MOVIE POSTERS AND MUSCLE POSES: GENERIC ETHNICITY AND POPULAR CULTURAL GENRES
To suggest that seeing Bruce Lee could perhaps have some relation to politics or to the political may seem preposterous. However, there are several ways to verify this claim. The most obvious is empirical: the sheer volume of the occurrence and even prominence of the figure of Bruce Lee in political or politicised discourses. Bruce Lee often features as a countercultural motif, in much the same way as (and sometimes even alongside) the likes of Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix. As testified by innumerable autobiographical accounts, filmic allusions and popular cultural juxtapositions and combinations, Lee functions in diverse popular narratives of struggle. And his appeal was not confined to particular ethnic or cultural groups. As Keiko Nitta observes, ‘if Lee’s ethnic representations have marked so strongly his impact, this is enabled by their equivocality that allows a translation of ethnicity to social alienation or a marginalized experience of struggle in general’ (2010: 380). She points out that ‘contemporary cinema has repeatedly reproduced Lee as the idol of not merely Asian men, supposedly confined in an emasculated stereotype, but also men socially vulnerable for disparate reasons’ (ibid.), and gives the example of the Bruce Lee poster which features in a famous early scene in Saturday Night Fever (1977), which
uses an impressive cross-cut of Lee’s naked torso in a poster on the wall and flesh of Tony Manero (John Travolta), an unskilled paint-shop clerk without any promised future. First imitating the poster at his bedside in a primary scene, Tony then dresses up flamboyantly in pink silk-satin, transforming himself to the weekend disco king. (Ibid.)
Twenty years later, Boogie Nights (1997) was still evoking the strength of this early popular cultural connection in its depiction of what Nitta calls the ‘popular cultural landscape of the 1970s’; the film utilises ‘Lee’s figure and kung fu moves to represent the ideal self-image of Eddie Adams [‘Dirk Diggler’] (Mark Wahlberg), an underachieving high-school student who has no particular redeeming features other than oversized genitalia’ (ibid.).
Perhaps the first cinematic instance of this connection is to be found in the use of a Bruce Lee poster in Horace Ové’s social realist classic about life in West London, Pressure (1975): we see a long shot of a Bruce Lee poster, which is the only apparent decoration in a room, before panning down to see the teenage hero sobbing on his bed after a nasty brush with the reality of racism – the inscrutable Lee staring out impassively like the protecting/judging super-ego.
In various ways, each of these examples can be said to provide grounds for Slavoj Žižek’s claim that the first kung fu craze of the early 1970s testified to ‘a genuine working-class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies’ (2004: 78–9). (We will look further into Žižek’s argument in due course.) Of course, the Bruce Lee poster features in very many teen identity conflict/struggle flicks, from No Retreat, No Surrender (1986) (which actually stars the resurrected ‘spirit’ of Lee as the teen hero’s teacher) to Forbidden Kingdom (2008). But, if the use of Bruce Lee posters in the opening scenes of films like these testify to the power of Bruce Lee as a generic muse, inspiration and pedagogue, it is the use of the poster in Pressure that precisely pinpoints the initial significance of Bruce Lee for a significant constituency of viewers: his ethnicity.
Bill Brown argues that what he calls Bruce Lee’s ‘generic ethnicity’ was evidently of immense importance to the first clearly defined Western viewing constituency of Eastern martial arts films: blacks and hispanics in American cities. Hollywood’s awareness of this constituency – this market – was signalled first by its tentative allocation of starring roles to both the Asian Bruce Lee and the black Jim Kelly in Enter the Dragon – a film which divided the starring role three ways, rather than entrusting it to Lee alone. Both Lee and Kelly ‘star’ alongside the white John Saxon. Lee is given no discernible personality (remaining, of course, ‘inscrutable’), while the black Kelly is characterised as appropriately politicised (on seeing the squalor of the harbour in Hong Kong he declares ‘ghettos are the same everywhere: they stink’). Kelly is also drawn along ethnic stereotypes, as someone who is ‘street’, hip, promiscuous and – predictably – destined to be killed off. Saxon, meanwhile, functions as an ersatz James Bond character, but one who has been reduced to a suave swagger, a gambling habit and a certain kind of formulaic attractiveness. Hollywood’s awareness of ‘the black connection’ was signalled secondly by the subsequent film, Black Belt Jones (1974), a film ‘in which black martial arts students battle white gangsters’ and which was the ‘first U.S.-lensed martial arts actioner’ (Brown 1997: 33).
In addition to class and ethnicity, an equation was quickly established between martial arts prowess and physical power and hence possible female empowerment (aka feminism) – as exemplified by numerous female martial arts stars in Hong Kong film, and then a legacy from Cynthia Rothrock to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and the Western reception of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the West. But whether approached in terms of class, age, ethnicity or gender, what is crystal clear is that Bruce Lee always functioned within what Meaghan Morris calls ‘a “popular” cultural genre’. She writes:
A ‘popular’ cultural genre is one in which people take up aesthetic materials from the media and elaborate them in other aspects of their lives, whether in dreams and fantasies, in ethical formulations of values and ideals, or in social and sometimes political activities. (2005: 1)
What, then, are some of the ‘sometimes political activities’ with which Bruce Lee might be linked?
BRUCE LEE AND THE BLACK CONNECTION
In a wide-ranging and detailed study organised by an argument about ‘the revolutionary significance of popular culture’ (Kato 2007: 8), M.T. Kato focuses on what is referred to as ‘the kung fu cultural revolution’. The key argument in Kato’s book, From Kung Fu to Hip Hop, is about ‘Bruce Lee’s kine-aesthetic of liberation and [its] reverberation with the decolonization struggles in Asia’ (2007: 6). Kato connects 1960s decolonisation struggles in Asia with the Western counterculture, which he construes as epitomised by Jimi Hendrix, driven by the cultural responses to the American war in Vietnam, and traces all the way to the American hip hop culture of the 1990s. Kato characterises all of this as ‘revolutionary’ – a claim which demands some clarification.
