Introduction: primitive passions and crisis modernity
In a 1995 book on the themes of visuality, sexuality, ethnography and contemporary Chinese cinema (Chow, 1995), Rey Chow offers an argument about what she calls ‘primitive passions’. This is a concept so central to her analysis of ‘contemporary Chinese films’ that she elevates it to the book's very title. Early on, she sets out a list of seven key points about ‘primitive passions’. These are:
- The interest in the primitive emerges at a moment of cultural crisis – at a time when … the predominant sign of traditional culture … is being dislocated amid vast changes in technologies of signification….
- [In such a context] fantasies of an origin arise. These fantasies are played out through a generic realm of associations, typically having to do with the animal, the savage, the countryside, the indigenous, the people, and so forth, which stand in for that ‘original’ something that has been lost….
- This origin is … (re)constructed as a common place and a commonplace, a point of common knowledge and reference that was there prior to our present existence. The primitive, as the figure for this irretrievable common/place, is thus always an invention after the fact – a fabrication of a pre that occurs in the time of the post….
- The primitive defined in these terms provides a way for thinking about the unthinkable – as that which is at once basic, universal, and transparent to us all, and that which is outside time and language….
- Because it is only in this imaginary space that the primitive is located, the primitive is phantasmagoric and, literally, ex-otic….
- In a culture caught between the forces of ‘first world’ imperialism and ‘third world’ nationalism, such as that of twentieth century China, the primitive is the precise paradox, the amalgamation of the two modes of signification known as ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. If Chinese culture is ‘primitive’ in the pejorative sense of being ‘backward’ (being stuck in an earlier stage of ‘culture’ and thus closer to ‘nature’) when compared to the West, it is also ‘primitive’ in the meliorative sense of being an ancient culture (it was there first, before many Western nations). A strong sense of primordial, rural rootedness thus goes hand in hand with an equally compelling conviction of China's primariness, of China's potential primacy as a modern nation with a glorious civilization. This paradox of a primitivism that sees China as simultaneously victim and empire is what leads modern Chinese intellectuals to their so-called obsession with China….
- Although there may be nothing new about reinterpreting the past as a way to conceive of the present and the future – and this is definitely one possible way of understanding primitivism – my proposal is that this ‘structure of feeling’ finds its most appropriate material expression in film.
(Chow, 1995, pp. 22–3)
Obviously, a lot has happened since the publication of Primitive Passions in 1995. The films Chow herself analysed in the early 1990s can hardly still be considered ‘contemporary’, for instance. Thirteen years is a long time in film. Furthermore, even the term ‘Chinese film’ can hardly be taken to have the same referent or to refer to the same spaces, entities, institutions and processes as were operating in the early 1990s. Indeed, perhaps the very notion of ‘film’, on the one hand, and ‘China’ or ‘Chinese’, on the other, might be said to have changed significantly, in any number of ways.
But what about Chow's central paradigm or analytical optic – namely, her conceptualisation of ‘primitive passions’? For, if all of the other terms might be said to have changed – ‘contemporary’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘films’ – then one might enquire as to the status of primitive passions within today's ‘contemporary’ ‘Chinese’ film? In other words, are primitive passions always the same? Are they always the same in film theory and in film practice? Are they the same, East and West? Are primitive passions universal or do they differ between geographical cultures? Do they change over time? Are they culturally or ethno-nationalistically determined?
Chow herself argues that ‘primitivism’ is ‘the imaginary foundation of industrialized modernity’, and that it ‘is crucial to cultural production regardless of the geographical setting’ (p. 24). If we connect this to her first claim (in point 1, above) that ‘interest in the primitive emerges at a moment of cultural crisis’, then it seems that ‘industrialized modernity’ equals or produces ‘cultural crisis’ in which primitivism arises a symptom, side effect or consequence of modernity. Accordingly, we might expect to find symptomatic ‘primitive passions’ wherever there is ‘crisis modernity’. And if there is ‘crisis modernity’ East and West, what might be the specifics of its elaboration in contemporary Chinese film?
