The hope of illusion

One of the greatest moments in the history of 80′s cinema was the crane kick finale scene of The Karate Kid. It’s quite simply the most amazingly foolhardy move ever attempted in a desperate gambit against all the odds. The thing is, if this had’ve been a real life moment, Daniel Caruso (played by Ralph Machio) would have ended up getting beaten senseless then kicked into next Tuesday.

I personally have a kinship with Daniel in this movie because when I was his age, I was going to full contact karate 3 days a week, and I was about his size as well. One grading I had to fight a bigger, tougher, more experienced fighter and, pumped up on the belief that anything was possible after seeing Daniel dispatch the bad guy, I  BELIEVED I could win. Well the referee said fight, and the next thing I was on the ground with my ears ringing and blurred vision. Some people rushed over and one guy said, “holy shit kid, I bet that hurt, you didn’t even see that kick comin, huh?!

Not really, no.

Modern storytelling mediums of film and TV have refined an art form as old humanity itself and created a powerful force of illusion that captivates the individual. In some sense I think this heightened sense of illusion has created an even greater sense of hope for those of us who watched a story and believed in it. The most blatant example of this that I’ve seen just recently was when I watched Avatar (IMAX 3D) and fell so hard for the Na’vi that I wanted them to win with a ferocity of heart that would have equaled any warrior on the back of an ikran. Of course it was really a foregone conclusion that the good blue guys were going to win, if they hadn’t I’m pretty sure people would have torn out their seats and threw them through the screen in defiant frustration. However even knowing that up front, when they did win everybody was filled with a profound sense of justice that they carried with them long after the end credits rolled up.

Within all of us we have instilled a strong sense of hope given to us from our birthright of storytelling heritage. Hope is as necessary to life as oxygen, without it a person will wither and die. But hope is something that we learn as much as a belief in our heart; the more powerful the illusion, the more powerful the hope it generates.

This is why movies like The Karate Kid (the 1984 original that is) have a magic about them that drives deep into our psyche; we wanted Daniel to win, even though we knew he absolutely shouldn’t. So when the dramatic music rose and he went into the crane stance our hearts rose in hope, and the final kick delivered us righteousness.

The illusion was complete, and we were better people for it.

Andy.

The The hope of illusion by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.