Week 12 Bruce Lee and Chinese Masculinity PDF

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Transnational Incorporations in Hong Kong Cinema CHAPTER 1 3

Stellar Transit Bruce Lee’s Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame

Copyright © 2006. University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

CHRIS BERRY

Bruce Lee’s stellar transit across the world’s screens was all the more spectacular for its shocking brevity. His untimely death at the age of thirty-one, at the height of his success and after only four martial arts features, transformed him from new star to shooting star. Born in the United States, appearing suddenly out of Hong Kong, and flashing across the world’s screens, he no sooner became the first global Chinese film star than he disappeared. In the years to follow, numerous Bruce Lee look-alikes tried and failed to fill the gap. They only succeeded in confirming his unique charisma, central to which is the body he delights in displaying in his films. Stripped to the waist, lean muscles taught with fury, and poised to pounce (Fig. 13.1), iconic images of Bruce Lee continue to appear on book covers, DVD covers, and fan web pages. Everybody loves Bruce Lee’s body, or so it seems. But they may not all love it for the same reasons. Bruce Lee’s body is a transnational frame, shaped by his own experiences in the United States and Hong Kong and by perceptions of the various transnational markets his films were aimed at. If all mass cultural products are open to interpretation in the quest for maximum sales, this polysemic potential must be even truer for transnational cultural products.1 Lee’s deployment of his body as a weapon to win international and interracial competitions has been variously celebrated as the triumph of the Chinese, Asian, or third-world underdog. It has also been understood within different models of masculinity and different body ideals, each with its own history. Finally,

Embodied Modernities : Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of Hawaii Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3413283. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:01:40.

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Copyright © 2006. University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

FIGURE 13.1. Bruce poised to pounce in Fist of Fury (1972).

Lee’s display of his body has elicited queer readings. These queer readings have intersected with the other ways of understanding Lee’s body, sometimes provoking anger, sometimes being appropriated for pro-feminist or queerfriendly purposes. The different interpretations of Bruce Lee have developed in different times in different places according to local circumstances; they are situated. Some commentators are clearly aware of other discussions that have preceded them. However, overall, each discourse has proceeded relatively autonomously. The underdog interpretations rarely incorporate issues of masculinity, and although the discussions of masculinity may acknowledge Lee’s underdog triumphs, they rarely relate this to the type of masculinity he developed. This essay aims to understand not only Bruce Lee’s body as a transnational frame, but also the interpretations of it as such. In a transnational framework, it becomes significant that the vehicle for the ‘‘triumph of the underdog’’ narrative is also a Chinese man and that the particular masculinity he embodies foregrounds the eroticized male body. Focusing on this framework enables me to make a further leap. In the past, I have noticed in passing that, while everybody else loves Bruce Lee’s body, I feel more ambivalent. After focusing on the transit of Lee’s star body more carefully, another altogether less spectacular asteroid comes in to view. Trailing Lee, it haunts his reworking of Chinese masculinity, revealing the price of success for his model of Chinese masculinity. I therefore argue that Lee’s body is an agonized one—caught in the double-bind of a compulsion to respond to the challenge of modern American masculinity on one hand, and a homophobic and racially marked self-hatred that is a precondition for that ability to respond on the other.

Embodied Modernities : Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of Hawaii Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3413283. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:01:40.

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Copyright © 2006. University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

