Global Media Journal

Using Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s international box office hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a case study, this paper argues that a local film, even with international funding and production team, still belongs to the “transnational national cinema,” a particular national/local cinema in global mass culture. Through the exploration of Ang Lee’s auteurism, this paper argues that the martial arts genre, the invocation of Chineseness and the Orientalistic aesthetics employed by Ang Lee in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, come not only from the strategic calculation of how to make an international popular cultural commodity but also reflect Ang Lee’s Chinese diaspora identity. Furthermore, this paper contends that an authentic China has become questionable and unrealistic in an era of globalization, like Ang Lee’s employing the Orientalistic aesthetics to represent the imaginary China is a kind of cultural translation/mistranslation , which is not selling out China. On the contrary, it is a pragmatic tactic to sell China to the international film market, and to make China be seen in a visionary global mass culture.

One may ask: Are Ang Lee and his films Taiwanese? Chinese? American? Taiwanese American? Chinese American? … The lack of a clear answer to such questions indicates the very nature of transnational Chinese Cinema.

Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is a cultural phenomenon. As a Mandarin martial arts costume drama, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is not only an international box-office hit, but also is highly acclaimed worldwide as a masterpiece. So far the box-office returns in the U.S. alone, have reached 150 million dollars, making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the most profitable foreign film ever in the U.S.. Its revenue has doubled Italy’s Life Is Beautiful (1998), once was the most popular foreign feature film in the U.S. film history. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has made another record: it is the first Chinese film (including films made in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or China) to win Academy Awards (it won 10 nominations and four Academy Awards including Best Foreign Picture). Because of the staggering success of this film, Ang Lee, after winning the best director in the Golden Globe Awards and DGA (Directors Guild of America), was chosen as “the best American film director” by Time magazine (Gorliss, 2001, p.55).

The international success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its relatively modest performance in two main Chinese markets, China and Hong Kong (Landler, 2001), raise a complex question about global cultural production and local cultural consumption. It needs a delicate explanation, considering the interaction of global media, political economy and specific interpreting practices with different cultural positioning.[1] In this essay, I try to answer more basic questions: First, with funding and crewmembers from different countries, and international promotion and distribution by a Hollywood studio, is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a “Chinese national cinema?” Secondly, what are the lessons Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon provides to the national/local cinema production? And why did a film by a Taiwan-born Chinese diaspora director and employing the Chinese martial arts genre become the most successful foreign feature film in the U.S.? In this essay, these questions will be answered first in terms of Ang Lee’s auteurism.

….But you can’t remove China from the boy’s head, so I’m finding China now. That’s why I’m making this movie [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] with these people, to talk about things we know and that particularly don’t exist. Good old China.

As a second-generation Mainland Chinese displaced to Taiwan by the Chinese civil war in 1949, Ang Lee studied film and started his directorial career in the United States. Different from the work of Asian directors such as John Woo who immigrated to America and has been totally incorporated into the Hollywood film industry, or Wayne Wang who goes back and forth between Hollywood studio production projects and the English-language independent productions, Ang Lee’s oeuvre can be divided into two main categories: the Mandarin-language productions and the English-language productions. The former includes his “father-knows-best” trilogy—Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The second category includes Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), and The Hulk (2003). Ang Lee seems always to oscillate between these two kinds of career, and the making of Mandarin-language films seems to be a cultural obligation for him (Hardesty, 2001, p. 21).

Although referring himself as a “Taiwanese” (Lee, 1999, p. ix; Hardesty, 2001, p. 21), Ang Lee admits that he has a serious identity crisis:

To me, I’m a mixture of many things and a confusion of many things…. I’m not a native Taiwanese, so we’re alien in Taiwan today, with the native Taiwanese pushing for independence. But when we go back to China, we’re Taiwanese. Then, I live in the States; I’m a sort of foreigner everywhere. It’s hard to find a real identity (quoted in Berry 1993, p. 54.).

Yet, this confusion of identity, I would argue, only reflects Ang Lee’s political identity crisis. In terms of cultural identity, he is very certain he is Chinese. When explaining the motive for making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee straightforwardly emphasizes this film is a fulfillment of his “dream of China.” Three years ago, when Lee first went to Beijing, literally his “Motherland,” his mother’s hometown, he tried to find out if he could make a film there. The result was disappointing because everything was modern, and he said:

I didn’t see what I was looking for—it felt as if I were in a big Taipei. I had no thrill because that China does not exist anymore, either in Taiwan or America or here: it’s a history. It’s a dream that all the Chinese people in the world have, an impression. Gone with the wind (quoted in Dupont, 2000, p. 40).

The audience can easily categorize Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a “Chinese film.” However, there is a hesitation to pigeonhole this film as a “Chinese national cinema.” As Lu argues, Ang Lee’s works are typical “transnational Chinese cinema.” According to his criteria, Lu points out that transnational Chinese cinemas, like Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), are films that “were funded by foreign capital (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Europe), produced by Chinese labor, distributed in a global network, and consumed by an international audience,” and they are dominated by the global cultural production and consumption (Lu, 1997, p. 11). Lu argues, “It seems that Chinese national cinema can only be understood in its properly transnational context.” And he goes on to articulate the transnational perspectives inscribed in Chinese cinemas:

Transnationalism in the Chinese case can be observed at the following levels: first, the split of China into several geopolitical entities since the nineteenth century—the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—and consequently the triangulation of competing national/local “Chinese cinemas,” especially after 1949; second, the globalization of the production, marketing, and consumption of Chinese film in the age of transnational capitalism in the 1990s; third the representation and questioning of “China” and “Chineseness” in filmic discourse itself, namely, the cross-examination of the national, cultural, political, ethnic, and gender identity of individuals and communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora; and fourth, a re-viewing and revisiting of the history of Chinese “national cinemas,” as if to read the “prehistory” of transnational filmic discourse backwards. (Lu, 1997, p. 2)

