Fifteen thoughts about Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon
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• Bruce Lee is reflective and sensitive. Still many, many people would like to kill him, especially with knives.
• Bruce Lee looks good in white. Actually, he looks good in black, too.
• Bruce Lee seems to have a sense of humor before or after he kills someone, but usually more so before (afterwards he tends to be reflective.)
• When people walk towards him to kill him, they all walk in step or in formation; left, right, left, right. Very gently.
• Bruce Lee chews gum. It relaxes him.
• The other channel has a man putting a worm up his nose.
• Another channel shows a man in a pink bunny suit being attacked by a large pit bull dog. But his suit is so thick that the jaws do not penetrate to the skin although he does later admit that he was rather scared when the dog pulled off his bunny head with one quick thrusting motion.
• It was almost the same motion that Bruce Lee used when he fought Kareem Abdul Jabar in another movie many years ago. The movie, though, has aged well because the themes it addresses are so timeless.
• Once I decided that I needed a new style to define the new “me.”
I was walking along the street in New York City and I saw the Capezzio store-I do not know if it is still there. It was very close to the Haagen-Dazs store, which I bet is not still there. Capezios seemed, at the time, like the perfect accent to the new ‘me’ which I wished to define: an accent of lightweight, flexible ballet shoes in a variety of colors. I could wear a different pair every day; each pair would enhance as well as reaffirm my definition. Because of my affection for the classics, I liked the black ones best. They look just like the ones that Bruce Lee wears.
• The clouds in Bruce Lee movies look like penises.
• A friend told me that Bruce Lee had a knife to his throat exactly 498 times in the course of his movie career. How could he know that? No one could really know that. First of all, did this include Bruce Lee during his movie career when he was not filming a movie, but relaxing at home with a plate of s’mores, or perhaps going to the movies on a date? Secondly, this friend of mine’s name was Chip.
• When Bruce Lee has killed a number of people, and once he has killed the last person, he likes to look at his hand and his hand will begin to tremble quite violently. He has a look in his eyes at times like this - one that is hard to describe except perhaps as a look of insanity - and yet while he is killing people he seems to look very relaxed. Once he winked, I think.
• Bruce Lee once killed a man who was wearing glasses and holding a bird cage but he didn’t kill the birds. Instead, they flew out of the broken bird cage from the branch of the tree that Bruce Lee had thrown the birdcage onto. Away they flew, light as tiny feathers, somewhere in China or Hong Kong.
• Blood in Bruce Lee isn’t blood red: it has a lot of orange in it. It is thick, like pudding made with milk rather than water, but orange in appearance, not chocolaty.
• Why do people keep trying to kill Bruce Lee? Don’t they know who he is? Surely, someone has seen him do what he does before this movie. You would think that once as a group of desperadoes surrounded him with knives caked with orangey blood under the penisy cloudy skies, that once, at least, one of them would say to themselves: “Hey! That’s Bruce Lee! No way am I getting near him, even with a knife, for surely that same knife will end up soon enough in my groin, and even if brave Lee trembles with remorse or becomes insane, it will not be sufficient recompense, for I will be dead with a knife thrust deep into my groin.” And then slowly, surreptitiously and stealthily, the prudent assailant would pace backwards as the others rushed forwards, and he would leave his life of crime forever, content to watch Bruce Lee only in the movies with his wife and kids, rather than, well, you know.
And perhaps he would even feel a bit melancholy when Bruce Lee dies, as he did, and think, “Well, he was a master of his craft, and he shouldn’t have died so young, and he was awfully good at what he did, even though what he did wasn’t awfully good, but then again, who am I to judge?”
At which point he would pick up the baseball mitt and go outside for a game of catch with his son, who was happy that his father was alive, even though he didn’t know it.
It would be just like Dante’s Inferno, when things started to get a little better.
And I know that it doesn’t make complete sense, but Bruce Lee seldom does.
Ricky Garni is trying to make sense of it all.