The popcorn was your lunch, that was how you planned
it.
I’m speaking for those of us of a certain age who’d sneak
away from our unexceptional teenage lives to take in a quadruple-feature in a
dubious part of the big city, a blurred spectacle that would pummel us equally
with depraved thrills and unexpected beauty. Back then, of course, there was no themed cable television or online
media—you couldn’t subject yourself to marathon sessions of watching whatever
turned you on without first making an actual pilgrimage. In the process you’d
trade in your safe, bright, private home for one that offered a very public
form of privacy, the houselights always set at a sickly semi-dim, a space that
was never not knee-deep in grubbiness, full of slumped figures in seats snoring
boozily through sprays of blood and splashes of widescreen nudity. You’d never
know whether to pity them or fear them, these fellow audience members, lest
they wake in a sudden incoherent rage, but it didn’t matter anyway because, above
all, you were there to ignore each other. You’d enter at 11-something in the
morning, stagger out at six-something, and if it was the summer, you’d be
amazed that it was still light out (after a day of gloom), and if it was
winter, you’d be amazed at the gentle darkness of the early evening (after a
day packed with too-bright colors, with explosions of fire and flesh). Earlier,
during the breaks between features, you’d take the measure of your own temporal
disorientation by trying to recall what you’d seen two movies ago, and usually
the answer wouldn’t come immediately—cognitively, you had joined the great haze of
the half-hidden and the half-forbidden while, outside, in the world beyond the
exit doors, real life slipped by unperturbed, as if on gliding silver casters.
Time never seems to care that we waste so much of it.
Years and years later we’d meet, this murk-enamored army of the
once-young who could recall the grindhouses, and talk would inevitably run to
favorite trailers and one-sheets; and, just as inevitably, the comment would
arise, and find no objection, that theses previews and posters were always far,
far better than the product they promoted. That’s true with most films, I
suppose, but in these cases we were dealing with artifacts both more endearing and more misleading, the former true not
despite, but because, of the latter. The advertising images were bolder, somehow more mythic for the way the films were condensed down to
their essence—a steely look given and zoomed in upon, a battle cry, a driving musical
signature over a montage of impossible stunts. Block letters and exclamation
points blazing out of the screen at you. Voice-overs that took these movies
extremely seriously and dared you to do otherwise; and the more absurd, the
more transparently pandering, the more seriously still.
That said, there was a handful of times when this maxim
didn’t hold, when what was delivered exceeded in every way what had been
promised. And for me the most memorable of those times involved The Final Battles of The Human Hatchet
(1977), aka The Final Battle of The Human
Hatchet, aka simply The Human Hatchet.
Kung fu (or wuxia)
movies of this period often incorporated elements of the grotesque and the
baroquely cruel, and I’m not sure if that’s because the practice made for good
business at the Asian box office, or because it so nicely fit the export market,
where they could share a bill with homegrown exploitation flicks and not miss a
beat. With The Human Hatchet,
however, there was a big difference—here we had a proven director (Huang Feng,
not that we tracked Hong Kong filmmakers in those days—if we had, we might have
marveled that this was one of his three releases in that single year) and in
addition, a topnotch star, Gordon Liu, shortly before he astonished
all of us with the classic 36th Chamber
of Shaolin.
The appeal of many of the HK films of this era (not to
mention countless Westerns, chanbara
flicks wherein a ronin grudgingly rises to the call of honor, a million cop B-movies
in which the protagonist is called out of retirement—or is about to retire and
feels there’s no need to risk his comfortable future) concerns the importance
of a reluctant hero. More precisely, a “damaged hero”—damaged by reputation, by
physical injury, by age alone, by emotional scars, or some combination of these.
The key is a form of incapacity—because that’s how so many of us saw ourselves,
and maybe still do. Tomorrow we would wake from our slumber and find a better
job, or any job, or be motivated to go to school, or just do some homework, or go on a date, or
exercise—we were, in the meantime, intentionally
lying dormant, that’s how the fantasy goes, waiting for the moment we’d supernova
out of our half-lives and onto some grander stage of participation. That way,
the longer we stayed inactive, with only sufficient agency to make our way into
these caves of wonder and violence, the more volcanic would be our eventual
eruption into the mainstream of humanhood.
