Journal of Chinese Cinemas Volume 2 Number 2 © 2008 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcc.2.2.123/1

'Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in

conjectures
Brian Hu University of California,Los Angeles

Abstract Keywords
In the decade after Bruce Lee's death in 1973, film-makers from around the Bruce Lee
world produced numerous films starring imitation Bruce Lees with names like genre
Bruce Li, Bruce Le and DragonLee. This article suggests that any understanding cycle
of the discourse of Bruce Lee as a star is incomplete without considerationof the imitation
ways in which the 'Bruceploitation' industry appropriated the star image of star discourse
Bruce Lee and repackaged it for a transnationalaudience in the waning years of martial arts film
'kung fu fever'. By analysing the films' narratives and marketing, the article
argues that these films are not mere 'clones' of the 'real' thing, but ratherimita-
tions with a self-conscious difference. These films present 'conjecturalBruce Lees'
that expand the familiarBruce Lee image in order to maintainfan interest. As a
result, 'Bruce Lee' as a discourse became increasinglyflexible and sticky, hybridiz-
ing across cultures and genres. This view of 'Bruce Lee' beyond Bruce Lee asks
that scholarsapproachstars not simply as discreteactors,but also as disembodied
star-functionsthat transformacross time and space.

More has been written about Bruce Lee than about any other Chinese star.
In popular culture, he is the subject of biographies, philosophical texts,
websites, wall calendars, posters and even folk songs. In film studies,
Bruce Lee and his films have been the subject of many excellent studies
that typically take as their object of analysis Lee's masculinity and/or his
Chineseness (Chiao 1981; Kaminsky 1982; Tasker 1997; Teo 1997:
110-21; Chan 2001; Berry and Farquhar 2006: 197-204). These studies
of the Chinese male body have provided valuable insights into issues of
Hong Kong identity, diaspora and cultural nationalism as manifested in
the 1970s. An alternative approach is proposed by Melanie Morrissette,
who calls for scholars to pay more attention to Bruce Lee's fight choreog-
raphy (Morrissette 2005: 58-59), and M.T. Kato (2007) has more than
answered that call.
But these existing studies fail to account for Lee's tremendously mal-
leable, enduring and global star persona as it evolved from Lee's first inter-
national appearance in 1971, and beyond his premature death in 1973.
This is because scholars and critics have limited their study to the five
martial arts films Lee made between 1971 and 1973: The Big Boss (Lo
Wei, 1971), Fist of Fury (Lo Wei, 1972), The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee,
1972), Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973) and The Game of Death
(Robert Clouse, released 1978). Because of the small number (and relative
availability) of titles in Lee's canon of mature films, his martial arts films

ICC 2 (2) pp. 123-135 © Intellect Ltd 2008 123

1. Another excellent are convenient for study. And because the films were produced within a
resource is
the website
short window of history, his films and performances are easily generaliz-
'Bruceploitation able. Rarely is anything mentioned of Lee's early career as a child star,
is a crime'. except as biographical background.
http://www.geocities.
com/manyjbruces/.
More importantly, little is ever mentioned of the countless Bruce Lee
imitators who followed after his death, significantly transforming the Lee
persona while further commodifying and refining it. The exception is Leon
Hunt's valuable 'Exit the Dragon, Enter the "Shadow"', which is to date
the best resource on the history of the phenomenon and its many incar-
nations (Hunt 2003: 76-98).1 In this essay, I argue that if we are to
understand Bruce Lee's star persona, we must consider 'Bruce Lee' not
only as an individual who starred in a discrete number of films, but as a
star discourse that lived on, though the actor did not. 'Bruce Lee' after
Bruce Lee is constructed by an industry seeking to exploit Lee's cinematic
persona, and by fans who refused to let go of the memory of Bruce Lee. In
this essay I focus on the discursive operations of the industry: the scat-
tered, heterogeneous film producers who produced internationally distrib-
uted 'Bruce Lee' films starring such actors as Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon
Lee, Bruce Leong, Bruce Thai and others.
The impetus for this essay is the question of why Bruce Lee, once the
most empowering of all Chinese screen figures and the world's most idol-
ized star, devolved through the decades into a clown, a shtick figure, a
racial epithet hurled against Asian Americans. Surely there are still those
who hail Bruce Lee as a cult hero, but there are just as many (in Asia and
the West alike) who view Bruce Lee as a cheap stereotype of Chineseness
on par with other 'heroes' like Charlie Chan. Provocative but idealistic
studies such as Vijay Prashad's 'Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of
Kung Fu' (2003) and M.T. Kato's From Kung Fu to Hip Hop (2007), and to
a lesser extent the studies listed above, prefer to conceptualize Bruce Lee
and his myth as eternal: frozen in immortality like the fetishized freeze-
frame of Lee's character at the close of Fist of Fury. Analysing the
'Bruceploitation' films that were made in the decade after Lee's death
allows us to consider how the industry's aggressive appropriation and re-
narrativization of the Lee persona diluted the Lee myth these film scholars
hold on to so dearly as inviolable.
This reconceptualization of stardom - from a discrete person to a dis-
course spanning multiple human bodies - can be better understood as a
'star-function'. Celia Lury has adapted 'star-function' from Michel
Foucault's notion of the 'author-function' in her discussion of stardom as
an ownable (and thus copyrightable) commodity (Lury 1993: 58). Here,
however, I want to emphasize not ownership, but extensibility. In his clas-
sic essay 'What is an Author?' Foucault (1977: 131) argues that the term
'author' 'does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual', but
rather 'it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of
subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy'.
Certain authors of special influence can indeed 'speak' beyond their own
texts and into future discourse as they are reinterpreted, remobilized or
even negated. For Foucault, such thinkers as Marx and Freud are authors
because they are 'initiators of discursive practices', not simply because they
physically penned books which bear their names (Foucault 1977: 132).

