HollowCity/DeadWomenTalking/Constantine

Today I read the first fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City (2014), the sequel to his 2011 novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  I read Miss Peregrine at the urging of my older daughter, who loved it, and I loved it, too. I found it refreshingly original and atmospheric and it used the interface between text and image in really imaginative ways. Above all, it conveyed a message about the importance of valuing difference that was neither sentimental nor oversimplified. Hollow City begins right after the cliffhanger ending of Miss Peregrine and the first fifty pages strike a nice balance between advancing the action and recapitulating some of the key moments and themes of the first novel.

I also finished Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking. In this closing section of the book, Norman discusses Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Getting Mother’s Body, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman.” A couple of things really jumped out at me, the first being the fact that Sebold’s novel is the first text to which Norman does not give unqualified praise. Seeing it for the most part as a rather insipid suburban novel that exemplifies that moment at which the presence of a dead female narrator is in danger of becoming a gimmick, Norman nevertheless provides an astute reading of the way in which the novel’s conclusion is surprising on both a plot-based and generic level. Norman’s book ends very thought-provokingly with a discussion of a dead woman who refuses to talk. After examining a number of examples of the ways in which dead women talking force communities to come to terms with their histories and further the cause of justice, Norman concludes that sometimes the most just and ethical position is to let the dead remain silent.

I also watched Francis Lawrence’s 2005 film Constantine, based on the comic Hellblazer. I’m not a huge fan of Keanu Reeves but I think he’s at his best here, largely because he’s supported by an amazing cast including Tilda Swinton (as the Archangel Gabriel!), Rachel Weisz (with a very credible American accent), Peter Stormare (with a wonderfully creepy and restrained performance as Lucifer), and one of my favorite character actors, Pruitt Taylor Vince (as an alcoholic priest). Not even the awful Gavin Rossdale can mess things up. But despite great acting and wonderful special effects, there’s one scene that ruins this film for me. When a Mexican laborer accidentally finds the object the entire film revolves around, he takes it to Los Angeles, crossing the border into the US to do so. Thanks to the evil power of the object, the Mexican man leaves a trail of death and destruction behind him, but the sight of this man jumping a fence to enter the US and crossing a plain while cattle drop dead all around him exemplifies viscerally racist fantasies of the immigrant as a source of contagion in a completely uncritical fashion. Ironically, a deleted scene from the movie shows the Mexican man killing two border patrol agents, but what Lawrence left in is just as egregious.
 

Hogan/DeadWomenTalking/MurdersintheRueMorgue

Today I finished Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. Not surprisingly, the conclusion of the novel brings a combination of resolution and open-endedness. Also unsurprisingly, this novel did not really turn out to be a whodunit. It was suggested at an early point of the novel that Hale, the local oil baron, was somehow mixed up in all the deaths and that turned out to be just so. But what’s interesting is that Hogan does not make Hale’s conviction and imprisonment the climax of the book; indeed, after following Hale’s trial in some detail, Hogan notes the fact of his conviction in just a single sentence. Although Hale’s imprisonment seems to promise the beginning of a time of healing for the people and the land that have gone through so much, in fact Hogan ends the novel with a final act of destruction: the blowing-up of the Graycloud house in another dynamite attack. Crucially, none of the main characters are killed, despite losing everything they have. Hogan implies, however, that the fact of bare life is enough for these characters because it is the precondition for whatever awaits them once the novel draws to a close.

I also read the next fifty pages of Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking. In this section of the book, Norman discusses Morrison’s Beloved (of course!), the figure of Ethel Rosenberg in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and the character of Clarance in Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Along the way, Norman provides a useful description of what the characters he is discussing all have in common, namely, that they serve as a “conduit between present and past, as well as between those who would otherwise not interact.” Kenan’s short story collection, one might argue, is especially well attuned to the issue of posthumous citizenship in that it is concerned so explicitly with the issue of community formation and maintenance, but for Norman, as for other critics who are looking at various aspects of how the past is neither dead nor past, Beloved is exemplary in its ability to work on various levels simultaneously: “Beloved is not solely a psychoanalytic drama of the return of the repressed for one escaped slave, but also an encounter with the nation’s slaveholding past, including its collective memory of dehumanization and painful severing of African connections.” Norman’s discussions are consistently detailed and thought-provoking, concise and exhaustive all at the same time.

