In his essay/memoir ‘Film Meditations’, Quentin Tarantino recalls when talking about action cinema that the only serious threat to the worldwide hegemony of Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood in the 1970s came from Hong Kong, embodied in Bruce Lee. “But the actor’s untimely death would end the competition before it really started,” he states. If in ‘Kill Bill’ Uma Thurman paid homage to the myth of martial arts with the iconic yellow tracksuit that she wore in her posthumous film ‘Game with Death’ (1978), her appearance in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, where the specialist played by Brad Pitt made her bite the dust, caused some controversy.
Thus, the daughter of the myth, Shannon Lee, regretted that the film portrayed him in a cartoonish way as “an arrogant jerk.” For his part, Tarantino justified that Lee was not exactly a humble guy and that, according to his biographies, he used to humiliate the American specialists who worked on his films. His particular way of speaking and a philosophical discourse that drank from Taoism and Zen Buddhism became immensely popular again thanks to an advertisement for the BMW X3 in 2006. The phrase “be water, my friend” belonged to the last television interview that the actor gave in 1971, two years before he died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973.
Half a century after his passing, Bruce Lee remains the greatest martial arts star of all time. He was the first Asian-American (he was born in the US) to become a star in Hollywood, although, as Tarantino well observes, his unexpected death at the age of 32 occurred just as he was about to storm the United States with his best work and the first produced by a major studio, Warner Bros. ‘Operation Dragon’ (1973), which hit theaters six days after his burial, took the world by storm. During the 2019 Hong Kong protests against Chinese authoritarianism, protesters adopted the slogan “be water” and outwitted the police with urban guerrilla tactics. Bruce Lee is still a legend.
The definitive documentary about the artist, ‘Be Water’ (2020), available for free on RTVE Play, leaves no doubt about his death. Her partner, actress Betty Ting Pei, gave her a painkiller to relieve a headache that caused an allergic reaction that led to cerebral edema. However, doctors from the Madrid Jiménez Díaz clinic defend that Lee died of hyponatremia, a kidney failure caused by her inability to excrete water consumption. The study, published last year in the ‘Clinical Kidney Journal’, put an end to the conspiracies. Neither the Chinese Triad nor drugs (cannabis was detected in her botched autopsy) nor a family curse (her son Brandon was shot to death on a set at the age of 28). Ironically, water killed the man who enacted becoming fluid (actually a line from the ‘Longstreet’ series script).
Disillusioned of Hollywood
The son of a Cantonese opera star, Bruce Lee was born in 1940 in San Francisco in the middle of his mother’s tour. Back in Hong Kong, he was a child actor and at the age of 13 he entered the academy of the legendary wing chun master, Ip Man. At 18 his father sent him to the United States to get him out of street fights. He studies Philosophy and marries Linda Lee Cadwell, a Caucasian woman with whom he had two children. His popularity will come from the 27 episodes of ‘The Green Hornet’ (Green Hornet), a series in which he increasingly had more dialogues as the faithful servant Kato. Hollywood’s racism caused the role of his life in the series ‘Kung Fu’ to go to David Carradine. Disappointed, he returned to Hong Kong, where he perfected his technique and tied three global blockbusters: ‘Karate to the Death in Bangkok’ (1971), ‘Eastern Fury’ (1972) and ‘Rage of the Dragon’ (1972).
Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, among others, were Lee’s pupils in Los Angeles, who was as hypnotic instructing as practicing martial arts with a perfect physique: 172 centimeters and 63 kilos of pure muscle fiber. “If you fight against me, you can kill me,” the protagonist of ‘Karate to the Death in Bangkok’ challenged, whose fight choreographies were so fast that they had to be shot at 32 frames per second instead of 24. Obsessive and perfectionist, Lee knew how to combine the lessons learned from boxing, dance, fencing and tai chi in his way of fighting. His ambition met with the racism of the time, and his early death made him a legend as alive today as he was half a century ago.
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