Popular culture is revolutionary, Kato claims, despite the fact that the ‘circulation of the popular cultural revolution, such as … kung fu films and hip hop culture … takes place primarily in the global commodity market as a deviant by-product of the mass consumer culture’; furthermore ‘popular cultural revolution arises from the historical context in which the commodity culture constitutes the infrastructure of communication among the masses’ (2007: 2). He continues:
Accordingly, the mass’s appropriation of the progressive aesthetics of popular cultural revolution can render the commodity to ‘speak’ for itself against the grain of its commodity identity, similar to how Luce Irigaray demonstrates that women’s autonomy undermines its imposed identity as a commodity: ‘For such actions turn out to be totally subversive to the economy of exchange among subjects’. (2007: 3)
Kato turns to Jameson to note the problem of the ‘penetration and colonization’ of ‘the unconscious’ that occurs with the ‘rise of media and the advertisement’ (ibid.), and then turns to the work of Guattari to support his claim that ‘affects’ can nevertheless arise at certain times and in certain places which supplement bare commodity relations, and engender a subversive form of affective communication or communion (2007: 5).Thus, the ‘colonization of the unconscious’ is drawn as a cultural-political problem connected to ‘the cinematic mode of colonization’ (2007: 8). In Kato’s text, this is illustrated by the example of African-born viewers and spectators who would not only cheer for (the white) Tarzan but who, ‘whenever Africans sneaked up behind him … would scream … trying to warn him that “they” were coming’ (Haile Gerima, quoted in ibid.). In response to this, Kato suggests that, given the problem of ‘the colonization and decolonization of the “mental universe” [associated with] cinematic colonization, the decolonization in the cinematic mode necessitates reconstruction of a vernacular imagery, narrative, and mode of reception, which can transcend the colonial imagery imposed upon the colonized’ (ibid.). Kato finds precisely such a decolonising vernacular in the work of Bruce Lee.
Similarly, Vijay Prashad writes: ‘There was something extraordinary about Bruce Lee’ (2001: 126). This related to his screen presence, of course, but also to the fact that Bruce Lee was clearly a trailblazer. In Prashad’s words, ‘The anti-racism of Bruce was not matched by the world in which he lived’ (2001:127). Indeed, Prashad refers us to the fact that Lee lived in an era in which Asians, whilst gradually gaining some legal, social and civil advances within US society, were highly marginalised and ongoing victims of historical prejudices and stereotypes. It is in this context that Bruce Lee emerges – a context in which ingrained ‘cultural stereotypes enabled the mockery of a people by suggesting that they could never be part of the republic, since they had too much alien culture’ (ibid.):
This was to change somewhat in the 1960s, as social movements against racism and state management of these movements helped produce what we know today as multiculturalism. US television, with The Green Hornet, 1966–67, embraced Bruce Lee to play the Asian, just as the state acknowledged the role of Asians in the creation of a cold war United States. The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act signaled a shift in US racism from outright contempt for Asians, as evinced in the 1924 Immigration Act, to one of bemused admiration for their technical and professional capacity. In the throes of the cold war, and burdened by the lack of scientific personnel, the US state and privileged social forces concertedly worked to welcome a new crop of Asians whose technical labor was to be their crucial passport to this New World. That is not to say that Asians found life easy… (2001: 127–8)
Prashad is keen to number Bruce Lee as part of what in Raymond Williams’ (1977) terms one could call an emergent and progressive political formation (for which ‘multiculturalism’ is only one possible name: multiculturalism refers us to only one sociological dimension of a far wider array of overlapping emancipatory and egalitarian struggles). This is why the final words of Prashad’s book are: ‘To remember Bruce as I do, staring at a poster of him ca. 1974, is not to wane into nostalgia for the past. My Bruce is alive, and like the men and women before him, still in the fight’ (2001: 149). This ‘fight’ – if it is indeed one fight – is represented as a very widely proliferating series of skirmishes, and as taking many forms across the globe. Prashad himself focuses on the significance of ‘Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity’ in the fight against racism and the movement towards an egalitarian multiculturalism. In such accounts, then, Bruce Lee is shown to be part of a counter-hegemonic movement, versus hegemony.
However, as is the case with other similar accounts, a certain question also emerges and remains unanswered. This is the question of articulation. Specifically: precisely how is Lee articulated with this (or that) emerging discourse? As we have already seen, Bruce Lee could quite easily be lined up alongside all sorts of things and said to be ‘like’ this or that, ‘part of’ this or that, or an ‘example’ of this or that. But which claimed articulation or linkage is valid and which is not? Which interpretation has the greatest claim to veracity, and on what grounds? This boils down to the question of articulation.
By ‘articulation’ I mean specifically the following. A thing may be said to be articulated to, with or by another thing in a number of different ways. It may be linked to it (as in the case of an articulating joint, hinge or chain). It may be something spoken by another thing or expressed through another thing (as when a sentiment is articulated by someone). It may be a situation or relation in which one thing determines the character, behaviour, status, meaning or form of another thing. Or, vice versa, one thing may be determined by another. One thing in the relation may have produced the other thing or been produced by it. Or it may be said to be ‘affiliated’ with another thing, ‘expressing’ or ‘an expression of’ another thing, and so on.
Some relations are literal, mechanical or unequivocal. However, there is a sense in which in the realm of culture – in which relationships are neither straightforward nor predictable nor perhaps even knowable – they all have a figural element to them. And this is where difficulties enter. For being affiliated with, expressing or being an expression of, and so on, all beg the question of the precise nature, ‘mechanism’ or ‘logic’ of the relation. What is the nature of the articulation? What do figurative expressions like affiliated, expressing, attuned with and so on, mean? Is the ‘expression’ active or passive, productive or produced, determined or determining? In any case, how and why? In other words: Where does the agency lie? Where does the articulating action take place? This question is often elided, in many different kinds of (cultural) study – and certainly not just in accounts of Bruce Lee which attempt to deal with ‘Bruce Lee and…’ or ‘Bruce Lee as…’. Rather than offering an analytical account of the relation of articulation that specifies where agency lies, such accounts offer descriptive or synthetic accounts that claim associations without fully specifying the nature of the association.
The work of Kato is an exemplary case in point. Throughout From Kung Fu to Hip Hop he asserts and reasserts a ‘connection’ between Bruce Lee and lots of other things. But the nature of these connections more often than not boils down to rhetorical sleights of hand on the part of the author, rather than being straightforwardly demonstrable. Kato repeatedly equates things that are ‘like’ each other, or translates distinct realms, practices or phenomena ‘into’ each other by way of a third term – very often the idea of ‘the beat’ or ‘the groove’ – the jeet kune do ‘beat’ and the hip hop ‘beat’, and so on.
