Okay,
so there’s a Bruce Lee biopic coming out, focusing on his legendary fight with
Wong Jack Man… And the main character is not
Bruce Lee. Bruce is in fact a supporting character in his own biopic
(and a thinly-written one at that, according to early reviews from the Toronto
International Film Festival,) playing second fiddle to a white guy who didn’t
actually exist. Yep, Billy Magnussen
plays Steve McKie, a fictional (white) student of Bruce’s and the film’s
focal-point character who apparently helps set up the famous fight. Yeah.
Normally,
with Dear Hollywood Whitewashers, I address a quote from someone involved with
the production who defends its racially-insensitive casting. Today, though, I’m doing something a little
different. I’m still looking at quotes,
but they’re certainly not defending what’s going on here. Rather, they’re a bit of direction to help me
understand how this movie could possibly have happened.
First
up is from a piece by Keith Chow of The Nerds of Color. Instead of writing a full response to the
insanity of making a Bruce Lee biopic about someone other than Bruce Lee, he
only explores it briefly and then reposts an old article of his that addresses
a very similar situation, from the Jet Li/Jackie Chan movie The Forbidden Kingdom, which – wouldn’t
you know it? – stars a white guy:
“From a marketing standpoint, many execs
still believe that audiences won’t flock to a movie unless the lead is white […]
Therefore, making Jason a Caucasian is viewed solely as a financial decision.
Even if that were true, which is debatable, it’s interesting to note that much of
the marketing materials for Forbidden Kingdom make little or no mention
of Angarano’s participation in the film […] and focus [instead] on the
iconography of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. So if shoehorning a Caucasian teenager
into the plotline is necessary to attract that demographic to the theaters, why
leave him out of the marketing? Well, probably because ‘Jackie Chan Fights Jet
Li — For the First Time!’ kinda sells itself. Which brings me back to my
original point: how unnecessary it is to make Jason’s character Caucasian.”
With Birth of the Dragon, Chow sees history
repeating itself, and after reading his article, I have to agree. While Steve is definitely featured in the
film’s trailer, nearly every headline/production shot I’ve seen relating to the
film has been about Bruce Lee and/or Wong Jack Man. Virtually the only references to Steve, in
fact, are to bemoan the fact that he takes center stage in the film. The accompanying photo for this very post of
of the actors’ headshots because a Google Images seach for “Birth of the Dragon”
didn’t offer me any stills of Steve.
So the
media, and for the most part the marketing, seems well aware that Bruce Lee is
the draw. But why doesn’t the movie
itself follow that line of reasoning?
Why didn’t The Forbidden Kingdom? When you have a great hook like “legendary
fight between Bruce Lee and Wong Jack Man,” why do you shoehorn in a made-up
white guy as your protagonist? It was
while ruminating on these questions that I was reminded of quote #2. John Cho, talking to Vulture prior to Star Trek Beyond’s release, was asked
about Asian representation in film:
“I've
seen many instances where we’re seen as a little less than human, or maybe a
little more than human — like ultrahuman, rather than subhuman. What is
wrong with film representation? Some of it is mechanical, surprisingly. I've
thought about why Asian stars — from Asia, I mean — look so much better in
their Asian films than they do in their American films, and now I can answer
that to some extent. There's an eye, and it's not a malicious eye, which is a
way that the people working the camera and behind the scenes view us. And then
they process it and they put it on film. And it's not quite human. Whereas
Asian films, they are considered fully human. Fully heroic, fully comic, fully
lovely, fully sad, whatever it is. And it's this combination of lighting,
makeup, and costume.”
Now, he’s
talking about lighting and presentation (he goes on to talk about how American
films don’t tend to reflect the true complexions of Asians and other PoC because
they’re “carelessly lit” in comparison to their white counterparts,) but I’d
say it applies to writing as well, and I think this is where the crux of the
matter lies: Hollywood put a white guy
at the center of both The Forbidden
Kingdom and Birth of the Dragon
because it doesn’t know how to tell these stories otherwise. Reviews have complained about the flat
writing for Bruce, that the film makes him a persona rather than a person. Do the makers of this film not know how to
envision him as a complete person, as “fully human”? Do they need a white protagonist because they
can’t understand how to relate to the Asian man the movie is supposed to be
about? And so, even though – for once! –
they actually understand that the words “Bruce Lee biopic” is the only draw
they need to sell tickets, the only way they know how to tell his story is from
a distance, through a white lens?
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