ENTER THE DISCOURSE
In 1973, Enter the Dragon was released. In many respects, this East/West co-production was very familiar: it was, after all, just another cheesy, formulaic action flick, essentially repeating a James Bond format. However, one thing about it was different: Bruce Lee. Indeed, so different was Lee that this formulaic film changed things. Its effects were transformative. It was an event. And with the word ‘event’, as shown in earlier chapters, I mean to evoke all of the resonances and associations that both Badiou and Rancière attribute to ‘events’. Of course, as a cinematic event, this complex technological simulacrum of a text cannot be located in or limited to merely one of the four measly regions that Badiou thinks an event has to be located in or limited to in order to be an event. Yet an event it was: aesthetic, at least; political, immanently. But, of course, as cinematic simulation, although it masqueraded as a putatively ‘Eastern’ graft into or onto Western popular culture and consciousness, the film was a ‘simulacral event’, but one that nevertheless founded a new discourse, a new set of discourses, a new field of discursivity. As a founder of discursivity, Enter the Dragon spearheaded the widespread introduction of a whole family of new terms into Western – indeed global – popular culture (martial arts, karate-do, ‘black belt’, kung fu, Shaolin Temple, Shaolin Monk) and a whole new set of connections and associations (Zen and pugilism, Buddhism and battle, meditation and martial arts, fighting warrior monks). Into Western popular consciousness it punched a paradigm, a whole new aesthetic vocabulary, a whole new perceptual-aesthetic field, a reconfiguration of what Jacques Rancière has repeatedly termed the partition of the sensible/perceptible.
It completed the countercultural fascination with the ‘mystical East’, and it supplemented it – it sublated it – reconfiguring and superseding it. Rising out from the mush of mystical mumbo-jumbo circulating in Western discourses about the soft, feminine Eastern Other arose many things: new embodied, philosophicohaptic, kinetic, perceptual and aesthetic performative practices; new interests in the East; new asiaphilias, projections and self-Orientalisations; plus nothing short of a whole new mode of masculinity: not the hulking hero, the cowboy gunslinger, the bar-room brawler, or the cop, spy or soldier, but now the invincible martial artist monk, created through hard work, self-discipline and the means of correct training; new mindsets, new bodysets, and whole new sets of fantasies about self and other; about the very intimate and the very far; about new aims and possibilities; new fantasies about the very old and very other brought very near and very new. Enter the Dragon was an event. Not an isolated event, but the pinnacle of a series of interventions.
As we have seen, studies have often focused on explaining the unexpectedly intense and immense appeal of Hong Kong martial arts films among poor black and Hispanic audiences in American inner cities and elsewhere around the world. This encounter was contingent: caused by the fact that Hong Kong films were cheap to show, so the poorer cinemas in poorer areas could afford to show them. Moreover, from 1967, the Hong Kong film industry had been deliberately seeking to break the US market. But the consequences of this contingent encounter were profound. Thinkers from Charles Johnson to Bill Brown to Gina Marchetti have dealt with it at length. With much more blasé brevity, we should recall, Slavoj Žižek has also proposed that the first reason for the strong appeal of martial arts films in ghettos the world over was initially class-based. Those who have nothing, writes Žižek, have only their bodies, only their discipline, only their desire. And ‘class’ is of course easily transcoded into the terms and registers of ethnicity, and vice versa. Moreover, Bruce Lee exploded into popularity across Asia, India, Europe, the US, the Soviet Union – everywhere. Vijay Prashad (2001) recalls that Lee politicised consciousness in India – the small yellow man beating big whitey. T. M. Kato (2007) argues that Lee offered an anti-colonial and decolonising aesthetic, an antidote to the stifling situation in which Africans watching Tarzan would cheer for Tarzan and against the caricatured African tribesmen. Bill Brown (1997) argues that it was Lee’s ‘generic ethnicity’ that sparked, fuelled and oiled his massive popularity and enduring significance. However, over time, write both Žižek and Bill Brown, immanent class antagonism became existentialised: martial arts became about self-actualisation, about realising self-potential, about uncovering existential paradoxes (about meditative or pacifist martial arts) – or, that is, depoliticised on one level and ideologised on another.
Enter the Dragon was the exploding of all of this into the mainstream. This pinnacle was clearly in some contexts a depoliticisation. In others it was an outright affront: Hong Kong audiences reputedly hated Enter the Dragon, because in it Bruce Lee plays not a rural mainland Chinese working class boy, but a Western projection of a fantasy of a Shaolin Monk, an inscrutable Chinese working obediently for the British Secret Service. Moreover, the cross-ethnic identification and hybridisation associated with martial arts spectatorship is separated out and sanitised in Enter the Dragon: all of the cultural entities and identities that could be infected and intermixed through martial arts fantasy and practice become compartmentalised again into stock figures: the lead role of the film is split three ways, into the white ersatz Bond (John Saxon), the black inner city karateka (Jim Kelly) and the pure ‘good’ Chinese (Bruce Lee), all facing the entirely evil Fu Manchu character, ‘Han’. So, in this highest pinnacle of the kung fu craze of the early 70s can be seen a depoliticisation, cooptation, domestication or hegemonisation. This was completed, argues Bill Brown, in the song ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting’, which rendered twee, eccentric and comic certain counterhegemonic cultural impulses via the cultural cross-dressing of the performer and the quirkiness of the musical Chinese clichés incorporated into the disco beat.
DRAGON ENTERING
So, if the Dragon had now entered, if East Asia had arrived, right into the heart of Western – indeed, global – popular consciousness and popular culture, it had arrived as a simulacrum, a precession of simulacra, a spectacle of stereotypes. The explosion of popular cross-cultural or East-West popular cultural communication of the 1970s was initiated, initialised, orientated and organised by a kind of circuit exchange of simulacra.1 If this is a kind of cultural communication, it has annoyed and even enraged all manner of scholars and purists. This is because it is at best a kind of ‘double communication’ rather than two-way communication. Two-way communication’ implies the face-to-face co-presence of two intending consciousnesses. But what we see in cultural communication like this is a process without a subject (without, at least, a simple, single, unitary or unified subject).
According to theorists like Fredric Jameson and Rey Chow, the ‘face-to-face’ of cross-cultural communication always involves the play of the cross-border distribution and circulation of stereotypes and the trade in tokens; stereotypes and tokens that overdetermine in advance the structure of cross-cultural encounters.2 Or, as Bill Brown has more generously formulated this: all of the interethnic identification and cultural mobility associated with early Western martial arts culture was premised and predicated on the collaboration of the Hong Kong and Hollywood film industries.