124 Brian Hu
 2. For instance, the
Thus they remain authors even after they have stopped writing, and lesbian community
indeed, after they have passed away. has famously
Similarly, certain stars 'speak' from beyond the grave. Elvis Presley lives appropriated Elvis's
2 persona in its
on (and is repurposed and recoded) through his impersonators. Tupac gender-bending
Shakur's music is unearthed and remixed posthumously. Actors who variation on the
appropriate aspects of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe still denote 1950s Elvis impersonator.
See Brittan
cool, albeit in new contexts. In Chinese cinema, a similar case can be (2006: 179-86).
made for Ruan Lingyu, Zhou Xuan and, of course, Bruce Lee. For Foucault,
the importance of the author is their 'function' in society - for instance, to
give text a legal owner, to justify a text's authority, and so forth. An obvious,
but important, function of the film star is branding. A film about Chinese
resistance through martial arts to 1930s Japanese imperialism is simply
an average martial arts film, but a film about Chinese resistance starring a
fast-moving, yelping man in a yellow jumpsuit is branded a Bruce Lee martial
arts film. These visual and aural qualities (wardrobe, movement, voice)
are key cinematic ways in which the star 'speaks' within the star-function.
Such qualities can be disassociated from the specific human body of Bruce
Lee and spoken through his imitators.
The artificial creation of a 'Bruce Lee' brand is precisely why fans and
critics have used the term 'Bruceploitation' to describe films starring Bruce
Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee and others, explicitly imitating actor Bruce Lee.
Qualities deemed specific to Bruce Lee's star-persona are estranged from
their rightful owner and exploited through wannabes and their makers to
ostensibly 'trick' consumers into imagining they are watching a Bruce Lee
film. As a result, the subsequent Bruces are frequently labelled Bruce Lee
'clones', in part fuelled by one of the most self-reflexive Bruceploitation
films of all, The Clones of Bruce Lee (joseph Kong Hung, 1977). However,
the word 'clone' fails to capture the logic through which Bruce Lee's image
has been repurposed cinematically after his death. First, producers did not
hide the fact that these were imitators, not the real Bruce Lee. With the
exceptions of the Golden Harvest-owned Game of Death and Tower of Death
(aka Game of Death 2) (Ng See-yuen, 1981), these films were advertised
with the name of the imitator as lead actor.
Further, articles in fan magazines on both sides of the Pacific discussed
the impersonators as actors with distinct personalities and abilities (Jinri
Dianying 1976; Scura 1976). In an interview in one such fan magazine, a
Bruce look-alike, Alex Kwon, discusses his own distinctiveness: 'I don't
intend to copy [Bruce Lee] to very fine points [...] because once I try to do
that I look very unnatural' (Scura 1976: 41). Many Bruceploitation films
even make the story of the 'Bruce Lee successor' their main narrative. The
Real Bruce Lee (Jim Markovic, 1979) is a biography of Bruce Lee, but also an
announcement that of all the Bruce Lee imitators, Dragon Lee is 'by far the
greatest'. And as its title suggests, Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (aka Bruce
Lee: Star ofAll Stars) (Lee Tso Nan, 1976) is about the death of Bruce Lee and
the rise of the student, 'Tiger' (played by Bruce Li), destined to replace him.
Financial incentive spurs active differentiation between the 'real Bruce
Lee' and the 'greatest of imitators': there is money to be made through
activating the Bruce Lee brand to create a new brand that can be further
exploited. But even without the industry actively highlighting the imitator
as Bruce Lee imitator, viewers would have quickly noticed the double

'Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures 125

signification of somebody like Dragon Lee. As Jane Gaines has shown in
relation to the photographed celebrity 'look-alike', the cinematic medium
is distinct from literature and painting in that the visible celebrity 'look-
alike' on film denotes simultaneously the image of a celebrity and the
transparent image of an actor pretending to be that celebrity. That the
viewer sees both 'Bruce Lee' and 'Dragon Lee as Bruce Lee' is, as Gaines
(1992: 235) put it, 'the perversity of the look-alike phenomenon'. In other
words, a 'clone' is impossible in cinema because the viewer can always see
the indexical representation of the imitator.
Second, the word 'clone' conceals what I take to be the key charac-
teristic of the Bruceploitation industry: differentiating product through
differentiating narrative. The goal of these films was not simply to replicate
Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon and The Big Boss. It was to preserve
the Bruce Lee image and make profits by presenting something familiar
but new. So instead of the term 'Bruce Lee clone', I prefer 'conjectural
Bruce Lee'. After his death, the Bruce Lee star persona functioned by
becoming flexible and sticky, providing Bruce with new narrative sce-
narios. Bruceploitation films took Bruce to new locations. Fist of Fury
took Bruce to Thailand, Way of the Dragon took him to Italy, and Enter the
Dragon to a mysterious island; what would be next if Bruce were still
alive? How about the streets of Manila (Bruce's Fist of Vengeance (Bill
James, 1984)) or the exotic 'Snake Worship Island' (Bruce Li in New
Guinea (C.Y. Yang, 1978))?
The films also endowed Bruce Lee with new villains to fight. How
would Bruce Lee fare against deadly animals? Conjectured battles raged
against giant gorillas (Bruce Lee the Invincible (Law Kai-shuk, 1978)),
deadly bulls (Challenge of the Tiger (Bruce Le, 1980) and vicious lions
(Tower of Death) (see Figure 1). The films also pit Bruce against characters
from other popular films, part of the industry trend of cross-pollination to
reinvigorate existing film franchises (for instance Zatoichi Meets the One
Armed Swordsman). Bruce and the Shaolin Bronzemen (Joseph Kong Hung,
1982) pits Bruce against the bronzemen made famous in Joseph Kuo
Nan-hung's famous 1976 film. In Jackie vs. Bruce to the Rescue (Wu Chia-
chun, 1982), Bruce is up against a Jackie Chan imitator. Bruce Lee Against
Supermen (C.C. Wu, 1975) sets Bruce against a clan of caped Chinese
superheroes. Godfrey Ho's 1982 film Secret Ninja Roaring Tiger has Bruce

Figure 1: Conjecturalvillains: Bruce Lee fights a lion in Tower of Death.

