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By
Grace
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Bruce Lee ~
What takes a fragment of a split second and hits you harder than a ton of bricks? A snapshot of martial art perfection: Bruce’s knuckles – your nose.
We all know that Hollywood action stars are not nearly as tough in real life as they seem to be on screen. They are, after all, just actors. We don’t really think Arnold Schwarzenegger can wield a sword and end up hitting anything but his own goddamn nose, or that Sylvester Stallone can throw a punch and actually do some damage. Nor do we really believe that Bruce Willis fell down those three stories of burning skyscraper onto the broken glass. It is all just movie dreamery for the sake of our entertainment. So, if you’re not familiar with the true story of Bruce Lee, I guess it would be equally easy to lump him in with the rest of the old Movie Hero Guard, chalking his success up to timing, pretty stunts and clever marketing.
Not so…
Bruce Lee was the real deal. He was a man who built bridges over cultural chasms, went up against ancient traditions – while upholding his own honor, and also created a whole new perspective on not only Martial Arts, but also Asian culture as a whole. And he would still have deserved the honors of being a Dead Rebel of the Week without even shooting one measly movie. How about that? Are you intrigued yet? Well, you should be.
Bruce was not born in China or anything. He was an American, brought into this world in 1940 by first generation Chinese parents in San Francisco. We often forget that and think all these martial art clowns came over by the boat loads from the old country, but no… he was 100% bona fide American and “Bruce” was his actual name.
Since his father was a famous Chinese Opera actor and needed to move to Asia for movies and shows, Bruce was sent to Hong Kong for studies. It was also there he started his martial arts education, studying such disciplines as Kung Fu and Wing-Chun, and quickly becoming very good at it. Still, he never let his academic education slip because of his other interests and maintained an excellent record throughout high school.
Because of some street fighting trouble involving an important Triad member’s son, Bruce was sent away to the United States again by his parents, fearing for his life. Bruce shacked up with a relative of his dad’s in Seattle and enrolled at the University of Washington as a philosophy major.
Now the winds start to blow. Things were a-changing… The first thing that happened was that Bruce started up a very humble after-school kung fu martial arts class for anybody who wanted to learn. Anybody! Gasp! “Surely not non-Asians as well?” cried the Chinese community in outrage! Yes indeed, those especially. See, at this time it was a sin and a crime against ancient Chinese/Cantonese traditions to teach anybody outside that ethnic heritage any sort of martial arts, especially Kung Fu. Karate was Japanese, and not of any concern to the Chinese Elders, but the old Chinese arts of fighting should stay within ancient bloodlines. Bruce didn’t care. He was already fed up with the way all different styles of martial arts were so limited by forms and what you could and couldn’t do. He wanted to expand upon the art of fighting, and incorporated elements from all sorts of combative sports and schools of thought to roll into his own “style of no style”, called Jun Fan Gung Fu – or what would much later evolve into one of the most famous schools of martial arts ever: Jeet Kune Do. There was karate, kung fu, tai chi, judo, muay thai, western boxing, fencing etc… All the best aspects of each style was taken out of context and paired up with other elements he had borrowed elsewhere and rolled into one new approach.
“If you want to learn to swim - jump into the water.
On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you”
- Bruce Lee
Bruce’s wife-to-be, Linda Emery, was the first woman to sign up for his Gung Fu class. As in all good stories they fell in love, but soon there was trouble in paradise. She was whiter than a ghost in a rice field so a big upset in both families immediately ensued. Chinese people weren’t exactly royalty in Seattle at this time (as opposed to now?) and their relationship was heavily criticized, ridiculed and abhorred by one and all. Didn’t matter to Bruce. They got married, told their parents to deal with it and moved to San Francisco to open up more martial arts schools.
Yet more trouble abounded…
Bruce’s disrespectful/arrogant attitude towards ancient Chinese customs had finally ticked off the Old Wise Ones, the martial arts mafia (I made up the name – sue me), and a summons was sent out to him after his club was trashed. He had to go before the Old Kook Council (I made that up too) and explain himself and his reasons for breaking ancient traditions. Bruce argued that the old ways were obsolete, too rigid and inefficient and that teaching Westerners would open up their eyes to Asian culture and expand their understanding for Chinese-American people as a whole. The council probably looked as stone-faced as we imagine they did and then told him that he had to prove that his new style of thinking worked in a match against Wong Jack Man, a seriously tough Shaolin schooled champion, an authority on all things traditional about martial arts. The underground Kung Fu master. If Bruce could go toe-to-toe with Wong, and not lose too badly, he would be off the hook. But Bruce did more than win… he stomped Wong’s ass into the ground. After the fight was over Wong got up and supposedly dropkicked Bruce in the back as he turned to bow to the masters. Wong always claimed he never did it, that it was Bruce who had been the unsportsmanlike and that he, Wong, had been the one fearing for his life during the entire fight as he tried to escape Bruce’s flurry of punches and kicks.
