Cobra Kai Life Lesson
I am loving me some Cobra Kai.
And not just because it’s wrap-you-in-a-warm hug nostalgia, but because it holds a great life lesson — one that could save us all a lot of anger, pain and suffering.
Cobra Kai is a Netflix series that picks up thirty-some years later with the same characters (and actors) from The Karate Kid. More importantly, it humanizes the iconic ’80s villain, Johnny Lawrence, who consistently beat the crap out of poor, sweet Daniel-san and ultimately received the crane kick to the face, for which millions of fans applauded because he deserved it, thank you very much.
Or did he?
Certainly Cobra Kai is not going to win any Emmys, but the depth is more than surface level. It dives into the complex details of what drives people to do what they do. It shows us that the “bad guy” isn’t really all bad, and the “good guy” has issues too.
The really shocking thing to me is that this is being served up on a platter to an audience who has held a belief for 37 years that Johnny Lawerence is a creep. This belief has been ingrained in us for nearly four decades, and with a slight shift of point of view a few episodes in, everything I assumed about Johnny is gone. Poof. It’s like he’s an entirely different person, but he’s not. He’s the same; the only shift is my perspective.
One of the most interesting scenes is when Johnny is warning his student about the Larussos, and he reminisces about the past, narrating iconic scenes that flash from The Karate Kid. These are all the classic scenes we remember in which Johnny bullies Daniel — the beach scene with Ali, running Daniel’s bike off the cliff, the skeleton costume fight at the Halloween dance — but told from Johnny’s entirely opposite point of view. He even recounts that Mr. Miyagi jumped him out of nowhere!
Johnny clearly believes his perspective as he’s remembering the stories. He sees his view as the factual retelling of the past. This is what happened. Fact. Of course we originally saw it in an entirely different way, but just by being aware that there is another way to see the exact same events makes us realize that what we see is not fact either. It’s only the way we view it. Meaning nothing can be inherently just one way — good or bad — it is only our perspective that makes it so. Even Johnny Lawrence.
Johnny didn’t change. I did.
The scenes didn’t change. My perspective did.
Judging things as either “good” or “bad” has been ingrained in us since forever. Even my two year old will refer to “the bad guy” in a book. I tell her, “well, there are no ‘bad guys;’ people can just sometimes do things that hurt others.” But then I turn around and ask her if she had a “good day” at school.
I grew up in a household with no gray. Things were either right or wrong, good or bad, black or white. And there’s simplicity and comfort in that until we get older and the world around us becomes all kinds of gray. Relationships get complicated. Life can be seemingly unfair. Politics can divide a nation.
The good news (thank you, Cobra Kai) is that external things don’t need to change. The world doesn’t need to change. Only our perspectives do. How we choose to judge a person or situation is the only thing that chains us to pain or sets us free.
What if instead of labeling a challenging person or unexpected hardship as “bad,” or seeing the other political side as so blatantly “wrong,” we shift our perspective? What if we “humanize the villain?”
Perhaps, in the end, we’ll find that the real villain is our own judgement.
