It's Not Just A Movie, It's An Action Plan: 'Big Trouble In Little China'
"Trouble," sang Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, in 1970 "Oh trouble set me free, I have seen your face, and it’s too much, too much for me."
"Trouble on my left, trouble on my right," sang Matt Shultz of the band Cage the Elephant in 2015, "I've been facing trouble almost all my life."
"Trouble, trouble, trouble, is all in the world I see," sang Lightnin' Hopkins in 1959. "You know I often wonder, what in the world gonna become of me."
I get it. And maybe you do too. There are those of us who feel as though trouble follows them. This is not so much a matter of a bad spell or a downturn in fortune or chemical depression or the effects of a bad diet and not enough exercise as it is an ill wind we never seem to be able to escape, following us wherever we go, subsiding just long enough in moments to let the sun shine through…before rising again to push the storm clouds back in to suffocate us once again.
When you're one of these folks, you understand the old superstitious attraction to notions of curses, of a dark brooding fate glowering down, of some greater force gleefully and torturously tossing you about like a set of knucklebones. It just doesn't seem possible that the world can keep doing these kinds of things to you at random, or for no reason at all. It feels as though there must be something out there targeting you, fixing you in its beady little eye, taking its joy from your unhappiness.
In the face of this, there's really only ever a single question: what do you do?
Some people turn to religion and find hope in the idea that there's another world beyond this one, which makes all of this insanity bearable. Others turn to the free market, with its promise that if you find the widget that people desperately need, and turn yourself through the discipline of hard work into the best widget salesman that there is, happiness and glory will ensue. Still others turn to science, with its promise that we can understand the world right down to its essence, and in that understanding become its master.
But perhaps, if you're like me, none of these options have any pull on you, and so you turn to art. Perhaps you even follow the advice of Jack Burton, from John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986) who explains the situation as follows:
"When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, looks you crooked in the eye and asks you if you paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: 'Have you paid your dues, Jack?' 'Yessir, the check is in the mail.'"
Which is to say that the Dark Lord of Fate – that eight-foot-tall maniac – cannot be avoided. He cannot be defeated. But what he can be is tricked, lied to, finagled, danced around, bluffed, delayed for long enough that we just might be able to grab a scrap of happiness before he applies his axe to our neck. Because, you see, even if you don't have it yet, Mr. Dark Lord, I promise that the check is in the mail. Really. Just trust me on this one.
Burton is played by Kurt Russell, and if you want to argue that Russell has given a better comedic performance anywhere in his career you're certainly welcome to, but you'd be wrong, so I wouldn't waste much time on it. He's a trucker who has no discernible home other than his truck – the Pork Chop Express, it's called – and thus is something like (if you'll excuse the cross-cultural references) the gunfighter riding into town or the ronin striding through the Japanese countryside, rambling, free, deadly, and looking for work. Except this isn't a Western or a Samurai flick, and Burton is pretty terrible at the whole being "deadly" thing. More on that is a minute.
Big Trouble in Little China is actually a kung fu movie. Burton falls into it because of his friendship with Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) who owns a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. When some punks from a street gang kidnap Wang's fiancée, Burton finds himself trying to help rescue her, which in turn leads to him getting pulled into a cosmic battle between good and evil. On the good side are Wang Chi, a benevolent sorcerer and tour bus driver named Egg Shen (Victor Wong) and their band of fellow warriors, called the Chang Sing.
Lined up against them are an opposing band of warriors, called the Wing Kong, three semi-mystical beings known as the Three Storms, and the leader of this whole enterprise, a 2,000-year-old evil sorcerer named Lo Pan (James Hong), who is old and incredibly decrepit and in a wheel chair. But if Lo Pan can sacrifice a girl with green eyes, then he'll be rejuvenated and free to wreak his evil mischief on the world once again.
It's a wildly entertaining flick and (as do so many of his best films) puts Carpenter's prodigious directorial talents on full display. But I'm not here today to sell you on it, but to try to draw out the remarkable wisdom it has to share about how to deal with the trouble that figures so prominently in its title.
If you're attentive to these sorts of things, you'll notice that the vast majority of action/adventure movies in the American tradition feature protagonists who are confronted by trouble. And in turn, the way the vast majority of them deal with this is by defeating it. They muscle up and smash it in the face like big ol' Arnold Schwarzenegger, or fly wise-cracking by the seat of their pants like Bruce Willis (and Kurt Russell in other movies), or use finely-honed fighting skills like Bruce Lee or Keanu Reeves in his Matrix to John Wick period. And even the goofier ones, like Harrison Ford in his Indiana Jones mode, are able to use their wits and special skills to get themselves out of whatever scrapes they're in.
Jack Burton, not so much. He indeed finds himself in big trouble in little China, and in every fight he's virtually the most useless participant.
He gets his ass beat by some street punks in the first ten minutes. In another fight, it takes him so long to get his gun operational and his knife out of his boot that Wang has already defeated the bag guys by the time Burton is ready to fight. In the film's big finale, he fires off his gun to announce his presence, causing a chunk of concrete to fall on his head and knock him out. And when he does regain consciousness, he barely kills a monstrous fellow in armor, only to be trapped beneath the armored body and once again miss most of the action.
