[In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] my team and I chose the most populist, if not popular, genre in film history—the Hong Kong martial arts film—to tell our story, and we used this pop genre almost as a kind of instrument to explore the legacy of classical Chinese culture. We embraced the most mass of art forms and mixed it with the highest—the secret martial arts as passed down over time in the great Taoist schools of training and thought.1
IN 2001, ANG LEE’S astonishing film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the prototype of the new global swordfighting martial arts genre, gained major success in awards ceremonies in the United States, including, most notably, the Academy Awards. Best Music (Score) winner Tan Dun described Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as crossing boundaries—of film genres, musical traditions, and national cultures. This description of the film succinctly suggests the exciting trend toward globalization reflected by mainstream acceptance of a subtitled motion picture in Mandarin. This conception of globalization is not only realized as the synthesis and transcendence of opposites but also as the representation of geographic localities and notions of territory—including nationalism, identity, narrative, and ethnicity. Lee’s films represent not only the international crossing of boundaries but the repackaging and reappropriation of Chinese cultural identity. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as well as three of Lee’s earlier works, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet, and Pushing Hands, are particularly clear examples of this phenomenon.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon proved to be his most globally recognized work yet. It was the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever to open in Britain, and the first Chinese-language film in history to become a mainstream American hit. Although Ang Lee had anticipated a fairly limited art-house response to the film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was widely acclaimed by critics, as well as receiving overwhelmingly positive word-of-mouth reviews. By March 2001, a few months after its U.S. release, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon continued its successful reception by becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. Its earnings stand at close to US$127 million, easily surpassing the record-breaking success of Roberto Benigni’s Academy Award–winning film, Life Is Beautiful (1997). At Cannes, it garnered four of the top awards, while at the British Academy Awards (BAFTA) in 2001, it won the David Lean Award for Best Director, Best Score, Best Costume Design, and Best Film in a Foreign Language. At the Golden Globes, the film won Best Foreign Film and Ang Lee won Best Director. The film received ten Academy Award nominations, the greatest number of any foreign-language film in history. As noted earlier, the film received four awards, but not the coveted Best Director award, nor Best Film, as Lee had been hoping. Moreover, Taiwan neglected to honor Ang Lee as best director at the Golden Horse Awards that year. However, in Hong Kong, a month after the Academy Awards ceremony, the film won eight awards, including Best Director and Best Film.
The director adapted the screenplay from a five-part martial arts series written by Wang Dulu in the early twentieth century.2 The movie is mostly from the fourth book, set in Qing-dynasty China, about the wuxia expert Li Mu Bai, who plans to retire and spend the rest of his life with the widowed warrior Yu Shu Lien, when the theft of his sword “Green Destiny” interrupts his plans. Mu Bai and Shu Lien track the theft to the young daughter of an aristocrat, Jen, a wonderfully complex character who hides both her martial arts expertise and a secret lover. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a story of repression in the face of the Chinese virtues of loyalty and chastity—repression represented by the unspoken love between Mu Bai and Shu Lien, as well as the young Jen’s repressed desire to break free from the social constrictions of family and conventions. Again, the timeless, universal qualities that are the larger themes of Lee’s works are present in full force. On the surface is daily life, the structured social codes and conventions that dictate people’s behavior. Underneath the restrictive social mores are found the repressed desires—the hidden dragon. The social restrictions common to Chinese culture are at times inverted in the film—loyalty is opposed by betrayal, and chastity is supplanted by sexual transgression.
Wang Dulu, Qing China, and China of the Imagination
The story presented by Ang Lee is condensed and adapted from Wang Dulu’s original narrative in the five-part series. Some of the major changes include the following: Li Mu Bai does not die in the fourth book; instead, he outlives the three other principal characters and is still alive twenty-one years later at the conclusion of the five-part saga. Jennifer Jay (2003) notes that Li Mu Bai’s screen death is a much more stirring depiction of the lovers’ tragedy: that the unspoken love between Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien can never be consummated. Jade Fox is killed earlier in the series, not by Mu Bai but by Shu Lien. In addition, while the ending remains ambiguous in the movie, Jen’s leap in Wang Dulu’s book clearly does not end in death; she survives and has a final encounter with her lover Lo before disappearing to Xinjiang, where she gives birth to their baby.3 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell W. Davis quote Wang Dulu’s expository coda for the novel, which explains that Jen, out of duty to her parents and in keeping with her highborn status, could never marry the bandit, Lo. After returning to him for a single night of sexual intimacy (as in the film), Jen leaves Lo the following day. The novel reads: “She left him the next day, without hesitation, like the tail of a celestial dragon slipping away, always ‘hidden,’ never to be found.”4 This prose hints through writing at the “hiddenness” of Jen expressed visually by Lee in the breathtaking ending of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Jen’s astonishing leap displays unusual artistry and creates a memorably haunting and ethereal atmosphere at the end of the film.
