The Hero Myth in Popular Culture: The Hong Kong Action Hero in Shaolin Soccer and the Hollywood Kung Fu Champion in The Matrix

Cinema basically blends art and economics, and the film industry presents the hero figure in a fascinating image and action. The film visualizes a brave man or woman’s physical actions in the service to mankind. The action hero in his or her physical actions with rigor and passion to serve his or her nation and community exemplifies what a man or woman should be doing irrespective of personal interests. In the Wachowski brothers –directed The Matrix (1999), Neo Anderson, featuring Keanu Reeves, uses kung fu techniques and a rigorously trained body to save humans from the invasion of machines. Similarly, Steel Leg Sing in Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer (2001), projecting Chow himself as an athletic champion, leads the Shaolin brothers team to a sweeping victory. The computer-generated graphic effects of the soccer hero’s exceptional performance in Shaolin Soccer and that of Neo’s virtual kung fu actions in The Matrix replicate a simulated body through electronically created computer graphics. Mighty Steel Leg Sing’s soccer game, enhanced by his acrobatics, embodies a perfect blend of the body, mind, and spirit. During a prestigious tournament, Sing sports soccer in such a spectacular feats that blends the athletic body and the twentieth-century popular sport. Like the digitized Neo in The Matrix, the soccer hero in Shaolin Soccer exposes magnificent feats of swirling movements and swift physical actions in the soccer field. The computer-generated graphics reposes the dynamics of the hero’s spiritual journey in the modern time human-computer interface brought to audiences through popular media and digital technology, shared by the Hong Kong and Hollywood action cinemas.

“Your Body Belongs to the State”

Focusing on Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow, the chapter explores the familiar forms of dehumanization invoked to reinforce the inherent othering of the rival nation, as well as how Hollywood interpolates the ostensibly progressive image of the self-reliant female action hero in working to shore up perceptions of institutions such as the CIA (with its long and ongoing record of collusion with some of the most reactionary militant and political groups across the globe). The chapter examines these two films within the context of the broader resurgence of Cold War imagery and ideology in contemporary Hollywood.

‘We Choose Our Own Pain. Mine Helps Me Remember’

This Chapter argues that Captain Gabriel Lorca, upon first look, is the archetype of the Starfleet Captain in the vein of Kirk and Picard: a white, middle-aged, (presumably) heterosexual man. However, his reveal as a Terran effectively recasts the character from a capable leader to a white supremacist sociopath, and is thus powerfully subverting the trope of the action hero, and in turn, that of the Starfleet Captain. Discovery thus actively criticizes pervasive ideals of masculinity of the genre (and beyond) through Lorca. It further does so via the character Ash Tyler, who also represents an alternative concept to the traditional action hero. Unlike Lorca, whose sexual prowess is referenced often, Tyler engages in a romantic relationship, an aspect usually neglected in on-screen romances of male heroes. Additionally, he is a rape survivor, again successfully subverting the established gender roles of the genre. This chapter discusses both Lorca and Tyler in order to highlight Discovery’s engagement with, and subversion of genre tropes, and its criticism of traditional ideas of masculinity.

Consuming Katniss

Catherine Driscoll and Alexandra Heatwole. 2018. The Hunger Games: Spectacle, Risk and the Girl Action Hero. London: Routledge.

Hollywood Action Hero Martyrs in ‘Mad Max Fury Road’

Laura Copier builds on Elizabeth Castelli, who characterises the discourse on martyrdom as highly ambivalent, yet persistent and powerful to this day and age, evaluating martyrdom as ‘an idea without a precise origin’ (Castelli, 2004, p. 35). Because it is both impossible and unproductive to pinpoint the exact historical moment in which martyrdom came into existence, Copier focuses, with Castelli, on the ongoing manifestations of martyrdom, in particular on the sustained investigation of contemporary, popular, and secular representations of martyrdom. The discourse of martyrdom is so powerful precisely because of its adaptability and, critically, the transformation of the object that it allows. It is not just the concept of martyrdom that is not fixed; it also causes related discourses to change. One of those discourses is Hollywood cinema, and its representations of gender and the body in female action heroes. Castelli’s ‘culture making’ dimensions of martyrdom that ‘depend upon repetition and dynamics of recognition’ are played out, as Copier shows, in the female character of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in the 2015 film Mad Max Fury Road. Through a close reading of the film’s genre, narrative, and iconography, Copier argues that the female action hero Furiosa is able to transcend and destabilise the equation of martyrdom with death.