The body in Jackie Chan's Project A

Colonial Comedy Kung Fu – the opening shot from Jackie Chan's Project A (1983). Video still, from the Hong Kong Legends 3-disc 'Project A Collection' DVD set, 2005.  

I’m currently working on some writing that attempts to think through the kung fu comedy film, and its rise in Hong Kong during the mid 1970s. I’m interested in writing about this genre in part precisely because it is one that has been relatively overlooked, and relatively undervalued. The epic martial arts film – clearly often nationalist or anti-colonial in its content – is relatively easy to understand as ‘political’, and hence for academia to valorise as ‘important’ and worthy of scrutiny. Relatively speaking the martial arts comedy is less easy to read in terms of a political ‘content’ or ‘position’. Its lack of ‘seriousness’ makes it harder to think about as a worthy topic of analysis – though perhaps a more positive way to think of this ‘un-serious’ nature would be to count such films as irreverent.

A number of authors – including, for example, Leon Hunt (2003, p. 102) – have thus proposed that whilst still in the shadow of the decolonisation movements of the 60s, the Hong Kong Riots, and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema, in its heroic mode, expressed something of this heavily politicised moment; but they argue that the rise of kung fu comedy in the mid 1970s marks a depoliticisation of the genre, reflecting the increasingly ‘taboo’ nature of politics in the colony during this period. In my recent article on Chang Cheh’s The Assassin (White, 2015), I came quite close to making such and argument myself.

However, I’m ultimately not convinced that these comic films are ultimately any less worthy of a political reading than their tragic-epic counterparts. A certain radical ‘redemption’ of these films seems to me to be in order. After all, they surely constitute the most ‘popular’ form of martial arts cinema, and, for a left-wing critic, the popular has to count for something. My proposal is that in such films, made as they are at a moment of rapid social change (one that it might once have been fashionable to mark as the moment of the rise of the ‘postmodern’), politics simply migrates ‘somewhere else’ from where it had been previously.

What’s interesting about working with these films is that one is thrown increasingly away from narrative readings and forced to engage with aspects of the visual, the cinematic, and perhaps in particular with aspects of performance. This in itself might mark a certain resistance in them to ultimately ‘bourgeois’ forms of narrative, marking the appearance of a cinematic ‘excess’ (Thompson, 1977) in relation to such structures. It seems to me that the various images and fantasies of the body that are represented in these films are central to how we might negotiate them critically.

At the moment I’m working on a section of the writing that attempts to think about these films in relation to Walter Benjamin’s writings about Mickey Mouse and Hollywood slapstick; and Jackie Chan is the main figure I’m thinking about. As part of this work, I’ve just been re-watching Chan’s Project A (1983), and, I might add, with huge pleasure.

It seems to me to be the film where the political stakes of the body in kung fu comedy emerge most clearly, largely because of a prominence of historical reference that is unusual in the genre. This historical reference brings the film close to a kind of political and social satire. I’d argue that some of the politics that attains this unusual visibility in Project A is in fact merely more latent, less explicit in many other kung fu comedy films, and that it helps us understand the broader signification of the body in a genre that had been under development since at least Lau Kar-leung’s Spiritual Boxer (1975).

Project A – made towards the start of a period that has often been understood by critics as always overdetermined by the looming of the 1997 hand-over of the colony to Chinese ownership – is set back in ‘old Hong Kong’, in what seems to be the late nineteenth century, in the heyday of unreconstructed British colonial rule. Though perhaps in some ways somewhat tender and nostalgic in its recreation of the past, there’s a strong strand of satire, which mocks the general chaos, ineptitude and corruption of the colonial regime, as exemplified by both its British and Chinese representatives. The plot is ultimately not terribly relevant for our purposes here, but revolves around the rivalries between the coastguard and the police force, and the attempts of the former to capture a band of pirates who are halting trade to and from the island.

What was most striking to me in rewatching the film, however, was Chan’s famous ability not just to stage fights but to work creatively with the environments and objects in which he sets his characters – something, of course, that is hardly a new observation about his comic or choreographic style. It has, however, been argued that something very similar was at the heart of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy, which often built its humour out of the transformation of objects from their mundane uses to new and surprising ends, based not on convention, but on the morphology of the object itself, presenting us with a rehumanisation of the alienated world of things as produced by capitalism, and a new mastery of the modern environment (Clayton, 2007, pp. 32–3).

This all happens, in hyperbolic form, in the action scenes of Project A. A chair is no longer an object that rules, determines and orders the human body through our very use of it. (If you are anything like me, you will remember well the constant commands from childhood: ‘sit up straight!’; ‘don’t tip the chair backwards!’; ‘Don’t put your feet on the table!’; ‘stop shuffling and sit still!’; etc., etc. In this, the chair is not just a chair, it’s a tool for the discipline and socialisation of the body.) Rather than something to be sat on in the ‘proper’ manner, a chair in Jackie Chan films is also for leapfrogging over, rolling across, or even for a momentary headstand. With a strike coming towards one, the body may well spin around to lie on the chair, ducking underneath the strike. And tipping the chair back in what would normally be a disastrous fall, the acrobatic kung fu comedic body might turn the chair into a form of shelter in which the body might momentarily nestle, before rolling away, or flipping it around yourself to move into a new point of attack or retreat. Wielded in the hands of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung or Yuen Biao, the chair is no longer a chair, but a shield, a tool for disarming or trapping an opponent, or a heavy bludgeon. Tucked rapidly under the body, it might become, again, a launchpad, or kind of a perch on which to posture and pose before the next exchange with an opponent.

