A Thornton Film Sport Body

‘I Know Kung Fu’: The Sporting Body in Film

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‘I KNOW KUNG FU’: THE SPORTING BODY IN FILM Andrew Thornton Centre for Cultural Research in Sport, University of Surrey Roehampton

Introduction This chapter draws on contemporary film and cultural theory to analyse representations of the body in popular film. The paper draws most heavily on Richard Dyer’s analysis of race, the body and representation, Barbara Creed’s feminist psychoanalytic reading of ‘the monstrous-feminine’ in Science fiction film and Susan Jefford’s postmodern readings of the shifting construction of masculinities, the body and technology in the ‘Terminator’ films. By focusing on films such as The Matrix (1999), it will be shown that the viewing and construction of the body in popular film, and in the media more generally, is framed by sporting symbolism and ideals. Further, the paper will begin to explore the ways that representations of the body are the site for a number of anxieties about the maintenance of racial and gender difference.

‘You are the One, Neo’: context and literature What Hollywood culture is offering, in place of the bold spectacle of male muscularity and/as violence, is a self-effacing man, one who now, instead of learning to fight, learns to love. (Jeffords, 1993: p. 245) 1

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I’m not afraid anymore Neo. Because the Oracle said that the man I would fall in Love with would be the One. Now wake up. Wake Up Neo! (Trinity, The Matrix, 1999) The issues of gender, the body and difference have been discussed at some length in contemporary academic literature that analyses the social and cultural significance of popular film, television and other media (Bordo, 1997; Jeffords, 1993; Dyer, 1997; Creed, 1990; Tasker, 1993; Cohan and Hark, 1993). The embodiment and representation of gender and racial difference has also been analysed within the social and cultural analysis of the relationship between sport, media and popular culture (Hargreaves, 1993; Carrington, 1999; Balsamo, 1994; Connell, 1990; Klein, 1993; Messner, 1992; Andrews, 1996; Gillette and White, 1994). This chapter draws on both of these literatures and the issues raised within them. I also hope to extend the analysis in new directions. As Jeffords suggests above, the imaging of bodies, males and masculinities in popular film has undergone a series of transformations in the 1980s and 1990s. The literature on sport and the body suggests a similar instability in the relationship between the body, gender, race and sport. This chapter explores how the symbolic capital (or language) of sport and sporting bodies is put to work in popular film. I argue that the use and manipulation of the symbolism of the sporting body represents the anxieties and pleasures associated with seeing and experiencing the body. More to the point, I argue that all bodies and representations of bodies are compared and contrasted to actual and ideal sporting bodies. The sporting body has in recent times become one of the culturally most dominant points of reference for discussions of the body (see also Kennedy, this volume). Sport has now taken its place with sexuality, reproduction and health as one of the most significant forums and forms for thinking about bodies. There are a number of films that one could draw on to explore these issues, but I will concentrate here on the film The Matrix 1 (1999). Jeffords’s remarks above are prescient, as it is the central character Neo’s awakening to/by the love of a woman that literally

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brings him back to life. In the end, instead of fighting the bad guys with his fists and guns, Neo defeats them because he has ‘learned to love’.

‘What if you were just a mental projection of your ideal self?’ Psychoanalytic method and film theory It is now clear enough that we can analyse films as cultural events (Turner, 1988) which leads us beyond questions of their structure and internal coherence, such as: How do films make sense or fit into other cultural practices of making meaning? Why are certain films produced at certain times? What are the social contexts in which a given film can possibly be made? This chapter is based in part on the use of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as it has been reworked by feminist, Marxist and post-structural theorists of culture, language and film (Creed, 1990; Dyer, 1997; Jeffords, 1993; Tasker, 1994). Psychoanalytic theory suggests that the formation of human identity works through a series of displacements and substitutions. Following Freudian psychology, it is argued that humans construct images, symbols and myths in an attempt to re-present and interpret experiences, emotions and events that occur in the early stages of sexual (identity) development and the formation of the sense of our selves as distinct social beings. These images and symbols are employed in an attempt to organise and cope with what at first seems unfathomable, ambiguous, fascinating and/ or traumatic. The core experience of identity formation that links it to sexual development (and I would argue links it to theorising the Body) is the child’s question, “Where do I come from?”. This series of experiences has been called the desire to return to the ‘primal scene’: to literally be present at the moment of one’s conception/origins. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that children eventually begin to posit answers to this question through the construction of a series of images and substitutions (Creed, 1990): for example, the popular myth that ‘The stork brings babies to the house’.

