The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora: Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood

Conclusion: Cosmopolitical Thinking

144 Conclusion: Cosmopolitical Thinking Today’s world is interconnected. Each challenge facing us is interlinked with others. Hollywood’s cultural, economic, and political influence on the world film industry, as an example, cannot be addressed without considering its cross-pollination by Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts film traditions. Yet, the Chinese-language film industry’s relations with Hollywood cannot be informed without taking notice of Hong Kong’s specific sociopolitical contexts and examining its film industry’s transnational dynamics. The recent interflows of film artists, styles, and genres in Hollywood and the Chinese diaspora, particularly through the transnationalization of Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts films, are examples of how East and West meet in the conjunction of local dynamics and global forces. The applications of martial arts in cinema are forms of knowledge and power. The development of martial arts cinema in Hong Kong uses the notion of martial arts to express the concept of xia, a warrior who takes action in the public sphere. The concept of the xia and martial arts choreography manifest themselves in cinema as wuxia, kung fu styles, and contemporary action thrillers. The Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts cinema was always already a hybrid genre combining traditions from Chinese martial arts, novels, theater, and culture, as well as traditions from different Eastern and Western films. It has fundamentally transformed the style and the content not only of martial arts performance but also contemporary action cinema, both “East” and “West.” Action, such as chases, stunts, fights, crashes, and explosions, is an important component of cinema. The martial arts film traditions from Hong Kong not only expand the potential for action in films but also have embodied 145 Conclusion the concepts, philosophy, and ideas of the martial arts hero and the concept of xia in contemporary action cinema. The incorporation of honor and loyalty in the public sphere from wuxia traditions and martial arts choreography has reworked the multiple conventions of filmmaking “East” and “West.” Audiences now know Jackie Chan and have seen films by John Woo. They are familiar with Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a wuxia film. The culture of Chinese legendary xia has also long fascinated director John Woo in the themes of male individualism and righteous heroism. With a vested interest in the theme of male homosocial bondings, Woo destabilizes the monolithic subjective position of hegemonic masculinity from the subject positions of the Other and problematizes the prescriptive norms of loyalty and belonging. Jackie Chan, a producer, actor, and filmmaker, shuttles between Hong Kong and Hollywood. His martial comedian persona further probes how the geopolitics of capital, people, performances, and cinema continue to shape his works. Yet, being transnational does not necessarily mean being cosmopolitical . The Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy seeks to sustain the ideology of hegemonic masculinity and Hollywood’s dominance by assimilating special effects–enhanced martial arts choreography and the creation of the Matrix myth. While the dominant global film industry, like Hollywood , shows increasing awareness of Hong Kong martial arts cinema in its creative consciousness, the cosmopolitical film artists shuttle between the different film markets and industries and produce Chinese-language films that embrace contemporary new media technology (as inspired by The Matrix) and create works that have established new standards of martial arts/action filmmaking in the Asian film industry. In comparison, Ang Lee’s cosmopolitical consciousness, as demonstrated in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has been reflected in styles, forms, narratives, language, and genre traditions (including ideologies of ideal femininity/ masculinity and Chineseness), both in the wuxia and Hollywood crosscultural discursive scales. Although there has been a wealth of recent publications on Hong Kong cinema and the interconnections between Hong Kong/Chinese and Hollywood film cultures, the scholarship only scratches the surface of a particularly rich topic of inquiry. By definition, research on Hong Kong/ Chinese and Hollywood cinemas draws on theories and methodologies informed by film studies, performance studies, Asian and Asian American studies, history, gender, ethnicity, and cultural studies. This book tackles the current state and the historical underpinnings of Hollywood 146 Conclusion and Hong Kong/Chinese film culture through the genre of common concern: martial arts cinema. The interflows between Hollywood and the Chinese-language film industries are not unilateral but rather multiple. Expanding beyond the border of national cinema studies requires fresh perspectives on how the interflows of people, images, and capital demand scholarship to consider the various cross-cultural links...