The term “postmodern” is a fairly easy concept to recognize, but perhaps is not always readily definable by the people using it. These days, the general prevalence of self-awareness brought about by the internet and suffused into all other forms of culture ensures that the qualification of “postmodern” can be levied at just about anything without fear of recourse. This is no surprise, as the current postmodern sensibility and the technology that today facilitates, among other things, the internet both came to fruition at around the same time and in parallel to one another. In his book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich writes extensively on the postmodern identity of digital technology and its utilization. In supporting his overall thesis concerning new media technologies and culture, Manovich sites “one of the key effects of ‘postmodernism’ as that of spatialization – privileging space over time, flattening historical time, refusing grand narratives.” (78) This can be more easily understood as the bringing together of disparate entities into a single form, rather than having them arranged conventionally by linear means. Where technology is concerned, such postmodern construction manifests in the form of electronic databases and computer generated virtual environments. Culturally, meanwhile, you can recognize postmodernism in the ways that various ideas and concepts are melded together.
On the internet, the cultural manifestation of postmodernism finds a particularly conducive outlet in the form of memes. Memes are representative constructs that allow for expressed ideas to be shared and manipulated freely, to the end of facilitating communication and entertainment amongst various parties. Through this manipulation, broader and more disparate ideas and concepts are created and further spread. This transformation is characteristic of Patrick Davison’s conception of memes, articulated in his essay “The Language of Internet Memes.” Though he broadly typifies the internet meme specifically as “a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission,” (122) Davison much more astutely characterizes the meme in general as the taught or learned behavior of an organism. Either way, the core of the meme is the conscious melding of separate thoughts and, via utilization of new media mechanisms, actions to the production or elaboration of something new. So it is then that the meme and memetic expression has long since been a signifier of postmodern culture, perhaps even going back further than Manovich’s proposed point of origin in the 1980s.
Take, for instance and in relation to the ultimate thesis of this essay, the cinematic genre of the spoof film. Existing within the popular consciousness all the way back to the 1970s, movie spoofs and parodies like Airplane and Young Frankenstein are rife with jokes and references which today manifest themselves far more frequently in the form of the meme. When one of those films plays upon the familiar tropes of certain subgenres and archetypes, or even parodies specific filmic reference points directly, they are taking part in an active conflation of ideas and information. These films began to flourish in particular throughout the 1980s, in parallel to early new media developments and postmodernist theory. Likewise, it was around the dawn of the 21st century that both new media and postmodern comedic sensibilities began to come into vogue in a big way. Prominent comedic entities from this time include the resurgence of standup comedy by way of the “alternative comedy” movement, as well as the debut of the Cartoon Network programing block Adult Swim, which traffics in all manner of self-aware, referential and irreverent programing content. These two entities would go on to find themselves intrinsically linked with online culture, both through promotion and the propagation of likeminded ideals. Where the cinematic realm was concerned, the movie spoofs arising from this time period were rapidly achieving a whole other level of postmodern self-awareness, to the extent that their own identity became subject to scrutiny (hence the reductive adoption and embracing of the “movie” movie moniker with films like Scary Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, etc.). Of notable exception from this crop of films, however, was one distinguished not for its expected genre riffing, but for its surprising depth of technical ambition. It was in this film, 2002’s Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, that the aforementioned postmodern sensibilities of both comedic style and technological exploitation found themselves coalescing together.
