Martial Cinema Tropes
The advent of the sport called “mixed martial arts” was a pivotal point in the history of the wider culture of the martial arts, and more importantly also marked a significant alteration in the perception of the martial arts that is held by the huge fraction of people who have no real experience in them; but who, being humans, with quirky human brains, are not slow or shy about developing opinions; opinions often shaped by nothing more solid than pop-culture, or in other words “martial cinema tropes.”
As a matter of fact, before the aforesaid dawn of the cage fighting era brought at least one form of the martial arts into nearly everyone’s living room; the impressions, ideas, and understanding of the manifold martial arts styles and methods that the uneducated person had was usually derived from pop culture; i.e. movies, television, and books.
Judo Chop!
There is a reason that when Mike Myers’ ironically silly 60s spy character, Austin Powers, would say “Judo chop!” before striking a bad guy in the neck with the edge of his hand, the audience would “get the reference” and laugh.
The first Austin Powers movie came out in 1997. That means that many people in the audience would have seen a lot of TV and movies in the Sixties, which were replete with examples of this misunderstood and badly portrayed “technique.”
They were “primed” for the ironic joke.
Probably beginning with James Bond films, you could also see examples of the “judo chop” in the original Star Trek TV series, Get Smart, and even the Flintstones! The character executing it would, usually employing a backhand motion, strike his opponent to one side of the back of the neck with the radial side of his stiffened hand. Ironically, this is just about the ONLY part of the human neck with thick enough muscle tissue that you can strike it with at least slight to moderate force and expect to do little or no damage.
That’s not a coincidence, but more on that later.
In reality, if you hit the FRONT of the neck you are risking damage to the windpipe and larynx, with consequences ranging all the way up to fatal.
Hit the very back of the neck and you are striking the cervical spine, again with potentially dire consequences.
Hit the side, or the side near the front and you are striking near the carotid sinus and the vagus nerve. Blows to the carotid sinus are potentially dangerous, especially to people with certain cardiovascular conditions.
Each of these more dangerous angles of attack to the human neck is also a difficult angle for an actor or stunt man to strike along without risk of injury to the other actor or stunt man.
So as it turns out, the renowned “judo chop” as it was portrayed ad nauseam in pop culture, evolved its peculiar form because it was a safe way for a stunt man to absorb real contact in order to better “sell the gag.” Add to this the fact that the vast majority of people are not well educated in the medical implications of blows to the various anatomical points, and that this was the 1960s, additionally meaning that such knowledge was, if anything, less extensive than it is today.
Keep in mind, though, that television and movies have never been under any obligation to depict violence in a realistic way.
In any case, the “Judo Chop” was arguably the earliest widespread martial arts trope in western pop culture, with the possible exception of Yakima Canutt and John Wayne‘s “pass punch” if you, like me consider fisticuffs of the western persuasion to be a valid martial art as well.
Anyway, getting back to the “Judo Chop,” in the year 2019 it is so far in the cultural past that it has been relegated to the status of an internet meme to be shared by hipsters.
Shards of Bone
Another pop culture martial arts meme, albeit less widespread is what I call the “nasal kill.” The “technique” in question consists of striking up into the base of the nose with a palm strike, with the fallacious rationale of driving “shards of bone” into the brain.
Yeah…that doesn’t work.
The nose is mostly cartilage, which is too soft to “penetrate” much of anything more solid than pudding. The chance of the small bones that are in the nose penetrating the much larger wall of bone that protects the front of the brain is so vanishingly small that flying pigs would be more plausible. Despite these medical facts, this particular trope has shown a ridiculous amount of staying power in pop culture.
Bruce Willis “used” it in the film The Last Boy Scout, Henry Winkler threatened to inflict it on another character in Heroes, and Nicholas Cage executed it, seemingly unintentionally, in Con-Air.
The Chiropractic Kill
This is yet another popularly portrayed method of dispatching a foe.
We’ve all seen it.