It is possible to open the book at virtually any page in order to see various unanalysed rhetorical devices structuring the work. For instance, Kato writes:
In both Jeet Kune Do and hip hop culture, creativity arises from the autonomy of self-expression. Accordingly, the quality of a work of art is gauged by the uniqueness of individual expressions that transcend the institutional boundaries. Hip hop comes from funk, rock and r&b, or reggae, but it’s free from any genre boundaries. So is Jeet Kune Do: it incorporates different styles into an open-ended system that is not institutionalized by any styles. However, both hip hop and Jeet Kune Do are not a postmodern bricolage of cultural multiplicity with weak or no foundation. The flourishing individual expressions in hip hop and Jeet Kune Do are well embedded in the cultural foundations and historical legacies: the African culture for hip hop and the Chinese culture for Jeet Kune Do. (2007: 177)
The range and interplay of internal contradictions and essentialisms within this paragraph is noteworthy (although, in the context of the book as a whole, this paragraph is not unique). Hip hop is essentially African, we are told, while jeet kune do is essentially Chinese. One may pause for thought about this. Both value the individual’s creativity when faced with a range of material from a multiplicity of styles and practices, and this creativity means that neither are institutionalised nor limited by styles. And yet, this creativity is not ‘postmodern’ – because it is anchored in essential traditions, African for the hip hop individuals, Chinese for jeet kune do individuals. Yet these two cultures, ‘both Jeet Kune Do and hip hop culture’, can be singled out and compared or drawn into supposed equivalence or identity because within them both ‘creativity arises from the autonomy of self-expression’. Implicitly, that is, these ‘two’ are ‘the same’ in a way that is different from any other possible thing that either might be put into a comparison with. But is this necessarily so? Is it not possible to compare either of these two not with each other but with, say, artistic practice, business practice, school work, and find that ‘creativity’ arises in much the same way? The rhetorical trick here involves proposing a state of exceptionality for these two valued ‘cultures’, drawing them into equivalence and then conflating that equivalence into a state of effective identity.
Kato immediately proceeds to quote a passage by Jeff Yang which performs much the same operation:
In inventing Jeet Kune Do, [Lee] took the lean and lethal kung fu style known as Wing Chun and stripped it down to the primal beats. … Because the art of Jeet Kune Do was motivated by practicality, it evolved like hip hop: It began in the old school – spare, freestyle, with nothing separating the master from the rhythm. And then, only after locking down the basics, did Lee start sampling the best of what other disciplines had to offer, biting on world flavours like Muay Thai, Jiu Jitsu, and Tae Kwon Do. Even toward the end of his days, Lee was still remixing. (Quoted in Kato 2007: 177–8)
Although more apparent in Yang’s passage here, the constructive/inventive processes are effectively the same as those used by Kato: the valued terms are represented through attractive images and analogies and presented as unique.
But let me be clear. To say that the connections between a and b are neither clear nor certain is not to say that there is not a link between, say, Bruce Lee and international anti-racist movements (Prashad) or even between Bruce Lee and ‘popular cultural revolution’ (Kato), or indeed between Bruce Lee and anything else at all, for that matter. It is simply to ask for further specification of the relation. What we mostly see in this regard is exemplified in the passage from Prashad given in the quotation above. In it, Bruce Lee is lined up with other historically, geographically, temporally or otherwise potentially ‘associated’ material, and a relation is assumed, implied or fabricated, but without being fully clarified. If we reread the following sentence from Prashad, for instance, we can see this occurring. He writes: ‘US television, with The Green Hornet, 1966–67, embraced Bruce Lee to play the Asian, just as the state acknowledged the role of Asians in the creation of a cold war United States’. Here, a connection is made between the televisual emergence of Lee and certain legislative changes. But is there a connection? If so, what is it, where is it, who is it a connection ‘for’, how does it ‘work’, where and why did or does it happen?
Kato is most helpful with the suggestion that the connection between Bruce Lee and ‘popular cultural revolution’ is ‘expressed in two narrative modes: symbolic articulation and kinetic articulation’ (2007: 41). By this, Kato refers to the way in which the narrative and choreographic styles, techniques and formulas employed by Bruce Lee’s films tapped into ongoing struggles in ways that appealed to certain constituencies at a particular historical political moment – a moment Kato characterises as dominated by ‘decolonization struggles’. Thus, for Kato, in Lee, it’s not just that the underdog wins, but it is the way the underdog wins, and who he beats. This suggests that the ‘reality’ of Lee’s relation to wider struggles is a visibility produced by the combination of two factors: first, the encoding of historical and ongoing cultural struggles, dramas and conflicts within the semiotic structure of the text, combined with a context of reception in which the interpretive tendencies of the audience are more or less attuned or inclined towards seeing such connections. This is why, although many texts employ the same sorts of familiar devices as those that are found in Bruce Lee films – devices which are little more than dramatic and semiotic clichés – in certain times and places, these can become politically affective. Or, as Kato puts it, ‘only through rigorous historical and social contextualization can this symbolic narrative become legible, thereby unfolding the means by which it liberated the unconscious of the Asian people faced with the image of colonization by the neo-imperialist cultural industry’ (2007: 40). As such, for both Kato and Prashad, the decisive factor about Lee that ‘connects’ him with other contexts and scenes relates to the convergence of his films’ dramatisation in condensed form of ongoing tensions, resentments and ethnically inflected power imbalances. Bruce Lee films offer the possibility of politicising consciousness – of producing a visibility.
‘Visibility’ is considered by Rey Chow to involve more than mere literal vision (as in the sense of ‘There it is: I can see it!’) and also more than metaphorical seeing (as in the sense of ‘Aha! I see! I understand!’). Rather, Chow directs us to the sense of ‘visibility as the structuration of knowability’ (2007:11). In this, Chow takes her inspiration broadly from Foucault and occasionally from Gilles Deleuze (especially in Deleuze’s explicitly Foucauldian moments).1 Similarly, one might equally evoke Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘partition of the perceptible’. But the point is that, as Chow puts it, ‘becoming visible is no longer simply a matter of becoming visible in the visual sense (as an image or object)’; rather, there is also a sense in which visibility should refer not only to visible images and objects but also to ‘the condition of possibility for what becomes visible’ – whatever objects and images are visible, and the way in which they are visible, depends on what she calls ‘this other, epistemic sense of visibility’ (ibid.).
Visibility and making-visible, then, are more complex processes than simply empirical orientations could countenance (or indeed ‘see’). The theoretical and conceptual issues attending to visibility involve something other than empirical considerations, such as those relating to the selection and make-up of who or what is represented where and when and how. According to Chow, in fact, there is a ‘political’ dimension to visibility and visuality which relates to ‘the condition of possibility for what becomes visible’ and involves matters to do with the ‘discursive politics of (re)configuring the relation between center and margins’ (ibid.). That is, visibility depends first on the establishment of a shared field of intelligibility as the condition of possibility for understanding (‘seeing’) and being understood (or ‘seen’).2 The condition of possibility for any ‘shared meaning’ and hence ‘intelligibility’ or ‘visibility’ per se is always already a complex ‘achievement’, ‘construction’, ‘outcome’ or ‘stabilisation’.
