“Fight or flight?” In previous columns I have often emphasized fight, as a matter of topic at least, addressing the mixed martial arts promotional imaginary and a notion of “combat aesthetics.” Here I emphasize flight. Not literally, but to look at internal tensions in the increasingly visible street “sport” Parkour. The tensions are between the enacting of a primitivist rhetoric of origins in Parkour’s philosophy (as indicated in the quotes above), and conversely, what I submit might be considered a mimetic play-form of mass-mediated influences. Instead of considering Parkour’s cultural flow from the margins to the mainstream, what about considering its flow from mainstream to margins back to mainstream again? This is, as David Harvey suggests, the deconstructive maneuver of looking for one “text” inside another. In addition to considering Parkour’s apparent movement from obscurity to mainstream cultural visibility, this is also a remarkable case of an independent-spirited, non-commercially motivated form of “play” moving rapidly into a “display”-based commodity form.4 And lastly, I wish to tie Parkour’s suggestion of a human/animal performance continuum to Avatar’s recent promotional pairing with the NBA playoffs.

For the uninitiated, Parkour, also referred to as Freerunning, is “the art of moving through your environment using only your body and the surroundings to propel yourself. It can include running, jumping, climbing, even crawling, if that is the most suitable movement for the situation.”5 And while Parkour is, in philosophy, not relegated to any particular landscape, it is taken up mostly in urban and suburban landscapes. The reference to a “flight” response, in all of its socio-biological implications, stems from Parkour’s basic philosophy that, more important than the repertoire of movements is the “intention” of getting from one point to another as quickly and efficiently as possible, as if it were a matter of survival. American Parkour claims, “if the intention is to get somewhere using the most effective movements with the least loss of momentum, then it could probably be considered Parkour.”6 Founded by David Belle and Sébastien Foucan in France during the 90’s, Parkour’s philosophy and practical history can be traced further back to Georges Hébert’s “méthode naturelle” used in training the French military, which was at least in part inspired from observing indigenous populations in Africa.7 Again, the ancestral environment of evolutionary psychology is invoked in describing Parkour as “the form of movement that our ancient ancestors may have used to hunt for food, or escape from predators on the plains of Africa. There is certainly an instinctual quality to it. (…) In practicing Parkour, we are reviving and honing that ancient instinct.”8

Click here to view the embedded video.

Parkour videos are shot and edited as chase sequences using continuity style techniques.

The flow of Parkour into the mainstream has functioned primarily to reinvigorate realism in action genres, especially that most integral of action film tropes –the chase sequence (most notably seen in Casino Royale, District B-13, and the recently released sequel: District B-13: Ultimatum. Parkour has also appeared in advertisements for Scion cars, the BBC, MTV, Nike, and Canon, to name a few. The documentaries Jump London and Jump Britain were also important factors in putting Parkour on the map.

I want to suggest that we look at Parkour as an enactment of sensational kinesthetic tropes prefigured in martial arts and action cinema, video games, and even comic books. As much as it may be appealing to follow the romantic notion of Parkour as human-nature reclamation (reclamation of instinct, animal-like physical prowess, etc.), it is hard to completely ignore the visual/formal affinities between how the practice is documented and the aforementioned spectacular action genres. All the while these romantic “myths of origin” are being purveyed, attention is diverted from the visual evidence suggesting the physical form as an expressive, mimetic play of existing action media tropes, which then complicates (if not contradicts) the conveniently appropriated rhetoric of the human animal and “natural” bodily prowess “reclaimed.” To what extent should we buy into the discourses of this particular version of romantic primitivism? Or, alternatively, take a view of it as an image-fueled imitative behavior extending more immediately from proto-parkourist action stars like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan –and all of the generically linked visual media unified through similar kinesthetic repertoires of the spectacular action body– than from our legitimate alienation from innate bodily impulses and abilities?

Allowing for a measure of both is called for, while the latter explanation is decidedly more cynical, poststructuralist, but also, thus far at least, not undertaken in any scholarly forum. Moreover, the view of Parkour as, in some sense, a media effect of the consumption of spectacular action genres is an important deconstructive avenue for better comprehending how much Parkour subverts the commodity spectacle, and how much it emerges from it. Discussions about Parkour online have casually noted that Jackie Chan was doing Parkour-like action sequences well before it emerged as a street and internet phenomenon (see video compilation). In an age of “wire-fu” and technified, hyper-edited action sequences, Parkour is capable of re-vivifying the chase sequence. But how much does Parkour exist now as a practice to be documented in spectacular ways? How much is this a form of expressive play motivated as much by a desire to record and witness oneself as a sensational action performer? Not to entirely discount the embodied experience and holistic benefits, but it is impossible to ignore the role of a subject’s internalization of spectacular action tropes and the related desires to experience the thrills and fear associated with it. Many of the amateur produced internet videos are constructed as virtual chase sequences, minus framing narrative motivations, other than the sheer thrill of flight. “Dispersion” is a good example of an extended chase sequence that utilizes (albeit spottily) matching-action and other continuity filmmaking techniques (see linked video). So is nature reclamation, or media-mimetics behind this transformation of play into display?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The tension between Parkour as a media-mimetics, versus Parkour as an authentic reclamation of the “natural” (or more precisely, a re-naturalization of human mobility in hybrid synthetic-natural landscapes) also presents, in my mind, another substantial case of the category of the primitive’s persistence as a free-floating signifier culture has trouble doing without. Some suggest that the “primitive” is dead, or at least that it has gone from being an external object (the anthropological primitive, out there in time and space) to part of the (internal) social-psyche of the western subject (and for my critical interests at least, this is a predominantly white, masculine subject).9 On the contrary, I maintain the primitive has only grown more persistent as an operative discourse in commodity culture as a necessary backwards-looking view from which to appreciate the present, in particular advancing states of human-technological extension, and alterity in general.

The continuum between animal and human performance is an aspect of popular primitivism(s) I have taken up in previous columns. Mariana Torgovnik defines at least one sense of primitivism as the “connections between humans/land, humans/animals, humans/minerals, of vital senses of relatedness and interdependence. Primitivism inhabits thinking about origins and pure states (…) and is the utopian desire to go back and recover irreducible features of the psyche, body, land, and community –to re-inhabit core experiences.”10 The status of Parkour as a popular primitivism is also evident in the names local groups of practitioners have given themselves, like “The Tribe,” “Urban Instincts,” “Tribal Movement,” “Street Animal,” “Sky Native,” and also in the titles of amateur produced videos, such as, “Escape,” “Timeless,” and “Dispersion.”

