The Bechdel Cast - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with Mia Wong

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Crouching Caitlin and Hidden Jamie join forces with their mentor and special guest Mia Wong to discuss Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @Itmechr3 on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante, and @jamieloftusHELPSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Start changing it with the Bechdelcast. Hey, Jamie. Hey, Caitlin. Let's be sisters and best friends. Okay, for now that is. Wow. Oh, you don't want to be my friend? Well, let's see how you fare as my enemy.

And then the best fight scene I've ever seen. It was so fun. Well, I think that that actually is a full recap of the movie in a way. There's also two guys. Yeah, sometimes, but they're not very important. There's two guys. There's a kiss. Oh, and and then Jade Fox. Yeah, I think my favorite character, Jade Fox. She rocks. Well, anyways, we guys, we gotta start the show. We gotta start the show. It's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Day on the Bechdel cast. My name is Jamie Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante, and this is our show where we examine movies through an intersectional

feminist lens using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point. Jamie, could you indulge us? Tell us what even is that? Yeah, that's so indulgent of me to do. Living deliciously here um okay the Bechdel test is a media metric uh created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel originally created as a sort of one-off um joke in her comic collection Dykes to Watch Out for uh there's a lot of different versions of the test the one that we discuss in this show uh requires that there be two characters of a marginalized gender with names that talk to each other about something other than a man for more than two lines

of dialogue but we talk about a lot of other stuff too because that would be a very short show even though to this day it is the easiest way to find out if someone is lying to me when they say they've listened to this show. They're like, yeah, that's the one where you for two hours. You I was like, do you think we go through the script? Like, what do you think happens? I simply don't know. It's baffling to me, but I appreciate the lie. And I think I mean that.

Oh, yeah. I love being lied to. And that is a big problem in my life. But enough about that. I would never lie to you, Jamie. Unless, but see, that's what a liar would say. Oh, so true. Liars love to call attention to the fact that they would definitely never lie. In this essay, I will. Let's get our guest in. Yes, let's. She is a podcaster, host of It Could Happen Here on Cool Zone Media. It's Mia Wong.

Hello. Welcome. Yeah, I think y'all asked for me. So now you're getting Mia Wong. It's true. Our listeners, in fact, demanded it. You've been a popularly requested guest on this show. And we're so happy to have you here. How are you? I'm hanging in there. I'm excited to be here. I'm hoping that the absolute chaos of last year is somewhat lifting. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna go from there and proceed on the assumption that i'm gonna be fine and not start dying halfway into this recording everything is let us hope not everything's coming up mia i can just feel it so we're talking crouching tiger hidden dragon mia what is your relationship with this movie so my mom loves kung fu movies. She also, she reads unfathomable numbers of kung fu books.

She's watched indescribable numbers of kung fu movies. And so I grew up on, I guess, kind of weirdly early 2000s kung fu movies. So things like House of the Flying Dagger, Hero, and then this movie which okay so i i i i was home to go to the doctor and i was like hey do you want to watch as i talked to my parents like do you want to watch uh watch this movie with me and they were like sure and my dad goes i remember not liking this movie like huh and then my mom was like oh no what she she okay so like she has watched so many of these movies that like when this movie starts she is doing like power level rankings based on like their qigong and like like their their ability to do the the the thing where everyone

has like a floaty jump and they can sort of like soar around in midair she's like ah this character qigong is weaker for the other i was like oh my god your mom sounds great and that also sounds like a very stressful way to watch a movie yeah it's fun too because she's like she also did martial arts so she was like a blackie in kashi kempo whoa and so it's a it is a time watching movies that's so cool yeah how how did she feel revisiting it he was kind of unhappy because it has so i guess spoiler alert for you so there's there's a trope in kung fu movies particularly the chinese ones somewhat less so the like hong kong kung fu movies but at the beginning of the movie she said okay so every every kung fu movie has one plot which is someone's either mother or their teacher dies and then someone gains a great power to go avenge them and then everyone dies at the end sick and that is also

this movie's plot more or less it's like oh everyone dies at the end yeah it's just kind of like a doubled up version of that plot yeah everyone's teacher dies yeah damn but so you you watch this movie with your mom is that right as a yeah yeah as a kid i think actually if i'm remembering right i think we actually watched this movie in a hotel in beijing in like a it was a very weird situation it's like we had this hotel and there's like a it's almost like a bunk floor so there's like this one giant window and then there's like these beds on the top of on like the top floor and then there's like a ladder and you go down and so my mom my dad were watching the movie on the tv my sister and i were like supposed to be going to sleep we were watching

the movie in the window yes oh i love sneak watching a movie yeah ah my dad used to watch i think i brought this up on the show before my dad used to watch ifc movies at night after we went to bed and that was the only way i could see boobs on tv even though it's just like i just should have learned how to like i I don't know why I was like, I could have just Googled it, but I was afraid. I lived in fear of everything. So I was like, all right, IFC boobs are the only boobs in this house. You know, that's probably a reasonable, pretty reasonable way to engage with the internet. I feel like we should be more afraid of it.

Honestly, yeah. Conditioned to be afraid of it honestly yeah conditioned to be afraid of it i went through a phase where when i was in college where i was like i was raised to fear this great tool and then you're like no hold on it is trying to kill everybody it's like the ocean very scary uh uh jamie what is your relationship with this movie i had i saw this movie again i feel like this is my story for every movie that came out in the early 2000s. I saw it on TNT at one point. And I don't think that this movie would have gotten as heavy an edit as some of my TNT faves.

It's not, it's not a cussing movie. And there, I mean, I guess that there is, there is some sex. But yeah, I saw it when I was probably in in junior high or high school I remember enjoying it and then I saw it again when it was just re-released in theaters I think it was just like a couple of months ago and so I saw the re-release and that was really fun I mean this movie is so cool in a gigantic theater it was very very exciting oh yeah so i it's not a particularly interesting history but it is somewhat long and i also i'm just like interested in um angley's career trajectory is like very fascinating to me he's got range the man's got range and also i was just reading about um i was

just you know perusing scholarly journal wikipedia And he and Spike Lee were classmates at NYU. And Ang Lee, like, worked as a crew member on Spike Lee's thesis. I was like, wow. Cool. You know, everything I hear about NYU, I'm like, good for them. Caitlin, what's your history with this movie? It's a very short one because I didn't see it until the re-release in theaters of february of this year i intended to see it sooner i bought it on dvd many years ago thinking oh if i have it on

dvd i'll definitely watch it because there's so many things on my watch list but they often um to quote a star is born okay they fall by the wayside oh yeah but um but i was like oh if i have it on dvd i'll definitely watch it but i also bought it on dvd long after the medium of dvd was popular so i still didn't get around to it but when i heard it was coming out in theaters again I was like oh this is a perfect opportunity anyway just to see it on the big screen because this is one of those movies that feels like a movie you know like a real go to the theater type film exactly exactly yeah um so I saw it a couple months ago for the first time and thought it was awesome i loved the fighting and the story and the characters and in general it rocks i love it pretty sad though it is

pretty fucking depressing towards the end which i knew is a trope but i was like i mean that's not a criticism it's just a fact, Caitlin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be fair, to be fair, this movie's survival rate is actually pretty high for a kung fu movie. Because, I mean, Michelle Yeoh's character, she survives. Yeah, I think both of the, Jen lives, right? I mean, it doesn't seem like Jen dies. I don't understand exactly what happens at the end, and I need help interpreting it.

Yeah, I have a thesis about this, but we can, I guess, wait for that until... Okay, okay. I was just like, hmm. My thesis is based on nothing, except I just was like, hmm. She's fine. Yeah. She survived worse than this. She's fine.

Yes. Well, shall I do the recap recap and we'll go from there? Yes. So we meet a warrior named Shulin. That's Michelle Yeoh. She is visited by Li Mu Bai. That is Chao Yong Fat. They are friends, but also there's a bit of romantic chemistry between them.

God, there's so much. Yeah, there's a lot of people holding tension in their shoulders and their eyeballs. Yes. Great. And their beautiful faces. And Mu Bai is also a warrior, a Wudang fighter. And just some context that I hope I'm getting this correct, but Wudang refers to a class of Chinese martial arts, as well as a fictional martial arts school that appears in

several works of Wuxia fiction. And it's named after the place where it's based, which is the Wudang Mountains. So there's a lot of references in the movie to Wudang as a place of study and also as a specific martial art style. So anyway, Mubai is a legendary fighter who studied at Wudang and he's been there practicing meditation. But he recently decided to break his meditation and leave it seems like something is weighing on him I know it's oversimplification to say that he got so horny he had to drop out of school but this effectively what happened but but that is kind of that's how it that's how it exists in my notes like too horny had had to drop out there's this great thing where he's like describing he like he's meditating and he's

like is in this place beyond space and time and michelle yo is like oh did you reach enlightenment and he's like no i got horny it's like really sad because it's amazing yeah although i almost like good for him because i think a lot of people would often misconstrue horniness with enlightenment. True. Yes. So at least he was able to recognize the difference. Yeah. And he's like, fuck this.

I'm out. Yeah. He's like, regardless, I am too horny to be here. I need to get out of here. And so he goes to Shulin and gives her his legendary sword green destiny is its name and he wants her to give it to a guy named sir tay for safekeeping he also mentions that his master who taught him to be a wudon fighter was murdered by someone named Jade Fox. Yes, where we get a great classic twist in the near future where it's like, Jade Fox is a woman?

