Post-Colonial, Post-Modern, Post-Protestant Post-Human: Bruce Lee and the Karate Kid
Many studies and narratives about Bruce Lee end in disappointment. This disappointment, I intend to show, is a specific consequence of the approach which is characterised by nostalgia. This nostalgia takes many forms. Here are some of the most common narratives: Bruce Lee once politicised ethnic, subaltern and postcolonial consciousness, but this energy dissipated; Bruce Lee smashed certain Orientalist stereotypes about Asian males, but this ultimately intensified other stereotypes; Bruce Lee diversified and ethnicised the previously white realm of international film and the associated global popular cultural imaginary, but the effects of this achievement were limited by the subsequent easy pigeonholing of ethnic Asian characters as martial arts 'types'; Bruce Lee introduced a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon into global discourse, but this was quickly 'lactified' or appropriated and hence 'whitened' by Euro-American martial arts actors; Bruce Lee's models of masculinity proposed new paradigms of maleness, yet these never caught on or at least were quickly supplanted; Bruce Lee 'bridged cultures', yet these encounters have now come to seem less like new multicultural conduits or establishments, new hybridised cross-cultural enclaves or settlements, and more like brief forays, smash and grab raids, appropriations and expropriations of and from different cultural repositories; Bruce Lee spearheaded the possibility of inter-ethnic identifications and cross-cultural mobility, but this soon became thoroughly depoliticised; Bruce Lee was the exemplary 'protestant ethnic', but nowadays that kind of protest and that kind of ethnic struggle has settled down.
This essay will look more closely at some of these narratives and consider the reasons for their trajectory towards disappointment. In the ensuing awareness of the ways that certain narrative structures or conceptual paradigms tend to lead analyses to disappointment, the essay will propose alternative approaches – not alternatives that refuse to acknowledge disappointment or failure, but rather alternatives that may enable us to regard the times and places beyond Bruce Lee without either running into nostalgia for lost promise or delusions about the radical propensities of current or future conjunctures. Taking our lead from the directions given in some of my earlier work – specifically, the queer conjunction of cultural translation and sexuality – the journey of this essay will be from subject-centred approaches to Bruce Lee to what might be classified as more materialist or post-humanist perspectives on his interventions.
Bruce Lee, From Masculinity to Biopower
Many have theorised the significance of Bruce Lee's intervention in terms of masculinity and identity. Scholars of popular culture and of Bruce Lee have overwhelmingly wanted to read him as 'progressive' in several main senses vis-à-vis white Euro-American hegemonic heteronormative patriarchal masculinities. In 2000, Jachinson Chan made the important point that 'the way in which Bruce Lee constructs a Chinese masculinity is potentially insightful in that his form of masculinity does not buy into a compulsory heterosexuality and his characters seem to encourage a homoerotic desire for his body' (Chan 2000: 385). But how far does or did the Bruce Lee rearticulation of masculinity vis-à-vis established (and) Euro-American models, tropes, types and norms, via his reconstitution of Asian masculinity, actually go? Chan undertakes a systematic reading of Lee's films in order to show the extent to which 'Lee's characters refuse to conflate masculinity with heterosexuality' (ibid.). He asks the organising rhetorical question: 'physical superiority can also be a sign of manhood, but does it necessarily signify a heterosexual identity?' Chan's answer is of course no. But the argument he wants to see realised is the possibility that 'by de-linking this connection, Lee's characters question other markers of manhood such as physical violence' (ibid.). Thus, he argues, 'By questioning the heterosexual assumption in the construction of manhood, … an ambisexual model of masculinity provides a discursive space that opens up the possibilities of alternative and contradictory models of masculinity that are not easily categorizable' (ibid.). To Chan's mind:
This is regarded as essentially progressive, then. One question which arises, however, is whether such a 'model' of masculinity ever 'caught on'. Such a proposition could be empirically tested or explored in any number of ways; but the role of Bruce Lee or anything else here would always remain debatable. So, before rushing into any such empirical route of trying to count the number of men who followed Lee into some kind of ambisexual version of masculinity, one first needs to note that Chan's own reading itself actually suggests that things might not be so simple. Indeed, his reflection on Lee's masculinity could be said to supplement approaches such as those of Brown, Žižek or Lo that we have already considered insofar as it proposes that 'the genre itself subverts its own ability to present social and cultural critiques' (Chan 2000: 385). This self-subversion would necessarily constitute something of a problem. We see this for instance in the following passage in Chan's consideration of masculinity, when he proposes that:
Whether or not one agrees with Chan's various assertions in his reading at this point (which I have to say I do not – you can take yourself seriously, seriously enough to work out every day, and still be distracted by smells, sights, scenes and sounds, the way that Tang Lung in Return of the Dragon, in a strange apartment in a capital city in a different country is distracted), the point is that Chan himself points to the problem of his own argument. Lee may offer a 'different' kind of masculinity – an 'ambisexuality', or at least an assumed heterosexuality that is not predatory or apparently not homophobic (although as we saw in a previous essay, this is not an entirely sustainable position vis-à-vis Bruce Lee's films overall), or whose realisation is permanently deferred for whatever reason (whether that be because of the decorum of Confucian ethics, warrior-like chivalry, a businesslike relation to his quest in the film, schoolboy immaturity or monastic vows of celibacy and so on). But at the same time, this is not at all certain. (So much so that perhaps where the critic would like to see ambisexuality we might instead propose that we are looking at a kind of ambihermeneutics on the part of the critic.) Of course, as suggested in previous essays, rather than reading Lee's films as if what they do is primarily offer viewers repositories of 'types' – types of, so to speak, 'role models' – what remains most suggestive about Chan's analysis is his focus on the significant appearance of gay characters within Lee's films. Specifically, once more, what strikes me as perhaps most significant about these characters is the fact that not only are they gay, but they are also translators.
As Chan points out, 'In contradistinction to Lee's blatant display of his masculinity, homosexuality, as constructed in the text, suggests effeminacy and betrayal of one's country' (375). However, he takes great pains to emphasise: 'The narrative logic [of Fist of Fury] seems to imply that Mr. Woo [the effeminate translator] is a villain who happens to be gay rather than Mr. Woo is a villain because he is gay' (2000: 376). In Chan's reading, something similar also pertains to the gay translator in Way of the Dragon:
In both films, argues Chan, the translator's 'effeminate behavior is condemned because it parallels his own political "deviance", rejecting his country, nation, and masculinity' (2000: 375). In Fist of Fury, argues Chan, Bruce Lee's character's 'heroic act of resistance toward the oppressive Japanese presence in China counters Mr. Woo's subservience and cowardice; and yet, on closer analysis, Chen's character shows more disdain toward Mr. Woo's traitorous behavior than his homosexuality' (2000: 376).
Insightful as Chan's reading is, these latter comments demonstrate the manner in which it is ultimately limited by what we might call its subject-centricity. That is, the readings focus overwhelmingly on characters and psychologistic interpretations of their actions, rather than on the biases and lines of force which structure the values of the film. Thus, Chan emphasises that Bruce Lee's character is not actively homophobic but does not pause to consider the significance of the reiterated coincidence of gay-translator-traitor in more than one of Bruce Lee's films. The symbolic order of these films is clearly homo-averse if not unequivocally homophobic.
Moreover, in Chan's reading, the translator 'has neither political nor physical powers'. Yet, it is crucial to note that it is through the entrance of the translator that institutional instability is introduced. As we saw in a previous essay, the translator and two Japanese martial artists enter the Jing Wu School in the midst of the official funeral of the Chinese master, Huo Yuanjia. They enter whilst a senior Chinese is giving an impassioned oration about what the Jing Wu School 'stands for'. The eulogy is clearly also a 'pep talk' or rallying call which is insisting that even though their institution has been struck hard by the death of their founder and master, his demise does not signal the demise of the institution; for Huo Yuanjia has taught them all well enough to ensure that the institution might continue, by following the principles he sought to inculcate. In other words, the threnody is also very much an appeal for continuity during a tense and difficult moment of crossing-over: the transition/translation from one cultural moment and institutional order to another. That is, at this point, upon the death of the master, what comes to the fore are urgent matters of transmission and tradition. What need to be transmitted now, more than ever, are the means to maintain stability, continuity. The tradition needs to be reiterated, reasserted, taking the form of emphatic words, in order to clarify what is to survive. The point being that agency exceeds (and arguably precedes) the individual subject, character, or agent. Agency is institutional. Chan is, certainly, aware of this. As he states about his own intentions for his study of Bruce Lee:
As indicated by Chan's awareness of 'institutionalized' biases as forces of agency in this passage, the 'institutional' dimension should not be sacrificed for a focus on characters. It should certainly not be downplayed or overlooked in any study concerned with cultural agency. But nor can the focus simply be on the power of this or that 'institution', however conceived. Any study must also consider the forces which constitute, form, deform and transform agencies and institutions, such as the productive and destructive forces of capitalism.
