A semester ago, while at Reel Video, a friend noticed that I was checking out Tsui Hark's Chinese Ghost Story III and asked, almost skeptically, "Hey, who do you watch these with?" 

"Myself," I said.

My movie social life hasn't changed much since, though this semester, January's slogan of "Have you seen Crouching Tiger yet?" has turned with February into "Have you seen Yi Yi yet?" Asian cinema has been a burgeoning influence for a while now (remember The Matrix and Quentin Tarantino?) but it took Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to put together the cavalry for the initially disparate, badly organized probes by the brilliant Jackie Chan's dubbed crap, the John Woo/Chow Yun Fat self-parodying competition, and the sort of creepy martial-Asian/urban-Afro marriage that characterizes Rush Hour, Romeo Must Die, and Berkeley API fashion. 

With a lens that seems to encompass all of China, and a talent list that includes Ang Lee, Yo-Yo Ma, choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, Peter Pau (cinematographer of The Killer and The Bride with the White Hair), and four main actors from four Chinese nations (including Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh), Crouching Tiger has brought together a representative China, and somehow 'synthesized' Asian cinema into something now familiar for Americans. Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, and Jet Li--formerly known to mainstream audiences, respectively, only as a Chinese Uncle Tom, a guy tied to John Woo, and a vague, half-recognized name--have suddenly joined that Hollywood roster of names that we not just know, but are expected to know. Much like Emma Thompson, Mike Myers, and Celine Dion, they can become popular only when they can become American. 

But the idea of assimilation also works on a much deeper level. In A Colonizer's Model of the World, J.M. Blaut says that Western historians have long held a 'diffusionist' bias--a belief that a modernizing, Western "Inside" spreads progress to the backwards "Outside," the rest of the world. Diffusionists believe the Inside is Western, creative, theoretical, rational, always advancing, and mature, and that the Outside is non-Western, imitative, bodily, emotional rather than intellectual, and childish. A look at Crouching Tiger reviews shows this misty film of prejudice wrapping itself around even the most harmless of action movies. Alexander Walker's comment in This is London, the online version of the big Brit paper, The Evening Standard, is predictably infuriating, when he says Crouching Tiger is "unlike other Chinese epics, whose...clone-like replication of Oriental features sometimes makes me uncertain of whom I'm watching." 

The most subtly pernicious statement, however, has been owned (and must be owned up to) by Ang Lee himself, whose summary of Crouching Tiger as "Sense and Sensibility with martial arts" sounds pretty good until you realize that it says that the core content comes from Jane Austen's West while the funny punches come from China. American reviewers seem only capable of playing copycat with Lee; Time magazine, which called Tiger the best movie of the year, repeats the same logic of insult, calling it "a blending of Eastern physical dexterity and Western intensity of performance," which topographically exiles dramatic "intensity" west of the suddenly nimble Chinese.

Far more blatantly, in the New York Times, David Kehr asks "Does the West love this movie because it is so profoundly Asian, or because it is not?" Kehr's contraction-less description of sino-cinema is clever and thoughtful (a rarer combination than you'd think), convincingly expert, and probably simplistic. Kehr makes the typical critical disclaimers on his topic's ineffability ("And certainly there is no single, monolithic Asian cinema"--undoubtedly; to talk about even Hong Kong and Chinese films in the same way is almost intellectually lazy) and then goes on to paraphrase exactly what makes Chinese films Chinese and American films American: Hong Kong is authentic; Hollywood is a postmodern collage of pulp serials and leftover impressions of old studio classics (A critic's diplomacy--translation: "Hong Kong, real; Hollywood, unoriginal"). 

Out first with the obvious: Kehr's dichotomy assumes that East and West exist and exist in mutually exclusive artistic universes, like two lovers looking at each other from across a river, allowed to look but never touch. Film history books concur--for them, a non-Kurosawa Asia barely exists--but film history disagrees: Tsui Hark, after high school, watched three to four movies a day; John Woo was influenced by Peckinpah, Wong Kar-Wai by Godard. Yet Kehr does sound kind of convincing--but as superficially persuasive as statements like "Being an artist/writer/musician is impractical" or "Comic books/Rap/Video Games turn kids into violent maniacs." Kehr's argument, like these, sounds good only within the first fifteen seconds, and bursts brightly with filmic evidence--most obviously, the muscles of Jackie Chan, the one-man special effect; the blood ballet/cinema verite of HK gangster chic (John Woo and Johnnie To); and the aesthetic paradox that enables many Chinese directors (Wong, Lee, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming- liang) to create films that feel stylistically crafted and yet recognizably real. 

This aesthetic superpower--the ability to fuse spectacle and authenticity--is what illuminates so many Asian films beyond the limits of the boringly real, of our own domestic sidewalk cinema. John Woo's charisma kings may laugh like us but they take bullets like supermodels take cheesecake--it feels bad at first but only ends up ruining their figure--and they leap through the air like ballet dancers crossbred with bullets. The choreography is stunningly artificial, a lyric meter for human movement, and the choreography's energy, its sweat and blood, are what make the movie-watching experience visceral, rather than only authentic. The American innocence of aesthetics--how we require movies to be numbed, distanced, and polished until they are identifiably fictional--is wonderfully lacking in Hong Kong, where the films aren't naive enough to be singularly and merely 'real.' Hollywood gives us televised superheroes slummed down into soap opera leads; popular movies are typically short stories of the single hero, who can be insistently summarized in one sentence: He is like you--only better looking. Hong Kong--which has its own formulas and sins--recasts this conflict with the volume up: its critical realization was that the characters and props didn't need to be so easily identifiable--the heroes could be superheroes, real heroes, instead of Nicholas Cage. Everything, in fact, could be fake--the flying swordsman and the hermaphroditic demon, the waning ghostess and the bobbing vampire, the gunman and the nationalist--only the energy needed to be real.