The question is what kind of visibility was Bruce Lee involved in the production or construction of. The relation between kung fu in America, America in Vietnam and Vietnam ‘in America’ has become a subject much remarked. However, Brown points out, such a connection was rarely perceived or proposed at the time, not least because it is ‘a connection that necessarily blurs the geographic history and the heterogeneity of the martial arts’. Nevertheless, notes Brown,
The connection between a post-Vietnam moment and the moment of the kung fu ‘craze’ … surfaced rarely in 1973, but tellingly. David Freeman explained the craze bluntly: ‘They beat us over there [and] we demand to know why. Our POWs are home and now America needs to know [the] enemy’s secret weapon’. While kung fu per se was certainly no secret weapon during the war, Lee’s guerrilla tactics [particularly in Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon] replicate what was taken to be the strategy by which US forces were defeated – which might be best understood not as knowledge about why ‘we’ lost, but as knowledge about how ‘they’ won. The conservative commentary on the martial arts, long after 1973, still considered their popularity an expression of global conflict. One satirical reporter claimed of the All-American Open Karate Competition that ‘half the contestants and more than half the audience are black or hispanic: karate is Third World anger release. Anyone can guess the unspoken implication: that those little, wiry yellow folk are superior’. It would be wrong to perceive in this anything less than anxieties about a new yellow peril, exacerbated by the image of an interethnic bond. (1997: 36)
Much has been written about the ‘interethnic bond’ indexed by the appeal of Asian martial arts to black Americans. Some have connected it to a ‘countercultural investment in Taoism and Buddhism’ (1997: 32); others to slick and targeted trailers for the films themselves; whilst ‘Raymond Chow himself pointed to Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, and the subsequent US interest in Chinese culture’ (ibid.). But for Brown, ‘it is less the ethnic specificity of Bruce Lee than what we might call his generic ethnicity that seems to have inspired the enthusiasm of the US black inner-city audience’ (ibid.). This ‘generic ethnicity’, he proposes, was accompanied by ‘an implicit invitation to translate the ethnonationalist conflicts staged within the kung fu film into the conflict of class’ (ibid.).
Many Hong Kong kung fu films, including Lee’s, are strongly organised by class antagonisms. Indeed, says Brown, ‘if we’re to believe the accounts of this international mass spectatorship, we might imagine a (failed) moment of international class longing’ (ibid.). In any eventuality, if there was a lag in scholarly knowledge about martial arts culture and its connections with ethnic groups globally (‘commentators groped for a rationale to explain the particular attraction of kung fu for black audiences’, writes Brown (ibid.)), market mechanisms in the form of marketing strategies were quick to respond: ‘the industry’s report on the primary audience for the twenty-one kung fu films that appeared in the United States in 1973 made it clear to producers that a new market had emerged’; as such, continues Brown, ‘not unpredictably, Black Belt Jones, in which black martial arts students battle white gangsters, became the “first U.S.-lensed martial arts actioner”’ (ibid.). Thus, notes Brown, ‘While “invisibility” had come to be understood, by some, as the provocation of the city riots of the 1960s, in the early 1970s the black population had become visible to the film industry as a potent consumer constituency’ (ibid.). The interethnic bond, then, could be said to be structured by the visual contours of a common process of ethnicisation shared by black and Asian subjects and organised by cinematic texts with Bruce Lee, who instantly ‘became synonymous with kung fu’ (1997: 31), at the forefront.
We see here the workings of a complex relation between visibility and invisibility around martial arts and cultural politics. Invisibility, exclusion, subordination and marginalisation in social, cultural and political realms and registers help add an affective interpretive charge to moments of visibility. Even texts that are, semiotically-speaking, simplistic, clichéd or hackneyed may then be said to become variously ‘related’ to wider social issues. A claim such as this implies that articulation involves processes of displacement and directness, fantasy and social engagement, escapism and expression. As Brown puts it, ‘The slippage between race, nationality, and class – not in oppositional thought but in urban culture – is precisely what seems to underlie the attraction to kung fu in 1973’ (1997: 36).
Yet there is a double movement involved here, which suggests that we should hesitate before rushing to the conclusion that the interethnic bond activated in the process of cinematic identification is simple or simply emancipatory in any way. For, first of all, it is not simply ‘hispanics’, ‘blacks’ and ‘Asians’ who are somehow ‘united’ or ‘hybridised’. Rather, any ‘postnational political affiliation’ that may emerge is clearly predicated on ‘the affiliation between Hong Kong and Hollywood’. This affiliation is easy to specify. Its nature is financial. It ‘worked’ to the extent that it was, in Brown’s words, ‘affectively subsidized by the longing of the urban masses’ (1997: 36–7). So, as Brown emphasises, we also need ‘to understand the attraction to kung fu films as taking the place of, as displacing, any sustained attraction to the radical postnationalizing imagination’ (1997: 36). Indeed, he notes: ‘As one French commentator dismissively put it, the films offer a “dream where politics are resolved by a boxing match”’ (ibid.). So, the potentially problematic or complicating dimension to martial arts films is that the ‘kung fu craze thus seems explicable within the cultural logic of urban history as explained by David Harvey, intensifying his sense of 1973 as the pivotal year in the transition to what he calls postmodernity’ (ibid.). In a sense, then, what this means is that the ‘urban spectacle of mass opposition that violently disorganized the space of American cities in the 1960s was finally transformed into the organized spectacle of consumption. In this, the ‘countercultural scene resurfaces as the commodification of subculture’ (ibid.). And it is within such a movement that, with their films that include ‘the local display of local ethnicity and multiethnic harmony, Golden Harvest, the Shaw Brothers, and Cathay Studios displayed interethnic and interclass violence that marked and managed the otherwise suppressed conflicts of the inner city’ (1997: 37).
