I was having a bad day. I felt physically unwell. I want to cry about things both large and small. The weight of the world had landed. When I got home, I made it to the couch, where I could barely lift my head or get up to pee. But I knew what I needed. I needed to watch the last 20 minutes of The Young Master, a movie that Jackie Chan made in 1980, and his first film with the studio Golden Harvest.
After mistakenly consuming water from an opium pipe, which grants Jackie Chan the invulnerability of a madman, he finds a new well of strength. He is Lazarus, rising from the dead. He uses his stamina to out-weather the stronger, more skillful man, who is too exhausted to continue. Despite being pummeled, Jackie Chan never gives up, and that quality, that stay-puttedness, wins out.
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Around the time of the insurrection, I had a bleak but humorous realization. Perhaps I was taking refuge in the same kind of simplistic narratives as the unmasked crusaders storming the capital, seeking heroism. The archetype of the everyman is dangerous and alluring when it involves believing that we are individually supposed to play the hero. How funny, I noted, that it was proving such an effective balm for me. Any archetype so large and all-encompassing can be many things to many people. What were these stories doing for my psyche? Why were they working so well for me right now? Why had Jackie Chan become my hero?
The film\u2019s finale is a 20-minute fight scene. The plot is not why I watch Jackie Chan movies (and I always call him by his full name. It only seems right). Here is a quick synopsis of the lead-up: A young Jackie Chan accosts a criminal named Kam to prevent him from fleeing town. Kam is a far more competent martial artist than our \u201Cyoung master,\u201D who has so far shown himself to be sub-par. Everything is on the line\u2014which isn\u2019t actually so very much. For most of the subsequent fight, Kam literally whoops Jackie Chan\u2014up, down, sideways, all ways, like Kam is a spirited kid playing tether ball and Jackie Chan is the ball. They are fighting on a dusty, dirty outcropping on a hot day. Jackie Chan takes brief water breaks, gets advice from a mysterious, vaguely suspicious man, and then goes back in to get whooped. I\u2019ve never seen someone work so hard to make it look like the other actor is kicking their ass. Jackie Chan is throwing himself with every little punch, flying many feet, rolling, tumbling, flipping. It\u2019s incredibly acrobatic and athletic, like watching an Olympic gymnast. Someone else might compare this scene to the WWF, but I would say its more like a Simone Biles\u2019 floor routine.
Throughout the scene, while barely swiveling my pathetic head to the right, I would grin at my partner Corey, who had joined me on a nearby couch. I was starting to feel okay, like myself\u2014a little bit tough and goofy. The movie was doing what I knew it would\u2014both cheer me up and distract me. I would say it was an escape, but it was more like a kind of medicine.
Confession: I watched and thought an enormous amount about Jackie Chan in the last year. I became obsessed with Jackie Chan movies around one month into the pandemic, before George Floyd\u2019s murder but after the body count in New York was mounting, toilet paper had run out, and our lives had shrunken in size. In April, I mistakenly thought the collection that the Criterion channel put up was going to be removed at the end of the month and so in a panic I decided to watch all seven movies they\u2019d presented within a few weeks. After my first taste, Jackie Chan movies seemed like the only thing that was giving me a sense of silliness and pleasure that I recognized from my past life. By past life, I don\u2019t just mean before COVID-19 appeared, although that too, but also childhood before puberty, the kind of silliness that makes you make voices, climb to the top of something and jump down, make up games that involve inordinate amounts of hopping\u2014this loose and sprawling before times, which were definitely not the present.
In order to stay present and engaged, I needed a periodic escape from the current reality, something that took me out of my emotional pain, and I found it in the completely ridiculous, masterfully choreographed, and delightfully weird movies of Jackie Chan. I kept up my life, trying to do A, B, and C, but in the interstices, I watched all seven in the Criterion collection, and then more. Whenever a friend came over for a bonfire, I tried to convince them to watch Fearless Hyena, Police Story 2, Snake in the Eagle\u2019s Shadow. My friend Eric loaned me the autobiography of Jackie Chan, I am Jackie Chan, which he owned, to my chagrin. I read it with a perpetual grin on my face. My brother Zak started bit-torrenting more obscure movies, and even when I didn\u2019t like them, I liked the way they added to my growing expertise\u2014ah yes, I would think to myself, this familiar formula, where he looks like he\u2019s going to lose! Ah yes, a wall to run up, a window to run through, a bicycle to commandeer, a silver-haired maestro who shines with marvelous malevolence! When Zak and I took a hike and found ourselves on a rocky outcropping, he asked, \u201CI wonder what Jackie Chan would do with this set piece?\u201D Suddenly, that question was always in my mind. What would he do at this intersection, with this building under construction, on this pile of rubble?
The final fight scene in The Young Master, and Jackie Chan\u2019s movies writ large, reminded me of a few things I wanted to be reminded of. On the simplest level, he teaches his fans the power of stamina. Every Jackie Chan finale is the story of near defeat, of hope almost vanquished, of exhaustion and inferiority challenging you to your last iota of strength. Jackie Chan almost always plays a pathetic character, someone who is boorish, self-involved, youthfully overconfident, and completely lacking in discernment and skills. He is not cool and collected. He is not Bruce Lee. He must go through a humiliating defeat that shows his hubris and crudeness. He must undergo a reckoning and refine his raw potential, often, in the early movies, with the help of an older, more seasoned, impish man. Then, he must fight his enemies again, for, well, all kinds of reasons, but usually some vision of goodness, and in that fight he must face near defeat. He must dredge up some kind of superhuman ability to suffer and from that pit, find an inexplicable strength. He wins through a sprinkle of cleverness and an ocean of will power. The last one standing is the winner, and that\u2019s the truth. Fall down seven times; get up eight. I let my mind extrapolate from these movies many personal lessons, albeit often ridiculous ones, fitted perfectly to this moment in history when staying put and stamina were the only options.
Jackie Chan plays an everyman underdog in these movies\u2014he usually begins with everything stacked against him. (He is also incredibly unaware of his effect on others and myopically absorbed by his own situation.) In the end, he is heroic, victorious. In Umberto Eco\u2019s exceptional essay, Ur-Fascism, he writes that under fascism, \u201CEverybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm.\u201D
What had been my escape mechanism\u2014Jackie Chan movies\u2014became a strange filter I used to think about my relationship to the present political reality. Like children playing with puppets as a way to talk about their feelings, I leaned into these movies to explore my own mind. I also just honestly enjoyed them! Since this was a rabbit hole I went down so deeply, I thought I would take a few newsletters, unfurling over the coming weeks, to share what I learned. Welcome to this bizarre deep dive on Jackie Chan. To be continued\u2026
In his second film as director, Chan plays Dragon, a young Chinese man who attends a martial arts school. After their rivals humiliate the school in a show-stopping Lion Dance, and Chan covers for his friend Tiger too many times, he is thrown out by the Master. The plot follows his comic adventures before he must face the ultimate showdown with a villainous super-kicker and criminal (Hwang In Shik).
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