Kehr's insistence that Asian film 'gets' realism in a way that Americans just don't--well, it sort of reminds me of the middle-aged accountant who lives in Palo Alto, drives a Lexus, and tells his hip hop-loving friends, that he's "keepin' it real." Half a century of suburbia seems to have contaminated Americans with an uncomfortable suspicion that other people--minorities and, more specifically, inner-city Blacks--are somehow experiencing lives more chock full of realism than a white, middle-class guy could understand. Let's call it authenticity-envy. Whether Kehr has it or not, he seems to be writing as if the only Asian movies were realist dramas or exploitation movies--the former, 'real' for dramatic effect, the latter for budget. But HK movies--like American music videos, Bollywood, and other inherently postmodern genres--are 'real' in a fundamentally different way than either of these realisms. While Renoir might have seen realism as a map and film as a tool for accuracy, a HK director might see realism as a quantity and film as a way to inject movies with so much 'reality' that they topple over the top of authenticity. Hyperreal and horrendously spectacular, Hong Kong is a cinema of grimaces instead of smiles, puddles or hydrant-gushing floods of blood, instead of scars.  

While Ang Lee's new movie may be somewhat restrained in comparison, Crouching Tiger almost bears too many clichés of typical kung fu drama: the elder fighter, trying to retreat from the world; the two young lovers, one of whom is bad; the master's tragedy. Two fight scenes quote directly from veteran HK filmmaker King Hu and the supposedly innovative strong female characters recall The Bride with the White Hair and Tsui Hark movies. 

These shimmering coherences of sound and image could be seen not as clichés, but as references--clues that allow us to trace Crouching Tiger back into the lineage of Chinese film. Chow Yun-Fat's character, for example, is remarkably similar to Jet Li's Wong Fei-Hung. The differences between the two characters is instructive--Li's is a hero for Chinese nationalists, wandering about in the Once Upon a Time in China series, a hokey but slick, slapstick melodrama. Yet the most interesting similarities are with two proto-Crouching Tigers, two filmic felines in the kneeling process: The Bride with the White Hair and Ashes of Time. Both are presciently similar to Crouching Tiger, art house hits that never crossed over: they are beautiful movies, slick the way Hollywood movies are slick; they are ensemble epics about swordsmanship and travel photography. And they are movies that succeed and fail in different ways: Bride is reliably thrilling but as inexplicably empty as a Hollywood formula movie; Ashes, on the other hand, focuses on the emotional drama more than the martial one, but its convoluted story and real-but-too-plentiful characters make the plot almost unbearably sluggish. The synthesis of this thesis and antithesis, Crouching Tiger was successful in that it climbed atop the shoulders of these two failed masterpieces: it resolves Kehr's dichotomy by being both real and stylish, by grafting Yuen Woo-Ping's 'lyric violence' onto Ang Lee's psychological realism, subtly, and complexity. Watching it, it's hard not to feel that Crouching Tiger is the final destination for the Hong Kong martial arts epic.

And yet, it seems almost every review suggests that Crouching Tiger's plot structure is essentially Western--by which I'm not always sure if they mean the hemisphere or the appropriately named genre. This kind of K-Mart dialectics is not only oversimplified--it's more or less a lie. But it's an unsettlingly irrelevant lie. Why mention it--and while simultaneously citing the movie's origins from a 70-year old Chinese novel? Consciously or unconsciously, the only explanation for this yellow journalism would be to imply that the Chinese couldn't come up with a good story--or at least one liked by Americans.  |||

||| DESIGN | WRITING | RESUME | MISC | KENCHEN.ORG

A NOTE OF EXPLANATION: This meta-review is also posted at the Satellite website and, more interestingly, linked to at Plastic.com, a highly-trafficked web community (both of these are older versions--I have added the last half of the article, the commentary on David Kehr's essay, to this online edition). I would post the link, but Plastic seems to have disabled its search engine. The reader comments, in any case, are very interesting, since they seem to be written by people who have not actually read this article. A good friend of mine--who not only completely disagrees with my views in general and this article, but actually runs a conservative race website--chuckled and wrote to me: 'There was the hint of an interesting idea in some of Plastic comments about your article but I thought, overall, the comments were disappointing compared with other discussions I've seen on the site--you're right, many of the commentators seemed to be fiercely attacking arguments you really
weren't making... or, at the very least, they were ignoring your central argument about the racism of the reviews." To be more specific:  they accuse me of 1.) disliking the movie; and 2.) grounding my argument in a tired I-was-hip-before-hip-was-hip ploy. Granted, this article is intentionally short and somewhat eclectic, but you can see that none of these criticisms have any relevance to what I'm talking about--the attitude that reviewers took to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.