The Truth of Bruce Lee

By Paul Bowman

In a consideration of the most famous people of the 20th Century, Davis Miller places Bruce Lee in the top four. Many may wonder about the point of such a futile and ‘nerdy’ exercise: why arrange famous names into a hierarchy? But Miller’s point in making the list is not to argue for the importance of Bruce Lee. Rather it is to point out that although Bruce Lee is surely at least as well known as figures like Elvis Presley, Adolph Hitler, Che Guevara and Ghandi, nevertheless, Lee is the one that we know the least about. A household name that is immensely well-known and yet unknown, Bruce Lee remains an enigma. However, this enigmatic status is not that of a mysterious Taoist priest or High Plains Drifter: Bruce Lee’s life is not shrouded in a mystery that derives from a lack of knowledge or information. Information about Bruce Lee abounds. Archives and records about Bruce Lee have not been lost in the mists of time. Rather, what Bruce Lee suffers from is what postmodern theorists called a legitimation crisis in knowledge. For, a huge amount of information has been amassed about Bruce Lee. He lived much of his life openly. He documented, recorded, took copious notes about and even filmed his training and teaching. Evermore text is produced about Bruce Lee. Myriad different discourses involve Bruce Lee or are even structured by a figure (or figuration) of Bruce Lee. And four decades after his ‘arrival’, Bruce Lee studies, fandom, worship and criticism continues to proliferate. Nevertheless, there is a crisis in knowledge about Bruce Lee. The ‘truth’ of Bruce Lee is interminably and vehemently contested.

This enduringly ‘controversial’ status has arisen for reasons that are surely overdetermined. For, the sense of – and the significance of the – uncertainly surrounding Bruce Lee relates not only to the still-surprising and contentious issue of his premature death; but it was doubtless intensified and foregrounded by the equally surprising and contentious death of his son, Brandon Lee, who died in equally bizarre, unclear and peculiar circumstances. For Bruce Lee died in circumstances that are to be regarded as either ‘mysterious’ or as ‘dubious’. His son, Brandon, was accidentally shot and killed on the set of The Crow, whilst filming the death-scene of the character he was playing in the film, by a gun that was meant to fire only blanks. Brandon’s death provided more fuel for and reignited various enduring conspiracy, murder, mystery and even ‘curse’ theories. For, the unexpected death of Bruce Lee had immediately precipitated conspiracy theories and action-adventure fantasy scenarios in which he had been assassinated by triads because he was revealing too many secrets of kung fu to westerners, and that they had dispatched him by a secret death-touch, or by poison. The poison thesis was also attractive to those who in a less Fu Manchu inspired vein fantasized Lee as the perfectly honed and impossibly pure and fit paragon of health. In some of these narratives, so pure and free from contamination was Lee that he had died from a reaction to a single aspirin or other such putatively trivial painkiller. This was because he had never taken such supplements before, so his body could not handle them. The reciprocal obverse of this theory is the sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll version, in which Bruce Lee had met his end thanks to too many prescription and recreational drugs. The latter thesis is currently in the ascendant.

(There is also, a simultaneous excess and dearth of knowledge about Bruce Lee’s martial art ability. Insofar as this excess and absence relates to the cinematic representation of his image and the difficulty of verification in the society of the spectacle, this too is a quintessentially postmodern problematic. Indeed, it is around this latter problematic that many questions condense, and the situation can be inverted and displaced. For, when it comes to the verification of knowledge of and about martial arts, the question becomes on of what ‘knowledge’ might actually be. There is an irreducible problem of verification here, to which we will return.)

However, the quasi-official story favoured, sanctioned, countersigned and legitimated by Bruce Lee’s official inheritors – a publishing and production enterprise fronted by Bruce Lee’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell and the writer she has granted privileged access to Lee’s personal archives, John Little – plumps for a rather more problematic narrative. This can be seen most clearly in the Hollywood film, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), a film that Meaghan Morris rightly calls ‘a sanitized as well as hagiographic interpretation of Bruce Lee’s life as authorized by his widow’ (Morris 2001: 181). Of course, Dragon is ‘just a film’. But, it is at the forefront of a particular sort of representational project, a sanitizing and hagiographic project, and it deserves attention at least insofar as it claims to be ‘the’ Bruce Lee story.