Lu’s analytical framework provides a pertinent perspective from which to analyze Ang Lee’s four Mandarin-language works. I will argue that with the increasing globalizing of film production, Ang Lee’s “transnational Chinese cinema” is a special kind of “national cinema” in the globalization era. I will use his international box office hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a example to analyze what Ang Lee inherits from traditional Chinese cinema and how he transforms it to cater to the international film market. In addition, I will also argue that Lee increasingly employs a more specific Oriental aesthetic and invokes more obvious “Chineseness” as the selling point of his Mandarin films in the international markets, including Chinese diaspora communities, and that this strategy culminates in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Having gone through cultural displacement several times, Ang Lee has been always conscious of his Chinese diaspora identity in his Mandarin filmmaking. According to William Safran’s Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return (1991), the “ideal type” definitions of diasporas are those who form “expatriate minority communities,” and they have the following characteristics: 1. They are dispersed from an original “center” to at least two ‘peripheral’ places; 2. They maintain a “memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland”; 3. They “believe they are not –and perhaps cannot be –fully accepted by their host country”; 4. They see the ancestral home as a place of eventual return; 5. They are committed to the maintenance or restoration of the homeland; and 6. The group’s consciousness and solidarity are “importantly defined” by this continuing relationship with the homeland (as cited in Clifford, 1994: 304-5).

Ang Lee’s real-life experiences nearly duplicate each characteristic Safran delineated. Although he was physically displaced from Taiwan to the U.S., as a second-generation mainlander growing up in the milieu of identifying with the China Proper and de-Taiwanese cultural policies enforced by the ruling Nationalist Party (KuoMingTung) back then, Ang Lee symbolically and culturally went through two times displacements from his imaginary homeland—China. In this way, all four of Ang Lee’s Mandarin-language films can be seen as a kind of homecoming.

Ang Lee’s diaspora identity may best reflected by his political detachment from Taiwan and the apolitical subject matter in his works. It is not surprising that none of Lee’s four Mandarin-language works has ever dealt with Taiwanese national identity which is the main characteristic defining Taiwan New Cinema (Chen, 2000). When Hou Hsiao-heien coped with the issue of Taiwanese national identity in his Taiwan Trilogy—The City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995), other second-generation Mainland Chinese directors also started to deal with the complex historical/political/cultural relationships between Taiwan and Mainland China, as seen in Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Wang Tong’s Banana Paradise (1989). However, the common subject matter of Ang Lee’s “father-knows-best” trilogy, Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman is about the conflicts and differences between traditional “Chinese” culture and western (American) culture. Ironically, Taiwanese intellectuals seemed lenient toward the detachment of Ang Lee’s works from Taiwanese social-political reality. As Chen (2000) explains, this is because no Taiwanese intellectual thinks of Ang Lee as a native Taiwan director. The funding of Ang Lee’s “father-knows-best” trilogy came from Central Motion Picture Corporation. CMPC is the largest film producer in Taiwan and is owned by the ex-ruling KMT government, which served as a mouthpiece of the government’s international propaganda for joining the United Nations. As Chen argues,

It is no accident that the setting of both films (Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet) was New York, thus permitting the ‘transnationalization’ of TNC [Taiwan New Cinema] and ‘Ang Lee,’ who has almost achieved the status of national hero since the release of Sense and Sensibility (1996). For the state [Taiwan], what matters is not so much the ideological content of the film, but whether it will disseminate the name of Taiwan (Chen, 2000, p. 176).

Another implication for Ang Lee’s Chinese diaspora identity is his using Chineseness to construct an imagined Chinese community. Chineseness is a set of cultural differentials which is adopted, by Chinese and other ethnic groups as well, to demarcate “Chinese” and “the other.” This is a kind of cultural boundaries has become naturalized to distinguish “Chinese” as an insulated ethnic community (Chow, 2000). These cultural differentials are functioned as nature, as Etienne Balibar argues:

Biological or genetic naturalism is not the only means of naturalizing human behavior and social affinities…. Culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin” (as cited in Chow, 2000, p. 5).

Ang Lee once describes his own experience of being Chinese in New York as follows:

Of course, I identify with Chinese culture because that was my upbringing, but that becomes very abstract; it’s the idea of China…. And the sentiment of being Chinese is different in New York than it is in Taiwan or in China. Wherever you come from, whether it’s China or Hong Kong or Taiwan, in New York, you’re just Chinese; it’s sort of generalized and merged, and people are drawn to each other by that abstract idea of being Chinese. (quoted in Berry 1993, p. 54)

It is the daily life experience of being “Chinese” in New York City, the symbolic capital of the international world that drives Ang Lee to invoke Chineseness in his films to define his identity. Ang Lee proves himself proficient at portraying Chineseness in his Mandarin-language productions. In his “father-knows-best” trilogy “Chineseness” is employed as a symbolic device, in a rather stereotypical way, to distinguish “the East/China” from “the West/America.” In Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, the cultural conflicts between “traditional”/”Chinese” and “modern”/“Western” cultures are the main dramatic tension through the narratives. In terms of the cultural signifier, everyone might agree that food and martial arts are two of the most universal representations of Chinese ethnicity, or Chineseness. In Pushing Hands, the protagonist is a martial arts (TaiChi) master from China who plans to live with his son in New York City, but the reunion is obstructed by the cultural difference between this Chinese old man and his Caucasian daughter-in-law. In this film, martial arts symbolize the wisdom of life—how to compromise with the reality and to lead a peaceful life. At the same time, in Pushing Hands the dinner table is the locus where cultural confrontations take place. When the Chinese TaiChi master leaves home after a confrontation with his daughter-in-law, he lands in a Chinese restaurant to work as a dishwasher.