Thus, the move to the multicultural moment also involves a distinct displacement away from politics as such. Indeed, Brown’s entire essay is an analysis of ‘how the political resistance of the 1960s transforms into the consumer pleasure of the 1970s and 1980s and, further, how collective radicality becomes transcoded into a privatizing politics of consumption’ (1997: 25–6). However, unlike cultural critics who bemoan this familiar movement of cultural appropriation and domestication, what Brown seeks to emphasise is the way that ‘the conditions of postnational possibility – the structural costs of what we might call outward mobility – are inscribed within the everyday’ (1997: 26; emphasis in original). Indeed, Brown concludes, it might be said to be the case that, at least sometimes, ‘postnationality finally exists neither as the work of “internationalists,” nor as the local instantiation of an interethnic and international bond, but as a physical feat consumed as an image in the register of mass culture’ (1997: 42). As a visual ‘physical feat’ par excellence, Bruce Lee – even though always-already commodified – can similarly be seen to constitute a pole of identification enabling the possibility of consciousness:
If the reception of Lee’s films seems to displace an overtly political and explicitly postnational affiliation with interethnic identification, then Johnson’s story [a story introduced and discussed below], while metonymically recording that reception, exhibits a double displacement: violence has been evacuated from the martial arts aesthetic, and, characteristic of the growing appreciation of kung fu in the 1980s, a class-coded mode of revenge (harking back to the Boxer Rebellion) has been transcoded into a search for self. By 1980, one could learn in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly that the ‘real value lies in what the martial arts tell us about ourselves: that we can be much more than we are now’. Existentialist struggle replaces both class and ethnic conflict in a classic case of the embourgeoisement of mass-cultural and cross-cultural novelty. (1997: 37)
In other words, in a positive register, we can say that hindsight and familiarity allow us to construe Bruce Lee’s anti-institutional interdisciplinary humanist countercultural vitalism as something relatively typical of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These were the wonder years of political imaginaries: Paris 1968, civil rights, the counterculture, Mao, Marx, anti-psychiatry, feminism and so on. Bruce Lee cobbled together and baptised his postmodern anti-institutional inter- and antidisciplinary martial art ‘Jeet Kune Do’ in (of all places) California in (of all years) 1968 (Inosanto 1980: 66). But, in a less positive register, we can also say that perhaps hindsight obliges us to regard this change as historically or ideologically overdetermined, rather than straightforwardly emancipatory. Such would be the position of a Régis Debray or a Slavoj Žižek: it’s the economy, dummy. It’s the commodifying logic of late capitalism. As is widely known, for Žižek, the key consequence of the student protests of 1968 was that, ‘in Hegel’s terms, the “truth” of the student’s transgressive revolt against the Establishment is the emergence of a new establishment in which transgression is part of the game’ (2001a: 24). All concomitant revolt against institutions, status quos and indeed even cultures and societies (for being constraining, stultifying structures) is merely the demand of a zeitgeist, which itself is produced during a time of capitalism’s upheaval or readjustment to its ‘late’, postmodern stage.
BRUCE LEE AND THE NEW AGE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM
It is pertinent to note here that Žižek also often asserts his conviction that ersatz forms of Buddhism and Taoism – what he calls Western Buddhism and Western Taoism – came to arise as the ‘spontaneous ideology’ of contemporary global capitalism. This, he claims, is because Taoist and Buddhist tropes, terms, platitudes and mantras seem to answer the questions and to calm the anxieties that arise in states of confusion, chaos, indeterminacy, deregulation and flows (ie in free-market capitalism), much better than more hard-line alternatives, such as the regressive retreat into nationalisms or fundamentalisms. In making this argument, Žižek follows Max Weber, explicitly supplemented by ideas from Althusser and Lacan, by claiming that just as Protestantism and beer were a large part of the hegemonic ideology of industrial-stage capitalism, so Westernised Taoism, as crystallised in fashionable practices like meditation and feng shui, are the superlative ideology of postmodern consumer capitalism. Indeed, as he sees it,
The ultimate postmodern irony is … the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when, at the level of the ‘economic infrastructure,’ ‘European’ technology and capitalism are triumphing world-wide, at the level of ‘ideological superstructure,’ the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened in the European space itself by the onslaught of the New Age Asiatic’ thought, which, in its different guises, from the ‘Western Buddhism’ (today’s counterpart to Western Marxism, as opposed to the ‘Asiatic’ Marxism-Leninism) to different ‘Taos’, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. Therein resides the highest speculative identity of the opposites of today’s global civilization: although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. (2001a: 12)
If this is so, then it seems reasonable to propose that Bruce Lee must obviously be a part of any such strange exchange between Europe and Asia. Indeed, all the narratives about Bruce Lee’s life offer versions of this strange exchange: Westernled ‘success’; ‘victory’ of ‘Eastern’ ideas. And although Žižek does not assess Bruce Lee in terms of this argument, he has passed comment on the changing status of Bruce Lee’s popularity, as we have already seen: the context of Žižek’s comments on the popularity of Bruce Lee is his afterword to Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics. Žižek’s title is ‘The Lesson of Rancière’, a title based on a strong allusion to Rancière’s own text The Lesson of Althusser (1974). It is in this context that Žižek mentions Bruce Lee to exemplify his argument about ‘new age’ ideology:
When, three decades ago, Kung Fu films were popular (Bruce Lee, etc.), was it not obvious that we were dealing with a genuine working-class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies? Spontaneity and the ‘let it go’ attitude of indulging in excessive freedoms belong to those who have the means to afford it – those who have nothing have only their discipline. The ‘bad’ bodily discipline, if there is one, is not collective training, but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realization of the Self’s inner potentials – no wonder that the obsession with one’s body is an almost obligatory part of the passage of ex-Leftist radicals into the ‘maturity’ of pragmatic politics: from Jane Fonda to Joschka Fischer, the ‘period of latency’ between the two phases was marked by the focus on one’s own body. (2004: 78–9)
Although there is a lot going on in this argument, the essential point is that, to Žižek’s mind, the initial Western interest in Bruce Lee during the kung fu craze in the early 1970s was a ‘genuine working-class ideology’. By the 1990s, this interest had morphed into its monstrous double, becoming a ‘perfect ideological supplement’, an exemplary part of ‘the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism’. In other words, in Žižek’s schema, Bruce Lee iconography once worked aesthetico-politically as a kind of subjectivating fantasy for the working classes, for ‘youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies’. But now, at least to the extent that interest in martial arts has become bound up with the wider ideological tendency to focus on ‘the realization of the Self’s inner potentials’, Bruce Lee and martial arts become disarticulated from ‘class’ and therefore (in Žižek’s model) from ‘resistance’ (2004: 79).3
As this argument about Bruce Lee and ‘class’ is made in the afterword to The Politics of Aesthetics, it seems pertinent to consider Žižek’s reading of Rancière. Readers of Rancière will note that Žižek’s move into a discussion of ‘class’ is in a strong sense a contortion of Rancière’s own thinking of politics as arising from a miscount – as it were, for Rancière, politics is not simply about class, but rather the inevitability of misclassification – the impossibility of a smooth, geometrically ordered society into stable classes. But Žižek’s reading of the potential politics of kung fu aesthetics (as exemplified by, as he says, ‘Bruce Lee, etc’) is this: the image was good, he suggests, the image was generative. But then it became warped or perverted – ideologically ‘appropriated’, ‘colonized’ or ‘hegemonized’. In fact, Žižek’s position appears to boil down to something strongly akin to a witty observation once made by the comedian Frank Skinner (2002): the difference between working-class men and middle-class ‘new men’ is that although both may be equally interested in fighting, ‘new men’ go to kickboxing or Brazilian jujitsu classes three times a week to improve themselves and to keep fit, while working-class men simply really fight – in pubs and on the street. In other words, for Žižek, if the emergence of the image was a pole of subjectivating identification, the future of the image is ideological phantasy. So, like many thinkers, Žižek’s point is that images, moments, events, become (to use an overburdened and deeply problematic word) ‘co-opted’ – ideologically recuperated: domesticated, channelled, moved into a place.