This film represents Qing dynasty (1644–1911) Chinese society, but does not specify an exact time period—and with good reason. Lee did not seek to present a historically accurate vision of China, but instead, the “China of the imagination,” an image of China that is felt deeply in the heart. Thus, the film’s most stunning scenes—an airborne battle among wispy bamboo plants; a final, suicidal leap to earth in reference to an ancient legend—are images displaying uncommon artistry for the average martial arts film. While making the film, Ang Lee had to shoot for a balance between Eastern and Western aesthetics, and a balance between drama and action. For example, the pacing of the film broke away from traditional wuxia martial arts films because the first fight did not occur until nearly fifteen minutes into the movie—an eternity for Lee’s Chinese audience. In addition, actors in traditional martial arts films are not usually expected to both perform stunts and, simultaneously, produce real dramatic emotion; in this film, the actors had to do both at the same time. Because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon garnered greater public acclaim in the West than in Chinese-speaking markets, some of Lee’s critics have accused him of making a Hollywood version of a Chinese martial arts film—an orientalist version of kung fu, set adrift from its Chinese roots. However, it must be kept in mind that Lee fought to retain the Mandarin dialogue for the film’s release in the United States, a choice which normally would restrict the marketability of the film to a limited art-house audience. Lee has memorably said, “[Making] a martial arts film in English to me is the same as … John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western.”5
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon mixes romance, feminism, martial arts, and high-art aesthetics. As a female lead, Jen’s character has mysterious powers which only gradually become clear. At her first appearance, living a cloistered existence as the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat, she may be easily underestimated by the viewer, seeming to be trained only in the arts of brush calligraphy and pouring tea. However, it is soon revealed that this young woman has been given advanced training in high-level martial arts. Nothing is what it seems. Not even when Jen, riding through the desert in a caravan, has her comb stolen by the rough and swashbuckling Lo (Chang Chen), does the viewer see passion on her face. The heat generated onscreen while Jen is held captive in the bandit’s lair is intense. The sexuality in this film is unsurpassed because it is eroticism with both Western and Chinese sensibilities. Chinese films, on the whole, are not normally so frank and explicit—especially surprising is the attention given to the bathing/sleeping that goes on in the bandit’s cave; these bluntly physical matters are usually unexplored by the more restrained Chinese filmmakers. This section of the film seems to have the gleeful and revelatory tone of It Happened One Night (1934), in the scenes between Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. Later on, when Mu Bai watches the drugged, and dripping wet, Jen in the otherworldly scene in the abandoned factory, there is again a very Western-style electricity and spark between them. She says, “Is it the sword you want … or me?” Chinese critics of this film have observed that such a blunt come-on is shocking from a Chinese woman, and have explained that she may be excused because she was drugged.
China in Ang Lee’s imagination also has a deep emotional resonance. The China mainland, where this film was made, is the homeland of his parents, from which they were forced to flee during the Communist takeover of China. Both of his parents were from the mainland and moved to Taiwan following the Nationalists’ defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. His grandparents and the rest of his father’s family were slaughtered during the struggle for Communist/Nationalist dominance of China. Lee’s father, a native of Jiangxi Province in southern China, escaped to Taiwan as the family’s sole survivor. Some of the ineffable longing and sadness in this film is surely attributable to the depth of loss experienced by Lee’s parents when they had to leave China. Although Lee grew up in Taiwan, the nostalgia for old China and the glories of its past is still a strong pull among the older generation of Chinese in Taiwan, especially the generation of Nationalist soldiers who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. It is important to realize that the film was not intended to be faithful to a historically-accurate China as much as it was intended to be faithful to the image of China in Ang Lee’s mind.
Cowriter James Schamus explained the difficulty of trying to work on the screenplay with two Chinese coauthors Wang Huiling and Cai Guorong (Tsai Kuo-jung). He originally wrote it in English, but upon receiving back his revised draft, he saw how far off he had been from telling the story correctly. Not speaking the Mandarin language in which the film was produced, or in which the original novel was written, Schamus describes the experience of writing the film as both rewarding and nerve-wracking. “It was weird because on the one hand, I was writing an original screenplay because I didn’t know the novel. … And on the other hand, I knew that I had to maintain fidelity to something I didn’t know.”6 Schamus described the process of writing the film in what he called “International Subtitle Style”:
It was really rewriting the script so many times, translating back to English, back to Chinese, writing it and, of course, finally rewriting the film one last time in the form of the subtitles and at that moment, through discussion … realizing how little of the movie I understood. [The film’s] meanings remain embedded in the Chinese language and culture.7
Ang Lee adds: “I grew up in Taiwan and this was the kind of film that captured public fantasy back then—the storytelling, the melodrama and the morality. That was what I was aiming at, the nostalgic feeling.”8
Criticism of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
One of the criticisms of this film is that it is “not Chinese enough,” or that it presents a hybridized version of Chinese culture. The cast is transnational and represents all the “Chinas.” The actors and crew were selected from all Chinese diaspora cultural zones (including overseas Chinese in America): Chow Yun-fat (playing Li Mu Bai), Yuen Wo Ping (martial arts director), Peter Pao (cinematographer), and Tim Yip (art director) all hailed from Hong Kong; actor Chang Chen (Lo) and director Ang Lee from Taiwan; and overseas “Chinese-Americans” included Chinese-American Tan Dun (composer of the musical score), Taiwanese-American Yo-Yo Ma (cellist), and Hong Kong–American Coco Lee (performer of title song). In addition, James Schamus’ work on the screenplay brought a heavily non-Chinese element to the narrative.
