Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World

3. The Fantasy Corpus of Martial Arts, or, The "Communication" of Bruce Lee

3 The Fantasy Corpus of Martial Arts, or, The “Communication” of Bruce Lee Paul Bowman . . . embodiment is itself a mode of interpretation, not always conscious . . . —Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities” Ten Things You Need to Know about Bruce Lee One day in 1973, in America, a young writer-to-be, Davis Miller, went to the cinema, as he often did, to see a movie, as he often did—any old movie, just a movie—because that’s what he liked to do. He writes: The picture that night was Enter the Dragon. The house lights dimmed, flickered, went out. The red Warner Brothers logo flashed. And there he stood. There was a silence around him. The air crackled as the camera moved towards him and he grew in the centre of the screen, luminous. This man. My man. The Dragon. 61 62 Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge One minute into the movie, Bruce Lee threw his first punch. With it, a power came rolling up from Lee’s belly, affecting itself in blistering waves not only upon his onscreen opponent, but on the cinema audience. A wind blew through me. My hands shook; I quivered electrically from head to toe. And then Bruce Lee launched the first real kick I had ever seen. My jaw fell open like the business end of a refuse lorry. This man could fly. Not like Superman—better—his hands and his feet flew whistling through the sky. Yes, better: this wasn’t simply a movie, a shadow-box fantasy; there was a seed of reality in Lee’s every movement. Yet the experience of watching him felt just like a dream. Bruce Lee was unlike anyone I (or any of us) had seen. (Miller 2000: 4) This encounter changes Miller’s life. In his account of this moment, Miller eloquently conveys an experience—his experience—singular, intimate, personal. But it is also an experience that has been shared in common by innumerable people in innumerable situations, all “alone,” yet all sharing something in common. We can see this same process, this same experience, in many accounts, in the most diverse places: pervading popular culture; in many forms of literature from many countries; and even in all sorts of academic work. All of these accounts describe this same moment: once, I was one way; then I saw Bruce Lee, and that was the day everything changed. But, I can almost hear the complaint: hang on a minute—isn’t Bruce Lee just that 1970s chop-socky martial arts star? Of course. Yet, anyone interested in the relations between popular culture and cultural politics needs to know a few things before deciding whether to dismiss Bruce Lee as just a seventies celluloid flash in the pan. Ten things, in fact. First, Bruce Lee was the first Asian male lead in what the movie posters for Enter the Dragon proudly declared “the first American produced martial arts spectacular,” in 1973. Second, Bruce Lee was the first Asian male to (co)star on American TV. First, in The Green Hornet in 1966 and then in Longstreet. (He nearly starred in his own brainchild, an idea that became the TV series Kung Fu; but the producers thought that an Asian lead was too risky, 63 The Fantasy Corpus of Martial Arts even though the lead character, Caine, was meant to be half Chinese. So instead, the entirely white David Carradine was orientalized for the role.) Third, in the words of Davis Miller: “in the three years immediately preceding his death Bruce Lee revolutionized the martial arts and forever changed action movie-making. He became the first truly international film luminary (popular not only in the United States, Great Britain and Europe, but in Asia, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent—in those pre-Spielberg days [when, it must be remembered] people in most nations were not particularly worshipful of the Hollywood hegemony)” (Miller 2000: 96). Fourth, Bruce Lee was born in America, raised in Hong Kong, a child star in dozens of Hong Kong films, catapulted to fame in Asia thanks to his role as Kato in The Green Hornet; the breaker of all box office records with, first, his Hong Kong martial arts films The Big Boss and Fists of Fury and then the Hollywood and Golden Harvest co-produced Enter the Dragon—a film that was “global” to a hitherto unprecedented...