The most significant recent example of idealizing animal above human is Avatar’s configuration of the “Na’vi” as animal-like in sensory intelligence (i.e. environmental awareness) and physical prowess. Seventy-five years ago Lovejoy and Boas named this particular sort of primitivism “animalitarianism,” tracing the history of primitivism’s tendency to hold features of the animal as “on the whole more admirable, more normal, or more fortunate than the human species” back to classical times.11 Today animalitarianism, for lack of a better term, is closely linked to environmentalism, as the “beasts” serve as our finest example of a species whose “desires are limited to their ‘natural’ needs and not, like man’s, expansive and insatiable.”12 But for all of Avatar’s positive messages about the Na’vi living in harmony with nature, these signs are easily misappropriated to sell things wholly contradictory to their original ideological impulse. For example, Avatar’s mode of animalitarianism lent itself well to a recent cross-promotion with the NBA. The ad baldly parallels Na’vi physical prowess in the wilds of Pandora with NBA athletes’ spectacular physical exploits. The synergy goes so far as to depict Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, and Dwight Howard as Na’vi, cross-cutting between warrior grimaces and spectacular flights on Pandora and the basketball court –a decidedly problematic racial equation.\

Parkour’s primitivism points to a striving and critique of modern alienation I admire. It represents a spirit of resistance to Eros-killing social obligations and confinements I want to get behind, and then it turns commodity. And while for the sake of critical analysis I have emphasized these tensions by drawing neat discursive boundaries between them, I realize they are not mutually exclusive. Maybe we can acknowledge this sort of grasping at pure states as hopeful, potentially resistant, and motivational rhetoric rather than something fully or authentically attainable, but we need to be alert to their abuses.

Image Credits:

1. Daniel Ilabaca does a “cat crawl” over mesh.
2. parkour videos are shot and edited as chase sequences using continuity style techniques.
3. chase sequence in Casino Royale, featuring Sebastien Foucan.
4. visual affinities between how Parkour is documented and commercial action media
5. Jackie Chan, a proto-parkourist?
6. NBA stars as Na’vi, and the paralleling of Avatar and NBA action
7. Avatar/NBA cross promotion video
8. visual affinities between how Parkour is documented and commercial action media

Please feel free to comment.

1. American Parkour Inc. http://www.americanparkour.com/content/view/226/325/
2. Wilkinson, Alec. “No Obstacles.” The New Yorker. (16 April, 2007). http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_wilkinson
3. http://www.foucan.com/?page_id=27
4. Bale, John. Landscapes of Modern Sport. (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), 7-9.
5. American Parkour Inc. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5012524148
6. Ibid.
7. The name comes from “Parcours du combatant” which was an obstacle course developed for training the French military.
8. American Parkour Inc. http://www.americanparkour.com/content/view/10/329/
9. See Kurusawa’s Requiem for The Primitive.
10. Torgovnik, M. (1996) Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 4-5.
11. Lovejoy, A. & Boas, G. (1935). Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. John Hopkins Press. 19-22.
12. Ibid.

If you’ve seen it, then you probably remember Nike’s “Alter Ego” commercial where Minnesota Viking running back Adrian Peterson’s skin is monstrously inscribed with the pattern of the “Pro Combat” apparel worn under his uniform. The image is a striking digital fusion of the synthetic and the “natural” or, the technological and the human, and the message is just that –technology so similar to nature that the boundaries are blurred. If we didn’t first see the Pro Combat protective padding on Peterson, the pattern on his skin might otherwise register as reptilian armor. That is, the athlete would register as a human-nonhuman hybrid species. Befitting such uncanny imagery, the advertisement’s mise-en-scene has a deep, inky, gothic tone with snow falling on the field of play that, as rendered in high contrast black and white, might as well be ashes from the apocalypse.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This commercial encapsulates so much of what fascinates me about the tenuously sublimated socio-psychological imaginary of professional sports. One of the most naked cultural sites for appreciating all that our science-based modernity is supposed to have suppressed but, paradoxically, cannot do without (at least in a controlled form). Elite athletes glorified here as subjects on the margins of humanity, pushing the limits of human potential in primal, physical ways rather than intellectual ones. As the “Alter Ego” ad suggests, we imagine them as possessing almost super-natural powers, as super-humans (or is it the post-human?). This encompasses a lot things, but here especially the fetishism of technology, the breathing of life into “dead” technology so it becomes more than its mere instrumentality or functional logic (high-tech underwear in this instance). But also the human itself as techné (the Greek root of “technology”), defined as art or craft with a technological basis. 1 The athlete as natural technology, as a refined instrument and artist of spectacular play-making. Always in tension in this scenario is the dystopian view of nature’s technology as irrational, dark, monstrous, Frankensteinian, animal and libidinal, versus the utopian views of technology as rational, light, functional, contained and controllable, or comfortably “dead”.

It’s surely not news that advertising excels at creatively permeating consumer technology with aura or “spirit” in the interest of creating commodity fetishes in consumers. Yet professional sports and its commodity culture does so in ways that more conspicuously implicate the status of the “human,” of “nature,” and its uneasy relationship with technology and, more generally speaking, the repressive complexes of modern life. Especially sports ads that utilize gothic, sci-fi imagery –as with the literary and cinematic genres themselves– present an interesting case for considering the intersection of corporal limits and their technological interface. The issue at hand is also well classified as a concern with the “techno-cultural body,” and in the generically related instances I tie together here, techno-cultural bodies conveyed in a hybrid of dark gothic and science fiction scene making and iconography.

