The Awakening of the "Lion"

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Regarding the entire Hong Kong martial arts movie trend from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, I also had a discussion with a Hong Kong friend, and I said with a smile: "Look at the most representative and influential movie genre in Hong Kong, which is full of It’s full of Great China’s approval.” My friend heard my overtones and replied lightly: “That’s because you were closed to the outside world at that time, and Hong Kong was willing to show the charm of ancient civilization to the outside world.” I naturally heard her words. sound.

Of course, I also understand the origin of her "Voice over Words" - almost 20 years ago, she just returned from studying in the UK, and she went into more than a dozen provinces in the mainland by herself for a long-term tour. I think since then She suffers from something like "traumatic stress syndrome" (but I don't think she will admit it) and there is no cure until now. What's more, the things that hurt her at that time, perhaps the stimulation to her has not weakened, but has become increasingly stronger.

So, I wanted to find a very representative Hong Kong film as an opportunity to talk about the questions I asked my friends.

This is the "Once Upon a Time" series starring Jet Li starred by Tsui Hark, including three "Once Upon a Time", "Once Upon a Time of Man" and "Once Upon a Time in the Lion King's Contest."

There is a lion myth about China that has spread far and wide in the past century. "China is a sleeping lion. When the sleeping lion wakes up, the world will tremble." This sentence has been verified by many historians. However, this does not prevent the Chinese from using these words to motivate themselves in times of national crisis and to seek hope of rebirth in the predicament. It doesn't matter whether Napoleon said this or not. What matters is that we are very willing to believe that he did give China such expectations. So that for a hundred years, the lion has become a symbol of the Chinese people. People look forward to the awakening of the lion and "the world trembles".

Why the Chinese people are so obsessed with "awakening", I think, to a large extent it was created by the inherent "barbarian concept" in China for thousands of years. The reason why China is "China" is that it is in the center of the world. , "Yangyang China", and other ethnic groups in this world, it is inevitable that they are regarded as barbarians, barbarians, and barbarians.

Strictly speaking, this idea was correct to some extent before the Yuan Dynasty. China was indeed the most civilized country in the world. This has long been proved by various historical materials: compared with other countries in the world at that time, Physically speaking, for example, highly developed shipping, trade network and social security system (the Song reached its peak), spiritually, “the old and the old and the old, the young and the young and the young”, “the benevolent loves others” ”, “The Sheji is the most important for the ruler”, “Propriety, righteousness, integrity and shame”, the etiquette norms and moral concepts of “the state of the gentleman”, etc. Not to mention the high prosperity of culture and art…

Around 1840, the "barbarians" with strong ships and sharp guns slammed open the country's door with one to one hundred or even one to ten thousand. People suddenly discovered that "barbarians" were the center of the world, even in the "old, my old and the old". The barbarians also seem to be doing better than the "Benevolence of China" in terms of "the old, the young, the young and the young", "the benevolent loves others", "the ruler is the most important", "propriety, righteousness and shame", and "the state of the gentleman". .

This kind of fall is so heavy, so heavy that we, who have a long historical memory, can't seem to bear it at all.

Thus, the male lion appeared—compared to the "dragon" who is the incarnation of evil in Western civilization, obviously, the "male lion", which is also a symbol of glory in the eyes of "barbarians", has a more worldwide orientation.

On the other hand, the Chinese also need to establish a new personality image, not a gentleman and a great Confucian who is a barbarian who is bare-chested and wearing a tattoo in traditional records, but a virtuous Confucian who wields "freedom" , "equality", "fraternity", "innate human rights" banners, but equally aggressive, strong and muscular body, should have two less kneecaps, so the "foreigners" who could not kneel correspond to the "Chinese".

——A brand new ideal personality that can have the same influence as the Confucian "gentleman" and the like.

This may be the historical background of the prosperity of martial arts in the Republic of China for nearly a hundred years.

This is also the background of Huang Feihong's appearance.

Of course, this is also the background of Tsui Hark's "Once Upon a Time".