The fact that Burton is so ineffectual when compared to the Chinese characters he's surrounded by has given rise to a lot of spilled ink over the years about how the film subverts the expectations folks in 1986 had about things like race and masculinity. And these are a valuable points. In a different, and infinitely worse, version of this film, Burton would save the good guys in this battle of Chinese forces, thus proving that when push comes to shove it's the white guy you can trust; here, they save him, again and again. The implications of this, and the way it makes the film into a rather subversive one when viewed through the lens (as they say) of race or gender, are all really interesting topics.
But there's also some other things going on here.
Jack Burton is, clearly, the hero of the film. He survives in the end, and evil is defeated. But those two facts are only oddly connected. As I've noted, he survives because he's repeatedly saved by other people, and the evil in the film is not wholly defeated, because there's a final shot – of Burton back in The Pork Chop Express, driving down the highway and yammering on his radio to anyone who will listen – that shows us that not all of the monsters have been vanquished. In fact, one of them is on Burton's truck with him. Trouble, in other words, is still following him. And it will continue to do so past the end of the film.
Beyond this, there's the fact that Burton in his perpetual bumbling is more like us out here in the real world than virtually every other hero of every other action film. This is not so much a matter of the fact that most of us can't jump into a helicopter and automatically know how to fly it, or kill a bad guy at a hundred yards with a pistol shot, or leap into the air and kick someone through a wall, as it is of the fact that, for most of us, trouble truly is more powerful than we are.
This is a hard truth of the world that both our commercial-empowerment-oriented culture and the heroic narcotics of Hollywood frequently lie to us about. The big troubles, from cancer to climate change, from politically terrifying groups to the realities of the economy – not to mention many of the personal troubles in our lives – are, like the Three Storms or David Lo Pan, mightier than we are. These troubles are larger and stronger than we are, they have more force and they have no conscience; at any moment they may sweep us away altogether.
They are not vulnerable to individual heroism. And, lest you are tempted to scoff at this, pound your fist on the table and holler about how we can overcome anything, remember that the biggest trouble of them all, death itself, is always out there. It is always advancing. And it is absolute.
No matter how big your fame or vast your fortune, you will lose against death in the end. And in ten thousand years (an infinitesimal amount of time to the cosmos) no one will remember either you or any of the things you find to be so important.
Trouble indeed, as the singers sang, to the left and the right; trouble, we have seen your face; trouble, sometimes you are all we see.
So what's to be done? Well, the first thing to be done is to fear not. Because if there's one thing about Jack Burton, it's that he's willfully and stupidly ignorant of fear. He tries like hell, he experiments, he complains, he brags, he blusters, he gets knocked out, he almost falls down a well in a wheelchair, he's generous to the people who are saving his ass and does his best to save them too, but he's not afraid.
Trouble, that is, has no hold on him. He laughs at the forces that are defeating him, even as they are defeating him.
And in doing this he becomes that rarest thing in the action-movie world: a hero who survives through the methods of art rather than the methods of force. He's wearing a silk bathrobe when he meets his love interest (played by Kim Cattrall); in the lead-up to the final fight he's wearing red lipstick that got on his face from a kiss; he pretends to be a nerd named Henry Swanson and then a phone repairman; he pretends to be able to take on anything and win, even when he has no chance.
These ridiculous and genuine things – being prey to accident, wearing ridiculous costumes, cross-dressing, pretending, inventing, swaggering, experimenting, faking, not giving in not because you're so strong but because you're too dumb to do anything else – are the methods of art.
Put differently, art is a dodge. It's a con. It's a game, a dance, a paradox, a frolic in the fields under the cliff face of the ghastly. It's a refusal of what is and an exploration of what is. It is not, very simply, what it is.
Are the characters on the screen in this or any other movie real? No, they're actors. How about the images conjured by the words on the page? Nope – those are mental constructs inspired by ink pressed into paper. They exist only in some netherworld of creative forgery. It's all paint on canvas that looks like a mountain but is not, pixels on a screen flashing on and off to trick you into thinking you're seeing a knife and a hand and a glove. It's joy and pain and recreation, a re-creation again and again of what's possible in the face of that old eight-foot-tall maniac.
And beneath it lies the truest honesty. The preacher, the widget manufacturer, the scientist – they all think trouble can be defeated. But the artist, like Jack Burton, knows that the most one can hope for is to be able to trick it for a while, dance along ahead of it for a few more days, laughing, joking, blustering, until we think of our next plan.
Enjoy this piece? If you want to support me, please share tylersage.substack.com with anyone you know who's interested in film, culture, ideas, or ebullience.
Also, as this is an entirely reader-funded endeavor, I'd be eternally grateful if you'd consider subscribing for $5 a month. For this meager amount, you'll receive every piece in full, get full access to the archives of this site, and greatly contribute to my ability to keep writing. I'll also send you a free six-demon bag.
If you'd like to read more of my work, my book on William Klein's cult classic superhero film Mr. Freedom is now available from Liverpool University Press. And my novel The Committers is available here.