GO WEST
But this collaboration can hardly be said to be one of equal partners – at least not culturally, not narratively, not discursively (in terms of the kinds of texts produced), regardless of the financial figures involved. These films may easily seem, in Chow’s words, to be “equally caught up in the generalized atmosphere of unequal power distribution and [to be] actively (re)producing within themselves the structures of domination and hierarchy that are as typical of non-European cultural histories as they are of European imperialism” (1995: 194). This is why many have argued that, cinematically, at least, the circuit of communication in which martial arts have circulated has been a one way appropriative street; or rather, a 2nd class return ticket. For, what has overwhelmingly happened is that the Western man goes or has been East, and brings back or has brought back or masters or will master something or someone from the East to the West. This is often kung fu or karate; or a woman; or both. One need only think of the cinematic legacies of Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, or Jean Claude Van Damme, or the appropriative logic of texts like Gold Finger (1964), Dr No (1962), Bullet Proof Monk (2003), The Last Samurai, The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Kill Bill to see this. Similarly, male Asian actors all seem to share a similar narrative: massively successful in different regional film industries (especially Hong Kong) but consistently unable to play anything other than chop-socky characters in Western (especially Hollywood) productions.
The UK Jet Li film Unleashed (aka Danny the Dog) provides a good allegory of this: Li’s character is removed from all culture, history, personality or personhood, kept in a dog collar and unleashed only to fight. When finally definitively unleashed from the leash, we learn that all Jet Li’s Danny (the Dog) desires is culture.
Accordingly, a lot has been said about the racism and cultural bias of the Hollywood film industry. Of course, just as much could be said about the racism and bias of the Hong Kong film industry. The stereotypes of Westerners in Hong Kong films are just as preposterous as their more famous Orientalist counterparts: the very recent film, Bruce Lee, My Brother (also known as Young Bruce Lee), for example, is a sentimental fabulation about Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong childhood, which along the way also waxes surprisingly nostalgic about Hong Kong’s British colonial past, but which, in doing so, could not seem to muster a single British actor to play any of the many British characters: at first the white actors seem to try to affect British accents, but by the end of the film, that brief has been entirely forgotten, and Australian and Mid-Atlantic accents abound. But this is not my interest here. One should not expect too much from Hollywood, or Hong Kong; or indeed Bollywood or Beijing. What strikes me as more significant is the question of the routes or directions of the transfers, travels and communications.
Martial arts films have long fed on the themes of diasporic displacement, of tradition and institution, of inheritance and communication, of passing on and passing over. The master dies or is assassinated; the number one son travels to a new town or a new land; the Westerner visits the East and takes away a new mastery of something very old. They feed on questions of transmission: who can be allowed to inherit the secrets – male or female, Asian or white? In which direction should things go?
As we have seen, Lee’s third Hong Kong film, Way of the Dragon, or Return of the Dragon, in Chinese was called Meng Long Guo Jiang, which can be translated literally, as we have seen, as ‘The Fierce Dragon Crosses The River’, which refers to travel and migration, and to the diasporic Chinese crossing over to Europe. In this film, Lee travels from Hong Kong to Rome and defeats the mafia – who are represented in terms of perhaps the strangest, most multicultural mafia gang ever depicted on screen, consisting not of slick Italian gangsters, but rather of shabby whites and blacks, and an ultra-camp Chinese translator. This mismatching mishmash or misperception of the mafia is entirely appropriate in a film which I argued above is best regarded as precisely the kind of postcolonial ethnography that Rey Chow argues for in her chapter ‘Film as Ethnography; or: Translating Between Cultures in a Postcolonial World’ (1995: 176–202). Let me note that when the Europeans cannot beat Lee’s Chinese local boy (aka ‘native’), they call in ‘America’s best’ – the martial artist Colt, played by Chuck Norris. Lee defeats the American karateka, restores the sovereignty of the Chinese restaurant business that he has come to save in the first place and then, when the hurly-burly’s done, jets off back to Hong Kong. Thus, the film seems to say: there is nothing for the Chinese in the West other than chop-socky and chop-suey.
Lee’s return trip in this film is essentially what has happened to all subsequent Asian male action leads: they go to America, beat the best of the West in action flicks, but then find nothing else for themselves, no other space, and have to return to Asia for anything like a different kind of cinematic role. Needless to say, Chuck Norris rose like a phoenix from Colt’s ashes and blazed the trail which whitened and Americanised martial arts, so that, ultimately, Western martial arts films need less and less to make what was earlier their obligatory reference to an Asian origin. Many still do, but the gesture ‘East’ is little more than window-dressing: in The Matrix Neo fights Morpheus thanks to kung fu software in a vaguely Oriental room; Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins (2005) is trained by ninjas but kills them all (because they are devious and fiendish) – and with a martial art that was actually entirely invented by US stuntmen. Rex in Napoleon Dynamite (2004) invents ‘Rex Kwon Do’ over two seasons of fighting in the octagon. While Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity (2002) doesn’t even remember how or where he learned to fight.
Martial arts cinema aficionados will tell you that Bourne’s fighting style is derived from Filipino kali or eskrima plus Jeet Kune Do, as taught by the film’s fight choreographer, Jeff Imada, as taught to him by Bruce Lee’s student Dan Inosanto. But, really – at least in one psychoanalytic register of ‘really’ – they have all learnt their martial arts like Bradley Cooper in Limitless – who learns his fighting from his memories of Bruce Lee films – or, indeed– like Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden in Fight Club: in the manner of a schizophrenic hallucinatory projection based on a spectator’s fantasy of Bruce Lee.
Indeed, despite all reroutings, displacements, transports, transformations and deracinations, what remains clear is this: spectres of Bruce Lee structure this discourse. But is this just an Americanised discourse – a conversation or discourse entirely ‘internal’ to the West? I don’t think so. This is because, as indicated in the previous chapter, especially following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, figures, spectres, stand-ins, tokens and representatives of Bruce Lee have reentered Hong Kong and Chinese films – and more than films – in very prominent ways.
As discussed in previous chapters, one can see that there has been a surprising upsurge of interest in Bruce Lee and Bruce Lee related themes in both Hong Kong and China. Before the Beijing Olympics, Chinese national television initiated a subsequently very long running TV series on the life and adventures of Bruce Lee. In Hong Kong over the last few years, a veritable rash of Bruce Lee related films has broken out. In most of these Bruce Lee returns at one remove, but present, in displacement: in films about his wing chun kung fu teacher, Ip Man, or about Chen Zhen, the character he played in Fist of Fury, as well as films about his young life in Hong Kong. All of this is fictionalised, mythologised.
