Bruce Lee's Heroic Kung Fu Voice: Overcoming Linguistic Racism and the Necessity of 'White Voice' in Enter the Dragon

Abstract

Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon (1973) conquered the global box office by proving the profitability of kung fu cinema based on a charismatic martial arts actor who could perform cinematically authentic martial arts fight choreography without relying on stunt doubles or special effects. Lee broke Hollywood’s racial glass ceiling and proved that Asian men with “yellow skin” could now become A-list stars. Concurrently, Lee also had to overcome linguistic racism and the demands of “white voice,” speaking English without a foreign accent, with Mid-Atlantic English being the preferred norm. This paper addresses this neglected audio dimension of Bruce Lee’s stardom. Enter the Dragon is the first kung fu film in which Lee performed his own lines of English language dialogue. His two previous kung fu films were dubbed into English by British voice actors. I have addressed this phenomenon as “dubbese fu” to highlight the mismatched lip synchronization effect as something that was not a deal-ending technical concern for Hong Kong’s multilingual commercial film industry but which became the object of ridicule as an aesthetic staple of these films when they reached film markets such as the United States where perfect lip synchronization was the norm. For Enter the Dragon, the continuation of dubbese fu would have transformed Lee’s character from the film’s protagonist to the film’s unheroic villain or sidekick. Lee joked that he secured the role of Kato in The Green Hornet (1966-7) TV series because he was the only Chinese in Hollywood who could pronounce “Britt Reid.” For Asian speakers of English, the “R/L” distinction is difficult to master and is one of the aural signatures of yellow voice. In Enter the Dragon, Lee faced an even more challenging vocal obstacle when the producer and scriptwriter intentionally named a British character Braithwaite, knowing full well how difficult it would be for Lee to properly enunciate the “th+w” in this surname without sounding like Donald Duck. For Cantonese speakers of English, these two consonants are particularly difficult to enunciate properly. They wanted Lee to lose face but their strategy failed. What emerges is Lee’s paradigmatic heroic kung fu voice, which is somewhat accented. Through an analysis of Lee’s vocal performance, this paper draws conclusions about 1970s Hong Kong and Hollywood studio practices, performance, and stardom centered on race and representation in postclassical cinema.