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The formation of identity is also framed by a passage through the Oedipal stage. This is the point at which the child differentiates itself from others. In Lacan’s (1977) account, the resolution of the Oedipal complex marks the formation of the unconscious as the realm of the repressed and the very possibility of (gendered) subjects establishing entry into the symbolic order. The Oedipal complex involves a boy’s desire for his mother as primary love object, a desire which is prohibited by the symbolic order in the form of the incest taboo. The father represents to boys the threat of castration which such prohibited desire evokes. The father as a competitor and authority figure can punish and castrate (or disempower) the child. Thus, males shift their initial identification from mother to father, who is identified with the symbolic position of power and control. The father comes between the Pre-Oedipal child and its attachment to the mother, which is presymbolic. For girls this involves the acceptance that they have already been castrated (or barred from full entry into the symbolic order and thus power). This results in deep anger but only partial identification with the mother because the mother is identified as lacking the phallus or phallic power, the same as the female child. This is so because the mother is part of the original oneness that is the child’s experience of itself as an undifferentiated self. The father figure thus becomes associated with authority and dominance. This is so because the symbolic order insists on difference, and within the Pre-Oedipal phase there is no differentiation within the consciousness of the child. The connection with the caring object/mother is more open and ambiguous because there is no perceived separation between the two. According to Julia Kristeva (1986), the small child faces the choice betweeen mother-identification and subsequent marginality within the symbolic order or father-identification giving access to symbolic dominance but wiping out the plenitude of the pre-Oedipal mother identification. This account is not intended to be a literal account of the child’s development. These events take place and are organized by the imaginary and subconscious. In Lacan’s analysis both males and females are stuck trying to acquire mastery of the symbolic, but neither ever can. Females are

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barred from access to the symbolic by being mother-identified. Boys, even though they can identify with the father and thus the symbolic, are also starting from a position of lack: that is, they too begin from the position of not having the power of the Father (symbolic order). Lacan suggests that we can never gain mastery of the symbolic order because we always begin from this position of lack. We do not have control of the symbolic: we can only enter into a relationship with it. In the ‘mirror phase’‚ we learn to identify with an image of ourselves or an other person/child. However, we can never fully identify with that image or symbol because it is external to us; we can never match it because it is not us.The only way that we have to communicate this sense of an inconsistency between our sense of a 'self' (or identity) and what is 'not this self' (or difference) is through the symbolic order. However, this mismatch or misrecogntion is unresolvable because the symbolic order produces the impossibility of identification in the first place. Arguably the Oedipal phase is not merely an intellectual process. It is the point at which we first come to be aware of bodies and ourselves as bodily entities and most significantly as capable of having desires and anxieties. This perhaps is why sport as a socially organised experience of the body has been so poorly understood in academic literature. The depth of sports participants’ connections with their chosen activity plays along the unstable joint between anxiety and pleasure that is similar to the earliest features of identity formation. Sport is not merely negative, it is deeply ambiguous. It insists on both connection and rejection. We can suggest that film is a type of symbolic ordering that is organised in the same fashion as the processes of identity formation. It plays around with the material of the fantasies and desires that we construct in an attempt to deal with issues of identification and power. Thus it is reasonable to suggest that film is the medium of communicating our fantasies and desires. Films are also examples of attempts to communicate our anxieties and desires. Creed (1990) points out thay sexual (identity) development does not only invoke negative or anxious feelings. Displacement is

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the method of dealing with the traumas and desires evoked in the process of sexual development. The meanings, symbols and representations that we construct in order to deal with these events are the results of these experiences. As members of a film audience we are participating in what is essentially an act of open voyeurism. We are actively allowing ourselves the pleasures and anxieties of watching. One cannot avoid being voyeuristic in watching a film. One of the major features of the voyeuristic act is that one is hidden/unseen or unknown to those who are being looked at and that one cannot pass through the barrier/s which makes this viewing possible. For example, we cannot walk onto the screen in a movie and ostensibly the actors are unaware and or non-reactive to the audience during viewing of a film. But what is perhaps more important in analysing film is not the nature of voyeurism, but rather the invitation to voyeurism: How do particular film narratives invite us to look? What fantasises and desires are they directing our attention to?