In The Wedding Banquet, the dramatic tension is centered on homosexuality and generational/cultural differences. But it is Chinese food and mealtimes, especially the wedding banquet sequence, that deploy the storyline and serve as an important symbolic device to imply the possible transgression between different national/sexual identities. Eat Drink Man Woman is a spectacle of Chinese gastronomy. The detailed depiction of the complex procedures in preparing and cooking Chinese cuisine is a vivid example of what Rey Chow called “self-exhibitionism” or “autoethnography” (Chow, 1995), and also a kind of “food pornography,” defined by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong as

making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways. In cultural terms it translates to reifying perceived cultural differences and exaggerating one’s otherness in order to gain a foothold in a white-dominated social system” (as cited in Ma, 1996, p. 198).

Wang Hui-Ling, the screenplay co-writer of Eat Drink Man Woman, admits that the profession of the protagonist in the original design is a tailor, and the later change into a chef was made by considering the international audiences’ interest in Chinese food (Chen Bao-Xia, 1994).

Yet, even The Wedding Banquet in which Ang Lee tries to cover as many diverse “Chinese” identities as possible—Mainland China/Taiwan, young/elder, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual--still presents the stereotypical images of the Chinese diaspora rather than a diverse Asian/Chinese American community. Gina Marchetti (2000) incisively points out like Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, most of the Asian American productions “deal less with the development of an Asian American identity among Chinese immigrants than with the creation of a transnational sense of Chinese identity” (p. 292). However, the traditional Chinese (Mainland Chinese) family depicted in Eat Drink Man Woman, set in modern Taipei rarely exists in modern Taiwanese reality. To a large extent, the family in this film is just a nostalgic imagination of a stereotypical traditional Chinese family.

After three modern family dramas, Ang Lee’s fourth Mandarin-language production moves back to ancient China. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is about the conflict among three women and one man surrounding a legendary sword. The story line starts when Li Mu-Bai (Chow Yun Fat), a famous warrior, asks his longtime friend and unacknowledged love, swordwomanYu Shu-Lien to give his Green Destiny sword to an aristocrat. Yu Shu-Lien (Michelle Yeoh) had inherited a convoy business from her father and remained single in honor of her deceased fiancé. Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the young daughter of Governor Yu, has secretly learned martial arts from her governess, Jade Fox. Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei) was an ambitious swordswoman who once offered her body in exchange for lessons in the highest martial arts from Li’s master. But when Li’s master finally refused to teach her martial arts she poisoned him and took cover as Jen’s governess. Apprehensive about her upcoming arranged marriage, Jen longed for the freedom of a fighter’s life. After she stole the Green Destiny Sword, a turmoil started.

In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the evocation of Chineseness is omnipresent. As a martial arts period drama set in the Qing dynasty, the film contains everything “Chinese” and exotic. By totally excluding the West from its narrative, this film has become a quintessential Orientalist fantasy. In analyzing the “father-knows-best” trilogy, Sheng-mei Ma criticizes Ang Lee’s works as “Third-World international or festival films” shot in a “tourist-friendly” way and argues that “taken chronologically in the order of their release, the trilogy reveals an increasing propensity toward exotic travel in search of the Other rather than nostalgic lamentation over the loss of the self” (1996, p. 195). I agree with Ma’s argument that Ang Lee’s Mandarin-language productions are increasingly inclined to employ Orientalist aesthetics, and are more often seen as exotic spectacles to international audiences than before. However, besides the “pull” from a sophisticated calculation of how to make a hit in the world film market, I will contend that Ang Lee’s anxious nostalgia for his imaginary homeland, China, which also serves as the subjective “push” force lying under the increasingly exotic, or “Chinese,” filmic aesthetics in his Mandarin-language production.

Contrary to the “political China,” the transnational sense of Chinese identity implies a “cultural China.” “Cultural China” is employed by Tu Wei-ming to elaborate on the contours of a symbolic universe “that both encompasses and transcends the ethnic, territorial, linguistic, and religious boundaries that normally define Chineseness” (1994, p. v). In the project of “cultural China,” Tu tries to deconstruct the cultural authority of geopolitical China. He wants, instead, to “explore the fluidity of Chineseness as a layered and contested discourse, to open new possibilities and avenues of inquiry, and to challenge the claims of political leadership (in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong or Singapore) to be the ultimate authority in a matter as significant as ‘Chineseness’” (1994, p. viii). Contrasting with the monolithic and hegemonic essentialist national China discourse with “cultural China,” Tu emphasizes that the periphery—the Chinese diaspora—can form a new cultural center of Chineseness. Tu uses “the living tree” as a metaphor to represent “cultural China”: the Chinese diasproa is sprouting the most vigorous new branches and leaves from the root China.

Yet Ien Ang incisively criticizes cultural China as a project to deconstruct “the obsession with China.” She claims, on the contrary, it represents “an overwhelming desire…to somehow maintain, redeem, and revitalize the notion of Chineseness as a marker of common culture and identity in a rapidly postmodernizing world” (2000, p. 288). Ien Ang argues that, the organic metaphor of “the living tree” exactly illuminates the illusion of decentering an essentialist China implied by the “cultural China” project. Ang contends

Without roots, there would be no life, no new leaves. The metaphor of the living tree dramatically imparts the ultimate existential dependence of the periphery on the center, the diaspora on the homeland. Furthermore, what this metaphor emphasizes is continuity over discontinuity: In the end, it all flows back to the roots” (2000, p. 289).

