ǁ Lee, Bruce Lı̌ Xiǎolóng ᴢᇣ啡 1940–1973—Kung fu movie star and martial arts cult idol Alternate names: b. Lee Jun-fan ᴢᤃ㮽; simpl. ᴢᇣ啭 Summary S ince his premature death in 1973, Bruce Lee has exerted a profound inluence on global popular culture. His international stardom derived from a string of highly proitable kung fu movies produced in Hong Kong during the 1970s: The Big Boss ૤ቅ໻‫( ܘ‬1971), Fist of Fury ㊒℺䭔 (1972), The Way of the Dragon⣯啡䘢∳(1972), Enter the Dragon 啡⠁㰢價(1973), and Game of Death ⅏ѵ 䘞᠆ (1978). With the success of these ilms, Lee effectively globalized the • 255 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • Lee, Bruce • Bruce Lee found worldwide fame as a kung fu movie star in the 1970s. A succession of popular Hong Kong ilms at the start of the decade (including Fist of Fury) launched his reputation and led to the Hollywood-produced Enter the Dragon, which showcased his talents for a Western audience. His mysterious death in 1973, aged thirty-two, turned him into a cult igure, and his inluence continues to permeate popular culture around the globe. martial arts genre. A worldwide wave of “kung fu fever” attended the international release of Enter the Dragon (a Hong Kong-US coproduction), and martial arts spectacle has since become central to Hollywood action cinema. One aspect of Lee’s global importance is the change he precipitated in Hollywood’s racial depictions. His prominence prompted Hollywood to relect upon its ignominious history of Orientalist stereotyping and racial discrimination. Lee also pioneered an inluential martial arts system (Jeet Kune Do ៾ᣇ䘧, or “The Way of the Intercepting Fist”). His star image, moreover, has informed more cultural texts (ilms, songs, television shows, comic books) than is possible to canvass. By the time Lee achieved global renown, his screen persona had already crystallized. His physique was breathtaking and remains an object of fascination, a prime source of his ilms’ spectacle. His sculpted, angular face was highly expressive, and he soon developed a repertoire of trademark facial gestures: a • Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography • Volume 4 • skeptically cocked eyebrow, a chastened pout, a twitch of the nostrils meant to convey indignation or contempt. In his scenes of physical combat—all of which Lee choreographed—he combines whipcrack speed and explosive force with an animalistic caterwaul, his muscular, sinewy body taut with emotion. At times he punctuates a lurry of high kicks with a staccato shufle, displaying the limber gait of a boxer. The ights themselves harbor emotional complexity. For Lee’s protagonists, to kill is to become wrought with rage and remorse: when he eliminates an enemy in Fist of Fury, he clutches his own trembling ist as if to quell the elemental rage within. Characteristically, the Bruce Lee protagonist is •ᴢᇣ啡• Selected Filmography of Bruce Lee Year English Title 1941 Golden Gate Girl 1950 The Kid/My Son A-Chang 1960 The Orphan 1966-67 Chinese Title Director Notes Esther Eng Fung Fung Role: Ah-Cheung Sun-Fung Lee Role: Ah Sam The Green Hornet George W. Trendle (Creator) TV Show Role: Kato 1969 Marlowe Paul Bogart Role: Winslow Wong 1971 The Big Boss Wei Lo Role: Cheng Chao-an 1972 Fist of Fury Wei Lo Role: Chen Zhen 1972 The Way of the Dragon ⣯啡䘢∳ Měng lóng guò jiaˉng Bruce Lee Role: Tang Lung 1973 Enter the Dragon 啡⠁㰢價 Lóng zheˉng hǔ dòu Robert Clouse Role: Lee 1978 Game of Death ⅏ѵ䘞᠆ Sı̌wáng yóuxì Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung, Robert Clouse Role: Billy Lo ㌄䏃⼹ Xì lù xiáng Ҏ⍋ᄸ匏 Rén hǎi guˉ hóng ૤ቅ໻‫ܘ‬ Táng shaˉn dà xioˉng ㊒℺䭔 Jıˉ ng wǔ mén • 256 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • 1979–Present • unremittingly virtuous, typically chaste, and an outsider even among his own comrades. The Road to Global Stardom Bruce Lee (right) in his role as Kato, together with actor Van Williams, in the ABC television series The Green Hornet (1966). • 257 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • Lee, Bruce • The son of a successful Cantonese opera actor, Lee was born in San Francisco on 27 November 1940. He made his ilm debut as an infant in the US