The functional basis of much sporting gear and apparel is to enhance natural attributes and instrumentalities of athletes in terms of efficiency of action, physical durability and comfort. In other words, adapting to environments. Compared to high-tech electronics this is comparatively low-tech stuff, like technical refinements in padding and other bodily protection. I prefer to think of them as performance enhancing mediations of nature. Advances in consumer electronics, as a point of comparison, are also mediations of nature, or “extensions of man,” to use McLuhan’s famous phrase, but tend to be more cerebral-sensory extensions –further alienated from basic kinesthetic functioning– than say running shoes or Under “Armour’s” moisture wicking apparel. Moisture wicking shirts mediate body temperature and perspiration; IPods mediate our cognitive interaction with the environment. And athletic action itself is variously mediated: football is highly “armored” (physically mediated) play while conversely, MMA (mixed martial arts) is predicated on the minimization of certain mediating elements. Those small, fingerless gloves are protection for hands, not opponents’ faces, and they guarantee a level of “reality” or “naturalism” in the hand-to-hand combat of trained martial artists (or technicians of human submission).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Performance enhancement and the increasing prodigiousness and prowess of elite athletes is perhaps matched in the enhancements of its electronically mediated transmission to fans, while the structure and rules of the sports themselves remain more or less stable. More spectacular viewing ecologies at least highlight, if not beg for, more spectacular playmaking. Thus something like the new Pro Combat apparel may give a running back like Peterson that added confidence to go for broke or, as one Nike commercial says, to “leave nothing” (and give everything to the game). The “Alter Ego” advertisement suggests as much; that Peterson’s combat apparel makes the man believe he is head-to-toe in armor. And to visualize it as corporeal –fully embodied, fused, merged, rather than simply clothed– propels the merely technological into the realm of the aesthetic, the aural, even the spiritual.

And the title of the commercial is more suggestive than it may first appear, getting to these issues of the techno-cultural body, technology as “other” than human (and the alter-ity of the elite athlete compared to the average(d) human). As suggested earlier, Peterson’s digital mutation is an image configured in some sense as primitive and monstrous (or animal like), but also advanced and technological –the ancient and timeless re-surfacing to give aura and life to the technological.

Tap Out’s “Hammer Hand” commercial is another sports apparel ad, but with a less direct narrative connection to its products. (Tap Out trades mostly in t-shirts with gothic imagery that have become widely associated with MMA cultural membership, not advancing the sport through equipment technology, like Nike). Hands are viewed as one of a fighter’s most noble instruments of destruction (after “heart,” that is), and indeed, “Hammer Hands” mutates fists into industrial instruments with grotesque, medieval styling. Are aspiring fighters and MMA fans wondering about the untapped potential of their fists? Do we imagine hands as primitive tools and technology for the honest, soul-bearing (or compensatory?), aesthetic work of fistic combat? The old romance of the body’s technological potential, (and even more abstractly the “courage” and strength of “spirit”) as an “honorable” instrument of aggression finds revitalization in the MMA promotional imaginary.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It comes as no surprise then that the military has found a brilliant market synergy with the UFC. A recent Marine Corp ad proclaims, “Some warriors fight in the Octagon, others fight in all four corners of the earth,” while intercutting between images of marine training and UFC fighters in action. When the work of war has become so technified, often alienated from the romanticized field of combat, analogizing the “glory” and “honor” of MMA combat with the work of Marines is a brilliant, yet problematic strategy. This works to re-mythologize and romanticize military combat, which is surely impossible to accomplish with any actual reference to its real theatres of operation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I admit to my own seduction by the Nike ads. It’s hard not to be. They succeed at artistically conveying the deep ambivalence of our relationship to natural physical limits and our aspirational technologies that seeks to exceed them. Extending our supposed limits is often hopeful and inspiring, yet it cannot exist without the imaginary of destruction that comes when it is taken too far. The Nike “Pro Apparel” commercial from several years back highlights this ambivalence through the use of masks on athletes that suggest the athlete’s prowess as an admixture of mimicry of the natural world (i.e. “wild life”) and the potential malevolence of technology gone wrong. As these images tell it, our present day sports culture, as much as it may wish to suppress it, is a performance combining versions of romantic naturalism, of eros or “life force,” but now more than ever also a science fiction theatre which cannot deny its darker side –the potential chaos of unchecked manipulations and mediations (or are they perversions?) of that nature. As a closing question (and perhaps a provocation), is the early fatality at Vancouver’s Luge track –sledding reaching new extremes– an instance of aspirational techné taken too far?

Image Credits:

1. Alter Ego
2. Alter Ego Commercial
3. Masks from Nike Pro Apparel Ad
4. Nike’s Pro Apparel Commercial
5. Tap Out’s “Hammer Hand”
6. Tap Out’s “HammerHand” Commercial
7. A Path for Warriors: Marine Corps and UFC

Please feel free to comment.

1. For an interesting study of techne in art and media, see: R.L. Rutsky. HighTechne: Art and Technology From The Machine Aesthetic to The Posthuman. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). I borrow Rutsky’s use of the expression, the “techno-cultural body.” Rutsky does not, however, deal with the professional sports imaginary.

The ever-expanding cultural visibility of MMA (mixed martial arts) is by many accounts directly tied to the resounding success of the UFC’s popular reality show, The Ultimate Fighter (TUF). Season one (2005) established some of the company’s most popular fighters (most significantly Forest Griffin), but also laid the groundwork for the organizing narrative structures that now define the promotion. With the UFC’s growing popularity, MMA has shed most of its old “human cockfighting” baggage. The new user-friendly version is largely the result of three changes: more rules and regulations (i.e. its not “no-holds-barred” anymore); a shift in emphasis to professional standards of athleticism in terms of training and technique; and lastly, a personality-based promotion of fights. Related to this last point, more than any other current sport commodity culture, and for obvious reasons, MMA media has availed itself of the romantic discourses of combat –athletes with the warrior’s “spirit” or “heart,” the animal of prey, the “gentleman and the beast.”

Despite its status as now just another regulated “modern” sport of skill with its own specificity of physical refinement, MMA still remains more open than other sports to the intersecting figures of the ancient and modern, primitive and civilized, rational and irrational, knowable and unknowable. While it is important when dealing with any contemporary sport media to keep the “ancient” in view (both in the historical and psychological sense) it is arguably more urgent in the “arena” of MMA. This has much to do with the sport –and its highly successful commodification– being rooted in a libidinal economy of desire associated with combat as a “test” or space for discovering the “authentic” self through pain and pleasure. These dramas are writ large in The Ultimate Fighter reality show and the promotional narratives that accompany UFC events. In this column I want to propose reading MMA events as narratives, and in particular how narrative “excess” in the form of descriptive “pauses” reveal some of their key psychodynamics.2

The fight itself is only ever one part of the story. MMA as a sport can thank the UFC’s imperative to make fights personal (often when they’re not) for its success. But the fan is eager for identification with the fighter’s character and the plight of their ensuing “war.” In the lead up to a fight, there is the “war of words” between fighters, and when the social actors don’t (or won’t) play into this storyline, there is always some other motivation to fight –to support a family, to avenge a loss, to test oneself as a man, and occasionally, just for the love of competition (and presumably the pain involved, both giving and receiving). Or, a fighter is friends with their opponent, respects them, but hey, this is business, and when they get in the cage “the friendship is over.” But in many cases it is simply about “shutting someone’s mouth.”