Using Ien Ang’s critiques to go makes clear that what Ang Lee did in his Mandarin-language productions was merely going back to the root of “the living tree” and to use the most distinguished “Chineseness” to interpellate individuals as Chinese subjects and to build an “imagined community,” an imagined China. Benedict Anderson’s felicitous concept of “imagined communities” (1983) is well accepted in the field of national cinema studies, because it makes people rethink the nation, not as something taken for granted, but as a socially and historically human construction. Anderson emphasizes that communities are not to be distinguished by their genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. The nation is defined by shared characteristics and cultural codes among its national citizenry. This can explain why the stylistic mannerism of Chineseness in Ang Lee’s Mandarin-language filmic narratives is significant in the imaging and imagining of China as a cultural community.

The film [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] is a kind of dream of China, a China that probably never existed, except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan…. My team and I chose the most populist, if not popular, genre in film history –the Hong Kong martial arts film—to tell our story, and we used this pop genre almost as a kind of research instrument to explore the legacy of classical Chinese culture (Lee, 2000a, p. 7).

My desire to direct a martial arts film comes from nostalgia for classical China. The greatest appeal of the kung fu world lies in its abstraction. It is a conceptual world based on ‘imagined China.’ This world does not exist in reality and therefore is free from its constraints (Lee, 2000b, p.116).

In this straightforward self–reflection, one can understand that for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to be a martial arts drama is not a contingency; instead, it is from Ang Lee’s conscious choice.

Genre is a special category to classify cultural objects. According to Allen (1989), genre attempts to interpret the dynamic relationship between texts and readers. It systematizes similarities among different texts so that a common language can be shared and an interpretive community of readers can be formed. In terms of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the martial arts genre is a sophisticated choice. First of all, it is an obviously “Chinese”/”exotic” genre to non-Chinese audiences. The stunning acrobatics and choreography, which were shown in Jackie Chan’s films and the box-office hit The Matrix, are Oriental spectacles that proved to be a successful commercial formula to attract international audiences. In addition to the action part, the costumes, settings, and musical score all provide opportunities to construct an imagined “Chinese” world. Second, as Ang Lee specifies, the martial arts film is “the most populist, if not popular, genre in film history.” “Populist” literally implies “comes from the people.” Here, Ang Lee reminds us of the long tradition of the martial arts film genre in Chinese film history. In doing so, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tries to invoke Chinese audiences’ collective memory of a specific national film culture.

In Chinese cinema, the martial arts genre is not only one of the most popular but also one of the earliest. Grown out of the unique tradition of the martial arts and popular martial arts literature, martial arts movies can be dated from the silent era of the 1920s in Shanghai. The genre’s first box office hit was Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (1928), which bred 18 sequels within three years. In the same period, the martial arts films occupied 60 percent of the total production of films in Shanghai (Desser, 2000a, p.11). The martial arts genre can be divided into two categories: Wuxia pian (martial chivalry films/swordplay films) and kung fu films. The former dominated the screen until the 1970s when kung fu films were invented by superstar Bruce Lee. Wuxia pian emphasizes swordplay to distinguish itself from the fistfights of kung fu. Almost all wuxia pian are period films, historical epics, or action-spectaculars with colorful costumes (Desser, 2000a). Another difference between wuxia pian and kung fu films is that female characters, i.e. swordswomen, always occupy the center stage of the former. One explanation for this difference is that wuxia pian heavily relies on choreography and wirework to show the warriors’ astonishing physical abilities, while kung fu is more realistic and highlights the spectacle of the masculine body. Specifically speaking, wuxia pian is the exact genre tradition drawn on by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The reason Ang Lee chose the martial arts/ wuxia genre for his fourth Mandarin-language production is because this special Chinese film genre can serve as a road map to guide him in returning to China, his imaginary hometown.

The martial arts film is the staple of the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries. It is estimated that between the end of World War II and 1980, the Hong Kong film industry alone had produced about a thousand martial arts films (Stokes and Hoover, 1999). Originally, Hong Kong’s films were Cantonese-dialect productions, which appeared in the late 1930s. Then were many filmmakers fled to Hong Kong from the Mainland to escape the Japanese invasion during World War II. However, by the middle of the 1960s, the Hong Kong film industry powerhouse Shaw Brother Studio started to produce films in the Mandarin language (the official language of both People’s Republic of China and Taiwan). After Shaw Brother Studio contracted with talented young directors such as King Hu and Chang Che with the release of productions like Come Drink with Me (King Hu, 1965) and The One Armed Swordsman (Chang Che, 1966), Mandarin martial arts movies dominated Hong Kong and Taiwanese film industry for a decade (Desser, 2000a, p. 32-3).

Martial arts, per se, is a Chinese diaspora film genre. Though it originated in Mainland China, the fruition of the martial arts genre was only accomplished in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In terms of Mandarin-language wuxia productions, the two master directors Chang Che and King Hu are typical of the Chinese diapora. They were forced to leave Mainland China when the Communists took over after 1949. Here, I want to go into a more detailed discussion of King Hu, not only because he is the only Chinese director of whom Ang Lee specified his personal admiration (Croliss, 2001, p.55), but also because he forged his career as a Chinese diaspora director just as Ang Lee has done.