The Protestant Ethnic and Post(al)-Identity
Keiko Nitta has also recently reassessed Chan's pioneering study of Bruce Lee, proposing that 'ten years after Chan's classical identitarian approach to Lee, we are now able to analyze more broadly the functioning of the worldwide popularity of martial arts' (Nitta 2010: 379). Nitta reiterates the fact that within various forms of scholarship, 'the substantial impact of Bruce Lee is often attributed to his legitimatizing a different possibility of gender self-expression for Asian men vis-à-vis their Caucasian counterparts' (2010: 378). She notes that despite so many examples of cultural texts in which the Asian male 'could never be completely a man' (to use the words of Song Liling in David Cronenberg's film M. Butterfly (1993)), when it comes to Bruce Lee, things are very different: 'one never has any difficulty in finding plenty of testimonies about ethnic empowerment brought about by the popular cultural figure of Bruce Lee', she writes; noting that 'In one interview, Lee's younger brother Robert remarks on the enthusiasm of black and Hispanic members of the American audience of Enter the Dragon, upon seeing the spectacle of the Asian hero defeating those who were far larger than himself' (ibid.). However, she continues, 'whilst acknowledging the significance of this sort of visual pleasure is to be respected, it strikes me that one strand of academic approach to Lee seems to have been too determined to read the actor/martial artist as a male ethnic role model' (ibid.). At this point, Jachinson Chan's study is held up as an exemplary case by Nitta. What she homes in on specifically is what she calls Chan's 'ethical conviction about an ideal model of Chinese masculinity' (ibid.). That is to say, Chan's conviction that the model of masculinity proffered by Lee's films (rather than in his personal life [ibid.]) – 'should be, unlike the dominant heteromasculinity, weak enough to be incompetent for hegemony' (ibid.). Nitta writes:
Furthermore, the singular appeal of Bruce Lee for many Asian American scholars in particular relates overwhelmingly to the fact that 'he prevailed in an industry that was initially reluctant to represent him because of his ethnicity'. To many commentators, such success makes him a 'master of identity politics' (2010: 379). Moreover, as Chan's analysis testifies, in addition to the significance of this for ethnic cultural politics, Bruce Lee can be regarded as 'an exemplary case of "ambiguity" in terms of masculine gender and sexuality played out on one particular man' (ibid.), as we have seen.
Approaching Chan's study ten years on, Nitta considers Chan's own orientations and investments. She asks: 'why does Chan himself have to recognize the ethnic value of Lee's cultural expression, despite its complicity in stereotyping? Why is he, even with a hesitation, fascinated with Lee's martial arts as an ethnic-masculine practice?' (ibid.) In a deft and incisive refocusing of attention, Nitta proposes that 'rather than the ambiguity of Lee's masculine model, [it is] the Chinese American scholar's hesitation [that] symptomatically signifies the status of martial arts as an object of consumption today' (2010: 379). For, Chan's own approach to or relationship with Bruce Lee has, in Nitta's words, 'uniquely satisfied two opposing directions of interest': first, 'Asian self-expressions accented by a sense of resistance to Western cultural preoccupations', and second, 'the U.S. reproduction of an Oriental other simultaneously exotic enough and accommodating to its principles of cultural circulation' (2010: 379). With this, the problematic is rendered as double: the forces of attraction and repulsion arise simultaneously: we find ourselves once more in the eternally returning relation (or reciprocally arising interimplication) between political agency (protest, resistance, alteration, change) and political passivity (becoming smoothly ideological objects), or, again, commodification. Bruce Lee is at once a sign of apparent potential resistance (protest), but also a harbinger or fomite of the globalisation of a post-nationalist ideology, and at the same time a multi-modal commodity, indeed a commodity that displaces political resistance, or rather commodifies and hence depoliticises resistance.
Viewed from this perspective, Nitta connects this double status with Rey Chow's notion of 'the protestant ethnic'. She reads the condition of both Bruce Lee and the ethnic studies academics as illustrative of the logics, mechanisms and double binds that Chow explores in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002). In Nitta's account of the essential features of this work: 'Chow demonstrates how the present-day ethnos materialize themselves through protests, as illuminated by the phrase "I protest, therefore I am"' (Nitta 2010: 379; Chow 2002: viii, 47). Hence, suggests Nitta, the congruency (and shared ambivalence) of so many critical appraisals and treatments of Bruce Lee and other such popularised mediated ethnic identities. For, through them, 'Martial arts … have functioned as a noticeable apparatus for both this protest and capitalist interpellation' (2010: 379). This ambivalent or double-edged status arises from the fact that (as many cultural theorists have suggested) 'late capitalism requires a cultural logic fundamentally based on tolerance, or more specifically a regime that attempts to earn the greatest profits by marketing a diversity of objects'; therefore 'a multicultural request for diversity is easily subsumed into the desires of capital' (ibid.). Hence the arising of what Nitta calls a frequent 'categorical confusion between political recognition of minorities and discovery of them as recipients of an ethnically defined marketing phenomenon' (ibid.).
To Be Ethnic Is To Protest
This Gordian knot of a situation has entangled many thinkers. Thinking ethnicity in terms of what Chow has dubbed 'the protestant ethnic' – which Nitta reminds us entails 'rereading "protestants" as those who protest against intolerance at large, rather than literally religious protestors' (ibid.) – Chow herself recasts this situation in a way that both bypasses and also utterly transforms the status of most narratives of cultural politics, resistance and agency – many of which propose a temporal narrative of 'early authenticity' followed by 'subsequent cooptation'. This narrative arises, as we have seen, not only in Stuart Hall's thinking, but also in Slavoj Žižek's and Gilles Deleuze's and others in a list which could be massively extended. Rather than becoming ensnared in this, Chow proposes:
Nitta focuses on this section of Chow's work and adds: 'As if demonstrating the accuracy of the underscored statement, "to be ethnic is to protest", the Bruce Lee films' popularity can exactly be located in the formula that equates, or diverts, the ethnic to protest' (Nitta 2000: 380). And not only the ethnic: As Nitta immediately points out, citing the intertextual presence of Bruce Lee in such films as Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Boogie Nights (1997), 'contemporary cinema has repeatedly reproduced Lee as the idol of not merely Asian men, supposedly confined in an emasculated stereotype, but also men socially vulnerable for disparate reasons' (ibid.). She suggests that this is a 'translation of ethnicity to social alienation or a marginalized experience of struggle in general', one that is enabled by the 'equivocality' of Lee's 'ethnic representations' (ibid.).
Such equivocality plays itself out in numerous directions and with numerous possible consequences. It will be worthwhile to elaborate some key dimensions of Chow's arguments about ethnicity at this point. For, although Chow's term 'protestant ethnic' alludes to and intertwines itself with Max Weber's work on the protestant ethic, in constructing it she mines the implications of the argument of Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978). This work sets out the ways in which much of our thinking about sexuality is based on material thrown up by and circulating in and as a discursive constellation about sexuality – a very old discursive constellation, says Foucault, which came together in the 18th Century. Chow follows Foucault's thinking, arguing for the presence and force of a similar discursive formation in a closely related field – that of ethnicity. That is, Chow proposes that today, such terms as ethnicity, identity, authenticity and even autobiography, confession, and protest, encounter each other in an overdetermined chiasmus. Thus, whenever issues of identity and ethnicity arise as a (self-reflexive, or 'personal') problem, this discursive constellation proposes that the route out is via the self-reflexive side-door of protesting, vocally, and often in the manner of autobiographical (self) confession – telling, showing, confessing the true state or true experience of one's victimhood or marginality and so on.
Chow's Foucauldian point is that a proliferation of 'discourses of the self' emerged in modernity. What is highly pertinent here is that these discourses of the self emerged with an attending argument about self-referentiality's subversive (protestant) relation to power and its emancipatory relation to truth. That is to say, the sheer proliferation of talking, confessing, protesting subjects – all believing that their personal narratives are 'emancipatory' insofar as they try to 'speak truth to power' – ought to set alarm bells ringing in the heads of anyone who has learned the lessons of Foucault's History of Sexuality. For, this proliferation of discourses and their shared conviction that protesting in autobiographical/confessional mode is subversive of power ought to refer us directly to Foucault's argument about what he called 'the repressive hypothesis' – namely, that almost irresistible belief that power tries to silence us and actually demands our silence (Foucault 1978: 18; Chow 2002: 114). As Foucault argued, however, almost the exact opposite is the case. Or rather, even if there are places where power demands silence or discipline, these are more than matched by an exponential explosion and proliferation of discourses – in this case, about the self.
These discourses include arguments about self-referentiality's subversive relation to power and its emancipatory relation to truth, which relates to the Enlightenment idea that an introspective turn to the self is emancipatory: the ingrained idea (whose prehistory is the Catholic confessional, and whose contemporary ministers Foucault finds in the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) that seeking to speak the truth of oneself is the best method of getting at our essential truth and the best way to resist power. Similarly, modern literary self-referentiality emerged with an attending discourse of resistance – a discourse which regarded things like literature (as such) as resistance to the instrumentalisation of technical and bureaucratic language, first and foremost. And, by the same token, self-referentiality emerged as an apparently ideal solution to the knotty problem of representing others.