This represents the opening act with the introduction of characters and the staging of some conflict, with the fight itself as the climax. But the resolution is usually more ambiguous (and contingent upon that climax). The success of the climax –unlike the carefully orchestrated pyrotechnics of an action film– will depend in the end on the experience and competency of the viewer, but in most cases the MMA viewer’s desire is to see as much give and take of punishment as possible. The plot moves forward when mutual punishment is consummated. The plot stalls when fighters do not “advance their position” or keep “working,” as the referee often reminds them during these “pauses” in story-time. It is in these moments when punishment is not consummated that I find some of the most interesting evidence of narrative “excess” in MMA. There is no cutting to commercial during those five-minute rounds, and plot steadily advances as mutual punishment is consummated, though when not, it is a strangely protracted, and, dare I say, “queer” affair. Especially for the uninitiated, the strategic intricacies and jockeying of the “ground game” and “grappling” might also appear to be forms of narrative “lingering,” favoring visual “description” over plotting. It is especially at these times –when punishment is not achieved– that a form of homosocial merging of bodies instantiates as excess to the predominant heterosocial narrative of penetration (or punching through). This is when the booing begins. But it never lasts too long as there are textual strategies in place to right the ship. Like the referee who sets them back on a course to “finish” each other, or the ring girl, necessarily present yet fragmented iconography securing the ritual combat as a heteronormative affair.

Perhaps the most mythologized fight of the past ten years is the Griffin-Bonnar fight at the end of TUF season one (2005). MMA commentator Mike Sloan asserts that: “When it is all said and done, everybody involved within the sport of mixed martial arts could very well be kissing the feet of Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar for eternity. Those two mighty warriors displayed everything a true fighter is all about: courage, determination, heart, resilience, skill and passion.”3  If you watch only one MMA fight in your life, make it this one, and you’ll witness the establishment of this narrative ideal. Griffin’s success in MMA has surely to do in part with his skill and athleticism, and especially with his candid and jocular charisma, but his readiness to take punishment and still persist is his defining trait in these MMA stories. Although most fights are counter-narratives to this exemplar, with the fan left waiting for that slugfest most resembling a street fight. Anderson Silva versus Thales Leites, contrary to MMA’s narrative ideal, saw the mutual respect for two styles utterly unwilling to reconcile with each other (2009). The result was a bizarre scene where the Jujitsu artist, Leites, lay on the ground waiting for Silva to enter his “guard,” while Silva the kick boxer remained standing, waiting for Leites to get up and “trade” with him.

According to Kristin Thompson narrative excess begins “where (narrative) motivation fails.” 4 More precisely though, narrative justifies any number of “devices,” but those devices may manifest
themselves variously by quantity, quality, and duration that exhaust or extend beyond the fulfilling of their narrative purpose. In generic terms, this translates to the minimal and the maximal: one more clever and gratuitous zombie killing in the horror film; one too many displays of clichéd sentiment in the romantic comedy; another random mansion exploding in a Jerry Bruckheimer film; or, another punch that doesn’t quite finish off our action hero. In MMA, the narrative excess lies at both ends of the spectrum. In the Griffin-Bonnar fight, they stay on their feet, however improbably, going well beyond the pugilistic standards of what satisfies a fight fan. In the Silva-Leites fight, nobody “finishes,” they avoid each other’s stylistic spaces altogether, one passing the time standing while the other lays down. Curiously enough, the Silva-Leites fight was a more tactical “battle,” and for the MMA literati, a fascinating moment where two fighters’ respect for their opponent’s skill trumped the popular promotion’s doctrine of explosive combat over cautious restraint. The more conventional narrative trajectory would have a smaller measure of both plotlines.

In these moments where action (or story-time) pauses while narrative discourse (duration) continues, other things, “deeper” things, become more salient. And it is also worth noting that, while Thompson’s notion of narrative excess relates to the cinema, in the fetishistic re-play imaginary of sports media, excess is elevated to another level (equatable to something like John Woo’s slow-motion balletics of violence). This excess in re-play exists on the rhetorical, or “official,” level (undertaken by commentators and fans online) as a re-appreciation of virtuoso technique, physical prowess, and unpredictable narrative events that accompany the unscripted. However, on another level these re-plays and “pauses” are pleasurable “flirtations with excess” that relate to displaced aggression, a desire to conjure virility, and, as Toby Miller puts it, a space to “watch and dissect other men’s bodies in fetishistic detail.5

On still another level, MMA combat and the personality-based promotion of fights returns an ancient “ethics of the self” which combines both “austerity and hedonism,” where the dual, the match, or the battle between individuals is a space for exploring our relationships to desire and pleasure, and our ability to govern these precarious boundaries. 6 The ability to govern the boundaries of desire is one of the organizing narrative impulses of The Ultimate Fighter reality show. While the cage is surprisingly the space of order, rules and regulation (cosmos) where fighters can properly negotiate these boundaries, their cloistering in a house away from family and friends is a symbolic wilderness (chaos) in which, nearly every season, tensions between fighters –confined to a space where fighting is prohibited– end up damaging that symbolic container of desire. Symbolic penetration ensues. Doors are kicked in, walls punched through, and beds pissed on, the first act which establishes compelling conflicts leading to climax in the cage. Resolution, though, is at your own discretion.

Image Credits:

1. The Ultimate Fighter reality show
2. The most mythologized fight, Griffin vs. Bonnar, an ideal MMA narrative
3. Silva vs. Leites, two styles unwilling to reconcile, narrative pause
4. The wilderness of the TUF house
5. Bisbing vs. Leben, the “narrative never exhausts the image…”

Please feel free to comment.

