The “accidental” action star (Mythmaking in the Martial Arts, Part 3)

Linda Lee Cadwell: When Bruce did the demonstration in 1964, before he had even come back to Oakland, where we lived at the time, I had received a phone call from William Dozier’s office.

Shannon Lee: Jay Sebring, the famous hairstylist, happened to see my father at the Long Beach Internationals, and he cut the hair of William Dozier, and he said, “Oh my God! You’ve got to see this guy—he’s amazing!”

Cadwell: When Bruce came home, I said to him, “You need to call this guy back: William Dozier. He’s a producer in Hollywood and he wants to see you.” That was the first inkling that, “Wow, I might be able to do something in Hollywood!” He never had any intention of going into show business. His passion was his martial arts, so he had a school in Seattle and a second school in Oakland. His plan was to open many, many schools all over the country.

I Am Bruce Lee is the most recent filmic hagiography of the deceased actor.¹ It’s conveniently available for free viewing on YouTube if you can stomach what’s essentially an hour-and-a-half infomercial for the Lee brand. His daughter and current mogul of his brand, Shannon Lee, was the executive producer, as well as appearing in front of the camera as an ostensible interviewee, along with her mother and co-beneficiary of the Bruce Lee estate, Cadwell. Their lines are scripted and well-rehearsed, and as can be seen above, Lee even attests events she was not only not present for, they took place some five years prior to her birth.

They want you to believe Bruce Lee becoming an action star was an accident.

To do this, first forget he grew up around show folk, including his father. Set aside his appearance in 21 films by 1964, as well as an unknown amount of Chinese opera, the main arena of his father’s fame. Ignore his having starred in The Orphan (《人海孤鴻》) pretty recently to the above events at 18. Pretend he wasn’t a child star whose body of work some have equated to Mickey Rooney’s.

To be clear, Lee was already a successful actor, and if he hadn’t had to leave Hong Kong under threat of arrest, he’d very likely have continued his career there.

I’ll relate yet another version of that story: gang challenge fights often took place on rooftops, and someone fell off, which may or may not have been Lee’s fault.² But if Lee could really have been connected to an actual death, it’s hard to believe he could ever have returned to Hong Kong.

Although its standing has no doubt been buoyed by his later fame, The Orphan, Lee’s last non-action film, is ranked among Hong Kong cinema’s top 100 films of all time.³

In the US, however, he was not well connected—film had yet to become as transnational as it is today. He knew he would need a gimmick to get noticed. Surveying the pop culture landscape as an astute player, he may have considered using his ability as a dancer, but kung fu (武術) was a much richer vein.

In the US Lee found himself in direct exposure to Asian martial arts had long since ceased being novel—in fact, it was both mainstream and commonplace. Already in 1945’s Blood on the Sun, James Cagney had played an American reporter working in Japan who, despite uncovering his host country’s sinister plot to conquer the world, has gone native, enjoying the pleasures of the baths (お風呂), as well as being a skilled judoka (柔道家). The Tanaka Memorial (田中上奏文 Tanaka Jōsōbun) around which the film’s plot revolves, is actually a thoroughly debunked forgery which nonetheless acted as a casus belli in the vein of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The film climaxes with a three-minute fight scene between Cagney’s Nick Condon and the villainous Captain Oshima (John Halloran) complete with judo throws, karate chops and kicks, and even some holds we would eventually see Lee use on screen. Far from a footnote, the film’s box office was $3.4M—a tidy sum for the day—and it also took home an Oscar.⁴ ⁵ More recently, the film has fallen out of favor because of its propagandistically anti-Japanese themes and use of yellowface.

Other prominent stars used Asian martial arts on screen throughout the ’40s and ’50s, including Edmund O’Brien and Spencer Tracy. Judo and karate dojos (道場) had sprung up across the US. Finally, Hong Kong’s long-standing wuxia and emerging kung fu genres of film were slowly finding audiences beyond America’s Chinatowns. Wuxia (武俠), meaning “martial heroes”, being a more fantasy-oriented genre of action film, often employing wire work and visual effects, in contrast to the more “realistic” aesthetic of the kung fu genre.

The Wong Fei-hung (黃飛鴻) serials, in particular, were standbys. Established in the late ’40s, they had already run to at least 59 films by the time of Lee’s arrival in the US. There would eventually be 119 films about this Cantonese folk hero, featuring huge stars like Jet Li (李连杰), Jackie Chan (房仕龍), and Sammo Hung (洪金寶) in the role.

And so, when Lee moved to Seattle and worked as a busboy, the revisionists will tell you he taught his coworkers kung fu in the alley behind the restaurant. However, a firsthand account from one of those people reflects something different:⁶

“I knew [Bruce Lee],” my mother tells me. “I worked with him in a restaurant when I was in high school.”

“Really?” This is now officially the only cool thing about her. “What was he like?”

“I don’t remember. No one liked him though. All that kung fu stuff; it looked ridiculous. Like a parody.”

Those who worked with Lee were a captive audience to his bid to parlay his showmanship and scant knowledge of martial arts into a career as an action star, but it seems they were not fans.

At Jun Fan Gung Fu (振藩武術; lit. “Bruce Lee Kung Fu”), he emphasized exhibitions and demos, in which he and his students often performed. His purpose was to get noticed—not necessarily to get more students for his kwoon (館—Cantonese for a kung fu school; 馆, guan in Mandarin), but more to gain notoriety—press mentions, photographs, whatever could help him with his real goal. It was during one such demonstration at a local high school he met his future wife.

That his sights were set on forging a new acting career is evidenced by his concurrently majoring in drama at the University of Washington. His majoring in philosophy is yet another myth.

It’s no accident Lee was discovered at Ed Parker’s tournament; first, Lee and a few of his kwoon buddies had been running up and down the Coast like a kung-fu garage band. Second, Lee and Parker—though the latter initially disliked Lee as a showoff—turned out to be kindred spirits. Never intending to compete, Lee was instead Parker’s special guest. Though Lee’s heirs have tried since to change the narrative, in a 1971 interview, he’s pretty clear about his level of dedication to the martial arts:⁷

Just about the time I discovered that I didn’t really want to teach self-defence for the rest of my life, I went to the Long Beach International Karate Tournament and got myself discovered by Hollywood.

One of Lee’s original students, Leroy Garcia, also confirms this:⁸

[O]nce he found, “God, I can make money doing this”, all the original people [in Lee’s school] just dropped out. Looking back on it, Bruce always had an agenda—he was a product now, not a friend and a teacher.

Let’s discuss Parker, cut from much the same cloth as Lee: information about his martial arts training is vague, but he somehow goes from being a brown belt to an instructor at his own school. By the early ’60s, he bills himself as a “grandmaster” taking advantage of the American public’s lack of knowledge about martial arts in order to inflate his image.

Though he started teaching kenpo (拳法) in Provo, Utah, he opened a branch in Pasadena and moved there to be close to Hollywood opportunities: high-profile clientele, action choreography, and, ideally, onscreen appearances.

He cashed in his dubious claims to martial arts expertise for a moderately successful Hollywood career, mainly as a stuntman, with notable appearances in Kill the Golden Goose, and a few of Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films. He was still better known as Elvis Presley’s karate teacher and bodyguard.

That his claims were overblown can easily be seen in his appearance on The Lucy Show a year prior to his eponymous tournament: he is repeatedly off balance, his arms flailing and generally lacking coordination. Although the show is a comedy, he is meant to be an impressive, skillful karate instructor, not a buffoon.⁹

Even in later performances, similar features can be seen; in an appearance on Chilean TV in the ’80s, he even falls over during a finishing move.¹⁰

Furthermore, it is an open secret his 1975 book, Secrets of Chinese Karate, actually comprised the technical knowledge of James Wing Woo, with Parker handling the writing, but which he then seized all credit for. Woo gave up trying to remedy the situation, instead building up a successful school with a dedicated following.¹¹

Parker’s First International World Karate Tournament, like much in the shady, nascent martial arts world of the time, was mainly a way of legitimizing and promoting himself. It also took place in Long Beach, a venue conveniently close to Hollywood.

Parker had wide coattails, helping along many martial artists in establishing their own schools, and though Lee’s case was slightly different, he still seemed a willing accomplice. He even lent Lee one of his own students for his demonstrations: Dan Inosanto, who was to become a major player in the creation and perpetuation of the Lee myth.

Many Lee bios conflate his appearance at the 1964 tournament with that at the 1967 one, including I Am Bruce Lee. When Gene LeBell reports in the film, “they treated [Lee] like a god”.¹² He is clearly referring to his appearance at the latter event, wherein he was something of a conquering hero, already having appeared as Kato on The Green Hornet.

In ’64, it would have been more, to quote Chris Rock, “Nobody knows my name; nobody’s glad I came.” The footage is easy to disentangle: the first tournament is the one shot in black and white, while the color footage is from ’67.

Again quoting LeBell in the same film:¹³

He did these things so realistically that people didn’t know if it was show business or the real McCoy.

It’s clear which one LeBell thinks it was—I’m honestly surprised his whole interview didn’t end up on the cutting room floor. Another martial artist-stuntman-actor, LeBell knew Lee (and Parker) well, working with him extensively on The Green Hornet.

At the tournament, Lee “sparred” with a well-rehearsed Inosanto and performed some spectacular parlor tricks; the one-inch and six-inch punch, again with an accomplice to sell their power by staggering backwards no matter how lightly they were struck (Taky Kimura and James Lee both attended with Lee, but it’s unclear which took part in this demonstration).

Another thing that appears again and again in these films is Lee’s “unstoppable punch”. Even though it’s from the 1967 tournament, let’s look into it: Lee, LLC says there were eight attempts, and the hapless karateka (空手家) on the receiving end failed to block even one.¹⁴

That karateka was Vic Moore, an authentic martial artist who had already won a world championship in 1966 and would rack up three more in 1968, 1969, and 1970, even defeating legendary Bill “Superfoot” Wallace in the last one, and he tells the story entirely differently.

According to Moore, there were supposed to be only two attempted punches by Lee, directed at his chest. Moore says he easily blocked both, and the footage the films use is from when he is smiling into the crowd after these blocks. Then, Lee surprises him, going for the head rather than the chest, as well as punching from out of range.

Looking at the footage, it’s easy to verify Moore’s claims: in the first frame, above, Lee’s punch is already at full extension, about a foot and a half shy of Moore’s face. You can also see Moore is looking up and to the left of Lee into the crowd—no one with any experience faces a punch with their chin up like that, and Moore was clearly experienced.

In the second frame, Lee has landed on his front foot with his arm already retracted. You can see Moore’s block in motion (and his chin come down) despite being caught off guard as well.

In short, Lee’s punch was never blockable because it was never in range.

Those responsible for polishing Lee’s legacy show this same footage over and over with different levels of zoom and tinting as if it were a series of punches, rather than a single cheap shot that never could have landed. Moore also claims he challenged Lee to attempt to block his punches, and the actor missed on both attempts.¹⁵

In any case, despite Cadwell’s claims, the effect of Lee’s appearance at the 1964 International World Karate Tournament had exactly the effect he had calculated—getting a call from Hollywood. Cadwell contradicts her own statement:¹⁶

Bruce insisted it was no real surprise to him. He’d anticipated something like this since appearing at the Long Beach Tournament.

Even without a solid deal, the Lees shuttered the kwoons in Seattle and Oakland—the schools that were supposedly his passion, that he had supposedly fought for and won the right to teach at—and moved to LA. But Bruce Lee the action star was born.

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Read subsequent articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 4: Urban Lee

Part 5: The Littlest Dragon

Part 5 Addendum A: Kato’s Comeuppance

Part 5 Addendum B: The Row over “Hollywood” Continues

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Read previous articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 1: The Bruce Lie

Part 2: Enter the Tycoon

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Notes

1. Pete McCormack (dir.), I Am Bruce Lee, 2012.
2. Norman Borine, King Dragon: The World of Bruce Lee, 2008.
3. The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures, Hong Kong Film Awards, 2009. 
4. Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars, 2009.
5. Best Production Design, Black and White, 18th Academy Awards, 1945.
6. Paisley Rekdal, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, 2000.
7. Daniel Moss, “Bruce Lee: the big boss and the $3 million man”, South China Morning Post, 1971.
8. Bao Nguyen (dir.), Be Water, 2020.
9. Jack Donohue (dir.), “Lucy and Viv Learn Judo”, The Lucy Show, Feb 1963.
10. Mauricio Beltrán, SGM Ed Parker en Chile, February 2011.
11. Dejan Djurdjevic, “What did Ed Parker study?”, The Way of Least Resistance, 2014.
12. I Am Bruce Lee, 2012.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. GrandMaster Vic Moore: The Man That Fought ’Em ALL!!!, 2013.
16. Borine, 2008.

