Stereotypes In Bloodsport

Bloodsport is a martial arts action 1980s film directed by Newt Arnold, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Frank Dux. Dux is a U.S. Army Captain, who chooses to participate in the kumite, an illegal martial arts tournament, to honor his mentor, Senzo Tanaka in place of his diseased son, Shingo. Although Bloodsport converges multiple cultures and ethnicities together to create a diverse, ‘non-racist’ film, the motion picture comes off as extremely anti-Asian, anti-Arab, and pure American with its mocking demonstration of the non-white combatants. The movie’s portrayal of other cultures (most notably the Asian culture) creates an insensitive, unrealistic, and degrading outlook of their actual culture. Through demeaning and antagonistic roles given …show more content…
Before arriving to the kumite venue, Victor Lin (played by Ken Siu) introduces Jackson and Dux to one of the organizers of the fight; with his best English accent, the organizer exclaims to them, “Okay, U.S.A” and leads them to the arena. However, before they take off, Jackson provides humorous dialogue by repeating and jeering the organizer’s dialogue in a mocking tone, “Okay, U.S.A, hah.” This particular scene demonstrates the Asian stereotype, ‘perpetual foreigner’. Although it is the organizer’s and the Chinese’s country, they are portrayed as unbelonging and foreign, while the Americans are shown as comfortable and domineering in a sense. According to Matthew Yi’s and Ryan Kim’s “Asian Americans seen negatively”, Asian Americans have always, not just in the ‘80s, been shown as an impurity of society--foreigners and strangers--even though most Asian Americans are “law-abiding, contributing members of the community.” Bloodsport shows that this stereotype was strongly noticeable in the 1980s as even in their native country, Asians are always shown as a perpetual

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