King Hu (1931-1997) was one of the Mainland Chinese cinema talents who immigrated to Hong Kong after the 1949 Communist revolution. In 1966, he directed his first martial arts film, Come Drink with Me, and its commercial success and special aesthetics opened a new page for the Mandarin martial arts films. Afterwards, King Hu moved to Taiwan and made his signature works, such as Dragon Gate Inn (1967) and A Touch of Zen (1971). Dragon Gate Inn turned out to be one of the biggest box-office hits in the whole Asian Chinese film market (including Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia Chinese communities), and the staggering aesthetics of A Touch of Zen made it the first Chinese film to garner an award at the Cannes Film Festival. In the 1980s, King Hu once again moved, this time to the United States where he tried to make a film about the early Chinese immigrants who built the railroads during the California gold rush, but lack of funding killed the project.

A Chinese born in Beijing who died in Taipei, King Hu built his reputation mainly on his Mandarin-language martial arts films (Stokes and Hoover, 1999; Desser, 2000a; Bordwell, 2000b). Hector Rodriquez points out that, derived from King Hu’s experience of exile and cultural rootlessness, his martial arts films emanate from a nostalgic “craving for China,” with elements like Chinese visual and performing arts and traditional ethical values (1998). These characteristics can also easily be found in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In addition to his unique aesthetics, King Hu’s works can be analyzed in terms of “national allegory.” In his seminal essay, “Third-World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism” (1987), cultural critic Fredric Jameson brings up the influential theory of “national allegory” to examine Third World cultural productions. He argues that every Third-World text is a kind of “national allegory,” because “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public Third World culture and society” (p. 142). In a similar vein, Bordwell points out that martial arts films in King Hu’s hands turned out to be a general national allegory:

Hu used the Mandarin movie as an occasion to explore China’s tragic history of state corruption. In a genre that spun out plots of private revenge and family loyalty, he elaborated political intrigues…. He gravitated to the Ming dynasty, a period in which venal cliques plotted against one another and cooperated only to oppress the people. He tried to capture China’s confrontation with external invaders, like the Mongols and the Japanese, and portrayed the Ming as a period when Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism jostled one another (2000b, p. 255).

King Hu’s martial arts films can be interpreted as nostalgia and as a political critique of China, a homeland he could never go back to because of the different political ideologies.

However, Hu is not the only Chinese director employing the martial arts genre to express concern about China’s politics. In fact, the martial arts film is usually used as a national allegory to refer to China in a world political context. For example, in his brilliant Once Upon a Time in China series, Tsui Hark uses the legendary Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-Hong as a nationalist icon who resists imperialist invasion. Wong Fei-Hong, a martial arts master, is depicted as a fighter who defends the Chinese cultural identity and Confucian humanistic ideals in the turmoil of modernization. These six films of Once Upon a Time in China series, produced from 1990 to 1997, were employed by Tsui Hark as a symbolic device to reflect the political/cultural/social anxiety of Hong Kong toward the 1997 return to Mainland China (Stokes and Hoover, 1999). Another example of this national allegory concept is the legendary kung fu icon Bruce Lee. He always plays a furious nationalist defender fighting back imperialist invasions of China. In his analysis of Bruce Lee and the kung fu craze in the U.S., Vijay Prashad (2003) highlights the 1970s’ political milieu of multi-ethnic anti-imperialism in which Bruce Lee’s Chinese national hero image became a popular icon among Black and other minority groups. In this case, the martial arts film is not solely a Chinese national allegory but is transformed into an allegory for all the oppressed people worldwide.

Stephen Teo (1997) incisively maintains that the martial artist/actor’s films produced a “cultural nationalism” expressing the Chinese diaspora’s desire to “identify with China and things Chinese, even though they may not have been born there or speak its national language or dialects” (p.111). He points out that not only the genre itself, but the production and marketing of martial arts films are significant. Just as King Hu’s Taiwanese productions took the Southeast Asia’s film markets by storm, these films also mold “a kind of pan-Chinese internationalism within the region [Southeast Asia]” (as cited in Bordwell, 2000a, p.67). When Ang Lee talks about how he fulfills the image of the China of his childhood memory in martial arts films, he exactly refers to this unique Chinese diasporic film culture.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Traditional Heritage and Transformation

In many ways, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a salute to King Hu’s martial arts films. Like Hu, Ang Lee highlights woman warriors of the martial arts genre. Cheng Pei Pei, one of the most famous martial arts actresses in the 1970s, who played the female warrior in King Hu’s Come Drink with Me, also plays Jade Fox, the villain swordswoman in Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The swordswoman impersonating a man in the fights in the inn and the bamboo swordplay scene remind the martial arts genre audiences of King Hu’s works, Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen. The bamboo swordfight of the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is obviously paying homage to King Ku’s classical bamboo fight scene in A Touch of Zen, which described by David Bordwell (2000a, 2000b) as, “perhaps the most famous scene in all the new wuxia pian.”

However, there are several critical differences between Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and vintage King Hu’s martial arts works. First of all, the national allegory as a political critique is totally missing in Ang Lee’s martial arts remake. In his “father knows best” trilogy, the family serves as a symbol of Chinese traditional culture, and it is always in conflict with Western/American/modern culture which makes it possible to find a common national allegory in the trilogy. However, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the Western/American/modern factors are totally wiped out, and the film is only a Chinese saga. Second, in contrast to King Hu’s reticent portraying of the warriors’ feats, Ang Lee pushes the Orientalist aesthetics to its extreme. For example, the fighting sequences of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are typically what Rey Chow (1995) defines as the “self-exhibitionist spectacles.” Taking the bamboo swordfight sequence for comparison, in Hu’s A Touch of Zen the fighting is presented in a abstract stylistic film aesthetics:

Apart from the acrobatics, the swordfight is filmed and cut in a daringly opaque way. Although each image is carefully composed, the editing makes the shots so brief that we merely glimpse the fighters’ extraordinary feats (Bordwell, 2000b, p. 2).

