What It Means to Understand Bruce Lee

A big part of Lee’s legacy is the philosophy he developed called Jeet Kune Do, the way of the intercepting fist. But even that—a treatise on the limitations of stylistic purity, often argued to be the foundation of modern mixed martial arts—found a life of its own. Lee’s attempt at a unified theory of self-expression was quickly branded a style too, becoming a template for learning how to fight “like Bruce Lee,” capitalizing on a rush of momentum Lee had generated through his Hong Kong movies. An entire cottage industry was created after his death to essentially clone him through impersonation—Bruce Le and Bruce Li were the two most prominent imitators in film. Finding oneself is hard, it turns out. Retracing Bruce Lee’s steps is easier.

The path has diverged, many times over. Lee’s ubiquity unsurprisingly lends itself to fan fiction; Quentin Tarantino has been publishing his own for nearly two decades. Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a patchwork of references, drawing from Lee’s final years both on- and offscreen: Uma Thurman’s character, the Bride, dons a near replica of the yellow jumpsuit Lee wears in Game of Death, which was still in production when he died; the titular villain, Bill, is played by David Carradine, who starred in Kung Fu, a series that Lee’s family has claimed was stolen by Warner Bros. from a concept that Lee had developed himself. But where Kill Bill borrows Lee’s iconography as a validation of the style that he made popular, Tarantino’s more recent evocation of him is purely transactional.

The controversial five-minute Bruce Lee scene from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood borrows Lee’s identity as a time stamp for the mid-1960s. During a break on the set of The Green Hornet (the short-lived 1966 TV action series that the real-life Lee starred in), a haughty Lee, played by Mike Moh, riffs on Muhammad Ali’s style and notes similarities to his own. A crew member asks a hypothetical: “If you fought him, who would win?” Lee dodges the question, but he’s pressed. “What would happen?” “I’d make him a cripple,” he responds. (The real Lee pored over Ali’s philosophies and analyzed his matches down to every punch. Be Water includes a frame-by-frame stylistic comparison to show how much Lee learned from Ali, as if it were a direct response to Tarantino at the behest of Lee’s estate.) Cliff, the Green Beret turned stunt actor played by Brad Pitt, cracks up at the notion of Lee defeating Ali in a fight. The two spar; Lee knocks Cliff off his feet first, then Cliff tosses Lee into a prop automobile, leaving a dent. The two seem equally matched, but they are not. Cliff is a main character in the story; Lee is a device set up to calibrate Cliff’s strength.

In response to backlash regarding the scene, Tarantino said: “If you ask me the question ‘Who would win in a fight: Bruce Lee or Dracula?,’ it’s the same question. It’s a fictional character. If I say Cliff can beat Bruce Lee up, he’s a fictional character, so he could beat Bruce Lee up.” However, by transposing Lee’s actual arc and likeness to his story, Tarantino directly summons the Lee mythology the way he would a work of public domain. Within the scope of the movie, Lee is almost as fictional as Cliff is.

But not all of Lee’s recent reincarnations over-index on his mythology. A month before Once Upon a Time was released in 2019, a sign was spotted at a pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong: Be Water! We are formless. We are shapeless. We can flow. We can crash. We are like water. We are Hongkongers! Lee’s most famous words have become an organizing principle for those of his homeland, a way of circumventing the police through waves of high-concentration rallies that can quickly and spontaneously disperse and regroup all across the city. As protests began all across the U.S. in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other black lives that have been lost as a result of police brutality, Hong Kong protesters, now yearlong veterans, offered advice on how to stay one step ahead of police: “Be Water” was a common, essential refrain. It’s taken five decades and countless mediums, but it’s hard to imagine a sounder tribute to Lee’s idea of formlessness, which has once again made a voyage from Hong Kong to the U.S.