Miyagi, Scene ... , "D-Day Sequence"
This script was moved by the subplot offered in The Karate Kid part I, that the character Miyagi was a Medal-of-Honor winner during World War II, due to his incredible skill in killing Germans…
—in the hold of a small landing craft nearing Normandy beach
The scene begins with a shot of a grey-eyed soldier, with blue cig-smoke leaking from his pinkish lips—the cigarette held lightly in his teeth. His upper teeth are slanted, causing window-like gaps where his canines should be, making his canines appear missing.
The camera stays set upon him; he suddenly has a vision of himself. He sees his face in the colorless French sand. The roof of his mouth is twisted, misshapen, up toward the camera. A small gush of water comes—a lustrous whirl of blood swishes out from some unseen part of his mouth, forming the quick shape of a talk-balloon, like a last yell.
Returned to himself, the soldier now rolls the cigarette in his mouth. Smoke beats from his teeth. There are ruminations. Spilling smoke. Compass grey eyes. "Sordid" indeed. A wax dummy, a cigarette slung from his lip.
The camera pans to the pink, fat face of an untried man
Babyface: Auugghh [curling his lips, and kind of gurgling it]—that's the sound they make in the movies when they get a bayonet in the guts!
Cut to the face of the man beside him, who looks out of the corner of a sluggish, brutal eye:
Ulysses: You got guts to spare, porker.
As the camera pans right from Ulysses, there is vagrant chatter … two different soldiers to the back of the landing craft steal amused looks into the moving camera.
Chatterbox 1: The Germans say they're invincible, but that little Krauter Hitler looks like a wind-up toy that couldn't even heft a gun. FDR could whip him from his chair…
Chatterbox 2: I wish I would've been a paratrooper… some Kraut in a pillbox is gonna shoot my face to a mess before I can even—set my goddamn foot on the beach. He shivers and licks his lips
Mac: Gonna have me'self some fun, gonna have me'self some fun, gonna have me'self some fun…
The three soldiers standing next to Miyagi in the landing craft are the exact same height as he. The camera beholds Miyagi's face. His unpolluted eyes are aglow, like heroic standards.
Immediately to a ½ shot of Miyagi's face; next to him (full-faced in the shot), Lutello smiles, his teeth attracting the eye of the camera by a peculiar glisten in them—he leans in to confide in Miyagi's ear: From here to Berlin, Miyagi; then we'll flip a kroner to see who gets to redden their knuckles on pulpin' up the Fürhrer's face...
Let's finish this quick, my Jap friend. I miss New York—all those Englishmen back on the island, their damn colorless skin...made me feelin' sick!
Cut to a complete view of the landing craft, to see the soldiers unsteady within, and spray launching over the ship's side. "Sharon's"—the small boat's name is visible in crude paint on one of its metal sides. Something like bedsheets can be seen tangled at the feet of the soldiers.
Return, to a 3/4's profile of Miyagi's eloquent but dire face, with water drops running along his helmet's rim and dripping free of its side.
Following one bead of water along Miyagi's helmet until it drips free. Miyagi sees an abyss. Miyagi is rememberer of himself. There is a restive moment, Miyagi's nude wife. It is a childhood meeting, Miyagi fishing, she floating on her back; Miyagi is fishing, he hooks a turtle, and his wife, a small girl, the sun in the shot, laundry, clothes; dragonfly, silk worm, menses, silkwormhaha, art—she has a madness (down a clay well); a mad dog is chasing her; butterflies chortle; she is drowning; she is riding on the back of cattle; she is tending to a hurt animal. The first encounter with his beloved, the romance scene, she softens Miyagi somehow. He strews her path with cherry blossoms—leaves a naked tree.
Miyagi sees himself as a youth. He is wearing shorts too big for him, tied with cord. Miyagi is constructing a retarded kite; as he tries to fly his kite, it suffers in the wind and pitches downward into a nearby pigsty. Miyagi's wife as a young girl laughs at his misfortune. She is flying a beautiful kite covered in gold scales. She runs to give Miyagi the string (the kite itself, flying, can be seen in the very compact shot—the kite's string being no more than 4ft in height above the heads of the children.).
The kite again plummets into the pigsty, where a huge, shit-eating sow begins to chomp the kite in its molars. The sow squeals awfully [the sound set on a loop]. Miyagi's wife begins to cry; he soothes her by petting her long black hair; he goes into the pigsty. The cornish swine there-in begins screaming madly, and young Miyagi kicks it in the side of it's head, near the neck, so that the beast falls unconscious; he and his wife repair the kite.
Miyagi's station is wrong.
Transition from the sliding house-door of Miyagi's wife, as she runs inside, without looking back to him—to the pale green, bespeckled door of the landing craft, falling open to offer a revolting picture of the gory methods of Man's barbarian genius.
[Music by JM; composition: "Miyagi Fears Nothing [Miyagi Fürchtet Nichts], Let the Mad Horse Draw Up Its Hooves"]
Just in front of the clattered-down door lies a soldier with a gaping wound below his sternum; his mouth is pitched open, his lips pulling back around thick teeth. His stomach is swollen and unnatural. It heaves out with a look of inflation. His left arm is upstretched and the fingers of his hand seem melting back down toward him.
