Binge-watched Iron Fist as part of my attempt to catch up with the Netfux Marvel universe. I liked it.
I liked it more than I liked Luke Cage. I think Luke Cage is a better piece of TV, truthfully — the best of the Marvel TV universe I’ve seen so far. But I enjoyed Iron Fist more.
I think I am mostly on board with the concept of Cultural Appropriation. You really have no right to be talking about Spirit Animals and Kabbala if you aren’t a native American or a Jew, any more than you ought to be talking about patron saints and guardian angels if you aren’t a Roman Catholic. So maybe you shouldn’t be making TV shows about white Kung-Fu experts? Or maybe you shouldn’t be making TV shows about Kung-Fu in the first place — maybe it’s quite patronising to use a spiritual practice as a motif in a action flick? You wouldn’t make a TV series about an exorcist in which Catholic theology is just there for local colour.
Well, actually, you probably would. But the point still stands.
The Netfux Matt Murdoch is a fairly strong Catholic. He doesn’t go to Mass but he does go to confession. That makes him only the third good example of a TV character with a religion who isn’t coded as the religious character. The 1970 martial arts craze tended to separate the “spiritual practice” part of Kung-Fu from the “kicking people terribly hard” part. Steve Gerber calls them out on this in an episode of Howard the Duck. Jim Starlin seemed to have had at least some interest in Eastern philosophy but Shang Chi was literally the son of Fu Manchu so that probably isn’t a very good example.
Danny Rand is a fairly strong Buddhist, praying for the dead and even saying a Buddhist grace (I am sure that is not the right word) before eating take-out. But maybe they are getting the details embarrassingly and patronisingly wrong?
The Marvel TV universe is drawing quite heavily on Frank Miller’s reinvention of Daredevil which makes it a kind of second cousin once removed to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Everyone calls everyone else “sensi” or “brother” and The Hand is behind everything. There isn’t an episode called Night of The Million Billion Ninja but there could very well have been.
Maybe the whole idea of Ninja infiltrating a big American corporation is quite racist in itself. Maybe that sentence still holds true even if you remove the words “infiltrating a big American corporation”. Someone said that an adult adventure serial in which Japanese businessmen and mafiosi employ samurai and ninja was on the same level as one in which the American gangsters employed cowboys and the British gangsters employed beefeaters. Which many of us thought sounded like it would be a whole lot of fun.
I liked it.
Iron Fist is one of those characters I have been reading my whole life: he arrived in Britain within a year of my starting to read comics. (There wasn’t enough monthly American material to sustain a British weekly comic indefinitely, so the British Avengers reprint morphed into Avengers Featuring Master of Kung Fu, Avengers Featuring Iron Fist and Avengers Featuring Conan the Barbarian.) He was created by Roy Thomas, one of the few examples of Stan Lee’s chief henchman creating a new character rather than reworking someone else’s.
Luke Cage is a strong bullet proof black guy: you can do stories about him, but there is no one thing that makes him unique. Daredevil is basically “Spider-Man, only blind.” Thomas gave Iron Fist a much stronger and more specific back story. Rich kid; plane crash in the Himalayas; taken into a mystical city which only appears on earth one year in seven; learns martial arts; returns to earth to reclaim his inheritance.
A lot of 70s martial arts stuff dealt with fish-out-of-water culture clashes; but I preferred “white guy raised in mystical city re-learning how to be an American” to “Chinese guy saying mystical things about these funny New Yorkers”. (Did I mention that Fu Manchu is literally his dad?) Telling a story about corporate corruption and organized crime, but giving it a backstory about secret societies, magic cities and dragons worked really well. Iron Fist eventually formed a double act with Luke Cage, which foregrounded the two-worlds theme even better. John Byrne briefly got hold of the character and revealed that Ku’un Lu’n actually exists on an alien planet where it is permanently besieged by triffids: this has been widely ignored. More recently, writers,,,, have introduced the idea that Danny Rand is the latest in a long line of Iron Fists; and that K’un’lu’n is only one of seven mystical cities which periodically pop up on earth. When they all arrive together there is a big tournament to find out which Iron Fist is the most ironic and most fisty.
The TV series seems to grok all this very well. It cuts all the overtly comic-booky stuff. Danny does not wear a yellow and green jump suit with a funny raised collar, although he does have an impressive tattoo of a dragon on his equally impressive chest. There are lots of ninja and martial artists, but no supervillains. “The Iron Fist” is now a job-title and Danny’s main purpose is to defend Kunl’un from The Hand, a purpose he has betrayed by coming back to New York. Some people have complained that The Hand appears in too many of the Netfux shows; but I think that a worldwide conspiracy of super-powerful ninja with a psychotic little old lady in charge works nicely as an overall Big Bad. They know how to raise the dead and manufacture artificial heroin, but they aren’t otherwise super-powered. No-one apart from Danny knows how to channel their chi into their fists until they become like unto a thing of iron although I am pretty sure that by the end of series two someone will have worked it out. (So far as I remember, in the original comic, having iron fists was merely a very, very advanced martial art technique and not a marker of messianic status.)
