iBook Action figures 5 - Restaging Heroic Masculinity: Jackie Chan and the Hong Kong Action

5. Restaging Heroic Masculinity: Jackie Chan and the Hong Kong Action Film 

Aside from the massive, long-term popularity of a certain Austrian bodybuilder and the notable but far lesser success of one Belgian karate champion, American action cinema has showcased principally actors born in the United States or in other English-speaking countries. The marketing of Asian stars in the United States has been particularly difficult, given the limited—and often derogatory or patronizing—connotations of Asianness in U.S. culture. Moreover, North American cultural stereotypes about Asians typically fail to distinguish among nationalities or ethnic groups, corralling Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and other groups into an undifferentiated, exotic mass. In Hollywood cinema since the 1930s, Asian male stars have appeared in a narrow range of roles, all circulating around a similar code of honor, tradition, and family obligation: for example, Toshiro Mifune’s brooding patriarchs in Grand Prix (1966) and The Challenge (1982), and Bruce Lee’s earnest kung-fu master in Enter the Dragon (1973). Performance, film form, and reception complicate these roles but do not upset the overall reductive typage. Because of restrictive cultural and generic conventions with regard to Asianness (and nonwhiteness generally), Hollywood studios produced virtually no films with Asian leads between 1973, when Enter the Dragon appeared, and 1998, when Hong Kong stars ChowYun-Fat and Jackie Chan made their respective English-language debuts in The Replacement Killers and Rush Hour. Not surprisingly, all three of these films feature briskly paced action narratives geared to young and urban audiences. Also in the late 1990s, Hollywood studios granted supporting action roles to Hong Kong stars, including Michelle Yeoh in the James Bond adventure Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998). 07_Markher_05.qxd 14/10/05 5:17 PM Page 159 Given the substantial changes in the U.S. film industry since the early 1970s, both in terms of corporate ownership of studios and in film production, distribution, and advertising, the success of Jackie Chan’s films in a high-production, special-effects-dominated film genre merits careful consideration. This chapter examines Jackie Chan’s star persona as it has developed over the course of his prolific and ongoing film career in Hong Kong and Hollywood productions, particularly as U.S. viewers interpret and respond to that persona. Compared with U.S. film conventions for male action heroes, Chan’s persona offers a progressive version of masculinity that combines skillful but playful physical dexterity with comic self-effacement. Historically, the martial-arts genre, with which Chan and other Asian stars are often associated, has been only marginally successful in the United States, and pure martial-arts narratives rarely appear in theatrical release.1 Consequently, white martial-arts stars such as Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme have, in their more profitable films, appeared in straightforward action narratives involving gunfights, car chases, and a limited amount of acrobatics and hand-to-hand combat, rather than swordplay or martial-arts kicks and punches.2 Moreover, in the 1990s, the appeal of professionally trained fighters such as Seagal and Van Damme was overshadowed by films relying on expensive pyrotechnics and digital effects rather than on scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Distinguishing him from the stylized American action-hero persona, advertising and promotion for Chan’s successful U.S. releases—particularly Rumble in the Bronx (1996), Supercop (1996), and the Rush Hour series— has foregrounded his acrobatic and combat skills. Chan’s characters also provide both the source and target of physical comedy. Contrasting too the stoic aggression and ironic detachment characteristic of U.S. icons of active masculinity, Chan’s films foreground his characters’ earnestness and emotional vulnerability. Challenging the notion that Western models of masculinity reflect a monolithic global ideal, Chan’s characters and his films’ narratives rely on alternative modes of male heroism, modes scarcely evident in U.S. popular culture. Debuting as a child performer in low-budget Hong Kong martialarts films, Jackie Chan appeared in more than fifty films by the end of the 1990s. He was Hong Kong’s, indeed all of East Asia’s, largest box-office draw from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, serving as actor and often also as director, stunt choreographer, and screenwriter of films that blend furiously paced action sequences and stunts with whimsical comedy. Chan’s star persona, developed over a broad range of films produced in Hong Kong and the United States, combines acrobatics, hand-to-hand combat skills, self-deprecating wit, and psychological and physical vulnerability. Until the mid-1990s, Chan’s films relied principally on Asian audiences for 160 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 160 their revenues. Though his Hollywood films rein in his antic persona to some degree, his roles for decades have displayed striking contrasts to U.S. cinema’s archetypes of heroic masculinity. Chan’s star persona and his successful penetration of the U.S. actionfilm market in the 1990s represent a significant development for film action heroes. In their visions of heroic masculinity since the 1960s, film and popular literature have responded to pressures surrounding male cultural roles variously through violence, spectacle, exaggeration, and fantastic resolution of narrative conflicts linked to real social problems. In the vast majority of the formations of heroic masculinity this book has studied, the utility of conservative, often anachronistic models of male agency is repeatedly reasserted through form and narrative. Chan’s films, in comparison, redirect the action films’ narrative and visual energies toward progressive ends. Chan’s many films with international settings and characters of different nationalities emphasize cross-cultural understanding. His historical martial-arts narratives as well as films with present-day settings show openness to modernity and cultural change. Finally, in contrast to U.S. films’ frequently gratuitous, unmotivated violence, Chan’s films redefine violent combat as both consequential and as a source of broad-based pleasure for viewers as well as screen performers. Chan’s films often privilege reverence for and loyalty to governmental institutions, family, and Chinese culture. However, they simultaneously validate youthfulness, dynamism, and nontraditional roles for women. The progressive racial and gender politics of Chan’s work, particularly when circulated among U.S. viewers and in other global film markets, offer an encouraging alternative to the cultural hegemony of Hollywood films that feature conventional, white male agency and violence. Chan’s persona both emphasizes the performer’s physical mastery and situates him as a comic underdog. This persona challenges Western—and to some extent, global—definitions of heroic masculinity, suggesting the tenuousness of many historical models of male agency and control.3 Physically, Chan incorporates into action-oriented narratives the burlesque body fundamental to comedy. His body’s continuous motion emphasizes his vulnerability and thus calls into question conceptions of the ideal male body. Chan appears simultaneously active and vulnerable, in contrast to the archetypal action hero, whose physical presence paradoxically relies upon a literal inactivity or passivity. Chan’s films further avoid the erotic, and often homoerotic, treatments of the male body common in U.S. action films. By U.S. standards of representation, Chan’s costumes and bearing do not exude sex appeal, nor does his body attain object status through displays of flexed muscles or through the slow, deliberate movements that U.S. action films use to connote manly self-assurance and control. (Poking RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 161 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 161 fun at the display of male vanity, Rumble in the Bronx features a brief comic interlude of Chan flexing his muscles at a store in front of a two-way mirror, unaware that others can see him.) Moreover, the comedy in Chan’s films stems not merely from the actor himself, but from the actions of other characters and from the convergence of narrative circumstances upon the hero. Comedy often places Chan’s characters in submissive, masochistic positions, destabilizing their control over the films’ humor, if not their action. Genre and the Development of the Comic Action Hero Since the early 1980s, the action film has been Hollywood’s principal money-making genre in international markets. Largely geared toward young, male audiences, both within the United States and abroad, action films through the late 1990s typically foregrounded solitary male heroes. As we have seen, the action hero’s character traits largely accord with traditional Western definitions of idealized masculinity: physical size, strength, charisma, pronounced facial features, aggressive behavior, and the ability to generate action. The presumed “naturalness” of this combination of traits disguises the construction of male gender identity, an identity normalized in countless Western cultural pursuits, institutions, and media. As Chan’s films demonstrate, however, Hollywood’s typology of the action hero does not reign worldwide. To contextualize Chan’s films, attention to the dynamics of U.S. comic action cinema is in order. The muscular, athletic, skilled-with-weaponry male hero was conventionalized in films such as Douglas Fairbanks’s silent 1920s adventure films, including Robin Hood (1922) and The Black Pirate (1926). Fairbanks’s characters already showcased a comic high-spiritedness, grinning exuberantly during fight sequences and other scenes in which they command the attention of other men. Subsequent decades saw the refinement of the gun-toting, aggressive-by-nature offshoot of this figure. By the late 1980s, action stars such as Willis, Schwarzenegger, and Eddie Murphy added comic decorations to increasingly familiar conventions of plot, character, and the representation of violence. Late-1990s Hollywood action films routinely kept genre conventions in play through other forms of parody. Action-comedies such as Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) and The Big Hit (1998) introduced self-conscious characters and plot devices that lampooned the genre’s fundamentally absurd approximation of historical reality. In the former, an assassin phones his therapist as he stalks a target; in the latter, a character in a gunfight also carries on an argument with his fiancée and her family. 162 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 162 Hollywood films that mix action and comedy usually subordinate conventions of one genre to the requirements of the other. As Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik observe, the broad range of possible comic situations permits comedy to work well as a hybrid genre (as does its lack of a specific iconography or setting). Neale and Krutnik argue that while other genres also combine into hybrid forms, comedy “seems especially suited for hybridization, in large part because the local forms responsible for the deliberate generation of laughter can be inserted at some point into most other generic contexts without disturbing their conventions.”4 Though audiences accustomed to action-film conventions often abide humor amid scenes of spectacular violence and destruction, comedic elements tend to be decorative rather than fundamental to narrative pacing or viewer enjoyment. Hollywood genre films usually structure the action/comedy mixture through “fish out of water” themes, either by drawing on elements of a specific star persona or building such themes into a story. For example, Eddie Murphy’s streetwise, sarcastic persona clashes with conventional police procedures in the Beverly Hills Cop films (1984, 1987, 1993). Similarly, Dennis Hopper’s manic persona lends humorous connotations to his villain roles in Speed and Waterworld (1995). Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comic vehicles such as Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop (1990), and Junior (1995) gain their primary comedic value from placing the action star in situations that deny his trademark physique the opportunity to fend off enemy hordes. This formula was revived in The Pacifier (2005), where the hardbodied Vin Diesel plays a Navy SEAL who must babysit a scientist’s children. In each of these examples, the foundations of the original genres—action or comedy—remain intact. While they contain some action, none of the Schwarzenegger comedies include action-film staples such as torture, mass destruction, or protracted gunplay. Conversely, the Die Hard series (1988, 1990, 1995) never strays into slapstick, which might threaten the integrity and suspense of the dominant action narrative. Generic prescriptions have historically limited the interplay between action films and comedies. Comedy’s inversion of social hierarchies potentially places the male hero’s dominant gender position in distress, a transformation that poses serious structural problems for the action cinema. For action films to affirm their protagonists’ traditional male role, comedic material must resonate outward from him; he must control the humor. If an action narrative makes the protagonist a comedic foil, he relinquishes some narrative or visual power, diminishing his apparent heroism and his ensuing generic credibility. In contrast, a wisecracking man who lives through beatings, gunshot wounds, and explosions can represent a traditional hero whose fortitude and self-assurance are so absolute that he can laugh in the face of danger. The successful action-comedy Men in Black, RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 163 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 163 for example, stabilizes its protagonists’ gender identities by isolating them from the fantastic world in which they operate. As they corral shape-shifting aliens and fend off a threat to the planet, they behave largely like protagonists in a conventional buddy-cop film. The heroes’ dark sunglasses and black suits, for example, set them apart from the film’s spectacular, cartoonish aliens, as well as from their fellow humans, most of whom they encounter only fleetingly. At the same time, the film limits the signification of its black protagonist’s (Will Smith’s) racial identity through his own removal from the film’s social world. He exists in an institutional utopia where conventional racism is apparently absent (although grotesque exaggerations of immigrant aliens abound). Similarly, Smith’s character becomes a comic foil only after demonstrating his abilities as a heroic policeman. Rather than critiquing or refiguring male identity, decorative comic elements here refine the reigning model, giving it the semblance of flexibility and renewing its appeal. In comparison, Chan’s films, rather than using comedy to reinforce conventional signifiers of self-assured male power, mobilize comedy as an intrinsic component of the star’s masculinity. Comedy provides Chan’s male heroes with a source of strength and autonomy. It simultaneously motivates viewers to respond to his protagonists’ vulnerability and self-effacement. At the end of the twentieth century, the Hong Kong film industry remained the world’s third largest national cinema, trailing only those of the United States and India.5 Like other national cinemas, it produces mostly genre films, in both locally specific and globally popular genres. Hong Kong films long offered viewers either sentimental romances or crime and action dramas, broad frameworks allowing a wide range of narrative, stylistic, and tonal choices. Within these frameworks, elements from other forms such as musicals, comedies, fantasy, and historical epics often combine in a single narrative. In the 1990s, independent U.S. directors began to appropriate elements of Hong Kong cinema in their own films. Quentin Tarantino transformed Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987) into Reservoir Dogs (1992); his later Kill Bill series (2003, 2004) mixes U.S., Hong Kong, Japanese, and other action-cinema traditions. Mexican American director Robert Rodriguez incorporated elements of John Woo’s The Killer and Hard Boiled (1992) into his Hollywood debut, Desperado (1995). Conversely, many Hong Kong actors and directors in the 1980s and 1990s—most prominently Jackie Chan and John Woo—often consciously referred to the plots of existing Hollywood films. The Westernization of Jackie Chan Chan’s films since the late 1970s set box-office records in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, but until the mid-1990s he remained largely unknown 164 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 164 to American audiences. Before New Line Cinema (controlled by Time Warner) and Dimension Films (a Miramax subsidiary) contracted for distribution rights to some of Chan’s films, most of his Hong Kong productions received only limited release in the West, and his early English-language films fared poorly in the American market. He appeared as a comic supporting character in The Cannonball Run (1982) and its sequel and played the lead in The Big Brawl (1980) and The Protector (1985), both unremarkable B-grade action pictures noteworthy only for Chan’s unusual stuntwork. In The Big Brawl, Chan’s performance includes some comedy. In one mischievous fight sequence Chan’s character, adhering to his father’s dictate that he refrain from fighting, adopts a passive combat style, ducking or sidestepping his opponents’ blows so that they collide with each other or with brick walls. Mostly, though, he appears in the film as a sincere and serious fighter in the Bruce Lee mold. In The Protector, as a sidekick to Danny Aiello’s tough-talking cop, Chan plays a one-dimensional Asian Other, and his character traits include, almost exclusively, honor and solemnity. The success of Rumble in the Bronx and Rush Hour raised Chan’s profile considerably in the United States and western Europe. Rush Hour was among the top ten films in U.S. box-office receipts in 1998, a year dominated by the action blockbusters Armageddon, Deep Impact, Godzilla, and the late-1997 release Titanic. 6 While most Hong Kong films exported to the United States still play only in art houses or in Chinese American neighborhood theaters, Chan’s first major-market U.S. release, Rumble in the Bronx, received widespread American distribution, complete with a highvisibility print and television advertising campaign. The film earned $9.8 million in its opening weekend in the United States and more than $30 million during its initial theatrical run, making it a great success for a modest-budget film produced outside the United States.7 Traditionally, Hong Kong films’ budgets are minuscule by Hollywood standards. Through the end of the twentieth century, Hong Kong films’ production values and special effects were visibly inferior to those of Hollywood films. To counter this limitation, Rumble in the Bronx’s advertising highlighted Chan’s performance of his own stunts and fight sequences. Similar emphases appeared in advertising for the rerelease the same year of Supercop (a film that originally appeared in Hong Kong in 1992 as Police Story 3 and, retitled, played briefly in the United States in 1993). To broaden the films’ appeal to American audiences, they were also dubbed into English, reedited to emphasize action sequences and comedy over character development, and provided with new rock and rap soundtracks, and in the case of Supercop, a glossier set of opening credits.8 Though Rumble’s profits suggested that films with non-Western heroes could lure RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 165 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 165 U.S. viewers, U.S. studios remained reluctant to finance such ventures. Chan’s first five films to gain wide release in the United States were produced in Hong Kong, with Hollywood-studio contributions limited to the above changes and to the films’ marketing. Chan’s success in the United States has occurred partly because of the performer’s comic persona, which distinguishes him from other action stars such as Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Relatedly, in the 1990s Chan gradually redefined himself as an action star rather than a martial-arts star. The more restrictive “martial arts” category limited Chan and other performers to low-budget productions with marginal viewerships, while the broader action category granted access to blockbuster fare with elaborate special effects and saving-the-world narratives. Perhaps paradoxically, the comic treatment of martial arts enabled Chan to broaden his appeal. While his flips, leaps, and kicks appear comically anachronistic in contemporary, firepower-heavy action narratives, his success with these historical combat forms mark him as a triumphant comic underdog, not an out-oftouch kung fu practitioner. The progressive ironization of the US action genre since the mid-1980s—with films such as the relatively humorless Rambo giving way to the more self-reflexive Terminator 2—produced by the mid-1990s a climate of audience awareness and expectations favorable to the broadly comic tone of Chan’s films. The wisecracking action hero remained a staple of the genre in subsequent years, even in otherwise straightforward action films: Will Smith’s characters, for example, emphasize comic exasperation in not only the Men in Black series but also the relatively serious Independence Day (1996) and I, Robot (2004). To integrate Chan’s skills into this cinematic environment, most of his 1990s films include action sequences involving chases and acrobatics—particularly jumps, flips, and falls from high places—rather than the hand-to-hand combat sequences that dominate his 1980s releases. When hand-to-hand combat does appear in films such as Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop, fight choreography emphasizes the comically dancelike rhythms of Chan’s movements over their practical combat value. Before 1996, Chan and his films achieved only limited, primarily subcultural, recognition in the United States and other Western countries. He earned recognition among martial-arts fans, who helped form audiences for the films of performers such as Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal. Relatedly, Chan’s Hong Kong films were released intermittently in the United States throughout the 1990s for repertory theaters’“Hong Kong festivals” in collegiate and urban locations, drawing college students, Asians and Asian Americans, and cinephiles. Finally, Chan’s films, like those of other Hong Kong stars such as Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li, played in Chinese-language theaters in major cities’ urban Chinatown neighborhoods. 