Ang Lee’s success has been perceived as Taiwan’s national pride, even though Ang Lee refrains from expressing any Taiwan nativist sentiments about Taiwan’s independence from China. His fame is considered a reflection of Taiwan’s ascendancy in the global cultural arena.ⁱ

Like many other ethnic Chinese directors working transnationally (including Wayne Wang, Evans Chan, and many others), Lee negotiates a career that that spans Hollywood, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the PRC, American indie and Asian American film cultures. As a result, situating his oeuvre—not only geographically, but ideologically, culturally, and aesthetically—can be challenging.

With Hulk (2003), Lee throws down the gauntlet. Ten years after The Wedding Banquet (1993), Lee finally lets one of his “bottled up” (as Bruce Banner’s mother describes her toddler-Hulk son) protagonists step out of the closet. Lee has always been a master of repression (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), of the decay of the patriarchal family (The Ice Storm, 1997), and of enduring paternal power (the “father knows best” trilogy of Pushing Hands, 1992, The Wedding Banquet, 1993, and Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994) in the face of inevitable social change. Lee knows what it is like to be on the losing side (Ride with the Devil, 1999), within a corrupt empire (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000). With Hulk, Lee collaborates again with writer/production partner James Schamus and with cinematographer Fredrick Elmes to revisit these themes.ⁱⁱ

With Hulk, Lee brings what has been churning in his œuvre for a decade to a boil. In the commercial American film industry, it takes guts, after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to let a man of color (albeit green) take on the United States military in the desert and survive. Given Hollywood’s bottom line of profitability, the fact that Lee would let an out of control non-white “alien” rip army helicopters out of the sky and escape into the camouflage of a Third World jungle needs to be given credit. The A-bomb be damned— the Hulk condenses the Viet Cong and Osama Bin Laden/Saddam Hussein into one gargantuan challenge to the U.S. military-industrial complex. Could Lee, like accused spy Wen Ho Lee, also from Taiwan, be feeling the pinch of not being white in America? Does the Hulk’s anger go beyond adolescent hormones out of control to tap into a different rage coming from a Third World location? Do the Hulk’s associations with Latin America and Vietnam through his jungle hideaway resonate with the wars in the deserts of the Middle East? Like his creator Lee, Hulk also seems to hail from Taiwan, from the Chinese diaspora, from Asian America, from the ranks of American minorities visible below the glass ceiling, targeted as “threats to national security,” under surveillance by the U.S. government. An Orientalist fantasy gone awry, Hulk shows that within the white, Western, establishment male (and, by extension, the American body politic) lurks the repressed man of color, perpetually angry, on the margins and on the loose, waiting to emerge as the apocalyptic destroyer of Western civilization or, perhaps, its ultimate salvation.

Rooting Out Hulk

The Hulk himself has always represented science out of control with his roots in Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as the Id monster from Forbidden Planet (1956). Because of his nuclear connection, he has a certain affinity to Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra, and other radiation victims/creations from Japan. He resembles mutant superheroes who find themselves both debilitated and enhanced by lab experiments gone wrong or nuclear explosions of various sorts in the post-Hiroshima era. However, with the exception of Lee’s Hulk, unlike other mutant superheroes, the Hulk’s alter-ego Banner does not want to exploit the Hulk’s strength for good, but, rather, simply get rid of the troublesome creature.

Gangly, out of control, misunderstood, unable to communicate effectively in the adult world, the Hulk becomes the adolescent past of the adult Banner—not a bad kid, just “green,” and in need of a little self-control. In the 1970s television show, the middle-aged Banner just cannot see himself as the Hulk. He suffers through an internalized generation gap, a crisis in the representation of the self in the mass media (hence, the journalist as villain), and a crisis of authority in the post-Watergate era when a fugitive accused of murder has more to fear from being hounded by the tabloids than facing the criminal justice system. (If it were not for journalists, Nixon would have gotten away with “murder.”) The fact that the Hulk represents an America at war with itself because of color (black, not green) and corruption (usually rooted in the quest for the greenback) also marks this incarnation of the Hulk . In his quest to rid himself of the Hulk, Banner seems to be his own worst enemy—bordering, at times, on the pathologically self-destructive, declaring himself “free” with his dying gasp in the 1990 television movie that featured Bixby’s last appearance as Banner.

