He's unstoppable, unbeatable, unbelievable.

A little background on Bruce Lee. I think a reason that I was interested in talking about him on this podcast is because he's a truly transnational cross-Pacific movie star. I know that in his heyday, he was a somewhat controversial figure in Hong Kong.

Hugely popular, of course, but somewhat controversial because he was perceived by some as being

too westernized, which, of course, was the opposite of the problem that he had when he was in Hollywood.

Now, water can flow, or it can crash.

Be water, my friend.

Do you find Bruce Lee a compelling presence on screen?

Oh, definitely.

There's something about just total kind of raw conviction he has in everything he does,

that even when he's kind of making silly noises or like there's there's a bunch of shots in this

movie where he he's like either about to strike someone or has just struck them and the camera

is just kind of lingers on him in slow motion as he kind of like reverberates oh yeah with

with energy and it looks absurd but i i don't know br Bruce Lee kind of gets away with it.

If there's an arc to the film, I suppose it's this school of very kind of docile, tolerant,

non-confrontational martial artists realizing they have to fight back in the face of this foreign aggression. And the line that made me laugh out loud was in the last five minutes of the film.

After the Japanese have come and ransacked the school, one of them throws up his hands.

And he says, our tolerance was a mistake.

In the West, Bruce Lee introduced a whole new Asian archetype.

In America, the popular archetypes of an Asian man would be like Charlie Chan,

you know, a wise Chinese detective who would say fortune cookie wisdom, or like Mickey Rooney and

Breakfast at Tiffany's, you know, racist archetypes. Bruce Lee was brash and arrogant and confident, and also plainly a sexual being in a way that no other Asian character seen in the West had been.

So you can imagine how important he has been for, let's call it the Asian identity and popular culture over the years.

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