Another discrepancy is that the pinyin system used in the subtitles is inconsistent. Li Mu Bai is romanized in mainland Chinese pinyin, while Shu Lien is romanized in Taiwan’s Wade-Giles, creating an appearance of uniformity to the Western viewer, while in reality simply mixing unrelated pinyin systems without explanation or comment. In a third example, the experience for the Chinese viewer is admittedly different from the Western viewer—the Western viewer sees a subtitled Chinese movie, while for Mandarin speakers, the actors’ language skills were uneven and distracting. Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh both had to learn Mandarin to make the film; Yeoh could not even read Chinese and had to learn her part line-by-line in pinyin. Chinese audiences heard distinct differences in the Chinese accents of the four leads: only Zhang Ziyi spoke with a standard Beijing accent; Chang Chen spoke with a Taiwanese accent; Chow Yun-fat, a Cantonese accent, and Michelle Yeoh, a Malaysian-English accent. Ang Lee defends his choice against the Shaw Brothers/Golden Harvest practice of dubbing actors with standard Mandarin voices:
From the start … I made up my mind to make an all-Mandarin-speaking film, knowing full well that Chow and Yeoh can speak only Cantonese Mandarin. Honestly speaking, the Mandarin spoken by Chow in the film is better than that of Chen Shui-bian … and even Jiang Zemin. I think ninety percent of it is no problem at all. There are problems though, with Michelle Yeoh’s pronunciation and intonation. But I think the quality of the voice which is capable of carrying emotions is more touching than listening to dubbed standard Mandarin. Therefore I kept their voices.9
In addition, some of the lines from the screenplay could not be translated directly between the two languages, resulting in further blurring, repackaging, and hybridization. The climactic line in which Li Mu Bai finally swears his love to Shu Lien as he is dying is rendered in the English subtitle as follows:
I would rather be a ghost drifting by your side as a condemned soul than to enter heaven without you. Because of your love, I will never be a lonely spirit.
A literal translation of the same line would be:
I would rather wander at your side, following you, and be a ghost in the wilderness for seven days; and even as I drift into the darkest place, my love will not let me be an eternally lonely spirit.
Jennifer Jay rightly points out that:
A literal translation would be too cumbersome for the Western audience, not familiar with the Taoist and Buddhist concepts of ghosts and the dead. But bringing in the Western notions of the condemned soul and entering heaven without a loved one is too foreign to traditional Chinese thought. This translation appeals to the Western audience, providing an obvious example of Westernized hybridity in the film.10
The problem inherent in translation is pinpointed by Rey Chow (1995) when she writes: “Genuine cultural translation is possible only when we move beyond the seemingly infinite but actually reductive permutation of the two terms—East and West, original and translation—and instead see both as full, materialist, and most likely equally corrupt, equally decadent participants in contemporary world culture.”11 Felicia Chan (2003) also examines the different reception the film was given in Asia and the West, examining how the different cultural backgrounds brought to the film by the viewer not only shape their understanding of the film but may also hinder the film’s translatability. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006) add that the film “projects a mythic, cultural version of Chineseness for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences,”12 with a contemporary comment: first, the mix of accents and origins in the film represents the ethnic diversity of the diaspora itself, and second, the film displays “a Chinese cultural nation in which Western-style individualism is celebrated by younger generations to the dismay of older generations. … Youthful rebellion and female liberation are central to the storyline, to the combat scenes, and to the generational tussle between Chinese and Western lifestyles that is part of the diasporic Chinese experience.”13
Ang Lee himself admits to the blurring and metamorphosis brought on by his blending of Eastern and Western filmmaking techniques in this movie:
The wuxia operates in a realm under the surface of society and the rule of law, called Giang hu [jianghu]. This is a world made up of individuals and their relationships. … For example, the wuxia can be a member of an underground, Mafia-type organization, but loyalty and honor are still the main values. In serving a master, the wuxia keeps his or her word, even to the point of death. [Today, the term jianghu has a broader meaning, referring to the entanglements of life and relationships in a society.] … In Chinese philosophy as a whole—and not just martial arts—inner and outer strength are both integral parts of every living being. Just as everyone [according to Chinese Buddhist thought] has the Buddha within themselves, they also have a tremendous power—the crouching tiger, ready to leap out. The key is to achieve a balance, to see harmony and reduce conflicts. … Coming from this kind of culture, stories like Crouching Tiger have been generally filmed in a particularly Eastern cinematic style. I have also worked in the very different Western cinematic tradition. Rather than choose between these two, I let the creative tension between these two styles become an important part of the making of Crouching Tiger.14
