Mortal Kombat II Analysis -- Violence, Catharsis, and Legitimacy.
About 6 months ago, I saw an old blockbuster film from the 1980s and was struck by some of the cultural assumptions. Since then, I've been casually exploring semionics and psychoanalysis. Two formative authors that influenced this effort are Slavoj Zizek and Roland Barthes. This analysis is part of a personal project I'm doing to use popular mass market films as a lens for cultural and social analysis. I'm not an academic nor a student. While I consulted generative AI for very minor stylistic critiques, this analysis is my writing and the ideas are my own. This is the first analysis I've published in any form and would appreciate any substantive feedback.
Below is a partial analysis of the film Mortal Kombat 2 (2026) and how it portrays and uses violence. Violence serves as a cathartic resolution to tensions developed within the film’s plot but also tensions over authenticity held by the audience. The actual images of violence serve as a source of nostalgia for the viewer as well as performative ritual. The subtextual function of violence serves to legitimize the characters internal development but also as metaphor for violence as a justification for sovereignty.
Violence serves as a cathartic resolution to tensions between competing forces within the film as well as expectations of the audience for authenticity. Fight scenes contain familiar elements of a battle between good and evil –each fighter displays their skills for the other until the fight begins. The advantage transfers between each fighter until one defeats the other, punctuated by brutality. The brutality itself is spectacular, one character’s skull is impaled on a large spike. Another’s torso is pushed into a ban saw. The fight itself is hardly brutal, mainly exchanges of kicks, punches, throws, and a few blood-inducing strikes with weapons. The brutality itself only punctuates and resolves the previous established tension. It’s ejaculatory. Violence in this sense is hardly symbolic –it’s pure elation for the viewer. This plot device is a forceful jolt to our moral ambivalence regarding violence, making it an artifact to enjoy rather than something to analyze and legitimize. A moral analysis of violence in this way would typically restrain violence. Moral Kombat II instead fetishizes violence –the viewer is relieved of taking a moral position on the justification for violence and is instead allowed to enjoy it as a form of ecstasy.
It would be naive, however, to reduce the film to some libidinal playground for uninitiated audiences. After all, it’s an industry film, a franchise installment, and in the end a business venture for the producers. It’s not primarily a path to induct viewers into the franchise (although, what producer would scoff at expanding their audience?), but to draw existing fans of the franchise to the theater. It’s not enough, however, to get them into the seats, you have to satiate the audience’s nostalgic expectations (they are, after all, making a third installment). The spectacle of violence was the main selling point of the original game series. Skill in the game was often associated with knowledge of the controller codes that allowed you to perform fantastically gruesome finishing moves. There was even a secret knowledge around “blood mode” that made the game MORE gruesome. Many of the deaths in the films were easter-egg shout-outs to the gore of the game. The tension this is meant to resolve is that of the fan viewer asking themselves if the movie is actually an authentic adaptation of the game. The gore operates as a legitimizing ritual through which the franchise demonstrates fidelity to its mythic identity
Even though brutality functions as ecstatic elation for the audience, violence in the film demonstrates deeper social fascination with violence as an organizing principle. Shao Kahn’s character uses violence as justification for political control (indeed, the entire competition of Mortal Kombat is a not-so-complicated metaphor for ‘might equals right’). Early in the film, Shao Kahn’s exchange with King Jerod is a challenge to the basic idea that political legitimacy can be achieved through violence. Facing inevitable defeat, Jerod tells Shao Kahn, “They will never bow to you,” to which Shao Kahn responds, “We will see.” His superior fighting skills wins over Jerod’s heroic display of resistance and -in keeping with the guiding principle- the people of Edenia submit to his malevolent rule. This outcome is unfortunate for the people of Edenia, but consistent with the sovereignty principle demonstrated through Shao Kahn’s victory. Years later when the competition comes to earth, Shao Kahn undermines his own legitimacy by assassinating Raiden (or mortally wounding him) in order to take his power and achieve immortality. When he is subsequently defeated by Cole Young in battle, he immediately regenerates and kills Cole. Shao Kahn’s subversion of the rules of the competition undermines his political legitimacy (if he can’t be defeated, his fighting ability does not prove his legitimacy and thus he loses sovereignty). The protagonists must destroy his immortality to move the plot along, but that action is not actually what defeats him. His death is the just reward for his subversion of the rules.
This is a complete inversion of the liberal democratic view that sovereignty is legitimized by the will of the people, but not actually a departure from the competitive order that currently animates where political sovereignty derives its power. Opposing forces compete for control through figurative battle and victory gives carte blanche for governing from the ideological edge. The rules that constrain how political forces operate are negotiable if they exist at all (the entire fight is mostly amoral, justifying otherwise immoral non-normative behavior with circuitous tautologies). The competition is a spectacle, positioning one side against the other in non-substantive displays of virtue, patriotism, and paranoia. Headlines use sensationalized language (“Watch Candidate A demolish/slam/eviscerate Candidate B’) at the expense of substantive analysis. Even voters cease to understand these spectacles as anything more than objects for meta analysis rather than forums for actual polemic discussion about existential issues. Finally, the winner hardly has to justify whatever dysfunction or malevolence accompanies their control as their victory itself justifies it. The only hope opponents have of regaining legitimacy is winning the next fight. Until then, they must yield to the authority of the conqueror, however malevolent it might be. The symbolism of violence and political authority isn’t subtextual or ironic –it’s a basic assumption about how the world operates. The proscriptions for escaping the malevolence of the opposing side isn’t revolutionary or even critical, it’s participatory i.e. –fight back.
The brutal might-equals-right framework is cast as virtuous while unwittingly undermining the democratic ideals we all claim as guiding virtues of our society. The film is authoritarian while allowing for a choice between benevolence and malevolence, presumably letting the audience decide which of the two better represent their ideological position.