Building the brand of Bruce (Mythmaking in the Martial Arts, Part 2)

Back in 1995, in the early days of the internet, a guy named Martin Eng created a website with the domain name brucelee.com. The site displayed,¹

[P]hotos of Bruce Lee, a chronology of his life, images of various martial arts paraphernalia used by him, a list of movies that feature him, and text from a book authored by him.

Eng claimed fair use, saying it was a non-commercial site, which included the following disclaimer:²

With due respect to Bruce and his family, and fellow fans. This is a non-profit web site. The fans’ products aren’t for sale if there are any, and I receive no financial benefits before, now and whatsoever.

Eng was a minor local celebrity himself for a time, the owner of the Russian Hill home where MTV’s The Real World was set in 1994, he also was a candidate in San Francisco’s 1999 mayoral race as part of the “hyena pack” attempting to unseat Willie Brown, the lion in the scenario. A tech-savvy entrepreneur, Eng once owned as many as 1,400 domain names, including asians.com.

Setting his notoriety aside, Eng might seem like a basic domain troll, but his interest in Lee seems to have been genuine; he is listed in the credits as a photo scanner for a series of unauthorized biographies of the film star, written by Sid Campbell and Greglon Lee.³

In 2005, Eng was sued by a company called Concord Moon LP. This entity was described in legal documents thus:⁴

Linda Lee Cadwell, the widow of Bruce Lee, and Shannon Lee Keasler, the daughter of Bruce Lee, are the legitimate heirs of Bruce Lee and the principals of Complainant Concord Moon LP.

The case was a slam dunk as so many others from those days were—it was clear mass registrations such as Eng had performed were specifically intended to usurp the trademarks others had legitimate claims to during the Wild West of the nascent internet, either hoping to be paid off to release them or to profit directly from their use. Eng’s claim his site was “non-commercial” didn’t hold water, since even though he didn’t sell anything on his site, it linked via ads to ones that did.⁵

Eng seems not to have been particularly harmed by the loss, nor by the destruction by fire of the massive house on Lombard Street Puck’s roommates booted him out of. His internet domains and real estate holdings rendered him permanently far more than well off. The house has since been rebuilt, as I’m sure you’ll be pleased and relieved to learn. Oh, and Puck ended up doing jail time, much to absolutely no one’s surprise.

Lee’s heirs have engaged in legal disputes with many others. Another of the entities they control, Bruce Lee Enterprises, won a well-publicized suit in 2010 against A.V.E.L.A., Inc. (the Art and Vintage Entertainment Licensing Agency), that “licensed” images of Bruce without actual authorization for T-shirts also involving Marc Ecko Enterprises—a “global fashion and lifestyle company”, according to their company profile on Bloomberg, behind such clothing brands as Eckō Unltd., Avirex, and Zoo York—who produced the shirts, and Target and Urban Outfitters, who sold them. The legal wrangling did determine A.V.E.L.A.’s claim the images they were licensing out were of the personas Lee portrayed in films, rather than images of him, per se, held no water.

Bruce Lee began the first of the businesses intended to control his brand in 1971 in partnership with Raymond Chow’s (鄒文懐): Concord Production Inc. (協和電影公司). Although Linda sold Bruce’s share of the company to Chow in 1976, she and her children, Brandon Lee and Shannon Lee (later Keasler) retained all rights to the deceased icon under California code Section 3344.1, as well as continuing to use the “Concord” name. The law confers on the immediate family the rights of a person,

[W]hose name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness has commercial value at the time of his or her death.

Over the years, there has been a hard-to-trace web of entities run by Cadwell, and later by Keasler. Here are those I was able to identify:

• Concord Moon, LP
• Concord Moon Management, LLC
• Bruce Lee Holdings, LLC
• Bruce Lee Educational Foundation
• The Bruce Lee Family Company
• Bruce Lee, LLC
• LeeWay Media Group
• Bruce Lee Entertainment
• Bruce Lee Beverage (Bruce Tea)
• Bruce Lee Foundation

Let me put in here I support the rights of Lee’s heirs to profit from his stardom, no matter how ghoulish or crass their efforts—seriously, Bruce Tea? But if you were shocked about my revelations in Part 1, you should know the effort to build up and proliferate the legend of Bruce Lee massive—one going far beyond his legitimate heirs, with many people seeing his status as a cultural icon as an opportunity to cash in, including the creation of a new sub-genre of film: Bruceploitation. A portmanteau of Bruce and exploitation, these generally low-budget films starred “Lee-alikes” and were in their heyday 1974–1981.

There have been several biopics over the years, and it’s important to understand these are not thoughtful documentaries executed by disinterested parties, but ways of establishing as fact a great many things reflecting well on Lee but simply untrue and denying the reverse. Even a quick perusal will turn up many inconsistencies, contradictions, whole-cloth manufacturing of material, and a persistent conflation of Lee’s onscreen personae with reality. This last element is particularly interesting given its similarity to the gambit the Lees sued A.V.E.L.A. over.

Although Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) is the clearest example of these, being based on Cadwell’s book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, there is a direct involvement by Lee’s heirs in other efforts, which escalated to the level of media carpet bombing in the early ’90s and shows no signs of letting up.

In the list below, in addition to pointing out work by Cadwell, Keasler, and deceased family member, Brandon Lee, I’ve also noted the involvement of John Little, who seems to have been the group’s go-to writer, Taky Kimura, student, longtime friend, and still board member of the Bruce Lee Foundation, and Dan Inosanto, another longtime student and friend, but who seems to have recently fallen from favor:

• Little Dragon (upcoming): Keasler—producer, writer
• The Bruce Lee Project (upcoming): Keasler—executive producer
• Conspiracy (2015): Little—interviewee as Bruce Lee’s biographer
• Bruce Lee: Die Faust Hollywoods (Bruce Lee: the Faust of Hollywood, German documentary, 2015): Inosanto—interviewee
• I Am Bruce Lee (2012): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—executive producer, interviewee; Lee—archival footage; Inosanto—interviewee
• How Bruce Lee Changed the World (2009): Keasler—executive producer, interviewee; Kimura—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: In Pursuit of the Dragon (2009): Little—director, producer, interviewee
• The Legend of Bruce Lee (2008): Keasler—executive producer
• Blood and Steel: Making ‘Enter the Dragon’ (2004): Cadwell—archival footage
• The Unbeatable Bruce Lee (2001): Lee—archival footage
• Reflections on ‘The Little Dragon’ (2001): Inosanto—archival footage
• Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000): Cadwell—interviewee; Little—director, producer, writer, voice; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—archival footage
• The Story (documentary about Game of Death, 2000): Little—director, producer, narrator; Inosanto—archival footage
• The Lees: Action Speaks Louder (1999): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—interviewee; Lee —archival footage; Kimura—interviewee; Little—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: The Legend Lives On (1999): Cadwell—archival footage; Lee—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: In His Own Words (1998): Cadwell—archival footage, special thanks; Keasler—archival footage; Lee—archival footage; Little—director, producer, musical arrangement
• Bruce Lee: The Path of the Dragon (1998): Keasler—interviewee; Lee—archival footage; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Masters of the Martial Arts Presented by Wesley Snipes (1998): Keasler—interviewee; Little—interviewee
• Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do (1995): Cadwell—special thanks; Lee—narrator, interviewee; Kimura—interviewee, thanks; Inosanto—narrator, interviewee, special thanks
• Bruce Lee—Martial Arts Master (1994): Lee—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: The Immortal Dragon (1994): Cadwell—interviewee, special thanks; Keasler—interviewee, special thanks; Lee—archival footage; Little—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993): Keasler—actress, performer: “California Dreamin’”
• The Curse of the Dragon (1993): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—interviewee; Lee—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Death by Misadventure: The Mysterious Life of Bruce Lee (1993): Lee—interviewee
• Bruce Lee, the Legend (1984): Cadwell—interviewee, Keasler—archival footage; Lee—archival footage; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—archival footage
• Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend (1973): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—interviewee; Lee—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—archival footage

Another person who frequently appears in these docupics is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but he seems to do so quite genuinely as a close friend and former student, and only in the role of an interviewee on those topics—after all, he has his own tremendous successes to manage.

On top of all the films, there have been many books penned by the various members of this group, Little was also the longtime Associate Publisher of Bruce Lee Magazine, and Keasler a writer on the recent comic book series Bruce Lee: the Dragon Rises. The most important of the books, apart from Cadwell’s bio, which I’ve already mentioned, are Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975), which Cadwell and Inosanto also helped to edit, and another Cadwell-backed effort, Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method (1978). Additionally, there is the so-called Bruce Lee Library, all of which Little wrote using a variety of materials from the Lees:

• Vol. 1—Words of the Dragon—Interviews, 1958–1973 (1997)
• Vol. 2—The Tao of Gung Fu—A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Arts (1997)
• Vol. 3—Jeet Kune Do—Bruce Lee’s Commentaries on the Martial Way (1997)
• Vol. 4—The Art of Expressing the Human Body (1997)
• Vol. 5—Letters of the Dragon—Correspondence, 1958–1973 (1997)
• Bruce Lee Artist of Life (1999)
• Bruce Lee Words From A Master (1999)
• Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (1999)
• Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (1999)

In short, there is an almost absurd amount of media about Bruce Lee—the number of authorized works alone is staggering, and there are still more unauthorized ones, especially if Bruceploitation is considered. Compared to this, Lee’s actual body of work was a single, fairly basic and largely plagiarized book (Chinese Gung-Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self Defense, 1963), four and a half films, one season of The Green Hornet, and a few bit parts on other US films and TV shows.

The image of Bruce Lee you have in your mind is a product, a brand. One carefully honed and refined to continue to be relevant and maintain its financial value, so media placements are worth paying for and merchandise continues to be sold. And they’ve done quite well: the Lee brand continues to pull down $5–10M yearly—impressive considering their golden goose has been gone for 45 years.

All this is why what you know about Bruce Lee is what Bruce Lee, LLC wants you to know about Bruce Lee.

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Read subsequent articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 3: Fists of Flim-Flam

Part 4: Urban Lee

Part 5: The Littlest Dragon

Part 5 Addendum A: Kato’s Comeuppance

Part 5 Addendum B: The Row over “Hollywood” Continues

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Read previous articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 1: The Bruce Lie

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Notes

1. National Arbitration Forum, The Heirs of Bruce Lee and Concord Moon LP v. Martin Eng, August 2005.
2. Ibid.
3. The series consists of Greglon Lee and Sid Campbell, The Dragon and the Tiger, Volume 1: The Birth of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do, 2003; Lee and Campbell, The Dragon and the Tiger, Volume 2: The Untold Story of Jun Fan Gung-fu and James Yimm Lee, 2005; and Lee and Campbell, Remembering the Master: Bruce Lee, James Yimm Lee, and the Creation of Jeet Kune Do, 2006.
4. The Heirs of Bruce Lee and Concord Moon LP v. Martin Eng, 2005. 
5. Ibid.

Showdown in Oaktown (Mythmaking in the martial arts, Part 1)

[A]ll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.¹

Late in 1964, in a small martial arts studio in Oakland, with few eyewitnesses, Bruce Lee (李振藩) lost a fight to Wong Chia Man (黃澤民—in all printed accounts I have seen, his name is given as Wong Jack Man, but those who knew him used the name I have given here) and ever since Lee and his heirs have been fighting to change the the memory of the encounter.² Wong responded by asking for a rematch with more people to judge the outcome, but the Lees chose the fight they could win instead.

So for over half a century, Bruce, and after him, his wife, Linda Lee Cadwell, and his daughter, Shannon Lee Keasler, have used their money and influence and his stardom and celebrity to feed the public lies about what happened.

Birth of the Dragon at least purported to present a balanced view of events; Wong’s portrayal in the officially endorsed biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story was absurdly one dimensional, as was Linda’s version of events in other accounts. I heard from a friend who was a student of Wong’s when the film was released the Sifu would say, “I am the monster,” referring to the shadowy Demon of Fate stalking Lee in the film. Unfortunately, the new film scored a solid 21% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the plot was nonsense with a coat of whitewash, so I’ve opted to skip it—after the fight, they team up to battle a crime boss?