Yes, I’m rambling now, I realize that. The point
is that there was a tacit agreement back then between us cave-dwellers to
keep any and all interaction between us to an absolute minimum. You’d use the imaginary as
an intermediary, a gauzy, ephemeral sounding board—you’d laugh at what someone
said three rows over, but you’d never meet, never acknowledge each other in
ways that involved anything beyond staring straight ahead at the fiery things
before you.
Which is why, as I’ll come to explain, The Human Hatchet was so remarkable, or at least my experience of it was (a distinction I
feel compelled to make even though it’s pointless, ultimately). That and the
fact that this was a movie that more than made good on the gaudy promises of
its trailer, which I recalled vividly from a week or two previously—and so provided
me with my very first sensation, and probably one of my last, of the state of
grace. I don’t deserve this, I
remember thinking. Maybe none of us do.
“Yes… This Is The One!” the trailer had announced breathlessly.
The letters arrived one by one rapidly from left to right,
apparently writing themselves by virtue of your reading them. Under them, a
close shot of a hatchet lodging in wood, the chunk sound underscoring the text, its single syllable pairing
nicely with any of the single-syllable words on the screen. (Slouched down in my seat, I let the
on-screen boast slip past my guard—then questioned it, even back then: what was meant by “the one”? Didn’t the copywriter responsible for this know that my eyes and ears had an
appetite that was all about quantity, that I was slowly amassing a vast topography
of the imaginary by taking in any and all items of sufficient power and dazzle? Or was I wrong, had I really been waiting for
one special cinematic story, some kind of messianic opus that would provoke a
personal transformation, and had simply not realized it? Well, maybe, in a
sense, I had been waiting for this
kind of singular arrival, just so that now, decades later, I could recount it
for you.)
“The Picture That Everyone is Talking About—”
Behind these words, and then eventually replacing them as
the letters were wiped off the right side of the screen, there’s a provincial
governor holding court; these trailers always included such shots, offering
proof of production values as if production values mattered much to us. The
governor, unidentified as such in the trailer, has the air of a warlord about
him, imperious and grave with his elegant and precise facial hair, his grooming
a kind of aesthetic weapon at his disposal. He speaks a line of self-serving pseudo-Confucianism—we
know not to whom because of how things have been edited: “Knowing our place in
life is what brings peace. Not knowing our place brings… war!” (Meanwhile, my place in life, at least for
this specific moment and many like it, was all too clear to me. I was in my
hibernation spot—I’d checked out the surroundings upon first entering the
theater and monitored them at regular intervals as the long matinee hours marched
dreamily on. I fortified my position by slumping and covering, by making myself
at one with the surroundings, a process that was not free of challenges. Were
the armrests acceptable as surfaces upon which I could lay my elbows and
triceps? If not, I didn’t depart; rather, I'd let the sleeves of my coat drape
over them, shielding my shirt or sweater from actual contact. The paramount rule,
however, was never ever to let one’s fingertips stray to the lip of an armrest
and beyond, so that they might come in contact with what could lie beneath. This
was how you inoculated yourself against the slyly encroaching suspicion that
you were part of the filth.)
“—And Soon You Will Be, Too!”
The cut on “war” brings us a glimpse of a full-on battle
scene, with spear-toting guards going up against peasants and assorted villagers
armed with pitchforks and other farm implements, the two groups collapsing upon
each other in the center of the screen, the first casualty being the empty
space that existed briefly before the clash. Which means that if you’re keeping
score, so far we’ve had a glimpse of the budget and a sense of spectacle—all
within ten seconds or so. Still not much to write home about it, but the
trailer, it turns out, is merely getting these checklist items out of the way
before proceeding to the heart of the matter. (At first there would appear to be an unintended lie in the trailer’s
assertion—I most definitely would not be talking to anyone about this or any
similar film. The kids at school? They had no sense of this—well, this world.
They were busy gravitating to Star Wars
and Saturday Night Fever, and I don’t
fault them for that. Besides, there really was no relevant discourse at all,
anywhere, except perhaps a few hand-stapled zines scattered across the country,
some capsule reviews in the Cantonese language dailies, or box office stats
buried somewhere in the back of Variety.
This was culture without conversation. You would think, then, that when a new
century later dawned and it seemed that everyone alive was thinking and
commenting about pop culture, I’d have welcomed the company, but by then I was
already accelerating in the opposite direction, longing to be silent and
sparing after years of chatter.)
“Just Who Is the Human Hatchet…?”