Classic cinematic twist. I just wanted to add, because he doesn't appear in the movie very much, but there's a, I don't know what their role is really. It seems to be like he's like an old servant or, or works with Michelle Yeoh's character, but it felt like he was really shipping Mubai and Shun Lin where he's like, come on, why don't you just,

just kiss already? Oh, that's Sir Tay. That's Sir Tay. Okay. Yeah. He wants them to kiss. I liked,

I liked. Yeah. He's like, why don't you guys just like stop being so silly and admit your feelings for each other and michelle you was like i don't know what you're even talking about teehee it's so good it's angley does that i mean like that's like angley's whole movie canon basically is like just forbidden love it's like because that's like sense and sensibility that's brookback mountain like it's like he just loves to keep the lovers away from

each other why there's this kind of this thing in this like so every old character who knows both of the two main characters like every old person is immediately trying to thrust them together like there's this scene later on where like michelle yo's at like her hideout and she she tells one of her servants who's like an old lady that like he's coming over and she's like oh my god the bedroom she's so excited this is like you've been waiting for this for like 40 years it's so good i really enjoyed that because I feel like very often, can you hear that? Oh, yeah, I can. There's not much I can do about it,

but I just wanted to acknowledge that it's happening. I feel like it is more tropey for the elder generation to be like, no, you must stay apart. So I found it very fun and refreshing for all the older characters to be like, no, kiss, life is short. Right. So I found it very fun and refreshing for all the older characters to be like, no kiss. Life is short. Right. So anyway, so we meet Mubai and he's like, Jade Fox murdered my master and he wants to avenge his master's death.

Shulin travels to Peking and delivers the sword to sir tay there she meets a young woman named jen played by zhang z okay can i can i interject a bit about the subtitles in this movie here yes please so this is the first time this is important something very very strange happened with the subtitles in this movie oh i think it has to do with the fact that okay so this movie is in mandarin most of the actors do not speak mandarin they are cantonese speakers and so they are doing the mandarin lines like completely phonetically yeah and i okay so i can't tell if like that's the thing that screwed up the subtitle people or if there was like a weird direction thing there's a few things in the subtitles that are very very weird one of them is they there's like two characters like jen is one

of them and then there's another character we'll meet later whose names they just randomly change and this is kind of important this this young lady's name in chinese is it's like you jiao long and so her name is dragon like beautiful dragon and this is a thing that is capital f foreshadowing in chinese but for some reason they named her jen in the in the subtitles and so it's completely incomprehensible i don't know why they did this well ang lee i think is the one who subtitled the movie from Mandarin to English. So it's his choice. He made a lot of stunningly incomprehensible decisions. How could you bury your own lead like that?

It's just like, oh, we'll just leave this one in as a treat for the Mandarin speaking audience, but no one else. I don't know. It was very weird yeah i read i'm excited to talk about that later because i knew that michelle yeo had to learn her lines phonetically for this movie for the most part but i um which is like i don't have the knowledge to understand that this is happening but yeah apparently the entire beijing crew of this movie was incredibly frustrated by the number of accents that appear within this movie that are, I guess, not authentic to the story. Although that is like sort of a bizarre thing. We'll get there.

Yeah. So Shulin meets Jen, who is the daughter of the wealthy and powerful Governor Yu. Jen admires the sword. She also admires Shulin's lifestyle as a warrior because she's free. She can roam around. She doesn't have to get married. Zhen is to be married soon and she doesn't seem happy about it. That evening, Zhen's governess, played by Cheng Peipei, is like, you should not be hanging around with Shulin. And Zhen is like, you should not be hanging around with Shu Lin. And Jen is like, I'm going to hang around with whoever I want, actually. And then later that night,

a thief steals the green destiny sword. We soon learn that the thief is Jen. It's so obvious it's Jen. Yeah. I also appreciated that the movie like doesn't make you sit in that mystery very long. No. And also like doesn't,

I don't know. I feel like it would have been a, um, an undercutting of Shulin's abilities for her to not realize that basically right away. It's like, you just spent an hour with this girl today. Right. But there's this like guard i think a guard named beau who is trying to stop her and he thinks that the thief

is a man because like her face is somewhat concealed but not enough that you wouldn't still recognize her anyway especially if she's like locally famous everyone would know her well i i think it's an interesting thing he's kind of like like the way he's depicted is just as being really incompetent like he he's fighting with this like staff that it's like it's like a staff with like a uh with like nunchuck thing at the end of it and he's like hitting himself in the head with it he's like this man this man has weak kung fu his kung fu is not strong great getting clowned on and she is a far more skilled fighter than him and like everyone in the movie

and she seems to be able to fly around and do all these like special gravity defying moves and yeah that's is that what your mom was commenting on and ranking it's yeah it's like it's called the weightless it's the thing it's like you you can basically become weightless is how it works and then you're just a power and it lets you float more and yeah walk up walls and do stuff like that it's so cool i read that michelle yo tore her acl in the second week of production on this movie yeah and then just kept making the movie yeah yeah all of those people all of the actors everyone who came out of like the 80s era like 70s and 80s era of like hong kong action movies those people are so unbelievably tough like they don't they don't

have stunt doubles i mean if people have seen so i'll never dies i think it was the bond movie she's in where she's hanging off the side of a car and she is actually physically hanging up the side of that car that car takes a wrong turn and she goes flying and she she is just doing it right like all of these a lot of these people get really really badly hurt because i mean they're everything that is there is just them actually physically doing the thing yeah so they are they are unbelievably impressive people i read or heard maybe in an interview with angley that later into filming michelle you broke her back. Yeah, I also read that. And that in the final scene where they're, we won't spoil it for 10 more minutes,

but where the lovers are together, they had to angle that shot very carefully because Michelle Yeoh's very obviously broken leg was just like flopped over to the side. It was like, or like a cast or something. They were just like, she was in the trenches by the end. They're like, we have to frame this shot so you can't tell that we almost killed her.

Yeah, I think this is partially a thing that was possible in Hong Kong and probably wouldn't have been possible in other places just because the labor standards are really weak because everyone is really heavily invested in like union busting. But the labor conditions on these sets are appalling and it it's horrible god yeah that's i mean which is like true across entertainment but this i was

like yeah it's you broke her back and she still had to go to work like no yeah there oh i had another thought but it's gone it'll come back. Anyway, well, so this fight is happening post this sword being stolen. And Shulin hears the commotion and goes after the thief. There's this amazing fight sequence between them. And then Shulin realizes whoever this is has trained at Wudon, hence these special moves. Anytime Shulin and Jen are fighting, it's just like, it's a good day. It's a good day for us. And there's so many great fight sequences.

So eventually, the thief, aka Jen, manages to escape with the sword. The next day, everyone is upset and trying to figure out who the thief was. Many suspect that it is Jade Fox, who is thought to be hiding somewhere in Governor Yu's household. Shu Lin pays a visit to Jen. It's not super clear if she knows that Jen is the thief at this point, but it seems like she is suspicious. Yeah, she does this thing, I think this is the scene where she intentionally knocks a teacup off the table to get Jen to catch it. I think that's a later

scene. Was that a later scene? Okay. Sorry, I'm getting my scenes confused. No, no, no. So good, though. And I did, like, I fell for the, when I saw it in theaters recently, because I didn't remember very much. I did fall for the the fake out of Jade Fox. Like originally, you think like, oh, she's of a different generation. She thinks that women shouldn't be sword fighting. But then

it's like, no, she's she's the ultimate sword fighter fighter and she thinks you should only be fighting for me. Right. That's great. Yes. Another fun fake out. Mm-hmm. Anyway, so Shulin pays a visit to Jen and Jen is like, let's be best friends. You're my sister now.

And Shulin's like, okay. And then Mubai shows up and we learn that Shulin was engaged to a friend of his who died and she and Mubai grew close after that but they didn't want to disrespect the other man's memory so they never got together Mubai is clearly trying to tell Shulin his feelings that he has feelings for her but they're interrupted and it doesn't happen and also i i loved jen's reaction there where she at least as it's translated she's like well that sucks for the guy who died but like what does that have to do with you having sex today it's like yeah yeah good point j Honestly, great point.

Meanwhile, there's this police inspector and his daughter who are trying to catch Jade Fox because Jade Fox killed his wife. His wife. His wife. And Jade Fox sends them a note saying, we will settle this at midnight. So they meet up at midnight and battle and we get that reveal that you were just talking about jamie that jade fox is a woman specifically jen's governess a really fun bechdel test pass in this scene let me avenge my mother's death you'll soon be like her you little whore and you're like well imperfect metric but but it does pass yeah it sure does so we get the reveal of jade fox's

true identity and we come to realize that jen is her disciple they've basically been like working and training together in secret for i think 10 years yeah mubai shows up to help with this fight, and he battles Jade Fox. We learn here that Jade Fox had infiltrated Wudon, stole the secret manual, and poisoned Mubai's master. And then she spent the last 10 years teaching herself to be a Wudon fighter, but she's still no match for Mubai.

And then Jen shows up in her disguise and fights him well wait there's that moment though where it's like you get a lot of important context for jade fox because i'm like okay jade fox yeah she's she's done crimes but some but i'm i'm a lot of the time i'm like she did what she had to do right i was gonna save that for the discussion because it's so steeped in gender she's like oh he was fine sleeping with me but he wouldn't teach me shit so unfortunately he had to go so she had to kill him yes so jen shows up and she's fighting mubai and she is more of a match for him but then she and jade Fox escape after Jade Fox kills the police inspector. Shortly after that, Mubai crosses paths with Jen again. Also by now, Shulin definitely

knows that Jen is the thief slash Jade Fox's disciple. And Mubai is like, Jen, you should be my student. I will train you because you have so much potential, but also you're messy. And she's like, um, pass. And she runs away and meets up with Jade Fox, but they argue because Jen isn't sure what to do about her future. But she doesn't really want to pal around with Jade Fox anymore, which upsets her and like jade fox is upset that jen is more skilled than her and that she kept some details and secrets of the wudan manual from jade fox uh which is like a really i don't know their relationship is so interesting i'm excited to talk about it same yeah um then a man named lo played by chang chen shows up in jen's room and we cut to a flashback where when jen's family was traveling through the desert this flashback is so long yes i want to interject a little bit to do the second piece of very, very important subtitle thing that's going on here. So, okay, one of the things that happens, this would be a lot, is people will say something is happening in the West. But the actual word they are saying is Xinjiang.

Now, mark that down. That is going to be a very important sort of ideology thing uh you you you may you may you may know what xinjiang is from the news now about the the autonomous region of china where muslims are being put in camps and you know the sort of general like people's war on terror stuff is going on that that i think is important to what's going on in this movie we'll talk about that later it isn't it is interesting that Ang Lee chooses to say capital W West. Right. And not tell you quite what's going on. Yeah, there's stuff going on there that's interesting.