Instead, let’s begin with the events leading up to the fight. Cadwell claims,³

It became an unwritten law that the art should be taught only to Chinese. Bruce considered such thinking completely outmoded and when it was argued that white men, if taught the secrets, would use the art to injure the Chinese, he pointed out that if a white man really wanted to injure a Chinese, there were plenty of other ways he could do it. ‘After all, he’s bigger.’ However, Bruce soon found that at first his views were not shared by some members of the Chinese community in San Francisco, particularly those in martial arts circles.

She goes on to state Wong’s pupils were all strictly pure Chinese.

That this is pure bullshit I can proclaim from personal knowledge: Peter Ralston, the Caucasian who taught me, was an early student at The Chinese Physical Culture Association (精武體育㑹—精武体育会, Jing Mo Tai Yook Woey).⁴ And I’ve run across many other non-Chinese students of Wong’s; he remained a central figure in the martial arts community of the Bay Area for 45 years. To give her the benefit of the doubt, the story could have been what Bruce told Linda, but it’s still categorically false.

Even Wong has admitted early on, his students were mainly Chinese, but rather than the result of exclusionary policies, it was because while interest in the Chinese martial arts had already begun to spread, the Japanese martial arts such as Judo (柔道) and Karate (空手) were best known to Westerners at this time and also because of his school’s location within the enclave of Chinatown. The fact is borne out by the tales Ralston would relate of how he would join the other students in making fun of any “white barbarians” who visited the school.

Lee already had a school in Seattle, but that was the small time. San Francisco was the epicenter of Asian martial arts in the US, with its large and diverse population of Asians and an interest in Eastern philosophies the Beat Poets had rekindled, which was to fully flower in the Summer of Love. So Lee left Seattle in the hands of one of his students and opened another school on Broadway in Oakland and tried to gain recognition.

His opportunity came in late August of ’64, when Hong Kong starlet Diana Chang Chung-wen (張仲文), came to the US to promote her latest film, Between Tears and Smiles (《故都春夢》). Lee, presumably connected via the Hong Kong movie scene, acted as her escort. When her film was screened in the Sun Sing Theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he took the opportunity to try to make a name for himself and his kung fu school. This included, by most accounts, some incendiary words about more traditional schools, and an open challenge to come fight him.

His loudmouthed braggadocio did get the attention of the leaders of the local martial arts community, who settled on Wong, another newcomer, as the guy to shut Lee up. The choice made a lot of sense: both were 23 and they,⁵

[…] shared a symmetry between them: the quiet ascetic and the boisterous showman, traditional against modern, San Francisco vs. Oakland, Northern Shaolin against Southern.

And this seems a good point to fill in some backstory.

Lee was born in 1940 in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His father was an actor in Chinese opera and film, and his mother was a half-Caucasian from a wealthy Hong Kong family. They returned to Hong Kong, and Bruce became a child actor because of his father’s connections. His was a family of wealth and privilege, with two maids and a chauffeur.

The mythmaking stretches back to Lee’s high school days, when he was clearly a troublemaker, starting a gang called The Eight Tigers of Junction Road (八虎聯合道), getting kicked out of La Salle College for his poor academic record as well as behavioral difficulties, and switching to St. Francis Xavier’s College—both high schools despite their names—which he also didn’t finish.

In 1957, Lee began studying Wing Chun (詠春), which he promptly began using in street fights. His parents sent him to the US in order to keep him out of jail, though there is a thin and likely apocryphal claim that he had beaten up the son of a powerful Triad and fled to avoid retaliation (there are many other such tales). His brother’s recollection makes no mention of any specific incident:⁶

The police detective came and he says “Excuse me Mr. Lee, your son is really fighting bad in school. If he gets into just one more fight I might have to put him in jail.”

In any case, he finally completed his high school education in Seattle. Despite him and others in his coterie claiming he majored in philosophy at the University of Washington, he was a drama major and a dropout at that.

And even though he had received only two years of training in some combination of Western boxing, Wing Chun, and Wu style Tai Chi Chuan (吳氏太極拳) at best, Bruce decided he knew enough not only to open a school, but to name it after himself in 1959: the Lee Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute. I say “at best” because he was a full-time student, a cha-cha dance champion, and appeared in film roles—20 by the time he was 18, so when did he have time to study martial arts? The famous master of his Wing Chun school, Yip Man (葉問), is known to have not considered Lee a serious student.

What Lee taught was his own version of Wing Chun. It’s difficult for me to think of his school as anything but disreputable—he was simply not qualified. I think a good characterization of Lee is a flim-flam artist cashing in on the martial arts craze then sweeping the US.

He was not some savant who combined a deep study of philosophy with day-and-night martial arts discipline; he was a high-school and then college student, who also worked as a waiter at a Chinese restaurant. But just as he knew enough to become a street bully in Hong Kong, he knew enough to pass himself off as a martial arts instructor in Seattle.

He had not yet started engaging in a rigorous physical regime, which was to include a great deal of weightlifting. The flashy moves of the martial arts showman were far in the future. It’s noteworthy because of the citizenship conferred by being born in the US, he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War in 1963 but was passed over 4F because of his congenitally poor eyesight. You can see the earpiece of his glasses, which he could not be without, protruding from his suit jacket pocket in the picture with Chung-wen. In his second Hong Kong action film, Fist of Fury (《精武門》), he wore his real glasses as part of his onscreen costume. This is the central problem of the Lee-Wong fight: the revisionists want to place the myth of Lee there, as well as turning the clock back—way back—on that legend.

Turning to Wong, he was born in Taishan (新寧, in the province of Kwantung (廣東), formerly Romanized as Canton, not far from Hong Kong). in 1941, and raised in a very different way. Unlike Lee, he began his training in the martial arts at the age of eight, learning Northern Sil Lum Chuan (北少林拳) from Yim Shan Wu (嚴尚武), the top disciple of Gu Ruzhang (顧汝章). The origins of this style come from the famous Shaolin Temple in Henan (河南), in the person of Monk Zhao Yuan (朝元 和尚), a member of the Ming (大明) royal family who became a monk when they were overthrown by the Qing (大清) in 1644. Sil Lum is the Cantonese rendering of the more familiar Shaolin. As with my previous article about martial arts, I apologize for the combination of Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as the sometimes odd Romanizations; I’m using these terms as I learned them.

After distinguishing himself in his studies, Wong went on to be taught personally by a cadre of Great Grandmasters. Dedicated study for 15 years with these martial arts luminaries allowed him to finally become the first person to complete the Northern Shaolin program of studies since WW2.

In martial arts schools, rather than diplomas, the images of the masters who make up that school’s lineage hang on the walls. It is from the pictures at Cheng Hsin (中心), Ralston’s Oakland school I know Wong and Gu. Gu was a distinguished student himself, sent south to spread the art in Canton, and famed for his powerful Iron Palm (铁掌功) technique. All this is the martial arts heritage Wong represented when he came to San Francisco Chinatown in 1964.

Lee was actually discriminated against because he was one quarter Caucasian; other students of Yip Man refused to train with him. But this was pretty far from the mission of Jing Mo, founded by Huo Yuanjia (霍元甲), and portrayed by Jet Li (李阳中) in Fearless (《霍元甲》—note the Chinese title for the film is simply the name of this famous martial artist). One of the main goals of Jing Mo was to spread the Chinese martial arts both within China as well as internationally, and to do away with the secrecy and insularity prevalent in the past.

Ironically, Lee played a fictitious student of Huo’s, named Chen Zhen (陳真), in his 1972 film Fist of Fury. But for anyone who knows anything about the history of the Chinese martial arts, the Lees’ attempt to tar Wong with a brush of race-based exclusionism holds zero water.

If you’re thinking things aren’t looking so great for Bruce Lee about now, I agree. And that night in the Fall of 1964 did not go well for him either, which I’ll dig into in subsequent articles.

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Read subsequent articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 2: Enter the Tycoon

Part 3: Fists of Flim-Flam

Part 4: Urban Lee

Part 5: The Littlest Dragon

Part 5 Addendum A: Kato’s Comeuppance

Part 5 Addendum B: The Row over “Hollywood” Continues

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Notes

1. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, 2016.
2. Michael Dorgan, “Bruce Lee’s Toughest Fight”, Official Karate, July, 1980.
3. Linda Lee Cadwell, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, 1975.
4. Wong chose an idiosyncratic version of this name, which typically ends with 會 including a character in Jing Mo, that was beyond my ability to decipher in the image of his school, which reads right to left
5. Charles Russo, “Bruce Lee Vs. Wong Jack Man: Fact, Fiction And The Birth Of The Dragon”, Fightland Blog, 2016.
6. Bruce Lee: the immortal Dragon, 2002.

Contributing factors in the Late Bronze Age Collapse (Late Bronze Age Collapse, Part 2)

An oft-bypassed attraction among the hill towns of Tuscany is the Museo archeologico nazionale di Siena. One enters  via the 12th-century hospital of Santa Maria della Scala—itself an interesting attraction as one of the oldest still-extant such facilities. Then, proceeding down a series of irregular stairs and ramps beneath the ediface, you arrive in Roman classical antiquity.

And so it goes, as you travel downwards, you also travel backwards in time, through Etruscan passages and artifacts, all the way down and back to the Villanovan period (ca. 900–720 BCE). The very word Tuscany derives ultimately from the name of the pre-Roman people who once dwelt in the region.

You may have noticed my reference to Troy VII in Part 1. This nomenclature is used by archaeologists to designate a specific stratum of ruins. These are similar in effect to geological strata where there are repeated periods of deposition, but with human habitation the cycles are much more rapid. These sequences generally reflect repeated destruction and rebuilding on the same site.

The pattern is widespread, especially among Late Bronze Age (LBA) civilizations. The siting of the city still has all the advantages it was originally chosen for, indeed more, as it is now higher, as it sits on a pile of rubble, which also doubles as a convenient quarry, so it is rebuilt on the same spot. It’s immaterial what the manner of destruction was—earthquake, fire, famine, warfare, etc. Much as the King of Swamp Castle (Michael Palin) says of his home in Monty Python and the Holy Grail,

Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ‘em! It sank into the swamp, so I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then it sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up!

Although Swamp Castle’s is a more compressed timeline, when an LBA city was brought down by some calamity, there was not only rebuilding, but improvement—the civilization would learn from its mistakes, put forth greater efforts, and often return better than ever.

For a more recent example, in 64 AD, the Great Fire of Rome blazed for six full days, reducing 10 of its 14 districts, or 70% of the city to smoking rubble. Though Nero was blamed for the blaze by many, he was actually away at Antium when the fire broke out. In any case, the Romans rebuilt, changing the opus incertum building method out for opus reticulatum because they found concrete buildings faced with brick as used in the latter were more resistant to flame. Opus incertum was another faced-concrete method, but used stone for the purpose. At high temperatures, the Romans found, stone burns, while brick does not.

And this is what’s remarkable about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC); there is no recovery from the calamities cities typically take (more or less) in their stride.

Taking another example of urban resilience, one of the earliest demographers, John Graunt studied the population statistics of London in 1663, concluding:¹

Let the mortality be what it will, this city repairs itself within two years.

Which is to say, despite London’s background death rate being much higher than in the countryside, to say nothing of its frequent outbreaks of plague, actual dips in population were quite temporary. By contrast, in the LBAC according to Jack Davis:²

The area of the Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos remained, as a whole in fact, severely depopulated for nearly a millennium.

Another thing I mentioned previously was the flourishing international communication of the LBA. In order for this to be carried out, scribes needed to be multilingual, but at least in the Near East of the time, Akkadian spread from Anatolia to Western Syria, Western Iran, the Levant, Egypt and Cyprus. It’s no accident the peak of Akkadian’s use as an LBA lingua franca corresponded to trade in the region from 1600 to 1200 BCE.

And along with trade, diplomatic communication was also carried out in Akkadian. Many tablets found in Amarna, Egypt from the rule of Akhenaten (ca. 1353–1336 BCE) contain correspondence from other royal courts including Cyprus, Elamite Iran, the Hittite Empire, the Mitanni, the Assyrians, the Kassites, as well as many smaller kingdoms of the Levant, and even as far as the Persian Gulf.

While it was extremely useful in this role of communication across many cultures in the Near East, the language itself had some significant flaws: The writing system of Akkadian is actually a borrowing itself, from Sumerian, which is both the oldest known written language and a language isolate. For Akkadian, this was a recipe for a highly complex system and also a defective script.