When is a chair not a chair? When it's in a Jackie Chan movie... Stills from Project A.

Similarly in Project A, coat-stands become tridents; vases become boxing gloves; bamboo poles are no longer for hanging washing on, but become a jousting lances for knights mounted on bicycles; bedpans become missile weapons, fired with a flick of the foot using a bicycle wheel as a launching device; tables become battering rams or vaulting benches; windows become portals to exit and enter a space. Banisters are for vaulting over or sliding down; flagpoles are for climbing up, out of harms way; awnings break your fall; chandeliers are useful to swing from…

We are thrown into the anarchic and surrealistically re-enchanted world, in permanent flux, which Benjamin (1931; 1933) lauded in the first Mickey Mouse cartoons. If machinery and capital had set the world into a state of permanent, disorientating change – and one which more often than not was experienced as a violence on the human subject, its body and its capacity for experience – Mickey Mouse, for Benjamin, also revealed the dialectically complementary side to this. The cartoon imagination foregrounded an underlying utopian desire for the power to transform the world that Benjamin saw modern technology itself as expressing, if in distorted form. In early Disney animations (and in the Hollywood slapstick of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd), this power was envisioned as re-rooted within the body itself. This power was rehumanised, bracketed off from a capitalist use of technology that had been turned away from the benefit of humanity and placed in the hands of a small elite who – as Benjamin suggested first in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) and then more emphatically in the final version of the ‘Artwork’ essay (1992 [1939]) – used it not to liberate but to exploit, and perhaps ultimately annihilate, the rest of humanity. This rehumanisation might be read as entailing a reconciliation between the body-intensive nature of Benjamin’s archaic ‘first-technologies’ and the modern forms he termed ‘second technology’, the true essence of which, he proposed, lay not in their alienating use for war and capitalist organisation, but rather in the institution of ‘play’ between humanity, technology and nature. (For more on Benjamin on first and second technologies – and their relation to such corporeal arts such as yoga, as well as his pursuit of the erotic, drugs and ‘running downhill’, see Hansen, 2002, pp. 52–3.)

A bedpan used as a projectile weapon, fired with a flick of a bicycle wheel. Video still from Project A. 

Chan’s Project A was made at a time in Hong Kong of rapid modernisation that competed with the Europe of Benjamin’s day or the America of Buster Keaton (Duncan, 2007), and seems to envision something of the same re-appropriation of the alienating world of things that Benjamin saw in the cinema of his own time. Through the re-enchanting magic of their transformation, humanity reasserts a creative mastery over the objects about him. However, in Project A this takes on a very particular significance in terms of the film’s re-imagination (and re-appropriation) of an emphatically colonial landscape.

Frantz Fanon, describing the colonial experience, proposed it as a ‘narrow world, strewn with prohibitions’ (Fanon, 2001, p. 29). If 1970s Hong Kong was not the most nightmarish of colonies (involving an altogether ‘softer’ form of colonial governance than the French-held Algeria that Fanon knew), with its crowded urban spaces it at least made Fanon’s figure of speech a matter of literal, physically experienced constraint, and this surely forms a significant context for Chan’s corporeal art. Walking in Hong Kong’s bustling streets even today, or looking up at the huge and tightly packed vertical towers of tiny apartments, a visitor to the island gets some kind of small insight into such an experience. Fanon makes much in The Wretched of the Earth of the ways that the colony is structured around spatial exclusion and control. It is around such spatial organisation that colonial violence is instituted and made a part of the everyday, embodied experience of the ‘native’. Much of Chan’s physical performance in Project A involves a renegotiation of such spaces, bringing an anarchy into them through his physical traversal and refunctioning of their logic. This is perhaps most spectacularly envisioned in the bicycle chase through old Hong Kong’s narrow alleyways, where the protagonists have to zig-zag their ways through the cheek-by-jowl lives of its inhabitants, navigating impossibly tight right angle turns as fantastical leaps, or climbing up walls to escape speeding pursuers. Here the relation between the human body and the bicycle becomes radically refashioned to make them tools for a superhuman traversal of the colonial metropolis.

The 'narrow world' of Hong Kong's alleyways reconfigured in a new composition of architecture, bodies and bicycles. 

This logic that pits the body against the colonial organisation of space is even set up in the opening sequences of the film, for example, as we see Chan, in his colonial coastguard uniform, rushing to a meeting at the police and coastguard headquarters. After leaping from his still-moving bicycle, which crashes madly into the bicycle rack, disintegrating as it does so, Chan rushes up the evocatively colonial staircase of the building and along its wooden balconies. Chan vaults and spins over a handrail to get past oncoming employees within the narrow space available, without breaking his stride, defying the ‘proper’ function of the Western architecture. His wild running contrasts to the neatly regimented marching columns of his colleagues, and, as he reigns himself in in front of a superior officer, his mode of propulsion is clearly a transgression of correct protocol.