Triumph of the Underdog Bruce Lee’s breakthrough as the first Chinese global star was based on only four features he made as an adult before his death. In the Lee legend, this achievement is a triumph of the underdog and a struggle against racism.2 Born in the United States in 1940, Lee grew up in Hong Kong, where he was as a 1950s child star. Returning to the United States and graduating from the University of Washington in Seattle with a BA in Philosophy, he had some success on American television before losing the role of Caine in the Kung Fu series to Caucasian actor David Carradine.3 American martial arts star Chuck Norris is reported as commenting, ‘‘Carradine’s as good at martial arts as I am at acting.’’ 4 Returning to Hong Kong, Lee debuted as an adult in 1971 with The Big Boss.5 It broke box office records in Hong Kong. He followed this in 1972 with Fist of Fury. It also set new box office records and enabled Lee to establish his own production company, for which he wrote and directed The Way of the Dragon. In 1973 he made the James Bond-style film Enter the Dragon for Warner Brothers. At this high point, he died of a mysterious brain seizure. A fifth film, The Game of Death, was completed later by splicing scenes he had completed with new footage using stand-ins. Each film is a variation on the triumph of the underdog theme. In The Big Boss, Lee is a migrant working at a factory run by a Chinese boss in Thailand. His mother has warned him not to get into fights, but he gets drawn into protests after two workers die. Impressed by his martial arts skills, the boss promotes him to foreman. But when Lee discovers he is being used and the company is in fact a front for drug smuggling and prostitution, he goes on a furious rampage. The film ends with him being taken away by police after killing the boss. The Big Boss takes place almost entirely in the Chinese community in Thailand, and so it seems more about class than nationality or ethnicity. Fist of Fury is his most evidently nationalistic work. Set in semi-colonized Shanghai in 1908, it is based on a true event—the death of the founder of the Jingwu martial arts school. Lee plays a student. Discovering that a rival Japanese karate school killed his master, he breaks his school’s ban on deploying its fighting skills with a series of retaliatory killings. The Japanese taunt him with a sign bearing the ‘‘sick man of Asia’’ slogan used to denigrate China. Lee destroys it and also the notorious ‘‘No Dogs or Chinese’’ sign at a park gate. The film culminates in a contest with a Russian champion brought in by the Japanese school. When the police come to arrest Lee, he runs at them and the camera. The film ends with a freeze frame of Lee in mid-leap as we hear his characteristic angry shriek and the hail of police gunfire.

Embodied Modernities : Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of Hawaii Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3413283. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:01:40.

Copyright © 2006. University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

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As Tony Rayns points out, The Way of the Dragon combines the migrant worker theme from The Big Boss with the contest or tournament theme from Fist of Fury.6 A bumpkin from Hong Kong’s New Territories, Lee flies to Rome to help his female cousin, whose restaurant is threatened by local gangsters. Lee trains the waiters to fight back, against his uncle’s advice that they should not fight. The gangsters bring in an American martial artist, played by Chuck Norris. The film culminates in the iconic Coliseum fight scene, followed by a twist when it transpires that his uncle was conspiring with the gangsters. The box office success of these films led to Enter the Dragon, directed by Robert Clouse and guaranteed international distribution by Warner Brothers. Playing off the popularity of the Bond series, Lee takes on the familiar role of an international police agent combating a wealthy evildoer. He is a highly trained Shaolin martial artist, and his opponent is a Shaolin-disciple-gonewrong called Han. He travels to Han’s fortress with a Caucasian American and an African American. The latter is killed, but together with his Caucasian colleague, he destroys the fortress and takes down Han. The wide range of ethnic and national affiliations in this small body of work hardly constitutes what critics think of as an artist’s oeuvre that inscribes a consistent signature. The possible exception is the fight scene choreography, which Lee was intensively involved with. Most commentators note his commitment to realistic fighting without the aid of trampolines, wirework, or editing tricks, as well as his development of his own unique Jeet Kune Do style.7 But even here, there are significant variations in the direction. Lee was only involved in writing and directing one film, The Way of the Dragon. Cheng Yu notes that director of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury ‘‘Luo Wei depended on editing and close-ups to convey the impact of the fight. Luo also often used subjective point-of-view shots such as Lee kicking or punching directly into the camera. In the Coliseum scene, Lee adopts a markedly different approach, using a medium or long shot to show the fighters on opposite sides of the (wide) screen or in two-shots. As such the style is closer to capturing the fight-performance or representing a reportage of a fight from the ring-side.’’ 8 As for Enter the Dragon, Tony Rayns is not the only one to disparage Robert Clouse, pointing out that he ‘‘fails to comprehend the most basic rule for filming the martial arts—that it is imperative to show protagonists full-length if their movements are to constitute the dynamics of the drama.’’ 9 This variety extends to the narratives as well as the directing styles, forcing audiences to decode selectively if they want to ‘‘make sense’’ of what Bruce Lee stands for. Four main and often overlapping possibilities for understanding Lee’s underdog triumphs circulate; they either represent a triumph for Hong Kong, for diasporic Chinese in general, for the third world, or for Asian