The success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon raises issues of cultural power, differentiation, and subordination, bringing accusations of Ang Lee catering to the West, of perpetuating Orientalism, of packaging Chinese materials with Hollywood wrapping. This is a hot topic in scholarship on the film; citing financial investment as an indicator, Kwai-Cheung Lo (2005) notes the difficulty of categorizing Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a Chinese or Hollywood film, since the financing of it was based on advance sales of the international distribution rights to various American, Japanese, and European companies. These companies included Tokyo-based Sony, Sony Pictures Classics in New York, Columbia Pictures in Hollywood (for the rights to Latin American and several Asian markets), Columbia Pictures Asia (based in Hong Kong), and Sony Classical Music. Lo notes the actual cash for the film was provided by a bank in Paris.15 Yeh and Davis refute the argument that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon makes narrative concessions by following Hollywood patterns of pacing for international action films. To them, the film does not follow these patterns at all; instead, the film “starts and closes very quietly.”16 This subdued pacing defies the typical action film, in which the action normally begins immediately with an explosive force. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar further refute the notion that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was made for a primarily non-Chinese audience; instead, they find in the film concrete details relating to what they refer to as the “Chinese nation” and the diasporic Chinese experience.17
The Chinese Genre of Wuxia
The wuxia tradition can be translated as “martial arts chivalry.” A “xia” is a “knight-errant,” except that he can be from any social class; the wuxia heroes are “outlaws” or “bandits” who live on the edge, outside of government regulation—the most similar parallel in Western culture is Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. While the Western literary concept of “knight-errant” begins in the late fourteenth century, where the term first appears in the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1350), the Chinese concept of the xia is found as early as the fourth century b.c. However, not until the Tang dynasty, around the ninth century a.d., do the stories begin to resemble the wuxia genre of today with its tales of chivalric derring-do. The literature of the wuxia genre hit its highest peak of development in the fiction of China; one of China’s most famous novels, Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin, or Outlaws of the Marsh, compiled from legends in the fourteenth century by Shi Nai’an) details the exploits of the outlaw Jianghu clan, a chivalrous gang that lives in marshes at the edge of Liangshan. These men are characterized by brave deeds, honor, loyalty to the clan, and extraordinary fighting skills, with the relationship between teacher and student bordering on master/servant. A person highly skilled in martial arts attains an esoteric knowledge of fighting techniques and an intense concentration of almost mystical powers. Many trained and gifted warriors excel in acts of physical prowess magnified beyond human power—flying, jumping impossible heights, hurling balls of fire, or becoming invisible. To fully enter into the experience of the wuxia world, a reader must take these impossible feats as a matter of course.
For the Western viewer experiencing wuxia for the first time, the fact that these clan members can run up walls and take off into flight (as the masked robber of the Green Destiny sword does in an early scene), ignoring normal laws of gravity, or can stand on bamboo stalks and sway around dangerously, lightly jumping from one bamboo stalk to another (as Mu Bai and Jen do), without any branches breaking, is initially startling. For Chinese viewers familiar with the wuxia genre, these tropes are well known; Chinese readers have pored over these novels and imagined the scenes of flying warriors in their heads for years—however, the advent of Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon marked the first time a director actually risked attempting to portray these fanciful visual images onscreen. The aforementioned “bamboo grove” fight sequence is one example of a common trope for the genre—King Hu’s masterpiece wuxia film, A Touch of Zen (Xianü, 1969), also had a bamboo grove fight scene, but his warriors had to stay at ground level because of the limitations of special effects at that time. In Lee’s world, wuxia warriors magically float at the tips of the trees, and for the uninitiated Western viewer, images like this were entirely new and unexpected, leading to a sense of childlike wonder and exhilaration. Western audience members may have spent a few seconds wondering about these strange occurrences, but ultimately decided that they just did not mind, even if it did not make “sense.” The flight choreographer for these otherworldly scenes was Yuen Wo Ping, who had already come to the attention of mainstream cinemagoers for his work in The Matrix (1999), another visually startling film. (One can only imagine how much more powerful these images would have been had one not already seen the astonishing special effects of the twirling slow-motion flight choreography of The Matrix.)