A quick, satisfying shot of a hatchet blade cutting through
the staff of three spears in one circular motion. Then the camera pulls back
and we see, at last, (I know: but “at last” is what it feels like though we’re now
only about fifteen seconds in) the title character, wild-eyed and, surprisingly
(if you know the actor), with hair similarly wild. Liu has short-handled
hatchets where both hands should be, and long, somewhat tattered sleeves conveniently
covering fake stumps—it’s the old “taped-over fists” visual that was a staple
in all the eras prior to when CGI enabled filmmakers simply to delete flesh. We’re
all aware the actor is still intact, but we’re okay with equating the invisible
with the absent because that’s the way this whole thing works. We let ourselves
be fooled, and fooling us is what occurs from before the get-go: all of the
posters and key art that promoted the film presented an image that is not remotely
in the film—Tian Gao bare-chested and sans hands. Some graphic designer was
ordered to gild the lily, and moviegoers fell in line.
More importantly, at least in terms of cinema history, this
was years before Evil Dead II and Edward Scissorhands leveraged similar ideas about missing appendages.
(Forgive the aside, but the premise of the latter always seemed a little dumb
to me. Why would Vincent Price’s character have fabricated the hands last?
Would you really make sure your creation had clothes, but not the means to take
them on and off? It’s a conceit that makes sense only on the level of psychoanalytic
male adolescence.) As you watched the trailer, you immediately wanted to know
how he acquired these skills, these unique weapons—did he train like this, specializing
in what seems to be a new fighting style? Was he a member of a temple of devotees/amputees? The trailer, however, was concerned with
bigger issues, ones of identity, as evidenced by the rapid-fire array of
options that followed in answer to the question it had just posed… (Much of what was exhibited in the cave was inane:
that was a given. So it took special circumstances to prompt us to express our
reaction to additional stupidity. I did it, too; not at first, and never the
first one to do so while any given film screened, but, yes, I’d contribute. I
had to be careful for my voice was distinctive, not like the others in
attendance. And I’d keep it brief, words that were short and declarative. You
see, you’d have to yell back at the screen once in a while, for good measure,
to show you were not above doing so… to prove it to yourself, that is—no one
else was likely noting your behavior. The practice of reacting out loud like
this also kept you from going too far and too completely into the self-contained
realms inside your head. Again: We talked to each other by shouting at the
screen.)
“Warrior?”
And now the first shock of the trailer: Tian Gao, cleaned up, on horseback, in armor
and imperial helmet, but more importantly—with both hands. He barks a phrase
that seems to contain no words, charges along a narrow mountain pass, leaps from
his steed to protect the governor’s litter with his own person. From higher up
on the sides of a sand-colored canyon, against which the indigos and emeralds
of the governor’s escort stand out like targets, a dust-covered but better
camouflaged troop of unidentified enemies pushes rocks and boulders down,
trying to force the litter off the road and take a fatal plunge. But Gao, with
inhuman ferocity and power, is kicking, punching, and somehow guiding the rocks
as they tumble down; on the ground near him are corpses in lighter armor—bodyguards
who have apparently already sacrificed themselves. One of the attackers from above,
disheveled, and as wild-eyed as we saw Liu with his hatchet-hands a moment ago,
something painfully desperate about him, screams, “His hands are
indestructible!”—and we cut.
What the trailer doesn’t have time to explain but which blossoms
narratively up out of such ingredients is the fact that we first encounter Gao as
the popular leader of the local imperial regiment; popular because he grew up
in the area, popular also because he is simply likable: decent, honest, smart. Additionally
the trailer does not bother, nor should it, with the connective plot tissue: that,
as a result of warding off the attack shown, he receives an unheard-of double
promotion (which in terms of the class system makes no sense whatsoever), both
to special adviser to the governor and to a member of his personal guard (which
just lost a few members, you’ll recall). In the movie we learn that the attack was
launched by a ragtag group of rebel peasants, their agenda nebulous except that
their hostility is directed against the governor himself, not the office he
holds nor the political status quo more broadly.