Now, I must confess, I have not seen that many Chinese films, contemporary or otherwise. But I have seen quite a few martial arts films, contemporary or otherwise, and – crucially – Chinese and otherwise. I say crucially because, it strikes me that a lot of Chinese martial arts films – including (perhaps especially) Hong Kong films – do indeed replay, reiterate or act out certain symptomatic responses to ‘modernity’ and other forms of ‘crisis’ – whether colonial, imperial or gangster capitalist. One of the most enduringly influential examples is Bruce Lee's 1972 film, Jing Wu Men / Fist of Fury, in which the Jing Wu martial arts association is persecuted by belligerent Japanese martial artists in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In this film, the crisis faced by the Jing Wu association transparently stands for that of China – embattled, besieged, fragmented, divided, exploited and oppressed, by internal and external forces. And this theme – of a time and condition of crisis – persists in Chinese martial arts film (however defined: ethnically and linguistically Chinese film; not merely People's Republic of China (PRC) film) all the way through to today. It even structures Wong Kar-wai's recent film, The Grandmaster (2013). And despite The Grandmaster initially being touted as another rendition of the story of Ip Man, the teacher of Bruce Lee, and hence an internationally popular figure, it is actually much less about its lead male character and much more about the easily allegorisable theme of the desire to unify northern and southern Chinese martial arts into one institution – an institution that, in the film, tears itself apart and then implodes.
So, to reiterate, a great many Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Chinese martial arts films are structured by or elaborated as a symptomatic response to ‘crisis’ – whether that crisis be precipitated by Japanese, Russian or Western imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, or the ‘progress’ of industrialised modernity. However, the fantasies that arise in martial arts films do not ‘typically hav[e] to do with the animal, the savage, the countryside, the indigenous, [or] the people’, as Rey Chow contends. They are certainly, to use Chow's phrase, organised by the championing of ‘an earlier stage of “culture”’. But I would hesitate before moving on, as Chow does, to the assertion that this ‘earlier stage of “culture” [is] thus closer to “nature”’. For what is valued in martial arts films is precisely institution, discipline, respect, tradition, and, in other words, a constructed and achieved culture. So, I would supplement Chow's formulation by appending the word ‘Chinese’ to ‘nature’: therefore, the ‘earlier stage of culture’ that is championed in martial arts films, is not closer to ‘nature’, but rather to a fantasy of Chinese nature. And, here, Chinese nature is culture.
As Chow says, here we are dealing with a paradox. And I am not disagreeing with her. All I want to do is explore this paradoxical situation in a different way. Specifically this: in Chinese martial arts films, crisis typically comes at the fraught moments and processes of the passing on and passing over of legacy, tradition and institutional inheritance. In an almost explicitly Derridean way (Derrida, 1981), the problem explored by these martial arts films is this: how to ensure the smooth Socratic/Platonic transmission of fixed, stable and complete knowledge from master to disciple/successor in the face of the interrupting, disrupting, subverting and perverting agency of an external force. In Derrida's terms, what the institution wants is insemination: pure, uncorrupted, undiluted, unmodified transmission. What the world constantly throws up is the threat of dissemination: impure, corrupted, diluted, incomplete, modified scattering.
In martial arts films, then, the primitive passion is not a simple fantasy about nature versus culture. It is rather a fantasy about an impossibly idealised relation of inside to outside. The outside is not necessarily bad, as long as (to echo Derrida) it leaves the inside to remain inside, while it, the outside, remains outside. The problem that Chinese martial arts films explore is therefore the problem of maintaining the institutions. It is rarely, if ever, nature versus culture. It is almost always institution versus institution.
If this characterises a tendency within the institutions of Chinese martial arts films, we might ask: what about other cultures or institutions of martial arts film?