Professor Zhang Jiande of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore once mentioned that Hong Kong movies have long had strong nationalist tendencies. He believes that:

…and thus a rather abstract and apolitical nationalism arose. ...Simply put, the term "Tianxia" refers to China and the world as a whole, and its millions of people. Coexisting with this is the concept of "country". It means a political entity in a region, a specific part of the world. According to Confucianism, "Tianxia" refers to the value of a civilization, while "country" is used to refer to a regime, that is, the government agency of a certain region in the West. (Because the world "is" the world). Chinese nationalism focuses on the moral and cultural aspects of Chinese civilization, on the underworld, issues of international relations, and issues of political institutions related to the control of the "nation", including the rise or fall of a certain dynasty, or the rule of a different "state". State"...it is not attached to any form of state power...

Like the overseas Chinese, Hong Kong's identification with China is more based on culture, or it can be said that it is based on an identification with a civilizational value system, which has long gone beyond the specific regime or even the country itself. The reason for this, I think, is probably that they failed to understand the "natural human rights" and "freedom, equality and fraternity", the cornerstones of Western civilization, during the long cultural collision, and instead questioned its possibility and hypocrisy. On the other hand, in the face of the "consumerism" and "materialism" derived from the increasingly clamorous individualism, the cultural concept of advocating the harmony between nature and human beings may be more difficult to be compatible.

It is indeed difficult for Chinese people without Christian beliefs to understand the difference between the certain figurative "God" in the Western world and the highly abstract and omnipotent "God" in China, so they are easily infected with moral strictures. Of course, this kind of moral supremacy is itself a part of our way of thinking, but in another system of beliefs that believe that sex is inherently evil to atone for sin, moralism is difficult to understand. For example, when we talk about freedom, the hidden semantics behind us are often: "people cannot have absolute freedom" - the existence of "freedom" is unattainable - "freedom" that cannot be achieved is hypocritical and arrogant In another civilization system, "people cannot have absolute freedom" - "freedom" is a contract (a contract between man and God - a contract between man and man) relationship, and it is a "bargaining" - "freedom" The meaning lies in the pursuit, that is, the process of approaching god, not in the result itself.

This difference in perception leads to almost radically different ways of approaching problems.

However, the opposite of the West is not necessarily the East. To a certain extent, whether Hong Kong, overseas Chinese, or even native Chinese, if the identification with the homeland is based on the systematic questioning of the Western value system, and Constructed from the concept of "the world" stripped of the specific family-state level, then the sense of identity itself, whose core is "root-seeking", is too abstract and too fragile. As soon as it hits the real concrete floor, it is either smashed to pieces, or a huge reverse effect erupts, directly rebounding to the other extreme.

Therefore, the closed China may be a kind of nostalgia and complex for condolences, more dreamy, more blurred, and more beautiful. And the vital issues that exist in our culture have been suspended, evaded, intentionally or unintentionally - but it is always there, it must be confronted, it cannot be ignored.

Tsui Hark's "Once Upon a Time" series is undoubtedly the film that best reflects the psychology of overseas Chinese in China. What it has to deal with is originally a problem that modern martial arts must face: the transformation of martial arts spirit. The most attractive thing in "Once Upon a Time" is the conflict, predicament and change that traditional martial arts face when hedging against many foreign symbols. Although many martial arts movies have been involved in this, there is no doubt that the Vietnamese overseas Chinese Tsui Hark handled the most lightly: he lifted some things high, and put some down, and the strength was just right. While humorous and thought-provoking, it also conveys a brand-new Chinese ideal personality image - Huang Feihong into everyone's heart. And its widespread acclaim also seems to imply that people have embraced the new image to some extent.

In the hearts of Chinese people, Huang Feihong is the lion who is about to awaken, is awakening, and has awakened.

This also corresponds to the theme of Tsui Hark's trilogy of "Once Upon a Time", "Once Upon a Time of Man, Be Self-improvement" and "Once Upon a Time as the Lion King".

——Perhaps because of Tsui Hark’s status as an overseas Chinese, or because Hong Kong is a special place where China and the West meet, he has never been able to leave the proposition of conflicting and colliding Chinese and Western cultures, and, more importantly, what he is looking for for the Chinese. Efforts made by the ideal personality. This seems to be a responsibility that Chinese people, or intellectuals, who cannot get rid of nationalism have consciously assumed for centuries.