‘The white man’s muscles’? In his book White (1997) Richard Dyer focuses on what is available in Euro-Western cultures to make sense of ‘white’ and whiteness, thus what he is discussing is not merely representation, but rather the politics of representation: how do representations work?; how do they mediate, constrain affect how we behave, think and feel? One of the central aspects of analysis in Dyer’s (1997) discussion is the representation of white male bodies in culture. One chapter draws particular attention to the significance of bodies which are built: bodybuilders, champion athletes, bodies that have been subjected to intense training regimens/practices. However, bodybuilders are only one (extreme) type of sporting body and there are other sporting bodies or embodiments that are represented in popular film. Yvonne Tasker’s discussion of Spectacular Bodies (1993) references this idea, but again she is looking at particular individual types of sporting bodies: Karate experts, bodybuilders and boxers. What I want to suggest is

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that the sporting body encompasses the broader set of images and symbols that frames how we see bodies: in other words, characters such as that played by Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films. ‘Rocky’, as a boxing body, is only intelligible and/or acceptable as a heroic figure because his body is read in the culturally dominant terms of the sporting body. I would emphasise that the body of many actors and figures in film are intelligible, knowable as legitimate heroes or figures because of the (symbolic) values that sporting bodies invoke. They are bodies that have been created, produced and reproduced through the symbolic and practical structures of sport. (Klein, 1993; Holmlund, 1994; Dyer, 1997). These bodies carry or are the signifiers of sporting ideals: spiritual purity, discipline, aspiration, superior morality. However, I want to argue that these representations connote the nominally positive values associated with sport: hard work, discipline, and most significantly, a strange type of purity of will. This spirit or will overcomes all barriers even if the body of the hero fails in its task; or rather the spirit of the hero animates the (male) body beyond its physical limits. The ‘bad guys’ and non-white and non-male bodies may also possess sporting bodies, but they inevitability take a back seat due to the lack of spiritual purity that goes with the white male hero’s body. But as I will point out, this is a deeply anxious and unstable construction of what Andrew Ross (1995) has called the ‘The Great White Dude’. In Euro-Western culture and thought there is no more powerful position than that of just being human. The claim to be ‘normal’ is the claim to speak from an unnamed position for all of humanity. For example, Western Liberal Democracy is founded on the principle of ‘equality for all’. However, once you claim difference, ‘I am black’, ‘I am white’ you become perceived and positioned as partial, biased, part of a ‘special interest group’ unable to speak for anyone else except ‘your own’ race. Raced people cannot speak for ‘all of humanity’ because they can only speak for their ‘own race’. Thus the naming and positioning of whiteness as part of racial hierarchy and classification displaces it from being impartial and normal (Dyer, 1997). It becomes

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one among many racial positions and identifications. It becomes known and seen and thus loses its normalcy2. Dyer points out that until the 1980s it was rare to see a white man semi-naked or unclothed in film and cinema. It is not and was not, however, uncommon in film and cinema to see black bodies in particular, and Native semi-naked bodies. And many of these bodies were unspectacular in comparison to the muscular and exaggerated bodies of contemporary male film stars. He poses the question: Why should bodies that appear so average, so normal have so much control of the world and other bodies? Dyer ’s analysis of ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Hercules’ films of the past and present suggests that, despite the limits of the white body, white bodies do maintain their positions of dominance in film and in culture through the insistence on the spiritual/moral superiority of white bodies. He argues that the built body is an achieved body, worked at, planned and suffered for. Building bodies is the most literal triumph of mind over matter, imagination over flesh. Dyer argues that the bodies represented in the colonialist adventure film constructs the white man as physically superior yet also an everyman, built to do the work of (colonial) world improvement. Dyer concludes that the built white body is not the body that white men are born with; it is the body made possible by their ‘natural’ mental superiority. The point after all is that it is built, a product of the application of thought and planning, an achievement. The built body equates with the colonialist enterprise: both work to organize, constrain and control that which is disorderly, lacking moral certainty and uncivilised, and in that moment reassert the (supposed) moral and physical superiority of white male bodies.