This week I’m teaching Edgar Allan Poe and so I thought I’d take a look at Gordon Hessler’s 1971 version of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poor Poe! The movie has very little to do with his story, being influenced far more by Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, as well as healthy doses of Hammer Horror, Italian giallo, and Grand Guignol. If that list makes the film seem like a bit of a mess, that’s exactly what it is, albeit an entertaining mess at times. Set in a Paris theater around the turn of the twentieth century, it tells the story of a series of murders that, as unlikely as it seems, are apparently being committed by a man who killed himself 12 years before. The dream sequences are done quite well but the only thing that really makes the film worth watching is the cast, which includes Jason Robards and Herbert Lom. I wonder how on earth they were persuaded to be a part of this absurdity?!

Hogan/DeadWomenTalking/ScandalinBohemia

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. I must say that I felt that this section of the novel is treading water a little bit. The divisions between the white and Indian communities are becoming more and more extreme as the ecological devastation intensifies. The severity of the situation is exemplified by two incidents. First, when a group of white men are shooting a colony of bats because they see them as a rabies threat, Belle Graycloud takes an armed stand against the men and is soon joined by other Indians in what is clearly a ‘drawing a line in the sand’ moment. While this line is being drawn another is being erased, so to speak, when the Hill People decide to hide the path to their community, partly because they feel that too many people are finding their way to it, and partly because the situation in Watona is worsening to the extent that they see the town as a form of contagion. These developments are a continuation and intensification of a situation Hogan has been describing for the past 100 pages or so, and there’s a danger that it’s becoming a little repetitive.

I also read the next fifty pages of Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking. Interestingly, Norman’s first two detailed examples of the phenomenon of dead women talking, Madeline Usher from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Miss Jessel from Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” do not actually talk (and in Madeline’s case, are not even dead)! Although Norman makes an interesting case for why these two characters should be considered as precursor figures in his study, he’s on much more solid ground when he proceeds to a discussion of Addie Bundren in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Alice Walker’s search for the gravesite of Zora Neale Hurston. The emphasis remains on how dead women posthumously insist upon their citizenship rights in a community of which they continue to see themselves as active members and on how this insistence on citizenship is potentially reparative: “The literary tradition of dead women talking…holds the power to correct such injustices through a concrete means by which to commune with the dead, especially the forgotten, misremembered, or improperly buried.”

As I’m teaching Conan Doyle again shortly, I also watched the Jeremy Brett incarnation of Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia". One of the nice things about Benedict Cumberbatch’s phenomenally popular reinvention of Holmes in "Sherlock" is that it is so different from Brett’s version that I can enjoy both of them without feeling like I have to choose between them.  Brett’s Holmes is, of course, the more traditionally ‘faithful’ adaptation of the two (a fact cleverly alluded to in the opening credits of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” at those moments when the live action shot pauses and turns into a sepia-colored old photograph) with its lovingly detailed recreation of late-Victorian London, but of course there are still significant differences between Doyle’s story and this version of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Some of the changes are nothing more than mere padding (for example, the annoyingly pointless flashback scenes showing Irene Adler and the King of Bohemia when they were happily in love) but others work far better, as when we get to see Brett show off his acting skills in his impersonations of the disreputable groomsman and the kindly priest, episodes that are merely described by Holmes rather than shown in the original story.

