My brother and I loved The Karate Kid and The Karate Kid II when we were little. We faux sparred (often ending in a real sibling fight) and emulated the legendary crane kick, balancing one-legged on ledges, walls, and any platform over three feet tall that we could find. My brother loved the the second movie so much he even painstakingly wrote out the lyrics to the Peter Cetera ballad Glory of Love and performed karaoke-worthy renditions of the song any time the Karate Kid-themed video came on tv.1 I still remember most of the words.
Like many kids in the 80s, the movie inspired us to take karate classes at the local YMCA. I only lasted 6 weeks. Real karate wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as the cool fight choreography in the movie. For my brother, however, it was the beginning of a lifelong study of martial arts. I’ve lost track of the number of styles he’s learned and the number of belts he’s earned. For years he fought competitively and he currently teaches Jiu Jitsu classes.
As my brother learned more real martial arts and inhabited the real world of martial arts tournaments, his allegiance switched from the protagonists of the original movie, Daniel and Mr. Miyagi, to the movie’s antagonists, Johnny Lawrence and the fighters from Cobra Kai, the “evil” dojo. He adopted this perspective years before a 2009 episode of How I Met Your Mother had Barney Stinson explain The Karate Kid as “the story of a hopeful, young karate enthusiast whose dreams and moxie take him all the way to the All Valley Karate Championship. Of course, sadly, he loses in the final round to that nerd kid … who barely even knows karate.”
Given my brother’s perspective, it didn’t surprise me that he raved about Cobra Kai, a 2018 television series that picks up 30+ years after the original movie and follows the karate bully Johnny Lawrence as he launches his own karate school. Of course my brother would like it. But why would I want to watch a show that glorifies teaching kids to hurt each other?
Netflix kept suggesting it to me, though, so I finally started watching. And I’m here to say: my brother was right. Cobra Kai is an awesome show.
It forces the viewer to reconsider concepts of heroes and villains, good and evil, victims and bullies, winners and losers—focusing instead on the experiences and conditions that make the characters who they are and the catalysts for change in each of their lives.
“Everybody believes they are the good guy,” says former CIA officer Amaryllis Fox, based on her experience in counterintelligence. “If you hear them out, if you're brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you might have made some of the same choices, if you'd lived their life instead of yours.”
Cobra Kai does exactly that, giving “bad guys” the opportunity to tell their version of events and dedicating screen time to back stories that humanize them rather than establish they were bad apples all along.
In the original movie, Johnny Lawrence got a villain’s edit. Viewers were conditioned to hate him because the cinematography and musical cues announced at every turn that this is the bad guy, while telling us very clearly that Daniel is the good guy. We learned almost nothing about Johnny’s backstory or motivations, so we recoil from the cruel things he does to Daniel. But when Daniel does questionable stuff to Johnny, viewers are sympathetic because we know more of Daniel’s story.
The television show rectifies that, telling us Johnny’s side of what happened, showing his unhappy home life as a teenager, and repeatedly reminding us that he, too, was a kid during the original movie. We learn he and Daniel had far more in common than the movie audience knew. The biggest difference between the two was who their mentors were and how those mentors shaped their perspectives and actions.
While the movie conditioned us to pick sides between two kids, framing one as victim-turned-winner and the other as bully-turned-loser, the television show demonstrates the complexity of humanity. Johnny and Daniel are just men trying to figure things out. And the show is full of adults and kids who sometimes behave like monsters, sometimes like angels, but most of the time – when they’re not engaged in epic karate battles – are just figuring life out too.
“We don’t know the risks or costs of someone’s journey until we take the time to ask,” says Melody Standford Martin in Brave Talk: Building Resilient Relationships in the Face of Conflict. In Cobra Kai, we see the characters’ journeys, and everything they do makes sense in the context of their lived experiences. Perspective is constantly shifting based on the situation, history between the various characters, new experiences, and the many ways each character grows and evolves.