Masculinities, inversion and internalisation In 1980s film, Susan Jeffords argues that masculinities were based on the externalisation of masculine power: Throughout this period, the male body — principally the white male body — became increasingly a vehicle of display — of

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musculature, of beauty, of physical feats, and of a gritty determination. External spectacle — weaponry, explosions, crashes, high speed chases, and ostentatious luxuries — offered companion evidence of both the sufficiency of this and volatility of display. (Jeffords, 1993: p. 245) Jeffords’ analysis of 1990s popular film suggests what she terms an inversion (a variation in which features or aspects of the original are reversed, or turned upsidedown) and internalisation of masculinity compared to its 1980s predecessors. However, she points out that this is not an absolute change, but rather a continuation on the theme of centring (white, western) masculine bodies, identities and issues in popular film (see also Tasker, 1993; Cohan and Hark, 1993). For example, in Terminator 2, Sarah Connor ’s pumped-up body first appears on screen in tight focus on her muscular arm. The camera then pans down so that we can see that she is doing numerous chin-ups (Jeffords, 1993: p. 249). There is a constant focus in this film on her muscularity. Sarah’s desire to free herself and save her son (and the world) manifests itself on her body: her will and power are externally manifest in the size and definition of her muscles. Jeffords suggests this is all part of the inversion of masculine difference in the 1990s. The inversion here is the application of the masculine signifier of muscles to a female body; but also in this film the de-legitimation of Sarah as a mother. As she becomes more masculine in attitude and body shape she loses the ability to mother.

‘I Know Kung Fu’: the body, difference and masculinities in the 21st century In the opening sequence of The Matrix we are shown a female figure clad in a shiny black form-fitting outfit being confronted by several armed male police officers. She counter-attacks them with amazing martial arts moves and then escapes by flying! This is a female figure taking an active and physical role in the story. Throughout the rest of the film the character “Trinity” is physically active and strong:

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fighting the bad guys, using every manner of guns and even flying a helicopter. This is another example of inversion of the normal position of female characters in mainstream film (especially ‘action’ films): the ‘normal’ female being passive and in need of rescuing. However, by the film’s end the filmmakers reconcile this inversion by turning Trinity into the ‘love interest’ for the leading man, “Neo”. The leading man also ends up rescuing her from certain death, even though she does play some part in her own rescue. Indeed, the leading man, Keanu Reeves as “Neo”, turns out to have the most extreme physical capabilities of all the characters. Trinity says to Neo just after he fights the Agents, “I’ve never seen anyone move like that before”. The audience is similarly enthralled by Neo/Reeves’s use of his body, even though we are well aware that this is ‘just a movie’3. It is clear that Neo/Reeves’s physicality within the narrative of The Matrix is quite important. Physical prowess and emotional growth or maturity have come to be seen as complementary, even necessary, aspects of heroic (masculine) bodies, as implied by Jeffords above. This raises the question of what is it exactly that ‘looks’ physically powerful and competent? As I suggested earlier, the signs of physical prowess of the (male) body reference the meanings and symbolism that are derived from the broader cultural representations of athletic or sporting bodies. That is to say, bodies that display the signifiers — or might even be said to be the signifiers — of not only physical training, discipline and effort but also the nominally positive moral and emotional ideals and behaviours of sport participants. These ideals include hard work, discipline, aspiration, fair play, a will to overcome obstacles to attain goals, and also a purity of will. For example, a recent Sports Illustrated article on Lance Armstrong’s fifth victory in the Tour de France was entitled ‘A New Definition of Will’ (Anderson, 2003). The imagery in representations of the male body in sport and popular film have come to be mutually reinforcing, even as they continue to change. The idea that physical prowess is equated with masculine embodiment is not a new one. The idea that sport bodies are ‘superhuman’ is a way of reconciling the continuous and enormous amount of attention that males (and in

