By Shaenon K. Garrity
We've lost a lot of great performers in 2009, but none has struck me as deeply as Patrick Swayze's recent death at 57 from pancreatic cancer. I feel like I took Patrick Swayze for granted. I dismissed him as a bad actor while forgetting he was a great entertainer. He always seemed like a stand-up guy, too, like you could go to his house and he'd crack you an unpretentious microbrew (none for him, thanks, he's recovering) and offer to take you up in his plane or learn how to break a man's arms or something. He made many of my favorite popcorn films:
Point Break,
Red Dawn,
Point Break,
Road House,
Point Break, that Chippendales bit on
Saturday Night Live,
Point Break, and also
Point Break. Have I mentioned that
Point Break is an awesome movie? Remember when Keanu Reeves fires his gun in the air in frustration? Remember the fight in the Australian surf?
Patrick Swayze is so iconic, his mastery of the martial arts so natural, his hair so huge, he could be a manga character. Many of the best Swayze movies share an intrinsic
Shonen Jump energy, directness, and, above all, sincerity. Maybe I'm just seeing Patrick Swayze in everything lately, but I think there's a lot in common between great Swayze and great manga.
Also, in
Point Break he takes off his shirt a lot.
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn, You May Enjoy the Manga…
The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu
There are times when society breaks down, when adult minds are unable to cope with traumatic change, and it's up to the younger generation to fight for survival. In
Red Dawn, of course, that moment arrives when Soviet shock troops parachute into Colorado, forcing thirty-two-year-old teenager Jed Eckert and his fellow Wolverines to form a guerilla resistance force. In
The Drifting Classroom, it happens when an elementary school building is teleported into an environmentally blighted future and the students are attacked by mutant monsters and crazed teachers. In both cases, prospects are bleak, the heroes' death toll is high, but the ultimate message is one of hope for the future.
The Drifting Classroom is also a good companion to
Steel Dawn, Swayze's 1987 film set in a postapocalyptic wasteland.
As an aside,
Red Dawn placed fifteenth in
The National Review's list of "The Best Conservative Movies." There are fourteen conservative movies better than
Red Dawn? Really,
National Review? A quick perusal of the list reveals that
Red Dawn's unfairly low ranking is due to a combination of conservatives having terrible taste in movies (
Forrest Gump at #4) and stretching the definition of "conservative" to mean "any movie Jonah Goldberg likes" (
Groundhog Day at #6), and really
Red Dawn should be number two with a bullet behind
Ghostbusters.
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, You May Enjoy the Manga…
Swan by Kiyoko Ariyoshi
Admittedly, the dancing is of minimal dirtiness, but this seminal ballet manga shares the basic plot trajectory of
Dirty Dancing: an initially wholesome teenage girl is drawn into the demanding, enticing, treacherous world of dance, learning the ropes under the tutelage of hot men with piles of fantastic blonde hair. Really, though, the list of shojo manga that thematically resemble
Dirty Dancing is endless. For dirtier dancing, consider
Sensual Phrase by Mayu Shinjo, in which a teenage girl writes rape-fantasy lyrics for a bishonen rock star, with, of course, sexy results. Or Ai Yazawa's
Paradise Kiss, which is basically
Swan transplanted to the world of fashion with extra bisexuals. Viz's Shojo Beat line should change its motto from "The Real Drama Begins In Shojo Beat" to "Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner."
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in Road House, You May Enjoy the Manga…
Firefighter! Daigo of Fire Company M by Masahito Soda
Among the many genres of manga that have no counterpart in the U.S., my favorite may be occupation manga, which present the protagonist going about an ordinary job, or a massively glamorized and badass version of same. The granddaddy of them all is the staggeringly long-running
Kosaku Shima series about a heroic salaryman, but there are manga for the more action-oriented professions as well. Just as Dalton in
Road House is nothing short of the greatest bar bouncer who ever lived, Daigo learns to become, as Jason Thompson put it in
Manga: The Complete Guide, "the world's most awesome fireman." Being the best at a hands-on job, whether bouncing, surfing, or dirty dancing, is a big part of the Swayze mystique, and job manga has that in spades. As the poster for
Road House explains, "Dalton lives like a loner, fights like a professional, and loves like there's no tomorrow." And does shirtless tai chi like Angel in
Buffy, but that's a subject for another column.