1. Stephen Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis, Pt. I,” Screen (Spring 1975), 16(1): 100. Qtd. in Kristin Thompson (1999). See below.
2. I borrow the notion of narrative “pause” and “description” from Seymour Chatman. (1990) Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 38-55.
3. Mike Sloan. “Just My Thoughts: UFC’s TUF Finale Was Crucial.” Sherdog. (12 April 2009) http://www.sherdog.com/news/articles/Just-My-Thoughts-UFCs-TUF-Finale-Was-Crucial-2658
4. Kristen Thompson. (1999) The Concept of Cinematic Excess.”In Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds) Film Theory and Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 487-498.
5. Toby Miller. (2001) Sportsex. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2-26.
6. Ibid

A few years ago I somewhat sheepishly confessed to one of my professors that I wanted to write about mixed martial arts (MMA) media. This apparently required some clarification because he asked what I meant exactly. “You know, The Ultimate Fighting Championship.” “Oh, that,” he replied. “…It’s like all those Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from the 80’s came to life.” At home my partner’s uptake was perhaps less savvy to these cinematic antecedents. Once, during the first weeks of my regular MMA viewing, she accidentally (or mockingly) called it “extreme wrestling.” Upon reflection, though, the theatrics of MMA events do share a likeness to professional “wrestling’s” carnivalesque excess. For months she readily accepted that I was watching it as “research” into taboo (by our standards at least) cultural exotica overlapping with some of my existing theoretical and thematic interests; and generally that it hailed me – simultaneously repelled and attracted me to be more precise. But key to the rhetorical strategy of such “reality” programming is to take you beyond surfaces by cultivating a formal literacy and technical proficiency, so you can perform as “critic”/commentator alongside those in the show. Before I knew it I was enthusiastically calling said partner into the living room to behold this improbable “kimura,” or that spectacularly timed “flying knee.” (To no avail; it never quite took with her). What I get now is a rather fatigued, “are you done watching people beat themselves up yet?” Well, as it just so happens, I’ve been watching “people” spectacularly beat themselves up since the 1980’s within the fictions of film and video games. Why now, with its ascendancy to full-fledged “actuality,” should I feel depraved for taking pleasure in it?

Recent work in genre theory by Paul Young considers the importance of considering genre in terms of “intermediality.” This is similar to the poststructuralist idea of “intertextual relay,” in which generic “horizons of expectations” are established in the audience’s mind even before the text arrives.1 Young maintains video game studies (“ludologists”) would greatly benefit from applying the concepts of film genre theorists to their objects of study (and vice versa for genre theorists). He discusses how video game designers have appropriated cinematic narrative conventions for use in video games.2 These circuits and cycles between media occur in multiple directions. My argument here is that the sale and promotion of the mediatized combat aesthetics of MMA benefit profoundly from existing generic regimes established in movies, video games, and comics. As I was gradually persuaded of the possibility for some “art” in mixed martial arts, the legitimate techné through which this prowess was channeled (in the best examples at least), I also grew more sensitive to the promiscuity of combat aesthetics and combat “play” across various media forms. These forms have sewn the seeds of a kinesthetic-aesthetic literacy for the vast appreciation of mediatized combat. These are aesthetics of power and domination, of blunt force trauma, of the “anaconda choke,” the “superman” punch, the prowess and potential of the body’s mundane instruments –hands, arms, legs. “Submitted by rear naked choke in the third round!” “Pow! Ooomph! Zowie!” as the old Batman program had it. Or, “Skadoosh!” as Jack Black’s Kung Fu Panda (2008) puts it.

The pleasures and continually evolving repertoire of combat aesthetics are deluged on us from the seemingly cuddly, childhood narrative product (foisting violent action “play” on children through anthropomorphized animals and moralizing narratives), through to the brutal and fearsome “gladiatorial” warriors of football, and now, in even more enhanced and explicit ways, MMA. Combat aesthetics –in their perpetual replay and fetishistic visual scrubbing and digital intensification– are fundamental to the sale and promotion of MMA product and programming, with a ready-made regime of cultivation materials in animation, action and martial arts cinema and video games. I have little doubt that my hailing by MMA combat media has roots in the tens (or hundreds?) of hours I spent as a kid (at friends’ houses only though! No electronic game consoles in my household) playing violent video games (and to be precise, they were: Street Fighter 2, Battle Arena Toshinden, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, and Ninja Gaiden – how could I forget), not to mention all of the football and action films.

Media studies scholars are justifiably wary of direct transmission models of viewer/consumer behavioral responses to media exposure, careful to allow room for “negotiated” and even “oppositional” readings/responses to hegemonic cultural encodings.3 But mimetic play is a powerful force, especially among youth. Some anecdotal evidence: my four and seven year olds were utterly lost to imaginary Kung Fu fighting for days after they saw Kung Fu Panda. And for a less cuddly example, a recent New York Times article reported MMA making forays into a Massachusetts high school.4 Local martial arts schools once devoted to singular traditions are giving way to MMA programs conforming to the mixed combat aesthetic exploding on the small screen. (The most recent “explosion” was the September 16th premiere of season 10 of The Ultimate Fighter, which was the most watched cable program in its time slot with 4.1 million viewers. Completing the cycle from fictional media, to “real” (i.e. MMA), back to fictional, is the arrival of UFC Undisputed – the video game. I’ve never played it, but the website claims the game has replicated an “authentic and comprehensive UFC atmosphere.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The promotional video for upcoming UFC 104: Machida vs. Shogun contains new levels of digital augmentation and intensification in its highlight reel format, exhibiting a close visual affinity with video games and animation. Strikes (i.e. kicks, punches, elbow and knee strikes, etc.) are laced with popping sparks, and sweeping trails of white energy follow in their path. I’m transported back to my earlier days of puerile rapture with combat games like Street Fighter II and Battle Arena Toshinden (and the more recent ones I’m surely missing out on) where fighters can manifest blasts of pure energy against their opponents. But for the “adult” viewers of MMA, there are more tasteful nods to the “art” of combat. Take Tapout’s most recent commercial depicting the “flying armbar,” in all of its acrobatic glory, with the aid of slow motion, dramatic low-key mood lighting, and a romantic classical violin score.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mediatized combat aesthetics are, to my mind, part and parcel of the dominant generic regime of masculine melodrama. Linda Williams explains that female melodrama has historically involved tears and excessive affect (the “weepie,” one of the “gross body genres”, along with porn and horror), while (I contend) masculine melodrama involves blood, sweat, and combat’s agonistic aggression.5 My own “submission” to the pleasure of MMA melodramas reminded me of the promiscuity and entrenched state of these aesthetic regimes. The seemingly innocuous act of letting our 4 and 7 year old boys watch Kung Fu Panda is, in all likelihood, the start of a much longer, and potentially dangerous, love affair.

