THE FAST, THE FURIOUS AND THE FIXATED
Bruce is everywhere, from Ben Tanaka to those shiny cars in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT
By Reihan Salam
Recently, I found myself arguing with a friend about a very vital question, namely, “Why is Justin Lin so dope?” We really do talk like that: I’m not proud of it. Anyway, we were breaking down why Justin Lin is so dope, and we concluded that it had something to do with why Ben Tanaka is so wack. Allow me to explain.
Adrian Tomine, one of America’s most celebrated comic artists, has just completed Shortcomings, a three-issue story cycle centered on self-loathing Ben Tanaka, an Asian American unhealthily fixated on Asian American masculinity. Well, that’s one way of putting it. More bluntly, Tanaka really, really wants to sleep with non-Asian (specifically, fair-haired and blue-eyed) women. I mean, really. It could be that it takes great artistic courage to have a protagonist who is so deeply unpleasant as to defy empathy. I can’t really say. All I know is that Tanaka needs help.
But what kind of help? While reading Shortcomings, I couldn’t help but think that what Tanaka needed most was a visit from Bruce Lee. As a free-floating spectral apparition, Lee would kick Tanaka upside the head, knocking the nonsense right out Tanaka’s ears. A new, more powerful Tanaka would then train his body and mind in service to, say, workers’ rights or some other worthy cause.
Bruce Lee has been following me my entire life. (Fortunately, I have yet to be confronted by his ass-kicking ghost.) As a kid, his action-packed meditations on nationhood and perseverance were broadcast Saturday afternoons on WPIX. Then, in elementary school, I was introduced to the notion that all Asians were trained in the martial arts. How this could possibly be a bad thing was a mystery to me at the time, and remains one even now.
By the time I reached high school—in my case a heavily Asian magnet school that drew working- and middle-class kids from the outer boroughs of New York—the Wu-Tang Clan was remixing the deeper themes of Bruce Lee’s kung fu classics with gritty rhymes about urban life, and almost every Asian American kid I knew ardently embraced the result. The day before I left for college my sister, who knows me too well, bought me a hipster-kitsch Bruce Lee wallet that I held on to for about five years. My computer wallpaper for most of college was a Giant Robot image of Bruce Lee manning a turntable. I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly why Bruce Lee has long formed the backdrop to my many misadventures, particularly since I can’t claim to be a kung fu connoisseur. I think it must have something to do with the fact that Bruce Lee was a wiry, compact, Asian American man who couldn’t help but kick ass. Violence doesn’t solve everything, to be sure, but Bruce Lee’s righteous fury was delivered judiciously and well: in this regard, as in so many others, he offers lessons to us all.
My guess is that Lin grew up in a similar milieu. In BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, he portrays four intelligent and thoroughly amoral thugs who literally could have walked out of my high school Calculus class. Unlike the mighty Bruce, these “gentlemen” were not of sound mind and body. These wannabe goodfellas took shortcuts, they embraced the crass materialism of their suburban surroundings, and they always took the easy way out—they were, in short, like almost all American teens, except a little bit smarter and a little bit more ruthless. BETTER LUCK TOMORROW was an instant American classic in the vein of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, a cold, hard look at how kids grow up in a country that manages to be obscenely rich and obscenely violent at the same time. The fact that these kids were Asian American overachievers simply said: we’re just like you—only more so.
Believe it or not, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT was another milestone. Yes, it was a straight-ahead moneymaker, and yes it “starred” about a dozen incredibly fast custom cars. But it also gave us an all-too-brief look at Han, an Asian American don who left home to escape his dark past (quite possibly Han from BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, also portrayed by Sung Kang), who calls Tokyo’s mean streets his “Wild West.” TOKYO DRIFT is about the hip-hop-inflected future, when Asian dollars and American know-how and vice versa will fuel global street culture, and it happens to be the future we’ll all be living in soon. Your kids, by the way, are living there now.
Now Lin has made FINISHING THE GAME, a frankly absurd look at the panic and chaos that reigned on-set just after Bruce Lee’s death, when a financially-strapped production team struggled to make a movie without its star attraction.
Somewhere, Bruce Lee is smiling.
Reihan Salam is a writer, producer, editor, and critic based in Washington, D.C.