Fracturing The Hulk further, Ang Lee splits Dr. David Bruce Banner from the live-action television series into David and Bruce, making David’s impulse to rid the world of Bruce/the pre-school Hulk much less benign. Rather than the accidental death of Banner’s wife and a female lab associate at the root of the television series’ narrative, Lee’s film substitutes David Banner’s murder of his wife as a botched attempt to kill The Hulk in the making, his son Bruce. Lee plays on the idea of the divided self, questioning more than in other incarnations of the character the white mask of Bruce Banner in relation to the “authentic” non-white self as outside of white authority. In The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990), Bixby’s Banner makes much of the fact he has never seen the Hulk, but in Lee’s film, the image of the Hulk looms in the mirror and Banner certainly sees himself as others see him.

Lee returns twice to Bruce Banner shaving in a steamy mirror—first with a dissolve to green presaging his eventual transformation and, later, during an hallucinatory moment, when the Hulk bursts through the steamy mirror and tries to strangle Banner while shaving. It seems foolish that Bruce can rid himself of all the hairy associations with primitive beasts out of control like King Kong by shaving or that he may assure himself of his own maturity and keep the childlike Hulk at bay by engaging in an act that marks his adulthood. Lee provides the first version of the Hulk conscious of seeing himself as others see him and aware of the impact his physical body has on the world around him. Like Fanon’s image of white masks that hide black skin or W.E.B. Du Bois’ characterization of the “two-ness” that defines African Americans, the Hulk looks through the mirror to see how the white world views him. Du Bois’ words resonate with Lee’s depiction of the Hulk:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.ⁱⁱⁱ

However, Lee’s Hulk is torn asunder. This Hulk exists in layers—adolescent and childhood fantasies vie with elements that seem to highlight questions of race and ethnic difference. However, although this Hulk may be similar to his earlier Marvel and Universal Television manifestations, Dr. Banner, elder and younger, has changed. Dr. Banner has stopped fighting the villains, stopped seeing his Hulk condition as “temporary” and subject to a “cure,” and he has stopped trying to vindicate himself. This Dr. Banner (the elder—played by Paul Kersey and Nick Nolte) is not just accused of killing a woman; he did, indeed, kill his wife, attempt to kill his son, and set mutant dogs on his son’s girlfriend. This Dr. Banner (the younger) admits that he likes being the Hulk. While Betty, his former girlfriend, appears to be obsessed with a “cure,” Bruce does not seem quite so eager to go back to “normal,” to being a “puny human.” Although sequels may return the self-destructive Dr. Banner to the screen, this Hulk appears to be at home away from the white establishment, happy to be in the jungle, and none too eager to “cure” himself of his so-called “primitive” impulses.

As a creature of the 1960s, the Hulk owes a debt to Pop Art as well as Marvel Comics. Both part of American Cold War paranoia and its critique, Pop Art and popular comics arose out of the post-nuclear age, the McCarthy hearings, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. The comic book aesthetic, exemplified by the work of Roy Lichtenstein (whose son, coincidentally, played Simon in Lee’s The Wedding Banquet), could cordon off the moment, intensify the emotion, magnify the detail, and revel in the surface of comic book mass culture that dealt with all the personal and global traumas of the post-war era abstracted and contained by oil on the artist’s canvas. Ang Lee seems to be doing much the same with his filming of The Incredible Hulk comics. In Hulk Lee aesthetically comments on the world of comic books, uses the split screen to reference popular culture but keep it at a remove, and explore the New World Order (rather than Cold War) implications of The Incredible Hulk.

A Pop Art figure, the Hulk does well out of his original context, and he easily adapts, much like his creator Ang Lee, to new political, cultural, and aesthetic circumstances. Difficult to situate ideologically, Hulk can be read as an allegory of the American body politic finally accepting itself as multi-racial with the Hulk as hero or Hulk may represent the reinvigoration of the myth of the threateningly primitive non-white pointing to the failure of the white American mainstream to maintain control. Perhaps, though, the Hulk should not be viewed as an emblem of American concerns at all, but as an icon of the Chinese diaspora, on the move around the world burdened by history, race, and ethnicity as much as by the onus of modern science and human hubris. The Hulk is slippery and not that easy to pin down—existing as he does—and as Ang Lee does—somewhere between Hollywood and Taiwan.

An Oedipal or Confucian Tale?