Image Credits
1. Digital Augmentation in Video Games and UFC (author screenshot)
2. Mixed Martial Arts: “Jean-Claude Van Damme movies come to life”
3. Combat Aesthetics in TV’s Live Action Batman
4. Kung Fu Panda: Starting a Potentially Dangerous Love Affair
5. UFC 104 Preview
6. Tapout Commercial: Arm Bar as High Art

Please feel free to comment.

1. The “horizon of expectations” is a well known concept in genre theory and criticism expressed originally by Hans-Robert Jauss.
2. Young, Paul. 2008. “Film Genre Theory and Contemporary Media: Description, Interpretation, Intermediality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
3. Hall, Stuart. 2006. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. Eds. Durham and Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
4. Porter, Justin. “Mixed Martial Arts Makes its Way To High School.” The New York Times. November 17, 2008.
5. Willams, Linda. 2004. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

“It is irrational to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. (…) The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.”  –Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto 

Following my previous column’s theme of the masculine primitive element in Mixed Marital Arts culture, I wish to present an exercise in genre mapping which traces a constellation of reality television programming based in a related impulse towards the dramatizing of masculine prowess, of male bodies at “play,” at risk, in extremity, testing ordinary thresholds and limits. Here I am thinking of the emergence of shows such as: Man vs. Wild, Survivor Man, Going Tribal, Tribal Life, Human Weapon, Last One Standing, Fight Quest, WildBoyz, and the most recent addition to the genre, Alone in The Wild.1 This grouping of shows figure prominently male spatial mobility, dealing with themes of survival, cultural and geographic isolation, forms of “primitive” contact or cultural expression; of challenging the boundaries and habits of the male body in exotic and threatening places and situations; of escaping the modern socially disciplined body to one more “natural” by subjecting it to “wild” environmental elements, sometimes animals, sometimes climate, sometimes indigenous peoples, sometimes one another. Thanks to the programming of Discovery, National Geographic, Travel Channel, MTV, and others, the project of communicating one foreign culture or environment for another, something that for much of the 20th century was the near-exclusive province of National Geographic magazine, is diversifying its repertoire. This grouping is a fascinating and often problematic subgenre of reality television devoted to quasi-ethnographic adventuring and nature explorations, some wholly earnest in their humanist cultural pieties, others tongue-in-cheek performances of primal masculinity. The latter I view as evidence of ruptured myths of purity and honor associated with accessing a spiritually regenerative preserve of primal masculinity. The “irrationality” of invoking the dichotomies primitive and civilized Haraway speaks of, when “purity” and “authenticity” are such unstable categories, creates a tension between romantic (or nostalgic) postures towards the masculine primitive, and those which use it as fodder for parody of essentialist gender tropes.2

Isolation (and rugged self-governance which accompanies it) is central to the masculine imaginary of a “natural” self and the tests of manhood associated with accessing primal potential. Privileged mobility is another trope of rugged, “authentic” masculinity. We witness these in the solo adventure formats of Survivorman and Man vs. Wild appearing each week in a different part of the world. The production crew documenting Bear Grylls’ survivalist savvy in Man vs. Wild is entirely effaced, while Les Stroud of Survivorman goes into the wild without a crew and does his own camera work –he films himself. Stroud’s self-documentation format heightens viewers’ awareness of his isolation, and I’m reminded in this of something Haraway says about the photographic “technologies of visualization:” they “recall the important practice of hunting with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness.”3 The camera self-sighted on Stroud in isolation in remote and exotic environments then is, ironically, a necessary tool in the postmodern arsenal for self-discovery and fantasies of primal access.

Crucial to this is Grylls’s and Stroud’s enactment of a certain skill-set, including a certain physical durability and resilience to the elements, all part of a practical knowledge base appealing to an older gendered division of labor in which manliness is comprised of certain competencies. Foremost of these is the construction and use of tools and technologies, in this case archaic technologies and a working knowledge of the natural world for surviving in extreme and varied environmental conditions.

But we live in a moment of almost obtrusive irony and reflexivity where these ideals are just as readily parodied as praised. For example, some may recall the hilarious episode of The Office where our suburban Michael Scott conducts his own comically flawed solo trip into the wild, (something any proper fan knows the rural savant Dwight is much better equipped for). Even Man vs. Wild took a comic turn when Will Ferrell was Gryll’s co-adventurer for an episode. This played perfectly into Ferrell’s now standard performance of the buffoon alpha male as he feigned rugged fearlessness despite being wholly ill equipped for the conditions.

Another fascinating parody of the wildlife-adventure and cultural-adventure formats is the MTV series, WildBoyz, featuring Steve-O and Chris Pontius. The show vacillates between wildlife stunts –ranging from the obscene (hosing down, and sizing up, a male Tiger’s gonads at a Buddhist “Tiger Temple”), to the absurd (running naked with ostriches), to the glaringly stupid (swimming with sharks)– and irreverent participatory performances with the local cultural tourism industry. Yet somehow their antics do not seem as irreverent as one might expect with locals appearing mostly unfazed and even playing along. Whether this response is by force of MTV and its celebrity, by local subjects’ being literally lost in translation, or because most of the cultural performers have long since accepted their participatory role in cultural simulation for survival, I’m not sure.

Wild Boyz is aware of the typical sobriety and seriousness that suffuses the genre they mimic. Each scene involves a formal interplay between an “objective” voice-over narration complete with British accent (“the long neck women of Mehong Sun wrap heavy brass coils about their necks, a tradition once believed to prevent them from marrying into other tribes”) and the gross body, juvenile shtick of Chris and Steve-O (“holy crap we’re in the middle of nowhere Thailand now! Oh yeah these women look great with long necks!”). (The film Strange Wilderness (2008) is another send-up of the wildlife genre exhibiting a similar posture towards nature (“bears derive their name from a team in Chicago. It is estimated that Bears kill over 2 million salmon a year. Attacks by salmon on bears are much more rare.”).