A grinding, repetitive flash. A foot above the head of this man, but miles back in the distance, is the flashing signal of a hungry chaingun.
Coming into view from the sidewalls of the landing craft, out of obscurity, soldiers race forward at diagonals that would intersect at the single, raised point of light from the chaingun fire—within this pyramid of movement is nothing but deadmen, pitched about, humps of green clothing...broken open, with spillings gathered about them.
The camera changes to the view from the machinegun nest; there is a smoldering cup of coffee and an orange on the ledge of the nest, as the chaingun roars savagely, and men no bigger than spots in the eyes scatter the beach.
As mortars explode by the feet of onrushing soldiers, they are sent into the air by pressurized springboards visible to the camera; gymanastics—the men look down as they fly, gauging their complex somersaults.
A nasty, torn face rears up, as the camera pulls in. His eyes are like bulbs lit by the vein and muscles seen awork beneath his skin. He seems to be yelling the machinegun fire, the dying, and the explosions. He has a cudgel. Everytime that he curses an explosion goes off. He is yelling to the troops. He is brandishing field goggles and a marshall's whip. He is yelling Lear quotes…Sgt. PygIron.
Open on a shot of a soldier, ducking and babbling, looking as though he were trying to catch his writhing, nervous tongue—constantly jumping out to lick at his lips and in the corners of his mouth—in his clicking-shut teeth. He doesn't have a gun. There is the screeching of hot iron; it is whistling hideously in the ears of those feebly covering their heads. He keeps looking behind him. Off balance, he screams like a woman sucker-punched in the gut as crimson flies from him, as though it were spitted from his burst flesh, as bullets thump: into his chest, his collar, and his forehead.
The camera picks another runner; he is muscular and has thick blonde moustaches over his lip. Jack-boots and luftwaffe. He dives down, crawling on his belly; he's muttering religious things, rites of protection. A gunner shoots a flap out of the GI's ass; he starts crying and snot is in his moustaches, stretching his neck, and his face is wrinkled and red; there is sand and grit around the wound and the torn fabric of his green pants; he checks his privates, "Oh, God!", a shot rings through the metal of his helmet; his head falls, his face falling forward into his helmet so that it bangs his nose with a metal "clunk".
Sounds—purging screams, tank sounds, sounds from the beach, of hissing sea-birds and clamshell sounds, Saturn dialogues, jokes; the sound of a great meat grinder—and the sound of a low burning fire.
Some guy checks on the runner just shot down; he picks him up and makes it near a point of safety [a bubbling synth follows their progress, and then hits a flooded and piercing highnote] as an explosion hits, and their innards are seen commingled with an upheaval of black dirt, and a joe standing near, with the slouch of a street-merchant—his back turned away from advance—turns aside and retches through his hand.
The last runner: it follows his beautiful face, destined features, his crystal, curly blue eyes—follow his worried eyes, only the sound of heat thumping, child-smiles, death from above, the sounds of a horse-step, nantuck' trumpet, pronouncing some awful, tweedled note; his face progresses to looking more and more unsustained, frightened. His head becomes close. See its fueling, the mechanism in it, and the daze in the eyes. The motion becomes static, seeming ready to crumble. There is a sound of a rifle shot. The face falls quickly away to reveal the leagues of other men charging the beach. There is the dull roar of their cries; the shot is softly out of focus.
The GIs reach an embankment; they dig in their bootjacks, and those who've survived cry the warrior's cry—now to a gallery of these men's faces, and the words that spread. Bizarre remorse, the faces, chimerical, changing, a quick run of focus upon one face each: stretching down a line of faces, faces of young flesh, not yet of cauterized wounds—still inexperienced of the chaos pain, the faces.
A narrow face: the face want for war, his eyes are pink, and he has a dagger like mouth, tight-set lips, and a little round of teeth concealed beneath them; he has choppy, straight-cut bangs. Then striking away to another face, the rifle cracks; sick-eyed cretin; babe, to the next face, is split in two, is a cracked mask, a face mucked in gauze, new killing tactics. The apparition is upon him; there is a white ring of bloodlessness around his mouth, and it looks like the apparition is upon him.
Cloudy cornea. His cheeks are swolled because they're full of blood; true, his eyes are swollen shut like fly-ridden, rotting cabbages. The man is thinking about rotting cabbages. His bottom lip is pulled tight.
A medic is hunched over the dying man, sturdily on one knee. The medic's face jerks around, perfectly overlaying the congealing death-mask of the man on the ground. His face is intense, begrimed, with stirring ire working the muscles in it. He screams, "I need an extra set of hands," five-score killers are bellowing, "He's losing blood, doc, he won't stop bleeding," doc sweathorse, dedlock, doc Dresden, Irishman.
