Romancing the Tao: How Ang Lee Globalized Ancient Chinese Wisdom

. . . a kind of a dream of China, a China that probably never existed, except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan.

—Ang Lee on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Can a traditional culture survive the modern world? Some sociologists and anthropologists have concluded that since traditional cultures are designed for stability and modern cultures designed for growth and change, traditional culture will either be erased by modernity or confined to museums. What is worse, according to some culture and media critics, the past cannot even be represented in the modern world as technology distorts what it mediates by changing conditions of production and reception. The mass production of culture, say some theorists, turns images of the past into distortions, caricatures, fetishes, and idols inevitably removed from the material foundations of modern life.

Postmodern theories of culture have challenged the progressivism of some versions of modernity, yielding less categorical notions of the boundary between past and future in postmodern art, suggesting that cultures may mix traditional and modern, high and low, local and global. One of the features of the architectural style to which the term "postmodern" first referred with some regularity was its eclectic mix of old and new features. If the postmodern view of cultural history is less linear than some versions of modernism, might that imply that traditional cultures can find new ways to be represented in a postmodern world? Unfortunately, though postmodernism brackets the progressivist assumption, it also raises doubts about universal truths, which are a standard part of most traditional cultures' self-conceptions. Where postmodernism diminishes our distance from the past in one regard (non-linear history), it sometimes questions our accessibility to it in another sense (the radical contextuality of meaning).

There may be no more technologically progressive medium for representing that past than film. What can one expect, therefore, from a filmmaker who hopes to represent the past in film? To answer this question, we may learn something by comparing images of traditional China in two well-received films of the last twenty-five years: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). It would be hard to find a directorial style more typically European-modernist on the one hand and multicultural-eclectic on the other. Given Lee's frequent interest in the tension between tradition and modernity, this contrast may shed some light on the possibility of representing an alien past in a postmodern world.

Moreover, China would appear to be an especially appropriate challenge. To the modern West, traditional China was an alien civilization: distant, mysterious, and self-enclosed by its imperial tradition. Where European civilization was often defined by sibling rivalries, most of China's official history took place at the center of a single, imperial world. True, the West's image of Chinese closure reflected our own colonial interest in market penetration; but cultural closure equally fits China's traditional self-image as the supremely, even sublimely autonomous civilization.

The twentieth century abruptly ended that 4,000-year legacy of self-enclosure. The Western point of view on that turbulent finale was stunningly captured by Bertolucci's sumptuous epic. Bertolucci's outsider view emphasized the irony of China's imperial stagnation and its subsequent violation by outside forces. As numerous critics have noted, the film's years in the Forbidden City dwell on the increasingly obvious imprisonment of the boy-emperor, Pu Yi, within the ossified traditions of royalty, a literal entrapment in a palace surrounded by a modernizing society that had left imperial authority behind. Before that film, most Westerners could hardly have imagined so remote a world of ponderous ceremony, aging eunuchs, feces inspectors, and magisterial aloofness. Then, royal entrapment turns to multiple invasions. Once outside the city's walls, Pu Yi's journey witnesses the assault on China by competing political and social forces, including European, Russian, and Japanese. The poignancy of Bertolucci's film depends upon the epically ironic transformation of Pu Yi from emperor to communist scapegoat, a personalized image of China's transformation from autonomous majesty to self-corrupting decrepitude to...