The architecture of the colonial police headquarters is also renegotiated by Chan’s coastguard hero later in the film, when he decides to spy on his superior officers, hoping to hear good news about the reinstatement of shelved plans to attack the pirates. Chan transforms a chimney into a tunnel that takes him into the heart of the administration, bypassing the normal security that keeps social inferiors away from the private discussions of their superiors. Chan, however gets more than he bargains for when the (English) Governor steps aside from his (Chinese) commanders into a side room to do a deal with a wealthy businessman who is in fact in league with the pirates. The Governor’s inner-sanctum-within-an-inner-sanctum sets up a further spatial divide in rank and privilege between him and his high-level subordinates. Chan, however, has come into this very room, and it is his illicit eavesdropping on this conversation, discovering his superior’s guilty secret – and his superior’s discovery that he has done so – that allows him direct access to the ears of the very highest level of authority. Being in the centre of the administration, Chan gets the privilege of putting the moral case to the Governor for fighting the pirates rather than doing a deal with them. Chan’s physical renegotiation of the environment thus becomes a parallel challenge to the normal hierarchies of the film’s world, which are realised in the architecture of the police headquarters and its regime of physical exclusion.

Chan turns a chimney into a passageway to enter into the heart of the spaces of colonial privilege.

One of the key fights in the film takes place in a high-class club, where the police have gone to arrest a suspect harboured by the club’s well-connected owner. The film labours the fact that this is a space from which the police are normally economically excluded (as well as linguistically so – the head waiter insists on talking to them in English). Then, when the fight breaks out we have a tour-de-force of the transformation and re-use of its fittings and furnishings, from the Rococo-style staircase through the antiques which litter its walls, to the furniture itself, as all these things are, in their turn, transformed into weapons. The scene is one where Chan’s stunt team get to ‘do their stuff’, performing a series of the spectacular falls for which they are so well known, crashing the human body (thrown, spinning, often from great heights, and with great kinetic force) into the various props or scenery provided. In most cases, though the body certainly gets an awful punishment, it is ultimately the club itself which comes off worst, the high-class environment being reduced, by the end of the scene to little more than fragments of wood, ceramic and plaster. If this was a space of colonial (and class) exclusion and privilege, a kind of a ‘kung fu revenge’ has been waged upon it in the scene through the collision of the environment with the rubbery bodies of the stunt team and their cartoon-character-like resilience. In fact, the film overall seems to have a point to make through our extra-diegetic response to performance, in the ways that (even where taking a thrashing) the performers’ bodies take on new, fantastical relationships to their environment, performing unusual forms of movement through it at new velocities.

Colonial space being reduced to rubble in Project A, as Chan hurls an opponent through and over the balcony of the exclusive club.

In the light of such a reading, the theme established through the early part of the film of the discipline of the body makes another kind of a sense, too. When Chan’s rather anarchic and incompetent squad of coastguards are disbanded and sent back to train with the police, this is to instil in them physical discipline, such as standing straight to salute, in the proper (Western) military manner. The training itself, however, becomes peculiarly subversive or carnivalesque in nature. When two recruits on parade are discovered mouthing a lewd comment about a passing woman, they are punished by having to repeat the comment ad nauseam, only serving to multiply, rather than negate its obscenity. A further recruit, who fails to salute correctly, is made to salute repeatedly, but this makes the gesture of deference into an absurd and mocking simulacrum of itself. The recruits are stood on alert in the middle of the night by an officer who claims to be concerned that they have drunk too much soup, with Chan having to call a militaristic ‘charge’ to the latrines. The next day involves the recruits stripped to shower, and interrupted, half soaped, and called out of the showers with only water ladles to protect their modesty. The whole training section (a peculiar parody, perhaps, of the training montages that had already become a staple of the kung fu comedy) serves to re-libidinise colonial discipline and to re-inject a sort of anarchy into it, through a failure of the ‘proper’ mimesis of the colonial masters. This ‘failure’ to conform seems to be celebrated throughout the film, as a productive, creative and ultimately transgressive and liberating act.

References

Benjamin, Walter (1931) ‘On Mickey Mouse’, in Jennings, Eiland Gary Smith, eds. (1999), pp. 545–6.

Benjamin, Walter (1933) ‘Experience and Poverty,’ in in Jennings, Eiland Gary Smith, eds. (1999), pp. 734–5.

Benjamin, Walter (1992 [1939]) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, pp. 211–244.

Clayton, Alex (2007) The Body in Hollywood Slapstick. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Duncan, Sydney (2007) ‘The Traditional Thing in the Modern Age: Contextual Perspectives on Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.3 (2007), pp. 353–367.

Fanon, Frantz (2001) The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.

Hansen, Miriam (2002) ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, in Gerhard Richter, ed., Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, pp. 41–73.

Hunt, Leon (2003) Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger. London: Wallflower.

Jennings, Michael, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, eds. (1999) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol 2, part 2, 1931–1934. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thompson, Kristin (1977) ‘The Concept of Cinematic Excess’. Ciné-Tracts: A Journal of Film, Communications, Culture and Politics 1.2, pp. 54–64.

White, Luke (2015) ‘A “Narrow World, Strewn with Prohibitions”: Chang Cheh’s The Assassin and the 1967 Hong Kong Riots’. Asian Cinema 26.1, pp. 79–98, doi: 10.1386/ac.26.1.79_1.

Martial Arts Studies and Gender (University of Brighton, 5th Feb 2016)

On Friday, I had the fortune to attend the UK Martial Arts Studies Network's first event, down on the Eastbourne campus of the University of Brighton, ably organised by Alex Channon and Chris Matthews, so though this edges off at a slight tangent from most of the posts on this blog, I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts that have occurred to me after the day.