One issue was there were many homophones. For example, the simple, one-syllable word ku (written ⟨gu⟩) could mean nine different things: bird, cord, eat, entirety, force, neck, legume, square, or voice, and this was far from uncommon. The way these words were represented somewhat helped to sort out which meaning was intended:³

Remember, I said “somewhat”—actually, you can see many of these are written in exactly the same way, and the sign for “eat” and “square” is that for “voice” with another element inserted, and the one for “bird”, is essentially similar to that for “entirety”, “force”, “neck”, and “legume”, but with a second, unpronounced symbol added. Of these examples, only the sign for “cord” is truly unique.

Coming at it from the other direction is no better; the “voice” version of ku was also used to write k’ak, “mouth”, and tsu, “tooth”. And indeed, there were often many ways to write a single word; below are the many ways in which ngesh’kana, meaning “pestle” could be written, and it’s far from a unique case:

Consider for a moment the challenges involved in deciphering this language. The syllabogram ngesh, which appears as the first sign in each version of the word above, was also used as a determinative—an unpronounced ideogram meaning “tree” and signifying something made of wood. Essentially, for every symbol, you’d have to decide if it was an ideogram or syllabogram, what word is being indicated, and how—or whether—to pronounce it.

Add to this the fact this system was then adopted to represent Akkadian, a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian, and cuneiform goes from being a complicated script to a complicated, defective script. I mentioned Sumerian was a language isolate, which means it has no known linguistic relatives, though there have been many attempts to link it to others.

Defective script is a technical linguistics term meaning the written signs used do not adequately represent the language as spoken. Many of the written elements changed in order to represent the phonetic values of Akkadian, for which a syllabary was ill suited.

Looking back at Sumerian ku, the homophony disappears in Akkadian: while “cord” is qû, “eat” is akālu, “entirety” is nagbu, “force” is emūqu, “neck” is kishādu, “voice” is rigmu, while “bird”, “legume”, and “square” have vanished. Not that Akkadian has no words for these things, but they did not use ones based on the various forms of ku.

Add to this the fact several other languages in the region adopted cuneiform, including Amorite, Eblaite, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian, and the scribe also has to determine which of these several languages they are reading ahead of the tricky process of decipherment. The Amarna letters also are remarkable for the fact the Akkadian used is heavily flavored with the local language, with many “Canaanisms” appearing in the texts. That is, the Canaanite language proper did not exist yet, but the texts show some of the elements that would come to characterize the language—this is its proto language.

Furthermore, many of these kingdoms, notably Egypt, had entirely different languages and scripts they used domestically. Egyptian hieroglyphics and hieratic script date from 3200 BCE, making the fact the Amarna Letters were written in cuneiform Akkadian an interesting discovery confirming its use as a lingua franca in the region. The biblical confusion of tongues starts not to seem like much of an exaggeration. In fact, the story seems ultimately to come from the Sumerian epic, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, in which Enki is featured as the confuser of languages.

This level of complexity led to another thing I referred to in Part 1: a professional scribal class. It would have been nearly impossible for anyone not trained from a young age to gain literacy. Few rulers, and indeed few at court in these kingdoms, would have understood the writing, and, outside of its home territory of Assyria and Babylonia, the Akkadian language itself.

Mineralogical examination of the actual tablets from Amarna shows their preparation was a painstaking process, including the use of various materials from Nile marls, whose inferior clay could blur incised signs, to Esna shales, with a much better texture as well as a pleasing buff color.⁴ This too would have been a duty of the scribes, as well as carefully refreshing such tablets once made so they could be used again. The tablets were generally not fired, so they could be reused—the baked clay tablets we have were often inadvertently exposed to high heat.

While the use of different materials might seem to show a process of improvement, the dating of these items shows the opposite. It seems with the expansion of regional diplomacy and trade, to say nothing of the steles and other monuments demanding the attention of scribes, the ability to train skilled scribes was being outstripped by the need for them.

So when the alphabetic writing systems of Phoenician, Aramaic, and Greek arrived, together with materials like lampblack ink and papyrus, their adoption was rapid. With only 22 letters (or 24 in Greek), scribes suddenly could learn to read and write in the space of months instead of years. Aramaic and Greek, both developments of Phoenician (along with many others) were to become respectively the lingua franca of the Near East and the Mediterranean.

The central bargain an agrarian civilization makes is specialization; rather than everyone being involved in food production, someone can make something those who are farming want but have no time for, let’s say shoes, and then they can barter shoes for food. Writing first came into being as a way of recording these transactions.

Eventually, there are many specialists of different kinds. As long as food is plentiful, the system continues to work. However, when there is famine, workers in some of the less useful trades just become mouths to feed.

If you’re a scribe, even in dire times, your king needs you; if there is famine, you write letters to other rulers asking for grain, if there is invasion, you write letters asking for troops. But what happens when ties to other kingdoms are broken, and such letters receive no answer? What use then is a scribe, or for that matter, a king?

Kingship is essentially a fictitious role. There is typically nothing either genetically superior about them (the opposite is often true) nor does their training endow them with unique abilities—warfare and diplomacy would be learned, but more specialized generals and chamberlains would know them better, and as already noted, rulers would depend on scribes for reading and writing. Generally, it is because of a connection by lineage to some figure in the past kingship is conferred.

Divine associations are often made, either as to descent or at least blessing, as I’ve discussed, and enshrined particularly in the West’s doctrine of the divine right of kings, and in the East, in the Mandate of Heaven. The web of contacts among rulers also serves to mutually legitimize kings—kings acknowledge each other and will communicate only among themselves.

But in the LBA, these elites lost the international framework and the diplomatic contacts that had supported them. Couple this with famine, foreign invasion, and likely increased taxes to deal with these issues, and you have a recipe for revolt—the fiction of the king’s legitimacy comes to an end.

And the kings, and indeed emperors, in the LBA ruled supreme. Trade too was not what we think of even in the ancient model with individuals or consortia purchasing goods at one port that are rare and valuable in the port of their destination, traveling there and trading the goods they have brought with them for ones that have rarity and value at their port of origin. Rather, there was no “trade” at all, but a system of “gift-giving” among rulers. Such expeditions traveled under the direction and authority of the kings and instead of bills of lading, they were accompanied by letters describing both the gifts they were sending to their fellow monarchs and requesting the gifts they desired most to receive.

In Mycenaean Greek, this type of supreme ruler is embodied in the word wa-na-ka:

Mycenaean Greek was written in Linear B, another ideographic/ syllabographic system, which could only represent the language defectively. The word appears in Homeric Greek as ϝάναξ, acting as a bridge from the Linear B written form to the proper transliteration. That transliteration is wanax and meant “king”, “overlord”, or “leader”, but most properly, “high king”, and appears to have been common in the LBA, and in the Homeric epics intended to represent those times. But it completely disappears in the Dark Ages and afterward. As Early Greece-focused archaeologist, Josho Brouwers notes:⁵

[A]fter the Bronze Age, the term basileus [βασιλεύς] ascends in importance while the wanax of old disappears, and is only preserved in Homer in standard phrases like anax andron (“lord of the people”, i.e. Agamemnon), and reserved to denote deities.

In short, it seems the empires and kingdoms of the LBA got too big too quickly: Assyria ruled its home territory in modern-day Iraq, as well as vassal states around the whole Persian Gulf, the Hittites controlled almost all of Anatolia, while the Mycenaean Greeks controlled the rest of Anatolia (part of the west coast) as well as the Greek mainland and islands, and Egypt, largest of all, comprised the whole Nile River Valley, with vassal states covering the Levant, Cyprus, Eastern Libya, and Nubia.

These vast nations proved unwieldy, stretching the limits of both infrastructure and communications, and the failure of any of these states had a magnified effect on the others, all of which were fairly tightly interconnected in terms of the prestige of their kings as well as the prosperity of their people.

During and after the Dark Ages, nearly every Greek city-state did away with hereditary monarchical offices, opting instead for either democracy or oligarchy. Sparta was a notable exception, having two hereditary kings, but the redundancy was an important element there. Additionally, Iron Age city-states (ca. 1200–700 BCE) were much more modestly sized.

Together with the breakdown of trade networks, the invasions of the “Sea Peoples”, the famines, and unavailability of copper I presented in Part 1, as well as the strain expansion placed on these kingdoms, and particularly the scribal class, and the over-concentration of power with the rulers I’ve discussed here are all part of the “perfect storm” that precipitated the LBAC.

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Read subsequent articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 3: The Luwian Menace

Part 3 Addendum: Fruit from a Poisonous Pseudoarchaeological Tree

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Read previous articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 1: Apocalypse BCE

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Notes

1. John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality, 1663.
2. Jack Davis, “Pylos”, The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean, Eric H. Cline, ed., 2010.
3. In modern Sumerian transcription, subscripted numbers indicate the different symbols with which a syllable is written, while superscripted words represent unpronounced pictograms.
4. Goren, Finkelstein, and Na’aman, “Mineralogical and Chemical Study of the Amarna Tablets”, Near Eastern Archaeology, 2002.
5. Josho Brouwers, reply to “In the Bronze Age Mediterranean, states such as Hattusa, Egypt, Assyria, et alia are described as unified, unitary monarchies….” r/AskHistorians, Reddit, 2020.

In the decidedly limited labyrinth of false choice (Interactive Storytelling, Part 1)

“[…] The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.”

“The Garden of Forking Paths” (“GoFP”), Jorge Luis Borges¹

Elizabeth Bennet: It is your turn to say something, Mr Darcy. I talked about the dance. Now you ought to remark on the size of the room or the number of couples.

Mr Darcy: I’m perfectly happy to oblige. Please advise me on what you would like most to hear.

Pride & Prejudice (P&P)²

This pair of quotes illustrates the difference between the promise of interactive storytelling and the reality.

The promise is you can “choose your own adventure”—an ever-widening possibility space leads down paths unique to your experience through ramifications ever more varied, you make meaningful choices in a vast world.

The reality is this system almost always yields an unsatisfying experience: The choices fail to provide real agency because they are necessarily limited, and even the choices that are allowed are often false ones. And typically, in the end, you are just trying to guess what the designer wants you to do.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze used Borges’ story whence the first quote is drawn to demonstrate the Leibnizian concept of several impossible worlds existing simultaneously, as well as to address the problem of future contingents first discussed by Aristotle. The many-minds, and many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the idea of the multiverse, also relate closely, and have drawn inspiration from “GoFP”. The possibilities created by its model increase exponentially, rapidly cascading towards the infinite. Borges’ “The Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand” also discuss infinite texts. He had a profound loathing of mirrors, which is also reflected (yes, I did) in “The Other” and “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which discuss them.³ This last work also contains the line: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men”, which bears on both elements.

Unfortunately, this Borges tale also inspired the idea of interactive storytelling.

In the 1945 children’s book, Treasure Hunt, pseudonymous author Alan George allowed the reader to choose among a set of actions at the end of each section of the story. It appeared only a few years after “GoFP”, so it’s hard to know if there was an influence, but the book’s cover does declare it “A MAZE In Volume Form”, so at the very least it’s a convergent work. In the world of computer interactivity, the mechanism described by Borges seems to have been favored from early on: from 1964 to 66, a program called ELIZA, used the format in the creation of an interactive artificial therapist. And with the advent of computer and video games, the idea really took off, appearing from quite early on, and rapidly becoming ubiquitous, particularly in visual novels, dating sims, adventure games, and RPGs.

The essential problem with this schema is how rapidly it grows in size. Even the absurdities Borges perpetrates are well thought out, however, though he warns the reader subtly: When his Doctor Albert says GoFP (That is, the fictional book, not the short story in which the book appears) is “incomplete”, it is because he realizes that containing infinite possibilities within the physical and therefore finite form of a book is not possible. And indeed, even freed from the bounds of a physical book, creating a large number of meaningful branches is difficult in reality.

As envisioned by Borges, the decisions at each node are binary—likening it to a labyrinth, he essentially says you can go left or right at each fork. If you created a work of interactive storytelling on this plan, with only a pair of choices at each branching, the amount you would need to write would expand exponentially. By the time you get only 10 choices deep in this tree, the number of branches would be 2 to the 10th, or 1,024. Every time you add one level of depth, the number of branches doubles, so 11 would take you to 2 to the 11th, or 2,048. The Lernaean Hydra is an embodiment of the terror inspired in the Ancient Greeks by geometric progressions as its multiplying heads develop in this exact fashion.

