White Savior with a Camera pt I
Hollywood's most popular living director is kinda racist and what you can do about it
I recently watched a compelling video essay that attempted to absolve Tarantino’s mocking portrayal of Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by claiming Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology was a “Bruce Lee Revenge Film”. The crux of the argument is that Tarantino was using the medium of cinema to right some historical wrongs against the martial arts icon, because:
Uma Thurman’s “The Bride” character dresses like Bruce Lee in Game of Death, and uses Bruce’s signature move, “The One Inch Punch”.
The film makes numerous homages to Bruce’s movies, as well as later films that would not exist without Bruce’s legacy.
The ultimate villain, Bill, is played by David Carradine of Kung Fu fame, a TV series about a Shaolin monk wandering the Old West that was allegedly stolen from Bruce’s own concept for a TV show that he’d pitched to ABC
While I agree with much of what the video points out, I believe that in the final showdown, the creator blinked. Rather than cleave through the big, ugly, foot-fetishizing, pasty forehead of racism that lurks beneath the gorgeously gory aesthetics of Tarantino’s oeuvre, he tried to spin the former video store clerk’s sins into heroism.
The reality is far more complicated: Kill Bill is at once a glorification of Bruce Lee’s works while at the same time a condemnation of Bruce Lee the man. In the final accounting, it is a work of appropriation that tries to rob the legacy of one of history’s greatest Asian Americans under the guise of female empowerment.
The Tarantino Formula: Subversion or Appropriation?
When it comes to his more famous movies, the Tarantino "formula" is to take a schlock genre and rewrite history with it, putting the historically downtrodden or oppressed victim in the lead and using all the film tricks and homages he can muster to build them up.
Django Unchained takes African American slaves, embodied in Jamie Foxx's character, and makes them self-liberators. Inglorious Basterds takes Jews and has them kill Hitler. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes the unsung heroes of cinema, the stuntman, and has them kill the Manson Family. Even Pulp Fiction is largely about Butch, the blue-collar boxer paid to take a dive, triumphing over the traditional heroes of gangster cinema.
So why oh why, when it comes to the entire Asian martial arts action genre with its roots embedded in Bruce Lee's legacy, a legacy without which there would be no Sonny Chiba the Street Fighter, did he put a white woman with virtually no martial arts experience in the lead?
To Be Continued…
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Unfortunately, as a new father of two with full-time work and several other commitments, I’m mostly relegated to writing these while the little ones are napping. So in order to get this right, I have to opt for quality over quantity.
I should also note that, in the final accounting, I am a Tarantino fan. He’s obviously a pioneer and a fan who believes he’s doing what’s right. The problem is that, like so many of our heroes, he’s deeply flawed and a product of his times.
Next week, we delve deeper into the Tarantino film formula, his hatred of Bruce Lee, and uncover the true identity of “the Bride”.
Let me put it this way: people outside Asian culture can operate in the ambiguity between tribute and exploitation. Maybe he sat in the grindhouses just like the rest of us. Maybe he only thinks in terms of those images. Or maybe he's using them to achieve something else that he wants—just like people have exploited Asians for their labor, their food, taken their art, taken their lands. The idea that people can just take parts of another culture for their own amusement—or to promote their careers—is an age-old problem.
Everything you write is true, however, I think it's necessary to define what a racist is before applying that label to Tarantino. A Merriam-Webster definition of racism is as follows:
: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race Ladino elites used racism to justify the displacement and enslavement of the indigenous population, and these beliefs, along with the resentment created by the continued exploitation of indigenous land and labor, culminated in the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996).— Mariana Calvo
In other words, "race" (which is a synthetic term created to justify colonialism and racism) requires that one believe that there are inherent differences between one ethnic group and another. And that one "race" is better or worse than another at a particular job or skillset. For example, if you think Asians are better at math than other ethnic groups, you are technically a racist. Whereas if a filmmaker depicts Asians as having an inherent superiority over Whites in martial arts, they are equally a racist. Why? Because it shows one ethnic group having superiority over another.
It's true that Tarantino does show Whites defeating Asians in martial arts. But does that mean he's a racist or is it an inversion of the racist stereotype that Asians are good at martial arts? I think by depicting Bruce Lee as a good, but not great, martial artist, it actually breaks the stereotype and therefore promotes anti-racists values.