On the contrary, the swordfight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is presented as an astonishing depiction of the warriors’ mythical feats. Relying on heavy wire work which could be erased by cutting-edge computer graphics technique, Ang Lee could create incredible images of how two warriors drift down to pause effortlessly and fight violently on the gently bobbing bamboo branches. In a rooftop chase sequence at the beginning, the wire work enables the two women warriors to walk up the wall and literally in the defiance of gravity.

Ang Lee seems very proud of the fighting scenes in this film. In his own words, he tried to make “the most incredible fight sequence you ever saw” (Hardesy, 2001, p. 22). Lee said he wanted to make the “action scenes play like choreographed dances” (2000b, p.116), so he “did a lot of vaulting wire work—more than Yuen Wo Ping [choreographer] ever did before” (2000c, p. 4). Yuen is a veteran martial arts film director and choreographer, whose works include Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China (starring Jet Li), Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master, and the international box-office hit The Matrix. Yet, the wire work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon exceeded anything he had done with this technique before.

Making fighting scenes like dance is nothing new to King Hu who once said, “I‘ve always taken the action part of my films as dancing than fighting” (as cited in Stokes & Hoover, 1999, p. 90). Yet, when King Hu tried to beautify the warriors’ feats he was careful to make them not seem like implausible or like sheer fantasy. David Bordwell argues that Hu used a unique stylish aesthetics to conquer this dilemma of beautification and mystification, which Bordwell described as “richness through imperfection,” and he goes on to explain it:

[A]ny such acts [feats] can be shown quite clearly if the director is able to spend time and money on wires and special effects. But special effects inevitably risk looking fake. Today this problem has still not been surmounted: wire-work often makes combatants look like they are being hauled and swung around…. The solution he [King Hu] found was to stress certain qualities of these feats—their abruptness, their speed, their mastery. And he chose to do so by treating these feats as only partly visible…. The recent wuxia pian techniques give us time to savor the outrageousness of the stunts, but Hu’s glimpses tantalize rather than satisfy our appetite for action ” (2000b, pp. 118-120).

Compared with King Hu’s abstraction of the fighting scene, Ang Lee’s arrangement is simply “make-you-see-it-all.” Distinguished from its basic Hollywood realistic narrative, all the fighting scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--no matter whether the rooftop chase, the inn fighting sequence, the duel between two swordswomen, or the bamboo fight--flaunt the warriors’ feats to a totally unrealistic extent. They are pure magic as most American critics describe this film. If King Hu’s fighting scenes were consummated through the audiences’ imaginations, Lee’s literally extinguish any imagination through special effects and computer graphics. Devoid of the political national allegory, the fighting scenes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are only spectaclized spectacles, or self-exoticsizing spectacles, which are used to cater to the oriental gaze dominating the international film market.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Why Ang Lee and Why the Martial Arts Genre?

If we explain the production of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon only through Ang Lee’s auteurism, it will be a dangerous simplification of a complicated global cultural phenomenon. To further explore the cultural logic behind the production of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, let us begin with these simple questions: Why is the most successful foreign film in U.S. film history a Chinese film? Why was Ang Lee chosen to be the director? And why is this film a martial arts film?

First of all, how could a Chinese film like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon be so overwhelmingly acclaimed by Western film critics and audience? In his Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (2002), Yingjin Zhang presents a detailed analysis of the operation of global cultural politics which makes the Chinese cinema a powerhouse of the international film industry. Like Klaus Eder, program organizer for the Munich International Film Festival, points out: “That is a surprising and admirable series of successes, which no other cinema has ever duplicated, at least not within the last two or three decades.” (quoted in Zhang, 2002,p.16). According to Zhang, the staggering success of Chinese cinema (including Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong productions) is a contingent mixture of post-Cold War/post-Tiananmen international politics, the highlight in international film festivals, the box-office boom in Western art theaters, the Western academic interest of pursuing the Oriental cultural authenticity, and the dialectic interaction between global cultural industries and Chinese local filmmaking. Owing to the Chinese cinema craze in the international film market, it is not too surprising that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a Chinese film, could take the international market by storm.

Second, why was Ang Lee assigned to direct Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? The answer might be that Lee’s previous works has proved not only he is familiar with the modus operandi of both U.S. and Chinese (Taiwanese) film industries, but he also knows how to make an international box office hit. In fact, Ang Lee’s debut, Pushing Hands, was a coproduction between Taiwan’s Central Motion Picture Company and New York’s independent film production house Good Machine Company. Through Good Machine’s sophisticated promotion strategy, Ang Lee’s second film, The Wedding Banquet, garnered the Golden Bear Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and became an instant hit in art houses worldwide. Since then Lee not has only become a brand name on the film festival circuit but also has given a pull to Good Machine’s solid footing in the U.S. film industry. Now, even though The Hulk’s failure in the U.S. market, both Ang Lee and Good Machine have been on the list of the most-wanted among Hollywood film studios.

Ang Lee’s long-time partnership with Good Machine is an interesting case of a reciprocal relationship between an artist and the managerial agency in the creative industry. Yet, a great part of credit for Ang Lee’s success has to be given to James Schamus, one of the co-founders of Good Machine Company. Almost all the screenplays of Lee’s works—including his Mandarin-language productions Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman—came from Schamus’ writing, co-writing or revision. It is no exaggeration to say that James Schamus serves as the informant of American culture to Ang Lee’s successful career.