The Ip Man films star Donnie Yen and other films about Ip Man are in production. In Yen’s Ip Man films, Ip Man is depicted as a flawless Chinese nationalist hero, one of the folk of Southern China who had to flee to Hong Kong to escape the Japanese. Throughout these films, Ip Man is regularly conflated not only with Bruce Lee but also with the character that Lee popularised in the ultra-nationalist film Jing Wu Men / Fist of Fury, with his ultra-nationalist character Chen Zhen. At around the same time, Donnie Yen also played Chen Zhen in the film Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen. In this, Chen Zhen is conflated not only with Bruce Lee, but also with Jet Li, and – bizarrely – also with the character ‘Kato’ that Bruce Lee played in the American TV show The Green Hornet.
Of course, as I have sought to emphasise, like Chen Zhen, the real, historical person, Ip Man, would be entirely unknown outside of Hong Kong, as would the martial art he taught (wing chun / yong chun). Both Ip Man and Wing Chun are now world famous solely because the most famous student was Bruce Lee. In other words, what shines through in this recent rash of films is the way that Bruce Lee is silently structuring more than just some films, but actually an ongoing discourse (at least a filmic discourse) about the relationship of Hong Kong to China and China to Hong Kong and on to the world. Chen Zhen returns from Europe to Shanghai to fight crime in the mask Lee wore when playing Kato in The Green Hornet. He returns to the famous Japanese Dojo to beat the son of the master he killed first time around in both Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury and Jet Li’s Fist of Legend. Bruce Lee’s and Jet Li’s and Donnie Yen’s Chen Zhens, plus Yen’s Ip Man all beat Japanese karateka in very similar dojos viewed through very similar camera angles.
In all of these films, the key journeys and transports are between Hong Kong and Shanghai. In addition: all are organised by the idea of escaping or combatting Japanese aggressors. In fact, the links between Hong Kong and the mainland are prominent in them all, and closely coupled with Japanese as enemy. As such, the figure of Japan is functioning now as a ‘screen memory’, and accordingly therefore as a stand-in, a scapegoat. But for what? The answer becomes clear when one knows that the real historical figure, Ip Man, moved to Hong Kong not to escape from the Japanese but to escape the emergence of the Communist regime in China. Unsurprisingly, however, this entity – Communist China – is entirely absent from all of these films. In its place is the one-stop-shop bogeyman of Japan. The complex and contradictory historical relationship between Communist China and capitalist Hong Kong is the proverbial elephant in the room that these films – which are ultimately all about reinventing the relationship between Hong Kong and China – cannot look at or speak about.
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
So, even though Bruce Lee has not always been regarded by Hong Kongers as a Hong Konger (as suggested earlier, he has for a long time been regarded by Hong Kongers as about as much of a Hong Konger as Hong Kong Disneyland) Bruce Lee is nevertheless structuring or suturing a renegotiated and re-grafted cultural discursive relationship between Hong Kong and China. Indeed, Bruce Lee has arguably always been the figure of the graft, the connection, the common link, the common identification, the thing shared in common. In some martial arts films – East or West – it is true that he may not always be there. But in martial arts culture, or the points at which martial arts connect to culture or connect cultures, he is almost always there.
Even in the recent US and Chinese co-production of the remake of the 1984 film The Karate Kid, Lee is written into a film that he was entirely absent from in its first incarnation. In the original, the focus is entirely American. It takes place in America. The martial art is Okinawan goju-ryu karatedo – karatedo being the martial art that America first experienced by virtue of its post-World War II occupation of Japan and Okinawa. And the motive for the action of the story in the first place is the fact that Danny Laruso has had to move from the East Coast of America to California, because of his mother’s work. However, by the time of the 2010 remake, there are some significant changes. The eponymous ‘kid’, Dre Parker, now has to leave the USA itself, because of his mother’s job. This is quite a new theme. More pointedly, they have to move from Detroit (America’s industrial disaster area) to Beijing. Immanently significantly, Dre is black. However, interestingly, ethnicity largely vanishes in the remade film. Dre Parker may be black, but he is nevertheless immediately and unproblematically recognised and welcomed in Beijing as ‘one of us’ by an almost albino-blonde white boy. Whether this bespeaks the footnote to the American dream of an American identity that is colour blind, or whether it testifies to the pragmatic contingencies of all relationship-, community- and identity-formation is something that can be debated. But what the black and the white share here is place of birth, of course, and language but also reason for being there: economic migration.
After Dre’s initial cultural disorientation and alienation, the film ditches the potentially knotty theme of cultural difference. Everyone speaks English in Beijing. Everyone is kind – except the schoolboy bullies. No one, but no one, is racist. Beijing is beautiful, welcoming. Dre and his sifu, played by Jackie Chan, go to Guilin, China’s own beloved tourist destination – where they have even built some kind of bizarre open-access faux-ancient Taoist monastery at the top of some kind of crypto-Wu-tang Mountain.
In other words, if in 1973 the film title Enter the Dragon seemed to be the announcement of the arrival of the East in the West, and reciprocally therefore the entrance of the West into the East – the commodification and marketisation of the East by the West, the popular cultural appropriation of the Eastern in the West – by 2010 the words ‘enter the dragon’ seem to be more of an encouragement – as in, ‘come on in, enter the dragon, it is great’.
This is unsurprising, perhaps, given the involvement of the China Film Group Corporation in the making of The Karate Kid, and the well-known concern of the Chinese state nowadays for its public image. But still, it is significant that, as if concerned for his protégé’s own public image, at the end of The Karate Kid, whilst preparing for the final showdown at a kung fu competition, Dre Parker’s sifu, Mr Han, presents him with a fine white jacket. Dre looks awed: ‘just like the one Bruce Lee wore’, he says. Indeed, it is obviously evocative of the white jacket Bruce Lee wears as the nationalist Chen Zhen at his master’s funeral in Fist of Fury. But here there is no such nationalism, no such fury. Rather, the film proposes a colour blind transnational interethnic Beijing, with no racism, no ethnocentrism, and only the subjective encounters of equals.
