From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture

3. Mutiny in the Global Village: Bruce Lee Meets Jimi Hendrix

And when the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. —Chief Seattle (1853) While the countdown to the end of the millennium was feeding popular imagination with the possibility of global catastrophe, smoke and tear gas rose in Seattle where the battle over the legitimacy of global capitalism took place. The home of Microsoft and Boeing, Seattle hosted the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a formidable supra-governmental vanguard for transnational corporate power. Fifty thousand protesters halted the meeting, sending a sobering sense of reality back to the popular consciousness amid the hype of the millennium turnover. The diversity of individuals , groups, and organizations involved in the protest—ranging from labor, environmentalist, indigenous, feminist, gay and lesbian movements, AIDS activists, consumer advocates, animal rights activists to militant anarchists —exposed one of the great ironies of global capitalism: the expansion of the sphere of exploitation removes the barriers from among the oppressed. In other words, the global reach of transnational corporate power inevitably opens up the possibility of global popular alliances to arise. When the people’s power converged in Seattle confronted police force armed with chemical weapons and “forced the WTO to cancel its closing ceremony, without an 71 CHAPTER THREE Mutiny in the Global Village Bruce Lee Meets Jimi Hendrix agenda for continuity,” the “Battle of Seattle” demarcated a new chapter of decolonization struggle in the era of globalization.1 It seems as if the rebellion was the materialization of Chief Seattle’s prophecy in speaking to the occupying forces of America about the immortality of his people. The ferocity of Chief Seattle’s invisible tribe in a battle with the transnational corporate power was augmented by two invisible warriors , namely, Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee, whose bones are coincidentally laid to rest in Seattle. Just like the people-power convergence in Seattle that overturned the homogenizing and oppressive forces of global capitalism, both Bruce Lee and Jimi Hendrix subverted the paradigm of transnational capital from within the factory of global commodities at its early stage. Their subversions , however, entail subtlety as their primary field of engagement is in the aesthetic realm and the unconscious. The type of subversion Bruce Lee and Jimi Hendrix were engaged in can be found where their autonomous self-expression created a rupture in the homogenizing forces of corporate intervention, upon which the possibility of liberation is actualized in a symbolic form. In order to discern this contested terrain, the process of a global commodity production must be approached as a dynamic one. Principally, this chapter analyzes the contradiction and antagonism embedded in the making of Enter the Dragon as one of the pioneering global commodities. The constitution of this particular commodity is interlaced with the real-life struggle between the transnational media corporate power on the one hand and the amalgamation of the forces of people and Nature on the other hand. A parallel excursion into Hendrix’s expression, as a counter aesthetic to the corporate processing of counterculture (specifically in relation to the film Woodstock as an incipient global commodity), is given in order to fortify the perspective of my analysis. The social contradiction and antagonism that weave through the make-up of Enter the Dragon can be untangled by several levels of contextualization. First, in order to determine the strategic interest of Hollywood as a transnational media conglomerate, a brief history of Hollywood is presented, with specific attention to its historical entanglement with the strategic paradigm of late capitalism. Secondly , the transnational capital’s attempt to impose limits on the subjectifying power of the working class worldwide is examined conjointly with the new Hollywood ’s attempt at the hegemonic control over the progressive thrust of popular culture (specifically, counterculture and kung fu culture). The third level of contextualization explores the condition of the Third World sweatshop production integrated in the transnational venture. Importing insights from instances of resistance at Malay microchip factories, we could unpack fundamental aspects of resistance in the transnational film production of Enter the Dragon. From Kung Fu to Hip Hop 72 The Transformation of Hollywood By some curious play of fate, the birth of cinematography—incubated by the Lumière Brothers—coincided with America’s rite of passage as a full-fledged member of imperialist nations, ostensibly...