Reality television often capitalizes on dramatic material provoked by plucking social actors from their native environments and dropping them into foreign ones (Survivor, the example par excellence). Exoticism and its close accomplice, voyeurism, are the cultural foundation of much of the reality TV landscape (not all of course –some programming relies on pleasures of mundane worlds). Consider the short-lived Discovery Channel experiment, Last One Standing. The show takes six athletes from developed Western nations and drops them into indigenous communities from South America, Africa, and South Asia, where they spend a brief period training in one of the community’s traditional forms of combat or physical competition. Then they compete in contests against the locals (not unlike Human Weapon and Fight Quest). Whoever wins the most events throughout the show is “the last one standing.” A New York Times review aptly described it as “Survivor meets Ultimate Fighting.”4 Seems like a good formula, but I think the earnestness of its quasi-ethnographic pieties combined with the well-worn reality competition format was too much for people to stomach (cancelled after one season). Despite its cultural insensitivity, Wild Boyz is considerably more transparent in its use of foreign cultures and environments.

Last One Standing emphasizes the challenges of adapting to strange athletic forms and their accompanying rituals. The Westerners’ identities are configured in terms of their athletic backgrounds. Each is a representative of a modernized Western sporting tradition: a fitness guru, an endurance athlete, a BMX racer, a “strongman,” a rugby player, and a kickboxer. As the show’s narration says, the athletes must “accept the challenge of traveling around the world to compete against the most remote tribes on earth, on their terms. But will their Western skills count for anything?” This is a recurring motif throughout the series –for the western athletes to take stock of how contact with foreign forms of athleticism and competition put their strengths and prowess into perspective. Learning Senegalese wrestling, a contestant states, “I feel weak. I feel unskillful, I thought I was skillful.” The narrator says of one British athlete, “he has made his mark playing gentlemanly sports like cricket and croquet. Richard is here to prove he is tougher than his privileged background might suggest.” But the combination of a conspicuously exotic mise-en-scène and the cross-cultural agonistic “play” (the British cricket player grappling with a Senegalese wrestler) may have raised too many troubling specters from the colonialist explorer imaginary.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What does this contemporary genre mapping suggest about the persistent impulse towards the sincere masculine primitive, and its convenience to mockery? In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway argues that our growing (in)human intimacies and interfaces with scientific and electronic technologies (to the extent of becoming veritable prosthetics) render the central dichotomies of our classical Western episteme (primitive/civilized, etc.) altogether blurry. This growing alienation and a global state of environmental panic are generating renewed attempts at rehabilitating our sensitivity to the natural world; to relearning states of (im)mediacy that necessitate (discursive if not literal) distance from the so-called artificial and the synthetic, and renewing contact with the natural and the authentic. These terms are all highly equivocal, perhaps even irrational, but recourse to categories like primitive and civilized are required, as they still remain very much constitutive of our commodity culture. Awareness of the masculine primitive as merely social performance or construct may inspire its parody, but it will not make it go away as such.

Image Credits
1. The Discovery Channel’s Surviorman
2. Bear Grylls in the Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild
3. The Office’s Michael Scott tries out being a Survivorman
4. MTV’s Wildboyz parodies National Geographic
5. Trailer for Last One Standing

Please feel free to comment.

1. I’m indebted to Cynthia Chris for bringing WildBoyz to my attention during a talk she gave at UMass in 2008. She reads a “species panic” in the show’s performance with nature, but is less concerned for a parody of the masculine primitive. For her analysis of the show, see Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
2. A great deal has been written about the masculine primitive, but none to my knowledge has sited it to the television landscape. For an example in film studies, see Gaylyn Studlar, “Wider Horizons: Douglas Fairbanks and Nostalgic Primitivism.” In Back in The Saddle Again: New Essays on The Western. Eds. Edward Buscombe and Roberta Pearson. London: BFI, 1998.
3. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991. p. 169.
4. Neil Genzlinger, “Last One Standing”; “Survivor Meets Ultimate Fighting, With Helpful Witch Doctors on Call.” The New York Times. October 4, 2007.

B.J. Penn, the current UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) lightweight champion, licks his bloody gloves after finishing off an opponent in an animal-like display of victory that marks his predatory prowess. In a related display of primal power, one of the UFC’s most popular fighters, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, performs his signature “Teen Wolf” howl during his rabid victory antics. In one of the TapOut brand fight apparel commercials, a ubiquitous mixed martial arts (MMA) sponsor, a fighter’s eye is digitally transmogrified into several different animal eyes, what appears to be a tiger or lion, a bird of prey, followed by an image of the swirling cosmos, suggesting the timeless (ahistorical) potential for wildness lurking within a man just waiting to be “tapped” into. This idea of untapped masculine potential and a fantasy of “consummate physical prowess”1 is also suggested in the very title of SpikeTV’s weekly program which re-plays old fights, UFC Unleashed.

These examples are played for serious, dramatic effect, while at other points along this reality-impulse fight culture’s “inter-textual relay,”2 animal-human links, or what we might think of more generally as nature/social tensions, are played to comic effect. For example, Old Spice’s “Double Impact” body wash and moisturizer for men commercial featuring the showering centaur, the man who is “two things in one” (“I’m a man, and a pretty smart shopper”). Here the notion of animal masculinity is comically invoked to suggest that the innate element of male wildness somehow interferes with attunement to civilization’s many refinements in skin care, like moisturizer. In the film Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) primal or animal masculinity and male bonding through violence was the antidote to the emasculating effects of consumer culture and alienated labor, while here primal masculinity is parodied, co-opted, quite literally domesticated, suggesting men can retain their wildness and still be “smart” consumers. Competing discourses of wildness and civility, instinct and discipline, and “heart” vs. mind, organize much of the rhetoric surrounding this fight culture. This amounts to a linking of the “natural” with the commercial, a co-opting of images of nature which appears to answer some felt need in the male viewer/consumer to have their “natural” wildness affirmed, to encourage them to embrace this wildness and “unleash” a buried inner potential. We even see this in the commercials for the ironically dubbed “‘natural’ male enhancement” products pawned awkwardly before and after rounds of sweaty, muscular grappling and fistic bludgeoning.

