Martial Arts Films

Although martial arts films have received comparatively little critical attention, they reflect widely shared American perceptions of a mysterious, and often stereotyped, Orient, and of Asian masculinity. Distinct from American action films in their focus on physical performance rather than characterization and narrative, martial arts films showcase near-mystical fighting skills that have been gradually separated from their original cultural context and associated with protagonists from different cultures. The martial arts hero's transition from Chinese revolutionary to American action star reflects evolving attitudes in the United States toward Asian manhood— and about masculinity in general.

Although American film and literature have traditionally constructed a feminized Asia that offers exotic delights to Western men, white Americans have been uneasy about Asian masculinity ever since their xenophobic reactions to the late-nineteenth-century influx of Chinese laborers. This reaction featured images of the so-called Yellow Peril, in which allegories of cultural contamination cast Asian males as rapists threatening white women (who embodied Western culture). Mainstream Americans were typically intrigued by Asian men as long as they were feminized, emasculated, and incapable of the cultural “rape” associated with the Yellow Peril. Thus, American films have generally represented Asian males either as demonized villains or as desexualized, amiable, and nonthreatening allies.

Although glimpses of the martial arts can be seen in American film since the 1940s, true martial arts movies made their first significant impact in the United States in 1973, when a wave of kung fu movies produced in Hong Kong met with unprecedented box-office success. Most scholars agree that their sudden popularity was a response to U.S. failure during the Vietnam War. The spectacle of a physically small Asian male defeating seemingly insurmountable odds—of an Asian masculinity characterized by quasi-mystical fighting prowess—represented a way of coming to terms with a perceived failure of American masculinity and military might in Vietnam. In an atmosphere increasingly open to Asian religions and philosophies and distrustful of the U.S. government, martial arts films of the 1970s offered disaffected American males a countercultural heroic model.

The early 1970s martial arts hero, embodied by Bruce Lee in films such as The Chinese Connection (1973) and Fists of Fury (1973), resembled the rebel males who dominated American films of the 1960s and 1970s in that he was hotheaded, impulsive, and resistant to tyranny. Martial arts films were at first marketed primarily to urban minority audiences, playing in inner-city theaters alongside blaxploitation films (a low-budget action genre featuring black protagonists and marketed to African-American audiences). The genre's appeal to minority viewers is understandable: it featured nonwhite protagonists battling imperialist or invading [Page 291]forces, and often defeating white opponents. Soon, blaxploitation films, such as Black Belt Jones (1974), began featuring kung fu fights, co-opting the martial arts genre to provide audiences the fantasy of individual martial prowess overcoming cultural oppression.

Achieving popularity during the 1970s, martial arts films explained the perceived failure of American masculinity in Vietnam by attributing to Asian men a quasi-mystical fighting prowess. Bruce Lee's triumph over white opponents made marital arts films popular among African-American men, while his stereotypical asexuality contributed to his appeal among whites. (©

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