Most of the history of this trope, then, is concerned with ways to limit these choices in order to make production even possible. One way this has been done is through a structure called a foldback, which has been described in various other ways, perhaps most entertainingly as the well-fed-snake model. It essentially means regardless of the choices made, eventually the branches reconverge, then bifurcate again, then reconverge again.

Another, similar one involves what’s called cycling, where specific branches turn back to other nodes than the one they branched from. Often a work will use both of these together in various combinations.⁴

The problem with both solutions is the choices you make don’t matter. The things you thought you were choosing collapse, or turn in directions you didn’t want to go. In her irony-impaired article, “Why in-game dialogue and character conversations matter”, Megan Farokhmanesh says:⁵

Although dialogue can branch—and often will—depending on player choice, writers must be aware that only one nugget of information will move the player forward. Everything else must eventually fold back into that conclusion. […] Part of a writer’s job, then, comes with thinking up many different questions that ultimately lead to the same answer.

And Brent Ellison describes this type of technique thus:⁶

One common technique employed to give the player a greater illusion of freedom is to have multiple responses lead to the same path.

To be clear, both of these sources are talking about how to make lack of choice look to the player like choice.

To get more concrete, I recently played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which features branching dialogue. At the beginning of the game, you meet a mysterious Old Man, and the dialogue options essentially allow you to either treat him with trust or suspicion. And it doesn’t matter. If you react the former way, he is glad. If the latter, he shrugs it off. You’ve made an hour’s worth of decisions changing nothing, and the game’s just begun. Once in a while, what you choose does make a difference though—you just don’t know, unless you either replay repeatedly or go online and find out what you’re supposed to do. I’m definitely not saying this isn’t a great game; I just don’t think this element was needed.

One marginally acceptable reason for employing this system is to attempt to force players to pay attention to the dialogue instead of simply clicking through it as quickly as possible because they think it might matter. But frankly, I reject this as well—just write more engaging dialogue not pretending to offer a choice.

Additionally, most of the decisions we make in reality are much more complex, with many more options as to both what we choose to do, as well as to how. Add more than a binary choice, though, and the expansion of branches becomes even more explosive. Treasure Hunt’s choice nodes were limited to the ends of sections because the book allowed several choices—essentially, the creator of such a work must decide between breadth and depth. And regardless of how many options are given, the chances are good, people being what they are, there will be other choices they wish they had.

One of the things people who like this trope reference is the multiple endings such stories can have. However, this again is a production issue as to how many can be provided.

In interactive novels, many endings are often given, but the preponderance of them are simply different ways to die. Indeed, what better way could there be to end a branch? Writers get extremely inventive about it, to the point many such works are less choose your own adventure, and more choose your own death—the interactive equivalent of the Final Destination movies.

Turning to electronic entertainment, these paths, which are essentially fail states, could go on much longer: you did not pick up an object you should have several scenes ago, so preventing progress, being a common one.

LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island was a breakthrough in 1990 because it was impossible for the protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood, to die. It was probably the first adventure game I ever completed because it also made sure you had all the items you needed to progress. There was nothing interesting to me in being killed off by game designers trying to show they were more clever than me, and their games were quickly shelved.

In addition, Monkey Island’s dialogue was extremely well written, and even branches ultimately leading nowhere were at least entertaining. The puzzle-solving, though skewed, fit well with the wacky gameworld, a consistent internal logic instead of a lesser designer’s punitive “because I said so”.

In games where branching dialogue is the primary gameplay focus, the player’s choices often affect game characters’ attitudes toward the player’s character in one way or another, with the player attempting to guess the “best” response in order to maximize game character disposition in their favor. And ultimately, these characters are stand-ins for the designer, who typically desires a specific response attitudinally, even beyond the strictures of a system seeking to falsify choice.

And this gets back to the P&P quote: similar to these game mechanisms, Elizabeth Bennett requires Mr. Darcy to respond in a very narrow range and she’s ready with a verbal fusillade when he missteps. His reply in the quote, intended to charmingly evade the trap, draws a fairly cold:

That reply will do for present.

Still, it’s better than a character taking the response you felt was kind of close to what you actually wanted to say as a very personal slight that can only be solved via extremely one-sided personal combat. If this sounds far-fetched, you haven’t played a lot of these games.

Even the term “interactive storytelling” in the context of video games has always bothered me. Good storytelling is always interactive regardless of the medium; a conversation between the creator and the audience. Kurosawa Akira’s (黒沢 明) 1950 film, Rashōmon (『羅生門』) provides an excellent example of how effectively that dynamic can be used: the viewer is presented with four versions of a story, and must choose which to believe, or, as indeed, is the point, which elements of which stories to select to construct the real truth as the accounts all carry the biases of the tellers.

Although Borges’ views of the movie are difficult to ascertain, he was known to be a fan of Taishō-period writer, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, upon whose short story, “In a Grove”, the film is based. The film takes its name and frame story from another of Akutagawa’s works.⁷ The short story also involves the subversion of the mystery genre, just as in Borges’ “Death and the Compass”,⁸ as well as going on to play a game with the reader, ultimately questioning the existence of objective truth. I can only think Borges would have approved.

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Read subsequent article in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Part 3: Adventure Game Hijinx and Deconstruction

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Notes

1. Borges, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”, 1941, translated by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions, 1998.
2. I’m quoting the 2005 film adaptation.
3. Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel” (“The Library of Babel”), 1941, “El libro de arena” (“The Book of Sand”), 1975, “El otro” (“The Other”), 1972, and “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 1940, all also translated in Hurley, 1998.
4. Image by Dcoetzee via Wikipedia.
5. Megan Farokhmanesh, “Why in-game dialogue and character conversations matter”, Polygon, March 2014.
6. Brent Ellison, “Defining Dialogue Systems”, Gamasutra, July 2008.
7. 芥川 龍之介 (Akutagawa Ryūnosuke), 「藪の中」 (“In a Grove”, Yabu no Naka), 1922 and 「 羅生門」 (“Rashōmon”), 1915.
8. Borges, “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”), 1942, also translated in Hurley, 1998.

I didn’t cry and there’s nothing wrong with me (Gladwellocalypse, Part 2)

The new season of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, is really good. It started off with one on golf, which was a bit of a softball—I don’t know the demographics of the podcast’s listeners, but I somehow don’t think the rich jerks and CEOs the piece puts in its sights are among them, or if they are, it remotely hurt their feelings. But then he moved on to some pretty deep and serious topics: terrorism, desegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, racist Winston Churchill—discussing the Bengal famine of 1943, which I’ve also written about indirectly as one element of British imperialism in India. And then came one on country music.¹

Now as a writer I get it: sometimes you need to lighten things up, or if nothing else, go a bit afield from the topics you usually cover—the eclecticism of my own articles is evident. And also, you can’t always please everyone. Finally, if Season One of RevHist was an indicator, there’s going to be one I just disagree with. This, it seems, is that one. So in spite of my wife hating it when Malcolm and I fight, here goes:

I know he’s not intending to be scientific by comparing Rolling Stone’s list of top 100 rock songs as if they were emblematic of what all the writers, performers, and listeners think about the genre, to the small sampling of individual country songs he has handpicked for their tear-jerking qualities. The corpus of rock music is much larger than country’s and covers a wider range of topics.

And rock isn’t really a genre at all, and hasn’t been for a long time, but a supergenre—maybe even a megagenre. Even the list he quotes demonstrates this when it mentions The Ronettes and Nirvana in the same breath. Wikipedia lists some 43 genres of rock in their article on the topic, which links still more articles that get even more specific.² Many maps and family trees have been created and argued about regarding how all of these interrelate.

One exemplar Gladwell puts forth is Unwed Fathers, and specifically the line:³

Your daddy never, meant to hurt you ever
He just don’t live here, but you got his eyes.

Right from its name, the song is not about these two—the mother and child have no agency in the tale, and only exist as the hapless victims of the titular men. These are generic, not specific people, and definitely not real ones.

Just to stick to the same theme for something like an apples-to-apples comparison, I offer Everclear’s “Father of Mine”. I’m not even really a fan of this band—I own no CDs and no songs and never have, but just from catching it on the radio, this one gets me way more—the refrain “Daddy gave me a name/ then he walked away”, is pretty raw, but then it has lyrics like:⁴

Father of mine,
Tell me where did you go?
Yeah, you had the world inside your hand
But you did not seem to know.

These seem to me to drill down into a sense of loss much more effectively than the country piece. Maybe because Gladwell had a fairly idyllic upbringing, while mine was less so, my feelings are a bit more attuned to the story Everclear’s Art Alexakis tells from his own experience as a child abandoned by his father. He writes about the sadness, but also the bitterness, anger, and how hard it is to let other people in afterwards. That’s quite specific and also quite real.

And I’m talking about specificity because Gladwell offers it as the reason country music’s lyrics are sadder. While I’ve already offered a counterexample, I’d also disagree with the point as a general rule. Detail can actually make songs less relatable. Turning back to “Unwed Fathers”, the lyrics make sure to let you know it’s an “Appalachian Greyhound station”, but its story happens everywhere and at every time. Hilariously, the song was translated into Swedish as “En ogift mamma” (“An Unwed Mother”) and saw success.

There is a device used across a variety of media called a cipher, also known as the everyman after a 15th-century English morality play of the same name, as well as by a variety of other names. The idea is the audience is presented with rather undeveloped elements, particularly around place and character, and they fill in the details, or more specifically, their own details—putting themselves into the work. A listener not from the Smoky Mountains listening to “Unwed Fathers” might feel alienated; that there is something about this experience that is outside their understanding, when there’s really not.

Gladwell next advances the idea since everyone is from the same area, they all have a shared context allowing them to be more specific.⁵ Here I think he’s delved into complete nonsense.

Maybe my take on this comes from having lived in Japan, a large, highly homogenous society. I can tell you in their case, at least, it leads not to more, but to less specificity—their shared worldview means they can say less and still be understood perfectly.

In fact, this is the idea behind haiku, and its predecessor, tanka. The Japanese, and particularly those of the imperial court, were bored of hearing so many words, and the strictures of the syllabic poetic form were created, at least in part, so rather than being explicit, composers would be forced to employ metaphors. Matsuo Bashō, a master of haiku, is famous for the piece:⁶

古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音

An ancient pond
A frog jumps in
The splash of water

This seems simple and pictorialist at first blush, but as Dorothy Britton notes:⁷

It carries one, in imagination, to the veranda of a temple in Kyoto, perhaps overlooking a landscaped garden hundreds of years old with a moss-edged pond. One hears the sudden plop of a frog jumping into the dark water on a still spring afternoon. But the thought process started by this poem go on and on. The pond could be eternity, God or the Ultimate Truth about this universe and man. And we, brash mortals with our works and investigations—each one of us no better than a frog jumping—make but a moment’s splash, and the ripples circle and die away….

Gladwell talks about “layering” in country songs; this is layering.

Next he interviews Bobby Braddock, songwriter of the showcased pieces, and the main subject of the story, searching for the source of his weepy lyricism:⁸

Your… kind of … tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.

Braddock replies:

I guess “tolerance” is probably a pretty good word for it.

I kept expecting Gladwell to circle back and replace it with wallowing. Instead, he says, much more favorably:

[…] Braddock is from the musical side of the United States where emotion is not something to be endured, it’s something to be embraced.

He goes on to detail how Braddock used to eavesdrop on other people’s cell phone conversations, which presumably inspired some of his works.⁹ That’s just creepy, and voyeuristic would indeed be a good descriptor for many of the country lyrics Gladwell talks about.

“He Stopped Loving Her Today”, the Braddock song Gladwell dwells on most, is again, pretty creepy.¹⁰ It’s about a couple that breaks up, but the man never stops obsessing about her until he dies. That’s not a touching sentiment in my book.

And there’s also a certain inauthenticity coming from observing these emotional states and perceiving them from the outside. Braddock is looking for tools to extract tears from our faces, not telling heartfelt stories of things he has actually experienced.

I’d liken it to ER—I had to stop watching the show, even though the acting and characters were great, because every time a pregnant mother came into the hospital, you knew she was a Chekhov’s Gun, and it was just a matter of when and how they were going to use her to shoot you square in the feels. Real, heartfelt emotion does not have a North-South divide, but I don’t want to have my feelings manipulated by made-up narratives with nothing but a profit motive revealed when the layers are peeled back.