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a different way, females) pay to representations of male athletes. By constructing the actions and bodies of elite and professional athletes as ‘extraordinary’ we are allowed to continue to unabashedly look at them. The desire to possess this type of body, sexually or through individual effort, is covered over by the assertion of its superiority. ‘Obviously’ I can’t be as skilled, fast or strong as Ronaldo, David Beckham or Andy Roddick, but my gaze all the time falls on their bodies. Margaret Morse (1988) has commented on how the use of slow motion replay in sport makes the bodies of athletes seem graceful and of heroic proportions. In a way, ‘bullet-time’, a new technique of filming invented by the makers of The Matrix, is a form of slow-motion that accomplishes the same effect and affect. ‘Bullet-time’ allows for the creation of sequences where different parts of the same film sequence are moving at different speeds. Filming the action from 360 degrees and then speeding up or slowing down various aspects of the action in the final print accomplishes this effect. (The real innovation here is the ability to film in 360 degrees: in traditional film-making one could only film from the perspective of 180 degrees or what is called the ‘180 degree rule’ [Turner, 1988]). ‘Bullet-time’ emphasises to an even greater degree the effects of slow motion that Morse has identified. The movement of the body reaches otherworldly dimensions, beyond our ability to put into any human framework. The result is the appearance of bodies moving as though controlled by the hands of an unseen supernatural puppeteer. We can readily see in The Matrix that Neo/Reeves is quite ‘ordinary’ physically compared to the rather more muscular, blackskinned “Tank” and “Dozer”. “Morpheus” (Laurence Fishburne), while a physical presence in the film, is only Neo’s ‘spiritual guide’, thus suggesting that he is not even Neo’s (spiritual) equal, despite his deep conviction that Neo is ‘The One’. Morpheus as the mystic, reverential leader is another stereotype from western and American mythology (Morrison, 1993). Ultimately, it is Neo who rescues Morpheus, Trinity and the entire human population. In the final sequence, Neo’s spiritual purity and will are the bases of his power, not to mention the love of a (good) woman. Thus the ‘ordinary’

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white male body is both spiritually and physically reinstated as the dominant figure. In the narrative structure of the film, Neo establishes his physical credentials early in the story in the training sequences with Morpheus while he is ‘jacked into the Matrix’. In the promotion of this film there was endless footage on television and in commercials showing the actors preparing for their roles by doing physical and martial arts training in order to be ‘convincing’ on screen. There is also a ‘making of…’ clip on the end of the commercial tape, entitled ‘I Know Kung Fu’, that goes into great detail on the training involved for the actors to ‘look convincing’. The female star of the film, Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, is applauded for her grit and determination. It is revealed in this clip that she had sprained her ankle quite badly in filming the ‘Lobby’ sequence, but continued to work on the scene without telling anyone. Thus Moss gets some credit for her masculine bravado and gets to embody the sports credo, ‘No Pain, No Gain’. This is an interesting and complex issue in terms of the nature of how and what the filmic body signifies. For, logically, there is no reason that a ‘virtual’ character inside of a computer programme or a film should ‘look’ physically strong and/or competent. However, this is a major issue in film and popular culture, as attested to by the attention paid to the training of the actors in The Matrix. In a similar vein, Sarah Michelle Geller, the actor who plays ‘Buffy: The Vampire Slayer’ on television, is somewhat unconvincing because she is female, physically quite small and non-muscular and she has no sports or martial arts credentials to assert her physical competence4. In the narrative, ‘Buffy’ has been shown doing some physical training and she does use weapons, and fighting techniques that resemble those of martial arts. However, the source of her physical capabilities is strangely disembodied — like Neo in The Matrix, Buffy is the ‘One’ (in this case, ‘True Slayer’). She is imbued with supernatural physical capabilities and the will to use them. Yet this may be why she has such a wide following — she is stereotypically feminine (even a sex symbol to some), but still manages to confidently ‘Kick Ass’.

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‘Morpheus is our father’: the return to the primal scene in The Matrix There are no visible or obvious mothers5 in The Matrix except the machines and ‘growing fields’ which are vast reproductive mechanisms. This is important because, as both Creed and Jeffords suggest, masculine anxieties about control of the reproductive process is a consistent theme in contemporary film and science fiction film. The imagery of the ‘birthing fields’ in The Matrix references an existing set of images from popular contemporary cinema. The growing fields can be seen as a further inversion of gender and bodies when we compare these images to the monstrous ‘mother’ in the first Alien (1979) film. In one scene, “Kane” (John Hurt) is lowered into a massive vaulted chamber which appears to be a virtually endless field of eggs/aliens. This vision is reconstructed in the image of the ‘growing fields’ in The Matrix. Unlike in Alien where there is a massive field of eggs contained within a reproductive body, in The Matrix the eggs are attached to a large skeletal structure, like so many grapes on a vine. Thus in The Matrix we have an inversion of the female/reproductive body: it is literally turned inside out. Creed mentions this image as a fairly common visual prop in many horror movies, where “the female reproductive and sexual organs are externalised in monstrous form” (1990: p. 136). The fascination with reproduction is emphasised in a scene in which Morpheus explains the ‘growing fields’ to Neo: “I’ve seen them Neo. Vast fields where humans are grown and liquefied in order to produce this”, and Morpheus holds up a battery. The ‘pods’ that each human is being grown in look like a mechanical incubator-womb/ human embryo-egg. In the film, the first image we see of the enslaved humans is what we would normally consider to be a very young baby, almost newborn, with many tubes sticking into it. This image constructs the body of the human female as the ‘terrifying’ scene of birthing because the egg-like ‘pods’ are clear references to the womb. The ‘baby’ is turned on its side in an image reminiscent of Ultrasound images of children still in the womb.