The film, as suggested by its title, is a pastiche of classic Chinese kung-fu movie tropes and archetypes. The story revolves around a wandering hero, the Chosen One, whose family was murdered during his infancy by a ruthless killer, one whom the Chosen One now seeks to extract vengeance upon. Naturally, the plotting of all this is carried out in a relentlessly silly fashion, with the characterizations of the cast being as elastic and cartoonish as the over-the-top action sequences. The film itself might have run the risk of submitting to the same pitfalls of its “movie” movie brethren were it not for Kung Pow’s dogged commitment to aesthetic authenticity. The film continually adopts and playfully pokes fun at the cinematographic style of the period kung-fu films it references, both in service to the parody and to the benefit of the film’s true overarching gimmick. Kung Pow does not just makes references of previous works, like many of the other spoofs previously mentioned, but it also seeks to appropriate literal preexisting material from another movie, 1976’s Tiger and Lion Fist, a.k.a. The Savage Killers. For at least half of the film’s running time, Kung Pow is comprised of scenes from Tiger and Lion Fist (to be referred to from here on out as “original footage,” with those sequences filmed specifically for Kung Pow being “new footage”), all of which are redubbed and reedited to suit the plot of this new film. The most significant alteration to the original footage, however, comes in the form of digital compsiting, “the process of combining a number of moving image sequences, and possibly stills, into a single sequence with the help of special compositing software.” (Manovich, 137) Throughout Kung Pow, all of the original footage has been digitally altered to facilitate the composite insertion of a new actor, Kung Pow’s star Steve Oedekerk, into the place of Tiger and Crane Fist’s character. In this manner, the story of Kung Pow is conveyed through a mixture of new scenes as well as those appropriated from the ‘70s film. This being the case, Oedekerk (also the film’s writer and director) shoots the new scenes in a way not glaringly different from the classic kung-fu style, so as to have them mesh convincingly with the original footage. Further contributing to this artistic aim is the utilization of various layers and visual cues employed in the footage, from the implementation of a muted color pallet and a filter of film grain to convey a sense of age.
While this technological feat is certainly impressive, of equal significance is indeed the manner in which the film measures its use of it. In his book Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, Stephen Prince makes note of how early digital effects were carefully regulate and balanced with practical effects and technology. Specifically, he sites Jurassic Park, wherein director Steven Spielberg alternated between CGI dinosaurs and animatronic ones, depending on the degrees of action and interaction that the story required. Likewise, the composite shots of Kung Pow are framed and shot very carefully: Oedekerk’s character generally restricts his movements during these shots, and careful editing is utilized on the old footage to allow for shots not revealing the hero’s face to be reused wholesale. More visually busy composite shots will also make quick use of body doubles and set recreations, so that the seams of the digital insertions are as unnoticeable as possible.
This is, of course, purely the case where such commitment to the authenticity of the scene is deemed important. Kung Pow, one finds, is highly selective in terms of its use of various digital trickery and postmodern approaches to humor (the various forms of which shall be addressed below). This comes into line with Manovich’s perspective of postmodern operations as they were perceived in the 1980s, when “historical references and media quotes [were] maintained as distinct elements.” (142) For instance, certain moments of composite editing, like the insertion of a dancing DJ character into the background of various fight scenes, are obviously edited, regardless of how clean (or as manovich puts it, “smooth”) the process is. Visual gags such as these help underline the postmodern sensibility of the film on the whole: whereas other digital films may require their special effects to mask unrealities of a shot, to make everything appear as natural and “realistic” as possible (the hallmark of Manovich’s ‘90s postmodernism), Kung Pow operates on an understanding that every effect in the film, however impressive, is patently false and merely the pretense for comedy. This freedom from idealistic limitation would seem to make literal Manovich’s idea of the selective element inherent in digital composing and, by extension, postmodernism on the whole.
During Kung Pow’s ending credits, scenes of specific green screen compositions are revealed in a series of wipe transitions, with the old footage being overlaid with the modern performances that are then to be digitally inserted. These brief glimpses into Kung Pow’s actual filmmaking process are also interspersed with another familiar cinematic trope: the gag real. This largely consists of scenes which are to be understood as actual bloopers from the film’s production, interspersed with fabricated flubbed scenes. These bloopers are false in the sense that they put forward the prospect of the film’s dubbed dialogue, recorded almost in its entirety by Oedekerk himself, as being actual flubs on the part of the “characters” Oedekerk is voicing (the silly voices talk to each other regarding forgotten and misspoken lines). This imposition of the patently false upon a familiar cinematic convention reasserts the previous postmodern sensibility that we saw regarding the film’s implementation of digital compositing: that understanding the artifice is intrinsic to the experience. Indeed, the final element of this sequence, continuing with this vein of ironic denial, are special fx scenes shot in the manner of actual, organic filmmaking. One shot details the computer generated cow from one of the film’s central set pieces as capable of physically interacting with the film’s cast and crew, while another shot of Oedekerk seemingly in the process of having makeup applied purports that the CGI presence of “Tonguey” (a recurring trick of digital composition) is also a factual presence in the real world. Again, the joke to all this is that we are capable of distinguishing these sights as false constructs.