For, how do you represent others truthfully, adequately, ethically? The answer entailed within this sort of position is: you do not. They should be allowed to represent themselves. Here, the self-reflexivity of self-referentiality is regarded not as apartheid but as the way to bypass the problems of representing others – by throwing the option open for everyone to speak the truth of themselves. However, in Foucault's phrase: 'the "Enlightenment", which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines' (Foucault 1995: 222; see also Chow 1998: 113). In other words, the desire to refer to the self, to discuss the self, to produce the self discursively, the impulse to autobiography and confession, can be regarded as a consequence of disciplinarity. Psychiatry demands that we reveal our 'selves'. As does psychoanalysis, as do ethnographic focus groups, as do corporate marketing focus groups, not to mention the confessional, the criminologist, and the chat show. Autobiography and confession are only resistance if power truly tries to repress the production of discourse. Which it does not – at least, not everywhere. The point is, autobiography and confession are genealogically wedded – if not welded – to recognisable disciplinary protocols and – perhaps most significantly – proceed according to the terms of recognisable metanarratives. Thus, says Chow:
Of course, in any engagement with or relationship to (cultural) politics of any kind, it is always going to be very difficult not to think about oneself. Indeed, even in full knowledge of Foucault, there remains something of a complex imperative to do so. For, surely one must factor oneself into whatever picture one is painting, in terms of the 'institutional investments that shape [our own] enunciation' (Chow 1993: 2). Indeed, suggests Chow:
To Protest and to Serve
Now, although what is about to follow may seem to be the wrong way around, insofar as it takes the form of a brief reflection on white subject-positions, the following considerations will turn out to bear directly on our ensuing engagement with Bruce Lee's 'protestant' legacies, as exemplified by his son Brandon Lee's film, Rapid Fire (1992). Chow points out that:
Chow proposes that we compare and contrast this with nonwhite ethnic subjects (or rather, in her discussion, with nonwhite ethnic critics, scholars and academics). These subjects, she argues, are pressured directly and indirectly to behave 'properly' – to act and think and 'be' the way 'they' are supposed to act and think and be, as nonwhite ethnic academic subjects. If they forget their ethnicity, or their nationalistically or geographically – and hence essentialistically and positivistically – defined 'cultures' and 'heritages', such subjects are deemed to be sell-outs, traitors – inauthentic. But, says Chow, if such an ethnic scholar 'should [...] choose, instead, to mimic and perform her own ethnicity' – that is, to respond or perform in terms of the implicit and explicit hailing or interpellation of her as an ethnic subject as such, by playing along with the 'mimetic enactment of the automatized stereotypes that are dangled out there in public, hailing the ethnic' (2002: 110) – 'she would still be considered a turncoat, this time because she is too eagerly pandering to the Orientalist tastes of Westerners' (2002: 117), and this time most likely by other nonwhite ethnic subjects.
Thus, the ethnic subject seems damned if she does and damned if she doesn't 'be' an ethnic subject. Of course, this damnation comes from different parties, and with different implications. But, in all cases, Chow's point is that, in sharp contradistinction, 'however far he chooses to go, a white person sympathetic to or identifying with a nonwhite culture does not in any way become less white' (ibid.). Indeed, she claims:
It is important to be aware that it is not just whites who pressure the nonwhite ethnic to conform. Chow gives many examples of the ways that scholars of Chinese culture and literature, for instance, relentlessly produce an essentialist notion of China which is used to berate modern diasporic Chinese (and their cultural productions). This essentialism is an essence that none can live up to, precisely because they are alive and as such contaminated, diluted, tainted or corrupted by non-Chinese influences.
Postcolonial critics (not to mention such popular cultural texts as, for example, the Paul Haggis film Crash (2004)) often recount cases in which nonwhite ethnic subjects are pressured directly and indirectly to start to behave 'properly' – to act and think and be the way 'they' are supposed to act and think and be as nonwhite ethnic subjects – in other words, to be both interpellated, in Althusser's sense, and disciplined, in Foucault's sense. Chow calls this 'coercive mimeticism' (2002: 107). Coercive mimeticism designates the way in which the interpellating, disciplining forces of many different kinds of discourses and institutions call us into place, tell us our place, and work to keep us in our place. As Chow writes of the ethnic academic subject: 'Her only viable option seems to be that of reproducing a specific version of herself – and her ethnicity – that has, somehow, already been endorsed and approved by the specialists of her culture' (2002: 117). Accordingly, coercive mimeticism ultimately works as 'an institutionalized mechanism of knowledge production and dissemination, the point of which is to manage a non-Western ethnicity through the disciplinary promulgation of the supposed difference' (ibid.). Moreover, this disciplinary mechanism extends far beyond the disciplines proper, far beyond the university. In Chow's words:
If we follow the train of dominoes that falls down from this, what soon becomes apparent is that the notion of 'authenticity' must ultimately be construed as a hypothetical state of non-self-conscious and non-constructed essential 'being'. The fact that this is an essentialism that is essentially impossible does not mean that it does not 'happen' or is not 'assumed'; rather it means that 'ethnicity' becomes an infinitely supple rhetorical tool. It is available (to anyone and everyone) as a way to disparage both anyone who is not being the way they are supposed to be and anyone who is being the way they are supposed to be. As Chow explains, 'ethnicity can be used as a means of attacking others, of shaming, belittling, and reducing them to the condition of inauthenticity, disloyalty, and deceit' (ibid.). Ironically, such attacks are 'frequently issued by ethnics themselves against fellow ethnics, that is, the people who are closest to, who are most like them ethnically in this fraught trajectory of coercive mimeticism" (ibid.). What this means is that the most contempt, from all quarters, will always be reserved for he or she who does not stay in their place, play their proper ethnicity. All too often, criticism is levelled individually, as if it is a personal issue, 'despite the fact that this historically charged, alienating situation is a collectively experienced one' (ibid.). Such is the disciplining, streaming, classifying force of coercive mimeticism. Such are the 'uses of ethnicity'. In the words of Etienne Balibar: 'the problem is to keep "in their place", from generation to generation, those who have no fixed place; and for this, it is necessary that they have a genealogy' (Balibar qtd. in Chow 2002:95). As such, even the work of sensitive, caring, deeply invested specialists, and expert ethnic scholars – even ethnic experts in ethnicity – themselves can function to reinforce ethnicised hierarchies, structured in dominance, simply by insisting on producing their field or object in its difference.
Ultimately, then, Chow's work on ethnicity asks us to pay attention to the micropolitics of everyday life. Ethnic subjects are always an object of discourse, constructed and construed as 'meant to be' this way or that, with accusations regularly levelled at those who choose this or that way of being. The ethnic, then, stands accused. Are you true to your history (your proper place, your proper identity)? Are you, in other words, a protestant ethnic? Or are you a sell out, turncoat, traitor?
Bruce Lee amounts to the protestant ethnic par excellence. Because he died at the height of his protestant moment, he has the dubious status of existing at the high-point, or the first stage of that two-part narrative structure, which, in the narratives of many, runs from initial energetic emergence or eruption (hope) to subsequent inexorable cultural recuperation or commodification (disappointment). Those who lived on beyond Bruce Lee do not have the same immortality, the same manner of dwelling solely in the first moment of hope, anger and energy.
The (Post) Protestant Ethos and the Spirit of Consolidation
In becoming a film actor, Bruce Lee's son, Brandon Lee, perhaps unsurprisingly followed in his father's footsteps. Maybe this would not have been inevitable or so visually obvious had Brandon avoided the martial arts action genre. But Brandon Lee became a martial arts action actor. In an important study of transnational China and the Chinese diaspora on global screens, Gina Marchetti observes that 'Brandon Lee created a star image that both adheres to and diverges significantly from the path taken by his father two decades before' (Marchetti 2006: 208). For, whilst 'Bruce Lee stood as an emblem of justified revolt and vengeance for audiences of the dispossessed globally, Brandon Lee's image promised the possibility of assimilation as he began to make inroads into a racist film industry' (ibid.). Indeed, Marchetti proposes, one of Brandon Lee's starring vehicles, Rapid Fire (1992), can actually be used 'as a point of departure for understanding how Hollywood has rethought its depiction of Asian/Asian American identity as a consequence of changing patterns of immigration and in light of America's evolving relationship with the People's Republic of China' (ibid.).
