Will the Real Bruce Lee Please Stand Up?

You would have thought, all these decades on from Bruce Lee's death, that the whole 'Brucesploitation' phenomena would have finally burned itself out.  While his actual film catalogue has now become part of 'respectable' cinema, the subject of serious critical analyses, and his life, martial arts techniques and philosophy have been assessed and reassessed, it seems that, for some, this still isn't enough.  Some mainstream filmmakers, backed by major US studios, still seem to think that there is an appetite for 'new' Bruce Lee films.  At least, this is the message I took away from my recent viewing of Birth of the Dragon (2016).  While, in terms of budget and production values, it might seem a world away from all those cheap seventies Hong Kong made fake Bruce Lee movies and biopics, make no mistake, in terms of 'Brucesploitation', it is cut from the same cloth as those films.  Like many of them, it purports to portray a perticular incident from early in Lee's career, long before he found fame in film and TV.  In this case, it the behind-closed-doors he had with fellow martial arts teacher Wong Jack Man in San Francisco in 1964.  Now, there is already a lot of misinformation surrounding this incident, which the film contrives to add to.  For one thing, it portrays Wong Jack Man as some kind of Shaolin monk on a pilgrimage from China, whereas, in reality, he was Hong Kong born and taught martial arts in the San Francisco area.  (Which he continued to do until his retirement in 2005, rather than returning to China, as he does in the movie).

Accounts of the fight and the reasons behind have always been contradictory.  Lee's camp claimed the fight lasted only three minutes or so, with Lee emerging a clear victor.  Man, by contrast, claimed it lasted 20-25 minutes with him as the victor.  Other accounts claim the fight was inconclusive, with Lee resorting to unfair strikes against Man.  This latter version seems to be the one the film favours (excluding Lee's unfair tactics) for the purposes of its plot, which casts the conflict as being less a result of any rivalry between Lee and Man, (in reality, it seems that it was the result of an open challenge from Lee, although his widow has claimed that it was the result of Man's disapproval of Lee teaching non-Chinese people Wing Chun), than the result of outside forces.  In this case, the fight is arranged via Chinatown crime figures, for betting purposes, with the fate of a Chinese prostitute one of Lee's students is in love with, depending upon its outcome.  Which brings us to the crux of the film's problems: in the process of completely fictionalising an episode from Lee's life, it also relegates Lee to being a supporting character in his own story.  The focus of the film is placed firmly upon Lee's entirely fictional, not to mention white American, student.  By doing so, it commits the 'crime' that concerned the real Lee so much: the fact that so much western pop culture relegated non-whites, particularly the Chinese, to secondary, stereotypical roles, in the belief that audiences couldn't accept a real Chinese person in a lead role.  Because there's no doubt that here Bruce Lee is reduced to a stereotype - that of the angry young Chinese guy.  To add insult to injury, it does nothing to explore his motivations for teaching martial arts to non-Chinese in the first place - that he hoped it could be a first step in breaking down the stereotypes and introducing white Americans to the complexities of real Chinese culture.

But this isn't the first time that Hollywood has misrepresented the Bruce Lee-Wong Jack Man fight.  Back in the nineties Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, a big budget biopic, completely fictionalised it,to the extent of replacing Man with an entirely different character.   In this version, Lee fights Johnny Sun, who represents the Chinese community who don't approve of him teaching martial arts to outsiders.  Significantly, in this telling, although wins the fight, Sun launches an attack on him afterward, (something Lee was claimed to have done to Wong Jack Man after their fight).  This rewriting of history shouldn't be surprising, as Dragon was derives from his widow's biography of him: Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew.  But at least Dragon puts Lee front and centre in his own story, even if its fictionalisation of some aspects of it are on a par with the average 'Brucesploitation' biopic.  A more recent portrayal of Lee has proven controversial for its apparent casting of him in a unfavourable light.  Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood presents us with a clearly fictional episode in Lee's career, where, while working on The Green Hornet, an arrogant and egotistical Lee comes into conflict with Brad Pitt's stuntman, Cliff.  The fight, which could be seen as a comment on the real life fight with Wong Jack Man, ends inconclusively, although Lee comes out of it as being, well, a bit of an arsehole.  It is interesting that the reaction to this portrayal garnered far more criticism than the broadly similar characterisation in Birth of the Dragon.  After all, the Tarantino version of Lee is clearly fictional and the incident is shown as recalled by Cliff who, it is implied, might be a reliable narrator, (it is notable that in a later scene, with Sharon Tate, Lee is shown as being a nice guy), whereas Birth of the Dragon purports to be 'real'. 

Of course, the problem is that the 'real' Bruce Lee has effectively vanished amidst the mythologising of him that has occurred since his death.  Indeed, this mythologising started virtually the moment he died, elevating him to a heroic stats that confused the real man with the characters he played and made him - to his fans, at least - immune from any criticism.  This process is entirely understandable - Lee was undoubtedly the first Chinese performer to really break through into mainstream western pop culture, his star status accepted by non-Chinese audiences without question.  His style of fighting popularised the martial arts, taking them to a mass audience, while his action orientated films with predominantly contemporary setting helped revolutionise the King Fu cinema industry.  But it has to be said that films like Birth of the Dragon which, on the one hand want to show the 'real' Lee, but on the other want to please devoted fans by fictionalising his life in order to maintain the myth, really add nothing to the legend.  Moreover, it doesn't even have decency to be insanely entertaining like the more bizarre manifestions of Hong Kong 'Brucesploitation'.