Hogan/Haints/DeadWomenTalking/LeftBehind

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. In this section of the novel, Hogan starts to develop the character of Stace Red Hawk, the federal agent, in more detail. It becomes clear that he has always felt some ambivalence about working for the government, but that ambivalence increases sharply once he comes out to Oklahoma to investigate the deaths. Like many of the other characters in the novel, he feels the pull of the old ways exerting their force on him as the situation around him worsens. Interestingly, Hogan also includes several white characters who become “race traitors” (to use Noel Ignatiev’s resonant phrase) by turning their backs on white privilege and living as Indians. At one point, Hogan references obliquely the 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee and this reminder of the Indian Wars and the genocide of Native Americans throws a new light upon the deaths being investigated in Mean Spirit. Specifically, if this novel is a murder mystery of a kind, what is the meaning of these murders in the context of the attempted murder of an entire race? How does the fact of genocide change the meaning of a Native American crime novel?

I also finished Arthur Redding’s Haints. In this closing section of the book, Redding points to a curious contradiction: contemporary American fiction is thronged with hauntings and ghosts and yet most Americans remain blind to, or in denial about, the gothic nature of our culture. Why? Redding’s answer is innocence, an innocence that Americans insist remains one of their defining qualities: “Innocence, which is always constructed in retrospect (innocence only manifests itself once it is lost, or threatened) is the very denial of haunting.” The project of Redding’s book could be thought of as a sustained attempt to make this denial impossible, but to what end? Although Redding resists reparative readings of some of the texts he analyzes, the closing words of his book resonate with suggestions of healing—both of the past and as part of an effort to imagine alternative futures: “the ghost is a figure by which we might imagine bridges across difference, but also recognize—and honor—that which is lost or sacrificed in any act of exchange or translation or history—that which is abandoned, left behind. The remainder, that haunts us, the ghosts of potential, of alternative.” It’s a beautiful vision, to be sure, but is it true to the darkness of the gothic, to the way it can be dedicated to opening rather than closing wounds?

I also began Brian Norman’s 2013 book Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature. The title is entirely descriptive in that Norman’s focus is on dead women who talk in American literary texts (Beloved, Angels in America, The Lovely Bones) and, increasingly, in popular culture as a whole (Desperate Housewives, Drop Dead Diva). According to Norman, “Dead women tend to talk in American literature when their experiences of death can address an issue of injustice that their communities might prematurely consign to the past.” Crucially, Norman distinguishes these dead women talking from either corpses or ghosts, partly because so much critical work has been done on these figures (and especially on the latter—see, for example, my recent posts on Arthur Redding’s Haints). The fact that these women are embodied, talking, and demanding, Norman argues, differentiates them from mute ghosts. What are they demanding? According to Norman, the answer is citizenship, and interestingly, just as with Arthur Redding, Norman sees Morrison’s character, Beloved, as emblematic: “Beloved inserts herself into the community in search of something else: citizenship.” This demand for citizenship, Norman argues, allows these dead women talking to address “concerns about political ventriloquism, inactive citizenship, posthumous legal rights, and racial blood memory.” In other words, there is a lot at stake.

I also watched Left Behind, Vic Sarin’s 2000 film based on the phenomenally popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The film tells the story of reporter Buck Williams, played by former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, who finds himself involved in a series of strange events that he comes to believe are the beginning of the Apocalypse, with the Rapture spiriting millions of believers to heaven while those who are ‘left behind’ witness the rise of the Antichrist in the form of Nicolae Carpathia, the head of the United Nations. This is one of those films that it’s impossible to be neutral about. If you’re an evangelical Christian, you may love it, and if you’re an atheist, as I am, it is hilariously bad. The acting is appallingly wooden, the production looks cheap and shoddy, and things move so slowly that one finds oneself wanting the Day of Judgment to arrive as soon as possible, just to relieve the tedium. Fun fact: Nicolas Cage is scheduled to star in a 2014 remake of Left Behind. If that’s not a sign of the impending apocalypse, I don’t know what is!