The silliness of this new Beijing-Hollywood vision of the world (or should that be Beiwood or Hollyjing vision of the world?) perhaps goes without saying. But perhaps it has one saving grace. For, in this film, Jackie Chan has finally been allowed to act, has finally been allowed a character; finally allowed a subject-hood, a humanising back-story, a depth and complexity. If in the end, this is very little, it is certainly not nothing. For perhaps this silly little remake of a film, which achieves little more that is new other than allowing the erstwhile slapstick martial arts institution Jackie Chan to play a mature character in a Hollywood production nevertheless bespeaks or registers the shifting geopolitical relations involved in cultural hegemony, identity and production. Despite its limitations, the film is perhaps also communicating a new message: no longer a message about decentring or provincialising Europe (Europe is neither here nor there) but rather a message about decentring and provincialising America.3
DERACINATED NINJAS
But are things really so simple? In a chapter entitled ‘An Oriental Past’ in her 2010 book, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, Jane Park begins from a consideration of a film series in which Asia / the Orient / the East is both everywhere and nowhere. The films in question are Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Park uses the films as clear examples of the extent to which clear borders between East and West are more and more blurred, less and less clear.
Asia is everywhere and nowhere in these films in a number of ways. Firstly, of course, they are not Asian films: they are Hollywood films. Yet much of the first half of Batman Begins, in particular, and much of the aesthetic of both is styled Oriental – it has an Oriental style or sheen – and nowhere more so than in the early sequences in which Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is trained in an isolated mountaintop temple in what Park refers to as ‘ninjitsu’. Park calls it ninjitsu because the masked characters who train Bruce Wayne in martial arts in the temple, and who call themselves ‘the League of Shadows’, are clearly marked as ninjas, are referred to once or twice as ninjas within the film, and wear the traditional/mythological black masks and black costumes, whilst training in swordplay, deception, illusion, distraction, stealth and evasion. So, we might reasonably expect our ninjas to be trained in what is referred to in Western popular culture as ‘ninjitsu’.
But who and what and where are these ninjas? The location is not Japan. It is Himalayan/Tibetan. Which seems unusual or incongruous for ninjas. But of course, one might ask: would a ninja headquarters or training school really need to be in Japan in this day and age? And would ninjas need to be Japanese? Surely such an assumption would involve conflating a practice with an ethnicity. And as I want to argue here, such a conflation is precisely the kind of thing that needs to be deliberately avoided in any study of film or culture.
Nevertheless, it does not seem unreasonably prejudiced to note that to be ninja as such would seem fundamentally to require being part of a precise historical and social relation; one in which a defeated samurai clan has chosen not to surrender to a victorious samurai clan or to commit suicide but to live on, covertly, secretively, because of the existence of the other samurai clans. And this is as much as to say that one cannot be a ninja as such without being part of feudal Japanese relations; and this would strongly imply being both ethnically Japanese and being located in Japan, and, of course, living in a very precise historical period, in the past. However, if we are not dealing with this sense of being a ninja, and if we’re just dealing with being an ultra-trained assassin with a black uniform and a predilection for swordplay, then yes, such ‘ninjas’ will be even better stealth assassins if they are not ethnically or linguistically marked, and if they have bases and camps all over the world. But this involves a subtle change in the meaning of the word ‘ninja’, one that has taken place because of what Rey Chow (following Vattimo following Nietzsche) refers to as the weakening of cultural foundations – a weakening of cultural exclusivity, borders and barriers – as a consequence of the intensification and expansion of the complexities and flows of mediated global and transnational popular culture attendant to modernity (1995: 195)
This is why, despite its technically anachronistic character, an understanding of ninjas as globalised and deracinated paid assassins with a penchant for the balletic and the bladed makes perfect sense to us today. Indeed, this is the dominant popular cultural understanding of the ninja. But we should note the Rey Chow type of point, that this is a very weakened, very fluid, deracinated and mobile conception of a ninja (1995: 195). ‘To be’ a ninja outside of an antagonism structuring feudal Japanese society can nowadays only mean to be a semiotic ninja – a trace, a remainder, a leftover, a mark, a residue, in diaspora. Nevertheless, this remains a semiotics with a currency, a communicability and a transmissibility: an afterlife and an intelligibility (1995: 199).
Of course, the image of the ninja as mobile and globe-trotting is surely the dominant image because it maps fluidly and fluently onto the more than century-old ‘yellow peril’ paradigm (see Seshagiri 2006). We should recall that one of the first ‘yellow peril’ fantasy constructions was that of the evil and insidious Chinese arch-villain, Fu Manchu, in the Sax Rohmer stories, written at the dawn of the twentieth century. These were inspired and structured by two diverse sources: on the one hand, Imperial worries about anti-British uprisings such as the Boxer Rebellion and, on the other hand, a desire to cash in on the successful format of the Sherlock Holmes novels. What is crucial here is that both Sax Rohmer and subsequent yellow peril fantasists have all recognised or dramatised that what is most perilous about the yellow peril is not when the yellow peril is a huge mass or multitude that is far, far away, over there, in a determinate other place in the East; but rather that the yellow peril is perilous because of its ability to move anonymously, individually, fluidly, fluently, silently, secretly and insidiously across the globe. Fu Manchu’s headquarters were in London’s East End, and he and his henchmen could and would pop up all over the world (or, more specifically, all over the British Empire), at will and unexpectedly.4
In other words, in ‘yellow peril’ semiotics, location is irrelevant. What is not deemed irrelevant in this semiotics though is ethnicity: what subtends and sustains the discourse is a belief in the permanence of a mobile and portable ethnicity which always manifests itself as anti-Western/pro-Eastern nationalist ideology (see Seshagiri 2006). Simply being yellow, no matter where and no matter how long you have been there, is taken as a sign of a necessary infidelity or non-belonging to the West; and an essential attachment – simply because of skin colour or ethnicity – to another place. Jane Park indicates the tenacity of the hold of this discourse – not just in popular fiction but also in serious public arenas – when she discusses the news media representations of both ethnically Asian criminals and ethnically Asian victims of crime in the US: in the language and representational structure of US news discourse, the ethnically Asian is never simply, wholly or wholesomely American (see Park 2010). The hyphen of hyphenated US identity politics reveals itself to be a double-edged sword (see Chow 2002).
It is with this unclear nexus of ethnicity, alterity, location, place and crossing over that I will be primarily concerned here. This is because in film and in our readings of film there are often conflations and confirmation biases at play which pull our readings in certain directions, often in ways which conform to both a geographical and what Jacques Rancière calls a geometrical structuring of the world, along ethnic and nationalist lines. As Rancière has consistently sought to impress upon us: we fall too easily into a style of thinking in which we assume that social classes and social groups each have their proper place and proper location and proper activities; and, because of this aesthetic distribution of the sensible and this paradigm of viewing and apprehending, this partition of the perceptible, this shared biased commonsense, our own thought processes work like police officers: we assume that we know where and what certain groups, identities and practices are or should be, and we push them back into their perceived proper places – or, when we apprehend them or think about them or represent them or engage with them, we measure the distance between where they seem to be and where we thought and think they should be (see Rancière 1999). This is a process that Rey Chow has called ‘coercive mimeticism’ (2002); coercive mimeticism being a term for any of the many processes through which ethnic, class and gendered identities are assumed, imposed, enforced, insisted upon and adjudicated, in myriad contexts. My argument here will be that looking closely and thinking about the relations between ethnicity and the perhaps surprising topic of martial arts choreography offers important insights into all of this.