While all this playful manipulation of digitally affected imagery (here and throughout the film) could have served as the primary source of postmodern commentary, Kung Pow takes just as many liberties via the more conventional uses of its source material. The disparities of plot between Crane and Tiger Fist and this film make for obvious inroads to reappropriation and pastiche, with certain scenes from the previous film assuming new purposes and contexts in the latter. Much of this reappropriation is conveyed through the imposition of new dubbed dialogue: an early scene truncates a speaker’s dialogue extensively, while later on the tone of the speech and its visual conveyance are ridiculously juxtaposed. The dubbing of dialogue over foreign films and the humorous incongruities that can arise from the practice has long been a particularly beloved trope of postmodern humor, finding roots in the work of Woody Allen and the cult television series “Mystery Science Theater 3000. A more recent and pertinent example can be found in the popular “Hitler Rant” meme. This series of viral videos revolves around an emotionally charged sequence from the 2004 German historical drama, Downfall, wherein an exasperated Adolf Hitler berates his staff. On Youtube, the scene has been excised of its narrative context and rewritten through its subtitles: the result has Hitler now proclaiming his frustration with generally innocuous and niche occurrences. While the creative and comedic spirit of these videos is not to be downplayed, it is likely that works like Kung Pow contributed to the meme’s inspiration.
Moving back to Kung Pow's digital effects, the postmodern visuals are also conveyed extensively through temporal editing. Unlike the spatial editing of the composite shots, temporal editing is the more familiar technique whereby two “separate realities form consecutive moments time.” (148) While temporal editing has its roots in classical media, new media has found ample opportunity to adopt it to new, subversive ends. The anime music video, where disparate visuals are stripped of their narrative contexts and reassembled at the whim of the editor. Likewise, in drawing from its selection of original footage, Kung Pow reassembles various moment and events to serve its own narrative purposes.
On the internet, the cultural manifestation of postmodernism finds a particularly conducive outlet in the form of memes. Memes are representative constructs that allow for expressed ideas to be shared and manipulated freely, to the end of facilitating communication and entertainment amongst various parties. Through this manipulation, broader and more disparate ideas and concepts are created and further spread. This transformation is characteristic of Patrick Davison’s conception of memes, articulated in his essay “The Language of Internet Memes.” Though he broadly typifies the internet meme specifically as “a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission,” (122) Davison much more astutely characterizes the meme in general as the taught or learned behavior of an organism. Either way, the core of the meme is the conscious melding of separate thoughts and, via utilization of new media mechanisms, actions to the production or elaboration of something new. So it is then that the meme and memetic expression has long since been a signifier of postmodern culture, perhaps even going back further than Manovich’s proposed point of origin in the 1980s.
Take, for instance and in relation to the ultimate thesis of this essay, the cinematic genre of the spoof film. Existing within the popular consciousness all the way back to the 1970s, movie spoofs and parodies like Airplane and Young Frankenstein are rife with jokes and references which today manifest themselves far more frequently in the form of the meme. When one of those films plays upon the familiar tropes of certain subgenres and archetypes, or even parodies specific filmic reference points directly, they are taking part in an active conflation of ideas and information. These films began to flourish in particular throughout the 1980s, in parallel to early new media developments and postmodernist theory. Likewise, it was around the dawn of the 21st century that both new media and postmodern comedic sensibilities began to come into vogue in a big way. Prominent comedic entities from this time include the resurgence of standup comedy by way of the “alternative comedy” movement, as well as the debut of the Cartoon Network programing block Adult Swim, which traffics in all manner of self-aware, referential and irreverent programing content. These two entities would go on to find themselves intrinsically linked with online culture, both through promotion and the propagation of likeminded ideals. Where the cinematic realm was concerned, the movie spoofs arising from this time period were rapidly achieving a whole other level of postmodern self-awareness, to the extent that their own identity became subject to scrutiny (hence the reductive adoption and embracing of the “movie” movie moniker with films like Scary Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, etc.). Of notable exception from this crop of films, however, was one distinguished not for its expected genre riffing, but for its surprising depth of technical ambition. It was in this film, 2002’s Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, that the aforementioned postmodern sensibilities of both comedic style and technological exploitation found themselves coalescing together.