126 Brian Hu
battling ninjas. The Clones of Bruce Lee offers the attraction of watching
Bruce Lee fight himself, a tradition resurrected later by both Jackie Chan
in Twin Dragons (Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark, 1992) and jet Li in The One
(James Wong, 2001).
The most audacious example of these tendencies is director Lo Ke's
1977 comedy Dragon Lives Again. In the film's bizarre opening credits
sequence, we see, against a hellish-red background, a series of encounters.
First, the film presents a James Bond look-alike crossing paths with a feet-
shuffling Bruce Lee, played by Bruce Leong. Seconds later, we see Bruce in
a different outfit - torn white shirt and black pants reminiscent of his
character in The Big Boss. This time, he's fighting a clan of shadow-like
demons dressed in black. In the next set-up, we hear Nino Rota's theme
from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) as we watch another
man wearing a slick scarf (making him ... the Godfather?), fighting the
same clan of demons. Bruce returns in the fourth set-up, this time battling
a Zatoichi look-alike. Next, Bruce dressed as Kato from The Green Hornet
takes on The Man with No Name, as a Morricone-esque spaghetti-western
theme plays. Next to take on Bruce (now dressed in Republican-era garb,
as in Fist of Fury) are two popular horror characters: Dracula and the
Exorcist. Next, Bruce (now with nunchucks) fights a Chinese wuxia villain
in traditional dress. The credits sequence ends with Bruce (back in his Big
Boss outfit) fighting the shadowy demons once more. The narrative then
begins with the corpse of Bruce Lee, dead after 'misadventure', awaiting
judgement in the looniest chamber of hell.
The opening credits sequence immediately establishes that the specta-
cle of Dragon Lives Again is the thrill of seeing Bruce in his many incarna-
tions, taking on the entire corpus of 1960s and 1970s action stars. In the
rest of the film's wacky 87 minutes, Bruce fights with or against the
One-Armed Swordsman, Caine (from Kung Fu), Emmanuelle, Yang Guifei,
the cops from House of 72 Tenants (Chor Yuen, 1973), Popeye (played by
future Hong Kong star Eric Tsang), and more, in addition to the superstars
of the opening credits sequence. The film's advertising anticipates the
attraction of this extreme rendition of 'conjectural Bruce'. The American
poster reads '12 Underworld Assassins Trained to Find and Kill Bruce!',
accompanied by pictures of nine of the more western-friendly faces.
Similarly, a two-page spread in the December 1976 issue of Hong Kong fan
magazine Cinemart highlights 24 celebrity 'cameos' from look-alike actors
(see Figure 2). The layout of this ad, with the Chinese title 'Bruce Storms
through the Gates of Hell', invites the viewer to experience a spectacle of
Bruce Lee never seen before: the same suave hero, but new villains, new
allies, new setting.
This narrative and marketing pattern can be seen as the industry's
attempt to transform Bruce Lee's star image into a diverse and self-sustaining
film genre, much in the way the massive James Bond, Wang Fei-hung and
Zatoichi series can be viewed as genres with their own narrative principles
and marketing image. Rick Altman (1998) theorized the pattern of genre
development by studios ('genrification') from the perspective of marketing
and product differentiation. Altman observed that genres are created into
cycles, which are then made into new genres through a process of generic
hybridization (comedy spawns romantic comedy, for instance), with cycles

'Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures 127

Figure 2: Spectacles of conjecture: Bruce Lee, Emmanuelle, James Bond and others
in an adfor Dragon Lives Again in Cinemart (Yinse shijie), December 1976.

publicly displaying their hybridity in advertising for the films. The objec-
tive of new cycles is economic: by hybridizing, the studios differentiate
their product from the products of other studios working in the same
genre. An important corollary of this model is that in striving to create
genres (to create cycles), studios strive not for homogeneity but for con-
stant difference from previous films.
The 'Bruce Lee cycle' can be seen as a step in the evolution of the
transnational martial arts film. The gongfu genre (in 19 70s parlance also
known as the 'boxing film') itself was a cycle resurrected from the stan-
dard wuda (martial action) film. Later in the 19 70s, fans could detect
aspects of the gongfu film as recognizably 'Bruce Lee' elements whether
the film actually starred Bruce Lee or not, just as certain aspects of the
Hollywood spy film are recognizable as 'James Bond' whether or not the film
includes one of the official Bond actors. In constructing this cycle, the
producers and distributors of Bruceploitation reorient the Bruce Lee star-
function, standardizing stock moves, outfits and narratives, and redeploy-
ing them in fresh configurations. As a cycle in search of a genre, the
'Bruce Lee film' was constantly subject to hybridization, mixing Lee's Jeet
Kune Do style with other martial arts film traditions like Jackie Chan's
action comedy and the 'blind warrior' trope, as in the 19 79 comedy Blind
Fistof Bruce. With or without Bruce Lee the actual person, studios would
genrify the cycle through hybridization. In fact, without the presence of
Lee, who was famously authoritative in producing his own films, this
process would be eased. Bruce look-alikes are by definition replaceable,
and a pliant, conjectural Bruce can be extended in any number of creative
directions.
How exactly was this narrative expanded in Bruceploitation? In the
language of genre theory, I argue that these films varied the semantic