166 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 166 These fan groups and theatrical venues accounted for a recognizable audience base but hardly constituted mainstream recognition of Chan and his films. To achieve recognition and financial success in the United States and elsewhere in the West, Chan’s films had to overcome linguistic, cultural, and generic obstacles. Since major studios, particularly in the United States, are loath to distribute subtitled foreign-language films, Chan’s first four releases in the West—Rumble in the Bronx, Supercop, Jackie Chan’s First Strike (1997), and Operation Condor (1997)—appeared with English dubbing. Mr. Nice Guy (1998, aka A Nice Guy), shot in Australia, was filmed in English, as was Rush Hour, his first Hollywood-studio production. Similarly, Chan’s films widely distributed in Western markets have been those perceived as most accessible to non-Asian audiences, specifically those with plots or situations familiar to audiences of Hollywood thrillers and action films. Supercop, Jackie Chan’s First Strike, and Operation Condor all feature Chan as a spy or adventurer, in the model of James Bond or Indiana Jones, who faces drug smugglers, global terrorists, or war profiteers. These films include sequences in many different international locations (Australia, Thailand, and North Africa, as well as Hong Kong) and rely on conventional action plots, masking the cultural differences apparent in many of Chan’s other films. In contrast, films set in China’s or Hong Kong’s historical past or those featuring traditional martial-arts plots, such as Project A, Part 2 (1987) and Drunken Master 2 (1994), although enormously popular in Asia, were long withheld from rerelease in the West because of their apparent cultural specificity. (The latter film was eventually released theatrically in 2000, with English dubbing and some scenes deleted, as The Legend of Drunken Master.) In Chan’s films with plots focusing on international espionage, the prescriptions of the action genre help to create relatively homogenous narratives that downplay their cultural origins. The dubbing and reediting of Chan’s films for English-speaking audiences also changes their comic meanings. In particular, the films’ original Cantonese dialogue often includes reference to Hong Kong and Chinese cultural and historical situations. Even in its dubbed version, Supercop comically contrasts urbane Hong Kong residents and rural mainland Chinese, contrasts that Western audiences may fail to discern. Similarly, many of Chan’s films, including Supercop, make direct or implied references to Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997, the implications of which may be lost on Western viewers. Perhaps more significantly, Rush Hour introduces elements of cultural confusion into Chan’s persona, casting him in the mold of a misunderstood Chinese traveler—in accord with the familiar U.S. stereotype of the quizzical Asian RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 167 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 167 tourist—who must prove his mettle to his American associates. These changes or differences notwithstanding, much of the global appeal of Chan’s films lies in the actor’s physical comedy, which carries a broad, comic meaning across specific cultures. Promotional materials for Chan’s U.S. releases downplay the films’ possible cultural differences or reduce those differences to high-concept images and slogans. Promotional posters and print advertisements for Supercop, for example, depict Chan suspended in midair from a rope ladder, muscles flexed and teeth clenched, surrounded by attack helicopters and the flames of an explosion. The film itself includes no scene of this magnitude, though in a climactic stunt Chan does cling to a rope ladder attached to a helicopter. The poster’s images of explosions and advanced military hardware correspond to Hollywood action-film conventions, as does Chan’s pictured attire of black T-shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers, a costume that does not appear in the film either. Cultural differences also serve as a basis for marketing Chan’s films. For example, Rush Hour’s advertising slogan, “The fastest hands in the East versus the biggest mouth in the West,” reduces Chan’s star persona to a single, easily apprehended idea. Similarly, the film itself relies on a monolithic conception of Asianness, introducing Chan’s character and other Hong Kong or Chinese elements with stereotypical “Oriental” music (sounds of high-pitched strings and flute), and at one point surrounding its protagonists with a busload of camera-toting Asian tourists. Rush Hour, Race, and Nationalism Rush Hour, Chan’s first major success in the West (its sequel performed even better), repeatedly enforces the notion of Chan and other Asian characters as tourists, as aliens in a Western cultural world. Unlike Chan’s previous films, altered for U.S. distribution to obscure their Chinese heritage, Rush Hour explicitly emphasizes the foreignness of its Asian star. The film follows a Los Angeles police officer, Carter (Chris Tucker), investigating the kidnapping of a Chinese diplomat’s young daughter. Carter receives unwanted assistance from the diplomat’s close friend, Hong Kong policeman Lee (Chan). As the African American protagonist and his Hong Kong Chinese counterpart overcome their ethnic and cultural differences, they defeat the Chinese American gang led by a white Hong Kong crime lord (the British actor Tom Wilkinson). The film introduces Chan’s character by showing him getting off a plane, highlighting his outsider status. He appears on planes twice more in the film, reemphasizing his tourist situation. Similarly, Lee appears throughout the film in locations around 168 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 168 Los Angeles where Asians might be expected to congregate: at Mann’s Chinese Theater, in Chinatown, at the Chinese Consulate, and at an exhibition of Chinese artifacts. Lee’s integration into the American cultural world is limited and turbulent, as when he accidentally starts a brawl in an African American pool hall. Lee’s only contact with whites is through the film’s FBI agents, who are depicted as unfriendly bureaucrats. The film’s displayed lack of solidarity between whites and Asians reflects the legacy of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. Significantly, the film also withholds the possibility of racial reconciliation. Instead, it portrays blacks and Asians as victims of the white power structure’s misguided leadership. Meanwhile, the film’s white characters appear as conventional supporting players who do not face the consequences of their inappropriate actions.9 Notably, the film presents a white Englishman as the mastermind behind its Asian criminal organization, simultaneously applying imperialist stereotypes of Asians as nefarious criminals and of white Europeans as habitually corrupt but still innately qualified to lead groups of nonwhites. Outside the sphere of its white characters, Rush Hour establishes connections between blacks and Asians, both at the narrative level and through the film’s marketing. Just as Bruce Lee’s films performed well among black audiences in the 1970s, Chan’s U.S. releases have attracted large nonwhite audiences, particularly Asians and blacks.10 While Asian viewers constitute a small fraction of U.S. film audiences, African Americans represent a reliable filmgoing demographic, and Hollywood studios in the 1990s shrewdly cast black actors to broaden films’ appeal.Rush Hour characterizes its stars along racial lines: Chris Tucker’s streetwise, trash-talking, sexually forward black man (the trademark persona of this comic star) counterposes Chan’s modest, honor- and family-oriented Asian. During the film, racial and cultural ignorance, presented narratively through Carter’s disdain for Chinese food and Lee’s halting rendition of Edwin Starr’s soul hit “War,” give way to cultural solidarity. In a key scene (albeit one with little narrative function), Carter and Lee stake out the villains’ headquarters, and Lee buys Chinese food for the pair from a street vendor. While Carter initially complains about the food, he soon begins eating it with relish. Carter then asks Lee to instruct him in disarming an opponent (a skill Carter will utilize in a later scene), and in turn, Carter shows Lee how to perform a serpentine dance move. The scene ends with the two characters dancing in rough synchronicity on the sidewalk. The film thus connects Tucker’s physical fluidity, a principal component of his star image, with Chan’s trademark poise and agility. Because of the scene’s relative insignificance to the film’s overall plot, it draws particular attention to the characters’ cultural differences. Through its foregrounding of Chan’s racial and cultural difference, Rush Hour reshapes the version of masculinity that Chan’s previous films RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 169 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 169 develop. Chan appears here less as a heroic underdog than as an introverted, misunderstood “child” of Asia who requires coddling and protection from U.S. authorities and from U.S. cultural rituals generally. For example, Chan’s first battle in the film, a poolroom brawl, results from his own linguistic blunder (attempting to mimic the slang of another bar patron, he addresses the black bartender as “my nigger,” and a fight ensues). Only the tutelage of Tucker’s character, the film suggests, can prevent such incidents. The comic elements of Chan’s actions derive not entirely from the intrinsic qualities of the actions themselves—in another scene, he escapes from atop a moving bus by clinging to an overhanging street sign—but from reactions built into the narrative itself. The film repeatedly shows Carter staring at Lee in wild-eyed disbelief, adding an element of redundancy that Chan’s Hong Kong films typically eschew. While such a reaction renders Tucker’s character the comic straight man in a narrative sense, Tucker provides the visible source of humor, contrasting with the serious or distressed expressions that Chan’s character often assumes. Rush Hour’s framing of male conflict and its insistence on cultural difference define the film as the product of a U.S. rather than a Hong Kong sensibility. Unlike the majority of Chan’s films, which depict his characters’ simultaneous allegiance and challenges to Hong Kong Chinese values and beliefs, Rush Hour identifies Chan’s character as a staunch defender of Chinese cultural tradition. His clashes with the film’s FBI agents appear less as conflicts among men than as diplomatic struggles stemming from cultural differences, specifically from Westerners’ unwillingness to permit Chan’s character to fulfill his duty to his countryman, Consul Han. To accommodate Western viewers, the film also limits Chan’s challenges to Western notions of masculinity. His performance—as an actor, fighter, and stuntman—is fairly restrained in comparison to his earlier films, with most acrobatic or fight sequences lasting no more than a few seconds. Conditions of the film’s production to some extent dictate this restraint. Owing presumably to insurance requirements, most of Chan’s fights and stunts in the film are relatively unspectacular, and he wore a safety wire for the filming of a climactic stunt in which he falls from a great height onto a hanging tapestry. Overall, his character appears controlled and efficient, while the more flamboyant and excessive displays—including a dance after a car explodes in the film’s opening scene, and much stylized mimicry of kung fu moves—are reserved for Tucker’s character. The construction of Chan as a conventional, if highly mobile, hero and Tucker as a comic prima donna reduces the overall signification of Chan’s character. Since Chan already appears culturally and racially distinct from most of the film’s characters (and its eventual viewers), the narrative stabilizes him by downplaying his otherwise comic persona. At the same time, the 170 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 170 film limits the visible evidence of Chan’s physical strength. While both Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop intermittently picture Chan in T-shirts or muscle-Ts that display his physique, throughout Rush Hour he wears a loose-fitting suit in which he does not appear physically powerful. Such costuming helps define the film as comedy- rather than action-oriented. By understating the physical presence of its strongest representative of East Asia, though, the film also reassures viewers who may be wary of the economic and military power Asian nations possess. The film similarly follows the Hollywood tradition of depicting Asian men as entirely without sexuality. While Chan’s Hong Kong films tend to present romance and sexuality through entirely wholesome gestures—hugs between characters, or childlike pecks on the cheek—Rush Hour denies Chan’s character even this connection to women. (Instead, the film reinforces the convention of the hypersexual black man, making a running joke of Carter’s desire to have sex with a fellow police officer, played by Elizabeth Peña.) Rush Hour completes its neutralization of Asian masculinity through the defeat of the Chinese gang members at the film’s climax. Studios’ willingness to bankroll Chan’s performances—New Line and Dimension with Chan’s redistributed productions, New Line for the Rush Hour series, and