Third, why were the martial arts, or specifically the wuxia pian, genre chosen for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Compared to kung fu films which were best represented by Bruce Lee’s powerful cinematic image, the wuxia films are a martial arts sub-genre less familiar to Western audiences. However, in the 1990s the nijutsu (a Japanese martial art emphasizing the mythical feats of the warriors, which is more like wuxia than kung fu) appeared in American comic books such as The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and achieved an astonishing popularity. In addition, the emergence of the home video game mania around 1985, aroused by the Japanese company Nintendo’s starting to provide software in the market, made Asian martial arts a household item in the popular culture in the U.S. Consequently, as the video game culture was incorporated by the film industry, more and more martial arts special effects were showing on both the big and small screen. This martial arts mania culminated in the box-office megahit Matrix (1999) (Desser, 2000b, p.89-90), choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, who did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as well.

This might make some sense of why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was well accepted by U.S. audiences. However, creating a film which will be loved both by the critics and by the audience is not easy. In his analysis of how Hollywood marketed Jackie Chan’s action comedy to U. S. mainstream audiences, Steve Fore (1997) points out the main difficulty faced by the Hollywood studio was the deep-rooted cultural bias of U.S. audiences toward foreign films (p. 258). Chan’s Chineseness gave the audience problems with finding a cultural proximity with his movie. Fore argues that the reason Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx (1996) were finally well-accepted by U.S. audiences is because the distributor strengthened the cultural proximity redubbing into English, rescoring and reediting, and by emphasizing that the movie was set and produced in New York (p.249). According to Fore’s argument, the marketing of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to U. S. mainstream audience was a mission impossible, because it is full of Chineseness, has an unknown cast, and needed subtitles to help the Western audiences understand the foreign language.

Sony Classics, the U.S. distributor of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon took painstaking efforts to create a niche market for it. Its tactics included choosing to enter the film in the noncompetition screening at the Cannes Film Festival rather than risking competition because Sony Classics wanted this film to be “perceived outside the art-house ghetto.” Furthermore many screenings for different target groups, such as graduates of a women’s leadership institute, female athletes, karate fans, the artist community, and TV news anchors, in the hope that they would spread good impressions of the film through word-of-mouth. Sony also hired a 13-year-old boy to construct a website for this film to attract the teen audiences (Lippman, 2001). However, the totally exotic movie-going experience may be the biggest selling point for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Judging from the box office returns and highly acclaimed critiques (including the Academy Awards) garnered by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was very obvious that all these maneuvers paid off.

All in all, the whole producing, promoting and marketing process of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can be examined in the context that Toby Miller et al. (2001) call the Hollywood’s “new international division of cultural labor” (NICL). The NICL, according to Miller et al., has developed a sophisticated system of surveillance, production, marketing and financing techniques to widen audiences, spread risk and ensure profit. This brief discussion of how and why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became such a huge success in the U. S. merely serves as a reminder of the complicated political economy operated behind the production and marketing a non-Hollywood foreign film[2].

Sometimes commercial and critical success in the international market can be the cultural original sin for a national cinema. Yet, in contrast to the works of Chinese Fifth- generation directors, such as Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), Ang Lee’s Mandarin-language productions rarely become the objects of criticism among Chinese/Taiwanese intellectuals. Again, this can be explained by Ang Lee’s Chinese diaspora identity and his detachment from Chinese politics.

Ang Lee’s films hardly refer to a substantial Chinese society: Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet are set in America and describe the lives of Chinese diaspora; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon goes even further, by setting in an ancient and imagined China. The only exception is Eat Drink Man Woman. Yet, its setting of modern Taiwan only serves as a backdrop for the storyline; in fact, the family drama of Eat Drink Man Woman can hold true in any Chinese community, whether in Mainland China, Hong Kong or the Chinatown of New York City. It seems impossible to use political affiliation or a nation-state to categorize Ang Lee, and people can best pigeonhole him as a “Chinese director”—in a cultural sense.

The films directed by Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige were seriously criticized as distortions of the “real China” because, first, they all specifically refer to the concrete China, the People’s Republic of China or geographical Mainland China instead of Ang Lee’s imaginary China. Second, according to Lu (1997b), Zhang and Chen inherited the traditional Chinese intellectual’s role as a social critic, and they present their films as political/cultural critiques of the PRC government or Chinese society. The indignant indictment of the Fifth-generation directors’ films as cultural sellouts of the Chinese nation in the international film market is basically constructed under the framework of the First/Third world dichotomy. In the Chinese intellectuals’ eyes, China is unquestioningly categorized as a Third world country. So, the popularity of the Fifth-generation directors’ films in the West “only reveals the fact that Third-World cinema is compelled to be part of a hegemonic, Orientalist discourse in order to be accepted by the West, which dominates the global cultural market” (Lu, 1997b, p. 128). On the contrary, Ang Lee’s Chinese diaspora identity cannot be clearly mapped on this First/Third conflicting world framework; his ambiguous and marginalized position takes his works out of the focus in this West vs. Chinese cultural debate.

In this vein, it is meaningful to compare Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, the two most popular Chinese directors in the international film market. Both of them are proficient at employing Orientalist aesthetics, although Zhang has a more critical attitude toward Chinese culture. While defending Zhang Yimou’s films as not totally “selling Oriental exoticism to a Western audience” or “airing one’s [Chinese] dirty laundry in public,” Rey Chow argues that it is imprecise to criticize directors such as Zhang for producing a new kind of Orientalism, she says instead:

[W]hat Zhang is producing is rather an exhibitionist self-display that contains, in its very excessive modes, a critique of the voyeurism of orientalism itself…this exhibitionism—what we may call the Oriental’s orientalism….In its self-subalternizing, self-exoticizing visual gestures, the Oriental’s orientalism is first and foremost a demonstration—the display of a tactic” (1995, p. 170).