Each time a character is on screen, viewers get to know a little more about them, making them far more complicated than easily categorizable “good guys” or “bad guys.” “When we get to know people, we can’t reduce them to just one thing,” says Amanda Ripley in her excellent and timely book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
I happened to be reading Ripley’s book when I first started watching Cobra Kai, and it’s uncanny how the show explores nearly every theme and concept in High Conflict. Ripley uses the La Brea Tar Pits2 — a place where the bones of thousands of creatures have been found mired in sludgey asphalt, likely attracted by a lone bison who got stuck and attracted a handful of dire wolves who also got stuck and attracted yet more scavengers—as a metaphor for the pull and destruction of high conflict. Cobra Kai brings the tar pit analogy to life, demonstrating how conflict between two people over stakes that seem relatively low to outsiders can escalate to war involving large numbers of people who had nothing to do with the original dispute.
Yes, a teenage karate rivalry escalating into karate riots 30+ years later is laughable – and the show definitely utilizes that concept to comedic effect – but as High Conflict reveals, the origins of many real-world conflicts are no less ridiculous. Furthermore, the show highlights one of Ripley’s key findings about how to get out of high conflict: building relationships with the “other” so we come to see them as fellow human beings instead of enemies.
“Knowing people as three-dimensional humans keeps us out of the tar pits,” she says. “We might still believe a negative story about our opponent, and we will continue to disagree about many things. But usually, relationships make it harder to dismiss and dehumanize other people.” Sharon Welch, professor of religion and society, agrees. In After the Protests are Heard: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation Welch writes, “A key factor in the expansion of sympathy in the past has been … the rise of a particular kind of fiction and autobiography that humanized the lives of others seen as nonhuman or threatening.”
But what does any of this have to do with digital hope?
Social media gives use the opportunity to interact with people we might not otherwise meet. It allows us to engage in conversation, to better understand the back stories and reasons why people think and act as they do, and to see them as three-dimensional human beings rather than the overly simplified labels we tend to assign based on one aspect of someone’s identity.
“[E]ncounters can interrupt the cascading assumptions we make about each other,” says Ripley. “Once people have met and kind of liked each other, they have a harder time caricaturing one another.”
If we approach digital media purposefully, with the intent of encountering our fellow human beings, we can pull ourselves out of the tar pits and throw lifelines to those who are still stuck.
“When we take the time to first, before anything else, see others, we will learn some vitally important things about their world,” says Martin in Brave Talk. “Even if we can’t find resolution, we will gain chances to truly connect and dispel myths and fear. We will build trust, empathy, and collaboration.”
Seeing the complexity of how people approach issues gives us a better understanding of how to heal wounds, build bridges, and find mutually beneficial solutions. “[T]here will be more than one way to create community economies, more than one way to establish excellent health care, education, and environmental practices,” says Welch. “Furthermore, what works in one situation may not work in another.” But to discover different approaches and to find the ones that work best for specific situations, we have to be willing to see the world through different eyes – and explore different approaches with curiosity and respect.
“When we grapple with perspectives that are not our own, we gain wisdom, facts, stories, and ideas that not only strengthen us, but balance us,” says Martin. “[T]he process of appreciating difference helps us build better families, schools, businesses, governments, communities, and ultimately, better selves.”
Digital media gives us easy and immediate access to a world of different perspectives. Learning to appreciate those differences and make room for the possibility that, if we’d had similar experiences, we might also share those perspectives sets us on the path to better understanding each other and working together.
I highly recommend watching Cobra Kai as an engaging (and often hilarious) exploration of what can happen when we see each other as humans instead of one-dimensional labels. If you do, please drop me a line to let me know what you think! Season 4 streams December 31 on Netflix.
Also from Lauren M. Hug — Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World and COMING SOON Digital Grace: Embracing Benevolence in an Outraged World.
Do yourself a favor and check out the video link. It’s epic.
The Tar Pits happen to be located about an hour from where The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai take place.