Retrospective on Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Film Platypus

It's now been eleven years since Ang Lee's masterpiece "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" took American theater-goers by storm.  I remember being in the theater and thinking "I've never seen anything like this."  Even "The Matrix" didn't come close."  The sword fight in the bamboo forest, in particular, is a great moment in Film.  Everything about the movie is excellent: the costumes, the sets, the nuanced acting, the lighting and cinematography.  It's truly a feast for the eyes and opened up the American mainstream (for a time at least) for other pieces like "Hero" or "The House of Flying Daggers."  These subsequent films, however, didn't make as much of a splash and American interest in Hong Kong period dramas has waned.

Granted, "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" was exceptional, why the loss of mainstream interest in the genre (there will always be geeks and hipsters who go in for foreign film)?  I think I can take a stab at it.  The most obvious is the cultural barrier.  Foreign films require an extra effort from an audience in order to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers to understanding.  It's not just that people don't like to read subtitles.  Decoding another culture takes time, and it can be frustrating to watch a film whiz by and not have the time to ask a friend a clarifying question or pause to puzzle out an obscure act or turn of phrase.  At home with a DVD player it's possible to press the pause button, but most Americans watch film as a mere amusement and stopping to puzzle out a cultural difference "spoils the fun."  I think there is also a deeper level.  Since they began importing them to the U.S., I have seen four major Hong Kong period pieces: "Raise the Red Lantern," "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon," "House of Flying Daggers," and "Hero."  All four movies are tragedies.

Tragedy doesn't sit well with Americans, especially modern ones.  It cuts against the grain of what some scholars have labeled the "Therapeutic Worldview."  You may be familiar with a related offshoot "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."  Briefly put, the Therapeutic Worldview teaches that all human problems can be solved by applying the appropriate scientific technique: medicinal, technical, or psychological.  In this understanding of the world, unhappy endings are entirely preventable.  They represent a mere failure of human ingenuity.  This flies in the face of what classicist Victor Davis Hanson has labeled the "Tragic Worldview."  The Tragic Worldview sees human life as a fragile tension easily swept away by competing forces that can only be controlled to a very limited degree.  In the Tragic Worldview, there can be no truly happy endings as death and entropy will always triumph in the end.  Looking at the four films listed above, the worldview behind the movies that have made it to the U.S. is distinctly Tragic.  Thus, the loss of mainstream interest in these films after the initial splash of "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" may be rooted in a fundamental disagreement about the way that the cosmos works.  Simply put: American audiences want films that affirm and don't contradict their picture of the world.  Narrow minded?  Perhaps, but it's very human.

So what can we learn eleven years later from Ang Lee's masterpiece?  First, we can learn to be stretched.  Great art is out there if we're willing to do the work to get it.  Second, we can allow our view of the world to be challenged.  In the movie, Jen lives the American fantasy of gaining enough power to "follow her heart."  Of course, being a fifteen year old girl, that means playing out in a confused and puerile fashion all her day-dreams lifted from the pages of pulp novels.  The results are disastrous and irrevocable.  Therapy cannot bring Li Mu Bai back, nor can proper medicine reach him in time to save him.  Jen is forgiven and allowed to live, but in the end the knowledge of what she has done poisons any hope for future happiness.  It is a tragedy.  We could posit that in the Brave New World, such problems could never arise, but the challenge is still there.  Is the tragic ending of the movie the result of mere social forces or is it rooted in an immutable human nature?  That's a question worth asking and worth two hours of our time and energy to bring up.