Tony Jaa: Hong Kong Action Cinema as Mode in Thai Action Stardom

Abstract

Tony Jaa has commonly portrayed rural villagers fighting the ills of foreign invaders and modernizing forces. A standard analysis of Jaa’s star text would most commonly (1) lend to a discussion of the martial arts icon as a national hero, (2) read the characters that he plays as symbolic of the national condition, and (3) analyze his performance as an articulation of the conflict between modernity and tradition. I am interested in Tony Jaa for the ways that he is linked to the nation not because of the characters that he has played, the symbolic conflicts between modernity and tradition that such characters face, or the traditional martial arts form, muay thai, that he practices. Jaa is iconic of the nation and in particular of the national film industry of Thailand because of the manner in which his body spectacles and virtuoso reception context have been determined by national economic predicaments and globalized exhibition cultures. It would be simple to address Tony Jaa as a nationalist icon with embodied connections to a state-sanctioned martial arts form through aesthetic analysis, but to do so without an examination of Jaa’s body spectacles as well as the “special effects” of the Asian economic crisis on the common production model in Thailand would serve to reinforce the naturalized absence of discussions of the labor arrangements, production hierarchies, funding structures, and exhibition cultures in cinema and media studies.