The contemporary worldwide addiction to the forensic-medical gaze, the power to see both the patterns of brutality inscribed on a body and the moral truths about whodunit, how and why they did it, takes a fascinating turn in Peter Chan’s (Chen Kexin 陳可辛) Chinese martial arts film Dragon (Wuxia 武侠, lit. ‘Martial Chivalry’: 2011) starring Donnie Yen (Yan Zidan 甄子丹), famous for his portrayal of Ip Man (Ye Me葉問2008, and sequels 2010, 2016). In a brilliant twenty-first century appropriation of both ancient Chinese medical traditions and the transnational forensic detective genre, Wuxia pushes the martial arts epic in a new direction with a minute visual analysis of the anatomy and physiology of the martial arts body.
Chan’s film draws on elements of both the two main sub-genres of the martial arts film genre, the fast-action choreographed bare-fist fight of the kung fu film, and the romance, chivalry and running-up-walls, flying-through-the-air fantasy tales of martial errantry characteristic of the genre from which the film takes its Chinese name, wuxia. While the film draws on the aesthetics of both these cinematic traditions, the themes of honour and chivalry are uniquely developed into an analysis of how martial arts moral philosophy is encoded in the living body itself. We learn that the martial artist has extraordinary control of the breath, his body has enhanced qi and is protected by a field of power that repels even flies; it is a hardened diamond body that blades bounce off, as in the Vajrapāni (Jingang shen 金剛神) martial traditions. More than anything else, the martial artist has a sophisticated knowledge of the anatomy of death, which he uses only in self and community defence. All these qualities, we are told, embody a Buddhist attitude towards the unfolding of life’s events, where every action is interconnected and responsibility must be shared.
Liu Jinxi, a seemingly meek and law-abiding paper-maker, is actually Tang Long 唐龍, a notorious killer and beloved son of a much-feared chief of a Xixia clan known as the qisher disha七十二地煞 (72 Demons). In an attempt to cast off his violent and vengeful past, Tang has absconded from his clan and married a local woman, Yu 玉 (Tang Wei湯唯) from the Yunnan village where the film is set. Now Liu Jinxi, a model villager, has integrated himself into the idyllic life of the village as the saviour of Yu, whose previous husband has absconded, leaving her with a son to raise alone. Together they have given birth to another son. Life is beautiful: cows graze on the roofs of the wooden huts, and the day moves to the gentle rhythm of the paper presses. Yu is modest and beautiful, but no romance or passion is allowed to distract from the strange relationship that develops between the two male leads, since in traditional male-dominated wuxia films celibacy and male camaraderie are the homosocial norms.Liu gets into a fight with two notorious bandits and kills them both, disguising his martial prowess in an apparently accidental sequence of events, while attempting to protect the elderly couple who run the village shop and inn. The rest of the film focuses on the investigation and eventual exposure of Liu Jinxi’s false identity by Xu Baijiu 徐百九 (Takeshi Kaneshiro金城武), the detective, by means of an analysis of both the forensic evidence provided by the corpses of the villains themselves, and the unique qualities of the martial arts body. As Xu examines the battered cadavers of the bandits, peering through his 1920s-style spectacles and covering his nose delicately with a white handkerchief, all the political hierarchies embodied in the superior gaze of modern science, and its claim to definitive knowledge, are challenged by the camera as it follows the apparently feeble, asthmatic and neurotic figure of the detective. His furtive observation trespasses from all angles into the lives and bodies of Liu’s family, disturbing and undermining the balance of the community, even intruding into their marital bed and day-to-day religious ceremonies. With this uncomfortable visual construction of the practices of science and modernity, the film begins to question the legitimacy of the concomitant eroticisation of a vanquished oriental ‘Other’ and its superstitions and fantasies. As Peter Chan’s film delivers its cinematic riposte to an unreconstructed Western narrative of scientific modernity, and to Xu’s single-minded pursuit of a morally superior universal justice, and instead outlines for us a unified and transcendent body of Chinese cultural genius, we are drawn in to a multi-faceted and compelling political vision, at once transnational in its production and intended audiences, and national in its powerful representation of an ethnically diverse one-China.
Throughout the film a series of slow-motion replays and fast-paced montages juxtapose martial arts action with stills drawing on images from China’s medical past, and footage generated by modern medical imaging technologies. With this collage of perspectives, Chan participates in a twenty-first century zeitgeist which disrupts the binary conventions that pit West against East; modernity against tradition; reductionism against holism; science against religion; objective anatomy against the subjective subtle body; and mind against body. In today’s world, the global balance of power is changing, and new forms of cross-cultural scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are required to keep up.