Disney for the expensive martial-arts western Shanghai Noon (2000), its sequel, and others—clearly represents a step forward in terms of Hollywood’s racial and cultural representation. Still, the U.S. film industry contains the culturally significant aspects of Asian male stars within particular narrative frameworks, reconstructing Chan as naïve, “fish out of water” tourist and taking the same approach for Jet Li’s first lead role in a U.S. film, Romeo Must Die (2000). Active Masculinity and Mobility Physical movements, or the lack thereof, contribute substantially to Hollywood action cinema’s conceptions of idealized masculinity. In action films through the end of the 1990s, audience identification depends on the construction of a powerful and charismatic protagonist, in accord with traditional Western formulations of heroic masculinity. As noted earlier, these archetypes emphasize connotations of physical presence: prominent body musculature; Nordic or Greco-Roman features, meant to indicate an imposing nobility; rigid posture and a fixed gaze, connoting authority; and a bearing that suggests self-confidence.Western action films have long fetishized the male body, relating it to classical statuary’s static images of power. Displays of flexing muscles or tense postures (similar to soldiers at attention or athletes awaiting a starting gun) suggest bodies ready for action, if not in action. RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 171 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 171 In male-oriented U.S. film genres throughout the twentieth century, male protagonists paradoxically assert their agency and control over narrative events through physical stasis. The suggestion of male invulnerability demands physical inertness. Physical and linguistic signifiers of hardness or density—the chiseled faces of Schwarzenegger, Charlton Heston, or Kirk Douglas, with their square jaws and accentuated cheekbones; the deep voices and measured delivery of John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone; even suggestive names such as “Brick” or “Rocky”—connote indomitable power. The slow, deliberate movements of protagonists of westerns, notwithstanding the occasional quick draw or punch, suggest that motion itself is a travail. Wayne’s unhurried actions in Red River (1948) and The Searchers (1956), Henry Fonda’s self-control in Warlock (1959), and Charles Bronson’s relaxed movements throughout Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) all denote their characters’ tenacity and self-assurance. The more Western heroes move, the more their masculinity is subject to redefinition. In genres such as the action film or spy film, character movements and body language frequently mimic the behavior of prowling beasts of prey. Inevitably, such representations intersect with androgynous images of motion. Arnold Schwarzenegger moves with “catlike” stalking motions in Commando and Predator (1987), among other films. Sylvester Stallone displays the boxer’s “floating like a butterfly” poise in fight sequences in the Rocky films. Often the male hero moves with an eroticized sleekness or fluidity that parallels the visual allure of female runway models; witness Jean-Claude Van Damme in Timecop (1994) or Wesley Snipes in Blade (1998). In these instances, the male body in motion suggests an erotic display to be appraised by male or female viewers, yet codes of action negotiate these displays. Van Damme appears in his underwear for one action sequence in Timecop; costume and exposed skin notwithstanding, the film narratively defines him as being under threat and in action. Similarly, Snipes wears leather pants and vest for much of Blade; though attired like a bondage-club patron, he engages in extensive, bloody violence as well. Numerous feminist theorists have called attention to the traditional organization of narrative around the male protagonist, producing an opposition between man as the determinant of action and woman as the facilitator or place-marker of male activity. Laura Mulvey argues in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that “the male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.”11 In an extension of Mulvey’s project, Teresa de Lauretis observes that in the male-controlled space of narrative, “the female character may be all along, throughout the film, representing and 172 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 172 literally marking out the place (to) which the hero will cross.”12 Given this structure, narrative generally favors active, mobile men and passive, inert women. The male action hero, however, demonstrates power most comprehensively through a lack of motion. Once in motion he appears vulnerable, active but also acted-upon. At a film’s end, the return to physical stasis marks his ultimate success. In cinema, male immobility often carries paradoxical meanings. The male body on the run often signifies escape or retreat. Films often use such behavior to comic effect, as in Running Scared (1986) and Midnight Run (1988), and certainly in Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin’s films. Only when the protagonist “stands his ground” does he embody uncompromised male dominance.13 The spectacle of the posturing male, fundamental to bodybuilding competitions and to other popular images such as movie posters and rock album covers, calls attention not only to the exhibition of male power, but also to the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the male body. In their survey of film masculinity, Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim note “the contradiction between the vulnerable passivity arguably implicit in the state of being-looked-at, and the dominance and control which patriarchal order expects its male subjects to exhibit.”14 However, they do not address the ways the mobile male body undermines the exhibition of dominance. Spectator sports, for example, represent the interplay of domination and vulnerability. Football running backs and receivers are usually chased, despite being positioned on “offense,” and boxers move around the ring to dodge blows. In each case, other powerful males do the chasing or punching. Nevertheless, a successful escape or feint appears consistent with notions of male mastery over events, but only to a point. A satisfactory display of Western male power demands that the male eventually cease flight, and stand and attack. Cinematic escapes and dodges generate meaning according to their generic contexts. In virtually all of his films, Chan uses flight as a survival strategy. The tactic appears incongruous with the “stand and fight” style of Hollywood action films, a style that depends upon a fundamental paradox: the inactive body of the action hero. Only in the limited context of what might be called the “escape film”—films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), The Warriors (1979), The Running Man (1987), The Fugitive (1993), U.S. Marshals (1998), and Enemy of the State (1998), in which a hero or group of heroes rushes from one perilous situation to another, pursued by policemen or villainous gangs—does flight adhere to the ideology of active male power. These films, built around the teleology of men’s escapes, risk demasculinizing their protagonists with such a narrative device. Even in situations in which flight appears admirable or heroic, heroes are motivated not by a masculine logic of power and conquest but by a more RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 173 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 173 ambivalent survival ethic. The Fugitive literally imperils the masculinity of Harrison Ford’s protagonist. He is at the mercy of patriarchal institutions, the imprecise legal system that accuses him of murder and the lawenforcement apparatus mobilized to pursue him. In addition, he does not visibly embody conventional, active masculinity: he does not carry a weapon or display bulging muscles, and he cries several times. Meanwhile, the pursuing marshal played by Tommy Lee Jones assumes the more stable masculine role of the respected, canny authority figure. One source of Ford’s credibility and appeal in the film is precisely this inability to occupy the active male role, which makes him an object of empathy rather than idolization. In most escape films, the protagonist’s flight is made to appear sensible because his pursuers are more numerous or better armed, and often the hero’s masculinity is proven at the climactic point at which he single-handedly overcomes his foes, as evident in The Running Man and First Blood. Even The Fugitive hedges its bets by concluding with a teethbaring fight sequence. Within the action genre, then, the pursued can reassert their masculine identity by triumphing over overwhelming odds or superhuman representations of masculinity. Comedy in Motion While conventional U.S. action films consistently avoid locating their protagonists as targets of comedy or in other demasculinizing situations, Chan’s films rely on comic treatments of escape that redefine his characters’ male identities while reducing his antagonists to caricatures of “serious” masculinity. Chan’s stunts resemble those of his predecessors Keaton and Harold Lloyd, but Chan’s stunts and comedy operate in a significantly different generic context than those of the silent-film comedians. Keaton’s and Lloyd’s small sizes and lean physiques, for example, visually distinguish them as comic performers rather than as suitable protagonists for 1920s action and adventure films. Chan’s similar agility, grace, and underdog persona translate effectively to the contemporary action genre, particularly because his comedy and acrobatics invariably coincide with displays of prowess in hand-to-hand combat. His onscreen victories ultimately demonstrate his manhood. At the same time, Chan’s films import the pratfalls and deflating situations of comedy, adding a broader source of appeal to the predominantly male-centered identification that his fighting skill encourages. When Chan’s films give precedence to his comic temperament, his opponents typically fail to overpower him. These men—criminal henchmen, gang members, and other fighters who use either martial arts or cruder fisticuffs—usually wear serious expressions and comport 174 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 174 themselves rigidly, tactics shown as unsuited to victory over a comic hero. Resituated within conventions of comedy, Chan’s adversaries play the role of straight men or comic buffoons instead of representing imposing physical threats to the protagonist. Comedy thus shifts the emphasis of Chan’s films away from the action film’s masculine schema of mastery and control. Nevertheless, his films, like Keaton’s and Lloyd’s, call attention to the physical mastery required to execute dangerous stunts. Notably, Rush Hour circumvents the representational problem of demasculinization (i.e., how to define a figure who grins youthfully and runs from his opponents as a worthy male hero) by depicting Chris Tucker’s character as a fast-talking braggart who performs badly in combat or sheepishly avoids it. Compared to the hypercomic Tucker, Chan’s character appears more conventionally heroic—and thus more ideally masculine—by default. Chan’s previous films, though, foreground the star’s reluctant-hero persona, renegotiating the action cinema’s terms of idealized masculinity. Chan’s persona relies heavily on uninterrupted movement as a signifier of limitless maneuverability. His films usually include multiple martialarts combat sequences, applying a trademark style that fight choreographer Craig Reid identifies as the “Perpetual Motion Technique.” Its premise, Reid observes, “is the maintenance of continuous body motion throughout the entire fight sequence to give the impression of nonstop action.”15 In Drunken Master 2, for example, Chan battles scores of axwielding assassins for nearly five minutes of screen time, remaining out of his attackers’ reach by leaping, punching, and kicking his way around a spacious teahouse. Fight sequences in his films typically occur amid elaborate sets, and combat covers a great deal of space, the result of Chan’s traversal of horizontal and