Taken on the strength of his reading of Bruce Lee alone, then (or rather, Lee-inspired martial artists), Žižek’s reading of The Politics of Aesthetics (and his assessment of Bruce Lee’s intervention) appears rather awkward and limited. Nevertheless, his proposition that something about Bruce Lee’s image has (or had) ‘aesthetico-political’ potential remains tantalising. This is especially so given the double or chiasmatic status that such a figure as Bruce Lee must ineluctably have within Žižek’s idiosyncratic ideological cosmology. For if – as Žižek repeatedly claims – the hegemonic ideology of contemporary capitalism can be seen in ‘the strange exchange between Europe and Asia’ (with ‘Western Buddhism’ and ‘Taoism’ becoming the hegemonic ideology of contemporary capitalism) then therefore we must surely accord a central status to the exchanges facilitated by precisely such figures as the star of ‘the first American produced martial arts spectacular’.
How are we to assess the strange exchanges taking place in, around and through a transnational text like Enter the Dragon? Whilst analyses like those of Prashad and Kato are compelling and detailed, their outright blindness to the possibility of a critique of the order of Žižek’s basic Marxist proposition suggests that they are organised in such a way that they stop before fully considering or focusing on the complexity of the emancipatory claims they value. That is, they do not fully interrogate their own values and investments. This is not to say that Žižek fully interrogates his, of course. Far from it, perhaps. It is just that, in these and many other works, Bruce Lee is largely constructed as an unequivocally progressive and positive object. Yet, as Bill Brown sagely points out:
One of Stuart Hall’s reiterated points that ‘this year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion’, that ‘today’s cultural breaks can be recuperated as a support to tomorrow’s dominant system of values and meanings’ – is a point easily illustrated by the history of kung fu’s success. Chuck Norris, who had demonstrated martial arts at several US military bases in the early 1960s and co-starred (as the loser) with Lee in 1973, soon managed to whiten martial-art masculinity on film. The further commercialization and institutionalization of kung fu marked by the proliferation of kwoons and regional kung fu federations depended on attracting a more heterogeneous consumer group. To take a well-known case in point: on the one hand, Jamaican-born Carl Douglas, culturally cross-dressing as the martial artist to promote his hit ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ (1974), sustained the sign of interethnic, countercultural challenge; on the other, the song mainstreamed and streamlined the aggression by reducing it to the rhythm of disco. The ‘discotized tribute to the legacy of Bruce Lee’, as the music industry called it, might be understood as working to discipline the notoriously raucous audience reaction to the films by syncopating the physical response to Lee’s violence, just as it worked to homogenize martial art choreography into the mainstream codes of dance. (1997: 37)
Following trends and transformations equivalent to these in other aspects of the political dimensions of popular culture, perspectives offered by many thinkers (including Régis Debray, Slavoj Žižek (2001a), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), or Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (2005)) often take us to this sort of point – namely, the point at which potentially revolutionary impulses are shown to have been ‘co-opted’, appropriated, expropriated, (re)colonised or hegemonised by ‘the mainstream’, or indeed by the capitalist logic of commodification. Such approaches often slide from this observation into sad conclusions about the failure of popular culture to achieve anything like a progressive political agency. In fact, it is also the case that part of Brown’s own study of the martial arts phenomenon is to ‘make legible the way US kung fu culture itself effectively expropriated and existentialized mass-cultural, inner-city history from the early 1970s, a history in which the radical politics of the 1960s seemed to resurface as “radical consumption”’ (1997: 38). However, unlike the types of critique offered by cultural commentators such as Žižek or Heath and Potter, which are little more than the claim that ‘the counterculture became the consumer culture’, Bill Brown’s reading of martial arts culture does not proceed according to an all-or-nothing mode, and so does not settle on such a dramatic, fatalistic (or anti-popular-cultural) point. Rather, Brown asks: ‘How does the transnational flow of goods and services extend the consuming subject’s affiliative horizon, and how does it thus revise (or leave unrevised) existing accounts of ethnic, national, and mass subjectivity?’ (1997: 24; emphasis in original)
Brown poses this question in terms of a reading of a short story by Charles Johnson, entitled ‘China’ (1983), which centres on the life of Rudolph and his wife Evelyn:
Rudolph Jackson is a 54-year-old national employee, a post office worker with high blood pressure, emphysema, flat feet, skinny legs, a big belly, and a ‘pecker’ that shrinks ‘to no bigger than a pencil eraser each time’ he sees his wife undress. […] Out with his wife one Saturday night to see a ‘peaceful movie’, his ‘eyelids droop’ during the feature, but he is enthralled by a trailer for a kung fu film, which Evelyn thinks of as ‘a poor excuse for Chinese actors or Japanese (she couldn’t tell those people apart) to flail the air with their hands and feet, take on fifty costumed extras at once, and leap twenty feet through the air in perfect defiance of gravity’. […] Rudolph, rather than joining her the next day at the revival meeting at their Baptist church, returns alone to watch the movie at the Commodore Theater. Even more enthralled by the ‘beauty’ of the martial art, he joins a kwoon, sends for eight hundred dollars’ worth of equipment, starts to meditate, begins an extraordinary physical regime that prompts his complete physical and psychic rejuvenation, and finally performs his success, after eight months, by competing in a kung fu tournament held in Seattle’s Kingdome. (1997: 24–5)
This familiar narrative again describes a process initiated by a cinematic experience. The process itself (its formations and its results) exceeds the bounds of cinema, of course. The ‘contour of this plot is not unfamiliar’, says Brown, because ‘it corresponds to what Susan Jeffords has taught us to call “the remasculinization of America”’ (1997: 25). Yet Brown reminds us: the putative ‘process of remasculinization ought to be understood … as the permanent state of American manhood’ insofar as it is ‘the projected crisis’ itself ‘which (from James Fenimore Cooper to Robert Bly) helps to sustain the power of American men, who – appearing perpetually oppressed by the family, the economy, the state – appropriate the rhetoric of oppression to justify their self-assertion’ (ibid.; emphasis in original).