Part of the premise of Gladwell’s piece was shown in its subtitle: “A musical interpretation of divided America”. In other words, he’s saying our political differences match those in the emotionality of our preferred musical styles, with rock standing in for the North and country for the South.¹¹ And maybe he’s right—maybe I’ve just touched on why Astroturfing and wedge issues work better in the red states.

To conclude, let me throw a gauntlet back at Gladwell: listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “One Step Up”. Again, I’m not a fan of The Boss, but even before I read his recent autobiography, Born to Run, I could tell this song was highly personal. After reading the book, I know the album it comes from, Tunnel of Love, was written during his first marriage that was just not working out. If you don’t consider this New Jerseyan’s sparely worded tale of a dysfunctional relationship, blue-collar squalor, drinking to forget, and potential marital infidelity to be on a par, if not far beyond, any manufactured melodrama delivered in a folksy twang, maybe you’re the one who’s beyond help.¹²

But only in this regard—I look forward to more RevHist (Update: not so much anymore). RevHist episodes have come out, both about racism in the legal system and they were also excellent.

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Read subsequent articles in the Gladwellocalypse series

Part 2 Addendum: Gladwell’s Golf Guff Gets Grief

Part 3: Descent into the Absurd

Part 4: The Immaculate Miscegenation

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Read previous articles in the Gladwellocalypse series

Part 1: The Limits of “Revisionist History”

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Notes

1. Malcolm Gladwell, “The King of Tears”, Revisionist History, July 2017.
2. “List of rock genres”, Wikipedia, retrieved August 2017.
3. John Prine & Bobby Braddock, “Unwed Fathers”, first performed by Tammy Wynette on Even the Strong Get Lonely, 1983, quoted in ibid.
4. Art Alexakis, Greg Eklund & Craig Montoya, “Father of Mine”, Everclear, So Much for the Afterglow, 1998.
5. Gladwell, July 2017.
6. 松尾 芭蕉 (Matsuo Bashō), 「古池や」 (“Old Pond”), 『蛙合』(Kawazu Awase, Frog Contest), 1686.
7. Dorothy Britton, A Haiku Journey, 1980.
8. Gladwell, July 2017.
9. Ibid.
10. Bobby Braddock & Curly Putman, “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, first performed by George Jones on I am What I Am, 1980, cited in ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Bruce Springsteen, “One Step Up”, Tunnel of Love, 1987.

The iconography of an interview with a Russian official

When Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (Сергей Викторович Лавров) was interviewed by Keir Simmons of NBC News this past week, his overall belligerence when discussing meetings between Presidents Trump and Putin (Дональд Джон Трамп, Владимир Владимирович Путин) during the G20, including references to kindergarten and trips to the bathroom, was hardly unexpected.

Lavrov and his underling Sergey Kislyak (Сергей Иванович Кисляк) are perhaps best known here for their inappropriate-seeming Oval-Office meeting with Trump, during which they shared many chuckles with him, and he shared state secrets with them.

Kislyak, long seen by US intelligence as a spy and recruiter of spies for the country—which the Russian Federation naturally hotly denies—found himself at the center of a scandal due to his perceived chumminess with the Trump campaign and administration. Apparently, even seen through the lens of Russian ethics, this violated norms enough to force him to tender his resignation this week. Indeed, as an American, I no longer possess the status to denigrate Russian moral standards, since at least for Kislyak, there were consequences.

Lavrov, despite his participation in the White House yuckfest, seems to not be going anywhere, at least for the time being. Rarely cordial in such interviews, his exaggerated testiness in this one is understandable in light of his having to bid one of his top officials and fellow Sergey adieu due to the optics this smug representative of the US press was rehashing yet again.

Nonetheless, even without the perspective provided by all of this specific context, a truculent, sarcastic interview given by a Russian official is very much par for the course, as I’ve already suggested. What struck me instead was the statuette placed on the table between interviewer and interviewee.

Although it’s strangely difficult to pin down solid information, this dimly lit, heavily curtained location appears to be a room within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation in Moscow (Министерство иностранных дел Российской Федерации, MFA).

In this oppressively monochrome environment, with unremarkably dressed men, and vague patterns, this one thing stands out, even silhouetted as it is in the filtered light of the sheer-draped window. A trio of human figures, posed dramatically within a triangular composition, can be made out.

Although I’ve lengthened the process of semiosis here, the work was instantly recognizable to me: it’s a miniature of Laocoön and His Sons. The hero’s name is Λαοκόων in Ancient Greek. The statue is also called The Laocoön Group (Gruppo del Laocoonte in Italian).

The sculpture it is based on is a massive marble one, unearthed in Rome in 1506 and thereafter displayed in the Belvedere Court Garden of the Vatican, itself likely a copy of a Greek original lost to the ages. Napoleon Bonaparte had it taken to the Louvre for a time, as he did with many works he admired during his reign. Some such spoils were repatriated, others remain in Paris. The Papal rights as the original looters of Laocoön and His Sons were upheld.

This appears to be the same work praised by Pliny the Elder as a masterwork.¹ Standing at around six feet, seven inches tall, the piece is made of at least seven interlocking pieces of marble—the total number is in doubt as some pieces are missing, and some have been restored—despite Pliny’s description of it as carved from a single piece. However, Pliny’s attribution of the piece to a trio of Rhodian artists, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodoros (Ἁγήσανδρος, Πολύδωρος, Αθηνόδωρος), is generally accepted.² It is considered one of the finest examples of Hellenistic baroque sculpture—that is, while it is not from the Baroque period, but long before, it marshals many of the same formal elements to create a sense of motion, drama, and grandeur.

Indeed, since its excavation—as well as prior to its inhumation, according to Pliny³—it has been admired by many, particularly artists, for its impressive virtuosity. Michelangelo Buonarroti was one of the first, if not the first, even going to the dig site to view the piece, which influenced him profoundly in his later work, including the Slave sculptures on the tomb of Pope Julius II, as well as several of the Ignudi and the figure of Haman in the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

It became an icon both of artistic excellence, as well as of human agony, particularly the rendering of Laocoön’s face, with its contorted features meant to reflect not just his own physical pain, but also the despair caused by the deaths of his two sons, which he ineffectively attempts to stay. The image of his eyes frantically peering heavenward in search of divine aid echoes through many a Passion of Christ and the martyrdoms of innumerable saints.

A number of copies of the work were made, beginning with Baccio Bandinelli’s commission by Pope Leo X, completed in 1525, and which now resides in Florence’s Ufizzi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi); every major art museum in Europe has one today. Woodcuts and small models also proliferated throughout the West, further expanding the piece’s influence among artists notably including Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and William Blake.

In the 18th century, miniature versions were created, probably both in Italy and in France, in gilt bronze, and based on the predilections of the Russian Empire at the time, I’d imagine the one still extant in the MFA is French, and dates from this era.

One of the reasons we can date this one is the position of Laocoön’s right arm. When the piece was unearthed by the Italians, this section was missing. A contest was held to imagine the pose of the arm and reconstruct it. Michelangelo was alone in thinking it should be bent back, others feeling the position should be more heroic, pulling the serpent away and breaking out of the composition’s triangularity.

In 1906, a marble arm was found by Ludwig Pollak, an Austro-Czech classical archaeologist, antiquities dealer, and museum director, in a builder’s yard near the find site of the statue. He found it stylistically similar to Laocoön, and presented it to the Vatican Museums, where it sat in a warehouse like the lost Ark of the Covenant for nearly five decades.

Eventually, someone tried this arm, finding the drill holes for a metal connecting post between the two sections aligned perfectly. As can be seen in the marble version above, the restored arm is bent, in the position Michelangelo predicted. The work the Russians possess shows the older, incorrect arm position.

So who is this Laocoön dude, and why have things gone so badly for him and his sons? He is part of the story of the Greek conquest of Troy, though he is not mentioned by Homer. A priest of Poseidon, he is one of the two Trojans who argue against taking a certain giant wooden horse built by the Greeks inside the city gates. The other is Cassandra (Κασσάνδρα), doomed to see what the future holds but to be believed by no one when she spoke of it.

In the Aeneid, Laocoön speaks the famous lines:⁴

Equo ne credite, Teucri
Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Do not trust the Horse, Teucrians,
Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans even when they bear gifts.

Teucrians and Danaans are Homeric collective names for the Trojans and Greeks, respectively. Although the stories vary, Athena, siding with the Greeks, typically sends a pair of serpents (which recalls Hera’s intended fate for Herakles) to punish Laocoön when he strikes the horse with his spear, and advocates for it to be burnt. For the Trojans (and Greeks), sons existed to give honor to their fathers’ names—providing them a small bit of immortality—so going after them is a pretty serious dick move. Even today, it smacks of Mob tactics, if nothing else.

When the snakes reach the trio, the Aeneid relates:⁵

Ille simul manibus tendit divellere nodosperfusus sanie vittas atroque veneno, clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit: qualis mugitus, fugit cum saucius aramtaurus et incertam excussit cervice securim.

As he reached out his hands to tear at the coils, his hairband soaked with gore and black poison,
He then also raised dreadful cries to the heavens: like the bellowing of a wounded
Sacrificial bull that flees, shaking from its neck an ill-struck axe.

This section interestingly mirrors the description of Strife at the entrance to Hades, also in the Aeneid:⁶

[…] Discordia demens
vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruenti

[…] frenzied Strife,
Her snaky tresses bound in a gore-smeared band.

A vitta, which I’ve rendered as “hairband”, and “band” (since the inclusion of “tresses” made “hair” implicit in the latter case), is an element of priestly attire made of white woolen cloth, and its pollution with dark gore and venom would have been a striking image to the Romans. Other translators have used chaplet or fillet to translate the term, but I find these so archaic as to carry no meaning for the modern reader.

As an allegory, the death of Laocoön is ambiguous: was he punished for acting against the gods, or for being right? He presents a figure similar to Prometheus in this regard.

And now we return to the meaning of this statuette in the context of the interview. Is it there to cast the Russians as those who speak truth, “though the heavens fall”, or as a warning to those who would tell an unpopular truth?

The reality is the Russians probably saw no significance in placing this statue within the scene of the Foreign Minister’s interview other than as pure ostentation: something old and gold to display the power and wealth of their nation, caring about classical myth almost as little as we.

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Notes

1. Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Naturalis Historia (Natural History), 36.11, 77–79 CE.
2. Ibid, ., “ex uno lapide eum […]”.
3. Ibid, “[…] opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum.” (“[…] a work preferable to all others in the arts of both painting and statuary.”).
4. Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Aeneis (Aeneid) II, 48–49, 19 BCE; I’ve used my own translations, here and below.
5. Ibid, II. 220–224.
6. Ibid, VI. 281.

The downfall of Bronze Age civilization (Late Bronze Age Collapse, Part 1)

O Muse, sing Peleus’ son, Achilles’ wrath.
Accursed, it brought the Greeks untold woes,
And cast untimely many valiant souls
To Hades, leaving heroes’ bodies prey
To dogs and birds; thus Zeus fulfilled his will […].¹

The sack of Troy, once thought largely a matter of legend, now seems plausible to historians and archaeologists. The historical site discovered by Heinrich Schliemann conforms in significant ways to the Homeric account. In fact, there is evidence for at least three separate confrontations between Greek peoples and Trojans, which might have been later conflated and mythologized in various ways in the Iliad (Ἰλιάς), mainly focusing on the last of them. Homer’s text is generally agreed to have actually been an oral tradition from a time when the Greeks had forgotten how to write—a Dark Age.

Emily D. T. Vermeule, classical scholar and archaeologist, makes the case for the war’s historicity:²

[T]he possibility that the Trojan War was [a Greek engagement] with an Anatolian dynast in his walled castle at the height of the early Mycenaean age must at least be considered. Since a fifteenth century Hittite drew a sketch of one of these Achaian warriors in full battle dress and plumed helmet and since one of them dropped his sword (was buried?) as far north as Smyrna, their presence in western Anatolia is not just philologically demonstrated but physically established.

There is additionally a contemporary account from the Hittites, who ruled most of eastern central Anatolia (modern Turkey) about a conflict occurring among their neighbors to the west, seeming to correspond to the Trojan War. In the Tawagalawa letter, written by Hittite king Ḫattušili III, warfare is described with some placename correspondences, summed up thus:³

The Lukka Lands mentioned in the text are classical Lycia, and Wilusa is Ilios/Troy.