Huang Feihong in the first film is still a bastard who doesn't know anything about the Western world. When he sees his thirteenth aunt, he will call "foreign woman", he doesn't know what photography is, and he even sneers at foreign goods such as suits. Huang Feihong's Occupation: Traditional Chinese medicine seems to illustrate a certain deep-rooted "Chinese complex" - you can't see, today, how many disputes between Chinese and Western medicine are taking place as a flashpoint in the dispute between Chinese and Western medicine? In fact, the same is true of that generation. Sun Yat-sen and Lu Xun both studied Western medicine - and the foreigners in the film have undoubtedly become villains with no character, bent on selling Chinese women to Jinshan as prostitutes, or tricking Chinese men into becoming prostitutes. Piglet. After seeing the power of foreigners' guns and guns, Huang Feihong immediately changed his mind even when he saw that Thirteenth Aunt was almost sold and the Westerners were unbearable. He put on the suit he originally resisted, and took pictures with joy. Due to the lack of background explanation, all this seems very puzzling - from resistance to acceptance, why did Huang Feihong change so quickly?

Perhaps realizing the sudden change, Tsui Hark arranged the image of the foreign woman "Thirteen Aunt". As a famous vase, Guan Zhilin's character is lovable, but her personality characteristics are still quite vague under careful examination. Although she has experience studying abroad Some of the habits left behind: wearing dresses, likes photography, and understands English (actually, the author set her to only stay abroad for two years, but her entire behavior pattern and living habits are simply better than the three Song sisters who studied abroad 30 years later. ), it is even more rare that she has no awareness of the boundary between China and the West, not only did she have a crush on Huang Feihong, a childhood sweetheart from the beginning (could it be that the expansion of the circle and the broadening of horizons did not allow her to meet better men who could give her more choices? ?), she was completely unaware of how much trouble her own dresses and photographic equipment would bring to her fellow villagers, let alone the instinctual identity confusion and the ensuing sense of entitlement after changing clothes - Tsui Hark only needs a She is just a silly and sweet Chinese girl who wears western clothes, understands foreign languages, and likes foreign things. There may be such a girl 120 years later. It was 120 years ago when China opened its doors. I can't imagine how it could exist. A woman like her.

However, Tsui Hark seems to be trying hard to prove that it is precisely such a aunt, and it is precisely such a blind love of the thirteenth who has become the catalyst for Huang Feihong to gradually accept the Western world. In the second part, Huang Feihong went to the provincial capital to open a medical association, met the White Lotus Sect, met the revolutionaries and even Sun Yat-sen, saw the excellence of Western medicine, and the revolutionary spirit of "sacrifice", and recognized it as a The "legitimacy" of China's future new force finally defeated the elites of the Qing Empire, Nalan Yuanshu played by Zeng Zidan, and Jiulian, the leader of the cult, and saved the revolutionaries... If the first "Once Upon a Time" in "Once Upon a Time" What is presented is the complex resistance of people to the West after the invasion of Western powers, then Huang Feihong in the second part seems to see more that China, which sticks to traditions in troubled times, has no cure. Ignorance is like a white lotus sect, even when they want to kill children, they also encourage children to kill, they are simply crazy terrorists! Nalan, who has studied abroad, wants to use terrorists to fight against the enemies of his empire: foreigners. In Nalan's heart, the bigger enemies than the foreigners are the revolutionaries who are bent on change. And this group of revolutionaries who had high expectations, after seeing the ignorant and crazy believers of the White Lotus Sect, would only sit on the ground in despair and cry: "The Chinese are helpless", "How can the Chinese be saved?"

Huang Feihong's stalwart was set off by everyone's paleness. He single-handedly cleaned up the mess, captured beauties, received the respect of future revolutionary leaders and even the elite of the Doomsday Empire, and finally watched the rising sun in the morning and smiled in the morning glow. When Sun Yat-sen went , he not only had the joy of "going away, hiding the merit and fame", but also a sense of accomplishment that he was about to participate in the great changes in the world. At this moment, I suspect that Tsui Hark and Huang Feihong successfully merged.