vertical distances. Chan’s stuntwork directs viewers’ attention to his physical interaction with surrounding architecture: his movements around indoor furniture and other obstacles, up and over walls, along the outsides of tall buildings, and clinging to moving vehicles. Such interaction makes viewers aware of the real spatial dimensions and structural properties of the objects displayed. In Hollywood action films, by comparison, the protagonist tends to dominate the spectacle no matter how disproportionately large the backdrop of action might be, and many objects function only to prove the protagonists’ destructive capabilities. In an iconic scene in Rambo, for instance, Stallone’s Rambo, after engaging in an explosive battle that levels a village of thatch huts, appears in medium shot while a massive fireball erupts behind him. Camera perspective allows Rambo and the fireball to appear roughly the same size, making the hero appear larger than life to the viewing eye. Rambo, bare-chested and sweating, runs toward the camera in slow motion, making his body a spectacle of dominance as well as an object for RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 175 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 175 erotic contemplation (though the violent iconography partly challenges this appeal). Jackie Chan’s characters rarely, if ever, receive erotic or epic-hero treatment in his films. Though he engages in hand-to-hand combat throughout his films, he rarely appears shirtless or in the conventional action garb of a torn T-shirt or other revealing or form-fitting clothing.16 Camera angles do not denote his character as an object: close-ups, conspicuously absent in his early starring roles, later highlight his comic facial expressions, eschewing “tough-guy” reaction shots and fragmentary shots of isolated limbs or muscles. When in motion, he appears most often in medium or long shots, so his body does not dominate scenographic space, and the camera does not devote attention to his body’s proportions. The camera frames him primarily to capture him in action, to show his performance of acrobatic feats. (Chan’s 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong productions particularly demonstrate these formal strategies. Later U.S. films such as The Tuxedo [2002] subordinate his speed and physical fluidity to close shots and the rhythms of rapid editing, so viewers see few uninterrupted movements.) Similarly, Chan’s films typically include stunts and sets that dwarf his character. In Project A, Part 2, the lengthy final fight sequence occurs in an open-air market and concludes atop a multileveled bamboo tower, which Chan appears to cover from top to bottom (and vice versa). Throughout the sequence, Chan acts on the defensive, evading attackers and throwing obstacles in his pursuers’ paths. He delivers his blows in transit and moves toward new ground from which to attack or ward off foes. The instinct for self-preservation takes precedence over dramatic, static “ready for action” poses. Chan’s perpetual-motion style not only showcases the actor’s combat skills but also serves as a primary component of his comic persona. His acrobatic feats parallel those of a circus performer and align him with silent-film comedians such as Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd. Gerald Mast observes of early screen comedies, “[t]he essential comic object was the human body, and its most interesting movements were running, jumping, riding, colliding, falling, staggering, leaping, twirling, and flying.”17 As Jackie Chan gained popularity and assumed directorial control of his Hong Kong productions, the films’ action gradually shifted from an emphasis on kung fu to a preoccupation with stuntwork and nonviolent acrobatic feats. Nearly every article about Chan written for a general-interest U.S. publication during his mid- to late-1990s rise to Hollywood stardom cites his interpretations of famous scenes from Keaton’s and Lloyd’s films, as if to remind readers that Chan was worthy of attention not merely as a foreign matinee idol but as an international performer drawing from a venerated film-historical tradition. In Project A, Part 2, Chan choreographs 176 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 176 the spectacular fall of a huge decorative wall, updating Keaton’s fallinghouse stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1924). In the first Project A (1983), Chan revisits the image from Safety Last (1923) of Lloyd dangling from a clock tower arm, placing himself atop a clock tower in a similarly perilous position. Differentiating his version from Lloyd’s, and in accord with the sometimes masochistic appeal of his films, Chan, handcuffed, plummets to the ground. Neither Lloyd’s nor Chan’s comic scenario fits the Hollywood paradigm of male action. Both men’s stunts, like Keaton’s, subordinate the heroic individual—represented visually by spectacular images such as that of Rambo noted above—to the discernible proportions of character and massive objects. Such a relationship aligns Chan again with silent-film comedians rather than with contemporary U.S. action stars. Writing on the history of film comedy, Tom Gunning notes Keaton’s temporary helplessness amid machinery. The comedian becomes “a projectile in thrall to the laws of mechanics.”18 Mechanical devices in Chan’s films, like those in Keaton’s, work as comic props, affording characters the opportunity to engage in humorous struggles. With few exceptions, the Hollywood action film uses encounters with objects or machinery for dramatic spectacle, not for slapstick. Hollywood action films put individual characters at the center of large-scale action, magnifying the protagonist to mythic proportions. In comparison, Chan’s films, like those of the silent comedians, depict large events in relation to human dimensions. Again, the generic context provides the crucial difference: conventions of the action genre supplant viewers’ everyday anxieties through fantasies of omnipotence, while comedy conventions engage directly with viewers’ sense of social powerlessness and physical limitation. Most Hollywood action heroes embody fantasies of domination over natural and artificial worlds, while Chan’s films establish putatively real relations with those domains. The lack of special effects in Chan’s films and the regular-guy persona he typically adopts further contribute to this aura of authenticity. Carnivalesque Space and the Grotesque Body The action style and narrative settings of Chan’s films incorporate substantial elements of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. Through their use of the distinctively low cultural form of kung fu and through the modest class status of the films’ sympathetic characters, Chan’s films resemble a form of carnivalesque ritual. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the carnival world corresponds closely to the narrative terrain of Chan’s films. Bakhtin defines the carnivalesque realm as a liminal and ambivalent space, RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 177 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 177 a festive terrain that breaks down boundaries between performers and audience, celebrates transgression, and simultaneously mocks and affirms traditional institutions. Chan’s films regularly transform scenes of violent action into displays of jubilant comedy. The films also close gaps between screen performers and viewers through Chan’s ordinary-guy persona, his use of not only large- but also small-scale settings for action (e.g., homes, apartment buildings, and other familiar or indoor settings), and the provision of outtakes showing the films’ production. The films typically challenge the utility of conventionally male forms of expression such as serious demeanor, anger, and brute physical force. Similarly, they satirize historical traditions and authoritarian institutions while ultimately affirming prosocial codes of behavior and cultural heritage. Action in Chan’s films also parallels Bakhtin’s theorization of the grotesque body. The kicks and leaps germane to kung fu correspond with the grotesque’s focus on the lower body stratum, and Chan’s thematized vulnerability further inverts the male action-hero persona. Bakhtin also argues that “if we consider the grotesque body in its extreme aspects, it never presents an individual body.”19 The grotesque body, he contends, is porous and connected to other bodies. Such fluidity is apparent in the numerous scenes in Chan’s films in which he battles multiple opponents simultaneously. Both Chan and his foes move as a single choreographed unit, making repeated contact with one another. They also sweat visibly, another process Bakhtin associates with the grotesque.20 The overall exaggeration and excess of the action sequences in Chan’s films contributes as well to their grotesqueness. Grotesque elements account substantially for the comic appeal and accessibility of Chan’s films and for the challenge they pose to authoritarian aspects of masculinity. Through exaggeration and excess, the films transport the well-meaning underdog into a realm that degrades elite institutions and rituals, affirming folk values and ingenuity. Chan typically plays working-class characters (police officers, young peasants, or wandering adventurers), and while they often contend with authority or bureaucracy, their fighting prowess removes them to a differently ordered world where bodily displays determine status. Chan’s working-class characters display apparently limitless dexterity and fighting skills, showing that a comic, acrobatic persona can achieve respect or renown in a wide range of situations, racial and class origins notwithstanding. Chan thus becomes a global ambassador for a revaluation of Asian masculinity. The issue of body size is central to an understanding of Chan’s star persona, particularly in reference to Western archetypes of masculinity. His body does not ascribe to the traditional iconography of classical, idealized maleness. Viewed by Asian audiences, Chan’s height and body proportions appear average, if not ideal. In absolute terms, his small stature becomes 178 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 178 evident in many of his films when he squares off against a much larger opponent. Chan’s unexceptional size functions as a component of his star image. His films present his body in its natural scale, without embellishments of camera position or complementary casting that would reconstruct him as a proportionally dominant male. Chan’s treatment bears comparison to Hollywood’s long-standing tradition of using cinematic illusions to make its male heroes, from Alan Ladd to Sylvester Stallone, appear taller than they really are. Among U.S. action stars, for example, Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, both men of less-than-average height, tend to appear alongside diminutive female costars or nearer the foreground of the picture plane relative to taller male costars, to create the impression of conventional, towering masculinity. Many of Chan’s stunts literally distort the traditional male form for comic effect. Early in Armour of God (1986), Chan curls up his body behind a round shield and rolls away from a band of spear-wielding foes, then uses the shield as a sled to ride down a grassy mountainside. (In this scene, his pursuers become objects of comic spectacle as well when they follow Chan en masse, riding their own shields.) In Police Story (1985), Chan uses an umbrella to hook himself to the lower rear, then to an upper side window, of a double-decker bus that escaping criminals have commandeered. Clinging to the vehicle like a tenacious insect, Chan twists his exposed body to avoid collisions with passing cars and to evade his assailants’ attempts to knock him off the bus. In Twin Dragons (1992), Chan leaps feet-first into the back seat of a parked car during a chase, wriggling his body through the narrow aperture of the open window. In each of these scenes, Chan’s body language again recalls Keaton’s performance style: a man with a small but athletic, flexible body struggles with objects and contorts his body into comic, defensive shapes. Chan’s visually amusing