A second example of a familiar trope from wuxia literature is the inn scene, in which Jen, cross-dressing as a young male fighter, defeats legions of challengers while triumphantly reciting classical Chinese poetry. This blending of martial arts and high drama results in an exultant scene, recalling both martial arts norms and the cinematic grandiosity of traditional Chinese opera films such as Love Eterne (which also employs the operatic convention of cross-dressing). Jen repels one man with the poke of her finger on a sensitive pressure point; another she drives out for sharing the surname “Gou” with her husband from the arranged marriage. When one of her enemies asks in fear, “Who are you?” she replies with this high-energy speech:
| Jen: |
Who am I? I am … |
| |
I am the Invincible Sword Goddess. |
| |
Armed with the incredible Green Destiny. |
| |
Be you Li or Southern Crane |
| |
Lower your head |
| |
And ask for mercy. |
| |
I am the desert dragon. |
| |
I leave no trace. |
| |
Today … I fly over Eu-mei. |
| |
Tomorrow … I’ll kick over Wudan Mountain!18 |
The film even uses self-reflexive language to explain conventions of the genre of the wuxia tradition. Early in the film, Jen expresses her secret longing for the wuxia lifestyle, set against the harsh reality expressed by Shu Lien. In this scene, Jen keeps up her appearance as a naïve young aristocrat, while Shu Lien explains that the wuxia lifestyle is not as glamorous as it appears in books, while pointing out the conservatism of friendship and trust in the wuxia chivalric code.
| Jen: |
(longingly) It must be exciting to be a fighter, to be totally free. |
| Shu Lien: |
Fighters have rules too: friendship, trust, integrity … Without rules, we wouldn’t survive for long. |
| Jen: |
I’ve read all about people like you. Roaming wild, beating up anyone who gets in your way! |
| Shu Lien: |
Writers wouldn’t sell many books if they told how it really is. |
| Jen: |
But you’re just like the characters in the stories. |
| Shu Lien: |
Sure. No place to bathe for days, sleeping in flea-infested beds. … They tell you all about that in the books?19 |
The title Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has multilayered meanings. On the most obvious level, the Chinese characters in the title connect to the narrative since Jen’s Chinese name contains the character for “dragon” and her lover Lo’s given name in Chinese means “tiger.”20 Thus the film’s title, to those familiar with Chinese characters, is as obvious a reference as “Romeo and Juliet,” or, in a related example, the famous Chinese lovers that Ang Lee admits inspired this film, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. On another level, the Chinese idiomatic phrase “wohu canglong” (crouching tiger hidden dragon) is a common expression referring to the undercurrents of emotion, passion, and secret desires that lie beneath the surface of polite society and civil behavior. These subverted desires, although hidden, are very potent and mysterious, and can emerge unexpectedly, or powerfully change the course of people’s lives. For example, Jen and Lo express their desires in sudden and unpredictable ways—as they do in the desert cave—because they are young, wild, and headstrong. Jen’s unrestrained desires lead to trouble for the others—she steals the Green Destiny sword as a prank to see if she can get away with it; she runs away and dresses as a man so that she can enjoy the excitement of the wuxia lifestyle instead of docile acceptance of the marriage her parents have arranged. In addition, her rash actions inadvertently put Li Mu Bai in danger and lead to his death. And finally, the film ends with Jen’s impulsive leap from the mountain bridge.
In contrast to this are the repressed desires of the older characters Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien, who honor their code of duty above their own feelings. This code of honor has shaped their lives, and Shu Lien’s early engagement to one of Li Mu Bai’s brothers-in-arms (who was later killed) prevents the two from being able to act on their own feelings—if they choose to do so, they would be dishonoring the dead man’s memory and abandoning the code of honor that has shaped their lives. However, in their pursuit of the foolhardy and impetuous Jen, their own “dragons,” or hidden desires, are awakened. Jen’s youth, energy, and passion remind them both of the romance and freedom that they have traded in pursuit of duty. This stirs the dragons of their longings and suppressed desires—most importantly, their love for each other which, although always lurking right beneath the surface, has never been openly expressed. It is Li Mu Bai’s fascination with the youthful Jen and his desire to teach her that, in a subliminal way, ignites his long-repressed passion:
| Li: |
You need practice. I can teach you to fight with the Green Destiny, but first you must learn to hold it in stillness. |
| Jen: |
Why do you want to teach me? |
| Li: |
I’ve always wanted a disciple worthy of Wudan’s secrets. |
| Jen: |
And if I use them to kill you? |
| Li: |
That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Deep down, you’re good. Even Jade Fox couldn’t corrupt you. |
| |
(The figure’s eyes cloud with tears.)21 |
In turn, this rouses Shu Lien’s jealousy, and stirs her repressed feelings for Li Mu Bai:
| Li: |
But, this girl … I saw her last night. |
| Shu Lien: |
I knew she would intrigue you. |
| Li: |
She needs direction … and training. |
| Shu Lien: |
She’s an aristocrat’s daughter. She’s not one of us. In any case, it will all be over soon. You’ll kill Fox, and she’ll marry. |
| Li: |
That’s not for her. She should come to Wudan and become a disciple. |
