Enter the Dragon – Bart Seng
The first scene from ‘Enter the Dragon’ that was really capable of evoking a kind of affectionate and child-like pride in my mid-20’s ethnic Chinese inner (and irrational) sensibilities, was when Bruce Lee smacked a younger Shaolin disciple in the head for lowering his gaze away from his opponent while bowing in respect. Before we continue looking at Bruce Lee’s final completed film appearance, let’s consider these explicitly Chinese filmic sensibilities, which are born from an early age, and prescribed by a racialised communality and its culture of affect and entertainment. Sensibilities rarely require rationality to exercise its effects on its subscribers; instead, they are most effective by way of aesthetic presentations and triggers, and only further reinforced by the discomfiting fact that it can never ever be cancelled (as much as one might be politically motivated to ‘decolonise’ their gaze, or even to expand the cultural horizon of one’s gaze).
The scene in which Lee chastises the young disciple concurred with a naturalised ideal of the Chinese hero – he is as righteous as he is wily, but he is allowed to be wily only because it is corroborated by his impeccable Confucian morality, thus he is also wise, shrewd, honourable and strong. In short, a philosopher-warrior imbued with Asian Values. And Bruce Lee is the moving, living image of this Chinese philosopher-warrior, even if Bruce Lee, the actor, had already died, just 6 days before the release of ‘Enter the Dragon’ in 1973. In the film, a group of martial artists travelled to a mysterious island to compete in a martial arts competition organised by the (also Chinese, or perhaps in the fetish spirit of its time, we can say Oriental) crime lord Han. True to its pulpy blaxploitation sub-genre roots, the film contains sincere caricatures of international espionage, East-Asian forms of martial arts and unspoken social antagonisms. Perhaps a postcolonial reading of the film would critique the authoritative character of the British intelligence agent Braithwaite who had engaged Bruce Lee to infiltrate the tournament in order to find evidence to bring down Han. The criticism being Lee, an East Asian man, appeared to be subordinated as a covert tool to a colonial authority to destroy another East Asian entity that has been deemed criminal by the same colonial force. Of course, as audiences, we are not so easily fooled by such a coercive narrative. We know that whatever ethnicity Han might be, he is without a doubt an unscrupulous drug lord and sex trafficker. We also know that despite being Lee’s immediate boss, Braithwaite is ultimately incompetent and amounts to nothing more than a bumbling and ineffectual deux ex machina.
‘What I’m really trying to say is, since 1973, anyone who has seen Enter the Dragon, has only ever wanted to be Bruce Lee, and in essence, Chinese… or Hong Konger, if you want to be politically precise,’ I explained with inordinate passion to my Polish date, the film suspended in motion on my screen, marked by Netflix’s logo and a one-line premise of the film. ‘Who wouldn’t want to be Bruce Lee – born into a rich, prestigious interracial family, endowed with ridiculous athleticism, a worldwide phenomenon, and also really fucking sexy. But I’d rather fuck Bruce Lee, to be honest.’ She has always been sexually straightforward, but this time I wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to fuck Bruce Lee or has somehow conflated me with Bruce Lee based on a very flimsy racial link. I got nervous and hit the play button but unfortunately, it was the scene where Lee was awkwardly introduced to another undercover agent posing as a prostitute. Lee remained true to his stoicism and eschewed the expected Bond-esque response, instead he made not a single move on Mei Ling. What can I say, he’s a consummate professional untainted by desire. ‘I bet he’s like super hard under those trousers and he had to play it cool y’know what I mean? Fuck, I would love to enter that dragon.’ I was aghast. As a diehard geek, I was utterly offended by the casual objectification of Bruce Lee by this white woman. It was almost as if she was participating closer with the moving, living image of Bruce Lee than I was capable of conceptualising.
I felt like I was experiencing some form of virtual cuckholding, watching from behind the screen as my date pins down and pegs my hero in one of Han’s dark, menacing dungeon cells. ‘Do you want me to be the dragon, or do you want to be the dragon? I personally have no preference.’ She was absolutely serious, and I was tempted, not for the sex but to finally be enabled into inhabiting the image of my Chinese hero, even if only in a half-baked sexual role play.
On the topic of an image’s representational abilities (or its lack thereof), Hito Steyerl once asked rhetorically: ‘ask anybody whether they’d actually like to be a JPEG file’. I don’t care for a JPEG file, but I would happily emulate a .MP4 or .MOV or even a .MKV file. I had practised Jeet Kune Do as a child, and would never ever, under no circumstances, avert my gaze from the enemy’s, even whilst bowing. That was why I packed up and left her apartment that night without finishing the film nor the date proper – I was only doing what Bruce wouldn’t have done.
On the way home, a random person took his face mask off, screeched at me from across the road, ‘KONICHIWA CHINK’ and then scurried off into a dark alley. Instinctively, an acidic pulse shot up from my stomach and through to the base of my throat. I definitely averted my gaze from him. I decided to stop by a late-night Chinese diner for some comfort food that had never failed to sooth frayed nerves. While waiting for my order of sweet-and-sour pork rice, I put back on ‘Enter the Dragon’. Lee was entering the mirror maze, engaged in a tense game of hide-and-seek with Han. His muscle-bound body speckled onto the jagged constellation of broken mirrors, while a sparse, hypnotic soundtrack dragged out the suspense. Lulled out of the film by this artificially produced atmospheric tension, a half-thought pierced through my defences: nothing about Bruce Lee relates to me! Not his socioeconomic birth right, nor his monumental successes during the height of the Asian-American Movement, nor his eventual immortalisation as a heroic image, and most certainly not with his superhuman physique and immeasurable wisdom.
The pride I had felt for Bruce Lee was largely predicated on an affective bricolage of childhood memories, cultural immediacy and an assortment of personal lacks and desires. I was never emulating the .MOV file, I was instead utterly seduced, and not even by Bruce Lee but, by the .MOV file streamed digitally to me on Netflix. It could easily have been the analogue information scanned onto a video cassette, or by the laser written sound and video on a pirated VCD. The medium that carries the film would change over the years, and every Entering the Dragon produces a slightly different mode and motive of seduction. In them, the image of Bruce may glitch, distort, suffer through bad lossy compression, and sometimes sport a different skin colour – it didn’t matter, I already knew the plot, the artifacts and lesions just endear him even more to me. Tonight, Bruce is coming to me in full, uninterrupted HD with all his analogue defects rendered as palatable as possible. He’s still rugged, but also sharper, shinier, and more synthetic. Identifying this fetish-image and its endlessly seductive qualities with some kind of generalised racial category of Chinese seems rather specious, even idealistic, and simply missing the point. Bruce Lee is not the aspirational Chinese hero we want him to be, if there is anything to be inspired from him (and there are plenty), it must only be found in the material thing that is his eternally moving, living image. The Cantonese shopkeeper broke my chain of thought with a hearty serving of red braised pork with rice. I did not complain about the wrong order, but she tried initiating a conversation through her face mask. Unfortunately, I could not understand Cantonese at all and when I tried to reply in what I assumed to be a mutual tongue, mangled Mandarin spluttered out of me uneasily. Incomprehension hung in the air, and we lingered in silence for an uncomfortable length of time. From the side of my eyes, I could glimpse the onset of some trouble across the street. She followed my gaze outside, and outside is North West London in 2020 where across the street from us, a woman was getting accosted by a junkie.