Before being this, the film is certainly what Marchetti calls a 'pastiche of post-1989 Tian'anmen politics, Oedipal ambivalence, ethnic gang wars, and urban paranoia', one which 'self-consciously alludes to the connection between Brandon and his famous father within a drama that only thinly disguises its attempts to reconfigure Bruce Lee in his son's image' (ibid.). Brandon, who plays Jake Lo, is certainly constructed as a rebel figure: As Marchetti points out, Jake arrives in the film quite late, after several other key figures and intrigues have already been introduced; but when he arrives he is on a motorbike, in white t-shirt and jeans, strongly reminiscent of other such movie rebels as Marlon Brando or James Dean (2006: 210). But Jake is essentially a rebel without a cause. Flashbacks quickly allow us to see that his father was killed in the 1989 massacre at Tian'anmen Square, and Jake's refusal to join those who are still protesting in the US for democracy in China signals that all he wants to be is 'left alone' – declaring at the outset that politics is 'bullshit'. Jake wants to be free from his father's 'political' legacy (unfortunately, his father, who is apparently revered by the student activists, turns out to have been no mere protester-martyr, but in fact an American agent working undercover in Beijing, for no more compelling a reason than the apparent 'right' of the US government to monitor and spy anywhere and everywhere – a fact which perturbs neither any character in the film, nor the narrative structure of the film itself: an American spy in China is presented as something that is perfectly fine and natural); he wants to be free from the activists who hound him to represent his dead father; he wants to escape from the fact that he witnesses a Mafia/Tong murder; and he wants to be left alone by the American agents and police who want him to work for them by acting as bait to catch the criminals. Jake is ultimately a rebel against political rebellion. His rebellion is, as Marchetti points out, merely a rebellion at the level of style. He just wants to be the edgy, moody, free-spirited teenager. In short, Jake wants to be normal.
Indeed, Jake could be normal, were it not for his family history and for what he witnesses. In this specific Hollywood illustration of the workings of coercive mimeticism, almost everyone in this context puts pressure on him to (want to) play his expected role as a protestant ethnic. Even his attraction to the very epitome of the normative Euro-American heterosexual ideal – the blonde model in his life-drawing class – also works against him: the model invites him to a party, as if on a date; but it is a trap, a lure designed to get him to a Chinese pro-democracy fundraising event. As if to rub salt into the wound, she even appears to be in a relationship with the leader of the pro-democracy Chinese student activists – suggesting that the beautiful white woman would be attracted to Jake were he to fulfil his stereotypical cultural obligations – in other words, if he were to be a properly protestant ethnic.
Indeed, let us pause for a moment to ask: what of these attractive protestant ethnics – or rather, what of the protest that apparently makes them more attractive (at least to our one exemplary 'token' white girl), more attractive than the ethnic who seeks to resist the coercive mimeticism which demands that he protest? One particular irony within the film is illuminating. This centres on the status the film gives to the object of the protests of the protestant ethnics: namely, the pro-Chinese-democracy movement. This status is voiced by one of those present at the fundraiser – a character, Chang, who turns out to be heavily involved in international crime: when asked why he – a (sleazy, seamy) businessman – is present at a political fundraiser, he replies, saccharine-suave: 'Democracy, capitalism – it's all a good cause!' Marchetti notes, 'although it makes narrative sense' to have Jake and gangsters at the fundraising event, 'because there needs to be some explanation for Jake's involvement with gangsters to get the plot moving', nevertheless 'the ideology behind the narrative choice is startling' (2006: 211). For, 'the fact that the film seems to be saying that gangsters and pro democracy Chinese protesters share a common set of values and interests slides by in the film without comment' (ibid.). Indeed:
As Marchetti also notes, Rapid Fire 'voices concerns surrounding gender roles, ethnic identity, race, international politics, crime, and governmental corruption'. Moreover, the film 'places these controversial issues on Brandon's shoulders in an attempt to reinvent an acceptable but nonthreatening multiethnic presence within Hollywood' (2006: 208). This is why, 'rather than defying a racist society that attempts to destroy him, Brandon's character learns to accept his role as symbol of a new America, cleansed of its racism, by putting his martial arts talents and romantic energies in the service of the police' (ibid.). Yet, Marchetti observes, 'Haunted by the ghost of Bruce Lee, this reconfigured masculinity, however, seems drained of affect, a postmodern simulation of an Asian American hero who has lost his original, justified anger' (2006: 208-9).
This draining of affect arises because the way that Rapid Fire negotiates the ideologically threatening problems that are clustered around ethnicity (Chinese, Thai, Sicilian) is by constructing Jake as a character who does not want to be involved in these 'controversial issues' as a protestant ethnic, but who merely wants to be a normal (protestant) male subject by playing out an apolitical Oedipal narrative rather than a political one. His 'problem' is with his father – his father's very involvement in what is coded by the film as 'cultural politics' (but what is actually, at best, covert US reconnaissance). This 'problem' is transferred onto his relationship with the substitute father figure, the police officer, Ryan.
In fact, the resolutions of Rapid Fire are Oedipal through and through. Jake's relationship with his father is not 'resolved', it is simply abandoned. Jake merely has to come to terms with the fact that his father died. When Jake finds nothing new in the file about his father that Karla has acquired, Karla emphatically reaffirms: 'Your father was doing what he thought was right. He died. It happens every day. Deal with it'. Thus, the enigma that has fuelled Jake's rebellious non-accepting attitude ('I never even knew why he was over there') does not culminate in some great revelation; it simply fizzles out, fades away, has to be forgotten, moved on from.
When the battle's lost and won
Marchetti notes that by structuring Jake's 'problem' in terms of the complaint 'I never even knew why he was over there', the film executes an associative sleight of hand which means that 'China and Vietnam have changed places historically' (2006: 214). America had no presence in China; there was no American conflict 'over there'. But, of course, this complaint and this sentiment is more than familiar vis-à-vis Vietnam. As such, any 'critique' or revelation is foreclosed at the outset by the filmic choice of the Oedipal rather than the political. One might say, the film is confused and confusing, yet it engages with its own potential complexities with a shrug of the shoulders rather than any other kind of interrogation. Or, as Marchetti puts it, even though a 'conservative reading and a critical irony inhabit the same narrative', there is 'no dialectical tension between the two; both are drained of significance'. This is chiefly because 'the film makes it appear as if the battle has been waged and lost by both sides long ago' (2006: 213-214).
Thus, she points out, 'When he critiques the government and rants against his father's politics, Jake really protests too much' (2006: 216). As symbolised by many different textual and dramatic devices, from the very first moment we see Jake in all of his rebel without a cause style, to his relationship with Karla and the father figure Ryan, plus many other such features, we increasingly see his 'full commitment' to the American establishment and ultimately to the fact that 'America accepts him' (ibid.). As Marchetti observes, after the dénouement of the action, Jake is asked the contextually loaded question 'are you in or out?' This question is literally about whether Jake wants to ride in the ambulance with the injured Ryan. But, symbolically, it is about whether Jake is in or out of the establishment. Marchetti's summing up of the status of Jake in Rapid Fire deserves to be quoted in full:
It strikes me that Marchetti's conclusion itself resounds with the postmodernism, nostalgia and disappointment that her own work diagnoses in the text. It certainly diagnoses the plight of the agency of the protestant ethnic (who plays out 'a maudlin reminder of the struggles of the past and a fantasy that these battles have been concluded'). But I also think that the orientation of Marchetti's analysis suggests a positional mourning or melancholia of the critic's own: a disappointment that 'Brandon is a postmodern memento mori', and that, in this text, 'it really does not matter whether Brandon is in or not'.
Certainly, I would want to propose that had the ending of the film been slightly different – had Brandon answered the interpellative question with the answer that he was not 'in', but that he was instead 'out' – the film would have been unable to represent this in any way other than as being something negative, problematic, unsatisfying. Recall the end of a film such as Good Will Hunting (1997), when Will – who is an untrained autodidact prodigy and, specifically, a 'natural' mathematics genius – rejects the option of taking a privileged place within the elite institutional status quo of well-paid scholars. This is conveyed as a largely unintelligible and inexplicable 'rebellious' gesture par excellence – as the stupid immature irrationality of someone who does not know a good thing when he sees it. Of course, Will Hunting will always have the option to return, meaning that his rejection of 'the status quo' is not necessarily a rejection but rather a deferral. Will is going off to 'live life' and to 'mature'. But my point is that, were Jake to opt out, to reject the offer of inclusion, this would constitute a certain frustrating lack of resolution or 'closure' to the film.
For rather than asking the question of whether the 'normal' rebellious teen wants to grow up or not, Rapid Fire asks whether the protestant ethnic wants to be in or out. The question Marchetti alerts us to is: On what grounds is continued ethnic protest justified or necessary? Fist of Fury depicted a situation where the Chinese in China could not walk through public parks, and where colonial powers intruded oppressively in multiple ways into everyday freedoms. Even the 'sanitized and hagiographic' Hollywood biography of Bruce Lee, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), depicted the experience of blatant and intrusive day to day racism. Rapid Fire, on the other hand, depicts a much more stabilised environment of intelligible and sedimented ethnic enclave identities: everyone can instantly recognise others according to fully intelligible stereotypes; whilst, reciprocally, characters can opt out of their stereotypical culturally (over)determined identities by claiming to be not, say, 'Italian' or 'Chinese', but rather, as Marchetti notes, 'American'.