The linguistic problems of matching later Homeric Greek versions of words with the centuries-older languages of the region is highlighted by the fact Tawagalawa is thought to be a Hittitization of the Greek Etiokles (Ἐτεοκλῆς), via a reconstructed Mycenaean form *e-te-wo-ke-re-we (something like Eteoklewes). He is also named as the brother of the king of the Ahhiyawa, who seem to correspond to the Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί)—one of the collective names for the Greeks used by Homer. The placename correspondences are Wilusa/ Ilios (Ἴλιος), Lukka/ Lycia (Λυκία), Taruisa/ Troas (Τρῳάς).

Homeric Greek is problematic: it’s a literary dialect of Archaic Greek containing elements of Ionic, Aeolic, Attic, Arcadocypriot, and even a smattering of non-Greek languages. Mycenaean Greek was written in syllabic/ ideographic Linear B, while Hittite adapted Akkadian cuneiform which has similar features, but the systems are otherwise completely unrelated. They are also both Indo-European languages, but from different branches of a vast family tree.

Syllabaries are not ideal for representing languages which are highly vocalic and favor consonant clusters, and both Hittite and Mycenaean Greek have these features, differing sharply from the languages their respective scripts originally represented. Reading either language reminds me of trying to decipher kana-ized English. Take Mycenaean 𐀁𐀩𐀞𐀵 (e-re-pa-to), for example: old as the word is, when you normalize the spelling, you get the very recognizable elep’antos.⁴

At any rate, war survivors from the Trojan side dispersed, some say settling in Europe, tying into national origin myths from Rome to Britain, both of which lack archaeological attestation.

As to the Greeks, the palatial centers as well as many other towns and villages of the Mycenaeans were abandoned, and no further monumental stone buildings constructed. The art of wall painting disappeared, and, since there was no longer a redistributive economy to keep records for, Linear B writing also fell into disuse. The population declined, vital trade links were lost, and the organization of the state, with kings, officials, and armies, vanished. O Brother, Where Art Thou? isn’t far from the mark in transposing Odysseus’ wanderings to the depression-era South.

I only recently ran across the term Late Bronze Age collapse (LBAC). I had heard of the Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100–ca. 750 BCE), the Fall of Troy, the Exodus (the historicity of which has not been established, but would fit into this context), and even the battles between the Egyptians and the Sea Peoples, which put an end to the New Kingdom period (ca. 1550 BCE–ca. 1077 BCE), but I hadn’t realized the extent to which these events were connected.

The cultural cataclysm of the LBAC included the Near East, the Aegean Region, North Africa, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greek Dark Ages are reckoned to have lasted some 300 years, but many of the civilizations affected simply never recovered.

The extent to which the cultures in the area were in contact during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) was something else of which I was not aware. As Eric Cline⁵ has pointed out, even civilizations not in direct contact were never more than three steps removed from contact with one another in this network. Basically, any of them could both send and receive goods with each other directly or via a few intermediaries.

How do we know? Lots of ways: first, there is the presence of goods from these civilizations in one another’s lands, as I’ve made brief mention of already. There are too many such examples to catalog here, so I’ll discuss one I found quite striking concerning a fresco found in what was an Egyptian port city called Peru-Nefer (modern تل الضبعة Tell El-Dab’a).

The reconstruction shows it’s a scene of bull-leaping, similar to that famously found in the great palace of Knossos in Crete. In addition to the distinctly Minoan motif, this particular type of wall decoration, called buon fresco—painting done with pigments dissolved in water on a thin coat of still-wet plaster—itself originated in Crete.

Therefore, artisans from the island had to have either worked on this piece, or at a minimum, trained those who did. Indeed, there seems to have been a craze for Minoan frescoes in the ancient Levant, as they appear in several locations in Egypt and Canaan, including Tel Kabri (תֵל כַבְרִי, Arabic: تَلْ ألْقَهوَة‎,Tell al-Qahweh, in modern Israel), Alalakh (Tell Atchana, in modern Turkey), Qatna (تل المشرفة‎, Tell al-Mishrifeh, in modern Syria), as well as Tell El-Dab’a.

Furthermore, a site called Mari in what’s now Eastern Syria has yielded more than 25,000 clay tablets inscribed with Akkadian text, including a wealth of documentation of ancient trade. Sadly, the site is known to have been looted during the present civil war while archaeologists looked on helplessly. Cline elaborates on the tablets found there:⁶

The archives included records of trade and contact with other areas of the Mediterranean and Near East, with specific mention of unusual items that were received. We also know from these tablets that gifts were frequently exchanged between the rulers of Mari and those of other cities and kingdoms, and that the kings requested the services of physicians, artisans, weavers, musicians, and singers from one another.

Included among the exotic imported objects recorded in the tablets at Mari were […] weapons made of gold and inlaid with precious lapis lazuli, as well as clothing and textiles […] The items had traveled a long way from Crete, acquiring what is now known as “distance value,” in addition to the inherent value that they already held because of the workmanship and the materials from which they were made.

So what happened to this early global trade network? The Sea Peoples have become a bogeyman for the collapse. Often cited in making this claim is a desperate letter King Ammurapi of Ugarit (𐎜𐎂𐎗𐎚) wrote to the King of Alashiya—an ancient regional name for Cyprus:⁷

My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka? … Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.

Note kings of the time often used familial terms in addressing their allies—using “father”, he is likely simply calling the king his elder close relation, just as people in many places, especially east Asia will use Uncle, or Aunt as a term of respect for someone older despite not being related to them.

As to the Sea Peoples, not much is known about them—even the term used for them was made up by French archaeologists. What is known is they seem to have been quite warlike: the Hittites, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, Cypriots, and others are said to have fallen to them. When they turned toward Egypt, an inscription of Ramesses III names them and their depredations:⁸

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No country could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denye(n) and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting “Our plans will succeed!”.

Note most kings did not know how to write, with an official scribal class handling the work, but the inscription was ordered by Ramesses and written in his voice. Also, Khatte (Hatti) is Anatolia under the Hittites, Qode is in the southeast of modern Turkey, Carchemish is in the north of modern Syria, and Arzawa is in western Anatolia. Other inscriptions use these and other names, for a total of nine, for which there are some more-or-less conjectural correspondences:

• Denyen (djnjw): Danaans (Δαναοί, a Greek group)
• Eqwesh (jḳwš): Achaeans
• Lukka (rkw): Lycians
• Peleset (prwsṯ): Philistines
• Shekelesh (škrš): Sicels (Sicilians)
• Sherden (šrdn): Sardinians
• Teresh (twrš3): Tyrrhenians (Etruscans)
• Tjekker (ṯkr): Teucrians (a Trojan group)
• Weshesh (wšš): Oscans (an Italic tribe)

There are many theories about the origins of these tribes and what spurred them into action, from migrations driven by famine to a quest for wealth. The Egyptians won a Pyrrhic victory against the Sea Peoples, with Ramesses declaring:⁹

They are capsized and overwhelmed in their places. Their hearts are taken away; their soul is flown away. Their weapons are scattered in the sea.

Those he did not destroy, he claims to have settled in Canaan under the crushing yoke of his rule. But as I mentioned, the victory came at a high cost: the New Kingdom was over, and a decline known as the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 1069 BCE–ca. 664 BCE) began.

The archaeological record seems not to jibe well with Ramesses’ account. Although many cities in the region were destroyed in this period, invasion doesn’t seem to account for all of them—the evidence seems to show some as rebellions, plagues, or natural disasters. A further sign the Egyptian claims may be overblown or misinformed comes in the fact the Greeks appear both as invaders and invaded, as do the Trojans.

The Bronze Age was fueled by the metal of the same name, an alloy of copper and tin. Copper was abundant, with an important center for its production being Cyprus, from which our word copper descends. One etymological analysis says the Mycenaean 𐀓𐀠𐀪𐀍 (ku-pi-ri-jo—kuprios) comes from the Sumerian word for bronze, 𒌓𒅗𒁇 (tsupar). What this leaves out is that an earlier form of the Sumerian word is kupar, which meant copper. To get from there to Κύπρος, we just add the Greek masculine suffix, -ος, and elide the unstressed vowel. pi-ri-jo (kuprios) originates with the Sumerian word for the metal, tsupar. To get from tsupar to Κύπρος, consider first, a confusion with kupar, Sumerian for “bronze”, second, ⟨υ⟩ shifted from an ancient /u/ sound to the classical /y/, and last, the addition of the Greek masculine gender suffix, -ος. The Mycenaean form had an -ios ending, which marks a masculine genitive, so “of copper”, which seems to have been later dropped, as now Κύπριος means someone from Cyprus.

Tin, on the other hand, was hard to get—there was some, but not a lot, in northern Anatolia. Cornwall, which was an important source later, is pretty far away, so most of it seems to have been brought from what’s now Afghanistan. Carol Bell observed:¹⁰

The strategic importance of tin in the LBA was probably not far different from that of crude oil today. The availability of enough tin to produce […] weapons grade bronze must have exercised the minds of the Great King in Hattusa and the Pharaoh in Thebes in the same way that supplying gasoline to the American SUV driver at reasonable cost preoccupies an American President today!

Handily, if you run short on tin, there’s another plentiful metal you can substitute to make bronze. Unfortunately, that metal is arsenic. What’s great about arsenical bronze is weapons and armor manufactured using it actually take on several good properties: arsenic acts as a deoxidizer, so castings are less porous and more ductile, and the capacity for work hardening is also increased, so better cutting edges can be created. Furthermore, it can be given an attractive silver-colored surface.

The downside, of course, is arsenic is categorically toxic. Most copper ore already contains arsenic, and smelting it vaporizes much of whatever is present as arsenic oxide. Ötzi, the Alpine ice-mummy, was carrying a nearly pure copper axe-head and had high levels of copper and arsenic particles in his hair, and so seems to have been involved in smelting. Copper- and bronzesmiths would often end up with chronic arsenic poisoning, causing peripheral neuropathy, a symptom of which is a weakening of the legs and feet.

This may be the dark truth behind ancient myths of lame smiths, Ἥφαιστος (Hephaistos) being a paragon of the type. One can imagine the results of manufacturing arsenical bronze on a large-scale: besides being even worse for metalworkers, anyone touching the finished product would eventually feel the effects of the metal’s toxicity. Copper arsenate, another compound of the same metals, is used as an herbicide, fungicide, insecticide, rodenticide, and slug poison and has been banned for many uses because it is also highly carcinogenic.

A similar factor often overlooked in the fall of Rome, which precipitated a more familiar Dark Age, was lead poisoning. The Romans found lead a wonder metal, using it in plumbing, makeup, and even as a flavor enhancer in their wine. The very word plumbing derives from Latin plumbum, “lead”, which also provides its chemical symbol, Pb.

Before you get all superior, remember we thought it was great to use in plumbing and paint, as well as to burn in our fuel until quite recently, even with a much greater scientific understanding of the situation. It was one of the first times corporations had clear scientific evidence of deleterious effects and chose not to act until forced to do so. And our problems are not over; lead in the pipes was also the problem in Flint, Michigan.

So one way or another, bronze was on the way out. During the Greek Dark Age, edged weapons of iron came into widespread use: by 900 BCE, almost all weapons in grave goods were made of iron. Some even claim the upheavals of the collapse had to do with an escalation of weaponry, including use of iron, or of bows with increased range.

Then as now, earthquakes were a constant danger over much of the region: there are 16 active faults known today. Some theorize an earthquake swarm, a sequence of seismic events over a large area. Just to the left of the famous Lion Gate in Mycenae, the sharp rise in the ground is actually shearing from a fault running through the site.

There were also extended periods of drought in the area, which would be pretty difficult for these ancient agrarian societies to deal with. The fate of the Mayan city of Copán (in modern Honduras) seems to offer a corollary: the city flourished in a fertile mountain valley, supporting a population of 18,000–25,000, but was also very susceptible to dips in farming productivity. Disruption of the food supply in the 8th and 9th centuries meant people had to disperse and live off the land; returning to a subsistence hunting-and-gathering lifestyle.

While Egypt continued to limp along after the LBAC, Greece came back stronger than it ever had been. After the 800s BCE, writing reappeared in Greece, now adopting the Phoenician alphabet, a script much better equipped to describe their language than Linear B, and one much of the world still uses some form of today.

The vacuum left by the downfalls of some civilizations in the area allowed others to rise, including the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Persians, the Israelites—the groups we think of as the wellsprings of Western civilization.