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in Ghost, You May Enjoy the Manga…
YuYu Hakusho, by Yoshihiro Togashi
In his review of
Ghost, Roger Ebert complained that the movie's potential to explore the mysteries of the afterlife was squandered by turning it into an action flick in which Swayze "learns simple parlor tricks—like picking up a penny—and of course by the end of the movie he is able to beat the hell out of the bad guy." So it is with
YuYu Hakusho, one of the launch titles in the American
Shonen Jump magazine, which starts as a quasi-detective story with a ghostly teen as the protagonist (the title translates as "The Ghost Files") but, by about the third volume, has devolved into a tournament manga where undead delinquent Yusuke Urameshi and his friends fight increasingly whacked-out demons with their improbable martial arts. Of course, just like Sam Wheat, the frequently shirtless spirit played by Swayze in
Ghost, Urameshi is doing it all for his girlfriend. Unlike Sam, Urameshi at no point possesses Whoopi Goldberg for some quasi-lesbian action with Demi Moore.
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, You May Enjoy the Manga…
Princess Knight by Osamu Tezuka
In
Manga: The Complete Guide, Jason Thompson writes, "‘Is that a guy or a girl?' must rank just behind ‘Are these characters supposed to be white?' as the most commonly asked question by people unfamiliar with manga." Given the slipperiness of gender in manga, you'd think it would be easy to find the perfect companion to Swayze's heartwarming film about three drag queens who change a homophobic small town for the better with their unyielding spirits and makeover talents. Alas, it's not so easy. Cross-dressing and transgender characters are common in shojo manga but usually play supporting roles, like Nuriko in
Fushigi Yugi or Isabella in
Paradise Kiss, and gender-swapping fantasies like
Ranma 1/2 tend to be more about reinforcing sex norms than challenging them. The closest I can come to the transformative spirit of Swayze's character, Vida Boheme, is Princess Sapphire, who defends her right to have both the pink heart of a girl and the blue heart of a boy. Also, they both wear a lot of wigs.
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko, You May Enjoy the Manga…
Twentieth Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa
When picking the perfect companion piece to
Donnie Darko, it's hard to choose just one manga involving a dark, hallucinatory journey through pop-cult debris into the core of the human soul, and I fear I may have chosen
Twentieth Century Boys just because they both feature guys in creepy rabbit suits. (What is with that? Is it a
Shining thing?) A thirtysomething convenience-store clerk discovers that Japan's fastest-growing cult is, inexplicably, based on a game he and his friends made up as grade-schoolers; searching for the identity of the mysterious cult leader called the Friend, he falls through the cracks of society into a weird and dangerous underground. There are plenty of sleazy hucksters to fill the spiritual role of Jim Cunningham, the pedophiliac self-help guru played by Swayze in
Donnie Darko.
If You Enjoyed Patrick Swayze in Point Break, You May Enjoy the Manga…
From Eroica with Love by Yasuko Aoike
I saved my favorite and most mangariffic Swayze movie for last.
Point Break is the closest thing to a manga I have ever seen in American entertainment. It's got the action, the passionate intensity, the homoeroticism, everything. The premise is remarkably similar to the classic 1970s shojo manga and prototypical yaoi
From Eroica with Love, with the setting changed from the European art world to the L.A. surfing community. The central conflict—a sexually charged dance between a criminal genius and the detective bent on stopping him, both of whom happen to be improbably hot dudes—remains the same. This is also the premise of
Death Note, but what the heck,
Eroica has better hair.
But there's one thing
Eroica doesn't have, and that's a scene where Keanu Reeves jumps out of a plane without a parachute to stop Patrick Swayze, the charismatic leader of the surfing/bank-robbing gang The Ex-Presidents, from escaping into Mexico. Manga tries, it tries hard, but that kind of magic is only possible with Patrick Swayze.
Vaya con Dios.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