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This imagery draws a tighter circle around the idea that the unfathomable process of reproduction is based in the (monstrous) female body even in the world controlled by The Machines. For example, in Neo’s ‘birth’ scene he is submerged in a red-tinged, claustrophobic, wet, slimy space; he is ‘freed’ by Morpheus ‘hacking into the mainframe’ (i.e. the symbolic order of the computer programme). He is also freed physically by Morpheus’ ship ‘disconnecting’ Neo physically from his pod. Although both interventions are reminiscent of the surgical procedure of a caesarean section delivery, Neo also then slides down a tube that is an obvious reference for the birth canal. His birth is above all traumatic as he appears to be drowning and entirely confused. This could be construed as Neo’s Oedipal separation from the figure of the Mother and entry into the Symbolic/Phallic order. Morpheus’s ship metaphorically and literally severs the umbilical cord with the Machine/Mother: reproduction and birth is thus framed as alien, dangerous, infinite and unfathomable — ‘the monstrous-feminine’ (Creed, 1990). These images are significant because Neo’s extraordinary physical capabilities are only possible inside the semi-virtual reality of the computer-generated Matrix: we could argue that the ‘inside’ of The Matrix is the patriarchal/phallic symbolic order of the real (Kristeva, 1986). As Morpheus informs Neo, “What if all of this were merely a computer-generated programme designed to pull the wool over your eyes?”. In ‘real’ Reality, so to speak, Neo is initially entirely constrained and controlled by The Machines. He is fully encapsulated and submerged in his ‘pod’. So Neo’s greatest constraint is not in fact a symbolic one, but rather the terrifying, claustrophobic body of the reproductive system (i.e. the female body) of the ‘AI’ and The Machines. This interpretation runs counter to the popular reading of the film which suggests that it is the Artificial Intelligence of the Machines that is controlling the bodies of the humans. “Marvel at the Mastery of our work Morpheus. The first programme didn’t work. It was too perfect. No war, no disease, no hunger. But human intelligence couldn’t accept

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this idea. So we invented this … “ (Agent Smith speaking as he interrogates Morpheus) The ‘real’ Reality is out of control, uncertain, dirty and dangerous compared to the orderly, managed and manufactured though ‘perfectly imperfect’ Matrix. The ‘real’ reality is the horror of the world destroyed by human bombs and the reproductive machinery created by the ‘AI’. It is Neo’s physical training and his spiritual teaching by Morpheus and the Oracle that allow him to leave the (feminine) body of the reproductive machines and defeat the ‘Agents’. His physical training in the martial arts in the early sequences of the film establishes his physical prowess and superiority, but also displays the inversion of masculine identity that Jeffords refers to. Neo is continually struggling with his emotions and having an internal dialogue with himself that suggests deep uncertainty about his position. For example, in the training sequence Morpheus tells Neo, “Come on! Hit me! You’re faster than this! You know you are!”. Neo looks perplexed at first, but then steels his resolve and eventually does prove to be faster than Morpheus. Also, when he is pursued by the Agents onto the ledge of a tall building, he says (to himself and the audience), “Why is this happening to me? I didn’t do anything”. While he does eventually employ his martial arts skills, he ultimately becomes the victor over the Matrix by ‘believing’ that he is the One in combination with the kiss/love of a woman. The muscular body of the action star seems to provide a powerful symbol of both desire and lack. [ … ] it is clear that both active and passive, both feminine and masculine terms inform the imagery of the male body in action cinema. (Tasker, 1993: p. 90) While Neo/Reeves is not muscular, we do glimpse his semi-naked body in a couple of scenes, and as well as masculine characteristics he does display feminine ones, not least of which is his breathy, whispery voice. The character Neo does take a generally passive, or