Hogan/Haints/ReelInjun

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. In this section of the novel Hogan draws some very effective contrasts between life-affirming events and the continuing presence of death. In doing so, she suggests not so much (or not only) that death is never very far away, but that life and death are inevitably intertwined. For example, when Nola agrees to marry Will Forrest (despite the fact that she is only 13 years old), she does so not primarily because she loves Will (although Hogan suggests that she does) but because she knows that by moving out of the Graycloud house she will save her family from the danger that continues to surround her as Grace’s heir. Similarly, on the day after Benoit and Lettie get married (a marriage that is partly inspired by Lettie’s feeling that Benoit will spend the rest of his life in jail), Benoit is found hanged in his cell, an apparent suicide but very possibly yet another murder victim. Apart from the identity of the killer(s), the other mystery is what exactly Hogan is going to do with the character of Stace Red Hawk, the Lakota Sioux federal investigator who has come to Oklahoma to try and get to the bottom of what is going on, but who has so far played a very minor role in this first part of the novel.

I also read the next fifty pages of Arthur Redding’s Haints. In this section of the book, Redding discusses the crucial and persistently undervalued work of Toni Cade Bambara (specifically her novels The Salt Eaters and These Bones are Not My Child) and makes a very interesting point about her use of the conditional ‘might have’ form: “This might have too is a kind of ghosting, the haunting of what exists by the alternate paths, the choices not taken, and these alternative futures too fully inform the present and must be honored and recognized as such.” Redding’s words not only indicate the complex temporality of his notion of the gothic that I discussed in yesterday’s post, but also address his persistent emphasis on possibility as a function of the gothic. This is why he resists Mark Edmundson’s suggestion that “American gothic is destined to be politically debilitating or sterile.” To this end, Redding emphasizes the open-endedness of contemporary gothic texts, minimizing the extent to which they are healing or reparative, and instead emphasizing how, even in their apocalyptic variant, they envision “the living productions and productivity of bleakness, of despair, far beyond anything we might envision as hope.” This emphasis on the productive dimensions of catastrophe provides Redding with a way of contextualizing the seeming nihilism that animates such texts as Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and E.L. Doctorow’s City of God.

I also watched Neil Diamond’s 2009 documentary Reel Injun, a thorough, thought-provoking, and moving study of the representation of Native Americans in film. Diamond acts as the film’s narrator as he travels across the US visiting iconic sites in both Native American history and cinematic history. The travelogue format works really well, as Diamond intersperses clips from various films with interviews with luminaries such as Russell Means and Sacheen Littlefeather, as well as with other lesser-known Native American film critics and filmmakers. The arc of the film is optimistic in the sense that it traces a gradual progression in how Native American culture has been represented in film, but its closing celebration of the film Atanarjurat may be a little too uplifting for some, considering the many problems that native communities are still struggling with. High points for me included the surprising claim that the silent era was, oddly enough, a kind of high point for the representation of Native Americans in film, along with an interesting question that get asked but not answered in any detail: why did Native Americans more or less drop out of American film during the 1980s?

Hogan/Haints/Room237

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. Hogan makes it clear that the murders of the Indians are also in a sense an attack on the natural order itself. In a heartbreaking scene, Hogan describes hunters who have killed 317 golden eagles in order to ship them back to the East Coast and sell them to taxidermists. These same hunters inadvertently start a fire that destroys, among other things, an ancient copse of trees and the almost apocalyptic overtones that Hogan gives to her description of the fire suggests that the whites have a purely instrumental attitude towards Indians and nature, seeing them as exploitable resources that will and can be used up until they’re exhausted. The responses of the Indian characters to this situation vary widely. Some, like Moses, seem resigned and defeated. Some, like Michael Horse, move further away from the whites seeking sanctuary in nature. Some, like Nola, try to resist in whatever ways they can. And some, who have accommodated themselves to the white world, begin to rethink that accommodation and contemplate going back to the old ways. The sense of personal and environmental turmoil and disruption that Hogan creates skillfully is visceral and widespread.