CHOREOGRAPHING AUTHENTICITY
In the context of the ninjas of Batman Begins, and of the film’s ‘ninjitsu’, a moment’s digging around or researching reveals that it is actually the case that the choreography we see in the film is derived from a martial art called Keysi Fighting Method (or KFM). This martial art was invented within the last few decades by a street-fighter from Barcelona called Justo Dieguez Serrano in conjunction with another from Hull in the north of England called Andy Norman. These two fighters met on a martial arts circuit made up of a loose network of like-minded martial artists who would travel widely around the world to train with each other at various training camps (not entirely unlike our deracinated ninjas, perhaps). Another of these like-minded fighters was a man – also from Hull – called Buster Reeves: a former sports martial arts star, freestyle sparring champion, world jujitsu champion, and stuntman who, at a certain point in time, exactly when he was a student of Andy Norman in Hull, was lined up to be the stunt body-double for none other than Christian Bale in the up-coming film Batman Begins (Norman n.d.).
So, the fighting method of the Orientalised yet non-Japanese (or non-Japan-located) ‘ninjas’, located in an apparently ancient temple somewhere far, far away, but definitely in the East, in this Hollywood film, turns out to be a very contemporary and avowedly ‘urban’ martial art; one that was invented, formalised and codified – or at least baptised and commodified – by two Europeans, who met on an international training circuit but who insist in all promotional and pedagogical literature, interviews and online film materials that KFM ‘comes from the street’, or, at least, is designed for ‘the street’. In any case, KFM became connected with Hollywood thanks to a certain international network of fighters, all of whom were striving for authenticity in their martial arts training. As Andy Norman and others say in interviews about Batman Begins (and elsewhere), KFM strives for authenticity and efficiency; it is not hampered by somebody else’s tradition; it is not, to paraphrase Norman, an ancient residual form of someone else’s truth; it is rather a truth that they themselves worked out in the here and now, through an unending process of thinking, researching, experimentation, testing and verification.
Now, to anyone familiar with martial arts rhetoric – that is, with the types of things that martial artists are going to say about their practice – it is very hard not to discern close family resemblances between KFM-style discourse and the rhetoric and discourse of Jeet Kune Do as it came out of the mouth of Bruce Lee in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Bruce Lee, martial arts practice should not be about respecting tradition and doctrine; it should always be about experimentation and innovation and, as he was wont to say, ‘honestly expressing yourself’. Thus, given the virtually identical style of rhetoric and discourse shared by Bruce Lee’s JKD and today’s KFM, it is clear that KFM is a contemporary manifestation of an impulse that was first defined by Bruce Lee’s inventive, experimental interdisciplinary research programme that he called JKD.
Of course, Keysi Fighting Method and Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do (or KFM and JKD) may seem very different in appearance and execution. Where Lee’s JKD would insist on the straight and the direct – the straight right lead or the direct finger jab to the eyes being its exemplary techniques – KFM is more likely to spin and roll into a different position – this is because the ‘pensador’ or ‘thinking-man’ defensive/aggressive stance is what its founders call ‘the nucleus’ of its approach. So Bruce Lee’s JKD and today’s KFM look different but they share the same experimentalist and verificationist ethos.
What is more, both were catapulted into the spotlight by a connection with the Hollywood cinematic apparatus. What is (even) more, both look and seem Oriental – the Orient is all over them and they are marked Asian – yet neither is properly Oriental or simply Asian. KFM appears in the recent Batman films as if it is ninjitsu, but it is not; JKD appeared both in Bruce Lee’s pre-Hollywood supporting role in Longstreet in 1967 and also in his unfinished film Game of Death, as if it were ‘kung fu’, and it was always heavily marked as Asian, as Chinese; but it is not: not really; not simply. Even Bruce Lee himself at times wanted to distance himself from an ethno-nationalist interpretation of what he was doing in JKD. In Game of Death Lee chose to wear a bright yellow tracksuit, so that his style could not be semiotically attached to any existing formal style from any culture. And, ultimately, JKD is a Chinese name for an art born in the USA out of Lee’s interdisciplinary explorations in boxing, fencing, grappling, wrestling, and kicking, from a Wing Chun basis – but a basis that became more and more translated and transformed over time, so that only certain axioms of Wing Chun remained (as expressed in sentiments about the centreline and about the immoveable elbow, and so on).
So, both JKD and KFM are heavily marked as Oriental; both are semiotically constructed as Oriental; but in the approach of Bruce Lee, to regard JKD simply as Chinese is to conflate Lee’s own ethnicity, on the one hand, and his deracinated interdisciplinary radicalism, on the other; and to do so in such a way as to make the ethnicity trump the activity: in other words, it is to assume that because Lee looked Chinese, therefore what he did was Chinese. This sort of conflation is as legitimate as claiming that because Batman Begins constructs KFM as ninjitsu, therefore KFM is Japanese. In other words, this all points to a problem of culture; one that raises its obscure – or obscured, or black-masked – head, whenever there is a crossover. This is especially visible when the crossover involves or is enabled by cinematic mediation or mediatisation.
IN AUTHENTIC CROSSING
Jane Park argues that in many manifestations of Hollywood’s cinematic imaginary – in its semiotic vernacular – ‘the Orient’ stands simultaneously for the ancient past and the technological or technologised future. She argues that in the recent Batman films, East and West are blurred. I want to emphasise the ways that the Orient is played and erased here and elsewhere, in order to show the deconstruction of location – and of certain conceptions of ‘culture’ – through the problematisation of space and location attendant to international film. The Orient is everywhere and nowhere here. It has both crossed over and been crossed out. It has also been underlined.
According to the interviews and short films that make up the extras of the DVD release of Batman Begins, Keysi Fighting Method became appropriated by Hollywood and was incorporated into the film largely because of its visual novelty: as one of the interviewees – the fight and stunt coordinator David Forman – puts it: we had seen kung fu, taekwondo, jujitsu; but we hadn’t seen this before. So, KFM offered a novel visual spectacle boiling down to a new and flowing style of movement, one that they decided suited the character and personality they were giving to Batman in the film: brutal, animalistic, pugilistic, almost crude in appearance, yet at the same time highly viewable and ultra-slick. According to Andy Norman, the co-founder of KFM, what the filmmakers liked about the look of KFM was that it showed a new way of moving, a way of moving never seen in fight choreography before (Norman n/d).