Whatever the true story is, it still had a drastic effect on Bruce’s approach to his own thoughts on fighting, which also coincidentally served to satisfy the Old Wise Ones’ original complaint: he shut down his own schools, disgusted he hadn’t won the fight quicker. He knew, going in. that he was going to win – he had never lost a fight in his life – but it was the way he had won that bothered him. It hadn’t been efficient enough as he had still relied on too rigid forms and stances. On top of that he had severely injured his spine during the fight and had to lay out in a suspended stretcher for weeks on end, and then wear a spine brace for months. During that time he rewrote the book on Martial Arts, dictating it to his wife. All those random elements he had previously borrowed from other styles were now blended carefully in with each other, leaving plenty of room for on-the-spot improvisation and looser forms. He removed most of the old Kung Fu aspects and added more tai chi and boxing, ultimately making up the very essence of his famous fight style, Jeet Kune Do. It was done. It was perfect.
“Man, the living creature, the creating individual,
is always more important than any established style or system.”
- Bruce Lee
Reenergized by his success in forming this new school of thought, Bruce wanted to prove to the world that it worked. He walked into an annual martial arts seminar on the West Coast and informed all the gathered karate black belts that he could beat anyone in the room with his new style, in 60 seconds or less. He was heavily challenged, but all contenders were quickly beaten into submission. In the end he was the lone man standing and even the most skeptical of die hard martial artists could see that he had a point with his reasoning.
“Lee, pound for pound, might well have been
one of the strongest men in the world”
- Chuck Norris
Bruce quickly made a name for himself in these circles and in 1966 he was approached by the producers of the TV series “The Green Hornet” – kinda like a predecessor to Batman – and was cast for the role of the Asian driver “Kato”. The show was a success. Not only did he become the first household name Asian-American in Hollywood, but he also got a taste for making movies and TV. He had already starred in movies as a child, courtesy of his father the famous actor, but here he saw the potential to be the star and bring something totally new to the table. He started lobbying his producers, through his agent, for a whole new series – a series that would take not only him to the next level, but also martial arts to new heights on the screen. Together with writers he sat down and nailed down the story for the classic TV show “Kung Fu”. The only problem was that the TV producers felt that Bruce was too ethnic looking and put David Carradine in the role instead. What a blow!
“You just wait. I'm going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.”
- Bruce Lee
Disgusted, Bruce Lee took his family and moved to Hong Kong. He made sporadic TV appearances in this and that show, but still dreamed of making real movies. And that was when he was scooped up by an enthusiastic Chinese producer who wanted to make exactly such a movie. Some of the ideas and storylines Bruce had written down over the years were now worked into his first movie, “The Big Boss”, based on a true story from Thailand. This movie, idiotically renamed “Fists of Fury” (because of a goof up that would be evident by the release of his next movie – the real “Fist of Fury”) in America, made Bruce a mega superstar all across Asia. The audience could not get enough of him and it broke all time records all over the place.
He followed up with “Fist of Fury”, renamed “The Chinese Connection” by American distributors to increase the confusion and to capitalize on the movie “The French Connection” that had nothing to do with anything. This movie has been remade several times by classic martial artist actors, the latest being Jet Li (another Real McCoy) in “Fist of Legend”. Anyway… “Fist of Fury” was another huge hit for Bruce Lee, who was now Asian Superhero #1. Up until this point 99% of all Asian movies were studies in sword play and silly romances – now, the audience had a hardboiled kick ass hero who fought empty-handed, an actual role model to a people who suffered immensely from an inferiority complex at this time – on both sides of the Pacific.
Bruce got so carried away that he made his third real movie all by himself. “Way of the Dragon” (called “Return of the Dragon” in the US since it was again goofed up and released after “Enter the Dragon”) was great. Bruce wrote, directed and starred himself, and even managed to get mega-hero Chuck Norris to play the bad guy and arch enemy. The end fight scene in Rome’s Coliseum is a classic. Never mind that it was really shot in a studio and that all the Italian gangsters are speaking English - the movie was made in California – it was still a triumph. Not only was it the first Hong Kong movie ever to be produced outside Asia, but also the first Hong Kong movie ever to make it big in America, courtesy both of Chuck Norris’ pull and the rising star of Bruce Lee. One of today’s most respected martial art actors, Jackie Chan, made his movie “Rumble in the Bronx” as a tribute to “Way of the Dragon”, loosely basing the plot on the same story. Bruce opened up the door for all these Asian actors to make a name for themselves in the big land of the West. Everyone and everything from actors, stuntmen and directors, to whole philosophies and traditions now seeped, and were gladly accepted, into American soil. The door had been kicked open with a flying round house.