Chow’s defense can also apply to Ang Lee. Even though not so defiant and controversial as Zhang’s works, Ang Lee’s Orientalist aesthetics still successfully transform a glossy “Chineseness” into a popular cross-cultural commodity, such as The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Cultural Arcade and Chinese Restaurant: National Cinema in Globalized Consumer Culture

Orientalism, which dominates the production and distribution of the international film market, has always been linked with cultural distortion and misrepresentation of Third world nations. When discussing globalization, quite a few scholars, such as Homi Bhabha (1997), Davis Morley and Kevin Robins (1995), have discussed the importance of cultural translation for local culture to gain a footing in the global cultural market. Rey Chow (1995) also sees national cinema in the postcolonial world as a special kind of cultural translation. Some critics of the national cinema presume that an authentic cultural text and the possibility of an undistorted intercultural translation exist. Orientalism presents an intended disfigurement and manipulation of the original cultural text to satisfy the Western gaze. For Western audiences Orientalism functions as a cultural logic to define their “self” in relation to the “other.” In this vein, Orientalism is transformed into the criterion by which to judge a national/local cinema. If we say a film employs Orientalist aesthetics then we obviously imply that “it is a bad film,” no matter how much pleasure it can bring to us.

Yet, as Chow argues, from the point of view of deconstructionism, the authenticity and the perfect translation of a cultural text now become questionable. As Hall (1997) points out, in the globalization era, the dominant culture is global mass culture which “is dominated by television and by film, and by image, imagery, and styles of mass advertising” (p. 27). In other words, the main form of global mass culture is visionary. In the postmodern transnational and transcultural market, how to make the national/local culture visible is much more important than providing a questionable undistorted cultural representation. That is because in the postmodern global consumer culture, every national/local culture has to be transformed into a commodity and then it can be consumed by audiences through the mass media.

According to Mike Featherstone (1995), because of the fragmentation and disjuncture in global capitalism, “attention should be given to the mediations between the economy and culture by focusing on the activities of cultural specialists and intermediaries and the expanding audiences…for a new range of cultural goods.” (p.2) Indeed, it does not matter that Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, or James Schamus are exactly those “cultural specialists” or “intermediaries” who translate national/local cultural texts into popular commodities for the consumption of international audiences. However, in terms of the cultural politics, are the sometimes conscious mistranslations which appear in their depiction of China really cultural sellouts or betrayal?

When defending the Chinese Fifth-generation directors’ films against the accusation of Orientalism, Chow employs the concept of the translation as the arcade originated from Walter Benjamin. She points out, according to the interpretations of Derrida and John Fletcher, Benjamin emphasizes that a good translation, like an arcade or a passageway, can cast a light on the original text to make it shine more brilliantly; however, Chow argues that the arcade is also a commercial passageway where shop fronts display their commodities to attract the eyes of consumers (1995, Pp.200-201). Chow emphasizes that even contemporary Chinese cinemas employing Orientalist aesthetics still are the cultural translations of the globalization era. She argues “if translation is a form of betrayal, then the translators pay their debt by bringing fame to the ethnic culture…. It is in translation’s faithlessness that ‘China’ survives and thrives” (1995, p. 202) This argument can also be used to defend Ang Lee’s employing Orientalist aesthetics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and all his other Mandarin-language productions.

In explaining his filmmaking strategies in Hollywood, Ang Lee takes a very pragmatic attitude toward the cultural politics of global mass culture. He uses the Chinese restaurant in the U.S. as a metaphor:

I think… it is like running a Chinese restaurant business in the U.S.—the westerners begin Chinese food by trying Sweet and Sour Chicken. After a while, they will be able to taste more authentic Chinese food. The more Chinese restaurants we have here in the U.S., the easier we are able to find green onion and tofu in our nearby supermarket (as cited in Chung, 2000, p. 39).

Obviously, Ang Lee is very self-conscious about his employment of Orientalist aesthetics as a cultural tactic. The felicitous metaphor of the Chinese restaurant not only implies the commodity-nature of films, but also justifies his self-exoticization of Chineseness, or the selling of ethnic Chinese flavors, in his own works as a strategy to attract international audiences. Ang Lee’s remarks imply Orientalist aesthetics might be the necessary evil for introducing more authentic Chinese films into the international film market. However, Ang Lee’s hope might just be a wishful thinking. Since there is no more an authentic China existed under the globalized context, how could it be possible for Chinese filmmakers to produce any authentic Chinese film?

No matter whether you like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or not, no one can deny Ang Lee’s accomplishments in transforming the Oriental gaze into a popular cultural product and, at the same time, his achievements in making “China” be seen by so many international audiences. It is still too early to predict whether the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a contingency or really opens a gate for Asian talents to the international film market. However, the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has brought up some valuable questions in global cultural politics to be contemplated by cultural critics and all national cinema producers worldwide.

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Key words: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee, Chinese diaspora, orientalistic aesthetics, martial arts genre.

[1] In terms of these questions, Ken-fang Lee provides a sophisticated interpretation in her article “Far Away, So Close: Cultural Translation in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp.281-295, 2003.

[2] For full discussion the production and marketing strategies of Crouching Tiger, HiddenDragon, please see Wu & Chan (2003), Globalizing Chinese martial arts cinema: The global-local alliance and the production of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Paper presented at the International Communication Association Annual Convention, May 23-27, 2003, San Diego, CA.

Article No. 8

Chinese Diaspora and Orientalism in Globalized
Cultural Production: Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

References

Article No. 8

Chinese Diaspora and Orientalism in Globalized Cultural Production: Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

References

Chinese Diaspora and Orientalism in Globalized
Cultural Production: Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon