I wanted to follow up on my earlier post about Cobra Kai. Here’s my point of departure:
So, what do we have? A conflict between two teenage boys gets reignited in their early middle age where it becomes amplified into a war for dominance of the karate world. On the one hand, it is rather ridiculous, adults using their dojos as vehicles for working out their conflicts. How Freudian! [Indeed. Think about that for a minute, think about it very seriously.] The series is aware of this and indicates that awareness in various ways.
Freud was interested in how our early life influenced, strongly influenced, our behavior as adults. His theory of psychosexual development placed a lot of emphasis on the early years, especially the first six years, but also – but also of course, especially of course – dealt with the emergence of sexuality in puberty.
Cobra Kai centers on Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso, but their story originates in their middle-to-late adolescence in The Karate Kid and its sequels. That’s a bit late for the really deep Freudian stuff to kick in, but the causal dynamic is nonetheless clear and Freudian in kind. The attitudes, feelings, and actions of these middle-age adult men follow patterns set in place in their adolescence. Not only are we told about this past, but we see scenes from the early films.
But the Freudian dynamic goes deeper than that. For it also explores the earlier life of the men who taught Lawrence and LaRusso, John Kreese and Mr. Miyagi respectively. We see scenes from Kreese’s experience during the Vietnam War and before and are led to understand how they have made him the bitter man he is today. LaRusso travels to Okinawa and learns things about Miyagi that he hadn’t known, including something about his early experience with competitive karate the full nature of which has yet to be revealed (we’re two-thirds of the way into the final season). Moreover, when Terry Silver is brought into the film, another bad guy from the past, we learn more about the origins of the Cobra Kai school of karate, strengthening the shows depiction of the pull of the past.
Cobra Kai is also shot through with mimetic desire and sacrifice. The original conflict between LaRusso and Lawrence centers on a mimetic conflict over a woman, Lawrence’s ex-girlfriend who becomes attracted to LaRusso. In the present, LaRusso’s decision to start a dojo is a mimetic answer to Lawrence starting a new Cobra Kai studio – notice that it is that form of karate which gives the series its name. And mimetic dynamics play out in the relationships among the teenagers at the center of the series, LaRusso’s daughter, Samantha, Lawrence’s son, Robby, and his young protégé, Miguel, and a young Cobra Kai student, Tory Nichols.
The sacrifice dynamic is a bit trickier, but the series features a number of karate tournaments and a number of gang battles between the rival dojos. Kenny Payne and “Stingray,” among others, emerge as sacrificial victims in those battles, and then we have the grand melee that ends episode ten on the sixth season. This takes place the Sekai Taikai, an international karate tournament to determine, in effect, the dojo of dojos and anoint the best karate style. The tournament breaks down in a free-for-all battle involving, not only the karate students, but their teachers as well. [Spoiler alert] The battle comes to a dramatic end when one of the student fighters, Kwon, a particularly arrogant fighter, accidentally kills himself with a knife he’d picked up off the floor. The knife had been dropped by Kreese, who’d intended to kill Silver. We’ll have to wait until February to find out what happens next.
Think of the scope covered in the film: from Vietnam, Okinawa, Korea, and America in the mid 20th century through to an international tournament three decades into the middle of the 21sr century. That’s a big chunk of recent history, albeit centered on actions involving only a group of individuals. No nation-states take part in the conflict. This is no War and Peace, but it is, nonetheless history, and it is history displayed in patterns analyzed by Freud and Girard.