The apocalypse has haunted our species’ imagination, however—a fall from a past Golden Age to one with diminished capacities and humbler hopes, or the end of all things: the Deluge, the End of Days, the Second Coming, Ragnarǫkkr, Frashokereti. No doubt for those trying to survive through those years of tumultuous destruction and catastrophic change, it was a grim struggle. But the arc of history, it seems, was toward the good. So if we are in the apocalyptical times some suggest, perhaps it will represent an opportunity for some eventual betterment.

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Read subsequent articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 2: Whither the Wanax?

Part 3: The Luwian Menace

Part 3 Addendum: Fruit from a Poisonous Pseudoarchaeological Tree

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Notes

1. Ὅμηρος (Homer), Ἰλιάς (The Iliad), Book I.1–5: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος / οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε, / πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν / ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν / οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή […]. I’ve translated it to be true to the original, the subject being the word, μῆνιν (wrath). I also believe the name of the hero is given as a patronymic, Πηληϊάδεω ᾿Αχιλῆος, (literally, “son of Peleus Achilles”) as was common in the ancient world.
2. John Lawrence Angel, “‘Priam’s Castle Blazing’: A Thousand Years of Trojan Memories”, Troy and the Trojan War, Johanna Mellink Machteld, ed., 1984.
3. CTH 181, discussed in Harry A. Hoffner Jr., Letters from the Hittite Kingdom, 2009. My emphasis.
4. ⟨p(h)⟩, later expressed by ⟨φ⟩ and with the phonetic value /f/, seems to have been said in Mycenaean Greek as /pʰ/; a hard /p/ with a puff of air after it, which I’ve rendered as ⟨p’⟩. It’s thought to come from an Egyptian word, with the Mycenaean version being the genitive of 𐀁𐀩𐀞 (e-re-pa/ ⁠elephās⁠): ivory.
5. Eric Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, 2014. The schematic is based on one of his from a lecture on the same topic.
6. Ibid.
7. Emmanuel Laroche & Charles Virolleaud, Ugaritica V: nouveaux textes accadiens, hourrites et ugaritiques des archives et bibliothèques privées d’Ugarit, 1968.
8. John A. Wilson trans., in J.B. Pritchard ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament, 1969.
9. Egerton and Wilson trans., 1936.
10. Preface, Cline, 2014.

Offhanded aggression in “Back to the Future”

Chuck Berry slowly replaces the handset on its cradle and stares dazedly at the phone for a long minute. He springs to his feet and digs through his bags for the notebook he uses to jot down ideas on the road, leafing through it to the right page. He looks down at his song. It’s eerie someone managed to come up with something so similar (identical?). He had had a feeling when he penned it, it was a good one; another follow up to “Maybelline”, the crossover hit he was currently riding high on.

But now, hearing some suburban kid playing it, it was clear it was too old school, already mainstream and square. It was time to get out of his comfort zone and come up with something new to really shake things up. It’s ironic Marvin had thought Chuck was looking for a new sound when he wasn’t and now he needed to, because of that call. He tears the page out, crumples it, and tosses it in the direction of the trash basket. He shakes his head: that was a close one.

We all know the scene. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is playing guitar on “Earth Angel” with Marvin Berry (Harry Waters Jr.) and the Starlighters for the Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance. But afterwards, he decides to bust out an “oldie from where he’s from” and slays “Johnny B. Goode”. The crowd goes wild.

The movie is sloppy with its 1955 facts across the board; IMDB’s “Goofs” page is immense.¹ And sure, it was harder to do research when the film was made, you had to actually relocate your physical body to an inconveniently situated place known as a library, and find books made of paper whose contents could not be easily searched, rather a crude, almost necessarily erroneous device—the index—had to be consulted. Today, we have facts at our literal fingertips and can find out what the popular songs and movies were at any given date nearly instantaneously.

And also sure, the film is a comedy; not to be taken too seriously, but the science fiction elements, and specifically time travel, mean the entire premise is closely connected to an accurate depiction of a suburban California town in November 1955. It’s not: IMDB lists 14 anachronisms, and it’s pretty far from exhaustive. And no, I’m not going to fix IMDB.

Turning just to Marty’s performance with The Starlighters, there are several such problems, which are worth mentioning as they go to overarching issues: That guitar did not exist then, that amp did not exist then, those effects did not exist then.

The song as well as the guitar are clearly meant to allude to Chuck Berry, but he played a Gibson ES-350T, which was his trademark until the manufacturer discontinued it in 1963. Only then did he switch to the ES-355. No one in the ’50s had a red guitar either—most of them were some kind of sunburst. Red didn’t happen until the ’60s.

The gag line on which all of this hangs comes when Marty is soloing and the injured frontman finds a phone:²

Chuck! Chuck, it’s Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Berry. You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!

As I’ve already indicated, Chuck was not looking for a new sound, as Marvin would have known. “Maybelline” was already a huge hit. It had sold over a million copies and hit number one on Billboard’s R&B chart and broke into the overall US chart as well, reaching number five only a few months previous to the movie’s timeline, and had stayed there.

Furthermore, the film is set in November 1955, with little left of the year in which Berry is known to have written “Johnny B. Goode”, so another likely miss historically. Indeed, Berry was to score nine more R&B-charting singles, as well as five that crossed over into the US chart as well before the release of this song. Two of these, “School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)”, and “Sweet Little Sixteen” charted higher in both categories: “School Day” reached number one R&B, number three US and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, number one and number two, compared with “Johnny B. Goode”’s performance of number two and number eight. The actual songwriting of “Johnny B. Goode”, rather than being a “new sound” was very much a rocked-up country blues song (as many were), exactly along the lines of “Maybelline” and these other hits.

I’ll note despite the awkwardness of the throwaway laff line, the movie did introduce a new generation to Chuck Berry’s musical genius; a silver lining.

Elvis Presley is commonly thought of as the personification of the white appropriation of rock and roll and the subject of Sam Phillips’ declaration,³

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

And again, the film misses the boat as Phillips and Presley had already done this, rerecording Arthur Crudup’s R&B hit “That’s All Right” in July 1954. And even Elvis was also far from the first, despite what Phillips thought.

Then we come to the actual influences on the song the film attempts to efface: the opening riff is a note-for-note copy of the intro to Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five’s song, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman (They’ll Do It Every Time)” from 1946, well predating the fictitious McFly performance.

As for the guitar sound, if that was what Marvin meant (sans effects), Berry’s inspiration for that, as it was for many rockers before and since, including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis, was not only not white but also not male: “Godmother of rock and roll” Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

The real shame of Marty teaching Chuck his business is it abrogates Tharpe. Listen to a few bars of her song “That’s All”, originally recorded in 1938, and you’ll hear the guitar sound that actually inspired Berry—it’s unmistakable.

And this is where the real problem arises. The filmmakers think about (or at least portray) rock and roll as being born suddenly in the mid-’50s. Check the date for Tharpe’s song again—1938. Elements recognizable as characteristic of rock and roll actually began to appear still earlier, in the blues of the ’20s. There is debate about which song is the proper one to cite, but I’d offer Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Shake That Thing” of 1925 as a notable paterfamilias, despite his use of a banjo guitar; a six-string banjo using guitar tuning. Uncoincidentally, Jackson was one of the earliest black musicians to have his work covered in recordings by whites, as The Allen Brothers did with his “Salty Dog Blues” in 1926.

Mainstream culture seems to think rock and roll’s history begins more specifically, at the point of its becoming white, making it possible for a Marty to deracinate it in 1955, but you’d actually have to go all the back to around 1670 in ports like Ouidah, and through them into the whole of what once was the Slave Coast of Africa, to reach what’s ultimately being whitewashed.

That the history of black American music begins in Africa (apart from the obvious) is attested in the English words associated with it, like the Kikongo meanings, if not etymologies, for words like jazz and funky. The concept of “cool” which has become integral to American culture, and perhaps even the world’s, is distinctly African, embodied in words like Yoruba itutu “(aesthetically) cool”, and the Fɔngbe phrase é na fa, “it will be cool”, which carries the exact same connotations on both sides of the Atlantic.

The whole reason rock and roll is the music of rebellion is deeply embedded in its history, which is also why it appealed to white teens in the conformist America of the middle of the last century. As Berry said of “Maybelline”,⁴

It came out at the right time when Afro-American music was spilling over into the mainstream pop.

Again, the history of black entertainers performing for white audiences goes way back, with venues like the Cotton Club strictly adhering to this format, beginning in 1923. They also required dancers and chorus girls to be light-skinned, as their advertising stated:

Tall, Tan, and Terrific!

The Brown Paper Bag Test was a common measure for “acceptable” skin color. These women also had to be at least five-foot-six and under 21.

The whole point of having Marvin’s band play in lily-white Hill Valley is to try to be cool, though Marvin should have been able to land way better gigs just on the basis of being the cousin of an already huge star. Marty playing with the Starlighters, however, would be problematic as it makes them a miscegenated band.

When Rosetta Tharpe was backed by white performers, The Jordanaires (who would also later play with Elvis), they could not stay at the same hotels or eat in the same establishments and many Southern venues simply refused to let them play. Certainly California would have been somewhat less strict, but the entire issue is glossed over, despite 3-D and Skinhead (that’s really his name) calling one of the Starlighters “spook” and the whole group “reefer addicts”, respectively. And, in fact, the lazy stereotyping of the film does have the band smoking pot.⁵

As for Marty himself, he is a deeply flawed character. Mr. Strickland (James Tolkan), a teacher at his high school characterizes him, not incorrectly, as a “slacker”: he lies to his parents, his audition tape is rejected, he’s frequently tardy to school, not especially bright, overly concerned with his physical appearance, and wantonly destructive of Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd)’s personal property. All of this is useful to the film as it makes him a highly relatable everyman for the audience, as well as being an effective driver for the plot as he bumblingly and repeatedly creates temporal issues he must then strive to correct.⁶

His performance of “Johnny B. Goode” is the penultimate such event—his note to Doc about his being shot in 1985 being the final one—but which apparently has no consequences other than Doc not dying. In the middle of “Earth Angel”, he is hovering on the brink of nonexistence, his hand becomes transparent, he ceases to be able to play, he is being unmade. Then the tide turns, his future parents dance and fall in love and he revives. He has literally just finished fighting to reverse the disruptions his trip into the past has caused, when with absolute disregard, he attempts to erase the genius of Berry, presumably a hero of his, in order to claim it for himself.

As for Marty’s portrayer, the performance was not Fox at all: Mark Campbell did the singing and Tim May played the guitar. Mojo Nixon took issue, singing in 1987’s “Elvis is Everywhere”,

Michael J. Fox has no Elvis in him.

Asked why he cast the film star as an “Evil anti-Elvis”, Nixon is unrepentant, refusing to dial back his criticisms based on Fox’s being “sick”—Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 and has been semi-retired since 2000—and it’s also worth noting Nixon has also accepted the revisionist idea of white rock and roll:⁷

In Back to the Future and in that terrible Paul Schrader movie with the Springsteen song, Light of Day, Michael J. Fox desperately wanted to be a rock-and-roller. He’s not! He is an evil yuppie twit, and he always will be an evil yuppie twit. He can’t be a rock-and-roller.

In the end, Marty breaks rock and roll. Even discarding the classic grandfather paradox he has created, performing a song he learned from Chuck Berry for Chuck Berry—so he wouldn’t have written it for Marty to learn it so Marty could never have performed it. ’Cause Chuck Berry never would have borrowed anything from a nerdy suburban white boy, no matter how good.

In the new timeline he has created, in the future he returns to, white rock and roll will have been what black musicians will have had to create a counter-culture to even sooner, which will then have been co-opted by mainstream culture. In Marty McFly’s new 1985, being a guitar hero, no matter how skilled, will have been made passé, irrelevant. Popular music will have either gone retro, led by banjo or accordion, or new, unheard of instruments will have been invented—almost anything but guitar, bass, and drums.

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Read the addenda to “Roll Over McFly”

Addendum A: The Immaculate Miscegenation

Addendum B: Appropriating a Missing Past

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Notes

1. “Goofs”, Back to the Future (1985), IMDB.
2. Back to the Future, 1985. 
3. Quoted in Jerry Hopkins, Elvis: The Biography, 1971, though it is disputed.
4. NBC Evening News, March 18, 2017.
5. Back to the Future, 1985.
6. Ibid.
7. Tom Murphy, “Mojo Nixon “un-retires” with Whiskey Rebellion”, Westworld, April 2012.