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at least reticent, position for much of the film. He is largely not in control until very late in the story, when he comes to be in control of the Matrix by taking up the (phallic) position of the ‘One’. The greatest fears in sporting embodiment concern the normal functions of the body, which must be disciplined by rationality, will of the mind and the regular control of the body’s appetites and needs (Andrews, 1996; Rail and Harvey, 1995). The disavowal, abhorrence and negation of the (feminine) body and symbolism are and continue to be central issues in the representation and reproduction of the masculine sporting body (Balsamo, 1994). In the final analysis, it is Neo’s mastery of the Symbolic universe (thus phallic/patriarchal power) of the computer-generated Matrix that allows him to save the human race. He never does master his body, or rather his relationship with his body. His body does die, until he is awoken to his ‘true’ self by Trinity’s kiss. It is reasonable to suggest that the representations of Neo’s fantastical physical feats evoke desire and anxiety in both male and female viewers. For the male viewer, Neo as the possessor of the phallic power of the ‘One’ has dominance over the Symbolic order of the Matrix. Thus he is a figure in competition with the male viewer. He is also a figure of desire because of his karate skills and use of guns, and the fact that he turns out to be the hero. As well, there is the not-so-minor inversion of the Sleeping Beauty myth as Neo is ‘awakened’ from the dead by the kiss of Trinity (a woman). This final ‘turn in the tale’ also re-establishes the heterosexual patriarchal order as Trinity takes her place as support for, and other to Neo, the nowconfirmed phallic (father) figure.

Conclusion The Matrix was considered a break-through in film as it introduced the world to ‘bullet-time’ and a new visual repertoire of film-making tricks. My analysis suggests here that it was, nevertheless, also bogged down in familiar issues of ‘who counts’ and what bodies will occupy positions of authority and power. The narrative certainly does play with the fantasies and pleasures of performing fantastic bodily feats,

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but it also reinforces a number of dominant ways of seeing and experiencing the body. The marginalisation of the female figure Trinity and the construction of human reproduction as alien and monstrous re-assert masculine fears and anxieties about the feminine body. It tries to resolve these anxieties by having Neo become all-powerful, even going so far as to allow him to fly like Superman at the end of the film. At the same time this film, not for the first time, puts into the open for examination the desires and anxieties of the white masculine body. As Neo says at the end of the film, “I can’t tell you how it’s going to end. I can only tell you how it’s going to begin”. This film and other representations of elite and professional athletes tend to show the male as superhuman, and at the same time work to encourage the viewing of the frailties and insecurities of that same male body. The construction of the body of the hero as necessarily athletic is affirmed in The Matrix. This is significant because film makers of today can ‘construct’ whatever types of bodies they want. For it is the case that bodies in the Matrix are not ‘real’ and thus do not ‘need’ muscular physiques. The fact that they have been represented in this fashion speaks to the depth and strength of the cultural significance of the sporting body.

Notes 1

I will be focusing here on the first film in the ‘Matrix Trilogy’, The Matrix, but with occasional reference to subsequent films in the series. Unfortunately time and money prevent me from getting copyright to use images from the film. However there are numerous production stills of the movie at: http:// whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/cmp/index_sequel_html.html

2

Theories of race and racial difference have generally focused on Blacks or Asians or First Nations peoples, but only in the last 10 to 15 years has the study of the racial imagery of whiteness become part a core issue in social theory. Arguably, most writing and analysis in Euro-Western academia and popular culture is about whiteness and white people, but rarely labelled as such. There are

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now quite a few texts devoted to this issue, but I have found the following most informative: Toni Morrison (1993) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and The Literary Imagination; Sander L. Gilman (1992) ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward and Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature’, in Donald J. and A. Rattansi (eds) Race, Culture, Difference; Ruth Frankenburg (199) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness; Kobena Mercer (1994) ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Kobena Mercer (1994) Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies; and also Amy Ferber (1998) White Man Falling: Race, Gender and White Supremacy. 3

In The Matrix much of the film is computer-generated graphics and imagery made possible by computer-assisted cameras and animation. Using this technology it is possible to quite literally construct actors, and thus, their bodies on film. There have been suggestions in the film making industry for some time now that it will soon be possible to make entire films with no ‘real’ actors in them. This raises the interesting question: what might the bodies of these ‘virtual actors’ look like?

4

Sylvester Stallone faces a similar issue in terms of being physically convincing. While he has become quite muscular he is by Hollywood standards quite ‘short’ for a leading man. Thus Stallone in many of his action films is consistently shot from below which makes him appear to be bigger on the screen and less noticeably shorter than the characters around him (Tasker, 1993).

5

This is ‘corrected’ in The Matrix: Reloaded with the inclusion of many scenes of children with their mother, fathers and families.

References Anderson, K. (2003) ‘Lance Armstrong wins his fifth Tour de France’, Sports Illustrated Vol. 99, No. 4 (August 4). Andrews, D.L. (1996) ‘The fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s blackness: Excavating a floating racial signifier’, Sociology of Sport Journal Vol. 13, No. 2: pp. 125–158.

‘I Know Kung Fu’: The Sporting Body in Film

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Balsamo, Anne (1994), ‘Feminist bodybuilding’, in Birrell, S. and C. Cole (eds), Women, sport and culture. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, pp. 341–352. Bordo, S. (1997), ‘Reading the male body’, in P. Moore (ed) Building bodies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Carrington, B. (1999) ‘Double consciousness and the Black British athlete’, in Owusu, K. (ed.) Black British culture and society: A text reader. London: Routledge. 133–156. Cohan, S. and Hark I. (eds) (1993) Screening the male: Exploring masculinities in Hollywood cinema. London: Routledge. Connell, R. W. (1990), ‘An iron man: The body and some contradictions of hegemonic masculinity’, in Messner, M. and D. Sabo (eds), Sport, men and the gender order. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics: 83–95. Creed, B. (1990) ‘Alien and the monstrous-feminine’, in A. Kuhn (ed) Alien zone: Cultural and contemporary science fiction cinema. London: Verso, pp. 128–141. Dyer, R. (1997) White. London: Routledge. Ferber, A. (1998) White man falling: Race, gender and white supremacy. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Frankenburg R. (1993) White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilman, S. L. (1992), ‘Black bodies, white bodies: Toward and iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth century art, medicine and literature’, in Donald J. and A. Rattansi (eds) Race, culture and difference. London: Sage, pp. 171–197. Hargreaves, Jennifer (1993), ‘Bodies matter! Images of sport and female sexualization’, in Brackenridge, C. (ed) Body matters: Leisure images and lifestyles (LSA Publication No. 47). Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association, pp. 60–66. Holmlund, C.A. (1994) ‘Visible difference and flex appeal: The body, sex, sexuality, and race in the Pumping Iron films’, in S. Birrell and C. Cole (eds) Women, sport and culture. Champaign: Human Kinetics. Jeffords, S. (1993) ‘Can masculinity be terminated?’, in Cohan, S. and Hark I. R. (eds) Screening the male: Exploring masculinities in Hollywood cinema. London: Routledge, pp. 245–262.

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Klein, A. (1993) Little big men: Bodybuilding subculture and the gender construction. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 159– 193. Kristeva, J (1986) ‘Women’s time’ in T. Moi (ed) The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Lacan, J (1977) Ecrits: A selection. London: Tavistock. Mercer, K. (1994) Welcome to the jungle: New positions in black cultural studies. London: Routledge. Messner, M. (1992) Power at play: Sports and the problem of masculinity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Morrison, T. (1993) Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. New York: Vintage Books. Morse, M. (1988) ‘Sport on television: replay and display’ in E. A. Kaplan (ed) Regarding television: Critical approaches — an anthology. Los Angeles: American Film Institute. pp. 44–62. Rail, G. and J. Harvey (1995) ‘Body at work: Michel Foucault and the sociology of sport’, in Sociology of Sport Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2: pp. 164–179. Ross, A (1995) ‘The great white dude’, in M. Berger, B. Wallis and S. Watson (eds) Constructing masculinity. London: Routledge, pp. 167–175. Tasker, Y. (1993) Spectacular bodies: Gender, genre and the action cinema. London: Routledge. Turner, G. (1988) Film as social practice. London: Routledge. White, P. G. and J. Gillett (1994), ‘Reading the Mmuscular body: A critical decoding of advertisements in Flex Magazine’, Sociology of Sport Journal Vol. 11, No. 1: pp. 18–39.

Films Alien (1979) Ridley Scott The Matrix (1999) Andy and Larry Wachowski The Terminator (1984) James Cameron Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) James Cameron