As reality TV goes this desire to invoke primal or wild masculinities unencumbered (or at least less encumbered) by social obligations is evident in other programs, such as Man Vs. Wild (Discovery), Survivorman (Discovery), Last One Standing (Discovery), Going Tribal (Discovery), Wildboyz (MTV), and Tribal Life (Travel Channel). MMA programming, and in particular the UFC brand, presents its own rhetoric of wildness and primal access by naturalizing masculine prowess and aggression through association with natural and animal imagery and motifs, including neo-tribal tableaus and myriad thorny tendril motifs (i.e. undomesticated and naturally threatening botanicals) emblazoned on screens and bodies.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is curious that scholarly and critical forums are not attending to the foregoing ascendancy of mixed martial arts from reviled (“human cockfighting”), marginal cultural “attraction” to mainstream phenomenon. There was much critical dialogue in the wake of Fight Club, and perhaps people figure that what was said then sufficed and still applies to the present state of reality-based fight culture. Maybe it is MMA’s lack of subtlety, lack of aesthetic distancing, its bald immediacy that stymies discussion (though I doubt this given the ample attention paid to other reality-based media). Or is it that there is so much there, a semiotic “punches-in-bunches” if you will, one is not sure where to begin?

MMA so blatantly participates in discourses of nation, race, class, gender, power, and especially border-crossings (in the form of cross-cultural appropriations) comprising its cultural DNA. While we see the dominant institutional sports become increasingly international in their make-up, none is quite so dependent on an international talent pool, an international kinesthetic repertoire, and an international fan base as MMA. With the triumphalism surrounding the UFC’s storming off into continental Europe with UFC 99 in Cologne, Germany, and the build-up to UFC 100 set for July 11, which includes two “super” fights, an unprecedented fan expo, viewing parties across the country, and any number of other commercial tie-ins, it is a good moment to take stock of this burgeoning “reality” sports’ rapid global expansion and the “naturalizing” semiotic profusion carried with it. UFC 100 is pitched as a historical monument to the organization’s staying power and legacy, which also includes a special program featuring “The 100 Greatest UFC Fights of All Time.” This all amounts to a canonization and historicizing (i.e. temporalizing) process superimposed over the more implied de-temporalizing discourses of primitive wildness and instinct.3

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of what has been written outside of journalistic discourse on mixed martial arts deals with its implications for the health professions (new varieties of injury), sports science (new varieties of strength and conditioning training), and the sociology of sport as MMA’s no-holds-barred forebears enacted a process of “de-sportizing” of traditional martial arts disciplines (jujitsu, judo, wrestling, muay thai, boxing, etc.), to the present “(re)sportizing” process of MMA through increased rules and regulations which has lead to its mass-market success.4 (Indeed, establishing MMA as a legitimate sport and a martial arts style unto itself and not simply a taboo spectacle of violence is perhaps the central accomplishment of the UFC brand). These are necessary approaches, but they do not account for the consumer repertoire of imagery and motifs at work in this fight cultures’ socio-biological and socio-psychological imaginary. And certainly there are other marked discourses woven in, like the war/combat metaphors, the psycho-sexual element, homoerotic spectacle, human-machine motifs, related kinesthetic repertoires found in video games and martial arts cinema, and feminist concerns related to “hegemonic masculinity”. I find the human-machine connections especially fascinating. In MMA the fighter is objectified as body-technology, as a predator-machine whose key instruments (fists, knees, elbows, feet) are as little mediated as possible (those small gloves!). This feeds into a fantasy of “natural,” un-alienated labor.

Primal screams and other visual and rhetorical devices are set in opposition to producers’ construction of fighters’ normal guy, “backstage” personas. If there is one device that has helped to launch the UFC to a much wider audience it is the deployment of “reality” TV style construction of the fighters’ back-stories. This takes the form of emphasizing a fighter’s fluency between worlds both wild and civilized, caged and un-caged. Rich Franklin, former middleweight champion and fan favorite, is rarely discussed without reference to his prior vocation as high school math teacher. UFC commentators, Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg, reliably comment on how “nice” and “intelligent” so-and-so is, but this is always set against talk of degrees of “heart,” code word for that ineffable question of a fighters’ will to survive in the cage. I do not want to suggest that all a fighter does to succeed in the cage is tap into some inner wildness without recourse to technique and training. It would be hard to overstate how disciplined these fighters are in terms of technique and sheer physical preparedness, or “durability,” as they like to say. But that unquantifiable element, the “heart” of a fighter, manifests itself discursively as a tapping into some latent but buried wildness, and there is always a tension in play between the more quantifiable disciplinary elements gauged through rankings, belting systems, and notable coaches, and the more unquantifiable element of “heart” or “spirit.”

Susan Bordo refers to this complex as “the double bind of masculinity,” the “gentleman and the beast,” the archetype of primal masculinity she sees personified in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan.5 The gentleman/beast, or social/nature binary tensions come to fascinating performative life in the SpikeTV reality show, The Ultimate Fighter, where the site of domestic confinement, the fighters’ house, is the source of chaos, and the cosmos (or order) is paradoxically found in the cage.

Where does one look for the positive couplings of the “natural” and commercial? Where is the spirit and idea of wildness applied progressively in consumer culture? Somehow I think this fantastic and psychologically projective appropriation in the arena of MMA is inevitable, but also potentially degrading to how we imagine wildness and our subjective relations to nature. My own romantic fantasy is that our engagements with the “natural” ought to intercede and challenge our consumer desires, not fuel them.

Image Credits
1. B.J. Penn cleaning his paws.– Author Screenshot
2. Quinton Jackson doing his trademark “teen wolf” howl after knocking out Chuck Liddell.
3. Old Spice “Double Impact” Commercial
4. BadBoy fight gear’s animal-like eyes.

Please feel free to comment.

1. David Desser, “Diaspora and National Identity: Exporting “China” Through The Hong Kong Cinema.” Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader. Eds. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 143. I borrow this notion of “consummate physical prowess” from Desser who uses it in describing a related component of Chinese nationalist pride in relation to Kung Fu films.
2. Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). I borrow the notion of an “inter-textual relay” from Neale.
3. Johannes Fabian, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. (New York: Columbia University Press). Fabian argues that the “primitive” is the key term of anthropology as a temporalizing discourse. In my usage here the primitive is a socio-psychological (rather than anthropological or geographic) category, as in Hayden White’s (1978, Tropics of Discourse) notion of the “wild man” as latent in everyone. Fabian argues that one of the main functions of this discourse is to de-temporalize and thus naturalize; as he put it, “to be naturalized means (…) to be separated from (historic) events meaningful to mankind.” 13.
4. Maarten van Bottenburg and Johan Heilbron, “De-Sportization of Fighting Contests.” International Review for The Sociology of Sport. 41/3-4 (2006): 259-282.
5. Bordo, Susan. “The Male Animal Reconsidered.” The Male Body. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999). 229-264.