128 Brian Hu
elements (the easily identifiable building blocks of a genre) of the Bruce
Lee film, while retaining the basic syntax (the meaningful organization of
those building blocks) (Altman 1984). From Lee's five martial arts films,
one can identify three main syntactical functions of 'the fight' - what tra-
ditionally structures audiences' responses to Lee's films (Chiao 1981: 35).
The first syntactical function of fighting is to assert Chinese strength in the
face of imperialism or racism (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon).
The second is to help uncover a mystery (Enter the Dragon). The third is to
'reach the next level' (Lee's unfinished Game of Death). We see these basic
syntactical operations maintained in Bruceploitation. Examples of the first
are those films set in the diaspora. The Big Boss was set in Thailand and
Way of the Dragon in Rome. Bruce Lee's Secret (Chang Ki and Chen Hua,
1976) retains the basic Chinese-versus-Other syntax, but varies the
semantic location, setting the film in San Francisco. Similarly, Bruce Lee's
Fist of Vengeance has Bruce fighting the Japanese and Spanish in the
Manila underworld, and Lee Doo-yong's Bruce Lee Fights Back from the
Grave (1976) takes Bruce (and his cultural nationalism) to Los Angeles,
where he fights white, black and Mexican villains. The varying locations
also reflect the fact that Bruceploitation films were made by production
companies from throughout the world.
The second syntactical operation is common in an important subgenre
of Bruceploitation: the 'vengeance for Bruce' film. These films typically
begin with the death of the actor Bruce Lee (complete with footage from
Lee's actual funeral). Exit the Dragon,Enter the Tiger construes a scenario in
which 'Tiger' must seek revenge for Lee against a cartel of drug traffickers
possibly involved with Betty Chen (a barely veiled reference to actress Betty
Ting Pei, in whose apartment Lee died). Tower of Death is about the brother
of Billy Lo (the Bruce Lee character from Game of Death) seeking revenge for
the death of Billy/Bruce within the underworld of transnational crime.
The third syntax strings the semantic element of 'the fight' into a series
of challenges of increasing difficulty. In the few scenes shot for Game of
Death, we see Bruce Lee ascend the stairs of a building, each floor contain-
ing an increasingly powerful enemy. Each enemy has his own attributes.
The three filmed for Game of Death are Dan Inosanto (a Filipino), Ji Han Jae
(a master of the Korean Hapkido), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (the popular
African American basketball player). The most obvious examples of the
use of this semantic function are the many Game of Death variations that
followed Bruce Lee's death. Since Game of Death was an unfinished film,
the legend of its existing footage inspired film-makers to produce entire
feature-length narratives around the known scenes.
These films sought to thrill audiences by parading the many fight com-
binations possible within the 'reach the next level' syntax. For instance,
each floor in The New Game of Death (Lin Bin, 1975), three years before
Golden Harvest's official Game of Death, pits Bruce against a fighter of a dif-
ferent ethnicity or weapon: the first floor features a Chinese duo, the sec-
ond floor a Japanese with a samurai sword, the third floor a Chinese black
belt with a staff, the fourth floor a white Chuck Norris look-alike, the fifth
floor an exotic Indian mystic with nunchucks, the sixth floor a tall shirt-
less black man, and the top floor the big boss with a big whip. Enter the
Game of Death (Joseph Velasco, 1981) features a monk, a snake charmer, a

'Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures 129

 nunchaku expert and others on each floor. Tower of Death retains the basic
structure but changes the location. Instead of going up a tower, Bruce
travels down into the depths of an underground castle, where he fights a
monk with a long spear, a man in a leopard-skin outfit, and a pack of
fighters wearing futuristic, metal-coloured jumpsuits.
Building on a Vibe magazine article by Jeff Yang, M.T. Kato provocatively
compares Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do with the remix in hip hop, with the
famous Game of Death footage being the most vibrant of 'samples' (Kato
2007: 178). To extend the hip hop analogy further, I would describe the re-
filming of the Game of Death narrative in Bruceploitation not as 'remix' but
as 'replay', the process by which the hip hop producer takes an old sample,
and then 'replays' it with new instruments, before mixing it into a track.
It appears that the central semantic element - the character of 'Bruce'
himself - should remain unchanged. Yet to differentiate product and pro-
duce new action stars, even 'Bruce' was varied from film to film. As long
as core Bruce cues were present (some combination of a yellow jumpsuit,
a bloody gash across the chest, a helmet-like haircut, the tendency to flick
one's nose with the thumb while fighting, the agile use of nunchaku, the
ability to shuffle one's feet quickly, the tendency to taste one's blood before
finishing off one's enemy, the preference for fighting shirtless and, most
importantly, loud yelping), the Bruces were free to assume different per-
sonalities and qualities. Some Bruces were even light-hearted: Blind Fist of
Bruce (Kam Bo, 1979) and Storming Attacks (Yueng Kuen, 1978). The
Clones of Bruce Lee even highlights differences between various Bruce look-
alike actors after a mad scientist decides to create three Bruce Lee clones.
Given this scenario, Jane Gaines's comments on the look-alikes' double sig-
nification become especially important. Held next to each other, each look-
alike's differences become even more evident, and part of the fun of the
film is to notice that there is a muscular Bruce, a nimble Bruce and so
forth (Hunt 2003: 80).
Another important variation on the Bruce Lee persona - one with
important ramifications for understanding Lee's masculinity - is that
unlike the sexually reserved characters of Bruce Lee's four completed mar-
tial arts films, Bruceploitation allowed Bruce to be sexually adventurous -
even promiscuous. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar astutely note that as
Lee's career progressed, his characters were increasingly allowed to appro-
priate American codes of masculinity (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 201),
which might reflect the increasingly transnational nature of Lee's cinema.
Berry and Farquhar anticipate the seemingly limitless transnational explo-
sion of Lee's image after his death and, with it, the transnationalization of
Lee's masculinity.
However, compared to that of Bruce's first four martial arts films, the
transnationality of Bruceploitation films is even more complex, heteroge-
neous and slippery, and cannot be explained in terms of the simple fluctu-
ation between American' and 'Chinese' masculinity. Therefore, I do not
read the Bruceploitation romances in terms of hybridized cultural codes.
Instead, I prefer to interpret them in terms of hybridized romantic genre
conventions. DragonLives Again appropriates European and Hollywood sex-
uality (from Emmanuelle (Just Jaeckin, 1974) and James Bond, for
instance), while Bruce Lee and I (Lo Mar, 1976) appropriates the fleshy lust

130 Brian Hu
popular in the soft-core pornography genre produced in Hong Kong in the
19 70s. Also, many Bruceploitation films (Bruce Lee Against Supermen; Exit
the Dragon, Enter the Tiger; The New Game of Death) appropriate tropes from
Taiwan's romantic melodrama genre of the 1970s (most famously, the
'Qiong Yao' films). These tropes include the walk on the beach during sun-
set, the Mandarin love ballad, and the extended music montage of lovers
holding hands as they stroll about the city
Semantic variability and generic hybridization created opportunities
for producers to differentiate their products from others within the Bruce
Lee cycle. But this cycle never became a genre, as is possible in Altman's
model. One possibility is that initiating a discourse in the Foucauldian
sense is not sufficient in creating a genre. Part of the 'genius of the system'
is its ability to maintain order despite the necessary variability. Wong
Fei-hung is the longest-lasting series in cinema history in part because of
the presence of a constant actor (Kwan Tak Hing) and Zatoichi because of
actor Shintaro Katsu, even as the series fused with other franchises:
Zatoichi Meets YoJimbo (Kihachi Okamoto, 1970) and Zatoichi Meets the
One-Armed Swordsman (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1971).
On the other hand, Bruceploitation films loudly flaunted the variability
of their look-alikes. Furthermore, Bruceploitation films were not managed
by a single company; thus, there were multiple sequels to the same Bruce
Lee movies and drastic reinterpretations of the Bruce persona. The many
biopics of Bruce Lee also confused matters. The mysterious nature of Lee's
death allowed film producers to playfully conjecture plots regarding Lee's
passing. The Legend of Bruce Lee (Lin Bin, 1976) supports the 'Vibrating
Palm theory' that Bruce Lee died after being attacked by a fatal martial
arts move. Exit the Tiger,Enter the Dragon suspects that Bruce Lee died as a
result of the violent drug trade surrounding Betty Ting Pei. Bruce Lee and I,
produced by and starring Betty Ting Pei herself, prefers the theory that
Bruce died of an old brain disease, compounded by drug use. There are
even variations within the same film. Bruce Lee True Story (aka Bruce Lee:
The Man, the Myth) (Ng See-yuen, 1976) presents three alternative end-
ings, each with a different explanation for Lee's death: he was beaten up
by a local gang, he suffered from a chronic brain disease, he faked his
death to retreat into spiritual reclusion. This tendency toward speculative
biopics resulted in multiple, contradicting mythologies that may be amus-
ing in their creativity, but ultimately make Lee's death spectacularly frivo-
lous. Without a dominant mythologizing presence like Golden Harvest or
Bruce Lee himself, the 'Bruce Lee' films that followed Lee's death failed to
congeal into a sustainable generic structure.
A second possibility for the fizzling out of the cycle was its inability to
sustain Bruce Lee's political credibility. Like Wang Fei-hung, James Bond,
Zatoichi and other major film franchises, Bruceploitation films have what
TV scholars have called 'series' narratives. In a series, the story concludes
at the end of each episode, and the next episode introduces a new, inde-
pendent story. There is little space for character development across
episodes. This differs from a 'serial' narrative, where subsequent episodes
pick off from the story of the previous episode (Kozloff 1992: 90-91). As
Jeffrey Sconce (2004) has shown, TV series sometimes create interest
by providing stunt episodes (the musical episode, the black-and-white

'Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures 131

3. For a discussion of the episode, the 'What if?' episode), which might also include episodes from guest
discourse of Bruce Lee
as mentor in recent
directors.
kung fu films, see Much of the appeal of Bruceploitation is exactly this stunting. How
Morris (2001). would Hong Kong B-movie king Godfrey Ho handle a Bruce Lee film? Or
Korean taekwondo auteur Lee Doo-yong? Anybody who ever wondered
how Yuen Woo-ping would have choreographed Fist of Fury should look
no further than the Fist of Fury scene in Bruce Lee and I. However, though
these conjectural combinations sustained interest in the series, they
diluted a specific and important aspect of the Bruce Lee persona: his
rebelliousness. Because the series format requires that the character
remain relatively unchanged at the end of the film (ready for the next
adventure in San Francisco, Manila or New Guinea), Bruce cannot die.
Except for the biopics, the films typically end happily: Bruce solves the
crime, gets the girl. However, as Hsiung-ping Chiao (1981: 38-39) has
noted, films like The Big Boss and Fist of Fury are perceived as subversive
because Bruce Lee is either arrested as a hero who stands up against
authority or is killed and becomes a martyr. These endings give Lee cred-
ibility as a political agent who sacrifices for the communities he repre-
sents. But because Bruceploitation films seek above all to make money by
keeping him alive (some variant of 'Bruce lives!' is their usual tagline),
death - and consequently Lee's specific brand of politics - is kept out of
the narrative.
Thus, because its primary function is differentiation, Bruce Lee's star
image lost much of its political and narrative coherence as it was sub-
jected to revision and competition between film producers in Hong Kong,
Taiwan, the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Italy and else-
where. Furthermore, the logic of the Bruce Lee look-alike is that Bruce
Lee is not a person, but a readily assumable attitude and style. If even
these C-grade actors could be Bruce Lee, in theory, anybody could be
Bruce Lee. In fact, this was the attitude taken by much of the fan dis-
course following Lee's death. Though nobody would claim that Lee could
be replaced, articles and advertisements in martial arts magazines sug-
gest that anybody could learn to be Bruce. There were ads for nunchucks,
books on Bruce's philosophies, and training courses. One article in the
American magazine Fighting Stars teaches 'Bruce Lee's fighting method
self-defense techniques', with special attention on Lee's distinctive footwork
(Lee and Uyehara 1981).
Just as the star-function of the Bruce Lee character in Bruceploitation
films was flexible and sticky, connecting Bruce to everyone from Superman
to The 18 Bronzemen (Joseph Kuo Nan-hung, 1976) to Dracula, the star-
function of Bruce Lee in everyday life was also increasingly sticky. Bruce
look-alikes could feel at home anywhere in the world, be it Hong Kong
(High Risk (Wong Jing, 1995)), Singapore (Forever Fever (Glen Goei,
1998)), South Korea (Once Upon a Time in High School (Yu Ha, 2004)),
Germany (Kebab Connection (Anno Saul, 2005)) or the United States (No
Retreat, No Surrender (Corey Yuen, 1986)).3 Anybody who could yelp and
make a fist could be Bruce Lee.
In the United States, 'Bruce Lee' stuck especially to many Asian
American males. Just as 'Bruce Lee' in Bruceploitation was no longer the
muscular hero of Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon, having fallen into the