production Golden Gate Girl (1941), before the Lee family relocated to Hong Kong in 1941. More ilm roles followed during his childhood, and he soon became a favorite of the Cantonese cinema. He won local fame in The Kid, also known as My Son A-Chang ㌄䏃⼹ (1950), in which he revealed himself an eccentric and endearing performer. The ilm puts on display what would later become Lee trademarks: the affectation of bravado and hubris; the penchant for buffoonery and mimicry; the marginalized, poorly educated, destitute igure vulnerable to deception. Above all, the ledgling actor delivers a highly physical performance, itting for a star later to espouse “the art of expressing the human body.” A series of Cantonese melodramas during the 1950s culminated in The Orphan Ҏ⍋ᄸ匏 (1960), a social-problem drama featuring Lee as an ah fei (juvenile delinquent). This ilm can be seen as an update of The Kid, and here again Lee animates his role physically. He deftly implies that the delinquent’s posture of cool indifference is too studied to be sincere, hinting at frailty beneath a youthful machismo. In 1959, Lee returned to America, seeking stardom. Instead he encountered institutional racism and Yellow Peril paranoia (i.e., Western fear of Asian invasion and supremacy). On screen, Hollywood’s Orientalist stereotypes held sway. Asians were routinely depicted as grotesques (Dr. Fu Manchu) or quasi-mystics (Charlie Chan); moreover, these roles were invariably portrayed by Caucasian actors in “yellow face” (Oriental-style make-up). In this context, few Asian actors found work. Lee illed his time opening martial arts schools on the west coast, recruiting several Hollywood celebrities. Gradually his proile increased, and he won a major role in ABC’s The Green Hornet series • Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography • Volume 4 • (1966–1967). Lee’s character (Kato) was both progressive and problematic, on the one hand a depiction of Asian heroism, on the other hand a racist recycling of the indentured man-servant topos. Moreover, though the series rejected the convention of yellow face, it still relied on cross-ethnic casting (Kato is putatively Japanese). Stymied by Hollywood prejudice, Lee returned to Hong Kong in 1970, accepting a two-picture deal at the newly formed Golden Harvest studio. •ᴢᇣ啡• Bruce Lee’s Chinese Nationalism By 1970, the martial arts genre dominated Hong Kong’s ilm industry. The swordplay ilms (wǔxiá piaˉn ℺մ⠛) produced by the Shaw Brothers studio established a tradition of highly stylized Mandarin-language action cinema. Formulaic plots depicted lying swordsmen capable of evincing “palm power,” their hands emitting potent energy rays. Febrile zoom shots, accelerated motion, saturated color, and wirework conspired to create a ictional world far removed from reality. An emergent strain of kung fu cinema retained these aesthetic features, even as it substituted ists and feet for bladed weaponry. What these martial arts ilms lacked in realism they compensated for through sheer visual brio. Into this milieu came Bruce Lee, whose kung fu ilms not only developed out of this wuxia tradition but departed from it as well. Lee sought to revolutionize the martial arts ilm, but he did not radically break with local norms of action cinema. On the one hand, he innovated a realist mode of kung fu ilmmaking, seeking verisimilitude at all levels of narration. He dispensed almost entirely with the hoists, pulleys, and trampolines responsible for the remarkable feats of Shaw Brothers heroes, favoring instead an action style grounded in plausibility. He jettisoned palm power, lying, and other outlandish conventions. He also promoted the use of actual locations, rejecting the local custom of ilming outdoor scenes in the studio. Under Lee’s aegis, director Lo Wei subdued the wuxia pian’s feverishness. Both The Big Boss and Fist of Fury demote and decelerate the genre’s ubiquitous zoom shot, and substitute a naturalistic color palette for a brightly embroidered set design. If the wuxia directors sacriiced realism for impact, Lee created impact through realism. Pledged to authenticity, he downgraded the wuxia’s outré elements in