Vote for my short film: http://yycyeg.storyhive.com/project/show/id/177
Use your other five votes for these guys: http://yycyeg.storyhive.com/project/show/id/143
Extra Credits' series on Western vs Japanese games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_rvM6hubs8
The Star Wars Prequels are Disappointing: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-ii-attack-of-the-clones/
My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini
Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/
Now, despite the title of this video, I'm actually going to be talking about two separate yet strongly interrelated genres.
In fact, they both bleed into one another.
The martial arts genre and the samurai genre of films, the samurai, the Ronin.
Both of them contain elements of the other, but both of them perfect one of the two elements.
And they really highlight the difference between the Western understanding of virtue, of violence, of nobility, and that of Japan.
And I think the best place to start is with the samurai, is with the Ronin, the warrior lost in modernity.
The unlanded samurai, whose master no longer has a need of him, who served faithfully, but in this modern age, we don't need military leaders.
We don't need heroes anymore.
Pack your bags and get out the door.
The man who was built to lead armies and has no employable skills.
It's useful to contrast the Ronin, the samurai without a lord, to the cowboy, our Western perfection of the nature of violence and independence.
Now, the mythos of the cowboy, of the gun, and I am channeling heavily from the guys at extra credits when I talk about this.
The mythos of the cowboy is that the gun establishes your independence.
The gun is what gives you freedom.
And we can see this in Western video games, the first person shooter, where it's you acquiring guns and improving yourself and fighting off hordes of enemies.
The gun empowers you and allows you to stand for whatever you choose to stand for.
It's all about freedom.
It's all about the individual.
With the samurai, it's quite a bit different.
See, the samurai weapon is, it's not a gun.
See, the gun has been described as the beautiful equalizer.
You know, God made all men, but Mr. Colt made them all equal.
Anybody with a gun is dangerous, whereas the samurai sword requires mastery, it requires specialization, and to devote your life to learning how to use this weapon properly requires a lord who will pay for you to learn this advanced skill.
So the samurai, first of all, serves a cause.
There's a higher purpose, his lord behind the samurai.
And second of all, the art of the samurai is an internal conflict.
The samurai doesn't worry about whether their cause is right.
By definition, a samurai that serves their lord well is doing the right thing.
The samurai is simply focused on perfecting their art.
And particularly in the case of the Ronin, with nothing left to fight for, they fight one another because of the beauty and the glory of battle in and of itself.
That's all they have left is pursuing their craft.
So you see this huge difference.
Whereas the gun frees the Westerner from the shackles of an oppressive society, for the samurai, they crave that purpose.
They crave that society, and yet the Ronin is denied it.
And so all they have left is pursuing self-mastery.
So in the samurai film, the use of the sword is an internal conflict.
It is internal mastery that matters, not external mastery.
It doesn't matter who they're going up against.
It's all about them mastering themselves, controlling themselves, and not giving into temptation.
That's the true struggle of the samurai movie, as opposed to the Western cowboy movie, where the challenge is overcoming overwhelming odds.
Next, next we get to the martial arts film.
Now, what's the standard plot of a martial arts film?
That somebody killed my brother, so I must seek revenge upon them.
See, martial arts, again, it's a thing that requires self-mastery.
And the martial arts film doesn't involve self-defense, you'll notice.
Often enough, the martial artist will be a pacifist up until a harm is done against their household, at which point that's when the gloves come off and they go on a revenge killing spree, demonstrating the mastery that they have over this art.
And yet the martial artist never tried to prove this mastery to anybody.
They were only studying it for their own sake.
And this is where we get into Eliezer Yudkowski's analysis of anime.
In anime, typically, what gives the hero their power is the fact they have something to defend.
Whether it's a child, whether it's a principle, they have something to defend.
And when they fail to defend that principle anymore, that's when they run into ruin.
And we see both of these film styles being embraced in the Star Wars movies.
First of all, we've got the Jedi, and we've got their lightsaber duels.
But the duels aren't about who's best with the sword.
You know, they're not a gunfight where the cowboy proves his superiority to his opponents by outfighting them in a gunfight.
No, it's not that at all.
In fact, the big flaw in the prequel movies was that the lightsaber duels became the whole focus.
It became all about skill, size, and power.
That's not what lightsabers are about.
Lightsabers are about the people fighting the battles.
It's about the conversation between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader.
It's what's going on between these two characters that matters, and the lightsaber itself is just an externalization of that conversation between the former pupil and the former master.
And even when Obi-Wan allows himself to be killed at the end, that's because he has obtained true mastery over the art.
He does not need anything.
He says earlier, you know, nothing so clumsy and random as a blaster.
He no longer needs something as clumsy and random as the sword.
He has found the true nature of sword combat.
And so now he is free to retreat to the mountains and paint pictures of flowers for the rest of his days.
We see the martial arts aspect in the second movie with Luke Skywalker.
See, Luke Skywalker is supposed to train to be a Jedi.
He is supposed to have a principle that he stands for.
And yet, in the second movie, he lets go of this principle and starts pursuing venal, emotional desires, which is not befitting a samurai.
A samurai fights because a samurai fights.
A samurai seeks self-mastery over the art.
They do not concern themselves with outside objectives.
They are absolutely committed to the art of the samurai.
And yet, Luke Skywalker, he wavers.
He pursues the venal, the base, the emotional.
He starts acting like a peasant, not a samurai.
And so he goes and fights Darth Vader to no effect whatsoever.
He fails to rescue his companions.
In fact, he has to be rescued himself because of the whole thing, because he stopped defending his principle.
When he was standing up for his principle, he managed to destroy the Death Star, but now that he's forgotten why he fights, he fights for nothing, and he loses all power.
In video games, you can see this with the Mega Man character.
Whereas the Western protagonist in a video game is always getting smarter, stronger, faster, getting bigger guns to kill even stronger opponents, defeating opponents that are stronger than he is.
In Mega Man, it's all about the art.
It's all about understanding your enemy and internalizing their methods.
Mega Man isn't about winning.
It's not about beating somebody stronger than you.
It's about understanding somebody, somebody that fights differently than you, and about internalizing their powers and improving the art of combat.
Mega Man fights eight robot masters, and then he fights Dr. Wiley.
He could have fought Dr. Wiley right at the beginning, and yet he chose to fight the eight robot masters.
Because he needed to understand combat.
He needed to pursue the virtue of becoming a great warrior for the sake of becoming a great warrior.
And then, when he does defeat Dr. Wily, it's not even about defeating him, because he always rescues him at the end.
Martial arts films and samurai films.
Those can tell you a lot about the similarities and the differences between Western culture and Japanese culture.