The film, as suggested by its title, is a pastiche of classic Chinese kung-fu movie tropes and archetypes. The story revolves around a wandering hero, the Chosen One, whose family was murdered during his infancy by a ruthless killer, one whom the Chosen One now seeks to extract vengeance upon. Naturally, the plotting of all this is carried out in a relentlessly silly fashion, with the characterizations of the cast being as elastic and cartoonish as the over-the-top action sequences. The film itself might have run the risk of submitting to the same pitfalls of its “movie” movie brethren were it not for Kung Pow’s dogged commitment to aesthetic authenticity. The film continually adopts and playfully pokes fun at the cinematographic style of the period kung-fu films it references, both in service to the parody and to the benefit of the film’s true overarching gimmick. Kung Pow does not just makes references of previous works, like many of the other spoofs previously mentioned, but it also seeks to appropriate literal preexisting material from another movie, 1976’s Tiger and Lion Fist, a.k.a. The Savage Killers. For at least half of the film’s running time, Kung Pow is comprised of scenes from Tiger and Lion Fist (to be referred to from here on out as “original footage,” with those sequences filmed specifically for Kung Pow being “new footage”), all of which are redubbed and reedited to suit the plot of this new film. The most significant alteration to the original footage, however, comes in the form of digital compsiting, “the process of combining a number of moving image sequences, and possibly stills, into a single sequence with the help of special compositing software.” (Manovich, 137) Throughout Kung Pow, all of the original footage has been digitally altered to facilitate the composite insertion of a new actor, Kung Pow’s star Steve Oedekerk, into the place of Tiger and Crane Fist’s character. In this manner, the story of Kung Pow is conveyed through a mixture of new scenes as well as those appropriated from the ‘70s film. This being the case, Oedekerk (also the film’s writer and director) shoots the new scenes in a way not glaringly different from the classic kung-fu style, so as to have them mesh convincingly with the original footage. Further contributing to this artistic aim is the utilization of various layers and visual cues employed in the footage, from the implementation of a muted color pallet and a filter of film grain to convey a sense of age.
While this technological feat is certainly impressive, of equal significance is indeed the manner in which the film measures its use of it. In his book Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, Stephen Prince makes note of how early digital effects were carefully regulate and balanced with practical effects and technology. Specifically, he sites Jurassic Park, wherein director Steven Spielberg alternated between CGI dinosaurs and animatronic ones, depending on the degrees of action and interaction that the story required. Likewise, the composite shots of Kung Pow are framed and shot very carefully: Oedekerk’s character generally restricts his movements during these shots, and careful editing is utilized on the old footage to allow for shots not revealing the hero’s face to be reused wholesale. More visually busy composite shots will also make quick use of body doubles and set recreations, so that the seams of the digital insertions are as unnoticeable as possible.
This is, of course, purely the case where such commitment to the authenticity of the scene is deemed important. Kung Pow, one finds, is highly selective in terms of its use of various digital trickery and postmodern approaches to humor (the various forms of which shall be addressed below). This comes into line with Manovich’s perspective of postmodern operations as they were perceived in the 1980s, when “historical references and media quotes [were] maintained as distinct elements.” (142) For instance, certain moments of composite editing, like the insertion of a dancing DJ character into the background of various fight scenes, are obviously edited, regardless of how clean (or as manovich puts it, “smooth”) the process is. Visual gags such as these help underline the postmodern sensibility of the film on the whole: whereas other digital films may require their special effects to mask unrealities of a shot, to make everything appear as natural and “realistic” as possible (the hallmark of Manovich’s ‘90s postmodernism), Kung Pow operates on an understanding that every effect in the film, however impressive, is patently false and merely the pretense for comedy. This freedom from idealistic limitation would seem to make literal Manovich’s idea of the selective element inherent in digital composing and, by extension, postmodernism on the whole.