Every character in "Men's Self-improvement" is full of elite consciousness, and their goals are surprisingly consistent: " Save China "! The methods range from killing to being killed, from founding a cult to sticking to a cult, all of them are violence (the essence of martial arts seems to be violence, and behind violence is power), but it has not achieved the ambition of saving China, but only wants to save people. Huang Feihong - "Men Be Self-improvement" is full of complex national consciousness at all levels, which is very heavy, very heavy, any topic is enough to fulfill the birth of a Lu Xun, but Tsui Hark concentrated all the contradictions in his hands in his jokes. Gently let go, scratching the itch, just the right amount of comfort .

In "The Lion King Contest", Tsui Hark's lion complex broke out in an all-round way. On the one hand, lion fighting is a Chinese tradition (mainly popular in Guangdong), and there is not only a rare "Lion Club" in the Forbidden City. The recognition of the lion king is really weak, so the probability of lion fights in Beijing is really not high, the lion dances in the north are mostly performance lions, and they are divided into male and female. It has the meaning of boosting national prestige by lion fighting. In the historical background of the Boxer Rebellion, such a "Forbidden City" imagination can only come from the modern, martial and more civilized coastal residents of Guangdong. On the other hand, Tsui Hark's film finally showed a new atmosphere under the Westernization Movement: a steam engine; and the only more realistic (more than ten lines) image of a Westerner in the three "Once Upon a Time": a crush on thirteen Aunt's Russian Assassin.

Tsui Hark's handling is obviously very interesting. The "steam engine" that overturned the world first became the curtain for Huang Feihong's first kiss, and then was used by Liang Kuan to cook eggs. Finally, Huang Feihong's hostility to the new "rival in love" was transferred to the steam engine. Hostility, claiming to compete with the steam engine. The conflict between the old and the new is mainly reflected in Huang Qiying, the father who clings to the lion who was kicked to pieces, and Huang Feihong, the son who wants to marry his godsister. It’s a pity that the two just stared at each other for a few times, and the father accepted his son’s deviance ( The son and his godsister hugged each other in front of everyone), and immediately became enlightened and made a comment that "some old rules should be changed." And the conflict between China and the foreign countries was taken away in one stroke when "we Han people should solve their own affairs". On the contrary, the "Love Tiger Oil" joke sublimated into a classic.

Tsui Hark hacked all the way and finally waited until the last moment, when Huang Feihong threw the gold medal back to Li Hongzhang . before, said

We not only need to practice martial arts to strengthen our bodies and resist foreign enemies, but more importantly, we should broaden the wisdom of the people and combine wisdom and martial arts.

It is said that when the film was shown at Peking University in the 1990s, there was applause in the classroom when I saw it here. Obviously at this moment, Huang Feihong is the male lion who is about to wake up (just the southern lion is also called the awakening lion), he is about to wake up like China, and then "make the world tremble".

In order to achieve this awakening, Huang Feihong must transcend all social levels and contradictions at that time: the conflict between Eastern and Western civilizations has become obvious, and the conflict with the government has also eased from the sharpness of the second part to the third part (but the back is still sharp) , and the easily overlooked conflicts with civil society in Jianghu society (Shahe Gang, White Lotus Sect, Zhao Tianba and other martial arts halls and gangs). Huang Feihong does not belong to any of them, and does not belong to any level of the West, the system or the people, and has almost no ideological connection with these forces. He can be an overseas Chinese. In this regard, he and Sun Wen and other early revolutionary party talents are all the same, but he is not a person.) He is completely new, with the shadow of a national capital businessman (opening a factory to sell medicine), and has a tradition with tradition. Close ties (Chinese medicine and martial arts), he is not forgetting the country and facing the future——

But he has no interest in politics. Except for helping Sun Yat-sen because of his personality attraction, he does not see any pursuit of power and wealth and any ambition to change the world. His expectation for life is mainly to talk about love and teach a little bit of English. Martial arts then be a good man and a good doctor. Occasionally meddling in business affairs and setting two tables together for wine, even if it is a small achievement in life - of course, this is also the rare and lovely thing about Huang Feihong.

With this setting, I can only shout "Oh, my god!"

The "Once Upon a Time" trilogy came to an end in this absurd core conflict. The audience felt the awakening of the "lion" with pride, and their emotions were greatly satisfied. Tsui Hark was so moved by himself that he almost didn't use the rising sun at the end of the movie to cool Jet Li's heart. It was only 20 years later that I watched this film again, and I was stunned, not knowing whether to applaud or scold (actually, I wanted to applaud). It's really good to cry out, and if you yell and scold, you can only say naivety.