During a fascinating event, which brought together academics and martial arts teachers/practitioners, we heard papers on and discussed a range of issues around inclusion and exclusion of groups in participation in martial arts and combat sports, and also examined the possibilities – and limits – of their use in reducing crime. Chris Matthews examined the ways that the design of spaces and the cultures they foster might include or exclude different groups, discussing their historical creation of a distinct masculine (macho) culture in boxing, and we were presented projects by the Eastbourne Boxing Club to open up a more inclusive environment.

Anna Kavoura and Catherine Phipps explored the ways that exclusion works in particular with regards to the different needs of LGBT+ participants.

Deborah Jump offered a provocative paper, from a criminological perspective, suggesting that the kinds of culture of toughness and strength fostered by boxing gyms often only reinforces the self-narratives of young men tied up with violent crime, rather than challenging this, and can simply reinforce the cycles of violence fostered by a culture of masculinity centred around notions of 'respect' and 'shame' rather than (as many boxing outreach projects hope) ending them. The hard, muscular body of boxing functions as a kind of armour through which vulnerability is denied and violence is normalised as a way of solving problems.

The highlight for me, though, was a fascinating paper by Kath Woodward which looked at the changes hopefully sown by the high-profile media coverage of women's boxing in the 2012 Olympics. Woodward's argument was subtle in binding together media representations and everyday embodied physical practice – something that the interdisciplinarity of 'Martial Arts Studies', I feel, is at its best suited to do. Woodward argued that it is precisely the repetitive, everyday nature of martial arts practice that makes it such a potentially socially transformative activity. But the logic of her paper perhaps also implied that it was the way that such everyday practice was tied into the more spectacular and cultural aspects of cultural representation that contributes to its potency. What was interesting form me about her discussion of everyday, embodied practice was that it also encompassed practices of viewing (rather than just participating in) martial arts/boxing. What she thought was particularly important in the 2012 Olympic coverage – especially that of the Nicola Adams fights – was that though the discourse around the women's boxing events initially placed gender central (with a media panic around such questions as: should women box? is it bad for their health? does it open up unsavoury voyeuristic pleasures?), once the competition began commentary increasingly 'forgot' about Adams's gender, presenting her fights in the same way as it would men's boxing – i.e. as a spectacle in which her gender was largely irrelevant.

Woodward offered up an interesting conceptualisation of this, looking at the ways that spectators – like athletes – often seem to enter the ecstatic, timeless time of the "zone" in their spectation. She discovers in this a reason for the depth and power of the effect of such specatorship. This seemed provocative in its implicit contrast to cinematic representation. Is there a difference between watching sport and watching a movie? The difference was not fully explored, but opened up much potential for further thinking. In an exchange afterwards about this issue after her paper, Woodward seemed to suggest that movies don't draw us into the "zone" in the same way as sport, since narrative holds open a different experience of time. However, I wonder about whether some of her ideas in fact make sense the particular experience of spectatorship of martial arts cinema, which, counting as a 'body genre' (like the hollywood musical) often explodes the time of narrative to throw us into the "now" of performance. Some Hong Kong films of the late seventies (I'm thinking of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, the "Venoms Mob", etc.) in their temporally extended and impossibly physical finales offer something more like the sporting event than what is presented by the usual requirements of Hollywood narrative. And interestingly enough, kung fu cinema (with its own frequent narratives of personal and occasionally collective transformation) seems to have a particularly strong effect in sending people to gyms or dojos, suggesting something special in the relation it forges between on-screen and off-screen bodies.

Woodward's paper was also enthralling in presenting a model of how change in such things as gender norms may actually may happen – incrementally and through moments of reiterated, humdrum behaviour. But the question I found myself asking at the end was the old one about revolution or reform. Is what we see in the changes in gender norms really just a matter of chipping at the edges of a patriarchal order, whilst leaving its essential structures in place? Although women's increased participation in things like martial arts or boxing seems an incredibly positive development, signalling some very big changes in the way women are seen and the behaviours that are open to them, are martial arts (and society as a whole) still primarily dominated by a patriarchal/phallogocentric order of gender that remains in its essentials untouched? At what point might all the little changes actually amount to a core transformation, and how might the two (quantitative and qualitative change) be articulated?

I did find myself, at the end of the day,  also asking a wider question of the event, that I think emerges from this same concern. During the day, we spoke repeatedly about the gender and sexual identities of marginalised groups – women, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ constituents, and lower class / criminal young men – but the missing issue was that of the more 'mainstream', ordinary, middle class – and ultimately privileged – forms of masculinity which are invested in the martial arts, too. I think this is not a poor reflection on Channon's and Matthews's curation of the event, but rather on the kinds of things that Martial Arts Studies itself currently seems to encompass.

I found myself increasingly wondering about the men in that very room where the seminar took place (including myself), and the kinds of ideas or experiences of masculinity that drew us into the martial arts. How might these ideas, fantasies and so on – perhaps, although seemingly far less "problematic" than the young offenders discussed in Jump's paper – in fact lie at the core of what's wrong in terms of gender construction around the martial arts? Travelling home, I found myself thinking about Benedict Anderson's notion of "banal nationalism," which allowed him to think of nationalism not in terms of its extreme, pathological and spectacular varieties (when countries declare war on neighbours, or skinheads attack immigrants), but rather in the tiny, everyday ways that people are encouraged to take the nation as a reference point for their identities (from, for example, the clockface on the news that promulgates a shared experience of time to the logo-isation of national maps in the depiction of transport networks or the assertion of a standardised national language over and against local dialects). I wonder if Martial Arts Studies needs to turn to similarly "banal" aspects of gender. And I wonder if, in order to address the core from which forms of exclusion emerge, it needs to study not marginal "others" but those at the symbolic centre of the social order.