Okay. I'm excited. Because I was, I mean, and we'll get back to this too, because I was trying to do, I mean, in the effort to research this movie historically, Ang Lee kind of makes it intentionally difficult because it could happen at any point in a range of 400 years. Yeah, although I think he's actually made it easier to figure out that he thinks he does because of some of the historical stuff. Really? Okay. Oh, I'm excited to talk about it. Yeah, same. So we're in this flashback now

where Jen's family was traveling through the desert and attacked by bandits led by Dark Cloud, whose real name is Lo, who we just saw. He's the other character who has an actual Chinese name, but they just translated as Lo for some reason. I don't know what they're doing with that this one's less important i think

so his gang pillages governor yu's like convoy i guess and he steals jen's comb so she runs after him and after a lot of fighting and chasing they end up in his cave hideout where he has taken her to like feed her and nurse her back to health but also taken her as a prisoner and then they end up kissing and having sex and now they're in love so there's that sure yeah that's a we'll circle back to that yeah yeah one other thing i want to say is that so lo thinks that jen is han chinese and she's not she is manchurian well she's she's manchu that's a that that that's another interesting thing that i think is kind of important that we'll get into later but i I guess the immediate context for this is that,

so this is set in the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty is not a Han Dynasty, which is sort of kind of unusual. It's a, there was, the history is a bit complicated. The very, very cliff notes version of it is that the previous Han Dynasty is falling apart and they kind of like negotiate a handover to this Manchu Dynasty that's coming out of

manchuria in order to sort of stop a peasant revolt from toppling both of them okay yeah so that's that's why everyone has like that haircut that's the like all the guys have the haircut that's like the shaved bald head and then the long like ponytail thing that's like that's like a specific qing dynasty thing imposed by like the manchus on other people got it okay so that actually does narrow down the period of time this movie takes place in very it's it's yeah and well we'll narrow down some more in the next part oh i'm so excited you're here yes okay so then we cut back to the present lo has come to peking to stop jen from getting married but she's like our relationship is over sorry

but the next day during a like procession slash ceremony i think for the upcoming wedding yeah low like wedding crashes it basically i mean that's one way to describe what happens and a big ruckus is caused and shulin and mubai are like they like pull lo aside and they're like what are you doing like if you actually love her get out of here and go to wudan and wait there meanwhile jen has run away and she goes to this tavern disguised as a man named master long a bunch of men try to mess with her but she just like kicks all of their asses like dozens of men incredible sequence they're all like really sort of incredibly funny like stereotypes of different like like of different kung fu guys like there's the guy who has a giant club there's a guy who's a monk there's the guy the first guy is like this guy is like i am iron arms long and then like

yeah she like undoes his sleeve and there's just like literally an iron like brace on his arm so that's why his arm's so hard it's so good it was so enjoyable and she's just like not only like physically dominating them but like hurling these incredible insults at them along the way yeah it's so quippy that scene is like the funniest scene i mean it's like not a super funny movie but but every time jenna is fighting she just like her inner stand-up comedian comes out like something comes alive with there's a scene when she's quipping i think it's the first scene when she and mubai fight and he's like how did you learn that move and she's um okay so uh jen has bested these dozens of all 500 people so they're they're in this like tea house and this tea house is when i say destroyed at the

end of this it's not like oh they broke it like giant sections of like it's like a multi-story thing yeah it's holding the center like giant sections of the it's like a multi-story thing yeah it's holding the center like giant sections of the building have collapsed from how hard she's thrown people through them it's amazing and it makes well it makes me feel bad for whoever owns that tea house and it's just like yeah but i'm just gonna pay for that you know but it's you you you own a kung fu tea house right like this is good this has to be like factored into the budget like they're well insured they're definitely well insured oh i want i wanted there's one more really funny scene right after this there's this scene that has like every all like like the the hundred people she's defeated are

all like standing around this crowd and all of them are like wearing casts and like splits yeah so funny right because uh shulin and mubai are like kind of questioning people around to find out where jen is but then jen finds shulin and they get into an argument because jen has caused so much trouble for like everyone around so the two of them have this huge, incredible sword fight. Jen, for, for all of her like ability and power is still such a teenager in a lot of scenes where anytime she's confronted about like,

so what about those 500 guys you just killed? She's like, what? You're just like, to be fair, I don't think she killed any of them. I think, I think they're all fine because they're all Kung Fu people,

and therefore they have an incredible ability to just get tossed around. Right. They also have good insurance. They're good. Yeah. So this amazing sword fight is happening. Eventually, Mubai shows up. Then he and Jen are flying through and fighting in the trees.

Eventually, Jen is saved by Jade Fox, who takes her into a cave. Shulin and Mubai follow her there, only to find out Jade Fox has drugged Jen and intends to kill her because she feels betrayed by Jen. Jade Fox shows back up. Mubai and her attack each other. Jade Fox is killed. Mubai is poisoned.

Jade Fox gives a Shakespearean sendoff. Oof. Great. Can't wait to talk about that. Yeah. So he's been poisoned and they think maybe there's no antidote. But Jen is like, no, there is. And I know it. She wants to help them to redeem herself.

So she leaves to get the ingredients and prepare the antidote. But by the time she gets back, it's too late. Mubai dies in Shulin's arms after they have professed their love for each other there's also this kind of weird thing where like he like dies and well he does the thing where he's like ah this is like my final breath and then he like dies but then Shulin like kisses him and then he's like alive for a few more seconds don't underestimate mubai's horniness horniness sustains him yeah it gives you just a few extra seconds yeah he has a brief snow white moment he's back baby yeah so jen has returned it seems like shulin might kill her, but she spares her life and says,

promise me one thing and never let go of that promise. Whatever path you take, be true to yourself. And Jen is like, I'll never let go of that promise. And then she goes to the Wudang mountains to reunite with Lo. And then the movie ends. And like I said,

I might, I think the ending is maybe too metaphorical for me to understand but she jumps off the mountain in reference to a legend that lo had told her earlier it has been interpreted in different ways but the movie ends with her jumping off the mountain the end yeah and then lo is like why did i tell my girlfriend the story about jumping off the bridge damn yes lo you do this i have regrets the one thing you never do so that's the movie let's take a quick break and we will come back to discuss. joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories,

and of course, the culture. I feel some Sandra Bernhardt in you. Oh my God, I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know, I'm so behind. Katherine Hahn can sing. Oh, I'm really good at, I know. I'm so behind. Katherine Hahn can sing. Oh, I'm really good at karaoke.

What's your song? Yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love a ballad. I felt Bjork's music. I just was like, who is this person? I gotta hawk this slalom, Rudy. I'm not gonna hawk

this slalom. I absolutely love it. It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my slok, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah,

I think a lot about that quote. What is it? like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Okay, we are back. I'd love to just jump right into the historical context, if that's cool with you, Mia.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so a lot of what's happening in this movie. So, okay, so one of the, you can't even really call it a subplot. It's like a third of the movie is sort of about the west so the the you family who are like jen's like father is a governor and he his thing is that he made his bones like in the west right and what this is is that okay so in in the 1770s

the qing dynasty does this push into xingjiang they do, like, basically around the time the U.S. is being formed, they do this invasion of the state that had been in Xinjiang. And they do a genocide. So the people who had been ruling the state were, like, sort of like a Mongol-speaking people. They are basically all dead. The Qing Dynasty exterminates them. They do a genocide.

And then after that, they bring in sort of like Han and Uyghur settlers to sort of recolonize the land of these people who they've killed. Okay. And that's sort of the backdrop of this whole thing, which is that the Qing Dynasty – so the Qing Dynasty is the last dynasty of China, right? They're the people who are eventually going to be knocked off by, I guess, the 1911 Revolution, but there's people who lose like the opium wars to the British, to the people, yeah. So, and that's usually the part of the Qing Dynasty that everyone remembers, is the part where they're just sort of like getting kicked around by a bunch of other imperial powers. But before the 18, like really like the 1840s, the Qing Dynasty is a really,

really brutal and expansionist empire. They're the people who are – they're like they're really the first people to like establish Chinese control over Taiwan. They try to push into Tibet. They're pushing – basically like they're pushing westward away from the sort of like traditional quote unquote, well, I mean, okay, it's hard to say traditional here because the Chinese dynasties control just almost completely random territories at different times, but they're pushing into places that are like not Han,

like very distinctly, like they're pushing into places that are usually Muslim. And this creates the situation where you have you know, you have Xinjiang or sort of the West that they're talking about, which is it, this is, this is China's sort of frontier, right? It's kind of unruly, their control over it isn't great because it's, you know, it's really hard to do force projection like that far away. It's deserts, it's plains, but you know, but there's some very interesting things like part, a lot of the, some of them, like the roof shots you get in this movie are like shot in a room chi

which is this or the sort of capital city of uh xinjiang and you know and so i mean this this also partially like this helps date the movie right like it's pretty clearly like after the conquest but before well i mean okay so there's another interesting thing you're sorry i'm sort of like going on no but this is all very helpful context. So Ang Lee, when he is discussing this movie, is talking about how this is his dream of what China is. Right. Ong Lee is from a very, very specific generation of Taiwanese people, which is actually like the generation that like my like my family comes from, although his family is way closer. Like is so OK, so there's there's a Chinese civil war from 1945, 1949. Right. Right. Which his parents escaped from where they survived. Yeah. Yeah. But so they're on the side of the kmt which is the nationalist party which is this like

i don't know that that that's a civil war where there are no good guys really like the kmt is this right-wing like narco death squad party basically they've allied with hitler uh they suck okay yeah i mean they're awful they are going to do a lot of they're kind of like the first prototype of like a new model of like right-wing narco anti-communist like death squad state you're going to see in like guatemala and el salvador and they're like deliberately exporting the stuff and so like on the grows up in this so the but you know the people who are aligned with the kmt like flee like flee the civil war to taiwan like my this too. Now, the difference there is that my grandpa was a paper boy. He was not like a KMT guy.