The lottery that this innocence has exchanged is destined to not last long. Before the lion woke up, let’s talk about it. Today, 20 years later, a large number of people may start to wake up:

Can that lion wake up? What price will everyone pay if he wakes up? Will this waking lion eat us first?

Or is living in Napoleon's prophecy a dream in itself?

Obviously, we do not want to admit that Napoleon may not have said this at all.

Everything is full of blurred confusion, and the chaos makes people tremble.

In the "Once Upon a Time" series, the segment that impressed me the most is probably the segment of the blind old man playing the erhu and singing a ditty in "Men Be Self-improvement":

Drifting away, don't ask the cause

I saw the afterglow in the middle of the mountain, taking care of a sad man

There is a long way to go, I can't help but feel sad

I'm so confused, it made me cry

I want to learn to cast a pen, to cast a pen to join the army, to work hard,

But I was mistaken by the Confucian crown, which made my ambition difficult to reach

I want to learn a scorpion, a scorpion and five lakes, and hide together,

But surrounded by demon atmosphere, far boundless

It is also said that the sea is dry and the stone is rotten, the stone is rotten and the sea is dry, and the love is not dead

Look at the heavy fog, the west wind is tight

The geese fly from the south to the north, afraid to hear from the guests

Peace is not reported, ask yourself how to bear

Empty teary eyes, looking at the cold and faint

Thanks to my deep love and fraternity, I am incompetent

Today, people are far away from the building, and the horizon is near

From then on, Piaoping and Duanjie,

How many deep alliances and secret covenants, every sentence is unfounded

The seemingly peaceful but desolate singing was covered up by the sounds of the market, playing cards, gambling, prostitutes, smoking, begging, begging, selling children and selling women, and mixed with the sound of guns and arson. Finally, someone gave two small money and asked him not to sing), only this weak but harsh singing revealed the real troubled times.

Even though "Once Upon a Time" consciously collected so many contradictions and conflicts, and such a rich social level, Tsui Hark finally used a certain abstract concept to unify all the contradictions unexpectedly, and also tried to achieve a certain degree of transcendence. Thirteen Aunt's image of a kind of "guide" mentor, let him see the power of modern technology and industrial civilization, but it does not involve political, economic and social transformation at all, not to mention the implicit "aggressiveness" behind this powerful culture, It is destined that Aunt Thirteen can only be a beautiful vase lacking character; Huang Feihong has conflicts and connections with all the forces, but he is consciously marginalized by any of them. This kind of connection generated by pure emotion is too fragile to be able to A truly complete personality is born. Therefore, although Huang Feihong said the self-righteous "way of a strong country", it is difficult to do any real action.

This may have been doomed to Tsui Hark's embarrassment and powerlessness. After all, all the characters in the film are rootless, unable to find the real soil for them to take root, bloom and bear fruit.

Then, the reason why "Once Upon a Time" is moving can only be the complex and prophecy about the lion. As Huang Feihong said in the movie, it is about " the country is rich and the people are strong ".

Obviously, Tsui Hark, like most Chinese, has a Chinese-style nationalism behind his deep-rooted ethnic complex:

Chinese nationalism invokes seventeenth-century cultural philosophies related to the general well-being of the people, and attempts to combine them with the modernization of the economy, which would give China a place in the world's nation of nations.

It's not right or wrong, it's just that after two world wars today, more ideas, more cultures, and more conceptual resources have been born to interpret, understand, position, re-examine and build a country The relationship between the individual, the world and the country, and even the world and the individual, in the trend of the world, modernization itself has become a proposition that must be reflected, but we stick to that moment, almost frozen at that time node a hundred years ago. middle.

At this time, how do we go to the world?

This is a problem that "Once Upon a Time" is unwilling to face.

But this is also a question destined to be answered.

Of course, the "Once Upon a Time" series of more than 20 years should only be the beginning. As a commercial film, it cannot carry too deep thinking. However, after "Once Upon a Time", I almost never see the film industry's ambition to try to answer this question. It seems that everyone thinks that this problem, "Once Upon a Time" has been solved, with a witty and good-looking Way.

Too many things, we thought it was the beginning, but we didn't expect it to be the end.

That's what's really scary.