An actor grabs another actor by the head; one hand on the chin and the other on the back of the head or the top of the head, and twists sharply, resulting in the second actor dropping limply to the earth, apparently dead from a fractured neck. This, “technique,” as depicted, is extremely unlikely to do much more than cause a neck sprain that would have no effect on the outcome of a fight; perhaps only making it hard for your opponent to turn his head the next day.
Let’s define some terms and positions.
Neutral neck alignment means that your neck is neither tilted forward (flexed), so that your chin gets close to your chest, or tilted back (extended), as if you are looking up at the sky, but instead, it is in an aligned, “neutral” position between those two extremes.
Nearly every “chiropractic kill” that I’ve seen portrayed in pop culture was done with the victim’s neck in a pretty neutral position. If the neck is rotated while in neutral alignment, even with the maximum force that a typically fit, strong human can generate it will be extremely unlikely to even end the fight, much less result in a fatality, even if the victim of this “technique” had his upper body and neck muscles completely relaxed, which is extremely unlikely during a violent encounter.
I suspect that, like with the “Judo Chop”, this meme persists because it’s easy for a stunt man to do safely, while still selling it dramatically.
The Harmless Knockout Fallacy
Now I want to address something less frivolous.
A very dangerous pop culture meme that touches on the cinematic martial arts, but that has also spread its malicious tentacles throughout our culture is what I call the “harmless knockout”.
This is the idea that you can hit someone in the head, knocking them out, with the only negative result for them being that they remain unconscious long enough to serve the purpose of the story, before “coming to…” after which they are perfectly alright aside from, perhaps a headache.
This misconception falsely combines two possible outcomes.
If someone wakes up with nothing more than a headache after being knocked out it’s extremely unlikely that they were unconscious for more than a matter of seconds or fractions thereof.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they suffered no significant brain damage.
It actually takes months for your brain to recover as much as it will recover from even a relatively mild concussion.
Blows to the head should always be cause for concern.
On the other hand, if a person who is rendered unconscious does remain so for minutes or hours the brain injury is almost certainly even more severe. Upon waking up the victim is unlikely to merely have a headache. Moderate to severe brain injury frequently involves an element of chance because the injury can be localized to a specific area or group of areas in this hugely complex organ.
Trying to describe in detail in an online article all the things the human brain does is way above my pay grade, but it all falls into at least four categories:
- Cognitive abilities, or the way you think, process information, and make decisions.
- Sensory abilities, or the capacity to receive and process information taken by your vision, hearing, etc.
- Physical movement and control.
- Emotional stability and control.
Any of a wide variety of deficits in any or all of these areas, with a big range of severity, can result from brain injury.
It’s a veritable cornucopia of possible brain damage effects! Now flip a coin or roll a twenty-sided die and make your selections.
Another important, real-world aspect of knocking a human unconscious that is not considered as often as it should be is the fact that unconscious people, assuming that they became that way quickly while standing, FALL, what with gravity and all, and have absolutely no ability to BREAK their fall. More people than you might realize suffer fractured skulls each year when falling onto a hard surface after being knocked unconscious. A not insignificant fraction of them dies from their injuries.
This trope of the “harmless knockout” is pervasive in pop culture and it is dangerous!
A blow to the head is manifestly not humane or safe! Portraying it as being that way in a cop show or a spy movie only perpetuates this myth and gets more people hurt! Humans with poor critical thinking skills, and that’s a large group, have been known to emulate behavior from pop culture, and in cases like “the harmless knockout,” their behavior can sometimes lead to tragic consequences.
The Modern Perspective
My career in both practicing and teaching the martial arts spans from more than two decades before the first UFC to the present. As I said earlier, before the early 90’s just about the only “source” of anything resembling information about the martial arts to non-practitioners consisted of TV and cinematic depictions.
One shudders to think about it.
It’s been interesting to see how much more sophisticated, but still often less than accurate, the impressions of the modern layperson are.
What are your favorite, or most annoying, martial arts cinema tropes? Let me know in the comments section below!
- Never Say Never - October 1, 2019
- Martial Cinema Tropes - June 3, 2019
- The “Training Overseas” Fallacy - March 22, 2019
Leave a Reply