pursuit of stronger affect. Lee preserved the nationalistic tenor of the wuxia ilm, and even intensiied it. Revenge—a mainstay of the wuxia plot— is in Lee’s ilms predicated on national and racial conlict, the retribution meted by Lee’s hero a reaction to racial slurs against the Chinese. He often demonstrates national superiority by pitting his abilities against foreign opponents. In Fist of Fury, Lee and his compatriots suffer harsh indignities under Japanese occupation: at a Shanghai Bund park, a • 258 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • 1979–Present • Japanese culture. Moreover, his Mandarinlanguage ilms tend to conlate Hong Kong and mainland China, making his cultural heritage ambiguous. From one angle, Lee’s eclectic persona undermines his claim to authentic, archetypal Chineseness. Yet it is precisely Lee’s cultural heterogeneity that ensures his enduring and far-reaching inluence. His cultural ambiguity admits multiple points of identiication. Diasporic audiences ind an afinity through Lee’s wayfaring protagonists, always adrift and struggling to assimilate to an alien culture (e.g., Thailand in The Big Boss, Italy in The Way of the Dragon). Other immigrant and ethnic groups, including African Americans and Hispanics, have appropriated Lee as a locus of inter-ethnic identiication. For these groups, Lee signiies not so much Chinese superiority as racial empowerment, the triumph of the ethnic minority over foreign (white) persecutors. At the same time that this act of appropriation deracinates Lee and displaces his nationalism, it guarantees his widespread popular appeal—an ethnic rather than Chinese subject, a victor over oppressors, a igure of identiication for disenfranchised peoples everywhere. His unexplained death on 20 July 1973 in Hong Kong triggered genuine disbelief, not least because at age thirtytwo he epitomized youthful vitality and physical excellence, but this only added to his fame. Lee’s cultural identity was repurposed even further after his death, in movies such as Quentin Tarantino’s • 259 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • Lee, Bruce • sign declares “No dogs and Chinese allowed,” while another character disparages the Chinese as “the sick men of Asia.” That Lee defeats his Japanese oppressors using a pair of Japanese nunchakus—a two-sectioned staff, the star’s customary weapon—is signiicant, the hero asserting Chinese superiority by routing the Japanese with their own weaponry. Lee more generally pushed Chinese cultural nationalism into the iber of his persona. Like the wuxia warriors, Lee’s protagonists embrace an ethical creed rooted in Chinese philosophy (Buddhism, Daoism). Their physical prowess, moreover, springs from a speciically Chinese form of physical training and combat: kung fu. In body and mind, Lee came to personify China, exemplifying “Chineseness” for a local audience receptive to positive depictions of Chinese identity. (This persona differed sharply from Hollywood’s Orientalist stereotypes and it is inconceivable that Lee could have cultivated it in Hollywood during this period.) Lee’s Chineseness, however, is far from simple or univocal. Though ethnically Chinese, he was born and partly educated in America, and he claimed US citizenship. His screen roles could be strange cultural hybrids: Kato in The Green Hornet is an English-speaking Asian superhero who dresses in a Mao jacket and bears a Japanese name. Lee’s trademark nunchakus and battle cry (the kiai, derived from Japanese karate) tether his ighting technique at least partly to •ᴢᇣ啡• • Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography • Volume 4 • Kill Bill (2003), in which the vigilante heroine dresses in a yellow tracksuit famous from Lee’s Game of Death. Here again the Lee icon serves as shorthand not for Chineseness but for emancipation and agency (in this case, of women navigating a brutally masculinist milieu). A posthumous exploitation industry coalesced in the mid-1970s, comprised partly of low-grade movies—labeled by critics as Bruceploitation cinema—that tapped Lee’s global popularity. Representative titles include Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave (1976) and The Dragon Lives Again (1977), and starred so-called clones bearing names such as Bruce Li, Bruce Le, or Bruce Thai. As one critic puts it, “With his death, Lee became an object, even a fetish” (Teo 1997, 120). The point here is not only that Lee’s nationalism becomes lost in the welter, but that the “Bruce Lee persona” now extends far beyond the ilms that Lee himself made. From the start his image was highly polysemous, but the signiications it has accrued in the decades since his death are impossible to enumerate. His cultural cachet shows no signs of waning. A statue in his image on Kowloon’s waterfront attracts a regular low of visitors. New audiences continue to discover his ilms. His popularity straddles several ields—cinema, sports, philosophy. Even the Bruceploitation juggernaut rumbles on, albeit elevated to a more prestigious form. Remakes, biopics, and spin-offs, including Fist of Legend (1994), Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), The Green Hornet (2011), and Portrait of Bruce Lee’s real-life kungfu master Ip Man. Photo by Dever. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (2010), pay respectful homage to Lee’s oeuvre and present putative heirs to his legacy (*Jet Li ᴢ䖲ᵄ, Jason Scott Lee, Jay Chou, Donnie Yen). A cluster of Hong Kong ilms centered on Ip Man 㨝ଣ, Lee’s real-life shıˉfu ᏿ٙ (martial-arts teacher) have also leveraged Lee’s cult status. Ip Man (2008), Ip Man 2 (2010), and Ip Man: The Final Fight (2013) have furnished Hong Kong cinema with a new mythic hero, one cast in the Bruce *People marked with an asterisk have entries in this dictionary. • 260 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • 1979–Present • Lee mold: devoutly patriotic, repelling imperial enemies, and exemplifying the virtues of the classic knights-errant. The canonization of Ip Man continued in *Wong Kar-wai’s ⥟ᆊ㸯 (b. 1958) meditative biopic The Grandmaster (Yıˉ dài zoˉng shıˉ ϔҷᅫ᏿, 2013), which incorporates a crowd-pleasing albeit oblique allusion to the pre-adolescent Lee. As ilm scholar Paul Bowman notes, “Lee has a kind of spectral and structural presence in [these] ilms, even if they are not literally about him” (Bowman 2014, 29). More than forty years after his death, Bruce Lee remains the spiritual father of Chinese martial arts cinema. Further Reading Bettinson, Gary. (Ed.). (2012). Directory of world cinema: China. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Press. Bowman, Paul. (2014). Fists of Bruce Lee: Shanghai’s martial arts ilm legacy. In John Berra & Wei Ju (Eds.), World ilm locations: Shanghai (pp. 28–29). Bristol & Chicago: Intellect Press. Bowman, Paul. (2010). Theorizing Bruce Lee: Filmfantasy-ighting-philosophy. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Glaessner, Verina. (1974). Kung Fu: Cinema of vengeance. Norfolk, CT: Bounty Books. Hunt, Leon. (2014). Bruce Lee. In Gary Bettinson (Ed.), Directory of world cinema: China 2 (pp. 53–56). Bristol & Chicago: Intellect Press. Hunt, Leon. (2003). Kung fu cult masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger. London: Walllower Press. Li Cheuk-to, & Keith Chan. (Eds.). (2010). Bruce Lee lives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong International Film Festival Society. Li Cheuk-to (Ed.). (1984). A study of Hong Kong cinema in the seventies (1970–1979). Hong Kong: HKIFF/Urban Council. Little, John. (1998). Bruce Lee: The art of expressing the human body. Boston & Vermont & Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing. Little, John. (2000). Bruce Lee: The celebrated life of the golden dragon. Boston: Tuttle Publishing. Miller, Davis. (2000). The Tao of Bruce Lee. London: Vintage. Teo, Stephen. (1997). Hong Kong: The extra dimensions. London: BFI. Thomas, Bruce. (1997). Bruce Lee: Fighting spirit. London: Pan Books. • 261 • www.berkshirepublishing.com © 2016 BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP, all rights reserved. • Lee, Bruce • Gary BETTINSON Lancaster University Bordwell, David. (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular cinema and the art of entertainment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.