Ninja Marxism and The Tyranny of Angry Boys
Having revisited Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie from 1990 again, I’ve come to one conclusion: in the context of what’s best for the health of a society, The Shredder is the hero of the movie and the Turtles are the villains.
Shredder’s mission is noble and radical. Dressed vaguely like a samurai warlord, he brings Eastern socio-political and religious principles to the corrupt, decadent West. His Evil Plot simply involves building an army of disciplined young people with intent to restructure society. They’re recruits for a new social order in which self-actualization, honor and brotherhood triumph over the emptiness of materialism and conformity, as embodied by the Turtles.
The Fagin’s Den of teenage waifs and malcontents overseen by this Dickensian hero functions as an ingenious covert martial arts school steeped in anti-Capitalist subversion. Shredder is not interested in world domination. He wants to fix the world. His den (the most attractive location I’d seen in a movie as a kid) is a Buddhist temple crossed with both a Marxist training camp and a YMCA. He trains wayward teenagers to be stealthy ninjas. Ninja training is a requirement — it can be rough but it imparts the merits of fitness and self-respect. This is the highest goal of martial arts. Shredder also imparts a notion of collective power to his “family”. It’s a power that rejects the corruption and greed of Western society, teaching values which stress that honor, respect and discipline are sacred — found only beyond the world of the physical. Beyond the material. “Money cannot buy the honor which you have earned tonight,” he tells his ninjas. Mental and spiritual strength to match physical strength.
Sometimes a Marxist father figure wears a cape
Shredder posits the Den itself as both a temple and a home: “You are here because the outside world rejects you.” What angsty teenager wouldn’t have wanted to go to such a place? Sure there’s a guy made of swords in charge of things and he makes you fight. But you can skateboard, dance, shoot pool, smoke cigars, play arcade games or poker or pick up a guitar and rock out. You can tag walls if you want to. You can be yourself. No cops. No parents. And judging by the looks of the recruits, Shredder doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender or sexuality. He merely looks around and sees aimless, wasted generations of perfectly able young citizens being groomed to be thrown away like so much of Capitalism’s refuse. So he provides them with freedom and some amenities of leisure as a reward for their hard work. It comes off less like cynical bribery or emotional blackmail each time you revisit the movie. Shredder has a heart. Look at that hideout that 21st century hipster barcades try so hard to recreate. It was clearly a labor of love for whoever designed it. Where did he learn how to make such a lavish, well thought out space with so many Western diversions he probably abhors? It’s the ULTIMATE Safe Space.
Shredder sees the big picture. “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people,” was Marx’s adage. So Shredder takes the fight directly to the material surplus, setting his Foot Ninja comrades to the task of stealth mass theft. Shredder’s crimes — the thefts — look to be largely non-violent, impersonal, class-blind and even stylish (a pickpocketed wallet changes hands four times for no apparent reason). He is not a terrorist, but his brand of criminality is still deeply political.
One theft of a TV or stereo system is a petty shame. However, the multiplying effect of so many of these specific crimes all over the city adds up to something more. It has the effect of subverting Capitalism by chipping away at what all those useful things represent, surplus by surplus. One must ask: What is it that we value in America beyond material comforts? Could Eastern nations perhaps have been onto something - religiously, politically and culturally - with their historical abandonment of temporal concerns? Could those respective countries be in a better position to approach a more fulfilling and meaningful existence this way? That is, before Consumer Capitalism would eventually gobble them up too?
Obviously, Shredder doesn’t need all those TV’s and stereo systems. It doesn’t even look as if he’s planning to sell them. The thefts are not rooted in greed. It’s about making a point, teaching his children moral and ethical lessons about the failed promise of sense-numbing consumption and the sheepish nature of the public at large. There is no ticking bomb about to go off in the movie, no giant monster or impending invasion threatening New York. Shredder is the least power-hungry bad guy you'll see in a movie. His mission is a spiritual one. It’s not a perfect operation. There are issues with personnel: Shredder’s bald lickspittle is needlessly abusive to ninja trainees. But it’s a revolutionary charge. Shredder is Tyler Durden doing Fight Club and Project Mayhem correctly, without the macho fascism.
You already saw Fight Club before you saw it. The Goofus & Gallant of People’s Revolutions.
The Ninja Turtles also learn the value of collective power, but it’s a collective power that appears to derive its strength from conformity and submission. Early on, Raphael is ostensibly punished and ostracized for his tendency to act out, which is blamed on his individualistic tendencies. He broods and curses in a heavy Brooklyn accent that simmers with aggression and resentment. He’s deeply ashamed of himself for losing his weapon. He’s high strung, full of anxiety and rage and he needs to leave the sewers and be alone (appropriately enough, going to a cheesy creature movie like “Critters” and hating it). His emotions are complex and he longs for more out of life than what satisfies the other Turtles. When Master Splinter tells him the cause of his angst is his uniqueness from his brothers in dealing with his anger privately, he cries. The bizarre scene is actually somewhat touching.
Smelly painted foam, oily muppets and real tears
Of course later on, following an injury, Raphael learns to submit to the group and conform to the will of his peers and in doing so, he ceases to be interesting as a character in the movie. We don’t hear any more on the subject of his inner crisis. He presumably stuffs his feelings back down inside, leaving his weapons — his specific means of enacting violence — as his only real distinguishing character feature beyond those headbands. For this, his reward is acceptance by his peers and the anonymity that provides.
The Turtles are Gremlins-like sendups of American subjects. Something about the way they conspicuously consume that makes consumption look vulgar and false. They consume, consume, consume. They inhale junk food and yell at cartoons on TV as if they were sporting events. Constant pop culture references they make show how television has turned their brains to mush. We’re meant to see in them our own inclination towards low culture but in the context of the rest of the movie, this is hard to do.
