The Empty Cultural Criticism in American Martial Arts Films

If Enter the Dragon (1973) is truly one of, if not the most, influential martial arts films in history as it has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, then Kill Bill: Vol 1 (2003) is the looking glass into the cultural memory of Dragon’s legacy, in turn cementing the legacy of pastiche that would define postmodernism. Whereas Enter the Dragon is one of the foundational films for the landscape of not just martial arts films but action films on a global scale, Kill Bill is its stylistic offspring and landscape-altering successor. With both films representing the state and nature of the American martial arts genre in each respective spatiotemporal setting, they expose how Hollywood deconstructed and decontextualized wuxia and other martial arts genres (and to a lesser degree, other grindhouse genres) to create this American subgenre. 

The context for the production of both films is necessary because it exposes the motivations for creating each film and what they were intended to offer to the genre. Warner Bros., Robert Clouse, and Bruce Lee created the 1973 film in collaboration with Golden Harvest in Hong Kong to capitalize on the growing popularity of Chinese martial arts films and Lee’s persona. Intended to expand the global market for such films, Dragon incorporates elements of James Bond-esque spy films into the traditional story of the wronged yet honorbound hero in wuxia tales. Interesting enough was the coexisting conventions of spy and Chinese martial arts films in the same narrative- i.e. Lee must travel to this remote island to take down an evil villain for the legal purpose clandestine reconnaisance for British intelligence and the extra-legal purpose of enacting honorbound vengeance on Han and O’Hara for his sister’s death- because it both symbolizes and exemplifies the synthesis of Chinese martial arts genre conventions with those of existing American action genres. The spy film being the subgenre of choice for amalgamation with Chinese martial arts makes perfect sense giving the intense popularity of James Bond at the time. Keeping record of the global box office success of other, Scott Mendelson of Forbes reminds us,

That $90 million initial global cume put [Dragon] on par with the several surrounding 007 movies of the era. George Lazenby’s now-beloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service earned “just” $82 million in 1969, while Sean Connery’s aggressively campy return in Diamonds Are Forever made $115 million in 1971. Roger Moore’s (Blaxploitation-centric) Live and Let Die grossed a strong $161 million in 1973, but Moore’s (martial arts-flavored) The Man with the Golden Gun earned just $97 million in 1974. The much-liked, Lewis Gilbert-directed The Spy Who Loved Me reasserted the franchise in 1977 with $185 million. (Mendelson)  

As Mendelson alludes to, blaxploitation was also an extremely profitable market at this time, so the inclusion of Williams in the narrative further cemented not just the established connection of blaxploitation with spy films through the larger umbrella of action but the future connection it would share with martial arts films, such as Karate Kid (2010) which would become a cult classic within Black American households as much as Kill Bill would among action movie fans.

Similarly yet more much more complexly and for different purposes, Tarantino blends the foundational wuxia-based narrative with that of spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation, and samurai cinema. He initially wrote both volumes as a single film, influenced by over some 80 grindhouse films and paying homage to the genres that created them. Steve Rose at The Guardian opined in 2004,  

Tarantino's "borrowing" has reached unprecedented proportions. The film is made almost entirely from elements of other films, mainly what Tarantino refers to as "grindhouse cinema": a catch-all term for movies that played in cheap US cinemas in the 1970s - Hong Kong martial arts flicks, Japanese samurai movies, blaxploitation films and spaghetti westerns. 

It would take a cinephile as nerdy as Tarantino himself to account for the exact details of what's being referenced when and how - and, of course, there are plenty of those. The Quentin Tarantino Archives fansite (tarantino.info) identifies some 80 movies that inspired Kill Bill, from Hitchcock's Marnie ("has the exact same nurse-walking-down-corridor scene") to Japanese retro-horror Goke: Bodysnatcher From Hell ("for the orange sunset sky behind the plane").” (Rose) 

Tarantino’s motivation wasn’t expanding the market for American martial arts films like Clouse, (Hero, a wuxia film directed by Zhang Yimou, was released only a year prior to Kill Bill and grossed $180 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, the same as Tarantino’s film) but rather paying homage to grindhouse cinema and exploitation films, using martial arts cinema as the primary vessel by which to introduce them to the mainstream. Within thirty years after Lee’s untimely death, American martial arts had grown from a budding market awaiting acceptance into the mainstream to a major subgenre that could popularize exploitation films despite their history of MPAA guideline violations. While this represents an important turning point in the landscape of film regarding the accepted amount of adult content and degree of violence in mainstream action cinema, and while American martial arts is present at both of these critical junctures (1973 and 2003) in the history of action films, as a genre it still represented a misappropriation of wuxia and other genres. 

