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Over the years, there have been numerous films that feature the character of the “monster-mentor,” by which I mean an elder who forms a young apprentice through the toughest kind of tough love.
Think of Lou Gossett, Jr.’s character in An Officer and a Gentleman who puts Richard Gere’s young Navy recruit brutally through his paces; or of the awful drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket who ruthlessly prepares one young man to be a soldier, even as he leads another to commit suicide; or of Pai-Mei in Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the Kung-Fu master who brow-beats one recruit until she is able to put her fist through a four-inch thick piece of wood.