I also then found myself wondering about Martial Arts Studies itself as a gendered space. As part of our explorations in the day, we thought in some detail about the ways that women, or those from the LGBT+ community, are often excluded by aspects of the environment and ritualised behaviour of gyms and dojos. But what about our academic Martial Arts Studies events? How welcome do they feel there, and how deeply has that been considered by us? Though the event at Eastbourne – with a fantastic mix of people attending – felt very inclusive, my feelings about the conference in Cardiff last Summer were rather different. I spoke to a number of women attendees afterwards who pretty much all told me that they had found it a rather uncomfortably "male" space. And indeed, it struck me strongly that there was a certain machismo that surrounded a lot of the socialisation that took place around the conference. Often the first question asked was not (unlike most academic conferences!) what your paper is about or some such thing, but about whether you practiced a martial art, and if so what style. The effect of such a question can, perhaps, be a little like the aggressive questioning that Bruce Lee is subjected to by a white martial artist on the boat on the way to a martial arts contest: "What's your style?" In the film, it wasn't just a polite inquiry, it was also a challenge. In the conference, the question was clearly less intrusive, but I wondered how non-practitioners may have experienced this kind of question. Did it imply less of a right to be there? Some of the papers, too, seemed to include hints about "martial credentials" that came close at points to masculine "posturing". One speaker (I shan't name him), after an explicit a denial of homophobia, followed this up, as evidence, with what was meant to be a joke but ultimately amounted to a homophobic comment. Were some of the gendered cultures of the training hall entering into the spaces of academic debate, too? It's often small, banal, everyday, overlooked performances that inscribe gender on a space – often much more subtle than directly homophobic or sexist comments, often far more everyday than the spectacular examples of subproletarian boxing gyms discussed at Friday's event, and often far more inscribed into the "normal" behaviour of "upright" citizens – and it seems to me that in order to safeguard not only the spaces in which we do martial arts, but also the academic spaces where we discuss them in this fledgeling discipline, we need a vigilance not so much on the "other" but on ourselves.

RIP David Bowie ... Martial Artist?

Introducing an Implausible (But Compelling) Conjunction – Bowie and the Martial Arts 

As I write, it is the week in which David Bowie died, and the media has gone into paroxysms of mourning for him – and quite rightly so, in my humble opinion. I'm quite happy to add to the mountain of obituaries – as a popular cultural figure he's one of the few, perhaps, about whom it would be impossible to write too much. Given the subject of this blog – martial arts cinema – I can perhaps only, however, hymn him as a figure in relation to the martial arts, rather than as a pop star.

But – David Bowie as a martial artist??????? Isn't that – well – rather preposterous?

What's this? Bowie-style high-kicking action? Can it be?

On the one hand, yes, it is a completely preposterous idea. But on the other, I have a certain faith that pursuing impossible conjunctions probably ought to be an important intellectual or academic method, certainly when it comes to the analysis of culture. Some impossible conjunctions (like the one that started me on the body of research of which this blog is just the occasional offshoot) have a power of compulsion behind them and in this case they surely take on the nature of the 'symptom' – the thing which in psychoanalysis calls for explanation and for some form of therapeutic 'working through'. The symptom marks the locus of a desire and a fantasy – and the very constitution of the subject itself. When we leave the analysts couch behind and start to look at culture, the questions might remain, of course: 'whose symptom?' ; 'which subject?' ; 'the symptom of what?' Perhaps the symptoms that I describe here are only mine and they are irrelevant to anyone except for me; but my wager is that they have a wider meaning than that. Perhaps if the paradoxical idea of David Bowie as Martial Artist has already drawn you thus far, through some rather dense academic prose, it suggests that it's your symptom too...

The idea of posing a relation between David Bowie and the martial arts (and in particular Hong Kong martial arts cinema) was, in any case, the subject of a short academic presentation that I gave a couple of years back, in order to give a flavour of my research to colleagues. That paper was called (rather mischievously) 'Panic in Hong Kong, or, David Bowie's Karate Lesson', and it sought to sketch a suggestive network of associations between a European countercultural milieu, in the thrall of a cosmopolitan vision of the global village, which might provide a figure for the valence of Hong Kong cinema as it was taken up in the West in the early 1970s. If it doesn't tell us 'what such films meant' as such, it certainly gives us an image of a set of relations and associations that we can interpret them as having entered into.

In the last few days, as Bowie songs have been going around and around my head, I've found myself thinking about this presentation again. But after all, the figure of return is also another marker of the symptom. So here goes a kind of self-analysis, which will start with me and open out to propose a set of wider cultural significances.

Panic in West Hampstead

Perhaps the origin of this presentation – and of the strange conjunction of Bowie and the martial arts as a compelling (if implausible) one for me – lies in my own martial arts training, and in some things that might, if you want to dismiss my association of the two, be put down to accident. (But as Freud notes – there are no accidents in the unconscious.)