During Kung Pow’s ending credits, scenes of specific green screen compositions are revealed in a series of wipe transitions, with the old footage being overlaid with the modern performances that are then to be digitally inserted. These brief glimpses into Kung Pow’s actual filmmaking process are also interspersed with another familiar cinematic trope: the gag real. This largely consists of scenes which are to be understood as actual bloopers from the film’s production, interspersed with fabricated flubbed scenes. These bloopers are false in the sense that they put forward the prospect of the film’s dubbed dialogue, recorded almost in its entirety by Oedekerk himself, as being actual flubs on the part of the “characters” Oedekerk is voicing (the silly voices talk to each other regarding forgotten and misspoken lines). This imposition of the patently false upon a familiar cinematic convention reasserts the previous postmodern sensibility that we saw regarding the film’s implementation of digital compositing: that understanding the artifice is intrinsic to the experience. Indeed, the final element of this sequence, continuing with this vein of ironic denial, are special fx scenes shot in the manner of actual, organic filmmaking. One shot details the computer generated cow from one of the film’s central set pieces as capable of physically interacting with the film’s cast and crew, while another shot of Oedekerk seemingly in the process of having makeup applied purports that the CGI presence of “Tonguey” (a recurring trick of digital composition) is also a factual presence in the real world. Again, the joke to all this is that we are capable of distinguishing these sights as false constructs.
While all this playful manipulation of digitally affected imagery (here and throughout the film) could have served as the primary source of postmodern commentary, Kung Pow takes just as many liberties via the more conventional uses of its source material. The disparities of plot between Crane and Tiger Fist and this film make for obvious inroads to reappropriation and pastiche, with certain scenes from the previous film assuming new purposes and contexts in the latter. Much of this reappropriation is conveyed through the imposition of new dubbed dialogue: an early scene truncates a speaker’s dialogue extensively, while later on the tone of the speech and its visual conveyance are ridiculously juxtaposed. The dubbing of dialogue over foreign films and the humorous incongruities that can arise from the practice has long been a particularly beloved trope of postmodern humor, finding roots in the work of Woody Allen and the cult television series “Mystery Science Theater 3000. A more recent and pertinent example can be found in the popular “Hitler Rant” meme. This series of viral videos revolves around an emotionally charged sequence from the 2004 German historical drama, Downfall, wherein an exasperated Adolf Hitler berates his staff. On Youtube, the scene has been excised of its narrative context and rewritten through its subtitles: the result has Hitler now proclaiming his frustration with generally innocuous and niche occurrences. While the creative and comedic spirit of these videos is not to be downplayed, it is likely that works like Kung Pow contributed to the meme’s inspiration.
Moving back to Kung Pow's digital effects, the postmodern visuals are also conveyed extensively through temporal editing. Unlike the spatial editing of the composite shots, temporal editing is the more familiar technique whereby two “separate realities form consecutive moments time.” (148) While temporal editing has its roots in classical media, new media has found ample opportunity to adopt it to new, subversive ends. The anime music video, where disparate visuals are stripped of their narrative contexts and reassembled at the whim of the editor. Likewise, in drawing from its selection of original footage, Kung Pow reassembles various moment and events to serve its own narrative purposes.
Temporal editing concerns itself with the continuity existing between separate shots, like the conversation depicted in the “Magic Clothes” scene. Instances of spatial editing, meanwhile, can be seen in those instances where Kung Pow utilizes digital compositing to convincingly insert new artifacts into the original footage. Consider the “Magic Clothes” sequence: in this scene, segments of dialogue serving the function of exposition are interspersed with seemingly nonsequitorial tangents wherein one character announces the changing colors of another character’s wardrobe. This discontinuity stems from the selective nature of Kung Pow’s editing. The shots of the character’s clothes being one color are taken from one portion of the original film, and those where they are a different color are clearly from a different scene. While the distinctions between these two sources are used as an off the cuff source of humor, the awareness of it is of particular relevance where matters of temporal and spatial editing are concerned. Temporal editing concerns itself with the continuity existing between separate shots, like the conversation depicted in the “Magic Clothes” scene. Instances of spatial editing, meanwhile, can be seen in those scenes where Kung Pow utilizes digital compositing to convincingly insert new artifacts into the original footage. Manovich defines the primary goal of both temporal and spatial montage to be the preservation of the fictional onscreen reality. Befitting the movie’s overall postmodern sensibilities, neather Kung Pow’s temporal or spatial editing is too concerned with this espoused goal, instead relishing in the moments where breaches in the fictional reality are most apparent. Moments of temporal editing are utilized time and again, both to shore up the narrative of the film and then to subvert that narrative in humorous ways. In the scene where Oedekerk's Chosen One is in first meeting Master Tang, the shot of Tang talking (accented with a flourish of his arm) is used repeatedly. The film goes as far as to draw further attention to this by inserting a sound cue for Tang’s arm movement. Here again, as with the “Magic Clothes” scene, Kung Pow is deriving its humor from the direct acknowledgement of its methods, methods that subvert conventional cinematic logic and even the inherent spectacle of the various digital compositing shots.