contortions of the body, like Keaton’s, conflict with idealized male images. The erect or fully extended body represents the normalized view of the male physique, as a glance at any survey of Western figure art indicates. Consider, for example, Michelangelo’s David, Donatello’s fifteenth-century St. George, and American and European monumental sculpture and heroic painting generally, which represent erect posture or the standing, extended body as a signifier of available male energy. Through demonstrations of the modestly proportioned body’s access to confined spaces and the contortions necessary to dodge larger physical barriers, Chan implicitly critiques the Western action hero’s characteristic hardness and rigidity. Chan’s malleable physical form also emblematizes the social and geographic body’s potential for mobility. Such a metaphor resonates strongly in Hong Kong, where, as Esther Yau argues in an essay on the colony’s 1980s cinema, “the public’s preoccupations are survival RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 179 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 179 and upward mobility.”21 Hong Kong has long combined the cultural heritage of mainland, Communist China—emphasizing family ties and other Chinese historical traditions—with capitalism’s emphasis on economic wealth and consumption. Chan’s domestic popularity stems in part from his evocation of multiple facets of Hong Kong society and culture. Audiences can read his characters as loyal tools of the state or anticorruption reformers, persecuted underdogs or charismatic heroes, dashing adventurers or humble Everymen. The narratives of Chan’s films similarly provoke multiple readings, sometimes earnest and prosocial, sometimes jesting and antiauthoritarian. As Neale and Krutnik argue, comedians’ “disruptiveness tends to be contained, and therefore motivated by a (culturally conventional) opposition between eccentricity and social conformity” (106). Chan’s own ambiguous persona negotiates this volatile terrain. In Armour of God, he portrays an avaricious treasure hunter, ostensibly unconcerned with the plight of his companions. In the film’s final sequence, though, concern for his friends’ safety takes precedence over his own well-being. Moreover, the film concludes with the destruction of the antagonists’ lair and treasure horde, a catastrophe Chan inadvertently sets in motion. To reconstitute his character as a happy-go-lucky adventurer, Chan finally shows no apparent remorse at his loss of fortune. Chan’s character offers a simultaneously whimsical and searing critique of authority in Project A, Part 2, in which he plays a naval officer assigned to root out police corruption. Over the course of his investigation, he discovers both comic and sinister malfeasance among law-enforcement and government officials, and finds his most trustworthy allies among a group of revolutionaries. By the film’s end, the members of the navy, the virtuous police officers, the revolutionaries, and even a band of motley pirates all rally around Chan’s character. Class conflict drives the narrative of Twin Dragons, where Chan portrays both a working-class auto mechanic, Boomer, and his twin brother John Ma, a refined concert pianist. The film’s comic situations and double-entendres rely on class disparities, but in the end, a double wedding equalizes Chan’s characters and their respective mates. In these cases, and throughout his films, Chan serves as the locus for a negotiation of Hong Kong’s class dynamics. Masculinity Dismantled Chan’s kung fu fights also use comedy to exaggerate conventional trials of manhood. In one of his earlier kung fu comedies, Fantasy Mission Force (1982), Chan first appears as a contestant in a rural “fighting champion” 180 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 180 tournament. Before combat, he engages in a game of psychological one-upmanship that revolves around oral fixations: his opponent smokes a cigarette, so Chan smokes a thicker cigarette. His opponent counters by smoking a cigar, and Chan responds with a larger cigar. Finally his opponent lights a pipe, and Chan follows by puffing on a comically oversized pipe, filling the screen space with smoke. Intimations of sexual insecurity and male performativity inform the scene’s visual comedy. In the ensuing fighting match, Chan’s blows do no apparent damage to his far larger opponent, exposing the preceding phallic showdown as a poor litmus test for male power. Chan adopts the mannerisms and static posture of the invincible male only to expose those characteristics as ridiculous and laughably artificial. At the conclusion of the bus chase in Police Story, Chan assumes a stance that suggests the mythical qualities of the Western action hero. Standing alone on an open highway as the bus bears down on him, he patiently loads bullets into his revolver, then aims it at the onrushing vehicle. The driver, in a panic, brakes quickly, sending passengers flying through the front windows as the bus grinds to a halt directly in front of Chan’s unflinching body. A shot of Chan standing rigid, gun pointed at an enormous bus, along with the scene’s editing tempo and sound effects such as the villains’ stupefied cries, code the event as comedy. With minor variations in editing and music, the scene would appear convincing in a Hollywood action narrative. Presented here, though, it self-consciously parodies the conventions of Western male heroism. When Chan steps briefly into the boastful male-hero role, a villain or a female foil quickly deflates his attempt to assume a position of dominant masculinity. Police Story features numerous comedy sequences in which Chan churns out self-mocking double-entendres to which he appears entirely oblivious. During one sequence, Chan tries to impress a female friend with anecdotes about his dominant status in a relationship, unaware that his girlfriend can hear every inflated word. He wears only a towel during this scene, further connoting a male vulnerability that contradicts his braggadocio. His sweetheart reveals her presence by mashing a birthday cake into his face. The incorporation of this vaudeville trope suggests the artificiality of his adopted “ladies’ man” demeanor. Later in the film, a female criminal informer whom Chan guards tape-records a conversation in which his words imply a clumsy sexual coupling. Chan, who plays a police detective, utters phrases such as “Watch what you’re doing,” “You’ll break it,” and “It’s the only one I’ve got,” while the informer, Selina Fong (Brigitte Lin), makes comments including “You really hurt me,” “It’s so small and ugly,” and “Now I’m all wet.” The dialogue actually refers to the mishandling of a potted cactus plant, but Selina manages to have the tape RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 181 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 181 replayed during a courtroom scene, making Chan the object of derisive laughter in a situation in which the success of his investigative work requires the presumption of male authority. Her strategy disrupts both Chan’s masculine self-assurance and the patriarchal institution of law itself. Chan’s interactions with women typically emphasize comedy, or even women’s fighting skills, rather than romance. In this respect, Chan’s films share something with U.S. action films, which generally imply the incompatibility of combat and heterosexual romance, particularly when nonwhite characters are involved. Hollywood action narratives often supply their heroes with love interests who disappear during fight sequences, watch helplessly from the sidelines, or are captured by villains. Women’s exscription from combat scenarios clears space for homosocial dominance or bonding rituals. Action films narratively delimit their sexual energies by restricting the presence of women, the conventional repository of those energies in Hollywood films. This compartmentalization helps action cinema disavow the patent eroticism of men grappling with men. Conventionally, the action hero frequently represents an asexual type. In the heterosexual imaginary, where normative masculinity is construed as natural, male heterosexuality need not be foregrounded; it merely exists, awaiting a woman to conjure it forth. In Hollywood’s terms, Asian male sexuality does not exist at all, since major studios do not yet view Asian couples as commercially viable, and Western cultural taboos still delegitimize a white woman’s attraction to an Asian man. Chan’s U.S. films correspondingly depict him as a sexless loner, and even in his Hong Kong productions, tender relations between the sexes receive drastically less emphasis than stunts and fight sequences (Twin Dragons, which showcases Chan’s blundering romances, is a notable exception). In comparison, U.S. action films foreground male autonomy but often append a female romantic interest to their male heroes as tacit proof of the men’s heterosexuality. U.S. action films overwhelmingly grant women protagonists active roles only when male heroes are absent, but women participate in action sequences in many of Chan’s films. Challenging U.S. action films’ rigid gender polarity, Chan’s fights alongside and against women both reorient his characters’ masculinities and validate displays of female power. In his battles against women, he tends to perform sheepishly, attempting to distance himself from socially inappropriate male–female interactions. When he displays overtly chivalrous behavior in Fantasy Mission Force and Armour of God, his female opponents take the opportunity to inflict unreciprocated pain on him. Idealized masculinity, across Western and most Asian cultures, defers to women in situations involving physical force. Respecting taboos about harming women, the gallant male hero appears 182 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 182 ill-equipped to cope with manifestations of female strength. Chan’s skirmishes with women proceed mostly in a comic vein, but they also suggest that his version of masculinity leaves room for an accessible subtext of female power. In numerous Chan films, as in scores of Hong Kong films since the 1960s, women appear in primary combat roles. Chan’s Supercop costar, Michelle Yeoh (credited in this film and some others as Michelle Khan), not only plays a central role in numerous fight sequences, she also performs some of the film’s most breathtaking stunts, including a motorcycle jump onto a moving train. Comic Violence and Narrative Chan’s films often reveal their comic dimension in the midst of violent or otherwise hazardous action sequences. In a 1991 interview, Chan suggested that audience tastes motivate his films’ movement toward spectacles of unusual action and away from more conventional fight sequences: Kung fu belongs to the past. In Hong Kong, we don’t talk about “kung fu” movies anymore but about “action” movies. Films are getting faster and we don’t care too much about fights anymore. What people want are stunts. [. . .] I’m always trying to imagine funny and dangerous stunts.22 Despite their escalating reliance on spectacular stunts rather than fight sequences, Chan’s Hong Kong films always include many hand-to-hand combat scenes. The deliberately comic violence of Chan’s films generally runs counter to Hollywood films’ graphic violence. Hollywood action violence often provokes laughter through its flagrancy or outrageousness, even when it does not appear in a comedic context. The antirealist spectacles of most Hollywood action films promote reception of screen violence as representation, not as symptom of social violence. Chan’s films produce a somewhat different effect—they break down taboos about violence by showing it as a natural extension of physical comedy. The young Buster Keaton’s vaudeville moniker, “the human punching bag,” suggests the comic dimension of physical violence, as do the routines of vaudevillestyle performers such as Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges. Peter Kramer, in an essay on Keaton, notes the performative skills necessary to conceive humor from violence: To transform acts of willful maliciousness and intense pain into comedy, performers had to signal clearly that their actions were make-believe, and