My own martial arts teacher is clearly a fan of Bowie, and he will frequently play Bowie songs during our classes. I remember in particular one class – one of the best classes I attended – in which, as we strove as students to draw martial spirit and martial awareness into our tai chi practice, he repeatedly played Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit' (again and again and again), stopping at one point to ask us about whether we knew what the song was about and to ask us why he might think it has something to do with the practice of martial arts. (Although, always enigmatic, he never directly answered that question himself, and left us to figure these things out). In any case, the thundering rhythm section of this song, for us in the lesson, stood the part of the war drums which I always imagine having accompanied military training in historical China. Some of Bowie's songs are simply great to do martial arts to – though that's far from a meaningful answer to the conundrum I'm setting. I think in many ways I 'found' David Bowie through my martial arts practice – as I've actually 'found' a lot of other music that I probably never would have become invested in had I not encountered it through this route. But my finding it is far from accidental. In some respects, I'd suggest, the music found me – there is an element of predestination in my seemingly random experience.

In one respect, well, I like Bowie – but so what? And my teacher's interest in Bowie, a skeptic will argue, may just say a lot about him, and about his particular tastes. There is no significance beyond that. But it also, to begin with, signals something about how old he is, having come into adulthood around the time that Bowie would have rose to fame. Here we are already edging beyond the accidental and the specific. This generational moment, which Bowie must surely signify for him, and from which his interest in Bowie (alongside many other musicians of the same era) must emerge already perhaps marks the conjunction as a significant one. And it is significant, too, in that my teacher belongs to a generation whose coming of age also coincided with the moment when Asian martial arts, too, were emerging (like rock) as a pursuit for disenfranchised youths, looking for meaning in their life. As well as Bowie, the transition from the sixties to the seventies was the moment of the rise of the kung fu film – alongside Bowie arrived 'Grasshopper' and Bruce Lee.

Bowie's first (eponymous) album was released in 1967, the same year as Chang Cheh's breakthrough film, The One-Armed Swordsman, revolutionised Chinese swordplay films. In 1969, as Bowie was recording Space Oddity, King Hu would already have been in the midst of filming A Touch of Zen, which ultimately came to be the first Chinese-language film to win a Grand Prize at Cannes. In 1971, when Bowie released his next album, Hunky Dory (his first album to reach the top 10, climbing to no. 3), Bruce Lee also performed in his first starring kung fu role in The Big Boss. The 'kung fu' film proper had been born. In 1972, the first kung fu films reached the major distribution in America (5 Fingers of Death/King Boxer being the first to receive a screening), and Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. In 1973, when Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups were released, Lee starred in Enter the Dragon, the first 'Hollywood' kung fu film, and the genre's great global blockbuster. This was the year that 'Panic in Detroit', the song from which we drew so much in our lesson some time in the 2010s in a church hall in West Hampstead, was recorded.

Bowie and martial arts, then, were contemporaneous, synchronous even, I would argue. However, what we might still need to start to think about is whether they were in any sense bound together; and if so, what on earth this unlikely juxtaposition might mean, beyond their simultaneous existence for an audience of young consumers of popular culture.

David Bowie's Karate Lesson

Let's jump then to a particular moment in the media, back in those glory days. David Bowie's Karate Lesson. Perhaps this gives us a snapshot of a kind of significance that Asian martial arts had within a particular nexus, and the way that they entered into a particular world of pop-cultural, subcultural and even countercultural meaning-making.

The date is January 3rd, 1976, and David Bowie is appearing on the Dinah Shore show. Bowie is thin, suave, androgynous, debonair, seemingly shy, but nonetheless exudes a powerful charisma, a gentle grace and his hesitancy or shyness itself functions as a disarming charm. And – to join David, Dinah, the 'Fonz' and Nancy Walker – Bowie has brought on to the show his karate instructor, Dwayne Vaughn. Vaughn is super-fly, fast as lightening, proudly sporting an Afro, looking for all the world like the star of a blaxploitation film, though dressed in his karate gi – a real life 'Black Belt Jones'; or a carbon copy of Jim Kelly's character Williams in Enter the Dragon. (As Williams says of another character: 'Man, you come right out of a comic book!')

No, it's not my fantasy, it really happened.

As the interview unfolds, Bowie talks to Dinah Shore about his motivation for starting karate. It was because a number of friends and band-members were doing so. It was, it seems, in the air in rock'n'roll circles – even (especially?) the circles which must have surrounded as un-macho a form of music as Bowie's gender-bending performances. Bowie talks about the similarities between the discipline of mime he learned at theatre school and those of the martial arts. Karate, it turns out, is, for him, a kind of fast-motion mime. Bowie and Shore, echoing each other's movements, turn a karate block ('wax off'?), which Bowie points out resembles a mime artist running his hands against a pane of glass, into a sort of dance. Dinah adds in a wiggle of the hips, and then bumps hers against the Fonz's, karate providing an alibi for something that floats between an aggressive and a sexually provocative action (both perhaps somewhat taboo behaviours for a 'nice' lady, even in 1976). There's something complex going on here in terms not just of the layers of movement imagery that lie one on the other (dance-mime-martial art), but also of the pastiches of gender performance that aggression-as-flirtation-as-dance-as-karate-as-mime seems to involve. Bowie giggles a little, perhaps like the women professors discussed by Joan Riviere in her famous 1929 psychoanalytic paper on 'Womanliness as Masquerade', who were worried about having asserted themselves too 'masculinely' by being clever, and so feel a need to compensate with an extra, exaggerated show of the 'feminine'. To put it in another, more 'oriental', way, yang and yin need to be balanced in Bowie's complex play of personae.