David Desser said about the early stages of American martial arts as a genre,

...Bruce Lee's untimely death before the release of what would be his blockbuster, mainstream hit, Enter the Dragon, put the genre on hiatus in Hollywood until Chuck Norris established it as a legitimate, American genre with Good Guys Wear Black in 1979… as a genre with mainstream, cult, and exploitation appeal it has much to offer as cultural mirror and cultural critique, if less often as artistic or aesthetic currency.” (Desser 77) 

Kill Bill’s offering for cultural critique is enmeshed with its postmodernist pastiche, making it unclear which structural elements of Dragon-era Hollywood culture that it actually mocks, if any. For example, both films utilize elements of blaxploitation, but in very questionable ways. In both movies, the typical race dynamics of one of their respective main genres is upended: Roper is a sauve James Bond-esque character who would’ve fit perfectly as the lead character in any other contemporary spy movie at the time, whereas O-Ren and Beatrix are both considered outsiders invading Japanese culture. The films point that out about themselves, with an entire scene dedicated to the sensitivity of the subject about O-Ren’s racial heritage; however, the inversion of racial dynamics between the white and Asian characters leaves little room for cultural critique for Black characters. That’s because blaxploitation’s incorporation into American martial arts provides a cultural mirror for latent antiBlackness, resulting from nonBlack creatives firstly wresting a Black genre from its sociocultural context in a similar fashion to their decontextualization of wuxia, then transposing its conventions onto a martial arts narrative- a Black martial artist (Williams) who fights using unorthodox techniques and beats up cops but is essentially lynched later in the story by the evil nonBlack villain, or a Black ex-assassin-turned-suburban-mom (Vernita Green) somehow misses a shot in her own house and is the first on-screen kill. Blaxploitation’s first major introduction into the American martial arts genre was in Dragon when Warner Bros. was trying to expand the genre to all profitable markets, including Black people, but it was clearly as an afterthought, so the legacy it leaves within the genre, even thirty years later, is one of the same internal exclusion.

Interestingly enough, both films very explicitly reflect the variations in acceptable displays of misogyny within different spatiotemporal contexts. Dragon’s display of women was very clearly taken from its spy film conventions of women and femininity while Tarantino offered a female heavy main cast while simultaneously reproducing modernist misogyny. If, with regards to race, white and Asian characters represent the primary locus of attention for cultural critique within Dragon, then the male characters represent this same locus regarding gender. The farthest the film dares to push in gender role reversal is revealing Han’s daughters to be his secret guard of femme fatales, and even then the use of known stereotypes and myths of women in spy movies in order to create this sort of surprise reveal for Roper still reinforces those very stereotypes. The film did not go beyond this reveal by including any full-fledged martial fight scenes in the same manner as Lee, Saxon, or Williams, but rather still utilizing its female characters as eye candy and objects to tantalize the male viewer. While Kill Bill instead places its femme fatale(s) at the forefront, it still reinforces misogynistic values in its storyline. Tarantino’s divorcal of the source grindhouse films from their original contexts not only serves as a disservice to the films and genres meant to be paid tribute to, but reinforces the flatness of female characterization in martial arts films. Rose said, 

“Beyond their aesthetic attributes, the movies playing at the ICA's Kill Bill season are remarkable for their political purpose: Lady Snowblood addresses Japan's postwar purification and reintegration. One of the victims in Female Convict Scorpion boasts of raping Chinese women during the second world war, while Thriller, for all its sex and violence, is a scathing attack on patriarchal 1970s society. What does Kill Bill represent? Is it about anything other than being cool?” (Rose)

When Tarantino flattened the sociocultural histories and meanings of these various films and genres that he “borrowed” from to create this love letter to grindhouse cinema, and specifically martial arts cinema, he reinforced the historical precedent of American culture’s subsumation and subsequent defanging of cultures, genres, and values foreign to its own. This feeling of unoriginality with regards to postmodernism is expressed through the hashing and rehashing of modernist conventions in new ways that supposedly promise more liberation: Kill Bill is considered a feminist film for repositioning female martial artists at the forefront of the genre for reframing conventions such as the fungibility of the female body for male use with Beatrix fighting off her attempted rapist. However, it’s already been discussed how Dragon employs its own (albeit borderline satirical) use of feminism with the surprise reveal of Han’s femme fatale daughters, connecting feminism as a humorous and unserious plot element in American martial arts cinema as it was with the 60s and 70s spy films it drew inspiration from and the action genre it would come to grow under. The American martial arts genre was created to cater to several different demographics to maximize consumption, and yet the motifs of the various genres, cultures, and films that are amassed as influences for these films are never reconciled with each other to honor their true contexts and histories while also offering a cultural critique. 