I also read the first fifty pages of Arthur Redding's 2011 book Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions. In some ways, Redding is following in the footsteps of critics like Teresa Goddu and Mark Edmundson, and even Leslie Fiedler, in trying to account for both the history and the continuing prevalence of gothic narratives in American culture. What sets Redding’s work apart, however, is the complicated sense of temporality that he develops in his examination of the gothic. While concentrating for the most part on twentieth-century and contemporary texts, Redding also has his sights fixed firmly on the past when he argues that the gothic is a way for Americans to come to terms with the ghosts of the past, and not only the past that actually took place, but also alternative pasts that were never allowed to come into being. But Redding is not concerned exclusively with the past, but also with futurity, and not just the future as apocalypse, but also with the gothic as a form of future-oriented possibility: “The American ghostly…signifies a relative liberation from historical servitude: It is a ghost of alternative, of potential, of possibility. This potential may damn or destroy us, as in the apocalyptic gothic…it may, alternatively, lead to salvation of a sort.” In this first section of the book, Redding pursues this argument through readings of Jamaica Kincaid, Isabel Allende, Henry James, and, inevitably, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison is exemplary for Redding for the way in which she finds “ways of speaking to and through the dead, by inventing alternative possibilities out of silence itself.”

I also watched Room 237,  Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, in which various enthusiasts explain their theories about the (hidden) meanings of the film. Ironically, I found the theories themselves to be the least interesting aspect of the film, perhaps because I wasn’t really persuaded by any of them. Instead, what really impressed me about this movie is the way it functions as a love letter to the medium of film as a whole, the way it serves as a prime example of exactly how and why people get obsessed about a favorite movie. In this respect, Room 237 is a wonderful experience. The film also reflects the continuing influence of auteur theory in the sense that nearly every claim made about The Shining’s hidden meanings attributes both intentionality and complete artistic control to Kubrick. This fact makes the nod toward the postmodern attack on authorial intentionality toward the end of Room 237 quite ironic, because this nod flies in the face of the way that the rest of the film emphasizes Kubrick’s genius. Ascher makes a very smart decision in not showing us any of the speakers, but instead accompanying their words with clips from The Shining and other Kubrick movies. Had we been shown the speakers, I think we would have become preoccupied with (judging them based on) their appearance. Instead, Ascher’s decision enables us to stay focused on what they have to say. For me, the immediate impact of the film was to make me want to watch The Shining and Kubrick’s other films again as soon as possible and perhaps that’s the highest compliment I can pay to Room 237.

Hogan/Golem/SuddenImpact

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. The death toll increases rapidly in this section of the novel and all of the deaths occur under mysterious circumstances. One victim is blown up in her house, another seems to have had a heart attack but could have been poisoned, and a third is found by the side of a road having been shot through the neck. There could be a connection between these deaths and that of Grace Blanket, but when Grace’s body is exhumed to try and determine whether she committed suicide or was murdered, the body turns out to be missing. One thing Hogan is unambiguous about: the exploitation of the Indians, where they can be cheated out of the money owed them by the state and even declared legally incompetent and made wards of the state if they resist, creates the ideal context and motive for their murder. We see this practice at work when John Hale, the local oil baron, takes out life insurance policies on Indians who owe him money. Hale’s ostensible reason for doing this is to give the Indians another option when they don’t have the money to pay him, but it obviously makes him a prime suspect in any of their deaths. Is Hale the suspect who is such an obvious choice that he can’t possibly be the real murderer? The answer to that question will depend on how closely Hogan follows the conventions of the mystery novel.

I also finished The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. In this final section of the book, Baer discusses another eclectic group of texts: novels by Cynthia Ozick (The Puttermesser Papers, 1995), Thane Rosenbaum (The Golems of Gotham 2002), and Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket! Watch Your Mouth 2000), as well as “Kaddish," a 1997 episode of The X-Files. An unusual and interesting feature of some of these texts is that a female character creates the golem, and in the case of Ozick, the golem is also female. Baer’s analyses at their best are consistently thought-provoking, but also wildly divergent in terms of length; her discussion of Ozick is probably too detailed (especially in terms of plot summary), while her discussion of Handler amounts to little more than a couple of pages. The consistent emphasis is on how these texts, despite their differences, validate the importance of creativity and imagination in a post-Holocaust context: “Imaginative literature, we see, is viable—not only viable but absolutely essential to help readers ponder identity, grasp the failings and triumphs of human nature, discern what we can of divinity, and achieve social justice (and, sometimes, even laugh).”