Next, Vaughan leaps onto the set, appearing on screen mid-way through a flying kick to tumultuous audience applause. Bowie is, he says one of his 'best' students. Vaughn and Bowie perform a miniature 'street defence' lesson, showing off the practicality of karate, where Bowie learns about being attacked by someone bigger than himself. Vaughn iterates the 'oriental' wisdom that the movement and force of the aggressor can be used against them even as they attack. Passivity, or non-aggression is a kind of advantage. When Vaughn opens a sentence, "If I was going to choke you like so..." Bowie cuts in, joking: "I would scream very loudly". The capacity for violence is performed and disavowed at the same time. Vaughn talks of distracting the opponent and then hitting them in the groin (Bowie laughs, and so do the audience at the suggestion of genetalia). Vaughn shows (with Bowie his training partner) a series of strikes – to the groin, kneck, eyes, shins, back – causing Dinah Shore to recoil in camped up mock horror, and the audience to laugh uncomfortably again at this spectacle of rather mild, choreographed violence that's been conjured into prime time television – the acted-out image of a killer art. To a contemporary eye, there's something of Master Ken in all this. (Watching it again today, I expect him to advise restomping the groin).

Vaughn discusses the importance of relaxation in developing speed, discussing the wasted force of tensed muscles, and goes on to perform a lightning-quick, devastating-looking kata, full of power and explosive motion, to rapturous applause.

David Bowie's karate lesson, within the space of prime-time chat-show television, has been a complex affair in which race is performed and negotiated, with Vaughn both expressing and in many ways transcending his 'blackness' through his mimesis of the gnomic and powerful Asian (rather than African) master. Masculinities, too (also in turn raced, and classed) are performed and transcended – the 'thin white duke' (as he was about to become) leaving aside his 'thinness' and 'whiteness' (and suburban Britishness) through the appropriation of the imagery of violence, through his play with pupillage in relation to an African-American karate instructor, and their shared process of 'turning Japanese'. The relation to violence and masculinity (and to a racialised image of the violence or militancy of black masculinity) are conjured onto the screen to be repeatedly disavowed or held within the safe confines of a giggly humour that holds it under erasure. Shore and Nancy Walker both mime out at once a fascination with a form of male potency and also an always-already erased female appropriation of this system of fighting, which no longer requires strength but skill, and so evades the brawn with which more typical forms of Western masculinity are associated.

Panic in Hong Kong

He looked a lot like Che Guevara
Drove a Diesel Van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion
A very modest Man 

He was the only survivor,
Of the National People's Gang...

(opening lines of Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit' (1973)) 

Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit' was written in 1973, and draws on Iggy Pop's memories, which he had recounted to Bowie, of the radical scene around Motor City in the era of the riots of 1967. The images are dark and despairing, looking back at a madly idealistic moment, in which people who 'looked a lot like Che Guevara' drove Diesel vans, were members of organisations (now stamped out by the violent reprisals of an authoritarian state) called things like the 'National People's Gang', and carried hidden weapons, dreaming of the violent overthrow of capitalism and the liberation of racially oppressed minorities, pot-smokers and the urban poor alike. The character described at the start of Bowie's song is often discussed as having been partially modelled on John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and founder of the White Panther Party, an organisation that took literally Heuey Newton's suggestion that any white people who wanted to support the Black Panthers' cause should go and found their own version of his party. The White Panthers' ten-point manifesto propounded the 'total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets'. The imagery of the song fluctuates between a sort of utopian wish expressed existentially in violence, a melancholic nostalgia for such a lost moment of revolutionary explosion, and the threat of closure of the possibility of such a desire within the already post-modern moment that the transition from the sixties to the seventies seems to mark. The swirling, entropic guitar lines seem to speak of both the darker aspects of violent revolt, but also a pervasive nihilism that seemed to follow in their wake.

Police in riot gear in Hong Kong, 1967.

In 1967 Hong Kong, where the kung fu film would soon develop, saw its own riots, as pro-Maoist groups sought to capitalise on discontent with injurious labour conditions, inadequate social care and  the (racialised) colonial hierarchies of the era. The Hong Kong riots, like those in Detroit, perhaps did not lead to the kind of radical utopia that some of their promulgators hoped for. In many ways, with Cultural-Revolution China as the alternative to colonial rule, the people of Hong Kong were lucky that the rioters failed to overthrow the Hong Kong state. In both cases, however, perhaps, the violence of the uprisings sent a shock into the system of colonial and capitalist cultures, and contributed to a loosening of a series of forms of repression that typified the world of that era – especially for those not privileged to be white, male, heterosexual, middle class and living in the global 'centre' rather than its peripheries. If they didn't trigger revolution, reform may well have been one of their longer-term consequences.

Both elsewhere in this blog, and also in a longer article (published last summer in Asian Cinema 26.1) about Chang Cheh's film The Assassin, which was made in their wake, I have argued in much greater length for the importance of the Hong Kong riots as a determining factor in the development of Hong Kong's martial arts cinema and the invention of the 'kung fu' film. Their images of violence, I argue run to the logic of the revenge fantasies of the colonial subject described by Frantz Fanon. Fanon's description of the role of violence within the psyche of the colonised subject might be useful in thinking about the nature of the Detroit riots too – and perhaps the need to appropriate and manage a violence which is normally aimed at one, from the outside, in African American appropriations of karate and the martial arts (as discussed, for example, in Vijay Prashad's fantastic book, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting).