Ong Lee, like, grows up in, like, a village for, like, military dependents, like the children of people in the army. So he has a very – so he's part of this generation in Taiwan that, like, I call them, like, the Guomidong brats because they're the kids of the kt people but um yeah it's they have a very very weird relationship with china because like if you're a kid in this generation like my mom was like under this too like you know you'll be like a seven-year-old right and you'll be like in school you will be singing songs about how one day you're gonna reclaim the motherland again, this is like a horrifying military dictatorship. Yeah.

And so they have this very weird conception of what China is. Right. And like a lot of those movies also, it's based on like specifically like Mandarin language Kung Fu movies from Hong Kong. Which is another kind of export that happens because there's all of these. So most of the Cantonese people flee to Taiwan, but some of them flee to Hong Kong. But those people are Mandarin speakers

and not Cantonese speakers, like most of the people in Hong Kong. And so there's this sort of like, this is sort of like very specific kind of kung fu movie that emerges that's like Mandarin speaking, that's mostly designed for like the the the mandarin speaking people in hong kong and like the taiwanese audience and so he has this

weird kind of i don't know like a very weird understanding of like his image of china is interesting and kind of bizarre i mean that's an extremely specific lens to be bringing yeah yeah well it's interesting too because it's like like this is something that like i'm like one generation removed from this right so like i kind of like like i look at that i look at like ugly and i'm like oh okay like i get where you're like i get what's going on here you're you're you have weird diaspora angst about china because you're Chinese, but you didn't grow up there, and your family is sort of Taiwanese, but you have this complicated relationship.

He also ends up going to the U.S. And so I was looking at this, and I was like, ah, yes, I see. He has the diaspora anxiety. Well, that context is also interesting when you consider that this movie is a multinational co-production between companies in china taiwan hong kong and the u.s so companies from several different regions are coming together to make a movie that's also going to be widely released in

these different regions. Yeah, I kind of wonder, I mean, anytime, Mia, to you, does that feel like a conflict? Or I guess I just like always wonder what the conversations between those production companies have to be in order for this movie to come out? Well, so for me, the thing that's really interesting about this is, if you look at the sort of arc of, I can't believe I'm talking about Chinese developmental politics on a film podcast. But okay, I'm going to barrel through this, which is- But it's relevant. All right, we're going to do a little bit of, okay, so China is very, very isolated

from international capital from about the mid-1950s until really the 80s, and even then not really until the 90s. But when China opens back up to capital markets they they tap into this thing called the bamboo network which is this network of sort of like chinese capital based on sort of family lines that has been like sort of spread out across east asia in the us and so the the way this process works is you you get a bunch of money from like you know people like people who were rich who fled, who end up either in the US or they're ended up in Taiwan. And that money flows through Hong Kong.

And then it goes through this sort of like currency control capital gate thing. And then that money gets injected back into the Chinese economy. And this is how a bunch of the sort of like Chinese economic miracle stuff happens. It's funded by this capital that had been sort of taken overseas by people fleeing the civil war. And if you look at the companies who are involved in this, right, these are all companies from the places that are directly along the paths of sort of bamboo network, right? You have an American company, which is sort of one end of the sort of capital spigot, right? You have Taiwanese company, you have a Hong Kong company, any of the Chinese state-owned industry. And this is, you are directly tracing the path of capital that is the thing that sort of re-industrializes China after this period and re-sort of like turns China like capitalist

again after the sort of period where it hadn't been. And I think that's, because there's a lot of debate about how authentically Chinese this movie is. And I think that's a lot less interesting than the sort of economic configurations that are what brings China. Because this movie is also released like a year before China gets admitted into WTO again, I think. It's either – let me check my dates on that. Sorry. Yeah, the movie comes out in 2000. Oh, yeah. The 2001. Yeah. So it's like a year before China like China really completely fully reenters the economy. And I don't know. I think there's...

Okay, so this is also my explanation of the ending of the movie. Is this capital stuff, which is... Okay, so I think what's going on at the end of the movie is that Ong Lee knows that he has to sell this movie both to a bunch of like american conservatives american liberals and then also chinese reactionaries and also chinese liberals and the sort of holdouts of whatever communists are left because there are actually like in 2000 there are still like communists in china right like there aren't many of them but they're still around and in order to do that he has an ending that deliberately can be read in feminist or anti-feminist ways

interesting okay and this is my sort of crank theory about it but like you know you can read jen jumping off the cliff as like oh she's realized that she strayed from like her like duties and obligations and she can't bear it anymore until she like kills herself you can also read it as like well she's fulfilling the the thing of the the myth of the man jumping off the cliff you know so she this is how she fulfills her dream but outside of patriarchal expectations there's a reading of it where she's just running away because she can use qigong and like falling you can't if you can change your weight to zero or like negative weight how are you gonna die from falling right she's unkillable yeah yeah and so i i think i think ang lee deliberately makes the ending like this so that

it can be sold to so many different markets different markets yeah i mean i buy it i i that that is first of all thank you for all that extremely helpful context because it is like only is a fascinating figure to me i mean i'm i i like his movies except for his hulk movie which i feel like yeah you know that was look everyone's allowed to flop it's fine i remember i saw that movie in theaters and i was like edward norton even as even as like a nine-year-old i was like edward norton i don't buy it in any case yeah Lee has a fascinating career. I didn't understand the context of how he grew up and what his relationship to China would be. And this goes back to, Mia, have you read Red Carpet?

It's like a book that came out last year. But it basically traces the relationship between the Chinese movie industry and the American movie industry throughout the 90s and 2000s. And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes up in a section of it because this was, I mean, this movie was a huge hit in the West. It was not a hit in China at all. True Lies was the big American. Oh, that's funny. James Cameron. James Cameron. He doesn't's funny. James Cameron. James Cameron.

He doesn't flop even when he should. I haven't seen True Lies, so I can't speak to it. It's pretty fun. But this movie was intended to because there was like this whole period throughout the 90s and the 2000s where there was like this sort of like

pie-in-the-sky dream between international movie industries. It's like, we're going to find a movie that everyone likes. We're going to do it. And I think, I mean, for a number of reasons, including to oversimplify, Americans are racist and hate to read. There are very few international movies

that cross over into the U.S. This was one of them, but it was not a hit in China at all. It was mostly reviewed as either boring, derivative, confusing, offensive. Yeah. And also everyone's really mad that, again, he forced a bunch of actors who don't speak Mandarin to do an entire movie in Mandarin, a language they don't speak, which is like this, this happens multiple times to Michelle Yeoh and she deserves better than this shit.

Like I just, oh, it's so infuriating. it's not the actor's fault at all. Yeah. It's like, I, I mean,

especially because Michelle Yeoh is just a treasure to all the fact that she had, she broke her back and like and they didn't even set her up for success in the lines, what are you doing? Yeah. And I think this is a diaspora brain thing too, right? Because he has this whole sort of like, he's trying to create this sort of like one China. Well, one China is probably not the right way to say it, but he's trying to create this sort of like this like mythical China that on the one hand never existed but on the other hand is sort of like accessible or comprehensible to everyone you know but he but he runs into

the classic trap of thinking that china is a real thing which is that like china okay this is this is going to be this is going to be the argument that I make that gets everyone really mad. But I – Go for it. Okay. There is a very, very good argument that like China as like a single unified thing is basically a European economic category and has nothing – there's a lot of accounts. You can read accounts like 1600s, right? Of Portuguese like merchants will go into parts of china and they will ask people

about china and no one has any idea what they're talking about right because you know if you're living in china what you're living under is like a series of sort of like okay well you have like a king right and your king pledges allegiance to like another guy who pledges allegiance to the emperor right like you're not sort of like that, that conception of China as like, like a unified, single unified entity that that's a very Western concept, because this is get this this sort of rebound thing where china gets taken over by like rivaling cliques of nationalists right but the problem is like you know both the ccp communists and the kmt are both like western they're western educated intellectuals and so their conception of nationalism and what china is like is the western version of it and so they they come back and now like everyone thinks that this is

sort of like naturally what china is and that like you know people people are projecting back like oh there's this continuous state that goes for 5 000 years it's like like it's a state that's in it's in different places with different ethnic groups run by different people it splinters into multiple states many times. People have this sort of like, this sort of nationalist mythos like takes over. And I think this is actually, this is I think important to the fact that

like what Shin-chan is doing in this movie and what the sort of like the quote unquote like ethnic other is doing here, where like Ang Lee is using these people who are not Han, who come from sort of like the hinterlands, who Jen literally calls Lo a barbarian like the first time they meet, right? And that is a very classic Chinese thing.