But then, the digital compositing in the film is hardly limited exclusively to maintaining cinematographic consistency. In one of Kung Pow’s early scenes, a fight sequence is capped off with a shot of a character having a perfect cylinder punched out of his abdomen, an effect achieved with a fairly rudimentary us of green screen editing. The effect itself is not terribly convincing, and the movie’s narrator sees fit to address this, saying “That doesn’t even seem possible… it was like one clean chunk!” Then, near the end of the movie, an original footage shot of a man talking is composited with an arm holding a cell phone, an anachronistic object within the world of the film that purposefully draws attention to itself. Anachronism is another of the film’s most prevalent sources of humor, both visually and in the dubbed dialogue. One of the most notable examples is the presence of the previously mentioned DJ, a man shown to be dancing in the background of various fight scenes. During these sequences, the DJ’s boom box is meant to account for the use of modern licensed music throughout the scene, rendering it technically diegetic where it would not be otherwise. During the ending credits montage, we are presented with footage of how this particular compositing effect was achieved, with the DJ performing on a green screen soundstage set to match the framing of the accompanying original footage. As if the prescence of the character in the movie weren’t distracting in its own right, Kung Pow goes so far as to officially make the method by which it was constructed a portion of the cinematic experience.
While such acts are worth addressing from a technical perspective, doing so does admittedly fail to recognize the overarching statement of the film. Where Crane and Tiger Fist may have concerned itself with the preservation of an onscreen reality, Kung Pow is at no point concerned with such matters. The implementation of digital compositing on old footage permeates the film’s experience, going all the way back to its promotion. There is simply no point at which the viewer is unaware that what they’re watching is a pastiche, and however the viewer chooses to engage with the film, they cannot do so without possessing this knowledge. As a result of this construction, the viewer is in a way made complicit in the filmmaker’s actions. Consider that “the techniques [discussed here are conventionally] used to create fake realities and thus, ultimately, to deceive the viewer.” (Manovich, 145) With Kung Pow, no such deception is taking place. In fact, the notion that a deception is meant to be achieved is at the core of the film’s sensibilities, the facile nature of the film itself being part of the joke. In this way, Kung Pow bears striking similarities to the onslaught of amateur digital filmmaking that rose up during the latter part of ithe 2000s. Green screen and composite shots like those achieved in Kung Pow are now within the capacity of any committed civilian to achieve. When Patrick Boivin uploaded his short film Iron Baby back in 2010, the effects on display were impressive even for their time, and were certainly on par with the likes of what we see from Kung Pow’s Cow Battle set piece. In the postmodern cinematic environment, the perceived need to deceive one’s audience can actually be beside the point. Instead of being convinced by Kung Pow’s special effects, we are now free to enjoy them in a more detached manner, appreciating their explicit aims as much if not more than their execution.