Embodied Modernities : Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of Hawaii Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3413283. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:01:40.

Copyright © 2006. University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

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Americans. Not all commentators try to assign meaning to Lee’s kung fu, and a formalist appreciation of the fighting style is also common. However, noting Lee’s Caucasian opponents in Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon, Stephen Teo is rightly suspicious of this approach.10 Most who see Lee as representing Hong Kong base this on his childhood there and his participation in the Hong Kong cinema. However, Kwai-Cheung Lo acknowledges that Lee does not connote a clear Hong Kong identity to most people from Hong Kong. Not only did Lee spend much of his life in the United States and hold a US passport, but he also appeared as generically Chinese rather than specifically from Hong Kong in all his films except The Way of the Dragon. Furthermore, his films were in Mandarin, rather than the local Cantonese language of Hong Kong.11 This lack of Hong Kong specificity leads other authors to see Lee’s triumph as a metaphor for diasporic Chinese pride. Yingchi Chu states, ‘‘No other Hong Kong star can more clearly express diasporic consciousness than Bruce Lee. His three best-known films . . . present stories of Chinese who live in places dominated and controlled by non-Chinese.’’ 12 Stephen Teo takes a similar view, seeing Lee’s ‘‘cause’’ as ‘‘cultural nationalism,’’ an ethnically based form implicitly distinct from the state-based nationalism of either the People’s Republic with its capital in Beijing or the Republic with its temporary capital in Taiwan after 1949.13 However, Lo reads the same characteristics differently, believing that Hong Kong inhabitants identify with the imaginary China of Lee’s films. Precisely because ‘‘Lee’s body is unable to offer a solid ground for locating a specific entity, ‘Hong Kong,’ ’’ Lo sees a homology between this slippery identity-in-non-identity with Hong Kong’s own ghostly presence fading out of British colonial status and into mainland China.14 The same lack of nation-state specificity grounds the third-world reading of Lee. Hsiung-Ping Chiao notes that Lee’s anti-western aggression ‘‘was congenial not only to Chinese, but literally to all people who felt that they had been degraded by western Imperialism (South Americans, Arabs, and Orientals).’’ 15 Vijay Prashad not only remembers seeing Enter the Dragon on its release in India, but also contrasts the film with the Bond series as follows: ‘‘Bond was the agent of international corruption manifest in the British MI-5, while Lee stood his ground against corruption of all forms. . . . With his bare fists and his nunchakus, Lee provided young people with the sense that we could be victorious, like the Vietnamese guerillas, against the virulence of international capitalism.’’ In order to make this interpretation that Lee is fighting in solidarity with what he elsewhere calls ‘‘the army in black pajamas,’’ Prashad has to overlook the inconvenient fact that in Enter the Dragon Lee is himself an MI-5 agent.16 Furthermore, the horror many diasporic Chinese audiences had of communism constrained Lee’s image from any explicit socialism.

Embodied Modernities : Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of Hawaii Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3413283. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:01:40.

