PHENOMENALITY: (1) *naturalistic* (2) *uncanny* (3) *naturalistic,* (4) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological, metaphysical*
A concept as idiosyncratic as
ABC-TV’s cult teleseries KUNG FU holds two sources of appeal for a blogger like
myself, whose aims are no less idiosyncratic.
One aim of this blog is to take
note of the ways in which metaphenomenal narratives construct meaning, using as
a basis the “four functions” formulation of Joseph Campbell. Campbell applied his formula only to myth,
but since I’ve argued elsewhere for the contiguity of myth and art, I find
Campbell’s categories of meaning—cosmological, metaphysical, sociological, and
psychological—to have broad application to the arts. The teleseries KUNG FU offers a chance to see
how these categories appear in an ongoing series, as it’s reasonably strong in
all four departments.
A second aim is to show how the
tropes of narrative fiction work in a myriad of ways in order to create the
tonal quality of “strangeness,” whether in its “marvelous” or “uncanny”
forms. One might call this the
“anti-Todorovian” aspect of the blog, since my NUM theory was formulated as a
rejection of Torodov’s formulations. The
ABC series offers some interesting applications of the NUM theory. Some episodes are as purely naturalistic as
are most TV westerns, but the hero himself—Kwai Chang Caine, a wandering Shaolin
priest in the American West of the 1800s—often evinces uncanny qualities,
displaying strength or resources beyond the realm of the naturalistic. In addition, some episodes confront Caine
with equally extraordinary opponents—raising the question as to how the
priest’s adventures relate to what I’ve termed “the superhero idiom.” This is
not to say, naturally, that Caine could ever satisfy the naïve conceptions that
define a “superhero,” any more than some of the other figures that I’ve related
here to that idiom, such as Tarzan and Zorro.
If the pilot
telefilm for the series were all that existed of the
concept, Kwai Chang Caine would have no more qualifications for the superhero
idiom than do the hundreds of other naturalistic cavaliers spawned by Hong
Kong’s booming kung-fu genre of the 1960s and 1970s. The telefilm begins by showing Caine (David
Carradine) in the present, as he seeks employment in the Old West, but the
narrative concentrates on the backstory as to how a Shaolin priest chanced to
appear in the United States—told through the series’ signature (and most
frequently spoofed) device, that of ongoing flashbacks.
Because the telefilm is concerned
with depicting Caine’s past in rich detail, the exigencies of the present
receive rather short shrift. Present-day
Caine happens upon a crew, largely made up of Chinese immigrants, who are
laboring to lay tracks for a railroad.
The Caucasian boss (Barry Sullivan) is a hard-ass who evinces no
sympathy for the sufferings of his workers, but neither he nor his cronies are
particularly villainous, merely insensitive.
Future series-episodes manage to address, with greater effect, the
marginalization of non-white peoples in a dominantly Caucasian country.
Though present-day Caine does
champion the cause of the oppressed workers—he ends up setting a bridge on fire
in protest of his people’s treatment—the narrative drive stems from the fact
that Caine himself is a fugitive from the Chinese legal system. A Caucasian bounty hunter shows up at the
work-camp and attempts to take Caine prisoner. Caine bests him
easily, but the altercation alerts the boss and his henchmen to Caine’s extra-legal status.
Alternating with Caine’s perils in
the present are the flashbacks to show how a priest with supreme martial arts
skills came to be a fugitive in a foreign land.
Caine is first seen as a child in China, orphaned by the deaths of his
Chinese mother and American father. He seeks out the security of a Shaolin
monastery, and despite his mixed heritage is admitted, which sets him upon the
path of what might called “enlightenment through advanced butt-kicking.” The numerous disciplines of the Shaolin monks
are always justified as being first and foremost directed to the initiate’s
quest for harmony with the world, and a monk’s ability to fight should be used
only as a last resort. Of course, given
the demands of an ongoing series, “last resorts” come up almost every episode,
although on occasion the writers of KUNG FU did have Caine place the desire for
harmony above the more familiar TV-role of “policeman” or “avenger.”
That said, Caine, unlike many TV
heroes, is guilty of a murder, although it’s committed in the heat of passion,
when Caine’s beloved Master Po is callously shot down by the nephew of the
Chinese Emperor. The nephew commits this
act by using one of the pistols perfected by Western craftsmen. Thus the gun, which allows the nephew to kill
easily, both brings about his own death (Caine impales him with a spear) and
causes Caine to flee to the land of his Caucasian father.