| Shu Lien: |
But Wudan does not accept women. |
| Li: |
For her, they might make an exception. If not, I’m afraid she’ll become a poisoned dragon. |
| Shu Lien: |
It’s not our affair. Even if Wudan accepts her, her husband might object. |
| Li: |
I thought by giving away the sword, I could escape the [jianghu] world. But the cycle of bloodshed continues. |
| Shu Lien: |
I wish there were something more I could do to help you. |
| Li: |
Just be patient with me, Shu Lien.22 |
An important later scene displays the growing boldness between the two duty-bound friends:
| Shu Lien: |
Have some tea. |
|
(As Shu Lien passes the cup to Li, their fingers touch. Embarrassed, Li pulls back.) |
| Li: |
Shu Lien … The things we touch have no permanence. My master would say … there is nothing we can hold on to in this world. Only by letting go can we truly possess what is real. |
| Shu Lien: |
Not everything is an illusion. My hand … wasn’t that real? |
| Li: |
Your hand, rough and callused from machete practice … All this time, I’ve never had the courage to touch it. |
|
(Li takes Shu Lien’s hand and presses it to his face.) |
| Li: |
[Jianghu] is a world of tigers and dragons, full of corruption … I tried sincerely to give it up but I have brought us only trouble. |
| Shu Lien: |
To repress one’s feelings only makes them stronger. |
| Li: |
You’re right, but I don’t know what to do. I want to be with you … just like this. It gives me a sense of peace.23 |
The relationship between Jen and her governess is very complicated. The vengeful Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), posing as a governess, has secretly taught Jen martial arts since she was a child. Formerly, Jade Fox was a part of the jianghu clan, but the leader of the clan refused to teach her, preferring to use her as a sexual partner. In revenge, she killed him and stole a manual of martial arts. She needed the child Jen to read it to her because she was illiterate; thus Jen’s apprehension of the martial arts quickly grew beyond that of Jade Fox. In one of her most introspective moments in the film, Jen expresses her fear and ambivalence about the situation:
| Jen: |
Master … I started learning from you in secret when I was ten. You enchanted me with the world of [jianghu]. But once I realized I could surpass you, I became so frightened! Everything fell apart. I had no one to guide me, no one to learn from.24 |
Jade Fox views the jianghu world as liberating; she welcomes Jen to join her in living in this state of nonconformity and nonallegiance with the rest of society:
| Fox: |
Come with me. You don’t want to waste your life as the wife of some bureaucrat. Denied your talent. … As a master and disciple we will rule. |
| Jen: |
I’ll never live as a thief! |
| Fox: |
You’re already a thief. |
| Jen: |
[Stealing the sword] was just for fun. How can I leave? Where would I go? |
| Fox: |
Wherever we want. We’ll get rid of anyone in our way. Even your father. |
| Jen: |
Shut up! |
| Fox: |
It’s the [jianghu] fighter lifestyle … kill or be killed. Exciting, isn’t it? |
| Jen: |
I owe you nothing. |
| Fox: |
Yes, you do. You are still my disciple. |
| |
(Jen lunges at the governess, and the two exchange a few blows. Jen presses her finger against one of the Governess’s pressure points, disabling her. Jen pushes her across the room.)25 |
Jen’s bullheaded rejection of the jianghu chivalric code puts everyone in jeopardy, including herself. First, in stealing the Green Destiny sword, she ignores the code, but steals the sword “just for fun.” This frivolous act causes the untimely death of one of the night guards. More significantly, Jen’s rejection of Jade Fox subverts the jianghu code of loyalty to one’s teacher. By betraying her own master, Jen breaks the code, which leads to Jade Fox’s attempt to poison her. However, Jade Fox’s act of revenge is also tempered by her own personal sense of rejection by the “only family” she had ever known. This complicated psychological twist is expressed in Jade Fox’s final monologue as she dies:
| Fox: |
(To Li Mu Bai) You deserve to die, but the life I was hoping to take … was Jen’s. |
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(To Jen) Ten years I devoted to you. But you deceived me! You hid the manual’s true meaning. I never improved … but your progress was limitless! You know what poison is? An eight-year-old girl, full of deceit. That’s poison! Jen! My only family … my only enemy … 26 |
Finally, in the abandoned factory, when Jen asks the sexually transgressive question in which the forbidden wish is articulated, “Is it the sword you want, or me?” Li Mu Bai does not answer. He has become more expressive toward Shu Lien through his repressed passion for Jen. Jen, in the meantime, has grown more like a true Wudan disciple from her time spent with Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai; in the end she selflessly rushes to find an antidote for Li Mu Bai’s poison, and her final leap could also be interpreted as an attempt to resurrect him. As the director himself has pointed out, this film’s use of wuxia is not simply to provide gratuitous action sequences—the wuxia displays also serve a narrative function. Because the martial arts form externalizes the hidden passions and emotions, these scenes also help tell the story. The violence, restraint, and exhilaration in the fighting sequences are, in Ang Lee’s mind, equivalent to verbal altercations in domestic dramas. Thus, when Jen and Shu Lien clash in a fight, the fight’s root source is indicated by Shu Lien’s furious and possessive remark: “Don’t touch it. That’s Li Mu Bai’s sword.”27 This remark displays the hidden passion of Shu Lien in a subtext that is almost Freudian.
