As it has often been said, movies teach you how to watch them. This pedagogy can take on almost Pavlovian forms as in the case of horror movies such as Jaws, which teaches you to treat a few notes on a tuba as terrifying. However, every film instructs you how to view it, and a lot of the struggle with watching different kinds of films has to with learning how to see things differently. If you come to a Béla Tarr film with John Woo habits you are going to be bored. Our viewing habits make our viewing practices. A lot of our debates about attention are about this process of learning, of how we have had our capacity for attention reduced. Netflix films made to be watched while doing laundry or scrolling on our phone prepare us to watch other films the same way, and when they cannot be viewed that way we get confused. Every film teaches you how to watch it, but only one film I can think of tells you where you should watch it and that film is The Last Dragon, or, as we are supposed to call Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon.
I am thinking of one scene in particular that occurs early on in the film. It shows a packed theater watching Enter the Dragon. Watching is the wrong word, they are not just passively sitting there taking it in, they are reciting lines, throwing popcorn, offering their own commentary. It is cinema as a mass art, as Walter Benjamin, would argue, an art for the masses and by the masses. I have memories of going to screenings like that on the east side of Cleveland growing up, where the audience was part of the show. I am not sure where I saw The Last Dragon, but the film is pretty clear--this movie is best seen with an audience who knows how to break the fourth wall. The scene also makes clear that this film cannot be viewed by itself. Unless you have seen, unless you love, the films of Bruce Lee, this movie is not for you. This is a movie not just about Bruce Lee, his cultural impact, but the particular connection forged between Kung Fu movies and black culture.
The Enter the Dragon scene is the film's origin story, apparently the idea for the film was hatched when the screenwriter, Louis Venosta saw a tenth anniversary screening of the film in a packed theater in Harlem. I will argue that it is the best scene in the whole film, the edits that constantly set up parallels between the action on the screen and the antics in the theater are so much fun to watch. Watching the film again, I was reminded of Alain Badiou's remarks about cinema as a democratic art. One of the things that Badiou writes about in that text, that I never could relate to, is the moment when a bad film transcends itself to become something else. I know that it happens, but I have always been hard picked to come up with examples. As Badiou writes,
"This is the great democratic advantage of the art of cinema: you can go there on a Saturday evening to rest and rise unexpectedly. Aristotle said that if we do good, pleasure will come “as a gift.” When we see a film it is often the other way around: we feel an immediate pleasure, often suspect (thanks to the omnipresent non-art), and the Good (of art) comes as an unexpected bonus.
In cinema we travel to the pure from the impure. This is not the case in the other arts. Could you deliberately go and see bad painting? Bad painting is bad painting; there is little hope it will change into something good. You will not rise. From the simple fact that you are there, lost in bad painting, you are already falling, you are an aristocrat in distress. Whereas in cinema you are always more or less a democrat on the rise. Therein lies the paradoxical relation. The paradoxical relationship between aristocracy and democracy, which is finally an internal relationship between art and non-art. And this is also what politicizes cinema: it operates on a junction between ordinary opinions and the work of thought. A subtle junction that you don’t find in the same form elsewhere."
Those few moments in the movie theater the movie rises, both formally in its use of montage, and in terms of its history. It is the moment when the film is both most artificial, most self-conscious about being a film, and most real, most true to what the film is really about. It is not a film about "the glow," about becoming a master, or even defeating the Shogun of Harlem. It is a film about watching kung fu movies.
The Last Dragon is not a good film, not by any stretch, but it is a film punctuated by moments that rise to something like the cult classic it became. The Bruce Lee montage is one such scene, Julius J. Carry III portrayal of Sho'nuff is another. It is for this reason that the film continues to have effects into the present. It is even cited in Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, the speech that Detroit (Tessa Thompson) gives as part of her performance is cited from the film. (I actually have a lot of questions about that particular intertextual moment.)
The Asian World of Martial Arts Catalog was a big part of my misspent youth
As I white kid in suburban Cleveland I was not the film's target audience, but I loved the film. As kid taking Karate and Tae Kwon Do classes people would constantly bring up The Karate Kid to me, but I never connected to it. Watching The Last Dragon again I understand the source of the connection. When "Bruce" Leeroy Green (Taimak) dons a ninja suit to show up to rescue Laura Graham (Vanity) the suit he wears is the same that you could buy from Asian World of Martial Arts, along with the throwing stars and nunchucks. The Karate Kid may have been close to the kinds of Karate Tournaments that used to take up my weekends as kid, but The Last Dragon understood that the appeal of martial films is in the fantasy not the reality. I do not have much more to say about the film, but watching it again made me want to punch Quentin Tarantino.
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