constituted highly accomplished athletic routines. The actions’ excess, their fantastic exaggeration, as well as performers’ self-conscious address of the RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 183 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 183 audience, were the most obvious indicators of their professional and ritualistic nature.23 Chan’s comic excesses lend the stunts and fight sequences in his films an appeal different from the purely sensational and spectacular displays of violence typical of contemporary U.S. action films. In contrast to the destructive spectacle of U.S. action-film violence, Chan’s films represent physical combat as an opportunity for comic innovation, and Chan’s inventive acrobatic displays supply viewers with pleasures long unavailable in U.S. action films. To a great extent, the structure of Chan’s films transforms their narratives’ overarching social concerns—political instability and imperial oppression in Drunken Master 2, corruption and revolutionary activity in Project A, Part 2—into farcical components of a comic storyline. Regarding a series of silent slapstick films, Donald Crafton argues that through their physical comedy, the films indicate that “the seeming hegemony of narrative in the classical cinema is being assaulted by the militant forces of spectacle.”24 In Chan’s films as well, plot elements often function principally to deliver viewers from one discrete episode of visual spectacle to another. As Tom Gunning makes clear in a response to Crafton, slapstick gags work both as spectacle and as elements of narrative.25 Many of Chan’s exploits emphasize comic spectacle over narrative cohesion. During fights or chases, for example, he often moves from one place to another in a roundabout fashion, highlighting the visual excitement of his motions rather than their utility. In a memorable scene from Rumble in the Bronx, Chan tracks a street gang to its lair, where conflict soon erupts. After attacking gang members with pool cues and furniture items, he moves the fight to a room filled with refrigerators and pinball machines. He uses the games and appliances as weapons and shields, and the viewer, rather than pondering the fight’s outcome or its relevance to the story, simply attends to the novelty of the display. Following the battle, Chan’s character makes a brief speech—saying to the gang, “You are the scum of the earth. Why lower yourselves?”—and his foes shortly become his allies. Though the scene emphasizes comic spectacle, it also further establishes Chan’s abilities and advances the films’ action. Slapstick plots transform displays of violence and suffering into elements of physical comedy. Early in Supercop, for example, Chan is persuaded to spar with an army drill instructor. The scene helps to establish Chan’s character but otherwise serves no essential narrative function. Like many fights in Chan’s films, the match occurs solely to test the participants’ combat skills. The action’s sportive and carnivalesque elements diminish the viewer’s sense of narrative drama while leaving sensation intact. The scene 184 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 184 includes comic body language from both men, antic cheers from the onlookers, and a cartoonish denouement that leaves Chan’s character hanging from a tree branch. Gunning suggests that such an emphasis on gags—or in Chan’s case, on extravagant comic stunts—subverts the logic of narrative by transforming gags or stunts into narrative. Gags or stunts, “through their integration with narrative, their adoption of narrative’s form of logical anticipation,” combine narrative progress and absurdist excess.26 To borrow Crafton’s “pie and chase” terminology, the chases in Chan’s films are also pies. Male and Female Masquerade Chan’s Hong Kong films include serious or sentimental interludes that compete with the ironic demeanor his characters adopt when enmeshed in incredible action scenarios. The films’ occasionally sentimental elements generally elicit camp responses among Western audiences. U.S. audiences found unintended humor, for example, in Rumble in the Bronx’s relationship between Chan and a boy in a wheelchair. While Chan brings a measure of earnestness to nearly all his roles, his characters simultaneously acknowledge the absurdity of their surroundings with self-reflexive deflations of convention. To this end, his films incorporate a considerable amount of masquerade. When he assumes the conventional persona of the male action hero, Chan undermines the fantasy that such a figure could actually inhabit social reality. In their excessively comic behavior, Chan’s characters usually do not contribute to discourses of cinematic realism. The international adventurer he portrays in Armour of God and its sequel, for example, draws directly on Hollywood’s Indiana Jones character. In Chan’s variation on the role, he not only displays the comic fear and vulnerability of the original, he also pauses to toss pieces of candy into his mouth during chaotic chases and fights. Though Chan rarely engages in the sardonic repartee characteristic of Hollywood action heroes, his quizzical facial expressions signify a refusal to accept the film world’s fantastic trappings as entirely serious, even when his life is apparently—or, in many stunt sequences, literally—at stake. In Drunken Master 2, Chan masquerades as the brash young fighter, Wong Fei-hung, he played in the original film, made over fifteen years earlier.27 At age forty, merely assuming the role of a young adult constitutes masquerade of a sort. Moreover, the character provides a notable departure from the contemporary characters who populate his films of the late 1980s and 1990s. Drunken Master 2 gives Chan his first historical role since 1987’s Project A, Part 2 and revisits the kung fu genre that he had suggested RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 185 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 185 held no further allure for audiences. He uses the role to display a broad range of comic facial expressions and body movements. In this film, Wong Fei-hung favors the “drunken boxing” style of combat, which relies upon lumbering and apparently disoriented motion, a posture that combines rigidity and slackness, and blows that appear flailing or clumsily delivered. Drunken boxing takes its name not only from the drunken appearance of those who exercise it, but also from the story’s premise that consuming alcohol aids the fighter, making him more limber and anesthetizing him from pain. This conceit adds a key comic element to Chan’s performance, allowing him to employ a range of contorted postures and dopey, stupefied, and bemused facial expressions. In the narrative, Wong Fei-hung’s drunken boxing allows him to overcome many practitioners of conventional kung fu, which appears a considerably more masculine combat style by comparison. Chan’s films present many contestatory images of masculinity, particularly in the context of the action genre. In the first Drunken Master (1978), Wong Fei-hung’s final victory over a macho opponent depends upon his mastery of the exaggeratedly feminine “Miss Ho” style of combat. Wong gains the upper hand with a series of exaggeratedly feminine moves, and at one point knocks down his foe by swinging his buttocks at him. In Once a Cop (1993, also known as Project S), Chan plays a cameo role in which he performs a comic stunt sequence in full female drag, complete with heels. Drunken Master 2 also offers unusually gendered images in its fight sequences. During one sequence, Chan’s Wong Fei-hung, wearing a loose, white robe (his costume for much of the film) and carrying a paper fan, squares off against a frenetic opponent clad in a leather vest and cap who fights with a heavy iron chain. The juxtaposition of the two suggests an exaggerated performance of both gender roles, with Chan’s character appearing as the graceful, feminine fighter while his foe parodies familiar signifiers of aggressive masculinity. In another scene, the teahouse melee noted earlier, Chan strips to the waist at the urging of his mentor, who then sprays him with tea (to make him slippery and more elusive). Here, Chan, bare-chested and glistening, comically appropriates Bruce Lee’s bodily codes as a preface to a farfetched spectacle of tumbling male bodies. Finally, the film’s last battle pits Chan against a suit-clad kickboxer, John (Ken Lo), who fights mostly while standing firmly on one leg and using the other to kick with mechanical precision. Despite the athletic prowess evident in this style, John’s one-legged fighting appears at odds with a masculine ideal that includes groundedness and stability. Borrowing performative codes typically deployed by women and gay men, the comic styles of Chan and his opponents in these many cases create new images of active masculinity. 186 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 186 Comic Masochism Chan’s actions throughout Drunken Master 2 blend apparently incompatible body configurations. These mixtures complicate codes of action-film masculinity by adopting the narrative strategies and gender dynamics of comedy. In subjecting his body to masochistic treatment, Chan transforms the serious province of male suffering into an arena for comedy, and thus for renegotiation of the terms of masculine violence. He moves the violence of action films toward the hyperbole of comedy and transforms the traditional hero’s ready-for-action body into a humorous or burlesque body. Paul Smith proposes a model for the burlesque body in his study of Clint Eastwood: “This comic body is a bundle of symptoms that is cast into the obverse diegetical situation to that of the ‘erotogenic’ masochism of the action movies—cast, that is, into a frame where the pleasure of contortion, complication, self-changing, and even burlesque is possible.”28 In Chan’s films, the comic body manifests his characters’ power as well as their limitations: the gift of nearly superhuman athletic prowess and the hindrances of modest body size and social position. Early in Drunken Master 2, Wong Fei-hung receives a savage and undefended beating from his kickboxing adversary, who is the son of a prominent Chinese general and the film’s avatar of unscrupulous authority. Wong successfully transforms his body, through the mode of drunken boxing, into a comic body to subdue the aristocratic villain at the film’s conclusion. The beating Chan endures represents a rite of suffering characteristic of action films. As Smith suggests,“action movie narratives [. . .] tend to represent for the viewer a kind of masochistic trial of masculinity and its body” (173). Proof of masculine power lies in the male body’s ability to withstand pain. The active body, then, becomes the body not only capable of action, but capable of withstanding the rigors of physical action as well. Kaja Silverman regards male masochism as a challenge to patriarchal order: “The male masochist magnifies the losses and divisions upon which culture is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed. In short, he radiates a negativity inimical to the social order.”29 As Smith points out, though, the social order reinscribes the masochistic tendency into its own narratives: “[P]opular culture narratives in effect enclose and contain male masochism” (165). Masochism becomes an emblem of male identity rather than its opposition. Chan’s films successfully retrieve masochistic suffering as a pretext for comedy, permitting laughter at the conventions that demand suffering rather than presenting those conventions as evidence of male power. The burlesque body allows masochism to regain subversive autonomy. The burlesque body lies at the intersection of comedy and masochism. The body acted upon signifies masochism, as does the noncomedic treatment RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 187 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 187 of the beaten or suffering body. As Kirkham and Thumim observe, “the ‘perfect’ body also implies its obverse, the mutilated or decayed body.”30 Similarly, Paul Willemen describes the American western’s presentation of the male body through scenes of the male “existing” in narrative space and