Primitive passions East and West
Interestingly, it is much easier to find straightforwardly primitivist fantasies and primitive passions in Western martial arts discourses and Western (primarily Hollywood) approaches to martial arts style and martial arts inspired film. At the pinnacle of this discourse, in the field of martial arts practice, would be the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). From its inception, the UFC declared itself to be the ultimate in the sense of most ‘real’ because it initially claimed to have ‘no rules’. This was a rejection of rules and limits – or indeed culture – in order to cut through the conventions and limitations produced by – precisely – ‘culture’. But, from the outset, the UFC played the paradox of, on the one hand, letting different styles meet each other in an unfettered space to see which style was best, while, on the other hand, letting primitive barbaric animality reign. The first child of the UFC was what is now known as mixed martial arts (MMA), a combat sport that both plays and erases its status as a style, discipline or cultural practice. On the one hand, it is a sport, a discipline, a culture. But at the same time its rhetoric and discourse fantasise about pure primitive animality.
The exemplary cinematic version of this impulse away from tradition, rules and conventions, and towards a different sort of fantasy of ‘primitive nature’ is Fight Club (1999). In both actual MMA and the film fantasy of Fight Club, the primitivist fantasy is the same: it is one of rediscovering a repressed primitive ‘truth’ – that is, the primitive nature that has been repressed by ‘culture’ and resides within each one of us. As commentators have noted, Fight Club is a kind of study of one possible response to the crisis of masculinity in an alienating consumerist society (Giroux, 2002). In other words, Fight Club may be about the UFC and MMA as primitivist responses to the crisis of masculinity in consumer culture.
To summarise my argument so far, then: my proposal is that in as many Chinese and Hong Kong martial arts films as I have seen, the ‘primitive passion’ takes the form not of a desire for a state of nature but for an unmediated (or, indeed, metaphysical) transmission from master to disciple1 in the face of one or another kind of crisis of external intervention.2 The passion here is for an idealised institutional condition, or state, but not simply for a ‘state of nature’. Rather, the ‘state of nature’ primitive passion is much easier to find in Western martial arts discourses – as exemplified by what I like to call the Fight-Club-isation of Western martial arts discourse. Of course, my schematic separation of East from West, or China from the US, here, may be cause for concern or consternation. Indeed, it should be. The traffic between East and West in film and martial arts has long been taking place. Yuen Woo Ping and myriad lesser-known luminaries are surely just as likely now to keep apartments in Hollywood as in Hong Kong, Taipei or Beijing, and at the same time. Furthermore, as Jane Park has demonstrated in her book Yellow Future, we can see more and more what she calls ‘oriental style in Hollywood cinema’ (Park, 2010). So: can the reverse also be demonstrated? Can we see Hollywood style in ‘oriental’ cinema? Doubtless, we could find many ways to answer in the affirmative.3 But I propose to explore this matter in terms of an example that might problematise an easy understanding of the term ‘Chinese cinema’ and that might illuminate some more the connections between film, culture, primitive passions and crisis.
Man of Tai Chi
Keanu Reeves's recent directorial debut is called Man of Tai Chi (2013). It is a multilingual film. It flits between Beijing and Hong Kong, and between English and Chinese. It flits also from bustling Beijing city to its less modern hinterlands, and from multibillionaire lifestyles to the bureaucratic banality of planning and development legislation, as well as a dilapidated temple whose sole occupant is the mandatory white-haired tai chi master. The dilapidated temple is, of course, a relic of Chinese heritage. The white-haired sifu is, then, one of the last living residues of a former pinnacle of Chinese culture, or ‘Chineseness’.
The person who navigates these waters is Tiger Chen, the sole student of an obscure style of tai chi. He is almost ready to receive the final transmission, but, his sifu says, he is not yet in control of his chi – rather, his chi is controlling him. Moreover, Tiger is evidently keen to dabble in the dark side, and to explore the use of power and violent force in combat, rather than sticking to the tai chi principles of softness, sensitivity, yielding and neutralising. Tiger, then, is at a crossroads. The first time we see him, he is practising standing-tree chi gung at 5 a.m. Then he gets in his car. The first words we hear are in Eng...