And I guess, to be fair, isn't the right word. They also think the Europeans are barbarians, which I think is more accurate than everyone else I think is a barbarian. But, you know, he's using them as this sort of like other against which Han-ness is defined. Where, you know, because like Lo is the guy who's like, oh, well, you should like, you know, we should get married together. You shouldn't be bound by the sort of like restrictions of patriarchal like Han society or whatever you should run off with me but then but then he like claims her as his property saying multiple times like she's mine yeah there and there's that uh I felt like weirdly like flirtily presented line of like well if I was going to

rape you I would have done it by now and you're just like yeah it's like this i mean this is truly because i i i have very little of this context and so now understanding more of of the historical context i think it's like i i'm curious what your opinion is mia because in interviews about this movie Ang Lee was very very vague about when it took place he like when asked could you be more specific of when it is and he's like no and it feels like this movie I mean it's like not surprising to me that it wasn't very popular outside of the west because it feels like in in some ways obviously not all but that like it it's made with a western lens or it fits in very cleanly with like the west's like just under education on chinese history and what like i mean i i think your average like american would watch this movie and have no idea when it

takes place and have no idea you know what what any of the context would be for it and sort of take it and just like assume like oh this is so historically accurate like this because it seems it seems like flying well i mean the the thing i would say about that is it's not like it's not i mean like okay so like obviously like there's there's there's depiction problems going on here. Sure. But it's also not not true that the Qing have this whole sort of frontier-esque thing going on in the West where they're sort of fighting these kind of insurgencies. And there's this sort of – I think it becomes clearer what's happening historically now than it was in 2000. Because in 2000 – this movie is a pre 9-11 movie right and i think that's actually really important in the way that xinjiang is portrayed because i mean things don't get like as bad as they are now in xinjiang until like the

race riots and that's like 2009 2002 like 2011 when things get like really, really bad. But also like this is a period like right before the war on terror like gets taken up there were like people from who are like nominally at least supposed to be from east turkmenistan separatist groups who the u.s tortures in guantanamo for the ccp and i i think i think it becomes more clear what really and on the i think is also deliberately doing this he's deliberately drawing parallels between this sort of and you know shinjan also it literally means new frontier right like that that's what like the word means um and he's he's deliberately drawing parallels through the cinematic language to the sort of like american frontier right like that when when when lowe's attack they do they do the thing where all the horses are like circling around the caravan right

yeah and he's actually like more right about that than i think people give him credit for because that that is like it is a very similar set of the colonial process that goes on when the qing marched through uh xinjiang as what happens when you know like when when the u.s is basically doing the same sort of like death march counterinsurgency thing that they're that they're fighting so i don't know i think i think i think he he accidentally discovered something that was going to be very important to sort of like Chinese nationalism, which is that a lot of modern Chinese nationalism is about this resentment that the Qing Empire like wasn't allowed to be an empire. And that it was sort of dismantled by Western imperialists because, you know, there was, you know, as part of like inter-imperialist rivalry stuff right right and whether he knew it or not and i i don't know there's something that he sort of gets maybe accidentally maybe not about how this nationalism functions about how

hanness is going to be sort of like constructed against this sort of like uncivilized barbarian way that they see like specifically muslim people who live in this region that he's gotten before everyone else kind of yeah he's good there i i'm so i i i am fascinated by him and also i mean if you look at the uh screenwriting credits and the source you know the source material it's also a blend of um it's the same as the production companies you have a a taiwanese screenwriter who who did a draft you have an american screenwriter who did a draft and it's based on a chinese uh wuxia romance novel which which that's another thing i want to talk about a little bit because that book a it's weirdly more trans than this one oh like do tell jen spends a lot more time as like kind of a guy or like kind of someone in between gender okay when jen's off being a

kung fu wandering nomad who beats up people in tea houses but there's another kind of interesting aspect of this which is that like okay so the the author of the books that this is based off of um he gets declared an like an old intellectual or like an old literati guy and so he gets basically like sent to a camp by the ccp and there's this i think, a kind of interesting arc of like, I don't know, the CCP going from throwing this guy in prison for being a Kung Fu writer to, and he's like, like hated basically by the Chinese left for like a very long time, because they sort of like left academics. Yeah. For being like a reactionary. He was like forbidden from releasing new books. Like he was sent off to be a school teacher instead of like occupying the any sort of like lit space it's yeah but then you know but there's this interesting thing where like he gets he gets sort of rehabilitated I don't know if he's specifically rehabilitated in the 80s like there are some people who are like like the party is like oh hey we did this person wrong and okay i'm not gonna say that part

there's a hidden take that you may unlock at some point later yeah but then you know but but by the time you get the 90s 2000s like this guy is this is the person that you know the sort of like state media thing is like oh we can sell this interesting okay so it is mean, because it does seem that he, from what I can tell, he, you know, dies in relative obscurity. And it's like most of this is posthumous. And I saw that his widow met with Ang Lee during the production of the movie. Yeah, I guess. What do you what do you make of that, of this work kind of being like reclaimed and uplifted 25 years later? I don't know. ccp has a really weird relationship with like this isn't really classic chinese literature but it has a weird

relationship with classic chinese literature where there's this thing at the very beginning like right after the revolution where the party makes a bunch of uh they turn a bunch of like classic chinese books into like basically like comic comic books so that regular people can read them. But they'll have annotations in Water Barge, which is a story about these bandits who are stealing from the rich. They have this thing of, well, these people failed because they didn't have the central guidance of the party to follow and stuff. So there's all this weird stuff going on. But they have this complicated relationship with this kind of – i don't know if national is even the right term but this kind of like i don't know i mean one of the things that happens during reform and opening is that like

so at least rhetorically the ccp have been very very very anti-confucianism which is like one of their few sort of like no you're right aboutconfucianism which is like one of their few sort of like no you're right about that ones like you know i mean like one of the one of the first things they do when they come to power is it had been legal to like sell your wife and ccp was like no like this sucks you cannot sell your wife like this is you know right so like this is the kind of like like this is the kind of like like this is the kind of patriarchal society that like you're dealing with here and you know the CCP ultimately fails for a lot of reasons to really fundamentally undo all of the genders like

patriarchy that had been embedded in Chinese society that they were at least nominally trying to get rid of. But one of the consequences of that is that there's this way in which gender egalitarianism becomes sort of like conflated with the Maoist project. And so when reform and opening happens, there's this rejection of sort of the Great Leap Forward and like the Cultural Revolution. There's this like revival of, like, it takes a little bit. There's like a revival of Confucianism. There's like a revival of like, it takes a little bit, there's like a revival of Confucianism. There's like a revival of like traditional gender norms. You get, you get the one child policy, which is this very sort of like militant and draconian sort of like

intervention of the state into like reproductive politics. And I don't know. I think, I think part of them, like the CCP being willing to make movies like this has to do with them, them like sort of being willing to go back and sort of like older mythologies that aren't really communist but are nationalist. Okay, interesting. That's I'm trying to think of like of another another example of that of something that was oppressed in its time and then is later sort of like i mean there's there's plenty of them but i don't have a functioning brain at this time um who does okay is is there any other um historical context that you wanted to discuss mia is there anything you wanted to discuss caitlin um yes but first let's take a break and come back for more discussion. to the next level. The one, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Lost Culture East.

That's right. The queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture.

I feel some Sandra Bernhardt in you. Oh my God. I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know. I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know. I'm so behind. Katherine Hanken's thing.

Oh, I'm really good at karaoke. What's your song? Yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love a ballad. I felt Bjork's music. I just was like, who is this person? I got to hawk this slalom, Rudy. I'm not going to hawk this slalom.

I absolutely love it. It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my slok, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden.

We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies.

Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia.

I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free,

subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. And we're back. And so I wanted to, since we talked a little bit about the kind of like production of this movie and how it was a collaborative effort, I think meant to appeal to a bunch of different markets, and that mostly only

appealed to a Western market. I wanted to talk a little bit about how the movie was marketed in the US. So I'm basing this off of the official trailer from Sony Pictures Classics, which was the company that distributed the movie in North America. And so basically, the trailer frames the male characters as the more prominent and important characters who are driving the narrative, which as we will discuss shortly, is not how the movie plays out. No. So for example, like the voiceover is like the story of a hero and we see images of mubai he's in like eight total scenes like i know he's barely appearing in this movie it gets worse so it's the story of a hero and we see images of mubai. The woman he loved. Then we see images of Shulin, a daring outlaw. Images of Lo, who's in

the movie even less. And then a princess destined to become a warrior. And that's when we see Jen. Oh my god. So Mubai is framed as the protagonist of the movie. Shulin is reduced to his love interest, ignores so much of what her character is. And then Jen is like defined as a princess destined to become a warrior, which is, I guess what that story is kind of. Yeah, not a princess. And then Lo is framed as a much more prominent character than he actually is. Similarly, the poster places Chow Yun-Fat in the front. His image is the largest. Jen is in the back most because it's sort of like layered images of those four characters. Jen is in the back.

Lo is on the poster for some reason. Also, why is he in the trailer? Like, it's all this stuff so i think that'll like transition into the conversation about and also how that i mean how the i guess the last contextual thing i wanted to talk about was how this movie was this movie was like we already said received extremely well in the west it was nominated for 10 academy awards none for acting which is interesting um and also i saw a very there's a youtuber i really love be kind rewind who did a cool retrospective of michelle yeo's career

and mentions multiple times in the video something i never thought about which is that there should be an oscar for best stunt work why is there not an oscar for best stunt work because they don't want to pay stunt for people yeah then, then they'd have to pay them. But just the way that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was received by Western movie critics, so in the year 2000, majority white men, the way that they write about this movie is very particular in a way that I've seen argued seems telling to how this movie works well with Western

audiences where it's like, oh, this is actually the greatest, you know, martial arts movie I've ever seen. It's like, well, kind of because it's like partially for you. But, you know, Stephen Holden at the New York Times said that this movie plucks Hong Kong style action adventure out of its generic niche and lifts it into elegant, lyrical, cinematic poetry. And you're just like, okay, just say what you're trying to say. The first truly highbrow martial arts film. So it's just obnoxious, and I love to talk about New York Times film critics as some of the most, I mean, all of the New York Times, really.

Their film section historically has just been pretty dire. Yeah. All right. Anyways, let's talk about the movie. So despite what the marketing of this movie in the U.S. would have you think, women are driving the narrative. They are the most active characters, Shulin, Jen, and Jade Fox in particular. The men are the more secondary characters. Jade Fox makes more sense on the poster than Lowe.

For sure. Oh, also with the Western movie. Sorry, I just like, but in an additional point just to sort of hit home how even like you know western movie critics working at the highest level still know nothing about movies that are outside of the west um repeatedly jen's character is like a mulan type a warrior princess because mulan came out recently and they're like oh my yeah but it you know okay i saw academics writing about this who were like oh well it's kind of rare for there to be like who shows like a this is this is like a a male dominated like hero genre and it's rare for there

to be like a female like protagonist and i was like have you watched any of these movies like you know say say say what you want about like the politics of like the average kung fu movie and i think the politics the average kung fu movie are terrible i think this movie actually has above average politics for a kung fu movie but the one thing you can say about that is every single person regardless of their gender knows how to fight and does kung fu like that's like that's like that's like the one thing you can say is that there are always like female protagonists who just absolutely beat the crap out of people it's like there's like a few people like you're both the academics and the journalists it's like have you guys like ever have you guys watched like picking up or blues like literally a single other kung fu movie like reading shit

like that in the new yorker you're like oh like they're oh my god they just don't care they just like didn't do any research and they're like oh yes the idea of a woman who fights was invented two years ago in an american children's cartoon you're like no china is an egg roll. It's just like, oh. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot. But anyways, the movie is absolutely driven by women.

