FOUR apparently said to Jessica Alba: “It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica… Don’t do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.”

Wordlessly, Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith begin to practice. They are illuminated in a plainly theatrical, even operatic, fashion by the car’s headlights against the wall.

The music tells me very clearly to be moved and I am moved. I am so moved. It is here that I am convinced I am watching a great love story unfold. Why guide someone out of the wrecked car. Why teach a foreign boy kung fu. Why be painful. Why be unable to move without moving another person. Why be beholden. Why be held. Why hold.