In an unusual role in that it downplays his martial arts
skills until the final reel, the governor is played by the wonderful and
reliable Lung Wei Wang (aka Johnny Wang), here not quite so artificially
aged as he is in other roles, with only single strands of grey/white mixed in with
his jet black hair, not the usual full-on snow-white get-up. The idea is that the
actor’s youth (in real life he was not yet thirty) is here used to a subtle
thematic effect: he is meant to seem too
young to be in such a position of power, which in turn means that perhaps he is
far older and by some means only manages to appear
much younger. “Those filth
who died,” he says of the rebel dead, “—dump them in the pit.” He commands this
in an off-handed tone, as if it’s standard operating procedure. After the
bodies are burned, he’s shown gathering the ashes by moonlight, scattering
drops of some mysterious oil upon them… and then re-burning them, chanting
something that we cannot make out and which may not be in any known language. In
a later scene that takes place in his inner sanctum he is inhaling deeply of a dense, black smoke,
and the implication is that he has made a form of incense out of his enemies. Incidentally,
these include the fellow who yelled the bit about Gao’s hands, a farmer whose
brother later joins Gao when he becomes an insurrectionist; it is a
decision-making moment drawn out both for suspense (will he attempt to avenge
his brother instead?) and emotional drama: can there be forgiveness in the
service of fighting evil? Well, yes, evidently there can be, and yes, this is political
theory based on sentimentality, one of popular cinema’s most prevalent modes.
“Outlaw?”
“Tian Gao, you are a traitor!”—this from a former comrade-in-arms
poised on a rooftop in the governor’s compound, and it is the first time the
trailer speaks our protagonist’s name aloud. Behind the outraged fellow are
swordsmen—the elite guard to which Gao had been promoted earlier. It’s a
rooftop that looks vaguely familiar from other period pictures from the same
studio, the kind of rooftop from which people are always leaping up to and
flying down from, their loose clothes billowing in vertical winds. In the movie this irate member
of the guard adds, “We should have killed you when we could!” but here the
dialogue is cut short by the action that immediately follows: he launches a terrific kick from the top of
this two-story building while below Gao lunges forward and takes out a support
beam with a criss-crossing blow from his two hatchets, and that entire section
of the roof collapses. Guards in indigo and emerald fill the air; their swords
fall separately. The kicker lands too distantly: where Gao had been. He turns, his sword leading the way, and Gao, now
classically bald again, now a disciplined warrior but for the other side, delivers the same sort of
criss-crossing strike, hitting the blade at two different points, and, instead
of shattering it, bends it into an impotent curve. The effect is comical, accented
by how the swordsman is gazing at the weapon in his hand, with a genuinely
puzzled and slightly moronic sort of fascination. (I am making it up if I say that in this point in the trailer all of us
sat up straighter and took notice; that’s how things should have been, how we
should have reacted—and in memory I have revised it so that that is indeed what
happened. To be clear, the strident tone
of nostalgia you may detect in everything I express is not due to my belief
that the past was any more enjoyable than the present; it’s just that the
memories are more malleable than anything else we can experience. It’s easy,
for example, to drop out the anxiety—the dread from which the movies provided a
consistent escape, and to recall only the escape itself. Thus we fix our own lives
in post, get them to conform to whatever narrative we are currently telling:
it’s not the story we tell ourselves that shapes our lives, but the story we
tell ourselves about the story.)
The trailer, and this was back when trailers were gloriously
achronological (unlike most of today’s), then shifts to an earlier point in the
film: “So, Gao has joined the rebels’ cause now?” the governor muses. “Every man must serve a master, so I should
not be surprised”—yes, there is foreshadowing taking place here, before the
picture has even been released—“Very well, then,” he continues. “It is with heavy
regret [sic] that you have my permission” —and there’s a sudden zoom in on him
as he stands up (for no reason that we can see): “—to kill him!”
What’s omitted in the trailer, naturally, is the entirety of
the governor’s speech, which sports that same over-the-counter strength version
of Confucianism noted earlier mixed liberally with Western-style social
Darwinism; after remarking that he should not be surprised by Gao's treachery, he observes: “I
serve only at the pleasure of the Qing. The Qing serve only at the pleasure of the
gods, while the gods serve at the pleasure of the Tao. And the Tao serves all, if we
allow it.” Pause. Then he says “Very
well...” In short, where the trailer makes the ostensible villain seem decisive
and remorseless, in the actual film he seems far more reflective, reaching his
decision almost reluctantly; in fact, it’s as if he is not talking about Gao
anymore but about himself—that is, if he
were totally free and not in the service of a specific political structure and
metaphysical scheme, he himself might arrive at a different decision. So we
feel for the governor, as vile as he may seem, and this is true even if we
realize how the cinematic moment is manipulating us: that’s the amoral beauty
of the movies.
[...thanks so much for reading this far, but I'm afraid I may have overstayed my welcome; so please stay tuned for the literally unbelievable ending of The Human Hatchet in a follow-up post. -Peter]
