Table Of Content
Theorizing Bruce Lee
Contemporary Cinema 5
Series Editors
Ernest Mathijs & Steven Jay Schneider
Assistant
Andrew deWaard
Editorial Advisory Board:
Martin Barker (University of Wales-Aberystwyth)
Wanda Bershen (Founder, Red Diaper Productions)
Mark Betz (University of London, King’s College)
David Bordwell (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Sean Cubitt (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Roger Garcia (Former Director, Hong Kong International Film
Festival)
Joke Hermes (University of Amsterdam)
Jim Hillier (University of Reading)
Mark Jancovich (University of East Anglia)
Douglas Kellner (University of California-Los Angeles)
Soyoung Kim (Korean National University of Arts)
Amy Kronish (Consultant in Jewish & Israeli Film)
Barney Oldfield (General Manager, Angelika Entertainment)
Murray Pomerance (Ryerson University, Canada)
Michael Renov (University of Southern California)
David Schwartz (Chief Curator of Film, American Museum of
the Moving Image)
M.M. Serra (Executive Director, Film-Makers Cooperative)
J. David Slocum (New York University)
Christina Stojanova (University of Regina, Canada)
Kristin Thompson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Contemporary Cinema is a series of edited volumes and
single-authored texts focusing on the latest in film culture, theory,
reception and interpretation. There is a concentration on films released
in the past fifteen years, and the aim is to reflect important current
issues while pointing to others that to date have not been given sufficient
attention.
Theorizing Bruce Lee
Film-Fantasy-Fighting-Philosophy
Paul Bowman
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
For Keira and Lilly, whose first reactions to seeing Bruce Lee
I will never forget
Institutional support:
The Centre for Cinema Studies, Department of Theatre and Film,
University of British Columbia
Cover illustration: Design by Andrew deWaard, based on Bruce Lee
Action Figure package illustration by Enterbay, based on still from
Game of Death (Copyright Universal Studios).
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements
of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2777-0
E-Book: 978-90-420-2778-7
ISSN: 1572-3070
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
User Guide: Main Menu
Warning .......................................................................................... 3
Language Selection ........................................................................ 4
Scene Selection ............................................................................... 5
Special Features .............................................................................. 6
Chapter One – Introduction:
Theorizing Bruce Lee, Sublime Object of Academia
Stereotyping Bruce Lee: Trivia, Clichés and Provocations ............ 7
Brushes with Bruce Lee as Body .................................................. 11
The Bruce Lee(s) Cultural Revolution ......................................... 15
Postmodern Post-Mortem ............................................................. 19
Eastern Orientation, Western Bias ................................................ 24
Dialectic of Martial Enlightenment .............................................. 33
Sporting Mysticism ...................................................................... 39
What’s Your Style? The Problem of Disciplinarity ...................... 43
‘My Style?’ The Disciplined Production of Difference ................ 45
‘The art of fighting without fighting?’ .......................................... 50
‘Fighting without Fighting’:
Interdisciplinarity, Bruce Lee and Multiculturalism ..................... 53
‘The First American-Produced Martial Arts Spectacular!’
Bruce Lee as Ideology .................................................................. 57
‘Show me some of it!’ The Way of Authenticity ......................... 61
‘These styles become institutes’:
The (Political) Institution of Culture ............................................ 63
Chapter Two – Film-Fantasy:
The Communication of Screen Violence
Keeping it Real ............................................................................. 67
Seeing the Violence ...................................................................... 73
The ‘Communication’ of Bruce Lee ............................................. 85
It Hits All By Itself ....................................................................... 93
Don’t Concentrate on the Finger! ............................................... 101
Bruce Lee and the (re)wiring of masculinity .............................. 103
My Dad’s Bruce Lee................................................................... 113
Chapter Three – Fantasy-Fighting
Revenge Fantasies, East and West.............................................. 119
Sick Men of Asia, and Other Animals:
Or: Contingency, Universality and Narcissistic Violence .......... 124
Violence and Vanity ................................................................... 130
The Semiotics of the Spectacle ................................................... 137
Martial Myths and Spectacles ..................................................... 146
The Martial Arts Pleasure Principle ........................................... 149
Interpellating the Dragon ............................................................ 151
The Symbolic Structure of Game of Death ................................ 155
Be Like Water:
Bruce Lee’s Bamboo from Kill Bill to Fight Club ..................... 158
Bruce Lee’s Nunchakus .............................................................. 161
Chapter Four – Fighting-Philosophy
Filming Philosophy: Like a Finger Pointing Away to an Icon ... 165
Bruce Lee’s Body of Philosophy ................................................ 169
The Undecidability of Bruce Lee ............................................... 172
The Interpretation of Bruce Lee ................................................. 175
The Essence of Bruce Lee .......................................................... 179
The Institutions of Bruce Lee ..................................................... 183
The Time of Bruce Lee ............................................................... 189
Postmodern Buddha Syndrome:
The Interlocution of Bruce Lee................................................... 192
The Bruce Lee Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Marketing ..... 196
The Interpellation of Bruce Lee .................................................. 205
The Lesson of Bruce Lee ............................................................ 208
Forget Teaching and Learning .................................................... 224