Don't believe the poster. Don't. Yeah, seriously. And then there are some interesting things happening as it relates to gender and gender roles and expectations in the movie. And I personally know very little about gender politics in China during this dynasty. So I don't know how accurately the movie represents the gender roles of this, again, sort of unspecified era. But there are some interesting things happening, such as women are allowed to be warriors, as we see with Shu Lin, but they are not allowed to train at Wudan, which I don't know

if that means that women are prevented from becoming the greatest warriors. I don't know if the implication is like to be the greatest warrior, you have to study at this institution i think that that's implied that seems to be implied right because they yeah like they have sort of secret techniques that no one else knows right that like and jade fox is like very enthusiastic about wanting to train there and learn these fighting techniques and she was not allowed hence her whole like character trajectory yeah um and and then it's i have okay question about this because i was like oh it's i'm not quite sure how she's feeling here because shu lin is such a composed character that sometimes i'm like oh how does she actually feel about that? Where the moment

where Mubai decides, I think Jen should train and I will take her on as my student and all, all this stuff. I couldn't tell if Shulin was chafing at that idea because it, she's like, well, you never asked me, you never wanted me to do it. That was sort of, I was like, that's how I would feel. But I don't, but I'm not her. But it was kind of a difficult, because I feel like there were certain moments where Shulin was not like upholding patriarchy, but like, you know, not pushing super hard. And like, right. So I don't know.

That was an interesting scene. Because I'm like how is she I feel like she has to be a little pissed that he's like I want this person who comes from a ridiculous amount of privilege I just met to train but you who I've known my entire life and I'm deeply in love with it never occurred to me kind of thing I did wonder about that there's a lot of interesting things happening about how certain characters feel about certain gender roles and expectations too. Because women are allowed to be warriors.

This is like a normal thing in society. I think you don't learn much about Shulin's backstory, except that she was engaged to a man and that she i think took over her father's line of work in some kind of like they say it's a security yeah security he's like a security guy right so hence her becoming like a skilled fighter yeah i mean there's also like a thing i think was interesting about one of the when she's like walking into beijing like i don't know what i can't remember who exactly he is like a guy who's involved with the thing tells her that like she's like she's doing a really good job and like her thing is safer than what her dad was doing it right she's even better than her dad i so good for her i really enjoyed that um because it's like not only was that like oh you know this is like a very you know hyper

competent character but just like how satisfying would that be if someone was just like hey I know your dad did this too but like you're you're you're killing it by comparison he fucking sucked I'm like I'm like hello like it's implied like he's maybe not alive anymore. So I loved that. It's like your dead dad, he sucked. So we learned this about Shulin and her backstory and just like this is her job and it is accepted by everyone. Then there are other women such as Jen who are expected to uphold more like traditional gender roles of like getting married and marrying a particular person who comes from a quote-unquote good family and the way that various characters kind of view these different expectations based on like kind of like what your position is in life where again Jen is from this upper class family and is therefore more bound by

traditional values of like polite society but she thinks that marriage is a prison and she wants to be able to like roam freely and go wherever she wants and do whatever she wants she wants to be a warrior and she's been training to do that in secret for a decade. Then you have Shu Lin, who is in this position where she is more free. She is not bound by these limitations and expectations, but she still holds on to these more traditional values where she says things like, marriage is the most important step in a woman's life. And later on, she says something like to Jen, I'm not an aristocrat as you are, but I must still respect a woman's duty.

And she also seems to long for romantic love and companionship in the way that Jen does not. So they kind of have these like conflicting values. I really love how those sort of kind of chafe with each other. And that always, that Jen is constantly wanting to have a blunt conversation that Shulin is not willing to have. Yeah. But it's like there's so much going on.

And I feel like very often in movies that are maybe technically feminist, but not fun to watch necessarily. It's because it's like all women are allies to each other. And that is feminism. And you're like, well, no, these are two very different people. They're, you know, like Michelle Yeoh's character is like 15 years older than Jen. They're of basically different generations and different classes. So it makes sense that and and totally different life experiences so it makes sense that these are

the things they're going to chafe on and it also I think like the way that Jen's youth and privilege is commented on and but in a way that doesn't negate her as a person I feel like it's always really clear why she's doing what she's doing, even when it is like reckless and intense. But it's, I don't know, I really liked that scene where Jen, I feel like being, you know, an 18 year old doesn't understand why, you know, Shulin is not completely thrilled with the life that she has. She's free. She can do whatever she wants. But Shulin can't do whatever she wants and is explaining that. But it makes sense that that's difficult for an 18-year-old to understand when you're being forced down kind of the straight and narrow expected life.

Yeah. Their scenes together are great. Definitely. The other part of this that I'm wondering about now that I didn't really think about when i was watching it is the extent to which shulun's also what have you okay i guess rolling back to the beginning one of the sort of interesting things about this movie is it starts with wubai is trying to like he's trying to give his sword away because he's like haunted by how many people he's killed and he like is trying to get away from the violence of the sort of like underground like kung fu world that he's in and he kind of can't

do it but i'm also wondering now how much of the sort of like you know because i i when when when jen and shulian are talking about, like, are you free, right? Shulin has this thing about, like, she starts talking about how, like, well, no, there's still rules in the martial arts world. You have to have these rules so that people can survive. I wonder how much of that is also just based on her thinking that Jen doesn't really understand, like, the extent to which the world can be a terrible place and that like this world is also just like a bloodbath and shuland says something to the effect of like yeah i mean no i'm not married and i could go anywhere i wanted but it's not as glamorous as you think this lifestyle yeah the. You know, the writers who, you know, write these legendary stories about warriors

are leaving out the less glorious parts of it, like how we, like, don't bathe for weeks on end and we sleep in flea-ridden beds. Oh, yeah. Shulun's like, we smell like shit. It's actually not great. It's actually not that fun. That's what I tell people who are like,

I'm thinking about starting stand-up. I like look we don't bathe it's disgusting your life is going to be miserable yeah and then she also says like well yeah you perceive me to have all this glorious freedom but like i haven't lived the life i wanted to have. Parentheses, I'm in love with Mubai and we have never gotten together because we're both too scared to admit it. So like, it's not all fun and games when you're a warrior. And Jen, because she's so young and naive and like, arrogance is another component of her character, which is fun to watch because she's like so cocky with her insults and stuff. But she's a young person who like doesn't understand.

And understandably doesn't want to get, you know, be forced into an arranged marriage. Like for sure. And so it's totally understandable why she sees Shulin and is like, how could you not be happy with that? Like, oh, here's a here's a fun um not the grass is always greener but the sword is always greener because it's the green destiny swish they did it they did it yeah i mean i and i it's like neither of them are free because neither of them are able to access the the life that they want and deserve that wouldn't be fucking hurting anybody. Like it's, that's not freedom for either of them. And, and I feel like

that is, that theme is explored in a different way with Jade Fox. I, I'm like, I don't know if this is controversial to be a Jade Fox apologist, but I, I'm right there with you. It's even more generational between Jade Fox and Jen. But Jade Fox is, I mean, it's almost like looking at like different generations of feminists. And Jade Fox is to some extent resentful of Jen for having access both in class and freedom to do things that she can't also the issue of the and i want to make sure i'm getting this right like jen is able to read and write and is very educated and so she's able to withhold information from jane fox to advantage herself and that is like what jokerfies jane fox at the end of the movie where where she's just like how could you i put my you know i put 10 years of my life into training you although you could certainly argue that she was

taking advantage of jen's station in life and in order to i don't know jade fox is fascinating to me because all she wanted was to go to nyu and they no, you cannot go like she couldn't go, she couldn't get educated the way that she wanted to and deserve to be. And then on top of that was like sexualized and treated like shit by Mubai's mentor. So it's like, how is she supposed to access this education? Like how like, and I feel like her whole life story is an attempt to remedy that the fact that she was denied an education right I'm very much with you as far as like I was watching this on one of my watches of this movie I was watching it through Jade Fox's perspective who by the way just quick side note Jade um jade fox is played by chang pei

who is considered cinema's first female action hero which is so cool um i think based on a movie that she starred in in the mid 60s oh i didn't know that yeah um but jade fox is a character who's like been abused by the men around her. She wanted access to something that she could not have access to because of her gender. She is often underestimated by people around her where like that guard, Bo, is like once he finds out that Jade Fox is a woman, because again, she's presumed to be a man, because a lot of people are making assumptions about gender as well throughout this movie. But when Beau is like, oh, Jade Fox is a woman. Well, no problem. Let me handle her.

And then the police inspector is like, actually, you can't. She is so good at fighting. And she killed my wife, who was also really good at fighting. My kung fu wife. She killed my kung fu wife. Right. But like, Jade Fox is someone who, even though is framed as the villain of this story, and I think there's also something, I mean, we touched on this already, but the way that like people of a lower class are framed in this movie, particularly Jade Fox and Lo are made out to seem either uncivilized or villainous or both. And it also feels like, I mean, with Jade Fox, like her weapon of choice is poison, which feels like a very one-to-one of like she's

very bitter and she tries to poison jen she tries to poison everyone because she's so full of this like i it's i don't know i think it can be read a lot of ways and i appreciated that it felt like you could read it a lot of ways where you are given the exact because i feel like often when we're shown older women and they're framed as bitter and angry you're given no context as to why that might be and it's just like inherent to being an older woman or an older femme specifically is like you're bitter and mean and horrible and it's like you know crone logic basically but with jade fox it's like you know exactly why she's angry and you can sort of you know decide how you feel about how she

weaponizes that anger against other people um but i appreciate i just feel like it's more than you usually get right to to know exactly why she's so angry but i was I don't know like I just wasn't very invested in uh Mubai as a character so when she got him at the end I was like sad for uh Shulin but I was more interested in how Jen felt about her death but instead Jen was immediately like oh Shulin and Mubai my new mom and dad she switches parents so many times in this movie um she's like I have to go help my my new my new dad um instead of I just I wish that I knew how she felt more about that relationship because the way that Jade Fox goes out is oh my god like she impaled by sword shards yeah no I mean, I mean her dying words.

