Forget About Killing Bill, There's Big Trouble in Little China!

It goes without saying that the primary role that Asian-Americans have played in American films over the last few decades has been as martial arts experts. Most of the popular American films featuring this aspect of Asian culture have come to the fore in the last fifteen years, but almost twenty years ago a big name director made what was probably the first American film to feature Asian martial artists as both the heroes and villains of the story. What is most interesting about the movie Big Trouble in Little China is how it subverts what has turned out to be quite prescient expectations of martial arts movies made in America.

Big Trouble in Little China is a hybrid movie that doesn't fit easily into genre and that upsetting of expectations extends into the cultural milieu as well. This film was made in the mid-80s, during the height of the action hybrid blockbuster era defined by the Indiana Jones movies and destroyed by the likes of Bruce Willis. Early on the movie sets up expectations that its hero will be in that mold as the instantly recognizable actor Kurt Russell swaggers and speaks with a John Wayne bravado. This makes the transition of the central heroic figure to the lesser-known Asian actor all the more striking. All too often, American films set among the Asian subcultures construct their all-American hero in such a way that he comes to be seen as not just saving their lives, but educating them about America. Big Trouble in Little China turns that convention on its head by having the character we expect to always know best and have the answers consistently being put in situations where he must turn to the Asian character we initially expected to fulfill the sidekick role for answers. In this way, this almost forgotten action/comedy succeeds both in illuminating the manner in which cultural divides are typically presented in Hollywood films, and in undoing those very stereotypes.