The Ending/Homage of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
The ambiguous ending of the film is a challenge to the viewer. There are two ways to view Jen’s death-defying leap from the mountain bridge and flight through the air, which goes into gorgeous slow motion as Jen flies downward. The first way to view it is of Jen’s wish coming true, that indeed she will fly and land safely because of her “leap of faith.” This is the ending steeped in magical realism—not too far-fetched, since Jen already displayed capabilities of flight at different points throughout the movie. Further developing this allegory, Fran Martin (2005) reads Jen’s flight as signifying the “rebel girl” of global pop-feminism, much in the same tradition as the final death-defying drive off the cliff at the conclusion of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991)—that film also “refuses visually to imply the deaths of its heroines, who seem to remain forever suspended in their ultimate trajectory.”28
A second way to view the ending is with the finality of tragedy. As in a Shakespearean tragedy when the principal characters’ corpses litter the stage at the drama’s denouement, the killing of Jade Fox and the sorrowful death of Li Mu Bai followed by Jen’s suicide leap take a heavy toll on the viewer, with this unexpected turn of gravity in the plot. This is one reason the film was so well-received worldwide; it was classical tragedy in the best sense, a genre that has become a rare treat for modern audiences. This is perhaps because heavy-handed tragedy of this type is overwhelming to modern sensibilities, just as the fate of Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus seems overwrought in Sophocles’ tragedy; Greek tragedies are often performed on the modern stage by adding some attractive, modernizing gimmick. As the example of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has shown, this type of drama was best attempted by an outsider presenting a foreign culture. The emotion-laden lines were spoken in Mandarin and read visually as subtitles—in this way the emotional power came to the English-speaker in a muted and lyrical form. This also explains why the film’s English-dubbed version was not popularly received.
“Green Destiny,” the name of the sword in the story, was a metaphor for the movie, and one from which Ang Lee took his inspiration. “It’s exquisite, sharp and flexible. It’s mysterious and overpowers you, and that became very fascinating to me, and I decided to make sight and sound out of it.”29 The magical 400-year-old weapon issues a startling metallic whoosh from the soundtrack whenever it appears, to demonstrate at the auditory level the sword’s tingling, magical energy. “I even take the color of green and make it a motif: jade, onyx, green bamboo. Mercury green, as they say in Chinese Taoist theory, is the most remote and mysterious place of the ultimate yin, where all existence comes from.”30 The Taoist element plays into Li Mu Bai’s final decision to remain a lonely ghost with the woman he has secretly loved: “So this male … makes [the decision] before he dies to be a wondrous ghost with the company of another lonely ghost who transcends through eternity. He finally makes a commitment. To me, that is what a romantic relationship is about, a man is ultimately trying to find someone, a yin is finding a yang.”31
Taking flight—Li Mu Bai and Jen fight over the Green Destiny sword in the unforgettable martial arts sequence at the top of the bamboo forest.
