“I thought the [Tarantino] character made him look stupid, silly, and made to be insultingly ‘Chinesey,’” said Bruce Lee’s wife at the time.
The ending of the new film from Quentin Tarantino, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, raises many questions. We try to answer a few of them.
Tarantino, the cineaste who put “Kill Bill’s” Uma Thurman as the Bride in Lee’s iconic yellow “Game of Death” jumpsuit, wrote Lee and Tate as supporting characters in a story anchored by two fictional white men; he even shows them together, in a quick flashback to Lee training Tate for her fight scene with Asian American actor Nancy Kwan for “The Wrecking Crew,” and later, training Sebring, who discovered Lee in real life.
How audiences are interpreting it is noteworthy. In the opening weekend showing that scholar and “Reel Inequality” author Nancy Wang Yuen attended, a cringe-inducing sound followed that scene: the sound of other moviegoers laughingBruce Lee, an experience Shannon Lee also had watching the film with a theater of strangers. “It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theater and listen to people laugh at him,” Lee said.
Arriving amid a groundbreaking time for Asian American representation, with films like “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Searching,” “Always Be My Maybe,” “Late Night” and “The Farewell” bringing unprecedented inclusion to the big screen, and Marvel’s first Asian superhero movie, “Shang Chi,” on the horizon, “Once Upon a Time” feels sorely retrograde, says Yang. “It’s this uncomfortable reminder that we’re the only people who saw him, and clearly other people saw him differently.
The scene opens on the Fox lot where “Green Hornet” was filmed, panning down from a billboard for the Pearl Harbor war drama “Tora! Tora! Tora!” — a film that wouldn’t be released until 1970, three years after “Green Hornet” was canceled. Lee’s later-era hairstyle too is anachronistic, another indicator that Cliff’s memory, or even the film’s memory, is subject to hazy misremembering.
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