What is specific to this example, though, is that Rudolph’s ‘access point to masculinity is … Hong Kong’s film industry’ (ibid.) – and pointedly not the American military. For, having been prevented from entering the military for medical reasons, Rudolph nevertheless expresses his newfound passion for kung fu in terms ‘echoing the U.S. Army’s famous slogan of the early 1980s: “Be All You Can Be”’. As Brown notes: ‘Exasperated by his wife’s failure to understand his new preoccupation, Rudolph patiently explains that he doesn’t “want to be Chinese”: “‘I only want to be what I can be’” (1997: 24). Given that the military slogan that Rudolph is echoing here was designed as an interpellative device of the state (‘a slogan meant to recode the post-Vietnam military as the site of postpatriotic self-realization’ (ibid.)) but is reiterated by Rudolph and put to quite different ends, Brown approaches the story in ‘China’ as a work which engages with the question of the interaction of ‘commodity culture, mass masculinity, and spectatorship’ in terms of ‘three different, and differently narrated histories – of “world literature”, of the global reception of kung fu films, and of the war in Vietnam’ (1997: 25).
So, on the one hand, if what Rudolph sought was remasculinisation, a sensuous experience of self-worth and potency, then the manner in which this became possible – and indeed, what Rudolph’s ‘decision’ testifies to – is the subjective power of the workings of a complex discursive moment or movement. This can be most obviously seen in the fact that his ‘new body is predicated on a globalizing media-distribution network’ (1997: 24). The effects of this network condense in the encounter with the cinematic text of those whose experiences and existential struggles involve problems of ethnic and class prejudice and exclusion. They enable new forms of identification and practice to emerge. Accordingly, even if Žižek and other all-or-nothing thinkers are right to lament the fact that the future of the image is hegemonic incorporation and ideological domestication, there remains something more at issue and at work than straightforward politics and straightforward protest, conceived in the most prosaic or indeed Cartesian manner (in terms of the intentionally, consciously protesting political subject). What this is relates to the significance of discursive mediation, discursive ‘communication’. For, what ‘happened’ when Bruce Lee ‘happened’ constituted an intervention, a displacement and a transformation, in many registers and realms – public, private, discursive, psychological, corporeal – in transnational popular culture. Enter the Dragon, no matter how celluloid, phantasmatic, Orientalist asiaphiliac/asiaphobic, was an intervention – an event. To borrow the words of Jacques Derrida, it seems clear that ‘what happens in this case, what is transmitted or communicated, are not just phenomena of meaning or signification’, for ‘we are dealing neither with a semantic or conceptual content, nor with a semiotic operation, and even less with a linguistic exchange’ (1982: 309). Rather, to isolate the word that Alain Badiou has made his own: we are dealing with an event.
As Badiou argues, events are encounters. Moreover, they cannot be communicated as such – at least not in any conventional sense of the term communication. Rather, in Badiou’s view,
Communication is suited only to opinions. […] In all that concerns truths, there must be an encounter. The Immortal that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must be directly seized by fidelity. That is to say: broken … with or without knowing it, by the evental supplement. To enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you. (2001: 51; emphasis in original)4
But what was it that happened? And how? If there is a ‘change’ as a result of an encounter with the cinematic text, then, in the words of Rey Chow, what is clear is ‘the visual encounter and the change, but not how the visual encounter caused the change’ (1995: 7). Thus, Chow suggests: ‘The central question in all visual encounters boils down to this simple how … how do we go about explaining the changes it causes in us?’ (ibid.). What happened to the many who reported a profound change in light of the encounter with the celluloid Bruce Lee might perhaps be understood in terms of the Althusserian paradigm of interpellation, which is, after all, a theory about the mechanism of how we become (again and again) certain sorts of subjects. Yet the question remains: who or what is or was doing the interpellating, or the making of subjects of and for what power or institution? For someone like Žižek, it is the case that if the emergence of the image was once a pole of subjectivating identification, the future of the image is ideological phantasy. However, as Rancière has argued, there is also the process of subjectivization, which often exists in complete opposition to ‘interpellation’. So, where Žižek (in a way that is not all that different from Althusser) would see imaginary and symbolic identification as placing us in a pre-given ideological ‘place’, Rancière prompts us to see identification as a disidentification that displaces us into a political ‘place’. This is a place of what Rancière calls ‘the aesthetic dimension of the reconfiguration of the relationships between doing, seeing and saying that circumscribe the being-in-common’. And this ‘aesthetic dimension’, he continues ‘is inherent to every political or social movement’ (2000: 17).
The question then must be: is the entrance of the dragon therefore part of a political or social movement? Yes and no. Not in any necessarily conscious or realist sense of ‘political’. But definitely in terms of the discursive ‘reconfiguration of the relationships between doing, seeing and saying that circumscribe the being-in-common’ (2000: 17). This aesthetic event is embodied in a restricted economy of movement (and stillness) punctuated by what instantly became signature gestures. Yet even so, in this, to use Derrida’s words again, ‘what is transmitted or communicated, are not just phenomena of meaning or signification’, for ‘we are dealing neither with a semantic or conceptual content, nor with a semiotic operation, and even less with a linguistic exchange’ (1982: 309). But at the same time, the entrance of Bruce Lee into global popular culture constituted for many an event of the order of what Badiou makes of St. Paul’s encounter on the road to Damascus – as mentioned earlier – an event producing a range of performative fidelity-procedures. And this is where we began, with Miller, Rudolph, Prashad, Kato, and countless others; even if, paradoxically, what most remains of Bruce Lee today – what remains most ‘familiarly known’ – are the gestures – the signatures – gestures which once punctuated and defined a discourse, but which, outside of that discourse, to borrow a phrase from Ernesto Laclau, have become fetishes, dispossessed of any precise meaning.