Despite the ambivalence at the heart of all hyphenated identities (Asian-American, Afro-American and so on), all of these options are fully available and none would disturb what Rancière often evocatively calls the distribution of the sensible, or what he calls in Disagreement (1999) the geometrical organisation of society. Society has been conceived of as geometrically arranged or structured since the time of Plato, observes Rancière; with different 'groups' assigned different positions, both theoretically and practically, both in terms of the way 'groups' are thought of and in terms of the ways they are related to, in the form of their social, legislative and institutional organisation. In this case, one can be 'ethnic-identity-x' or one can be 'American'. The hyphenated identity allows one to oscillate from one pole to the other. Of course, the (unhyphenated) American is the norm, or rather the ideal. The ethnic is, to borrow a phrase from Freud, the internal foreign territory. Indeed, as is well-known, the ethnic must always also be a hyphenated ethnic-American – a double status which involves both elements of mainstreaming and marginalising, of being both in and out, both normal and abnormal, both equal and unequal. The hyphenated identity is often regarded as a solution to the problem of multicultural identity politics. But it is rather more a stabilisation, taking the form of an irreducibly problematic yoking together of incompatible entities.
Despite its residual complexity, becoming this stabilised, neutralised, hybrid identity is the only real option made available to Jake, and the option he ultimately takes. Marchetti pinpoints precisely the way that the film handles the threatening dimension of ethnicity and fully 'inoculates' Jake:
There is, then, an enigmatic relation between several different sorts of 'difference': cultural difference, ethnic difference, and sexual difference. The protestant ethnic is easily masculine or masculinised. That is, protest is easily rendered as a process of remasculinisation. But the included ethnic – what does he or she become? Does he become a she? Rey Chow has noted that even in such influential (and hence exemplary) modes of thinking of ethnic agency and politics as that of Franz Fanon, political agency is gendered: the protestant ethnic is masculinised. Anything other than separatism is feminised. Hence, feminisation and complicity are drawn into a relation. Miscegenation is regarded as treachery (Chow 1998: 55-73).
But what if ethnics wish not to be protestant ethnics – if not to not 'protest' at all, but rather to protest the forces of coercive mimeticism which want to force them 'to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them' (Chow 2002: 107)? As Chow clarifies, coercive mimeticism is 'a process in which [ethnics] are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imaginings of them as ethnics' (ibid.). Now, Nitta contends that something important and distinct occurs in the martial artist as a character vis-à-vis the situations of coercive mimeticism. Supplementing Chow, she proposes that 'in so far as the martial artist displaces the dominant heterosexual structure of the Western action film', then, 'his significance [might] be evaluated in terms of more cutting-edge queer theory or psychoanalytical theory, rather than a theory of stereotype' (Nitta 2010: 384). This is because, as we have seen, ethnicity is bound up with the gendering of agency per se. So, where Bruce Lee is masculinised (without, nevertheless, necessarily acting as a force of or for heteronormativity), Brandon Lee is feminised. (Marchetti details at length the feminisation involved in the eroticisation of Brandon's body, even in the heterosexual love-making scene.) Moreover, the masculine body is the active body of the protestant; the feminised body is rather more passive. As Marchetti puts it: 'whereas Bruce's physical presence connoted resistance to racism, colonialism and class exploitation, Brandon (half Asian and half white) is exploited here as an image of assimilation, acceptance, and reconciliation' (Marchetti: 218).
Yet, is this destiny of the ethnic identity necessarily one of a journey from active, strident, striving 'father' to passive, castrated homogeneity? Even if the Oedipus complex were stereotypically to be regarded as resolving itself in such a way anyway (it is not: the son tends to replay the role (re)played by the father), there are other positions that remain to be considered: What about the position of the mother, for instance? Or, indeed, as one of Marchetti's subheadings phrases it, what about 'Oedipus in Diaspora'? Nitta explores this question thoroughly in her study of the interplay of masculinities in such post-Bruce Lee martial arts films as The Karate Kid series of the 1980s (1984, 1986, 1989). In these films she finds the martial arts subjectivity of the Okinawan-Japanese-American father-figure Miyagi to constitute the positive realisation of the masculinities produced by and in the wake of World War II. Miyagi, it must be remembered, is systematically contrasted to the ex-military martial artist 'Sensei' John Kreese of the Cobra-kai. She concludes:
Such an argument has its precedents in such founding works on globalisation as Armand Mattelart's identification and description of some key characteristics of contemporary developments in capitalism, which he approaches in terms of the 'communications revolution' (Mattelart 1993: 5-8). This revolution in communication has, Mattelart argues, precipitated a 'need' for the ideological re-working of erstwhile mythologies of nationalism, and hence precipitated all sorts of crises of cultural identity and transformations in the status of alterity. Such rearticulations are necessary, according to Mattelart, in order for capitalism to realise what he calls its 'global target' (1993: 6). Thus, processes of globalisation constitute the development of a spurious universalism, an ultimately Western or Eurocentric hegemony (Amin 1988). This amounts to a change in ideologies, away from the dialectics operative even during the very recent past, and into a state characterised not simply by nationalist ideologies but rather by 'discourses of truth'[1] which advocate the equivalence in difference of all cultures, and, therefore, the rejection of the idea of ethnic or cultural antagonisms.
Cultural antagonisms are things of the past. At least, this is the ideology of globalisation rhetoric. Traces of the impulse to represent things accordingly can be seen in the orientation of the universalist egalitarian discourse of the later Bruce Lee, of course, and also in Game of Death. But it can also be seen far beyond Bruce Lee. For instance, we can easily see in many other filmic texts, which can be variously regarded as iterations and reiterations of different elements of this ideology. Again, a prime example would be The Karate Kid (1984), a film whose popularity could be diagnosed by ideology-critique as being a consequence of the fact that, as the poststructuralists used to say, it is an utterance (or, better, a parole) originating from and destined for a 'dominant hegemony' which 'speaks itself back to itself' through filmic texts like this. Semiotic analysis can reveal the ways that 'encoded messages' surround the main characters, Danny Laruso and Mr Miyagi, in particular, but also 'sensei' John Kreese of the Cobra-kai karate club (Nitta 2010). Ideology critique and semiotic analyses both seek to delineate the relevant features of the hegemonic discourses into which alterity – in this case, the Oriental alterity of the Okinawan karate expert, Miyagi – is handled. Such analyses can also reveal the extent to which Miyagi is a construction built from elements of Orientalist Western myth. But in the context of our current concerns, along with approaches which focus on discourse, ideology and hegemony, other important theoretical tools, as suggested by Nitta (2010), do still come from psychoanalysis – and, I would add (supplementarily) also from deconstruction. The connection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction within the same work can be justified in many ways. But in the context of a consideration of The Karate Kid, it most immediately imposes itself because of a similarity between the status and work of the phallus (Lacan) and the logos (Derrida) – as both being principles containing the 'constitutive contradiction' of misrecognised synthesis, coherence, plenitude, and presence.
The Karate Kid conforms to the Barthesian concept of the 'readerly' text. It is designed so as to be interpretatively unproblematic. It utilises established, sanctioned techniques of encoding, that should not (ceteris paribus – other things remaining the same) frustrate the (Western) viewer's horizon of expectations, as it requires only that the viewer be au fait with dominant Hollywood 'realist' action cinema conventions. The film assumes a viewer situated within or intimately literate with what Kaja Silverman once termed the dominant fiction of the Western hegemonic intertext (1992).The film encodes its messages in such a way as to facilitate the unselfconscious arrival at 'the' unequivocal interpretation, achieved by the use of traditional enunciative and fictional conventions, such as sequential narrative causality, strictures of continuity, verisimilitude, and effects of 'vraisemblance' derived from the familiarity of the iconic character of the televisual signs – in short, the text utilises performative codes in such a way as to create denotative effects: that is, appearances of referentiality and codes of such fixed conventionality as to have become universal in meaning among Western viewing subjects. As Stuart Hall once put it in a now canonical essay:
The thematic structure of The Karate Kid is, again, familiar. Apart from the extra-textual or a priori signifying value of the title itself, the story follows a tried and tested plot formula which takes the form: upheaval – conflict – resolution. Intertwined and integral to this is the approximation to a romance, which follows a parallel pattern. Because of this, traditional methods of textual analysis would only really arrive at the conclusion that the film is not in any way a work of art: it is not innovative enough to occupy this status. But this is precisely what makes it a valuable text for cultural analysis.
The film presents the journey of Danny Laruso from the loss to the subsequent 'symbolic reappropriation of presence' (Derrida 1974: 142-3). The geographical upheaval of Danny from New Jersey to Los Angeles initiates a personal crisis which, though not immediately discernable, comes to prominence very early on in the narrative. In the Lacanian terms of Kaja Silverman, on his arrival in L.A. Danny can be said to be still playing out his previously achieved and maintained 'other and fictive' fantasy of self (Silverman 1992: 3). This is depicted by his pose as karate expert, and his amorous pursuit of the rich girl, Ali (who is the ex-girlfriend of a jealous boy, who also happens to be the most senior of the Cobra-Kai karate students: hence the conflict). At this stage, the 'objets a' (Silverman 1992: 1-7; Silverman 1983) through which Danny has created his sense of self are intact, so to speak: he is seen by himself and others as a wielder of the power of karate, and he is seen in the same way to be obtaining the attractive Ali. So, he is, in his own ego, or 'moi' (as Silverman notes, 'Lacan often refers to the ego as the moi, since for him it is that which is responsible for the production of identity or a "me"' [Silverman 1992: 3]), the wielder of agency, potency, completeness. Silverman notes that:
It is the illusory plenitude of self that is shaken by Danny's physical and psychological beatings on the beach, the soccer field, and the journey home on his bicycle; as well as the trauma of seeing that his enemies are senior students at the local karate club – compounded by the fact that they see him seeing them in their own 'phallic' glory. Being seen in the impotent state of the desiring spectator by the senior student of karate (who is therefore the fullest bearer of the image of phallic potency) is the penultimate event in the 'upheaval' section of the film. The last straw, so to speak, comes with the beating Danny takes whilst on his bicycle (castrated state) by the motorbike gang of karateka (phallic plenitude).