In this story Caine does not
appear particularly “uncanny” in his talents, with one exception. Bound to a central tent-post by the railroad
men, Caine uproots the post and uses it to club one of his adversaries into
dreamland. This is clearly not a
“marvelous” level of strength, but it is the sort of uncanny feat one often
sees performed by Tarzan or the various incarnations of Italy’s “Maciste.” However, the feat receives so little emphasis that I don't deem it as changing the overall naturalistic thrust of the telefilm.
The film ends as Caine is forced to engage in
a battle with another bounty hunter, this one from China and equally gifted in
martial fighting-skills. Caine could be
said to satisfy the Christian associations of his surname in that he ends up
killing the hunter, though most future episodes will not portray Caine in such desperate
straits.
The first regular-length episode
to be broadcast is entitled “King of the Mountain,” which again pits Caine
against another bounty hunter, whom he battles, appropriately enough, atop a
mountain. But the main “threat” is that
the wanderer Caine is almost drawn into the peaceful life of a
faux-family. Caine befriends a boy
orphaned by an Indian attack, and when he learns that the boy’s only relatives
are venal scumbags, he takes a job on a widow-woman’s ranch so that the boy
will be provided for. Some possibility
for romance is suggested, but the intrustion of the hunter causes Caine to
realize that he must, in the tradition of other fugitive-heroes, move on.
Two scenes are noteworthy: for the
first time, Caine’s beliefs in harmony are seen to have palpable effect, as he
“gentles” an untamed horse purely by communicating his good will to the
creature. Caine also looks into the soul
of his pursuer and psychologically reads his fascination with death. This proves prophetic, as the hunter ends up
killing himself in his efforts to capture the fugitive. The first of these scenes is sufficient to
rate “King” as an uncanny narrative.
“Dark Angel” shifts back to the
naturalistic mode. Complementing Caine’s
almost-initiation into family dynamics in “King,” the fugitive tries to track
down the family of his American father.
He first encounters a “faux father” in the form of a preacher/conman,
Serenity Johnson—appropriately portrayed by John Carradine, real-life father of
David. Serenity saves Caine from being
hung for the murder of a prospector committed by hostile Indians, but Caine
isn’t able to save Serenity from his own folly.
The preacher pursues the dead prospector’s strike, but the Indians catch
him and expose him to the sun, causing Serenity to lose his sight. Caine labors to give Serenity a crash-course
in Shaolin sensitivity, so that he can navigate almost as well as the blind
Master Po.
At the same time, Caine is able to
locate his paternal grandfather, but Henry Caine proves to be a bigot who
resented his son’s marriage to a Chinese wife, and hates Caine as the fruit of
that marriage. Caine isn’t able to
penetrate the grandfather’s hostility, but Serenity rains down “hell and
brimstone” on the old man. Henry yields
to Caine some key knowledge: that Caine has a half-brother somewhere—which
development gives Caine a new purpose in his father’s land, beyond just running
from the law.
Though the KUNG FU telefilm was
weak in its depiction of the problem of racism, the third episode “Blood
Brothers” makes up for that lack. While
searching for his half-brother Danny in a small town, Caine stumbles across the
fact that Lin Wu, one of Caine’s fellow monks, lives there—or has lived there,
since no one in town seems to know what became of him. Caine protects a Chinese patriarch named
Soong from the town’s young rowdies, but even Soong and his family members
won’t reveal Lin Wu’s fate.
It will surprise no one that this
is another take on the popular formula seen in the film “Bad Day at Black
Rock,” or that Lin Wu is dead, killed by the racist rowdies. The episode also presents Caine in a rather
activist role. He responds to Soong’s
accomodationist tactics of keeping his head down at all times by saying that
“the more you attempt to remain unseen, the more they will feel free to seek
you out.” Caine persuades Soong to seek
justice for Lin Wu in the American law-courts, and manages to win over the
somewhat xenophobic locals to the sociological concept that the people of China
are no less human than themselves.
As in the telefilm, Caine’s
interaction with Chinese nationals allows for them to spread the myth of
Shaolin supernatural skills, as when Soong tells the local sheriff that “a
Shaolin priest can walk through walls.”
Caine doesn’t quite do this, but when the lawman confines Caine to a
jail-cell, the Shaolin does break free by rather handily bending apart the bars
of the cell’s window. Therefore this
episode also falls within the province of the uncanny.