Many viewers are unaware of the homage to King Hu in the bamboo forest scene. In King Hu’s film the bamboo grove battle was played out at ground level, under the trees in dim light. Here the battle takes flight to the tips of the trees, as it does in the original source material. Ang Lee describes King Hu’s influence on him:
The first time I met [King] Hu was in 1984. That was a long time ago, when I graduated from film school and I wanted to go back to Taiwan to look for opportunities to make films. … I drove 17 hours up there [in New York] to see him. I really worshipped him, because he was the first Chinese director to be known internationally, because of the “swordsman” movies, a really special theme with unique visual effects. For this reason, I thought that maybe I could work for him, get to know him, hear him speak. People like me who grew up in Taiwan, receiving Chinese education, have lost touch with the mainland, because I was brought up as a Chinese, but I haven’t really been to mainland China. That’s why I sometimes feel strange about my Chinese identity. This identity was obtained from Mr. Hu’s movies and Li Hanxiang’s movies, from TV and textbooks. It was very abstract, not because of blood relationship or land but rather an ambiguous cultural concept. It was like a dream. You couldn’t make sense of everything, but it was a holistic Chinese influence and it is in my blood. I think his martial arts films are different from modern kung fu action pictures. It was swordsman, not action and fighting. In his time, his style was relevant to Chinese history. He used the world of the swordsman to present the abstract part of Chinese culture. He guides you into Chinese landscape paintings, a legendary atmosphere which was very special. His cinema skills were very modern. He used quick editing techniques to all action, all visual effect … very Chinese, yet very modern. He was an amazing and unique director.32
Kwai-Cheung Lo points out Ang Lee’s Chinese, yet modern, stylistic features, which the director seems to have taken from his source. Many Chinese film critics have also pointed out similarities with King Hu’s filmmaking, placing the film squarely within the tradition of King Hu’s intellectual and spiritual swordplay (wuxia) films—such as A Touch of Zen—with their deep philosophical seriousness. The presence of actress Cheng Pei Pei (as Jade Fox) also indicates this homage, because in the 1960s, Cheng was one of the biggest martial arts actresses and widely known to be King Hu’s favorite actress. David Bordwell calls Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon “a millennial synthesis of the great wuxia tradition.”33 Bordwell cites examples to demonstrate how Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon references, recapitulates, and pays homage to the greatest elements of Chinese swordplay films. He outlines some of these references:
The serene self-possession of Li Mu Bai is reminiscent of King Hu’s fighters. … Shu Lien’s rooftop pursuit of the mysterious thief echoes 1960s’ adventures, and her unfussy prowess puts her in the line of women warriors played by Wu Lizhen, Josephine Siao Fong-fong, and Cheng Pei Pei. Cheng herself is on hand as a witness to the golden age, playing Jade Fox, the vengeance-mad swords-woman. The young couple, Jen and Lo, recall the combative couples of Shaolin vs. Ninja [1983]; by the end, however, their love affair, told through sumptuous desert flashbacks, acquires a sweeping poetic anguish akin to that of Ashes of Time [1994]. Behind the scenes is choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, a living encyclopedia of Peking Opera, martial arts techniques, and cinematic fireworks. … Blending everything is Ang Lee, fully aware of the landmarks of the genre he’s working in, and like his predecessors he at once pays homage to them and reworks them to new effect.34
The cumulative effect of these references leads Bordwell to praise the film’s continuity with the great wuxia tradition while carrying it into the twenty-first century—Lee’s film sets the bar higher than ever.
Resuscitative Force in Cinema
When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was released in 2000, critics began to consider Ang Lee as a director with a very unique vision. Not only had he done a marvelous job re-creating an ancient and now nonexistent China—“the China that is fading away in our heads,” as Lee has called it—but he was bringing a breath of fresh air into a cynical, inbred, and inward-looking Hollywood.35 In recent years, Hollywood films, especially comedies, have sunk to a new level of tired self-referencing and referencing of other recent, unfunny comedies; at the same time, the topics of mainstream dramas and serious films are often formulaic and dictated by box office receipts. The answer, at least for the New Yorker’s film critic Anthony Lane, is the freshness brought in by foreign filmmakers like Ang Lee. Writing in 2000, Lane sees similarities between Lee and old Hollywood filmmaker Michael Curtiz, the maker of such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, to which Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon offers the best comparison) and Casablanca (1942). Born Mihály Kertész in Budapest, the director changed his name to conform to American standards, but retained the old-world sophistication of his directing vision. Lee can be compared to Curtiz in that they are both “civilized craftsmen with honor and humor.”36 Lane calls Ang Lee a “Curtiz for our times; the uncondescending outsider,” and claims that: “China and the Pacific Rim are delivering the liveliest and least cynical filmmaking in the world, and also the most uncowed.”37 This point is certainly true, as Lee bravely takes on not only homosexuality in his own culture in The Wedding Banquet, but then further dares to take on homosexuality in the United States with Brokeback Mountain, or sheds a glaring light on the Vietnam era in The Ice Storm, or presents the Confederate side in Ride with the Devil. Lane poses this question:
Is it too fanciful to suggest that the generation of [Ang] Lee, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, or perhaps the generation that follows them, might ride to the rescue—or, at any rate, resuscitation—of American movies with some of the panache that marked the great Mitteleuropa immigration of the 1930s and 1940s, itself an escape into the entertainment industry from a world of threat? Would Ernst Lubitsch, watching The Wedding Banquet, not have recognized the stirrings of a kindred spirit?38
These observations about the power of foreign and international influences to “resuscitate” American film are prescient and anticipate Ang Lee’s dominance of awards ceremonies in 2005 and 2006—the point that Ang Lee makes “uncowed” cinema seems to anticipate the daring social commentary in Brokeback Mountain—and again, in 2013, Lee’s second Academy Award for Best Director for the innovative use of 3D technology in the similarly “wondrous” and “magical” Life of Pi. With the making of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee not only dares to refashion a classic Chinese genre with his own expansive vision, he also successfully brings the wuxia world to global popularity to enliven international cinema.