Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II is a game about fighting people. You would think that it mainly took place in the streets, but for the most part the action is confined and limited in space. Streets suggest destinations, but street fighters and street fighting, in this milieu, provide ends and endings. Each stage is the end of a character’s story, while the victor (the player) is elevated from a life on and of the streets to one of international fame and travel. Street Fighters, like international footballers are both class traitors and class heroes; they live unattainable lives at the expense of the very people who celebrate them most and who would take their place just the same if they could. John Lennon sang that a working class hero was something to be, but an underclass hero is a far more pragmatic and ambivalent being.
Street Fighter’s clearest antecedent is Bruce Lee’s film Enter the Dragon. Enter the Dragon is a curious film in that it takes the form of Hong Kong cinema, its signifiers and shorthands, and presents it in a way that is instantly understandable to a non-Hong Kong audience. It doesn’t dilute anything, but rather, in a way that is reminiscent of Lee’s fighting style, concentrates it. But this concentration allows for the politics of Hong Kong cinema to be backgrounded; each explosive fight is packed with meaning but this comes so thick and so fast that before there’s the time to unpack that meaning the film is interested in showing you something else. This is good film-making, but it is also dangerous for the film-maker; as with Lee’s fighting style it has the potential to bring destruction upon the user.
Far more than the thin plot about international fighting tournaments, shadowy bosses and undercover agents, Enter the Dragon and Street Fighter share this explosive political commentary within constrained, brutal bouts laced with the finality of true defeat. Side-scrolling beat-em-ups are languid in comparison: there are always more goons to fight, always more enemies to throw against the hero. They echo the chaotic gang battles of traditional Hong Kong cinema, the scene where a tavern is invaded by wave upon wave of identical villains. Against the horde, against progress and mass corruption, one can never truly win, but only prevail and maintain what is right and just for one’s community. Enter the Dragon exposes this, wrapping up the communal motivations of the working class hero with the selfish ones of the underclass hero and creating a model for Street Fighter’s clash of flawed individuals.
Fighting has always been political, and techniques have always been tied to class and ideology. Hong Kong cinema systematises and choreographs those politics to tell stories about and within the history of empires, those of China and of Britain, but Enter the Dragon marked the emergence of an international language of fighting. Street Fighter II is a game about fighting people, and in being so it is a game about geopolitics. It is a game about the ties of the individual to the places that they exist in and which nurture them throughout the stages of their lives; where they start and where they finish and where they want to be through all of that. It is about loyalty and personality and ambition and morality, condensed so skilfully into a few explosive minutes that you might almost miss it and assume that it was sheer spectacle.