The peculiar feature that runs through the film is its sustained self-contradictory proposition that Bruce Lee developed a set of martial principles at the same time as it represents them as having been always already present, ‘in’ Bruce Lee, even in his (entirely spurious) childhood training in wing chun kung fu. The real twist of the knife comes in the form that these supposedly always already present principles of jeet kune do are represented in Dragon as the flashy cinematic moves of Bruce Lee’s celluloid kung fu. Thus, we see the pre-teen child Lee training wing chun drills on the wooden dummy and then breaking away from the repetitive drills and into a concluding series of back-fists (reminiscent of the killing blows Lee lands on the Japanese cook who infiltrated the Jing Wu school in Fists of Fury in order to poison Lee’s sifu), accompanied by Lee’s signature cinematic sustained kiai. Coming from a pre-teen child, the effect is obviously and deliberately comical. But the motif is a stock in trade of the Lee myth: one must break out of routine and ‘be spontaneous’. (As Meaghan Morris rightly notes, this is taken up as the structuring pedagogical motif of No Retreat, No Surrender.)

However, this explicitly or literally advocated spontaneity is not something that Dragon manages to encapsulate or represent. The famously ‘anti-institutional’ Bruce Lee is represented throughout Dragon as regularly striving to establish a chain of kung fu schools ‘like MacDonald’s’; and what we see taking place within those schools is precisely the sort of relentless rote repetition of standardized moves that not only Bruce Lee but the entire pedagogical style of Chinese martial arts teaching refuses. (Such repetition is characteristic of Americanized/militarized Japanese and Korean systems such as karate and taekwondo.)

Thus, what is shown in Dragon runs absolutely contrary to what the dialogue and narrative purport to advocate.

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Paul Bowman is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Roehampton University.