Because of this, in the wake of Batman Begins, Keysi Fighting Method started to become global. (It is also seen in Mission Impossible 3 (2006)). This take-off itself is a new version of the same mediatised route that first made all nominally Oriental martial arts global: David Carradine and Bruce Lee introduced nominally Chinese martial arts quite decisively to the West and off the back of this mediation, untold numbers of people all over the world started practicing nominally or actually Chinese, Japanese and Korean arts, first of all, and more and more diverse nationalities of arts subsequently – Brazilian jujitsu and capoeira, in particular.
In relation to the exemplary case that is Bruce Lee, it is fair to say that it was only because of his celebrity that Jeet Kune Do became known. Then, as people looked backwards in time, so to speak, ever-desirous to return to the source or the mythic origin of Lee’s art, more and more people discovered Wing Chun. So it was only because of Bruce Lee that the art he studied as a teenager, wing chun, became popular outside of Hong Kong. By the same token, it was only because of Bruce Lee that his teacher, Ip Man, became so well known that he has since been reclaimed and reconstructed as a legendary Chinese patriot within some recent Hong Kong produced films.
To put it bluntly: virtually no one would have heard about kung fu were it not for Bruce Lee; no one would be doing Jeet Kune Do; Wing Chun would be insignificant outside (and possibly within) Hong Kong, and Ip Man would be equally unheard of. I say this without any disrespect intended to any of these people or styles. I just want to emphasise the crucial role of the filmic apparatus in producing visibilities, mythologies, beliefs and practices. In fact, there is a sense in which almost every martial art or martial artist today could be said to have a debt to cinema (no matter how unwanted), and could also be said to be mediatised (no matter how anti-spectacular the martial art is). This is the case even with Bruce Lee’s JKD and with KFM (not to mention MMA and the UFC), and even in the face of their shared and avowed commitment to authenticity and reality.
For, with both, it is the case that an art that was inspired and guided by the desire for the real and the authentic has been mediatised, and in that mediatisation glamourised, and in that glamourisation further commodified. So, now, even if you cannot find an actual human instructor in KFM, you can sign up and download the syllabus – white belt, yellow belt, and so on, through to black. And these training videos are themselves pretty slick textual productions: finely crafted and beautifully edited films which emphasise the different ways to train in order to practice, to simulate and emulate and generate authenticity – or the effects and features of authenticity – in training for real and authentic combat. So, pretty soon there should be plenty of virtually-produced KFM certified instructors to set up physically-located schools.
In itself, this is no big deal. There have long been correspondence courses. And far be it from me to fetishise the value of the face-to-face co-presence of teacher and student. (Derrida deconstructed this decisively decades ago.) Rather, the point I would like to make is to caution the conflation of text with geographical location, or geographical location with ethnicity and/or ‘culture’.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHETHNICITY
Rey Chow nails one problem of this tendency in her 1993 book, Writing Diaspora. In this book, Chow points out the ways that, in American universities in particular, the academic world is all too easily divided up geographically. That is to say, academic departments and approaches are divided up along nation-state lines, in a way that actually mirrors – and yet obscures – the geopolitical organisation of the world. It mirrors it in that a school or department can be, for example, a school of Chinese studies. In this school or department, there will be experts in so many areas of this geographical entity’s social and cultural landscape: for example, Chinese literature, Chinese language, Chinese history, Chinese philosophy, and so on. In the next building or somewhere across the campus, there will be the Japanese counterpart of this; elsewhere the Russian and Slavic and elsewhere the Indian and so on and so forth – in a way in which the geopolitical identity of nation states is mirrored in the academic division of labour.
(There may also be – as there is in my own university, for instance – schools of European Studies. But such schools and departments are less likely to teach European Philosophy than they are to teach the unmodified and putatively universal discipline of capital p Philosophy – in other words, the supposedly universal category or version of a subject; a universal or transcendent version of a subject, whose ‘universality’ is of course merely the simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of its Eurocentrism.)
The reiteration of geographical or geopolitical (or, in other words, national) boundaries as a way to organise universities, their departments and schools, their disciplinary landscapes, and ultimately therefore the knowledge they produce, has many consequences. For instance, Chow draws attention to the likelihood that translated Chinese texts dealing with, for example, women or the family or the state will all too often be given a modifier in translation, so that, in their English language versions they become, all of a sudden, texts dealing not with ‘woman’ or the family or the state but now with Chinese women, the Chinese family and the Chinese state – and in a precisely diametrically opposite way to the way in which European texts about the same subjects would be translated. Chow proposes that a French language text called, say, la femme, la famille, l’état, would almost certainly be translated as something much closer to woman, the family, the state than French women, the French family and the French state (1993: 6). Of film itself, Chow says: let’s contrast titles of studies of ‘first-world’ film with titles of studies of non-‘first-world’ film. While the former typically adopt generic theoretical markers such as ‘the imaginary signifier’, ‘the cinematic apparatus’, ‘feminism’, ‘gender’, ‘desire’, ‘psychoanalysis’, ‘semiotics’, ‘narrative’, ‘discourse’, ‘text’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘film theory’, the latter usually must identify their topics by the names of ethnic groups or nation-states, such as ‘black cinema’, ‘Latin-American cinema’, ‘Israeli cinema’, ‘Brazilian cinema’, ‘Japanese cinema’, ‘Indian cinema’, ‘Spanish cinema’, ‘Chinese cinema’, ‘Hong Kong cinema’, and so forth. To the same extent, it has been possible for Western film critics to produce studies of films from cultures whose languages they do not know, whereas it is inconceivable for non-Western critics to study the French, German, Italian, and Anglo-American cinemas without knowing their respective languages (1995: 27).
So, Chow points to the hierarchies of value involved in organising knowledge geographically. The problem is both that this can too easily take place against the backdrop of an assumed universality – capital p Philosophy (as universal) versus ‘Eastern Thought’ (as regional), for example – and also that this type of thinking follows an implicit Cold War, Orientalist, imperialist or colonialist logic, in which the other culture is there to be known in the form of a data-mine or, ultimately, a target.