Bruce’s last real movie, “Enter the Dragon”, was directed by Hollywood and featured many American actors. By this time Bruce was so famous that thousands of people visited the Hong Kong movie set and constantly interfered with the shoots. It didn’t help that the Shaolin extras in the movie would take turns to challenge Bruce to fights in between takes. Much like the infamous gunslinger rolling into town, Bruce was now the man to beat by anybody who wanted the title “Bruce-Slayer”. He accepted every challenge, 300 in all during the making of “Enter the Dragon” and won every single one. As a matter of fact, Bruce never lost a fight in his life. See, he was the real deal, not some candy ass glass fisted wannabe hot shot. For instance: His old enemy, the mighty Triad, had their eye on this shoot and sent hard ass thugs to screw with the production company, extorting them for protection money. Bruce walked up to the main thug, flashed him a smile, and punched him in the mouth so hard that the guy’s teeth all shattered - every single one. The Triad left.
“When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand.
And when there is an opportunity... I do not hit... it hits all by itself.” (shows his fist)
- Bruce Lee
Bruce died under mysterious circumstances in ’73 during the making of “Game of Death”, and the movie had to be puzzled together through alternate takes and make up footage much later. The film should have died with Bruce as it wasn’t very good anyway. Bruce was a bit fucked in the head at this time – neglecting family and losing control of his previously so religiously structured training and exercise program. It has been speculated that what was stated as “cerebral edema” for cause of death was, in fact, a case of fatal poisoning at the hands of the Triad, as payback for recent grievances and old wounds. Who the hell knows? At any rate, he died 32 years old, with a swollen brain, and no autopsy could ever disclose the actual reason. Thus Bruce Lee’s demise was just labeled as “Death by Misadventure”. Of course, this made his name grow even more and he has thus become the myth, the man and the legend we think of him as today. The fact that his kid, Brandon Lee, also died under mysterious circumstances with Triad connections, while shooting “The Crow”, of course adds to the magnetism of the Bruce Lee name.
“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”
- Bruce Lee
It is important to realize, though, that he was not a myth or just another fake ass legend. He was the real deal. He went against the grain every step of the way, fought harder than most for his ideals and wasn’t afraid to own up to his mistakes and improve upon flawed logic – and all this while staying true to himself and seeing the possibilities in everything, instead of the limitations.
Sure, Bruce Lee was probably one of the best fighters ever born – his punches were pound for pound harder than anybody else’s at the time, and he went from zero to full contact in 3 hundredths of a second, and he was gifted with a spooky sixth sense for anticipating his opponent’s move – but he was also a great man. Sure, he could knock you on your ass with his famous one-inch-punch, but he would also tell you what you could learn from it and how to become a better person through it. He taught the physical and the philosophical aspects of fighting to people who had never before been invited to join in on that school of thought – the Westerners. At the same time, he rolled out the red carpet to Asians overseas and to Asian-Americans on the wrong side of the tracks who had never been invited to join in with the “good people”. Now the Asians in general, and the Chinese in particular, were “interesting” and “exciting” rather than “strange” and “scary” instead. Whole walls between Eastern and Western cultures were shattered and the world changed its attitudes and set ways in a lot of aspects forever. All because of Bruce Lee.
And more than that… he was the coolest cat on the screen. I personally think he is a Dead Rebel because he could kick anybody’s ass with that arrogant smile forever dancing on his lips, without ever once breaking a sweat. Bruce Lee was a kick ass motherfucker.
“It's not what you give, it's the way you give it."
- Bruce Lee
If you want to really dig the story, but are too lazy to go to the library and read any of the many excellent books on his life, then rent the movie “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story”, based on his wife Linda Emery’s biography on him: “Bruce Lee – The Man Only I Knew”. It’s actually pretty good, and even though it’s slightly biased from her obvious perspective of the loving wife, it really paints a good picture of a guy who beat the odds, the stone traditions, and pretty much everybody else who stood up to him. And he did it in style.
“I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations
and you're not in this world to live up to mine.”
- Bruce Lee