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By Paul Bowman In a consideration of the most famous people of the 20th Century, Davis Miller places Bruce Lee in the top four. Many may wonder about the point of such a futile and ‘nerdy’ exercise: why arrange famous names into a hierarchy? But Miller’s point in making the list is not to argue for the importance of Bruce Lee. Rather it is to point out that although Bruce Lee is surely at least as well known as figures like Elvis Presley, Adolph Hitler, Che Guevara and Ghandi, nevertheless, Lee is the one that we know the least about. A household name that is immensely well-known and yet unknown, Bruce Lee remains an enigma. However, this enigmatic status is not that of a mysterious Taoist priest or High Plains Drifter: Bruce Lee’s life is not shrouded in a mystery that derives from a lack of knowledge or information. Information about Bruce Lee abounds. Archives and records about Bruce Lee have not been lost in the mists of time. Rather, what Bruce Lee suffers from is what postmodern theorists called a legitimation crisis in knowledge. For, a huge amount of information has been amassed about Bruce Lee. He lived much of his life openly. He documented, recorded, took copious notes about and even filmed his training and teaching. Evermore text is produced about Bruce Lee. Myriad different discourses involve Bruce Lee or are even structured by a figure (or figuration) of Bruce Lee. And four decades after his ‘arrival’, Bruce Lee studies, fandom, worship and criticism continues to proliferate. Nevertheless, there is a crisis in knowledge about Bruce Lee. The ‘truth’ of Bruce Lee is interminably and vehemently contested. This enduringly ‘controversial’ status has arisen for reasons that are surely overdetermined. For, the sense of – and the significance of the – uncertainly surrounding Bruce Lee relates not only to the still-surprising and contentious issue of his premature death; but it was doubtless intensified and foregrounded by the equally surprising and contentious death of his son, Brandon Lee, who died in equally bizarre, unclear and peculiar circumstances. For Bruce Lee died in circumstances that are to be regarded as either ‘mysterious’ or as ‘dubious’. His son, Brandon, was accidentally shot and killed on the set of The Crow, whilst filming the death-scene of the character he was playing in the film, by a gun that was meant to fire only blanks. Brandon’s death provided more fuel for and reignited various enduring conspiracy, murder, mystery and even ‘curse’ theories. For, the unexpected death of Bruce Lee had immediately precipitated conspiracy theories and action-adventure fantasy scenarios in which he had been assassinated by triads because he was revealing too many secrets of kung fu to westerners, and that they had dispatched him by a secret death-touch, or by poison. The poison thesis was also attractive to those who in a less Fu Manchu inspired vein fantasized Lee as the perfectly honed and impossibly pure and fit paragon of health. In some of these narratives, so pure and free from contamination was Lee that he had died from a reaction to a single aspirin or other such putatively trivial painkiller. This was because he had never taken such supplements before, so his body could not handle them. The reciprocal obverse of this theory is the sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll version, in which Bruce Lee had met his end thanks to too many prescription and recreational drugs. The latter thesis is currently in the ascendant. (There is also, a simultaneous excess and dearth of knowledge about Bruce Lee’s martial art ability. Insofar as this excess and absence relates to the cinematic representation of his image and the difficulty of verification in the society of the spectacle, this too is a quintessentially postmodern problematic. Indeed, it is around this latter problematic that many questions condense, and the situation can be inverted and displaced. For, when it comes to the verification of knowledge of and about martial arts, the question becomes on of what ‘knowledge’ might actually be. There is an irreducible problem of verification here, to which we will return.) However, the quasi-official story favoured, sanctioned, countersigned and legitimated by Bruce Lee’s official inheritors – a publishing and production enterprise fronted by Bruce Lee’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell and the writer she has granted privileged access to Lee’s personal archives, John Little – plumps for a rather more problematic narrative. This can be seen most clearly in the Hollywood film, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), a film that Meaghan Morris rightly calls ‘a sanitized as well as hagiographic interpretation of Bruce Lee’s life as authorized by his widow’ (Morris 2001: 181). Of course, Dragon is ‘just a film’. But, it is at the forefront of a particular sort of representational project, a sanitizing and hagiographic project, and it deserves attention at least insofar as it claims to be ‘the’ Bruce Lee story. The peculiar feature that runs through the film is its sustained self-contradictory proposition that Bruce Lee developed a set of martial principles at the same time as it represents them as having been always already present, ‘in’ Bruce Lee, even in his (entirely spurious) childhood training in wing chun kung fu. The real twist of the knife comes in the form that these supposedly always already present principles of jeet kune do are represented in Dragon as the flashy cinematic moves of Bruce Lee’s celluloid kung fu. Thus, we see the pre-teen child Lee training wing chun drills on the wooden dummy and then breaking away from the repetitive drills and into a concluding series of back-fists (reminiscent of the killing blows Lee lands on the Japanese cook who infiltrated the Jing Wu school in Fists of Fury in order to poison Lee’s sifu), accompanied by Lee’s signature cinematic sustained kiai. Coming from a pre-teen child, the effect is obviously and deliberately comical. But the motif is a stock in trade of the Lee myth: one must break out of routine and ‘be spontaneous’. (As Meaghan Morris rightly notes, this is taken up as the structuring pedagogical motif of No Retreat, No Surrender.) However, this explicitly or literally advocated spontaneity is not something that Dragon manages to encapsulate or represent. The famously ‘anti-institutional’ Bruce Lee is represented throughout Dragon as regularly striving to establish a chain of kung fu schools ‘like MacDonald’s’; and what we see taking place within those schools is precisely the sort of relentless rote repetition of standardized moves that not only Bruce Lee but the entire pedagogical style of Chinese martial arts teaching refuses. (Such repetition is characteristic of Americanized/militarized Japanese and Korean systems such as karate and taekwondo.) Thus, what is shown in Dragon runs absolutely contrary to what the dialogue and narrative purport to advocate. Paul Bowman is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Roehampton University.