Danny projects his rage about this castration onto the bicycle itself. This is, then, a metonymic condensation and displacement related to his own (ego's) position, as conveyed in the symbolic contrast of bicycle/motorbike, or rather inferiority/superiority (Silverman 1983: 177). Whilst he is taking out this anger on his bike, he tells his mother that the cause of this anger is that he does not 'know the rules here'. When asked the way in which his anger could be eradicated, he comes out with the contextual non sequitur of 'I gotta take karate – that's what!' This is a non sequitur in the sense that all the information he has given his mother so far is that he 'hates' his 'stupid bike' and that he wants to go home: 'Why can't we just go home?' It is not the bike that he hates, of course, just its signifying function as being a vehicle for the metaphor of his own castration. And it is not necessarily 'home' he wants to return to, but rather the state of 'illusory plenitude' that he had attained and maintained before being divested of his earlier untested sense of self. Similarly, Danny does 'know the rules here'. He knows them only too well. They are the rules of masculinity and male identity condensed and displaced into the injunction, 'master karate'. When 'here' means in his own 'psyche', then his 'moi' requires the rule of 'mastery of karate: invincibility'; and when 'here' means 'within the context of the logic of this film', then the rules remain 'Danny must achieve mastery of karate'.
However, fundamentally, karate itself is not the motive force of the narrative. Karate is just conceived of by Danny and the value system of the film as an answer to all his problems. To be physically invincible is the conflation with psychic plenitude afforded by the ideal representation of his superego: and such representations, Silverman asserts, play a 'vital part' in 'defining for the subject what it lacks' (Silverman 1983: 177). The motive force of the narrative is the obtainment of the girl, Ali. Karate is the means to plenitude; Ali is the affirmation of that plenitude:
Danny will not relinquish the repetition of those representations of himself to himself, of his moi: karate equals phallic agency, mastery equals the reappropriation of value, signalling the point of structural narrative closure: the assertion of presence: resolution.
The means whereby Danny achieves mastery is through Mr. Miyagi. This relationship is constructed for various reasons, such as the stylistic symmetry of the film, and making the manifest themes of the 'true nature' of karate and the noticeable differences between Oriental 'wisdom' and Western insufficiency more superlatively stated, and this aspect will be considered in due course, but first it is more appropriate to continue with the examination of Danny.
What is most striking in the Danny-Miyagi relationship for the purposes of our discussion is its deployment of Oedipal structures. The absence of any other father figure in Danny's case expedites the adoption of Mr. Miyagi as a substitute. Just as the theoretical position of the father in the Oedipal triangle designates 'all those values which are opposed to lack', that is, the phallus, so Miyagi, within the parameters of the text's discursive space, should be the perfect embodiment of that symbolic position. However, in a classic Oedipal drama, Danny should work through an ambivalence towards him, which in the psychoanalytic developmental narrative would correspond with the ambivalence felt by the child of the same sex, arising because of an ultimately rivalrous desire for that symbolic position. In this fictional situation, the desired position would be that of Miyagi as the ideal representation of phallic agency, in this case crystallised in karate, of which Miyagi is presented as the master. In the psychoanalytic narrative, the Oedipal subject experiences a 'brutalizing sense of inadequacy ... because he can never be equivalent to the symbolic position with which he identifies'.[2] However, in this text, things are slightly different.
As Nitta (2010) observes, the model of masculinity offered by Miyagi could be regarded as a potentially more significant advance on the models of masculinity proffered elsewhere. As we have seen, Nitta scrutinises Chan's (2000) contention that Bruce Lee's 'ambisexual' mode of masculinity is ineffective for hegemony and hence offers a kind of ethico-political innovation. But Nitta finds Miyagi's masculinity to be even more productive a model – for, Miyagi is nurturing, caring, soft, delicate, passive, yielding: in other words, closer to the feminine and hence occupying a position more akin to the mother. However, if this is the case, then rather than looking for a new model of masculinity in Miyagi, perhaps two possibilities need to be engaged beforehand. The first is the possibility that the film is simply Orientalist. This has all the hallmarks of Orientalist fetishisation of the good other. Miyagi represents everything feminine, enthralling, mysterious, soft and subtle.
The second is the possibility that Danny's Oedipal father figure is not something embodied in one character, whether that be Miyagi or anyone else; but rather the desire for karate insofar as it stands for complete potency and plenitude. Danny has an initial ambivalent relationship with karate: first playing at it (kicking open the entrance to the apartment complex he is moving into on arrival in L.A.), a play acting which is witnessed by another teenager who takes his performance seriously and hence offers Danny the possibility of claiming the social status and cultural capital of 'karate expert'. Then, when Danny is beaten in a fight on the beach by Ali's ex-boyfriend, he tries to recuperate his lost cultural capital by looking for a karate club in order to become the subject he fantasises himself to be. Unfortunately the club he finds is full of the very teenagers who were his opponents on the beach, and – worse – the very one who fought Danny and beat him so comprehensively is the head student. After this crushing sense of inadequacy is forced upon him, Danny tries to walk away from karate and conflict, but he is relentlessly pursued and humiliated by the Cobra-kai karatekas.
Thus, the phallic plenitude that Danny initially desires (to be) takes the form, first, of a fantasy (his play-acting the persona of being an experienced karateka). It then becomes embodied by the version of phallic potency offered by the aggressive, hyper-masculine white American karatekas. However, excluded from this club, it is Miyagi who teaches Danny not so much an alternative interpretation of karate mastery but rather a different route to that mastery, coupled with a different ethos. Where the Cobra-kai are taught 'strike first, strike hard, no mercy', Danny is taught through a series of apparently non-training, indeed apparently nonsensical pedagogical devices ('wax on, wax off', 'sand the floor', 'paint the fence', 'paint the house') to understand karate in terms of a certain paradox – namely, that he trains to fight so that he 'won't have to fight'.
In other words, the film divides and displaces the Oedipal ingredients or coordinates throughout the film. This reminds us, in a way, not to anthropomorphise or be too subject-centric or humanist even when thinking about subject formation.
In any eventuality, the end of The Karate Kid, depicts the fantasy scenario of Danny resolving a kind of ideal Oedipus complex. The film ends at the moment of resolution, at the very point of Danny's emancipation from being bullied and his establishment of a coherent, complete and 'fully present' identity. In the simple universe of the Hollywood film, the culmination is this rather than the messy consolidation of multi-layered and compounded misrecognitions. Danny has mastered karate, become reconciled with his mother and won Ali; he has gained social acceptance through the affirmation of his 'value': he gets the power, the car, the girl, the trophy, and the vanquishing and approval of his former enemies. The last words of the film are spoken by the previous karate title-holder, whom Danny has now supplanted: 'You're all right, Laruso!'
Laruso as Rousseau
Even though the direction I would like to nudge readings is not subject-centred, it is important to note the ways that, like many films, The Karate Kid gives a kind of insight into the way that complex problems of identity are treated ideologically, and the way that difference or alterity are brought into line, moved into place. The question is the nature of any relation this may have to the process and practices of subjective 'reality'. The story of Danny is a simple depiction of any number of standard, standardised and intelligible movie themes: justice overcoming injustice, the journey from boyhood to manhood, righteousness prevailing in the face of the odds, good overcoming and correcting bad, purity overcoming corruption, flexibility trumping rigidity, and so on. The film is easy to interpret. It is designed to be 'consumed' rather than 'wrestled with'. And, as Stuart Hall argued in his canonical work on the cultural logics of viewing and spectatorship, any text offers a 'discourse' which:
In this sense, the work is an ideologically saturated utterance whose principal 'effect' is the reactivation of the very values that gave birth to its messages – the 'culturally instigated, and hence collective' desires of the 'predetermined narrative' of Western culture, within which the 'normal' 'Western subject is fully contained' (Silverman 1983: 136). As such, the film may be deemed unimportant or insignificant in and of itself. However, Gayatri Spivak draws our attention to what she calls Pierre Macheray's 'formula' for 'the interpretation of ideology'. This begins from the proposition that 'what is important in a work is what it does not say':
Like any 'classical' Hollywood film, what The Karate Kid 'refuses to say' relates to the maintenance of its enunciative status, as well as its fictionality: to the concealment of its method of production as well as the necessary but acknowledged censorships of its narrative strictures, excluding all other cinematic thematic and stylistic possibilities, so as to maintain its interpretative stability. What it cannot say is a different matter altogether. For what this proposition would seem to rely upon for its validity would be several qualifications, among which is the more complete notion of 'what it cannot say if it is to remain the same' – the same in status, appeal, audience, income, identification, and 'effect'. But, of course, this qualification may constitute a reversal back to the former category of 'refusals'. The question of whether a silence is a refusal or an inability to signify is perhaps largely undecidable. But for our purposes, let us merely add the minor proviso of 'staying the same': what can the film not 'say' if it is to remain 'the same', generically, ideologically?
Among the things that The Karate Kid cannot say must include the extent to which the dynamics of the situation occupied by Danny exemplify a certain elaboration of the 'working through' of what Jacques Derrida called the 'metaphysics of presence' (1974). Preferred hegemonic discourses concede to what Derrida often referred to as the metaphysical desire for resolution, for 'closure', for unitary and stable interpretations and meanings. (This is similar to the way Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis construe the work of the ego.) The metaphysical desire is for resolutions of certainty, the plenitude of the 'moi', the possibility for the closure of the sign.
Danny Laruso is contained in a narrative in which the attainment of full presence is presented as simultaneous with the full statement and real-isation of worth.[3] However, in Derrida's examination of the problems of 'presence' and 'value' as located by Rousseau, Derrida argues that in Rousseau there is no escape from a kind of inverse relationship between speech (presence) and writing (worth). Derrida quotes Rousseau: 'If I were present, no one would ever know what I was worth'. In other words, according to Rousseau, one must always sacrifice either one or the other state of 'existence'. This is because 'the operation that substitutes writing for speech also replaces presence by value: to the I am or the I am present thus sacrificed, a what I am worth is preferred' (Derrida 1974: 142). If there is any philosophical or theoretical truth in this relationality, it could be said that the hegemonic operation carried out by such texts as The Karate Kid works to insist not on a kind of inverse proportionality of presence to value but rather on a relation of direct proportionality or co-incidence. It can therefore be 'said' that the film exemplifies the hegemonic necessity for the maintenance of the mythological fallacy that insists upon the co-incidence of presence and value, logos and phallus, that has been called 'phallogocentricity'. Laruso is 'written' so as to be known, and the existential knowledge of his worth is constructed so as to coincide with the moment of his presence, which is, of course, fictive. This makes Danny into a 'native', a 'specimen'. As Spivak puts it:
Posed in this way, the processes integral to the hegemonic maintenance of the dominant symbolic order (phallus/logos) – specifically, the idea of the 'unary' self, the plenitude at the centre – necessarily involve these myths of coherence and cohesion. They are the pinnacle of identitarian thinking. So there is a sense in which such texts coax viewing and consuming subjects away from the traditional status of Western Imperial 'knowers', cultural ethnographers (replete with a 'problematic self'), and that they have rather become inculcated with the desire – as the ultimate goal – of occupying the position of the 'known' (the traditional state of the ethnographer's 'native'). The idea that 'the person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self' has as if been ideologically rewritten within such texts, as: 'the person who is known obviously cannot have a problematic self (and who would want such a thing!)'. We are all known others now. We are all protestant ethnics. So what, then, is made of or done with the 'ethnic' ethnic within this text?
The acknowledged and articulated form that alterity takes within The Karate Kid is embodied in Mr. Miyagi. He is precisely one of those 'recurrent token figures' which Spivak concedes 'it is so much easier to have' in handling alterity when it comes to representing it (Spivak and Gunew 1993: 195). For example, the first time we see Miyagi, he is sitting, facing away from us, inexplicably clicking chop-sticks in the air. He tells Danny that he will fix his faucet 'after'. When Danny asks 'after what?', Miyagi snaps 'After after!' Later, when showing Danny how to cultivate bonsai, Miyagi's only advice is that Danny should 'close eye' and 'think only tree'. Through all of these and other similar devices, the connotations are all those of that 'alien' yet 'lisible' imagery of Japanese Zen.
This is the economy of representation employed by the text. For the purposes of the film, the figure is basically a composite derived from several strong myths about the Oriental native, combined so as to maintain the familiarity of the figure. Indeed, the very title itself establishes a specificity within the viewer's horizon of expectations. The chain of expectations activated firstly by the title, secondly by the 'kid', and thirdly by the demonstrations of the kid's ineptitude at the 'karate' promised by the title, all pave the expectant way for the rapid ascension of the otherwise incongruous and redundant Oriental character to an unequivocal genre-specific position of the 'Oriental Martial Arts Master'.
The ascension of Miyagi to his signifying status is not immediate, of course. As a necessary component of the unfolding drama the connotative sign undergoes a series of deferrals before being strongly 'fixed' – he is not, for example, presented in a freeze-frame, wearing full karate suit and black belt, looking at and saluting the American flag, as the Barthesian system might prefer. All the imagery condensed in and around him is presented intermittently and cumulatively, so as to develop the connotation of his exoticism and Zen-esque appeal. Indeed, the association with the mystery and impenetrability of 'Zen-ness' has for a long time been a prerequisite for the 'Oriental Martial Arts Master', and it is complexly intertwined with the martial arts film. The inclusion of such mysticism within this cinematic style is a convention of the 'langue' whose primary utility comes from its propensity to signify either lofty idealism or (tautologically) just simple mysticism, or both, so as to elevate the practices advocated therein from crude violence into the ostensible realm of the 'spiritual'.
Alterity is then contrived simultaneously as being both alien and actually familiar: everyone in the film knows what it is and hold it in esteem, but the film stipulates that despite this familiarity in the West it remains Oriental and perfect only in its ethnicity, so to speak: Danny beats the seasoned karateka because his 'source' is more pure, as it comes replete with the holistic, informing 'zen-esque-ness'. Indeed, Miyagi is actually the name of one of the reputed founders of karate-do; and this lineage does stem from Okinawa and not Japan as such; a fact which complicates the commonplace belief that karate is simply Japanese. Karate-do has a rather more complex colonial and post-colonial history.
The fact that Miyagi is from Okinawa is emphasised throughout The Karate Kid. It is as if this information subtly changes the status of Miyagi, creating a category for his ethnicity more suitable to a narrative which is so susceptible to the use of superlatives. Because Miyagi is not simply Japanese yet Japanese-esque he can occupy the more perfect position of authenticated alterity combined with the USA-condoned patriotic immigrant national – who earned a medal 'for valour' in World War II by 'killing many Germans', as the inebriated Miyagi puts it. The Okinawan origin overcomes the potential signifying pitfalls inherent in either Japan or China, or any of the other 'authentic' nationalities of Martial Arts Masters, such as Korea or Thailand. For all of these Eastern possibilities carry potentially negative nationalistic connotations, and such connotations would cloud the purity of the film's messages and frustrate that strenuously motivated anti-ambiguity of the celebratory nature of the Oriental, even though that celebration belies the servitude of that Oriental to the Western subject.
The appeal made by the film to a myth of Oriental superiority regarding karate is a reflection of the hegemonically sanctioned 'understanding' of the 'reality' of Oriental otherness, and that this otherness manifests as a 'real' difference in the subjectivity of the Oriental. This subjectivity is represented in Miyagi as the warrior-poet, the fisherman-philosopher, the harmony of the yin-yang. Edward Said notes (including the tell-tale word 'known'): 'As a known and ultimately an immobilized and unproductive quality, they come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality: hence, when the Orient is being approved, such phrases as "the wisdom of the East"' (Said 1978: 205). Of course, Said is discussing the Middle East here, but it is readily seen that the Far East contains the same myths of mysticism with immense appeal in the West. Its aphoristic philosophies of Buddhism, Zen, and Taoism are so popular as to go some way towards the explanation of the popularity of the West's recent martial arts explosion, at least, and its hegemonic assimilation as negotiated through the generation of its own discursive idiom yet consistent with all other hegemonic utterances.
That there is such an affinity here between the West's 'utterance' about one of its others and the demythologised and demystified components of that same alterity's own formulation of itself; and that this affinity occurs at a moment of 'affiliative engagement' in a field of discourse prone to the antagonisms of nationalism and racism, is an event which implies a hegemonic tendency towards the incorporation of nationalist difference into the positive and preferred position of that discourse. Bhabha notes that:
The representations offered by The Karate Kid suggest an 'affiliative cultural engagement'. It does, of course, use as its paradigm a 'hasty' reading of the myths surrounding 'ethnic or cultural traits' as well as the premise of 'the fixed tablet of tradition' (Spivak 1988: 274), but the fact of its occurrence is ambiguous. That the alterity of Japaneseness is approximated to and celebrated as a form of difference with cultural 'worth' in the West is jarring. That this message is 'lisible' (readable/intelligible) and therefore hegemonically sanctioned is still a further complication of the common theoretical equation and starting point of 'superstructural' ideology as being determined by the economic interests of the 'base' – for, economically, the Japanese economy is the prime mover in undermining the West's desire for monopoly, so one would expect the continued maintenance of pro-West/anti-East myth. But there are, of course, economic reasons for the eradication of constraining national ideologies: as Samir Amin argues,
It is evident, therefore, that the dimension of capitalism that is Eurocentrism which 'undermines its intended universalist scope' is that which is being hegemonically re-worked, so as to facilitate the realisation of capitalism's universality. This is consistent with Bhabha's contention that
In this sense, it can be said that the 'extension' of dominant discourses from crude nationalist and ethnocentric constructions into the 'ideological emancipation' of multicultural interaction and acceptance postulated by globalisation stem from the complexities of the relationship between 'interest' and 'desire' – not only in the subject-specific terms as it was presented earlier by Silverman, but also in terms of the wider theory of ideology as examined by Spivak: as being 'a theory which is necessary for an understanding of interests', the adoption of which avoids the pitfalls and shortcomings of theorisations which reject it. As Spivak argues
So to propose that economic interest is a determinant of ideological desire, and to acknowledge the universal aims of capitalism, is to account for the generation of the environment within which this utterance exists. The expansion of capitalism could be said to have moved beyond the imperialist forms of its recent past, entering into a stage of globalisation no longer dependent upon the fuel of nationalist discourses and ethnocentric mythology for momentum. Processes of homogenisation to a global scale, in terms of consumptive practices and ideals, have spawned mythological discourses of putative emancipation, which could be encapsulated in the epigraph: All consumers are equal in the eyes of the commodity. Of course, this is not to say that myths incorporating national and cultural alterity are inert, for they clearly still permeate as residues echoing earlier voices of hegemony, as well as persisting as political positions and equations, and codes to be 'played-off' with each other and newer codes, but the forms of the 'homogenising hegemony' do desire the decommissioning of some of these outmoded codes and conventions of commonsense interpretation.
Is this then to enter a discourse of postnationality? Interethnic identification and cross-cultural affiliations do seem to be increasingly possible in a world that is networked and culturally fluid on the basis of postnationalist communications technologies. These are of course ultimately and intimately intertwined with the development and functioning of capitalism. But, they are not reducible to capitalism as such. To echo T. M. Kato's Kristevan and Irigarayan point that we encountered earlier, such new materialities can and will have unintended and far-reaching effects and consequences. Indeed, as Barthes wrote in the 1970s: 'the metaphor of the Text is that of the network…. Hence no vital 'respect' is due to the Text: it can be broken…; it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy' (Barthes 1977: 161). Barthes' theorisation of textuality still offers us a productive way to approach Bruce Lee, martial arts, film and culture, even when erstwhile forms and forces of articulation with politics seem drained of affect.
In 'From Work to Text', Barthes clarifies the effect of structuralist studies on our understanding of, in a sense, everything. Barthes' post-structuralism (it is post-structuralist because Barthes now sees all 'structures' as open and de-centred, and therefore susceptible to being opened, fractured, broken, and hence changed) makes the following observations and assertions. Firstly, language is not a 'tool' that we simply 'use'. Language 'makes' us. Second, language does not magically 'divide itself up', into literary and non-literary language. On the contrary, the division of language into literary and non-literary forms is the work of powerful institutions – and the very distinction between 'literature' and 'non-literature' has nothing to do with 'reading', but rather with imposed cultural values ('tastes', 'cultured-ness' and so on), which have nothing to do with reading, but work to impose order through a kind of value-driven censorship. As part and parcel of this process, literature has become sacralised, fetishised, without us ever having really noticed its social functions of instituting hierarchies of power, domination and exclusion. But, he argues, the birth of the concept of the Text changes all this. He distinguishes between 'works' and 'texts': the 'work', thought of as a 'proper' literary object, is thought to be what it is because of the 'genius' of a particular 'Author'. However, this, he argues, ignores language. All works are actually produced by language, and are therefore texts – fabrics, woven from citations. 'The Author' is something of a fantasy used to stabilise meanings by the dominant interpretive institutions (such as the university). Indeed, for Barthes, society is governed by institutions that control – produce, police, and regulate – meanings, and hence, practices and people, in diverse ways. But the Text is a force of political and cultural change. This is primarily because, argues Barthes, 'a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language' (1977: 157). But its consequences extend beyond the concerns of the English Literature Department, and right into the realms of culture.
Nevertheless, the notion and the ramifications of textuality are a matter of reading and interpretation. Barthes contrasts the text to the earlier notion of 'the work'. As he argues, 'the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example)', whereas 'the Text is a methodological field' (1977: 157). This he calls an 'opposition' – a distinction – in which 'the one is displayed' (i.e., the work is a 'thing'), whilst the other, the text, is only something to be 'demonstrated' (i.e., the Text is a process): 'the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language'. Crucially, argues Barthes, 'the Text is experienced only in an activity of production' (ibid.). In other words, you cannot simply 'see' Texts. You can see 'books' or 'works'. Textuality is a mode of reading – based on an acknowledgement that meaning is produced just as much, if not more, by the act of reading, than it is by the 'author's' act of writing. Indeed, 'the Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed' (1977: 156), insists Barthes. If texts are produced by language, then you cannot delimit what they mean or say; the 'writer' or 'producer' may have had intentions, but they cannot be 'known', nor do they have any relationship to the possible meanings that can be produced on 'reading'. The Text is infinitely polysemous. 'The Text is plural' writes Barthes, because 'the text is a tissue, a woven fabric' (1977: 159). The text is 'woven entirely of citations, references, echoes, cultural languages'. Moreover, 'the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas' (1977: 160).
Although this influential argument is rightly familiar to those within literary, film and cultural studies, its pertinence for the study of Bruce Lee or martial arts culture per se has yet to be stated, let alone fully elaborated. But put bluntly, Bruce Lee has always been approached as work, as a work, as a worker with a work to do, and so on. However, says Barthes, 'the work closes on a signified…. The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified' (1977: 158). To approach Bruce Lee as Text is to allow for the re-opening of Bruce Lee: Bruce Lee re-opened, reloaded, recharged, precisely because no longer regarded from a position which valourises the original moment of emergence or of task, responsibility or labour. 'The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary)' (1977: 159), writes Barthes. Such a reader of Bruce Lee must be prepared to avoid the temptations of utopianism, urgency, politicised 'realism', and so on; prepared instead to allow 'the infinity of the signifier' (1977: 158), prepared in other words, to let the signifiers 'play'.
In other words, then, to study Bruce Lee, to do justice to the impact, influences and effects of Bruce Lee, one must forget Bruce Lee. Forget the protestant eth(n)ic, the intentions, the aspirations; and accept the chaotic dissemination of a truly unique intervention into myriad realms and contexts. Bruce Lee cannot simply be regarded as 'author', authority, origin and measure of the cultural legacies of Bruce Lee. Of course, as Barthes writes, 'It is not that the Author may not "come back" in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a "guest". If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters'. How can 'the author' be the origin of the meaning of the text? Yes, he or she may have an 'intention', but how can we 'receive' it? Historical or biographical research into their life is itself only the production of yet more texts. If you have an 'archive', you still have to interpret it, decode, translate, guess, add, infer. Your interpretation cannot be 'final' or 'decisive'. Indeed, this whole course of action is skewed from the outset by the fetishization of 'authorial intention', the fetishization of 'Man' as origin and controller of life, meaning, and destiny. The facts are, as it were, under your nose: it is language that produces us, and not the other way around:
The same may be said of the celluloid-I, and of the films we consume. But do we all always 'consume' Bruce Lee? According to Barthes, it is 'the work' that 'is normally the object of consumption'. That is to say, we 'consume' works when we read them as 'works'. They are commodities. However, in Barthes' schema, we 'produce' texts when we read things as texts. This is, in a sense, the first stage of a kind of empowerment. For, not passively consuming, but rather approaching texts as Text, argues Barthes, 'requires that one try to abolish the distance between writing and reading'. The traditional notion of 'reading' is one of passivity. The textual notion of reading is one of activity, of production. Thus, reading is itself a kind of writing – or re-writing: 'reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text…. the text itself plays (like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over'. Hence, Barthes proposes 'a final approach to the Text, that of pleasure': 'As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation' (164). And this is doubtless the most enduring and perhaps important force in the cultural legacies of Bruce Lee: the production of a pleasure without separation.
[1] See Foucault: 'in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth' (Foucault 1988: 93).
[2] Silverman notes: 'When the child internalizes the image of the parent of the same sex at the end of the Oedipal crisis, it compounds mis-recognition upon mis-recognition. The result is a brutalizing sense of inadequacy both for the male and female subjects – for the former because he can never be equivalent to the symbolic position with which he identifies, and for the latter because she is denied even an identification with that position' (1983: 191).
[3] The Karate Kid, as a fiction, utilises a process whereby the effect of closure can be affected: as the cinematic text is a process reliant upon writing, so the film is 'written', and, 'To write is indeed the only way of keeping or recapturing speech, since speech denies itself as it gives itself' (Derrida 1974: 142). Through this economy, the situation of Danny Laruso avoids the full realisation of the paradoxes integral to the desire for presence.
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