The Art of Self Defense Hits the American Man Where It Hurts

The Art of Self-Defense opens with a joke. A lanky, lonely-looking man named Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) is sitting in a cafe, minding his business, when a tourist couple starts shit-talking their American coffee — in French. They turn their attention to Casey. He looks a little desperate, yes? He’s probably reading the personal ads. He’s probably already masturbatorily imagining the women who wrote those ads — and so on. All of this is spoken aloud, indiscreetly, because who in America would know French?

Casey, of course — that’s the punchline. Or it would be. It turns out the most important element of this scene isn’t that Casey potentially knows what the French couple is saying, but rather that he isn’t going to do anything about it. Casey, a lowly accountant with an uneventful life and a paper straw for a backbone, is not going to defend himself.

A little later, Casey will be on his way to buy dog food for his dachshund. A motorcycle gang will ride by, and for no reason — or so he thinks — they will beat him to a pulp. Again, he just takes it, getting his ribs broken and face beaten in.

The Art of Self-Defense, the second feature from writer/director Riley Stearns, is a strange, uneven, but ultimately effective satire of masculinity. Casey, morally defeated and terrified, is going to leave the hospital and, riding a plentiful wave of vacation and sick days, find a solution to his bullying problem. His first thought is to buy a gun; instead, he lands himself in a karate class instructed by a quietly mystical sensei named Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) who instructs Casey to quit French — a feminine, wishy-washy language — and take up German, and to exchange his yippy dog for something that’ll scare the neighbors.

Sensei is an evil man driving a cult of personality, but Casey doesn’t know that yet. He’s also not aware of the ironies that gradually stack up in Sensei’s disfavor: the fact, for example, that Sensei forbids food or shoes on his karate mat but breaks a man’s arm, unleashing blood everywhere, with little sense of consequence or mess and even less of a sense of moral justification.

It’s thanks especially to Eisenberg, Nivola, and some splashes of sharp, effective humor that neither we nor Casey have any idea where this movie plans to take us. But we sense something is up: a blood stain on the dojo mat, mysterious talk of invite-only “night classes” which, as Casey learns, are something of a Fight Club for karate boys-become-men, where the only rule is that there apparently are no rules. Almost everyone in this movie talks strangely, and that’s suggestive in its own right: a little deadpan, a little dead behind the eyes.

Then the karate starts, and bodies get moving, and the energies onscreen noticeably, attractively shift. It’s no wonder Casey falls headlong into this world of men. His skimpy body gets tighter. His confidence grows. The symbolism of karate’s power — his white belt, which soon becomes a yellow one — empower him throughout his everyday life. Bit by bit, he’s being drawn into a world that he doesn’t quite understand.

This is a role that may as well have been custom built for Eisenberg, who careens through the movie with fascinating verve, channeling his angular jawline and nebbishy spirit into something openly pathetic and volatile. Eisenberg’s instrument is, as always, his neurotic energy, which he sometimes wields to make his protagonists near-impossible to love, as he did in the role of Mark Zuckerberg. Other times, it’s a likable nervousness. Sometimes you look at him and he seems to have the beep-beep-boop inner life of Dr. Spock or an automaton. Yet other times, when the role is especially good — as is the case here — that’s merely the surface, a distraction from the whole world of inner afflictions roiling underneath.

So it is with Casey, whose energy is sensitive, but also tightly-wound and a little off-putting, like a jack-in-the-box. You’re inclined to feel for him, at first — just look at his hot, angry tears after being bullied by another man in a grocery store parking lot. He’s afraid to go outside after his assault, and almost completely stops going to work. When he finds karate, he “finds himself” — the kind of thing people say in Army recruitment commercials and which, in this case, feels true.

It’s a tricky role; you want to laugh at this guy, and the movie’s dry humor and unsubtle ridiculousness encourage you to. But everything Casey does — from nearly buying a gun to signing up for karate to punching his boss in the neck — is an exaggerated (or maybe not?) response to his fear. He confesses it outright: “I am afraid of other men.”

What’s intriguing about The Art of Self-Defense is how intricately it weaves the obvious with the merely suggestive. This is definitely, unsubtly, a movie about the endgames of masculinity, and Eisenberg’s performance accordingly flirts with outright effeminacy. Really, the entire movie does. Stearns, ever committed to finding the joke, pushes male bodies into close proximity at suggestive angles — winkingly, dangerously. Consider the moment that the hapless Casey gets his white belt tied and straightened up by another member of the gym, who does so with his face eye-level to Casey’s torso — an angle that seems to speak for itself. Later, after another class, Casey’s fellow students — all of them more highly-ranked purple and brown belts — get nude after a workout and start massaging each other.

The gag feels obvious, but it’s worth telling: hyper-masculine spaces have a way of resembling the opposite. There’s actually a woman in this gym, Anna (Imogen Poots), who’s been a student of Sensei since the gym was founded, but she’ll never graduate to black belt because, according to Sensei, women can’t hang. You sense that the real game here is subordination: Sensei prizes the students who submit to his influence, and Anna has a mind of her own. But Stearns has the movie express this mindset as open, blatantly wrong misogyny, so clear that it almost stops being satire.

The Art of Self-Defense isn’t as successful in those terms. By the time we landed in the dojo with Casey, I’d forgotten a few of the movie’s odd contrivances — for example, the generic names on everything (the dog food labelled “dog food,” the karate gym called “Karate,” Sensei’s name). On the other hand, I’d also forgotten about the relative timelessness of Casey’s home life: his 70s suburban aesthetic, the sense that even if cell phones existed in this world — it’s honestly not clear! — Casey would almost never use one. It feels like it’s all playing out in a kind of moral vacuum, a place-less, timeless space in which volatility is encouraged and the unpredictable becomes the norm.

In all that happens — as the movie shifts unmistakably toward broader, troubling darkness — the pathological underpinnings of a man like Sensei are both extraordinary and undercooked. We’re to sense, I gather, that Sensei was once a man like Casey, and that his own masculinity is as put-on as that black belt of his. But you probably already knew that. What deepens over the course of the film are Sensei's ideological extremes; Sensei himself remains shallow. You sense the movie being obvious about the obvious things but overly subtle about the things it ought to be excavating. That’s a flaw, but not a damning one. The movie isn’t a parable, exactly. But in its finest moments, it feels like one.

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Source: Vanityfair.com

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