The first half of the series is most fun; with Danny arriving back in New York as a homeless beggar and trying to prove his true identity and regain control over his father’s mega corporation. The story about where he has been for the last fifteen years and how he got glow-in-the-dark hands dribbles out over half a dozen episodes. We don’t see the inside of K’u’n’l’u’n. We’re told several times he had to face a dragon to become The Iron Fist, but when we finally get to the flashback it is strongly implied to be a metaphorical dragon. Danny’s dad’s company is now being run by his dad’s best friend and his son, and obviously they are not in any way corrupt and not in any way involved in Danny’s dad’s death. Harold and Ward Meachum seem to be actively trying to channel Norman and Harry Osborn: David Wenham in particular is performing an impressive Wilem Dafoe tribute act.
Finn Jones does a pretty impressive job of putting across a character whose life was effectively suspended at the age of 15. Fifteen years of martial arts training and nothing but has given him a strength of character and the ability to punch holes through walls; but in other respects he is charmingly naive. There are plenty of stunt men and body doubles on hand to convince us that he is the legendary Iron Fist, the living weapon, the greatest warrior in the universe, but when the actor has to go through his own Tai Chi moves he isn’t any more impressive than I would be.
There is something slightly Potterish about the way in which childhood truama is being played out in the boardroom of a billion dollar company and in the enclaves of mysterious cults. Harold was an abusive father to Ward; Ward bullied Danny when they were kids; Danny and Joy Meachum were kind of childhood sweethearts. (Danny proves his identity by sending her a bag of M&Ms.) Almost every scene, however bloodthirsty, has an “I remember when we were kids” element behind it.
Luke Cage had the advantage of actually being about something: it clearly had writers who knew Harlem and cared about black community issues — or at any rate were able to fake it. Iron Fist is about a fictional corporate world and a fictional China. In the end it is about secret societies duelling against each other; with the personal and the political entangled with loyalties to Kun’’lun and to The Hand. Of course Danny’s old mate from the monastery shows up in New York at the least opportune moment. Of course he, Davos, thinks that he would have made a better Iron Fist than Danny has. Of course they end up resolving their differences in a huge fight scene.
I have just realised, while typing this, why Iron Fist worked so well for me. Nasty gangsters are trying to push a new kind of heroin into New York. Nasty pharmaceutical companies are overcharging poor people for life saving drugs and filling kids up with cancer causing pollution. A nasty businessman is trying to cheat a naive kid with a fabulous haircut out of his inheritance. But against that background, people in modern clothes walk into gyms and bow and say “respect the dojo”. People who seem to be learning self-defence have links with obscure secret societies. K’unlu’n is divided against itself; there is a power struggle in The Hand. And everyone talks about this stuff as if you already know what it is.
Jedi. That’s what they are. They are all Jedi.
8 comments:
I quite liked Iron Fist. I understand that people who know lots about martial arts think that Finn Jones is a bloody awful martial artist, but since I don't it was OK enough for me.
Preferred Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.
The problem that all the Marvel TV series have is that they've got about 8 hours of story and they're making 13 hours of TV from them. Padding, padding, padding. Also, by The Defenders it's really "Oh God, not the ducking Hand again."
Defenders though is reasonably good, at least in part because they're only making 8 hours of TV and they have to give screen time to 4 central characters so it has to keep moving. No time for boardroom shenanigans.
I've not watched anything after that though.
The other continual criticism of Iron Fist was that he was a white character in a role that could be Asian. Ummm, yes. Obviously the comic book character is white, and used to get a whole man of two worlds, not really fitting into either vibe. It would not have required a huge retcon to make him Chinese-American, but at the same time, a Chinese martial artist coming to America and being confused the modern world and so on is a pretty well trodden trope. Pretty much all that's left of Shang-Chi since they had to take Fu Manchu out.
Thinks. Why isn't Shang-Chi now just the estranged son of the Yellow Claw?
Because the Yellow Claw is just as much a racist stereotype as Fu Manchu?
Obviously, though he has been used by Asian writers in the recent past and critically is owned by Marvel. Fu Manchu comes with copyright and trademark issues which prevent him being reinvented into something fractionally less racist.
"The son of the world's worst crimelord who ow fights to dismantle his father's legacy" is a more interesting concept than "Very good at Kung Fu."
"He was created by Roy Thomas, one of the few examples of Stan Lee’s chief henchman creating a new character rather than reworking someone else’s."
Scorching burn.
I imagine that Disney could afford buy off Sax Rohmer if they really wanted to....
Presumably, you could make Shang Chi's dad a Chinese master criminal without undue racism. It's the Yellow Peril imagery of Fu Manchu which is offensive, not the fact that he is Asian and a Bad Guy. Or is it important that he Shang Chi's dad is a PULP bad guy?
I suppose the idea that Nayland-Smith had been fighting Fu for decades, and that the posh-British guy became a kind of substitute father for Shang was of some importance. I've read the original 70s series but am not really familiar with what's been done with the character since.
Nothing interesting has been done since, because "really good at Kung fu" isn't that interesting. That said, his father is now a Chinese mystical crime lord that is neither Fu Manchu or the Yellow Claw (because that would be racist). According to Wikipedia "Zheng Zu, an ancient Chinese sorcerer who discovered the secret to immortality". That was in Secret Avengers by Ed Brubaker, which thinking about it was pretty good, but that's mainly because I'm a sucker for Mike Deodata art.
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