In that article, I make much of a resonance between Fanon's description of the dreams and fantasies of fantastical physical strength and power that he found common amongst colonised peoples, as a symptom of the desire for metaphorical as well as corporeal liberation, and the kind of imagery so around which kung fu films are structured. Fanon describes dream imagery of being able to outpace lines of traffic in great leaps, and this is curiously echoed in American film critic David Bordwell's much-quoted description of his response to kung fu cinema, which often left him (though a portly academic) with the thrilling illusion as he left the cinema that he, too, could vault parked cars in the parking lot outside. Such car-jumping imagery is echoed once again in Bowie's vision of what's at stake Detroit. My favourite passage in the song runs:

Putting on some clothes I made my way to school
And I found my teacher
crouching in his overalls
I screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine
And jumped the silent cars that slept at traffic lights

The 1967 riots of Hong Kong and Detroit were both, perhaps, fore-echoes of the phenomenon that came to be the global unrest of '1968' and Bowie's songs and performances, too – with their audacious renegotiations of sexual, gender and even racial identity – are also a part and parcel of the era of rebellion that has come to be marked by that symbolic year.

And kung fu, too, would fit into this picture if we read it through Bowie. That such a reading is plausible is supported by another, triangulating, narrative (which on its own, again, might be only anecdotal): when Felix Dennis turned away from the vanguard counterculture of OZ magazine (founded again in the magic year of 1967), to become a capitalist, the venture (in that other magically recurring year within my account here, 1973) that spanned his transformation of role from radical activist to publishing magnate was Kung Fu magazine. The craze for kung fu (and Kung Fu) seems to mark both the last glowing ashes of a radical project of anger, hope and emancipation, and its subsumption into a world of commercialised popular culture (rather like Bowie on the Dinah Shore show). The massive success of Kung Fu – largely a vehicle for Bruce Lee fandom – formed the economic ground of what would become a massive publishing empire.

Kung Fu Monthly, covers, with Bruce Lee.

China Girl / Japanese Boy

Bowie's lesson in kung fu also, perhaps, exists within a wider fascination with the Orient in his work. This in turn takes its significance within the context a wider interest of the countercultures – and the longer Western avant-garde with which the counter-cultures allied themselves – with images of the Far East. Bowie developed a complex, rich and rather nuanced (even, at its best, I think, self-critical, parodic) form of this orientalism, particularly focused around Japan – a form which allowed and opened up a space for the renegotiation of a series of traditional 'Western' cultural values and identities.

Bowie in a 'Space Samurai' costume, designed by Kansai Yamamoto,  (I believe 1973).

Fashion historian Helene Thian, for example, has discussed at length Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane costumes. These were designed by Kansai Yamamoto. Some were given trimmings of chinoiserie; others formed kimonos covered in Japanese characters; others still were formed into full-blown 'Space Samurai' costumes, echoing in form the hakama still worn by Aikido students today. His performance style was influenced by an early interest in kabuki theatre and especially its onnagata (female impersonation) roles, which were fostered during his years as a drama student under Lindsay Kemp – an added depth of allusion, perhaps, buried in Bowie's recognition of mime in karate movements expressed on the Dinah Shore show. Kemp's version of mime – and his interest in play with gender – were strongly inflected by this fascination with the orient, and both Kemp's and Bowie's acts of redefinition of masculinity were surely both inspired by (their misreadings of) the differences between 'Western' and 'Asian' forms of masculinity – however layered these were by orientalist stereotypes going back to the nineteenth century. Even the famous lightening stripe on Ziggy's face (seen so many times in the press recently) riffed on the make-up techniques of the onnagata which Bowie studied in Kemp's school under Tamasaburo Bando; and Ziggy's quick changes within a performance might also be linked back to the lightening-change techniques of kabuki.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Asia offered Bowie (and the hippies more generally) a form of 'becoming-other' within which the self could be reformed. Even if the idealisations of Bowie's 'becoming-Japanese' did not end in Japaneseness as such, and often at the very least ran very close to reiterating dangerous and invidious stereotypes that others have to live with, they nonetheless offered forms of very real self-transformation that empowered young working class people (especially, perhaps, men) and allowed them to resist the forms of interpellation that British (and American) society had hitherto imposed. A very generous reading might suggest that such forms of renegotiation, in deconstructing or undermining the supposedly solid binaries on which the relations between East and West relied, set these relations back into play, opening them up into transformation. Bowie was a key figure in the popular renegotiation of the ideas of East and West – just as Paul Bowman has argued Bruce Lee was.

Something of all this is, I would argue, at play in Bowie's karate lesson, in which, acted out on mainstream TV, a series of complex layers of racial, sexual and gendered identities are performed and renegotiated.

What this might suggest, I hope (though I'm not sure that I can do more than offer a 'suggestive' reading) is a network of countercultural projects in the wake of the 1960s into which the Asian martial arts entered as they became absorbed within Western culture. These contexts were (I am proposing) instrumental in forming at the very least one kind of socio-political significance which martial arts took on in the identity politics of the 1970s (and beyond), and one kind of appeal that may have taken many people – David Bowie himself, but also perhaps a generation of young people across Europe and America – into movie houses and training dojos with the hope of self-transformation. Self-transformation, of course, is, above all, what Bowie has always been about; and it's also been at the root of the appeal of martial arts.

As this is a kind of a tribute, the final words here should go to Bowie himself, along with a kind of toast to see him off. Here's to the hope that even in these difficult times, his project for countercultural change and challenge continues – and that images and practices of the martial arts continue to play a role in its unfolding...

I watch the ripples change their size

But never leave the stream

Of warm impermanence and

So the days float through my eyes

But still the days seem the same

And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Are immune to your consultations

They're quite aware of what they're going through...