Will The Real Fake Bruce Lee Please Stand Up?

Bruce Lee is a legend personally credited for jumpstarting the kung fu genre of Hong Kong film to international prominence. Yet there’s also a literal meaning to that. There are only around three and a half actual Bruce Lee films, in the sense of what people usually mean when they say that. Enter the Clones of Bruce is a documentary that tells the story of what’s actually a lot more relevant to the Bruce Lee legend than anything Bruce Lee himself ever actually did–the extent to which the entire Hong Kong film market transitioned to aggressively producing Bruce Lee ripoff films.

None of this is to say that Bruce Lee wasn’t an exceptional talent who died young. Every interviewee in this documentary glows in admiration for the man. All the same, these film industry professionals fully recognized that they were working in a business, and Bruce Lee’s movies becoming massive overseas hits turned into a very awkward problem when foreign distributors kept demanding more Bruce Lee films, which didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist. Because Bruce Lee was dead.

The scheme the industry came up with was to market and rename other actors as Bruce Lee lookalikes. People like Bruce Le and Bruce Li did their very best impressions of the real thing, with his trademark yelling. This served to placate an audience demanding more Bruce Lee that wasn’t necessarily too picky about authenticity. Indeed, in one late portion of the documentary, we find out that that in huge stretches of Europe unscrupulous distributors didn’t even bother using the fake lookalike names. They just called every martial arts movie a Bruce Lee movie, to the point that one interviewee states that he was surprised to eventually learn that Bruce Lee was an actual person, and not just some sort of stage name or character archetype.

The Chinese market compensated for this apparent disrespect of Bruce Lee by having a lot of these movies effectively function as Bruce Lee tributes, becoming increasingly elaborate fanfictions of his actual life. A film shoot in Italy, for example, contrives to have Bruce Lee run into gangsters and other international criminals. Bruce Lee also becomes something of an antiracist folk hero, constantly teaching people not to disrespect and underestimate Asian men. In the singularly most famous recursive example of the Bruce Lee trend feeding on itself, The Clones of Bruce Lee has an evil scientist literally clone Bruce Lee after his death, with the three title characters all being Brucesploitation actors in their own right.

Like all great documentaries, Enter the Clones of Bruce is purely informational about the trend, and does its best work by begging questions that no one tries to answer. The most obvious one being, if Bruce Lee had lived, would he have even wanted to continue working in Hong Kong at all? Bruce Lee’s arrogance and ego is no secret–it’s a core part of his appeal. Enter the Clones of Bruce notes that he only ended up working for Golden Harvest because Shaw Brothers turned down his asking fee, which they considered absurd for an untested talent.

You also have to consider the cultural context of the early 70s. This was a grim time for Hollywood. Indeed, a big reason why Bruce Lee became such an international sensation was because of a lack of compelling material from the world’s leading film market. Does Bruce Lee still become a hero of the developing world if he lives? Or does he sell out to the first major American studio that offers him a big paycheck?

These questions are so muddled in part because Bruce Lee’s estate had basically no control whatsoever regarding his image. Hong Kong film studios could and did use the abstract idea of Bruce Lee for their industry without the permission of his widow. And it’s especially unclear how beneficial this may have been to the Hong Kong film industry in the long run. Enter the Clones of Bruce notes that despite the derogatory nature of the work they were doing, many Bruce Lee rip-off character actors were genuine talents in their own right. They just couldn’t really develop as such when the industry had already decided to force them to fit the Bruce Lee mold.

Enter the Clones of Bruce briefly mentions Jackie Chan as the man who helped put an end to that, managing to convince directors to use him for his unique slapstick style than as yet another Bruce Lee clone. But the more profound argument for change actually comes from Sammo Hung and Enter the Fat Dragon, a movie which makes a deliberate distinction between embodying the spirit of Bruce Lee and literally imitating him. Along those lines, the portly hero at one point picks a fight with a Bruce Lee clone making a movie within the movie.

If nothing else, Enter the Clones of Bruce makes a compelling argument that we cannot, and should not understand the Bruce Lee phenomenon purely in terms of the actual Bruce Lee. Without the clone films acting as effective advertisements for his image, it’s impossible to guess whether he’d still be a worldwide name, or at least, that we’d associate him so purely in terms of martial arts philosophy, when the real Bruce Lee could have done nearly anything he wanted with his career had he lived. The Bruce Lee we know is, by comparison, largely just a brand- possibly the purest brand in all of film history because he became an abstract idea rather than a product in his own right.