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 231
Filmography .......................................................................................... 245
Index ...................................................................................................... 247
User Guide: Main Menu
Warning
At the start of Enter the Dragon (1973), Bruce Lee delivers one of his
most famous lines: ‘it is like a finger pointing away to the moon’. The
status of this aphorism and indeed the meaning of the lesson that Lee
seems to be delivering when he says the words are contentious: is this a
platitude or a profundity, a cliché or a koan, a riddle or ridiculousness? Is
it mystical philosophy, an intercultural encounter, or a cynical parody – a
synthetic simulation? This is a complicated matter to decide. In an analy-
sis of some of the occurrences of the finger pointing to the moon riddle in
Zen Buddhist writings (yet without ever mentioning or indicating an
awareness of Bruce Lee), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes that Western
education largely proceeds by ‘assuming that every lesson can be divided
into ever more bite-sized, ever more assimilable bits’. The ‘wisdom tradi-
tions’ of Buddhism, on the other hand, principally ‘assume that students
have already surmounted a fairly high threshold of recognition’ (2003:
171-2). The book you are currently reading, Theorizing Bruce Lee:
Film—Fantasy—Fighting—Philosophy, makes a similar assumption. It
assumes that readers have an awareness of Bruce Lee, his films, and
probably even some sense of quite how dramatic and significant his en-
trance was – not just in the realms of film but also in those of cultural
fantasies as well as in terms of the proliferation and development of mar-
tial arts. Indeed, as we have already seen, his impact may even be felt in
philosophy itself. All of this is as much as to say that the assumption or-
ganising this book is that to study or theorize Bruce Lee cannot proceed
according to ‘ever more bite-sized, ever more assimilable bits’, because it
requires the simultaneous engagement with issues to do not only with
4 Theorizing Bruce Lee
film, philosophy, fighting, popular culture, and issues in postcolonialism
related principally to ethnic Chinese diasporic consciousness in the 1960s
and 1970s, but also to questions of intercultural exchange, encounters,
and so on. As this book’s subheading and chapter titles announce, the
hypothesis organising Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film—Fantasy—Fighting—
Philosophy is that in the case of a complex object (or field) like Bruce
Lee, these coordinates are interrelated and interimplicated; they cannot
simply be separated, but must instead be engaged in relation to each
other. Of course, things become even more complicated when one real-
ises that each of these coordinates – film, fantasy, fighting, philosophy –
exists in not just one but several academic disciplinary languages. At the
same time, they are engaged – in multiple and mutually contradictory
ways – in popular cultural discourses. So, to state it as directly as possi-
ble: this is going to be messy.
Language Selection
Inevitably, there are going to be a huge range of voices and ‘languages’
involved here. As well as Bruce Lee’s films and published writings there
are the words of his friends and students. There are films and practices
inspired or informed by Bruce Lee. There are academic studies of Lee in
several disciplines, and many more which use, mention or involve Lee in
a supplementary manner. There are different ways of approaching and
engaging with his films, his writings, his martial arts, his epoch, his sig-
nificance and his legacy. This book cannot speak in all of these languages
all of the time. Moreover, it cannot simply let all voices be heard, unfil-
tered, unedited or unproduced. So, on the one hand, I must inevitably
quote from many different ‘languages’, or texts that use wildly differing
frameworks and registers, but on the other hand, I must inevitably prefer
certain styles, orientations and registers over others, and translate a ca-
cophony into a coherent utterance, intelligible to certain ears, in terms of
particular concerns. This is another way of saying that although not eve-
ryone is going to approve, this book is written in the academic language
of contemporary cultural studies, and the many voices, perspectives and
positions referenced and discussed in it are largely going to be engaged in
terms of the questions and issues that circulate within and constitute this
User Guide 5
messy discursive field. So, as much as non-academics may baulk at such
a treatment of Bruce Lee, it remains the case that the academic language
of cultural studies is arguably the lingua franca of the contemporary
Western (and increasingly global) arts and humanities. So, to state it as
discursively as possible: this is actually going to be tidy.
Scene Selection
Each of the four chapters is a largely discrete entity which could be read
in isolation, and the book could conceivably be read in any order. How-
ever, the book has been designed to be read from start to finish, insofar as
Chapter One is the most introductory and each subsequent chapter builds
on, emphasizes different aspects of, deepens or develops away from ar-
guments and ideas laid down earlier. So the choice of scene selection is
yours, although the recommendation is that you ‘play all’. However, the
book does not deal with Bruce Lee in a linear or biographical manner.
Chapters turn and return to several key moments, scenarios, ideas, ques-
tions and themes, and they approach them with different emphases, in
different styles, according to different optics: the opening scenes of Enter
the Dragon; the fight with Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon; the na-
tionalism of Fist of Fury; the significance of nunchakus; Bruce Lee’s his-
torical and cultural ‘locations’ (1960s Hollywood and Hong Kong, in par-
ticular); Lee’s antidisciplinary critique of martial arts styles and institu-
tions and his interdisciplinary approach to martial arts; the ‘philosophy’
of jeet kune do, the interpellative and subjectivizing force of Lee’s image
and movements, etc. These scenes and problematics have been selected
because of their exemplarity: they exemplify ongoing issues in film stud-
ies, postcolonialism, cultural and political theory, and cultural studies.
Indeed, this is my primary reason for studying and writing a book about
Bruce Lee in the first place. Theorizing Bruce Lee raises questions and
proposes insights – for film studies, cultural studies, identity studies,
postcolonial studies, and beyond – that are both fundamental and ongo-
ing, generative and unresolved, constitutive and contemporary.