scenes that display “the male mutilated [. . .] and restored through violent brutality.”31 The retributive notion of regeneration through violence operates only intermittently in Chan’s films. The notion of vengeance tends to contradict comic motifs and to signify an all-encompassing male power that Chan’s characters do not possess. He often suffers punishment at the hands of characters who subsequently cease to be narratively relevant as adversaries. One scene in Rumble in the Bronx, which appears between comic fight sequences, shows the street gang pelting Chan, in slow motion, with shards of broken bottles. Later, Chan does not exact revenge in kind, but subdues the gang in the comic episode at their hideout. Similarly, when Chan’s characters injure themselves through falls or collisions—which occur in Project A and Supercop, among other films—they must accept their suffering without complaint. Chan’s mishaps render the masculine impulse for revenge obsolete. The burlesque body provides visual amusement and an equivocal social critique. In the narrative logic of Drunken Master 2, drunken boxing denotes a historical tradition of combat as well as a scorned form of physical expression. As in many of Chan’s films, Wong Fei-hung here validates traditional forms of authority while challenging corruptive strains of bureaucracy or capitalism. Here again, Smith’s argument informs Chan’s films: “The burlesque functions within such double expressions of class ressentiment and solidarity as an element of ironic self-deprecation that is modulated into self-celebration, and as such can be seen as a crucial element in the carnivalesque” (180). Drunken Master 2 celebrates Wong Fei-hung’s participation in the carnivalesque kung-fu subculture even as it depicts the consequences, both humiliating and physically painful, of unsuccessful negotiation of the dominant culture’s terms. Between spectacular victories in combat, Wong suffers beatings at the hands of his father, the kickboxing aristocrat, and a gang of British consular police. The institutions of paternity, capitalism, and law all disavow kung fu as a means of expression or an assertion of physical autonomy. The formulation of the burlesque body, which Smith revisits following Jean Louis Schefer’s conception of the burlesque in reference to the comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, prescribes physical reaction rather than action. Schefer contends that the burlesque body “neither carries nor guides the action: it absorbs it, and is the catastrophic and unbound place to which action returns.”32 Thus the conception of the inert male hero comes full circle: though Chan’s films define his persona through perpetual 188 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 188 movement, suggesting a dynamic model of masculine ability, the actor’s motions are predicated upon escape from danger. As noted previously, viewers accustomed to Western action-film conventions may infer that Hollywood’s male heroes stand motionless because of their imperviousness to harm. Chan’s comic body language belies such constructions of masculinity. He moves comically but usually defeats opponents in the process, and so constant movement is revealed as a practical combat and survival strategy. At one point in the climactic fight in Drunken Master 2, Wong plants his feet firmly on the ground while his opponent, John, strikes at him repeatedly. His blows fail to connect, because Chan’s upper body becomes rubbery, seeming to move independently of his stationary legs. Chan’s serpentine movements produce a humorous effect, compounded by John’s abundance of wasted effort. The scene displays the comic body’s potential for control through defensive maneuvers. Male Hysteria and Madness The burlesque body can also appear through displacement. In Chan’s interactions with other characters, the burlesque body often resituates itself in another character, apparently as a manifestation of the other’s hysteria. Such displacement liberates the heroic protagonist from hysterical symptoms, locating him in a more conventionally masculine role as he responds to the predicament of his burlesque companion. For example, in Drunken Master 2, in the showdown with the Ax Gang, a shot of Wong’s mentor trying to remove an ax from his back undercuts the tension created by the simultaneous depiction of Chan’s character in serious combat. In many of his films, Chan temporarily plays the serious-fighter role while his opponents receive comic treatment through displays of hysterical cowardice or exaggerated masculinity. In Twin Dragons, the easy victory of Chan’s character Boomer over a burly biker causes his foe later to prostrate himself before Boomer and proclaim Boomer his master. Occasionally, a partner becomes the comic foil to Chan’s relative straight man. Twin Dragons pairs Chan’s working-class Boomer with a reckless, outspoken dwarf, Tyson (Teddy Robin), who is repeatedly captured, threatened, or otherwise victimized. The tensions surrounding Chan’s character are displaced onto Tyson, who exhibits hysterical symptoms throughout the film: he is boastful and abrasive, he is a failure at romance, and others scoff at his clumsy attempts to manifest male power. As Smith argues, “the hysterical body casts a light on the powerlessness that the heroic body lives with [and] on the powerlessness that such a body lives within” (178, emphasis his). Though Tyson displays no physical power, his brash statements, such as the RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 189 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 189 hollow threats he makes to a gang of criminals, motivate Boomer to perform dangerous activities he would not otherwise undertake. In this case, displaced hysteria returns to its original source. Rejecting the stoicism of previous action heroes, Chan’s good-natured comedy humanizes his screen characters, in turn promoting audience engagement with them and the situations in which they perform. U.S. action-films’ templates of hypermasculinity presume an emotional gap between performer and viewer. Even in romantic or family-based comedies, comic elements often distance viewers from situations that might elicit empathetic responses, such as scenes of domesticity or interpersonal relations. Chan’s use of comedy, however, encourages empathetic responses to action-film scenarios. His version of male agency resists U.S. action films’ conservative articulation of physical suffering. Through emphasis on the overriding farcical nature of action sequences or of entire narratives, comedy makes his characters’ pain more bearable to viewers. Episodes showing Chan being beaten or humiliated are always countered by his ensuing comic triumphs. A more substantive “don’t try this at home” disclaimer closes most of his films released since the mid-1980s. In these films, collected outtakes show Chan and his fellow performers filming stunts and fight sequences gone awry, giving viewers a sometimes disquieting reinterpretation of scenes that may appear cartoonish or fantastic in the regular flow of narrative. Notably, his Hong Kong film outtakes typically locate the sequences in physical reality (as we see that actors can and do suffer physical injury), while those of his Hollywood films promote the pleasure of filmmaking (with Chan and his supporting players misreading dialogue, to their and production crews’ apparent delight). The characteristic outtakes that appear alongside the closing credits in Chan’s films contribute significantly to his star persona. The extranarrative material supplies visual proof of Chan’s risk-taking in the service of realism, efforts he proudly asserts in ancillary media. Years before becoming a marketable star in U.S. films, Chan told an interviewer: I never use special effects or editing and camera effects in my movies. When you see me doing something on the screen, I really do it. It’s my trademark, my own style. I love American movies, but I wouldn’t like to work in the American way.33 In another interview, Chan commented on stunt players’ wariness of his direction: “Everybody knows Jackie Chan is crazy.”34 Outtakes depicting other cast members grimacing in real pain or toweling off blood corroborate this view, locating his self-professed craziness in a wider experiential context. An implicit economy is established: Chan’s madness imperils his 190 ACTION FIGURES 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 190 coworkers but serves the film production, which then grants pleasure to viewers. Chan’s offhand comment hints also at the larger social context in which his films appear. Though his displays of androgynous physical mastery call into question conventional formulations of male identity, the attribution of madness contains his subversion, situating his conduct well beyond normative masculine behavior. Chan displays an excess of activity. Through his inevitable accidents during the performance of stunts, his behavior connotes an inability to police the reasonable boundaries of human aspiration. The evidence of Chan’s hysteria is inscribed across his scarred and maimed body.35 Patriarchal order may thus recuperate his abilities as a madman’s folly. As Smith observes, one form of “hysterical residue” apparent in some action films “is an unresolved or uncontained representation of the body of the male as it exceeds the narrative process” (167). Chan’s ability to overreach the screen, to perform beyond the requirements of a conventional narrative, has become his trademark. This activity occurs outside traditional social orders, particularly the order that Hollywood action films impose. Chan’s persona does not adhere to dominant cinematic models of male identity—especially the models prevalent in the action genre—thus marking him as an aberration. His mass appeal, however, reaffirms the resonance of his unconventional persona. The modification of Chan’s image in the West since the 1990s represents U.S. studios’ attempts to align his persona more closely with Hollywood conventions of active masculinity. As noted previously, films such as Supercop and Jackie Chan’s First Strike cast him, at least superficially, in the model of the globe-trotting, James Bond–style adventurer. These films contain Chan’s unconventional masculinity within a more familiar model of action-film manhood. Rush Hour, by contrast, emphasizes Chan’s underdog status and his foreignness, which the film presents as inherently exotic. The film constructs its narrative around Chan’s estrangement from the surrounding culture, a narrative strategy not utilized in his Hong Kong films. Rush Hour conflates Chan’s masculine and racial attributes into an indistinct cluster of traits that signify his foreignness. The visibility of Chan’s films in the West does represent a progressive development in Hollywood representations of active masculinity and of Asians, albeit one motivated by profits rather than by any notion of multiculturalism or social good. The steady flow of Hong Kong actors, directors, choreographers, and cinematographers to Hollywood after 1997 promised expanded opportunities at least at the level of film production, with further shifts in patterns of representation and narrative appearing imminent as well. However, most of these transplanted filmworkers remain active principally in second- or third-tier U.S. productions without Asian cast members. RESTAGING HEROIC MASCULINITY 191 07_Markher_05.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 191 In the early years of the twenty-first century, only Chan and Jet Li remain bankable stars in U.S. films. Li has found a small niche in mid-budget action films such as Unleashed (2005), Cradle 2 the Grave (2003), and The One(2001), while studio attempts to market Chan to younger audiences in films such as Around the World in 80 Days (2004), The Medallion (2003), and The Tuxedo have been resounding box-office failures. To date, the U.S. industry has swiftly absorbed Hong Kong production talent, but sympathetic—or any—treatments of Chinese characters remain in short supply. Chan’s multivalent masculinity has not yet bred successors, but his very success indicates U.S. and global audiences’interest in diverse formations of action heroism.