Oh, sure. Yeah, that too. Are really, really intense. Where she's like, you know, the real poison is the deceit of an eight-year-old girl. And you're like, oh, there's so much going on there. And it's so dramatic. I think there's like an interesting kind of... If you look at like the three women main

characters right there's this kind of gradient of like okay there are three things that you like want to have right you want to be you want to have like like a high class position you want to have the ability to do kung fu and you want to be free right and no one has all three of them really but jade fox is the person who has none of them like she is she is low class the high class kid that she's like i'm gonna try to like learn kung fu with this person and go be free with them is like does this really you know the way it's framed in the movie is that jen is like a superior martial artist and thus knows that like there's no way that that Jade Fox could possibly learn like the secrets of this thing. But it's like, how does she know that? Like, it really just seems like she's just right. She's just being like a terrible aristocrat and she's writing off.

Yeah. Jade Fox. It's just. Yeah. It's so frustrating to see and to see that sort of bear out in the internal logic of the movie where it's like well I guess she thought that because it was it was true and there's we don't know that yeah right well and it also implies there's only one way to become a good martial artist and it's by going to this one school like there's it's not suggested that there's any possible alternative yeah I'm always a little leery yeah when it's like oh the I don't know it's almost like the the latest Star Wars trilogy logic where it's like you can't just be a person you have to somehow be connected to aristocracy

and power and legacy in order to justify being good at something or being like the best at something. And I feel like between Jen and Jade Fox, we see the same thing where Jen has access to more, which isn't really called attention to too much. But the fact that Jade Fox doesn't have them is her downfall. And also like the way that Jade Fox is like her governess when they're hiding together yeah i mean that that power dynamic too is like jade fox deserve better and like deserve better from from jen also i i don't i mean it's like difficult because she's a kid and you know i i don't know it's complicated i love her she did she did nothing wrong yeah she is a true hero

why isn't she on the poster insulting yeah she kills the great hero yeah this kung fu was not strong enough to block all the darts she defeated him right yeah she doesn't get any credit for this either right right the fact that she and i don't know like i get that it's supposed to be like poetic that in the end they kill each other but jade fox is totally like it we're led to believe that one of mubai's driving forces in his life is to kill her but it's it's very like he says early on like i have yet to avenge my master and i have to do that by killing jade fox yeah who again is only the villain she doesn't deserve to be framed as the villain of the movie if anyone's the villain it seems to be the mentor guy who we never see on screen because he died before the movie starts, but thank you. Thank you for that. Jade Fox. But right.

But I was reading that cause I, I haven't seen that many WUSHA movies or I'm not really familiar with that form of fiction, but I was reading that poison as a weapon is framed in those narratives as always being like very cowardly. So anyone who uses poison poison is like oh that person's not a real warrior they're a coward and of course jade fox's weapon of choice is is poison that's how she bests her enemies and it also like it gets used by women a lot which sucks just across yeah like across fiction in general from all yeah

regions yeah so that is a bummer i yeah i i don't appreciate the way that the movie frames her with all of these villainous qualities even though she was you know just oppressed by this system that otherwise the movie seems to be challenging, like these patriarchal standards of women being expected to be married off and their worth as a human hinges on them being a wife. And you have this young woman, Jen, who's pushing against that and pushing against all these oppressive expectations that are foisted upon women. And because of that, this movie could easily be interpreted as a feminist text. But then the movie turns around and frames this like scorned woman of Jade Fox as a villain,

even though she's doing the same thing as jen like she's also speaking out against these oppressive gender-based expectations but for some reason when jade fox does it it's bad and she's a villain i i will say i think it's interesting that like her her existence winds up getting it like institutional change starts happening because everyone kind of looks at her like you know like one of the one of the important things with this movie is that jen has this conversation with mu bai about going to udon and jen is like well they don't train women and mu bai is like well hey i'll i'll go talk to them they might make an exception yeah and you you can see things like very slowly starting to change. But like, I think part of what's going on in this movie is that the sort of like, okay, like, I guess you call it like the heavenly kingdom, which the heiress, which is, you know, the sort of aristocracy is, you know, incredibly corrupt, right? In that, like, the aristocracy is based on the system of political marriages that like forces women to essentially be servants and like do sex

work for the powerful male members of the family so like that's obviously sort of like a corrupt system and everyone's trying to get out of it but then also the sort of like the the martial arts underworld is also you know just a corrupt system because it's also based on the same sort of logic of patriarchal exclusion the logic of like using women for sex and then it's just getting rid of them and never like teaching them etc etc and i think part of what the movie is about is the characters slowly coming to realize that like all of this stuff is messed up and why have we been like oh yeah because like one of the things over the course of the series is that shu lin realizes like why have I been wasting my entire life like not being the person I love because. you know he lives his life as this you know legendary warrior he gives that up because he wants to be with shul and he's so horny that he quits grad school and he finally like works up

the courage it almost happened to me no um he finally like works up the courage to tell shul and his feelings but before anything can really happen between them, Jade Fox kills him. And in his dying breath, he's like, I've always loved you. I've wasted my whole life, meaning like I've wasted my life not being with you, aka I've wasted my life denying my feelings and being afraid to express my feelings, which is like not a typical arc or journey for a male character period and particularly not in like an action movie or for like an action combat warrior type of character so I thought that was very interesting I appreciated the high drama of it um yeah as far as relationships between women I feel like we yeah like you're saying yeah we get like a pretty strong gradient of women of

different ages class backgrounds life experiences and and just like desires of what they want out of life I feel like and and as I was watching this I was like oh yeah I think we're very often and even in ways that are that scan progressive sometimes we're told like all women want the same thing now and it's to work 80 hours a week and it's like well that's not you know that's simply not what everybody wants and I like that there is just like at a base level the three main women who are driving this story all want something different and they're like their definition of personal fulfillment is different and I always appreciate seeing a flexible definition of what that is definitely can we talk a little bit about the relationship between Jen and Lo

yeah because I mean it's like Mubai and Shulin you're like you know what they love each other so much I'm not gonna say no good for them I'm not opposed to their relationship I'm sad it didn't get to happen but and it seems like Mubai like had no issue like part of why he loved Shulin so much was because she was hyper competent and great at what she did and like it didn't seem like that relationship happening would have interfered with that it was just all the feelings but yeah the the uh genuine low relationship well that's that's different yeah um i'll just kind of break down some of the key beats okay which is low and his bandits raid the group of travelers among them is jen and her mother he says leave the women alone so feminist icon low yeah although i i i i interpreted that as

keep them alive oh for later although i i don't know which way it's supposed to be i interpret it i guess is like yeah we're bandits but we have a code of ethics and we don't we might pillage but we will not rape like i don't well though although based on what you just said mia and and based on how afraid jen is i don't think it's inconceivable that she thought that that might happen and that's why she was kept alive because when she's actively afraid of him and he's like don't worry I'm not and then you're like wow what a hero right and then when she returns to the group of like bandits they seem like they're about to descend on her and then Lo shows back up also and he's like leave her for me like she's mine yeah to kind of save her but i mean again they're we're about to talk about how

messed up their relationship is but um yeah there's something else you need to talk about with this briefly which is that okay so there is a whole thing about gender race relations between like Uyghur men and like Han women like this is the the thing that starts the race riot that like when things go start to go really really bad in Xinjiang it's because a bunch of Chinese factory workers like beat a bunch of Uyghur workers to death and they do it because the rumors start spreading that like a Uyghur workers to death. And they do it because the rumors start spreading that a Uyghur worker has raped a Han woman. And so that is a thing that is... The sort of sexual politics... Interesting.

The sort of racial sexual politics, the thing that's hanging over the edge of this in a way that, for me, was really weird. I don't know what Ang Lee was trying to do with this if he understood really what he was doing like getting into here right i mean because that's like you and we see that in hollywood movies all the time with different i feel like in in old hollywood in particular anytime you see a black man with a white woman, it seems like, are you talking about a similar dynamic of like they're coded as predatory and then Jen's character would be more like virginal research about what's going on, sort of like the Qing Dynasty's like borders, which is racist in its own way but they just don't think about it very often but it reads the the fact for example like that lo is the only character and i think the only character

in the movie who talks about rape like at all i think i could be wrong about that but it scans weird if you read jade fox is like oh sure he would sleep with me but he wouldn't teach me it's not clear right in what capacity she was there like was she there as a sex worker who was like knowingly providing a service for these warriors or was it a more sinister or is it even like yeah or i think you could argue like i mean i don't know but like almost casting couchy behavior of like dangling the carrot of like oh maybe i'll teach you if you have sex with me right yeah yeah that could go a lot of ways right yeah but i still think it's very it rings alarm bells to me that he has like i mean i I guess it's partially just the way that like the character is written and

just the incredibly weird kidnappy situation that's going on. But the fact that he's the one like non Han character who, well, not the only, but like the one plot relevant non Han character is the one. Yeah. Well, okay.

Not Han or not Manchu, because at this point they're both, the ruling class is sort of like unified. Right. Yeah. For him to be framed as again, like presented as, quote unquote, barbaric and uncivilized and being a thief. Yeah. And then and then he does he does do the weird thing where they're like wrestling and then they start kissing and it's like, OK, this is where the worst thing is. The consent nightmare scene. Yes. Yeah. Where like basically she's trying to get her comb back.

They've had a weird rapport up until this point where like. So weird. I feel like it's implied by the movie that she's escaping his clutches flirtatiously. Yes. It's. Yeah. Like I can't exactly pinpoint what is happening to make me think that but i think like that that's how i'm reading it right so yeah there's like this weird flirtation going on

almost like a negging situation that they're both doing and they're like fighting and then at one point they're wrestling and then all of a sudden and you know trigger warning for assault but he has his hand down her pants and then they're kissing and it's not clear if she's consenting to this or not there was no like him checking in and being like is this the vibe and then all of a sudden and then people said all the time back then right Right. It was of the time. And the consent is so murky. And consent is something that should never be murky gray area thing, obviously. Which it's like, but tell that to a movie in 2000 and see how they do.