Anthropology is a residue of British imperialism, it is often said: the natives are objects and curios, relics from the past, specimens from nature, to be studied by the modern Western investigator. Area Studies, it is also said, is a disciplinary field that is a direct product of the post-World War II and Cold War US mindset, elaborated in accordance with the injunction to ‘know your enemy’. Such a geographical imaginary – when it organises academic work – is both politically consequential in one way and also depoliticising in another. Edward Said names it ‘Orientalism’, of course; and I feel confident that I do not at this point need to digress into a lesson on Orientalism. But one consequence of the regionalisation of knowledge according to national borders is its essentialism. And essentialism – as much as it can be shown to be politically consequential – is also depoliticising; in that it works to reinforce the idea that national cultures, with their histories and their languages, organised by borders, are expressions of a cultural essence, with culture regarded as a treasure trove of history to be revered. In this framework, only the past is authentic. The past is superior. The present is corrupt. And specific cultural studies of specific cultures become inclined to evaluate contemporary cultural productions in terms of how well they fare against the values imputed to the past. And this transforms the very definition of, say, literature, or music or art – precluding it from being assessed as a critical or political discourse, and demanding that it be an expression of an authentic culture – an authentic culture that it will inevitably be doomed to fail to live up to, because of the fact that it is contemporary and alive and therefore corrupted by the present complexity of the interconnected, ever-crossing-over world.
REGIONALITY
But, the retort may come: ok, so maybe we can deconstruct the idea of regional cultures and regional practices and regional texts, like film, because everything is increasingly transnational – for instance, in film financing, film distribution, film production teams, film values, film talent, and so on. But on the other hand, there are obviously regional film industries and histories and institutions and realities. So, how are we to engage with the ongoing reality of this self-evident regionality? If we ignore it on the basis of its complicity with either Orientalist or imperialist or otherwise nationalist processes, are we not ignoring a significant political fact about regional film? After all, does not even a cultural theorist like Rey Chow, who prominently problematises regionalising perspectives, herself write entire books about Chinese film, even as she points to pitfalls and problems of nationalising film studies and essentialising cultures along nationalistic lines and within Eurocentric and colonial conceptual universes? So, if we want to listen to Chow and learn a lesson from Chow, how then do we negotiate the paradox opened by two of her key cautions – first, the caution against falling into the ‘area studies trap’, of nationalising, homogenising and essentialising culture along national and ethnic lines (1993; 1998); while, second, treating film as ethnography, as she also proposes (1995)?
Chow herself resolves the paradox of her twin yet apparently contradictory injunctions – on the one hand, do not ethnographise film; but on the other hand, approach film as ethnography – by elaborating what we now too easily call a deconstruction of the notion of both ethnography and – ultimately – of translation, and specifically of what she calls cultural translation.
This is not simply a deconstruction because although she certainly deconstructs ethnography and anthropology, she does not really ‘deconstruct’ translation or cultural translation. In actual fact, she turns Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man’s own deconstructions of translation against them in order to show the limitations of their approach, or rather, the points at which they stop. She does this to show that what she calls the negative impulse – the rigorous but negative critical energy of deconstruction – cannot really engage with the specificity of the film medium itself. And this is the important task, she argues: because this is where the action is.
To say that Chow does not deconstruct is not quite right, however. She definitely advocates the need to deconstruct nativism, primitivism, regionalism, ethno-nationalism, and so on. She certainly wants to deconstruct the tacit idea that there is an original text, for instance or, more than that an original before any particular text; an original that the text is trying to represent, communicate, or indeed ‘translate’. This is why she regularly points to the criticisms levelled against globally successful filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou – in order to show the ways that most of the criticisms made against these directors are based on the idea that their textual productions are unfaithful representations of some true depth and essence of China. Ultimately, she suggests, such criticisms are based on a self-essentialising which follows from a belief that there is an essence or an underlying truth to China that needs to be (yet cannot fully be) translated with accuracy and fidelity into filmic form.
But every text is a construct, Chow reminds us. Every text. And this includes the pre-text of a nation, such as China. So Chow certainly deconstructs the idea and relation of original to copy. But she takes her leave from deconstruction when she notices that the readings of the deconstructionists are so much orientated towards the past (at least the etymological past) and hence towards some sense of the prior and original – even if deconstruction also shows that the original text is a failed or incomplete or unsutured text. The point, for Chow, lies in the orientation towards the past as such. For such an orientation means that, even though the deconstructionists deconstruct the original text, they still believe in it, and look to the past to find it.
This is a problem for Chow, for lots of reasons, but mainly because if one orientates one’s reading towards the past then the present is always going to look like an inferior, corrupt and bad copy: a bad translation. So, instead of going down this line, Chow insists, one needs always to remember that even the putative original is always and already an unoriginal construction, a fragment made up of fragments. So, one should orientate one’s reading or valuation of it in terms of its effects on and within the present. In going down this line, Chow foregrounds the work of Walter Benjamin.
CULTURAL TRANSLATION
The key moment in Chow’s elaboration of a theory of cultural translation comes when she quotes a long passage of Walter Benjamin quoting Rudolph Pannwitz. Pannwitz writes, as Benjamin and Chow both point out:
Our translations, even the best ones, proceed into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. & The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. (Quoted in Chow 1995: 188–9)
I think it may be harder to see or imagine what this might mean in written language or literary culture than it is to see what it might mean in film language and visual culture. Indeed, I think that it is easy to see the ways that not only the supposed ‘best’ but also even the (arguable) ‘worst’ films deftly, happily, joyously and fluidly translate from one film language to another, from one genre to another, from one regional semiotic or technical vernacular to another. In other words, what I am arguing here is that you see this sort of cultural translation all the time, in which an importation (a copy from or of an ‘origin’) intervenes into and modifies a milieu (a ‘destination’, a context, a present). Such interventions or translations or crossovers are inevitably in one sense unfaithful betrayals of a former state, but equally – as Chow concludes – in another sense respectful reiterations and animating breaths of new life, even if that life is a transformation, an afterlife.
So, I am suggesting that a film like Batman Begins is best approached not in terms of a paradigm of simple appropriation but in terms of a thinking of cultural translation. The film is certainly an index of the effects that the translation of Oriental style into Hollywood continues to have in film. But if we think of it as an appropriation or an implicitly unjust expropriation of something quintessentially Oriental, I think that we are sentencing ourselves to operate according to problematic assumptions about culture as property or underlying essence rather than process or productive event.
