The Philosophy of Ang Lee

Subverting Heroic Violence: Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock and Hulk as Antiwar Narratives

192 subVertIng heroIC VIolenCe Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock and Hulk as Antiwar Narratives David Zietsma Culture of Violence Popular culture is replete with images of violence. The use of violence is especially widespread on entertainment screens, as evidenced in video games such as Call of Duty (Activision, 2003) and Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft , 2007), television shows such as The Shield (2002–2008), Oz (1997– 2003), and Criminal Minds (2005–present), and films such as The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006), 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006), and Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet, 2008). This culture of violence is enmeshed in a broader culture of nationalistic militarism that celebrates violence as a heroic means to moral ends. A multitude of war films depict American war experiences through images of heroic violence. Films with a range of perspectives on war such as Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), and Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002) are united in extolling violence as a noble avenue for overcoming evil and saving others.1 How is this hegemonic discourse of violence constructed? What individual and collective identities does such cinematic violence perform? How are images of violence connected to real-world violence? Slavoj Žižek has suggested that looking directly at real-world violence precludes understanding because “the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking.” Žižek’s answer to this problem is to cast sideways glances, to look awry at real-world violence. In doing so, Žižek utilizes numerous cinematic representations of violence, such as Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992), and North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, Subverting Heroic Violence 193 1959). Although he does not probe these linkages, Žižek’s sideways glance implies that the cultural horror of violence is enmeshed with an indulgence in cinematic depictions of heroic violence.2 This chapter looks doubly awry at real-world violence by exploring Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) and Taking Woodstock (2009) as films that subvert heroic violence. In other words, I do not survey heroic violence films discovered in looking awry at real-world violence, but instead attempt to look awry at such films and thereby catch a glimpse of their internal symbolic structures by exploring two films that negate heroic violence. I argue that Lee opens up the discursive space to critique the hegemonic narrative of heroic violence by creating two films that do not fit their anticipated narrative form. In turn, this narrative disturbance allows Lee to present a demasculinized and nonviolent heroism. Finally, by framing both films in the context of American wars, especially the Vietnam War, Lee’s subversion of individual heroic violence emerges as a critique of American patriotic militarism. In these two films, then, violence functions as an obstacle to selfrealization ,meaningfulrelationships,andahopefulfuture.Leephilosophizes that nonviolence is a more human and more effective path to personal and national redemption. From the perspective of a philosophy of nonviolence, Hulk and Taking Woodstock fit philosopher Douglas Lackey’s categorization of universal pacifism, which prohibits all violence in both its radical early Christian and later Gandhian forms. In this category of universal pacifism , all violence is ultimately destructive and therefore should be avoided. Lee’s philosophy of nonviolence tends toward these radical Christian and Gandhian forms of universal pacifism, forms that might “transform the souls” of one’s opponents and afford “personal redemption” through “nonviolent resistance to evil.”3 Disturbing the Narrative Form Both Taking Woodstock and Hulk defy the expected narrative form of their respective genres. At the outset, Taking Woodstock suggests a story about the sexual coming of age of Elliot Tiber (born Elliot Teichberg). A phone call early in the film from a boyfriend leaves Elliot feeling jaded. Will Elliot be able to overcome this rejection as well as his fear of what his parents and the community might think about his sexuality? Later, an obvious sexual attraction between Elliot and a muscular construction worker on the motel site results in a passionate kiss on the dance floor. But despite these teases, 194 David Zietsma the film sets aside the sexual identity question, first by virtually abandoning the construction worker story line as a significant plotline, and second, by imaging Elliot’s LSD experiment as rife with both homo- and heterosexual overtones toward which Elliot appears completely neutral and unaffected...