Right. And then post that, they are in love with each other. Right. Then she's riding on his horse. Right. And you're like, like yeah that was pretty bleak right yeah hated it um and again it's like but it's also like not the first time we have seen that where it's like this captivity is this is this big draw up to right a relationship which is a different kind of captivity. And then the way that their

relationship ends is she has no say. Like it's, it sucks at the end where she's like, I really, please don't send me back to my family. I want to be here with you. And he's like, no, if we, oh, he's doing, he's doing like some 4D chess in this moment where he's like well if we had a kid you wouldn't want her to stay here so i'm telling you that you have to go back and i was like what and she's like i guess so it's like no you could kill him like why are you agreeing to this plus like her whole thing has been i don't want to be trapped not Not that every relationship is a prison, Caitlin. Try to remember that. I'm talking to myself.

But like, it seems like not only does she want to be out of the confines of this arranged marriage, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in kind of long-term companionship. Maybe I'm just kind of filling in the blanks but i don't quite understand i think it's like kind of open to interpretation i don't know yeah i don't know um i do have to go soon okay um i think that was everything i had so yeah mia is there anything else that we haven't touched on yeah i think we're good all right cool then cool. Then we've already discussed one pretty incredible pass of the Bechdel test. I want to shout it out one more time. Let me avenge my mother's death.

Response, you'll soon be like her, you little whore. And that's going into the pantheon of my favorite passes that you can't say it's not plot relevant and they certainly both have names uh yeah that I laughed I lol'd when that one came out I was like woohoo I mean but the movie the movie passes constantly because you have so many scenes between our two main characters you also have a ton of scenes between shen and jade fox and yeah there's there's plenty of discussion about all sorts of shit yeah definitely and uh that brings us to our nipple scale our scale where we rate the movie famous perfect scale zero to five nipples based on examining the movie through an intersectional feminist lens. I would still give this like maybe like a three and a half or four nipples.

I think there's a lot to like and appreciate about this movie. I love that it's driven by women, that it is exploring gender politics and gender expectations. Could have maybe gone further with that. I would have liked to have seen more backstory for Shu Lin. I wanted to just kind of know more about her character in general because she is sort of the movie doesn't reduce her to Mubai's love interest the way the trailer does. But a big component of her character is like, you know, revolving around her. that because I don't know anytime a kind of relationship even when it's with a man more boring than you is connected to what your definition of personal fulfillment and freedom is I'm like a little more lenient about it because we see so we see that it's like it's not like she

wants to ditch everything else in her life it It's true. She wants a relationship and the life she has. That is. Yeah. Fair. I'm getting defensive. No, I, I agree. And I, and I, yeah, like we've talked about this before, but it's hard for like modern feminists to particularly like women who are attracted to men and might want to be in relationships

with them it's a difficult thing to reconcile that sometimes at least for me I don't want to speak for everyone but like I've found that to be um just a difficult thing to uh balance but it is yeah and I feel like that's but that's like part of shulin's journey which is maybe more interesting than i'm giving it credit for so just forget i said anything about it but yeah i i think there are a lot of interesting female characters and interesting relationship dynamics between women i always love to see that in movies. Also, I read a lot of pieces from Asian American writers who were saying how much they appreciated that they were able to see characters who look like them in this big action movie at a time where Asian representation was

super low. I mean, it's historically and still quite low in mainstream Hollywood. So you know, they appreciated the representation of strong, powerful Asian women. And then the fight scenes, like just every fight scene in this movie. And this is like me speaking extremely like surface level movie analysis here but they i think all involve jen and they're all so fucking incredible like it's just awesome i'd love to just see women fighting on screen in an action movie i like to see women participating in the action it's you know simple brain thing but i like it i don't appreciate how Jade Fox is framed as a villainous character her like contempt and resentment is super valid like she has been deceived and undervalued and

underestimated by different people like throughout her life and she's potentially been abused by that mentor guy but the movie still treats her as this like bitter old woman villainous woman uh and also because she is an older woman who is resentful of a younger woman which is something you see a lot in media it is often uncontextualized it's just like well this is just how older women feel duh at least it's contextualized in this case but but then it still does the thing anyways it still does the thing anyway so yeah i don't know um a lot of the host the historical and cultural context i was not super familiar with so thank you again Mia for all of your insight um I'll give the movie four nipples I'll give one to Shulin two to Jade Fox Justice for Jade and I'll give the fourth nipple to the daughter of the police inspector who's in that few scenes and I who I think is also like

dating Bo um but I'm not really sure anyway yeah that's that's it okay I'm gonna give mine and then I have to jump off I'm really sorry okay no worries um I will meet you at four um yeah I think the historical context of this movie um and then how that sort of contrasts with the way it was marketed in the west and how it was discussed in the west um is like a very particular moment right in uh history and i just yeah i'm gonna be thinking about for days how this movie can be identified to a pretty specific time period but most western viewers just didn't have the knowledge or on the part of the reviewers the interest in figuring out what you figured out very easily the academics didn't do it either i'm so baffled it's like i'm so bad

stop it hard to this day the wikipedia page says it could have happened anywhere in these 400 years. We don't really know. Okay. So the historical context, and I think also the, like you were just talking about, Caitlin, the framing of both older women and the character of Lowe and the way that he's framed and called a barbarian, and then it does act without consent. It just, it feels like it's reinforcing a lot of negative stereotypes on top of making assault seem romantic.

So just really some of the worst things you can do. Yeah. And then I'm like, that said, four nipples. It's confusing. Unfortunately, this movie just fucking rocks. Like, it's really really good um and the movie is absolutely driven by women which in a movie that's successful in the west in 2000 is pretty unheard of especially women that are not constantly um sexualized because

this is also the same year charlie's angels comes out, which is an action movie driven by women, but at what cost? So I think this movie is doing a lot of really unique things and it also has plenty of issues and I'm glad we got to talk about it. That said, I would feel so lucky I got to see this in a theater. It was so fun. I'm going to give all my nipples to the legend Jade Fox, because I really think that she did zero crimes when you think about it. And we should honor that. We should respect her for sure. Yes.

Mia, how about you? Okay, so I'm holding a grudge against this movie for the fact that the most easy interpretation of the ending is... So Jen gets told by shulian be true to yourself right go like live the life you want to do and then she immediately jumps off a cliff right i i'm mad about that that pisses me like yeah i was like oh there's a feminist interpretation but like the most obvious interpretation is that she was like oh my god i can't live with being free and then she jumped off a cliff which is like an like an unbelievably reactionary like like and that being the most easy surface level

reading to have pisses me off a lot right like i was very angry when that movie ended because i was like really like i know just he jumps off a cliff like really yeah it's like that could have ended so many like why doesn't shu lin start training jen like if the whole thing was like she needs more training or like there's so many ways you know she if jen was like yeah i thought about it and like i said before this relationship is over lo so see you later i'm gonna go do other stuff like it could have but then and again i know there's a lot of like metaphorical and spiritual ways to interpret how the ending goes but um just kind of taking it at face value it's like what but yeah i agree yeah so what do you what's your nipple rating i'm giving i don't know i'm gonna grudgingly

give it three fair because i think there's a lot going on here that's good there's a lot going on here that's weird sure trying to figure out how to no i feel like jade fox is the most wronged character in this whole series i'm gonna i'm gonna follow giving them all to her because like she she deserved so much better than every single person from like every single person she encounters screws her over from a different subject position, which is like a really sort of incredible way to get screwed. Yeah, like, why at no point is Mu Bai, like, you started the training, I'll help you finish it, Jade Fox. Like, he doesn't bother. He's only concerned about training, like, a younger woman. It's, everyone wrongs her. Yeah, I mean, he's just, he's just utterly, and this is the other thing, like, the only time he really shows emotion in the entire thing is when he's killing jade fox and he is like pissed and it's like like yeah okay like i i get i get it's the kung fu like you killed my master but this this

is one of those like this is one of those things where you look at that and you go there's extenuating circumstances i i don't know it it it's frustrating for sure yeah it sucked um glad glad she killed him in the end that was great uh yeah so three nipples all to jade fox uh so thank you so much for joining us for this discussion it was such a treat come back anytime and what would you like to plug where can people follow you online etc yeah so my my day job is i'm one of the hosts of the podcast it could happen here okay my my my my specific episode plug is if you don't know what this is and you want to listen to something we did a series called the war on trans people last year and i think it's still really important because all of that stuff is still going on and it sucks yeah yeah uh you can find me on twitter at itvchr3

yeah i guess the the closing thing i want to plug is is that kung fu movie i briefly mentioned earlier uh picking opera blues because picking up a blues is a movie about three lesbians overthrowing a military dictatorship and then household having sleepovers and it rips it is a kung fu movie is so good i love it it's also released like 14 years before this one no kidding because this movie like despite its flaws like feels ahead of its time for the year 2000 so that one feels even more yeah it's a it's a it's a trip it's also about a period of Chinese history that nobody other than me has spent significant – well, that's not true. Me, a bunch of weird war gamers, and four academics have spent a bunch of time studying, which is like the warlord – well, the pre-warlord period.

There's a period right after the Chinese Revolution, but before this guy dies where China is ruled by this guy named Yuan Shikai, who's just like this – he's the guy who gets put in charge of china because he has the largest army at the end of the revolution and he sucks and everyone hates him and this is a movie about people trying to overthrow him and it rips into the time period that gets no attention ever so yeah it's cool hell yeah well yeah thanks again for coming on the show check out that movie check out it could happen here um you can follow the bechtel cast on twitter and instagram at bechtel cast you can also subscribe to our patreon aka matreon you get two bonus episodes a month plus access to the back catalog that can all be found at patreon.com slash Bechtel cast as well as our merch at tpublic.com slash the Bechtel cast for all of your merchandising needs and with that let's go not jump off a mountain bye hey everybody this is Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang we've got some exciting news for you you know we're always bringing you the best guests right well this Bye that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture.

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