Of course, features of this process do also indicate the extent to which Western discourses often seek to appropriate and to claim ownership and mastery of practices that might more organically be connected with other cultures. Gary Krug, for instance, has written a fascinating study of the American appropriation of Okinawan karate – a long discursive process, he lays out, which culminates in events like the peculiar case of an America-based martial arts association expressing outrage and refusing to recognise the authority of Okinawan and Japanese martial artists in the same style to award the highest dan-grades without the consent of the US association. In other words, the US-based association bearing the name of a formerly and concurrently Okinawan martial art now regards itself as holding the ultimate authority and being the sole institution with the power to award the grade of tenth dan to anyone. The Okinawan practitioners are regarded by the American association as no longer able to legislate on their own activities (see Krug 2001).
So crossovers do often entail crossings-out and discursive controversy. There was always controversy at the heart of Bruce Lee’s crossings-over, from Hong Kong to Hollywood and from Wing Chun to Jun Fan to Jeet Kune Do. And, of course, at the pinnacle – the explosion – the crossroads – of Lee’s crossover, he died. In the wake of his untimely demise, Hollywood hungered for more Oriental or Oriental-esque martial choreography. More importantly, it hungered not just for exotic choreography, but also for more of the Bruce Lee style of authenticity in choreography. The fast, the ferocious, and the beautiful; not the robotic rhythms of kata but the believable spectacle (the unbelievable-believable).
There were always a range of styles of martial choreographies on offer. But one style rose to dominance, trampolining to prominence especially but not solely after the entrance into film of Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon. For, Brandon had studied Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee’s friend and student, Dan Inosanto. Moreover, Brandon studied JKD along with his own friend and contemporary Jeff Imada. And Jeff Imada, who was working in the film industry, helped out prominently with Brandon Lee’s own films and then went on to become the stunt and fight choreographer for an extremely long list of Hollywood films.
What this means is that it is possible to trace a strong connection between – and a largely untold story of – Hollywood fight choreography per se (or tout court) and Dan Inosanto’s school of Jeet Kune Do. And one thing that is particularly under-acknowledged in this regard is the fact that, whilst Bruce Lee preached interdisciplinarity and innovation in martial arts research, he also always insisted that Dan Inosanto himself should respect and champion the martial arts of his parent culture – the Philippines (a place that Inosanto himself is not actually from). Accordingly, Inosanto has always studied and championed a wide range of martial arts of the Philippines.
Now, what is perhaps even less widely acknowledged is the extent to which it is these Filipino arts – specifically Filipino Kali and Eskrima – that we see depicted in film after film after film from Hollywood. A multitude of Hollywood films with the most memorable martial arts choreography have involved Imada in choreographing role. So we might want to rush to a conclusion about the presence of the Filipino arts in Hollywood. But there is more. For what is perhaps most peculiar about many of the films that could be said to be full of Filipino martial arts is the extent to which the choreography within them is represented as if it is non-Eastern, as if it is entirely deracinated, connected with either ‘the US military’, ‘Special Forces’ or ‘the street’ – specifically, of course, the US street. There is little if any mention or acknowledgement of the Filipino connection – of the fact that these putatively deracinated, universal, logical, rational, Western martial arts – as best seen in The Bourne Identity trilogy, for instance, is not simply universal or US, but rather Filipino.
But what about Batman Begins? The founders of KFM are adamant that their art comes ‘from the street’, and that it is ‘for the street’. What they neglect to mention nowadays is that these selfsame founders of KFM, who choreographed Batman Begins, are also – or were formerly – qualified instructors of Dan Inosanto’s school of Jeet Kune Do. This is a branch of JKD which is heavily informed by Filipino Kali. And a quick look at the current appearance of Filipino Kali shows it to be, in many respects, very much like that of KFM.
There is a lot that could be said about this. One thing would be the observation that the ‘east winds’ that are blowing here are not following the same course between Hong Kong and Hollywood and back again that they once were, in what was once a very visible interaction of regional styles and practices. Now there appears to be some kind of movement between Hollywood and the Philippines, but via two American-born, American-living, American-working but ethnically-Asian martial artist choreographers (Dan Inosanto and Jeff Imada). This movement now proceeds according to what we might call a less straightforward, less visible and less regionally-specifiable crossover.
Another thing of note is the problematic double-status of the martial arts formerly known as Filipino: on the one hand, they are clearly a dominant force, one that is arguably hegemonic within Hollywood action choreography; but on the other hand, as this ‘ethnicity’ is largely unknown or unrepresented, and because what aficionados might recognise as Filipino is not marked as Filipino and is depicted instead as if it is the height of rational US military or street efficiency, then Filipino martial arts might be regarded as simply the most exploited work force in town. In either case, whether ‘hegemonisation’ or ‘exploitation’, this new formation has clearly involved a crossing out or erasing of an earlier ethnic or cultural identity.
But does it matter? Am I an ambassador for Filipino martial arts, wanting to right the wrong of under-acknowledgement, or wanting to right the historical record by publicising the cultural lineage of the martial arts choreography? I am not, and the point of all of this is not just nit-picking or being pedantic for the sake of it or for the sake of raising consciousness or awareness. The point is rather to draw attention to the processuality of culture and to the constitutive character not just of the textual productions – the cultural translations – but also the often unpredictable, often overdetermined nature of the networks that are constructed before, around and in the wake of them. As Fredric Jameson (1991) once said of the postmodern condition: in facing it, we must resist the temptation to judge it good or bad, because to judge it is a category mistake. It’s just the way it is. Traditions, networks and relations are constitutively mediated and mediatised. Cultures no longer have self-evident and self-identical layers, depths, surfaces and properties. Instead of properties cultures are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through proper-ties and improper-ties: connections, linkages, articulations and reticulations. As Ernesto Laclau once put it, writing in the context of political theory:
[We] gain very little, once identities are conceived as complexly articulated collective wills, by referring to them through simple designations such as classes, ethnic groups and so on, which are at best names for transient points of stabilization. The really important task, is to understand the logics of their constitution and dissolution, as well as the formal determinations of the spaces in which they interrelate. (2000: 53)
In the face of the globality of the ‘space’ of the cinematic apparatus, Jane Park is absolutely right to focus on the blurring and crossing over of Oriental and Western styles. The ‘east winds’ are still blowing strongly, so much so that the ‘East Asian’ of ‘East Asian Cinema’ is no longer in its supposed ‘proper place’ or existing within its supposed ‘proper ties’, but is now at the heart of cultural crossovers of such complexity that region, space, location, ethnicity and identity should now all be approached as cross-cut, cross-hatched, crossed-over, cross-fertilised, crossed out and underlined, in ways that should oblige the study of film culture to blow the cover of any conflation of culture, identity, value or significance with nation, location, language, ethnicity and other essences.
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