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At the time of the original release of Lee’s features, the kind of third-world internationalism Prashad remembers fondly was, as he details, closely interwoven with ethnic minority politics in the United States. For example, David Desser has traced the popularity of Lee’s films with African American audiences,17 and the importance of non-Caucasian audiences for later crossover actors such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li is both well known and also manifest in the ethnicity of many of their American co-stars.18 However, as Jachinson Chan has pointed out, if there was ambivalence in Hong Kong about whether Lee counted as a genuine local, the same is true in the United States for his status as an Asian American.19 Perhaps in these circumstances it is not so surprising that much of the literature on Asian American culture makes only passing reference to Lee. Apart from Chan’s work, the only other major exception is that of Sheng-mei Ma, who places Lee’s nationalism as part of a broad Chinese and Asian phenomenon, including Asian American culture.20 Chan, however, places Lee as a breakthrough in the representation of Asian American men, who appear feminized in figures such as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan.

Copyright © 2006. University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

Competing Masculinities As part of a monograph about Asian American masculinity, Jachinson Chan’s discussion of Bruce Lee analyzes both the triumph of the underdog narrative and Lee’s masculinity. It is exceptional in this regard, since most commentators make no connection between Lee’s underdog triumphs and the type of masculinity he deploys. Even for Chan, masculinity exists only in the singular and there is no discussion of different ways of being masculine. Maybe this is also why other authors do not discuss Lee’s embodied masculinity; maybe it seems ‘‘natural’’ that only a masculine man could symbolize the communal reempowerment they see in his narratives, and ‘‘masculine’’ only means one thing. For example, Kwai-cheung Lo notes Matthew Turner’s research on the turn to a ‘‘modern western mode of health, posture and physique’’ in Hong Kong in the 1960s, adding that ‘‘a unique combination of western bodybuilding and Chinese kung fu (with an admixture of James Bond karate and mainland flying action) were brought together in the figure of Bruce Lee.’’ 21 This is a telling observation, suggesting a tension between other Chinese masculinities and western muscle culture, but Lo does not pursue this line of enquiry any further. Similarly, in her essay on race and masculinity in martial arts cinema, Yvonne Tasker hints at different masculinities when she comments, ‘‘The Chinese hero often fights for and as part of a community, while within the American tradition the hero has become an increasingly isolated figure.’’ 22 Tasker implicitly

Embodied Modernities : Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, edited by Fran Martin, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, University of Hawaii Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ndlib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3413283. Created from ndlib-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:01:40.

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treats Chinese community and American individualism as fixed cultural characteristics here, rather than as figures in the dynamic contestation of what a real man is in different but increasingly interconnected spaces in the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and global ‘‘free trade.’’ Kam Louie’s recent study of Chinese masculinity gives us a better understanding of this. He details two longstanding masculinities, both valorized in Chinese society. Wen or refined masculinity is symbolized by Confucius and the gentleman scholar-official, and emphasizes culture-based power rather than physical prowess. Highly attractive to women, the wen man may dally with them, but in the end must give up erotic pleasure to fulfill his ethical obligations. Wu or martial masculinity is symbolized by the god Guan Yu— shrines to whom figure in many a John Woo film—and the fighters who inhabit the legendary domain of the jianghu (rivers and lakes) outside civil society. These heroes emphasize physical strength and skill. Except when drunk, they eschew women completely, and their primary commitments are to their blood brothers. The wu fighter’s body may be more revealed than the wen scholar’s, which is almost always lost in billowing robes. But in neither case is the male body eroticized: the fighter’s body signifies his martial prowess only.23 Indeed, the very concept of the ‘‘muscle’’ did not exist until appropriated from western anatomy studies in the nineteenth century.24 This specific ‘‘invisibility’’ of the male body in earlier Chinese culture is part of a broader absence of the revealed body in Chinese fine art prior to contact with the west.25 Louie notes, ‘‘The Bruce Lee screen persona has all three characteristics of loyalty, righteousness and mateship to justify him as a wu hero.’’ He adds that ‘‘like the wu heroes in traditional narratives, even when the women around him are concerned about him, the Bruce Lee characters do not romance these beauties like a wen scholar would do: he always attends to his social obligations first.’’ 26 Jachinson Chan, apparently unaware of these other masculinities, interprets Lee’s behavior within the conventions of American masculinity only, claiming tha...