BRUCE LEE BEYOND BELIEF
Nevertheless, Bruce Lee arguably remains incredible. Certainly, every time I see him again, it is as if for the first time. I use the word ‘incredible’ deliberately, and not uncritically. This is because, despite its apparent simplicity and familiarity, the word ‘incredible’ can and often does mean both ‘believable’ and ‘unbelievable’ – at the same time. If something is incredible, it is hard to believe. You want to, but you cannot entirely commit to it. Bruce Lee remains incredible in this way: incredible in a paradoxical and ambivalent sense. The cinematic spectacle of Bruce Lee seems to testify to something believable (Bruce Lee’s apparently real – incredible – skill), but at the same time, what the image shows us also appears to be an incredible, unbelievable, constructed, spectacular simulation.
This ambivalence is a characteristic problem of all representation. In this context, representation drags the cinematic spectacle and the uncertain reality or unreality of bodily ability into an incredible relation. Yet is this essentially distinct from other forms of representation, or indeed from representation as such? According to Alain Badiou, there is a ‘preformed philosophical response’ to cinema, which ‘comes down to saying that cinema is an untenable relation between total artifice and total reality’ (2009). He writes: ‘Cinema simultaneously offers the possibility of a copy of reality and the entirely artificial dimension of this copy’; what is more, this preformed response asserts that ‘with contemporary technologies, cinema is capable of producing the real artifice of the copy of a false copy of the real, or again, the false real copy of a false real. And other variations’. As such, ‘This amounts to saying that cinema has become the immediate form (or “technique”) of an ancient paradox, that of the relations between being and appearance’ (ibid.).
Writing about written and spoken testimony and belief, Jacques Derrida proposed that
one can testify only to the unbelievable. To what can, at any rate, only be believed; to what appeals only to belief and hence to the given word, since it lies beyond the limits of proof, indication, certified acknowledgement, and knowledge. […] It is always a matter of what is offered to faith and of appealing to faith, a matter of what is only ‘believable’ and hence as unbelievable as a miracle. Unbelievable because merely ‘credible’. The order of attestation itself testifies to the miraculous, to the unbelievable believable: to what must be believed all the same, whether believable or not. (1998a: 20)
Although Derrida’s words here refer to spoken and written words, it is clear that the complex ambivalence of such representation is active in terms of the status and work of the visual image or spectacle. As both Brooks Landon (1992) and Leon Hunt (2003) have depicted it, what they call ‘the aesthetics of ambivalence’ permeates all kung fu films. Hunt characterises this in terms of ‘an ambivalence predicated on the paradox of cinematic trickery (accepting the ‘fake’ as ‘real’)’ that is involved in all action cinema, combined with ‘a seemingly impossible investment in both documentary realism and fantasy’ that characterises martial arts fandom in particular (2003: 28). As has been widely remarked, watching Bruce Lee move and fight seems to involve all three components, in a way that is rare even in martial arts film: yes, we know it is a fictional film with staged and edited choreography, yet Bruce Lee’s skill seems persuasive, plausible and real (incredible yet credible); yes, we know this is fantasy, yet it seems so convincing, and so on, in a vertiginous circle of belief and disbelief, with each element feeding and frustrating the other, in terms of a desire to believe combined with a knowledge that, in any case, there is always going to be something fundamentally fantastical, phantasmatic and fake about the spectacle … and yet always also something that is going to seem ineradicably to be fundamentally believable.
One way to encapsulate a dimension of this is to state that the aesthetics of ambivalence involve knowing very well that something here is fake, but nevertheless desiring it, believing it. According to Žižek, in psychoanalytic terms, the perspective or attitude of ‘I know very well, but nevertheless…’ is the very formula of the fetish. (This is reiterated so often throughout Žižek’s work as to make one reference superfluous.) So, martial arts fandom might easily be ‘diagnosed’ as fetishistic. And this may be so. Yet such a diagnosis too hastily downplays the complexity of the doubt and desire that can arise in response to the spectacle. For it is not as if viewers who come to enjoy the spectacle or sometimes enjoy the spectacle always knew this, in advance, or came to view it in order to get a ‘fix’, or to ‘get off’ on the violence, because it is their fetish and they are fetishists. That is to say, such a perspective is too quick to characterise viewers as ‘types’ – as groups, as pre-constituted viewing constituencies. Moreover, such a diagnosis does not in itself tell us anything about how or why this might happen: how one might ‘become’ such a fetishist/fan, how or why one might be affected, altered by a visual spectacle – and when, where, in what contexts, with what effects. How does ‘being’ a fetishist/fan affect my ‘being’? Is it the case that martial arts fans are a ‘group’, a ‘type’, in the sense that they all share some psychological or sociological similarity – some shared developmental ‘tic’ in common? Is the film a spark which can only ignite certain socio- or psycho-logical ‘types’?
There are many psychological and sociological approaches available to scholarship, which pursue such a thread. Many of these approaches move swiftly into empirical, ethnographic and quantitative styles of scholarship. In doing so, they inevitably turn away from the textual moment or event, preferring instead to conduct ‘fieldwork’ or to ask questions about race, gender, class and other psychological and sociological formations in the determination and significance of ‘taste’. Without disparaging such orientations, my own approach does not seek to follow such a line. Rather, it is concerned first of all with focusing on what we might call the event, the cinematic event, the complexity of the textual moment of encountering the cinematic text or spectacle. Bruce Lee is primarily – although not exclusively – a cinematic textual construct. What we ‘know’ of him, and the way in which we know him, has been constituted overwhelmingly by the cinematic apparatus. As such, if ‘Bruce Lee’ is ever involved in anything like a ‘change’ (whether in ‘us’ or ‘them’, whether here or there), then it is the encounter with the cinematic spectacle would seem to define the ‘actual moment’ or scene in or from which a change – whether a change into fan-fetishist, practicing martial artist, or whatever – could be said to ‘happen’, no matter what socio-cultural or subjective ingredients could be said to have been ‘in’ us beforehand.
This is not to abstract film from a social context. On the contrary, Bruce Lee clearly informs, defines, determines or supplements many and varied ‘popular cultural formations’. Such formations clearly matter – at least, if culture ‘matters’. But it seems important to emphasise that such formations are constituted, called into being or organised around or through a cinematic spectacle, becoming what Meaghan Morris calls a ‘popular cultural genre’, in which ‘people take up aesthetic materials from the media and elaborate them in other aspects of their lives, whether in dreams and fantasies, in ethical formulations of values and ideals, or in social and sometimes political activities’ (2005: 1). It is towards this productive, ‘pedagogical’ dimension to Bruce Lee that we will now turn.
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