We finally come upon Miyagi (again, finally), lightly touching his handsome beard; he seems to be sitting in repose, his knees gathered up in front of him, his left leg somewhat outstretched. His shoulder is set against his rifle, and he is looking behind the camera to the struggles of doc Dresden.
The doc comes under fire, shells stray about the sprawled body and the doctor. Miyagi begins to run toward the pair in order to distract the fire away from them; he flips sideways, in a cartwheel air, and lands cruelly upon one leg—his left leg drawn up grandly, foot positioned near his right knee. His hands are in the en garde pose. He then drops his left foot sturdily, and grits it in the sand, standing defiantly before the pair who were hailed upon by the most furious rain of meat-seeking lead.
The machinegun assault has stopped, its laborer in awe—but he quickly comes about and swears a new vendetta against Miyagi's soul; the German gunner growls, his tongue gnarling and rolling [to be translated into High-German], "I am the lord of the flies, and the corpes King! I will fly down upon you and smell your reeking blood," the bullets stray, and split the ground like gold shocks of light.
Miyagi ducks down at full forward run, reaching a complete halt in one lithe, indistinguishable movement, extending his arms—with his fingers straight and reaching out to some invisible plain of equilibrium, outward to the left. A bullet sounds in his helmet. His helmet rolls from his bald head, [the following scene exists as an extended shot—from the first movement of Miyagi toward the machine gun nest; the scene shot viewing only Miyagi's strong back-profile, onward rushing, approaching with vision and speed upon the lighted-eye of machinegun fire that is at the pinnacle of the shot—unless detail tells otherwise].
Miyagi reaches a grisly impasse of barbed-wire, heaped up and rattling coldly in the seawind; He then leaps from his right foot, and cycles his legs like Carl Lewis.
He touches his slippered foot upon the barbed impasse—and hangs airborne, in absorption of the physical with the spiritual—then with a jerked start, he propels forward, pointing his right arm as a guiding light, while he rests his left hand on his hip, looking no less than a Feudal Japanese Lord astride some armored stallion.
Back to the German's face, he has outthrust mandible—his blonde hair in awful disorder; he wrings his hands and curses, and begins aiming the machinegun, thrashingly, with maniac grandiosity [done in the air of Klaus K.].
He clenches his helmet strap in his teeth. His throat is red, and his face is as pale as snow [all dialogue in foreign tongue to be translated by expert hand], "You will die by the sound of my voice Chinaman! I am on the heights! Die by the sound of my voice (repeated, screaming)…" still the bullets fall, flash like stalks of light after Miyagi; he begins spinning his body, his arms outthrust as propellers, his left arm slanted upward, and his right arm, downward.
Bullets rip past his left then right shoulder. In the midst of a revolution Miyagi bounds suddenly into the air, spinning his legs like a whirr-ing top, turning over in the air in a rigid posture, then lands back aground, jogging steadily. There is only the sound of a slight wind. There is another German in the corner of the cement bunker, crouched, with a solemn look on his face, feeding bullets into the chaingun.
A line of fire is bearing straight down on Miyagi; Miyagi—some grand gesture of physicality. The fire coming down, the fire falling, and Miyagi crutches spritely to the ground, planting his hands, then lifting his trunk and legs free of the ground he begins to rotate his legs in rapid-fashion as a man on a pommel horse. He spin kicks his legs til there is a ring of dust gathered round him. The dust merely curls in delicate whisps at first, then begins to grow in a crackling vortex around him.
The tornado Miyagi has thus summoned begins progressing up the expanse leading to the foaming machinegunner, Miyagi concealed within.
The German fires directly into the vortex, bullets splinter and sear within the tornado, effecting nothing. The German is screeching and saying, "Strike out my eyes— let the birds have my eyes! Where has he gone? He is ghost and I am flesh, I will open hell for him; I will plant your corpse beneath a black oak tree, necromancer." The tornado then dispels in an airy dance, near the bottom of the clifface the gun bunker rests atop, revealing nothing within it—Miyagi has disappeared.
"Ah!… I must have killed him, he is likely crying at the sight of his blood, lying at the bottom of the rocks, [to a view of Miyagi alighting a sheer clifface, jumping from foothold to foothold with the greatest ease in his black-slippered feet]…trying to hold his guts in, as the lid tries to hold back steam in the simmering pot! That Chinaman was reckless to dare the everlasting might of the German race. What a bitter creature is man, a bitter, bitter creature…"
Miyagi jumps into view, "bap", and shoots the German gunner—bullets dashing teeth, but there is no time to see the shape of the wound as the gunner covers his mouth with both hands, and his blue eyes seem to fill with the chilling light of the sea. The German crumples, like a hideous + helmeted puppet struck from its strings, his soul reeling down to the abyss. Miyagi's first words, spoken in perfect English [he only talks to dead Nazis in this manner], "Your blindness defeated you; your heart is buried in conquest's muddy cause, and your eyes are too full of an Obscene, miscreant God to be able to see the man just before you; may you rest, and through the infinite dark, remember your way to the heart of humanity," the Nazi's tongue is balled against his cheek, in his sordid, sprawled mouth, the colorful pink inside is unseemly.