Which is perhaps for the best, considering the state in which such special effects exist today. Just as postmodernism and early new media technologies saw their parallel rise during the 1980s, so too did the rise of home video ownership, the first time ever that the average citizen was imbued with the means of rewatching cinematic films on their own terms. Prior to this development, the special effects and visual tricks of cinematic films were often subjected to no more than a few viewings, often within a specific environment constructed for focused, uninterrupted consumption. With a home video copy, such effects can be put under careful and sustained scrutiny. This often results in what many viewers typify as a film’s effects appearing dated, or limited by the technological advancements of their time. For instance, the CGI cow from Kung Pow can be sited as being dated, both for the cartoonish nature of its design and the frequently obvious discrepancy between it and its organic surroundings. On the other hand, the digital compositing used to insert Steve Oedekerk into the original footage has aged significantly better, as the film consciously works around the technology’s limitations to make the effect as unintrusive as possible. Were the film not made in such a way that an awareness of the effect’s presence was unavoidable, one could easily lose track of the effect amid the rest of the original footage. Compare it with a similar effect employed by the 2010 drama, The Social Network. In that film, actor Armie Hammer supplies duel performances as each of the Winklevoss twins. Through digital compositing, both performances are then inserted into the same frame, achieving a virtually undetectable effect that, again, one would hardly be aware of were it not a matter of public knowledge. In both of these films, the act of digitally compositing actors into shots is postmodern in method, but Kung Pow makes the effect a matter of direct and explicit purpose, whereas for The Social Network it serves a more narrative purpose; this marks the distinction in both film’s overarching postmodern sensibilities.
The greatest distinction Kung Pow: Enter the Fist bares is by the manner in which it suffuses itself in its postmodern sensibility. Going back to Davison’s characterization of internet memes, he describes the average meme as being comprised of three components: its manifestation, its behavior and its ideals. According to Davison, “The ideal dictates the behavior, which in turn creates the manifestation.” (Mandiberg, 123) If we were to apply this reasoning to Kung Pow, then we could easily recognize the forms that each of these components take and how they influence each other. As the evidence has shown throughout this essay, Kung Pow possesses a thoroughly postmodern ideology, one that recognizes special effects like digital compositing and manipulation as tangible and recognizable constructs. From here arises the behavior of self-aware and highly referential humor, largely directed towards the cinematic form and the apparatuses that perpetuate it. All of this ultimately manifests itself as the movie in question, a comedic spoof of both a specific genre as well as various modes of digital filmmaking. That Kung Pow would succeed (arguably, and to various extents) in these endeavors is interesting, especially when you consider that such results were likely not intentional on the part of the filmmakers. Still, it’s not so great a stretch to place the film within the boundaries of Fredrick Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as “a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order.” (Manovich, 131) It just so happens that Kung Pow: Enter the Fist was endemic of the emergence of formal cultural features in the form of digital technology and a type of social life as can be found on the internet. Indeed, observations of postmodern methods and expression in this film are likely just as much endemic of a postmodern digital culture, one that seeks to find connections and relations between all manner of sources, as the film is itself.
Bibliography
But then, the digital compositing in the film is hardly limited exclusively to maintaining cinematographic consistency. In one of Kung Pow’s early scenes, a fight sequence is capped off with a shot of a character having a perfect cylinder punched out of his abdomen, an effect achieved with a fairly rudimentary us of green screen editing. The effect itself is not terribly convincing, and the movie’s narrator sees fit to address this, saying “That doesn’t even seem possible… it was like one clean chunk!” Then, near the end of the movie, an original footage shot of a man talking is composited with an arm holding a cell phone, an anachronistic object within the world of the film that purposefully draws attention to itself. Anachronism is another of the film’s most prevalent sources of humor, both visually and in the dubbed dialogue. One of the most notable examples is the presence of the previously mentioned DJ, a man shown to be dancing in the background of various fight scenes. During these sequences, the DJ’s boom box is meant to account for the use of modern licensed music throughout the scene, rendering it technically diegetic where it would not be otherwise. During the ending credits montage, we are presented with footage of how this particular compositing effect was achieved, with the DJ performing on a green screen soundstage set to match the framing of the accompanying original footage. As if the prescence of the character in the movie weren’t distracting in its own right, Kung Pow goes so far as to officially make the method by which it was constructed a portion of the cinematic experience.
