Fan tales about Bruce Lee

July 20 marked the martial arts hero’s 50th death anniversary. Showtime recalls the many stories celebrating him

The actor and Marilyn Bautista in ‘The Big Boss’ (1971)

Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury (1972).

Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’ (1973).

The most deeply etched image of him in my head is not even real.

I had a classmate named Victor in standard V who had been left behind by his batch. He failed all subjects, and couldn’t spell or do basic arithmetic. We got to talking between interminable drill practice for sports day, and found that he too was a fan. He had seen every one of the films that had come to Bangalore, and had pieced together the tragic story of our hero’s death from a piece in ‘Dina Sudar’, the Tamil eveninger, which his grandmother read out to him. He didn’t really die, Victor said. That’s just a story that the Chinese government put out. They didn’t want anybody to give out their secrets. They’ve locked him up in a room with impossibly high walls and no windows, and they feed him once a day. If you go anywhere near, you can hear him practising, and saying what he will do to everyone who locked him up.

For some reason, this story was oddly satisfying. It had the crazy truth-iness of dreams. I never let go of it, and began to dream extravagant versions of this story where I heard his voice, and tunnelled through, or broke in through the tiles with a length of unwinding rope at my waist and another coiled around my arm for him to take, and hoist and climb, or something.

Did Bruce Lee speak to me and to millions of other small boys, and men? I’d say that the harsh cries that flew out of his mouth as he did impossible things with hands and feet were the birdsong from which some kind of a dawning came. Victor became somebody truer to his name as he filled our heads with Lee lore. The Dragon films were the first ones I watched more than once. Perhaps we saw in him a person who knew how to be one. Perhaps we knew we had encountered a magic more real than the trick shots and camera lies that were the staples of our time. Perhaps we recognised somebody like ourselves, a person without any real address, finding a way to dignity and self-respect. I can only fail at conveying to you the rapture that filled our limbs as we sat in dark cinema halls soaking up this strange flying apparition several times larger than our collective selves.

We went into the Bruce Lee filmography upside down.

This we, incidentally, includes my father, who transmitted his enthusiasm to me wordlessly. He taught Tamil literature at a college, but for some reason, never missed a single martial arts film.

‘Enter the Dragon’, which released after Lee’s death, ran for an eternity at Galaxy Theatre in 1977 and then went straight to T-shirt. I owned one eventually, a flimsy pink rag with his beautiful snarl and upraised nunchaku, while the all-caps text below blazoned forth the title of the film. I was five, and in love.

After a two-year wait, filled with stories we made up about him, and complicated theories about who the dragon in the title actually was, we got to watch a film titled ‘Return of the Dragon’, often known as ‘Way of the Dragon’. I remember the tennis-ball-sized lump in my throat when he puts his cloak on Chuck Norris’ body after defeating him.

‘Fist of Fury’ came to Symphony in 1982, and for weeks before and after this arrival we little boys fought in the lunch-break over whether Bruce Lee dies in the film. Had to be that said the realists, who were in the minority. The romantics, me included, out-shouted this garbage, and said that when he flew into the air, it was to kill all those jackasses despite their guns.

His breakthrough film, ‘The Big Boss’, came only in 1983. I’ve forgotten which theatre, but what I remember, apart from the fights which had me biting into my own lips in excitement, were two quieter moments. One was the first sex scene I had ever come across. I didn’t know where to look, and neither did my father, and yet I somehow remember every moment. A minute later he comes to his senses, and starts stumbling out and breaks into a run when he sees the woman he slept with. My father burst into a guffaw at this, and I wondered why.

The next one to come, in 1984, was a strange compilation titled ‘The Green Hornet’ which spliced together several episodes from a TV series he had sidekicked in before becoming a star. I watched it in Imperial out of loyalty, and cheered during the three minutes of limelight that they gave him.

In between these films, there were the Shaolin films, and that groovy Jim Kelly’s Black Belt Jones, and the Bruce Lie films starring various lookalikes named Bruce Li and Bruce Le and worse, but his films were the main event, filling the month of their arrival with a burst of Technicolor.

I’ve rewatched ‘Enter the Dragon’ endlessly, and see a million things I missed the first time, and several times after. It created an appetite, and an audience. Some part of it was the tragedy of finding a prince, losing him, and grieving for him. Another part of it was cinema returning to the kineticism in its name, a mode in which speeches were not so important, a mode in which one could be in the moment, be in charge, and do it without words.