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11 CHAPTER 1 Wang Dulu and Ang Lee Artistic Creativity and Sexual Freedom in CrouchingTiger, Hidden Dragon Adaptation is...both a leap and a process. —Dudley Andrew1 Viewers of Ang Lee’s blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) are always intrigued by the last scene in which Jen (Zhang Ziyi) leaps off the bridge for no obvious reason. It is not easy to decide whether this is a suicidal act,an attempt to eliminate shame and compensate for misdeeds—in which case Jen may be revealing a repressed Confucian sensibility—or an act of rebellion and escape, a soaring liberation from tradition and patriarchy. In fact to examine this moment, a flashpoint for conservative and liberal interpretations , is to open a window not only on the way Ang Lee has adapted the fiction of Wang Dulu but also the way the film as a whole has helped shape the image of Chinese women in the postmodern global market.2 Many mainstream critics see Jen’s leap as an expression of guilt. Since the Manchurian princess is complicit in Jade Fox’s murder of Li Mubai (ChowYun-fat) it seems plausible to assume that remorse has driven her to a real suicide, no matter how beautiful or sublime it may be. Rong Cai calls Jen’s death “a masochistic act of repentance” and argues that her “female body is punished for initiating and harboring the unauthorized desire that causes the demise of the male hero” (2005: 456). Catherine Gomes finds Crouching Tiger to be saturated with traditional Confucian gender politics (2005: 52), and Emilie Yeh and Darrell Davis speak explicitly of a “Confucianizing ” tendency running through the films of Ang Lee.They suggest that Jen’s leap is a self-sacrificial atonement for “wrongs she has caused Li, Yu, and her family” (2005: 194). 12 CHAPTER I Kenneth Chan is a good representative of those who see Jen’s flight as a radical break from convention, “a strong feminist statement” against the dominant patriarchy. Because Jen rejects the opportunity of reuniting and staying with Lo, she can be interpreted as “saying that her relationship with Lo cannot be structured in any way but in accordance with society’s (and hence patriarchy’s) expectations ...” (2004: 14). In a similar vein, Fran Martin collects “pop-feminist” readings of CrouchingTiger that see Jen as one of “the hard-fighting third-wave feminist heroines of globalizing popular media culture” (2005: 157). In 2001, Time magazine portrayed CrouchingTiger as a celebration of “girl power” and compared it to such popular entertainment as Drew Barrymore’s Charlie’sAngels and the children’s animation series The Powerpuff Girls. Many viewers familiar with Euro-American media culture align CrouchingTiger with a larger postfeminist movement that sees Jen both as a feminist and a feminine action hero. What is it about CrouchingTiger that produces, in roughly equal measure, conservative,Confucianizing,and misogynist responses on the one hand and progressive, liberating, and feminist ones on the other? The question may seem insoluble—a matter of taste—but it may also be a by-product of Ang Lee’s complex thinking about gender and politics.This Chinese/Taiwanese director, who was trained and currently resides in the United States, has given long thought to questions of personal and aesthetic freedom in traditional and contemporary China and Taiwan. One of the reasons this film is so compelling is that he has used it to link these questions about gender to the process of adapting martial arts fiction to martial arts cinema. In a 2005 interview with Michael Berry, Lee remarks that when critics used to ask him to identify a theme that recurred in his films, he would say “people in a changing time.” He also gives another answer: he has been exploring “the concept of freedom against social propriety.” There are two sides to this, he notes—“someone putting a force upon you” and “you putting a force upon yourself”—and his concluding remark is very suggestive in the context of CrouchingTiger: “There is no such thing as absolute freedom. Unless, of course, you jump off a cliff to get away from it all!” (quoted in Michael Berry 2005: 155). Emphasizing both external and internal obstacles to freedom, Lee produces a dialectical and conditional model of subjectivity that validates a spectrum of interpretations of Jen’s final, “absolute” act. The film is both a performance and a study of the external and internal conditions on freedom, the former spectacularly borrowed from martial...

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