While such acts are worth addressing from a technical perspective, doing so does admittedly fail to recognize the overarching statement of the film. Where Crane and Tiger Fist may have concerned itself with the preservation of an onscreen reality, Kung Pow is at no point concerned with such matters. The implementation of digital compositing on old footage permeates the film’s experience, going all the way back to its promotion. There is simply no point at which the viewer is unaware that what they’re watching is a pastiche, and however the viewer chooses to engage with the film, they cannot do so without possessing this knowledge. As a result of this construction, the viewer is in a way made complicit in the filmmaker’s actions. Consider that “the techniques [discussed here are conventionally] used to create fake realities and thus, ultimately, to deceive the viewer.” (Manovich, 145) With Kung Pow, no such deception is taking place. In fact, the notion that a deception is meant to be achieved is at the core of the film’s sensibilities, the facile nature of the film itself being part of the joke. In this way, Kung Pow bears striking similarities to the onslaught of amateur digital filmmaking that rose up during the latter part of ithe 2000s. Green screen and composite shots like those achieved in Kung Pow are now within the capacity of any committed civilian to achieve. When Patrick Boivin uploaded his short film Iron Baby back in 2010, the effects on display were impressive even for their time, and were certainly on par with the likes of what we see from Kung Pow’s Cow Battle set piece. In the postmodern cinematic environment, the perceived need to deceive one’s audience can actually be beside the point. Instead of being convinced by Kung Pow’s special effects, we are now free to enjoy them in a more detached manner, appreciating their explicit aims as much if not more than their execution.
Which is perhaps for the best, considering the state in which such special effects exist today. Just as postmodernism and early new media technologies saw their parallel rise during the 1980s, so too did the rise of home video ownership, the first time ever that the average citizen was imbued with the means of rewatching cinematic films on their own terms. Prior to this development, the special effects and visual tricks of cinematic films were often subjected to no more than a few viewings, often within a specific environment constructed for focused, uninterrupted consumption. With a home video copy, such effects can be put under careful and sustained scrutiny. This often results in what many viewers typify as a film’s effects appearing dated, or limited by the technological advancements of their time. For instance, the CGI cow from Kung Pow can be sited as being dated, both for the cartoonish nature of its design and the frequently obvious discrepancy between it and its organic surroundings. On the other hand, the digital compositing used to insert Steve Oedekerk into the original footage has aged significantly better, as the film consciously works around the technology’s limitations to make the effect as unintrusive as possible. Were the film not made in such a way that an awareness of the effect’s presence was unavoidable, one could easily lose track of the effect amid the rest of the original footage. Compare it with a similar effect employed by the 2010 drama, The Social Network. In that film, actor Armie Hammer supplies duel performances as each of the Winklevoss twins. Through digital compositing, both performances are then inserted into the same frame, achieving a virtually undetectable effect that, again, one would hardly be aware of were it not a matter of public knowledge. In both of these films, the act of digitally compositing actors into shots is postmodern in method, but Kung Pow makes the effect a matter of direct and explicit purpose, whereas for The Social Network it serves a more narrative purpose; this marks the distinction in both film’s overarching postmodern sensibilities.
The greatest distinction Kung Pow: Enter the Fist bares is by the manner in which it suffuses itself in its postmodern sensibility. Going back to Davison’s characterization of internet memes, he describes the average meme as being comprised of three components: its manifestation, its behavior and its ideals. According to Davison, “The ideal dictates the behavior, which in turn creates the manifestation.” (Mandiberg, 123) If we were to apply this reasoning to Kung Pow, then we could easily recognize the forms that each of these components take and how they influence each other. As the evidence has shown throughout this essay, Kung Pow possesses a thoroughly postmodern ideology, one that recognizes special effects like digital compositing and manipulation as tangible and recognizable constructs. From here arises the behavior of self-aware and highly referential humor, largely directed towards the cinematic form and the apparatuses that perpetuate it. All of this ultimately manifests itself as the movie in question, a comedic spoof of both a specific genre as well as various modes of digital filmmaking. That Kung Pow would succeed (arguably, and to various extents) in these endeavors is interesting, especially when you consider that such results were likely not intentional on the part of the filmmakers. Still, it’s not so great a stretch to place the film within the boundaries of Fredrick Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as “a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order.” (Manovich, 131) It just so happens that Kung Pow: Enter the Fist was endemic of the emergence of formal cultural features in the form of digital technology and a type of social life as can be found on the internet. Indeed, observations of postmodern methods and expression in this film are likely just as much endemic of a postmodern digital culture, one that seeks to find connections and relations between all manner of sources, as the film is itself.
Bibliography
- Mandiberg, Michael, The Social Media Reader. New York, New York University Press, 2012.
- Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass, M.I.T. Press, 2001.
- Prince, Stephen, Digital Visual Effects in CInema: The Seduction of Reality. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2012.