I also watched Sudden Impact (1983),  the fourth (and highest-grossing) film in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ series, and the only one in the series directed by Eastwood himself. It’s a peculiar combination of a typical Dirty Harry film and a rape-revenge movie a la Ms. 45, with Sondra Locke’s character avenging herself against those men who gang-raped her and her sister ten years earlier. Despite the fact that Harry Callahan is investigating the murders, he ends up framing one of the rapists for the revenge murders because he agrees with Locke’s idea of ends-oriented justice. There’s an element of seemingly progressive thinking in the film inasmuch as the rapists are presented as scumbags (some of whom are pillars of their community, and all of whom are ordinary) and the trauma of the rape is conveyed unflinchingly. But on the whole it’s hard to imagine a film that conveys more perfectly the conservative law and order perspective of the Reagan era. Both Clint Eastwood’s and Sondra Locke’s characters are meant to be admired for doing whatever it takes to punish criminals when an ineffective and corrupt judicial system can’t do the job. Its success at the box office demonstrates how much this message resonated at the time.

Hogan/Golem/FistofFury

Today I read the first fifty pages of Linda Hogan's 1990 novel Mean Spirit. Hogan is a Chickasaw writer who was known mainly for her poetry for the first part of her career. Mean Spirit, which was her first novel, tells the story of the persecution of Oklahoma Indians in the 1920s. The basis of the persecution is the fact that the Indians live on oil-rich land and the background of Hogan’s story involves the mysterious deaths of a number of local Indian residents. The main focus of this first section of the novel is the murder of Grace Blanket and the impact of that murder on her family and friends. Although Mean Spirit could be classified as a mystery novel, Hogan invests most of her time recreating the culture and lifeways of the Indian characters in the novel, drawing contrasts not only between full-bloods and mixed-bloods, but also between the ‘Hill People,’ who have deliberately resisted the ways of white people, and those Indians who live in and around the small town of Watona, where the action of the novel takes place. One thing is immediately clear in the aftermath of Grace’s murder—her daughter, Nola, will inherit her mother’s oil-based wealth. Consequently, if her mother’s murder was indeed motivated by the desire to acquire her land, Nola is now in danger.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. This is easily my favorite section of the book so far, partly because Baer discusses the relationship between comics and the Golem figure, a relationship that she tracks through a wide variety of texts, including a Marvel Comics strip featuring the Golem, James Sturm’s graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing  (2001), and novels by Pete Hamill and Michael Chabon. Baer not only tracks the crucial Jewish contribution to comics and the graphic novel, but also argues for the superhero (beginning with Superman) as a kind of golem figure: “He defends the innocent and the unfairly persecuted, he has superhuman size and strength, and he believes in the possibility of tikkun olam, repair of the world.” Apart from the interesting texts she discusses, however, this section of Baer’s book is also strong because she is so much more open-minded in her approach to the changes these texts make to the legend of the golem than she was in her earlier discussion of golem films. She lets go of the requirement that all intertextual appropriations should be ‘faithful,’ and in doing so she is able to both appreciate and convey the creativity with which the golem figure’s relation to the comics genre has been treated by a variety of writers.

Sometimes, only a martial arts movie will do, so today I watched Bruce Lee in his second major film role, Fist of Fury (1972). Directed by Lo Wei (who also appears in the film as a police officer), Fist stars Lee as Chen Zhen, a martial arts student who seeks revenge when his teacher is murdered. The film is set in early twentieth century Shanghai and, like many of Lee’s other films, addresses the context of imperialism both explicitly and thoughtfully, with Lee’s character defending the honor of the Chinese against the evil Japanese villains. Lee’s charisma and his incredible fighting skills are both on full display here, but you may be surprised by his abilities as an actor. The scene where he cons his way into the Japanese dojo by disguising himself as a mild-mannered and harmless telephone repairman is absolutely charming. You can find an excellent essay by Keziah Wallis on Bruce Lee as the masculine embodiment of Chinese nationalism in Fist here.