132 Brian Hu
depths of parody hell in films like Dragon Lives Again, the association of
'Bruce Lee' placed on Asian Americans is anything but heroic. As Asian
American activist Phil Yu blogs in response to a 2007 incident in which a
California employer was sued for racially harassing his Asian worker with
'Bruce Lee' taunts:

[...] what Asian guy in America can't relate to being called Bruce Lee or
Jackie Chan or some other kind of martial arts nonsense (and not in a good
way) during some point in their lives? [...] You know, some dude yelling
'Bruce Leeeeeeeel' out of a passing car? Or some idiot making kung fu noises
while you're waiting in line at Burger King? That's right, it happens.
(Yu 2007)

Chinese American director Justin Lin concurs: 'Every Asian American has
been called Bruce or have [sic] had the Bruce yell thrown at them. It's a
dichotomy of pride and anger. At once powerful, but also stereotypical.
You can't escape it'. These words come from the press kit for Lin's 2007
farce Finishing the Game (Justin Lin, 2007), a parody of Bruceploitation
that conjectures the casting process for Lee's unfinished Game of Death. In
this film, Lin expands the stickiness of the Bruce Lee persona to comedic
limits beyond even Dragon Lives Again. Infiltrating the casting sessions are
a South Asian Bruce Lee, a Caucasian Bruce Lee, a shell-shocked Vietnam
War refugee Bruce Lee, and others who collectively lampoon the joke that
'all Asians look the same'. On a more general level, Finishingthe Game sees
the discursive flexibility of Bruce Lee as an opportunity, wresting control of
the Bruce Lee persona away from the white film industry in Hollywood
and the Asian film industry in Hong Kong, and toward the Asian
American populace which has historically suffered as a result of the indus-
tries' exploitations in the 1970s.
Another example of the Asian American hijacking of Bruceploitation is
Elliott Hong's 1982 comedy They Call Me Bruce, about a Chinese immi-
grant who is constantly referred to as 'Bruce', even though he is nothing
more than a noodle cook and, more importantly, does not know kung fu.
Zaniness ensues when the cook is mistaken in a newspaper as 'Bruce Lee
reincarnated!' and is then unknowingly led on a nationwide drug-smuggling
operation. The cook learns to use the 'Bruce' stereotype to his advantage,
deflecting violent encounters and attracting women in the process. Like so
much of Bruceploitation, They Call Me Bruce uses the 'reach the next level'
syntax from Game of Death, structuring fights into a string of increasingly
important villains to overcome. Now the 'death tower' is not a metaphysi-
cal tournament of fight techniques, but America itself. The film is struc-
tured as a road movie, taking 'Bruce' from state to state, fighting (in
gratuitous stereotypes worthy of Bruceploitation) Italians, Jews, cowboys,
Poles and blacks to assert the cook's rightful place in America. His (and
the film's) comedic assumption of the Bruce persona culminates in a
grandiose shot of the cook arriving in New York at the heels of the Statue
of Liberty.
In Hong's hands, the Bruce Lee look-alike is no longer a stooge but an
agent: an impersonator who combats stereotypes by playfully assuming
them. Tina Chen (2005: 10-11) has theorized the act of impersonation in

'Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures 133

Asian American cultural production as 'the deliberate confounding of
both visible difference and visible sameness', an act that is effective in

both critiquing the impositions placed upon Asian American subjects via the
roles in the US imaginary that they have been historically asked to perform
and foregrounding the ways in which these very roles might be utilized to
disrupt the codes of conduct they ostensibly uphold.

Thus we witness another operation of the Bruce Lee star-function in

Bruceploitation. Deliberate difference here does not simply create marketable
differences between products, but foregrounds gaps in the epistemology of
Asianness in America, as well as gaps within our conception of the 'Bruce
Lee' star itself.

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Suggested citation
Hu, B. (2008), "Bruce Lee' after Bruce Lee: A life in conjectures', Journalof Chinese
Cinemas 2: 2, pp. 123-135, doi: 10.1386/jcc.2.2.123/1

Contributor details
Brian Hu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Film, Television and Digital
Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include
post-war Chinese popular culture and the diaspora. His writings on cinema have
appeared in Screen, Continuum, and Post Script.
Contact: 11372 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]

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