They don’t seem to value anything beyond their own needs. Sure, they’re friendly to younger people, nobly wanting to fight crime and protect the innocent, if only because it seems to allow them to get back to eating pizza and arguing about Gilligan’s Island. In the eyes of the filmmakers, the Turtles (and Casey Jones) share all the worst traits of teenagers: impatience, stubbornness, obnoxiousness, self-absorption, raging hormones. They’re constantly accidentally destroying property. Something about the way they don’t tip the Domino’s delivery man for not instinctively knowing he was delivering pizza to mutants in a sewer sticks in my craw. What that delivery guy went through is why I would line up to be a Foot Ninja for Shredder.
The Turtles' success seems tied to this connection to consumption and collective stupidity. As “teenagers” (whatever that means for them), they experience the kind of emotional confusion felt by teenagers (teenage boys exclusively — No Girls Allowed). But if the movie has one major setback, it’s that those issues are never carried out. There’s no room for it in this kind of movie. For commercial reasons, the condition of being Mutants, Ninjas and Turtles supersedes the more interesting problem of their internal deadlock as Teenagers. The fun to be had at Shredder’s facility seemed like it was part of a carefully regimented lifestyle. With the Turtles, it is the WHOLE lifestyle. Until they learn to meditate, only Raphael goes beyond the immediate concept to emerge as a character complex enough to transcend his arrested development. When they “become one” before the third act, they’re instantly less interesting as they commit to going back to New York and fighting to protect the system that’s keeping people down. To literally punch, kick and mock all those young ninjas who’ve earned the Dragon Dochi, thereby teaching them a lesson about....what exactly? About what family, honor and individuality really mean? With no ideology of their own to counter Shredder’s, are the Turtles really prepared to teach that kind of lesson? Is there no dignity? Does the ethos of an expat Samurai really lose to that of a bunch of five-foot-tall mutant turtles who live like crust punks and act like assholes in this world?
Indeed, that arrested development seems crucial to the whole tone. Listen to the boorish, condescending way Casey Jones talks to April and how she secretly likes it. His sociopathic non-adulthood makes him a natural part of the proceedings. This is reflected by the fighting in a very interesting way. The Turtles seem to win fights only because their kung-fu relies on a heavy fusion of slapstick and bricolage (like Jackie Chan). To a Shaolin Monk, it would look impure. The Shredder actually tells them they fight well “in the old style.” But is it the old style? The Shredder’s fighting looks pure and honorable— notice how he calmly waits for the Turtles to regroup and approach him to attack again.
There’s something impure about the Turtles’ fighting. Their success in combat seems based on the ability to use anything around them to fight with (reliance on material goods yet again): cymbals, answering machines, encased meats, a fish tank, a garbage truck. It’s interesting that they have a fight in a junky antique store. Clutter suffocates everything. Not since Up In Smoke has a major movie been such an homage to filth and mess. As far as the fighting is concerned, one could argue that in America, improvisation, adaptation and individual expression mutates foreign cultures until they become something new, for which we are all the richer as a People. But if that were true, there’d be no need to “go back to their roots,” as it were, and the spiritual quest at the country house would have been unnecessary. Only by hitting the pause button on consumption can the Turtles achieve their goal. In other words, they could ONLY become enlightened and learn to speak to Splinter with Eastern Meditation in the woods, away from junk food and television. It’s what Shredder would do.
It’s in that middle stretch that the movie changes from a dark, dank character study about all manner of angst-ridden young men (Danny, Shredder, Turtles, Casey Jones, foot soldier recruits) with their little power games and invented hierarchies, to a quirky indie feature both whimsical and playful. The change in tone is jarring. There is sunshine and introspection in the movie at last. Everything is not caked in grime. April’s musing narration is a welcome addition. Privileging a woman’s perspective in the world of this boys movie seems like a radical gambit, though the movie never bothers to explore or share it. Too bad it goes away when it’s time for the punching to resume. I liked when April’s drawings of the Turtles begin to animate and come to life like the panels of the originary TMNT comic book. Or A-Ha’s “Take On Me” music video.
The whole thing is nervy. It was produced by legendary Hong Kong studio, Golden Harvest with mega-Producer Raymond Chow at the helm. For this we have the benefit of an outsider’s perspective on American culture and the American struggle. In Shredder, it makes its Eastern critique of the shallow, vaguely altruistic but all-too-American self-glamorizing motives of the Turtles.
Commercial requirements of course dictate that this critique can’t be sustained for very long because of who we’re supposed to be rooting for. Still, Golden Harvest makes its entry into The Ninja Turtles franchise — the epitome of merchandising mania at the time — into something that approaches a criticism of that mania.
It’s kind of amazing what’s left out of the proceedings. There are no chases in this movie. No car pileups. Nothing explodes. So much darkness. This is the darkest, rudest, grimiest, urban miserablist landscape this side of Seven. Trash piled high in the streets. The Turtles sewer lair is a depressing oubliette. Commiserating with the eighties view of New York as the world capital of filth and depravity, Golden Harvest seems to view American big cities as cold, terrifying, crime-drenched cesspools. Like Tim Burton’s Gotham City in Batman. Darkness everywhere you look. And like that movie, the violence here may be bloodless but there’s a great deal of anger beneath it. This is a character study about the danger of trying to liberate prolonged male teenage adolescence from its anger. Conform or good luck revolting — those are the only choices.
I rooted for Shredder. When the threat of Coronavirus begins to diminish to the point where pre-virus life can fully resume, the worst possible scenario is if people go back to living like the Turtles: fighting like mad to prop up an oppressive status quo, cheerfully participating in our own corporate-mandated degradation.