Desser argues that the popularization of American martial arts cinema was due to a belated and reluctant “acceptance” of defeat in the Vietnam War on behalf of the white mainstream audience, claiming, 

Genres are said to be popular precisely because they answer, within structured fantasy, social, historical, psychological, or cultural issues within the culture that produces and consumes them. A genre may rise when societal issues coalesce around its particular patterns of setting. theme, and motif and fall when these issues seem no longer relevant. Of course, a genre's rise and fall is dependent on other issues, as well, such an industrial ones: the ability of an industry to produce similar films cheaply and quickly; the emergence of a space, a niche, in a marketplace, and so on... But the industrial factors that gave rise to the appearance of Hong Kong movies on American screens and of American martial-arts movies themselves must take a dim second place to the importance of historical and cultural factors giving rise to the genre.

One cry heard again and again in the discourse surrounding the Vietnam War was raised against the nature of the enemy: physically smaller, technologically inferior, how could such an army defeat the American military, the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force the world had ever seen?… Such an enemy might very well be understood to have possessed secret, ancient, mystical fighting techniques by way of explanation for the U.S. defeat. Co-opting those techniques, at least through the structured fantasy of genre over the course of the next decade, would help alleviate those cultural tensions. (Desser 103-4)

Rather than believing these causes must be mutually exclusive, it would be more accurate to acknowledge both causes’ roles played in the viability of martial arts cinema as a market, including the profitability of Bruce Lee’s persona. Desser’s analysis of the synthesis of American martial arts cinema is honestly reflective and typical of the creation of the genre itself, because he obfuscates the role of Hong Kong’s motivation for cultural exportation as well as the role of the first Chinese star to have a globally recognizable martial arts persona. Shaw Brothers Inc. and Golden Harvest were competing for control of the martial arts cinema market in the early 1970s, and Dragon gave Golden Harvest that edge; meanwhile, Warner Bros. was attempting to capitalize on Lee’s global success in Chinese martial arts films. Whatever motivations and sentiments existed in the era of Good Guys Wear Black (1979), which Desser sites as the true beginning of American martial arts cinema as a globally popular phenomenon, are irrelevant to the true beginning of its rise to popularity in 1973, which was spurred by the competition for market control in Hong Kong. This reality clarifies the genre’s progression into Kill Bill, because its origin story is one of amassing yet diluting various genres and cultures to make vapid cultural critiques. Whether Tarantino’s exhibition of this in his fourth film is intentional is up for debate, but pointless, because it is an accurate display, combining the pastiche of postmodernism with a clear yet nostalgic reflection of the maturation of American martial arts cinema, or lack thereof. 

Works Cited

Azula, Alfredo. “Everybody Is Kung Fu Fighting.” TODAY.com, TODAY, 29 Nov. 2004, https://www.today.com/popculture/everybody-kung-fu-fighting-wbna6612102.  

Dixon, Wheeler W., and David Desser. “The Martial Arts FIlm in the 1990s.” Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2000, pp. 77–110. 

“Here's What We Learned from Re-Watching ‘Kill Bill’ 15 Years On.” Sleek Magazine, 10 Oct. 2018, https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/kill-bill-anniversary/.  

“Librarian of Congress Adds 25 Films to National Film Registry.” The Library of Congress, 28 Dec. 2004, https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-04-215/films-added-to-national-film-registry-for-2004/2004-12-28/.  

Matuszak, Sascha. “Bruce Lee's Last Words: Enter the Dragon and the Martial Arts Explosion.” Vice, https://web.archive.org/web/20200102120348/http://fightland.vice.com/blog/bruce-lees-last-words-enter-the-dragon-and-the-martial-arts-explosion.  

McCarthy, Todd. “Kill Bill Vol. 1.” Variety, Variety, 30 Sept. 2003, https://variety.com/2003/film/awards/kill-bill-vol-1-3-1200538937/. 

Rose, Steve. “Found: Where Tarantino Gets His Ideas.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 6 Apr. 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/apr/06/features.dvdreviews.   

Scott, A. O. “Blood Bath & Beyond.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 10 Oct. 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/10/movies/film-review-blood-bath-beyond.html.

Thompson, Howard. “'Enter Dragon,' Hollywood Style: The Cast.” Movie Review - - 'Enter Dragon,' Hollywood Style:The Cast - NYTimes.com, New York Times, 31 Jan. 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170131232805/https://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9500E3D71631E63BBC4052DFBE668388669EDE.  

Variety Staff. “Enter the Dragon.” Variety, Variety, 11 Oct. 2016, https://variety.com/1973/film/reviews/enter-the-dragon-1200423093/.