If earlier incarnations of Banner/Hulk presented a divided character, Lee depicts Banner father/Banner son/Hulk as an indeterminate entity. In previous versions, the Hulk was simply the misunderstood, alienated child of the nuclear age with Banner acting as the creature’s creator/father—the child as the father of the man in reverse. Banner was at odds with General Ross in order to win from him his daughter Betty. In the film, the oedipal dimension of the comic book formula structure (set aside in the live action television series) remains as the General and Bruce duke it out in the desert after Ross has warned Bruce to stay away from his daughter in no uncertain terms. Lee’s film adds another layer by including another Dr. Banner as the pater familias, the Western patriarch who can dispose of the members of his extended family as he sees fit to maintain his control.^iv David Banner condenses a range of myths associated with Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman civilization as he oscillates between the patriarch who must destroy his son to save the nation like King David or sacrifice his daughter for victory in battle like Agamemnon. Hulk can be read as the story of Abraham and Isaac with a different ending. Of course, the oedipal aspect of the film takes on another dimension as the narrative offers a fantasy of the son growing up to challenge the corrupt authority of the father, who had “punished” (“castrated” as Freud would say) the mother behind closed doors. The Hulk returns repeatedly to this “primal scene” of the parents having a fight (as the child imagines, or sex, as Freud says) behind the closed bedroom door. When the door swings open, the son witnesses the penetration of the mother—sex turned into violence in the child’s imagination as Freud would have it. The mother dropping as the A-bomb destroys the lab in the distance conjures up the orgasmic images of sex and mass destruction that have become a clichéd part of the cinematic lexicon at least since Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).

Edith Banner (Cara Buono) does resemble the dark haired, dark eyed Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), which keeps the oedipal element in play. Bruce battles his biological father to possess the memory of his murdered mother. He also takes on the father-figure writ large General Ross in order to wrest Betty out from the old man’s control. Before the film begins, Betty has already dumped Bruce, and, again, looking at the narrative from an oedipal perspective, the film becomes a quest for the re-masculinization of the castrated Bruce as he struggles to assert his virile domination over an environment that includes his reluctant love object as well as very potent father figures.

Not only do her father and his protégé Glen Talbot appear as rivals to Bruce for Betty’s affection, Bruce’s biological father David also ends up putting the moves on her. Creeping closer to the mesmerized Betty on the coach in his home, David talks about her attractive features in his low, husky voice as he secretly steals her scarf to use in the planned attack of his mutant dogs meant to bait his son. David uses his own paternal, implicitly incestuous, animal magnetism to take advantage of the emotionally needy Betty. As if this is not enough, David “seduces” Betty with his melodramatic version of the circumstances leading up to the death of his wife in a later scene. He manipulates Betty again in order to get at his son Bruce.

Oedipal complexities aside, Hulk remains a global work that must travel outside the West. In fact, Lee’s Hulk owes at least as much to Confucius as to Homer’s epics and the Bible. In fact, the Hulk is not the first transnational green screen creature to be linked to Chinese culture and Confucian morality. Golden Harvest’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), for example, owes a heavy cultural debt to Chinese civilization with the Confucian bent of its mutant rat leader, and Yoda of the Star Wars series (1977- ) also condenses green skin and Chinese philosophy into a single futuristic body. The generational conflicts presented in Hulk really have as much, if not more, to do with Confucian notions of order and a Chinese conception of the patriarchy as they do with Oedipus and Freud. In fact, filial piety becomes a key issue in the development of not only the relationship between Bruce and David Banner but, also, in the relationship between Betty and General Ross.

Lee has spent a good part of his career exploring the Chinese patriarchy and Confucian morality in the modern world. Throughout his “father knows best trilogy,” he avoids exploring the darker aspects of this, holding back, indulging in nostalgia for the days when daughters would unquestioningly obey their fathers, when sons would have babies on demand to keep paternal descent unbroken, and no child would dare countermand even the slightest whim of the patriarch who deserves absolute filial piety. Although not as stupid and blind as he may appear, the modern Chinese father must play the fool to keep the veneer of Chinese culture intact in the modern (read “Western) world. Lee can depict the possessiveness as concern, the sexism as fatherly affection, and the demands of absolute obedience as the rightful tribute to the older generation.

Lee often talks about his rocky relationship with his own father in interviews. Lee’s father was disappointed that his son did not do well on the college entrance exams in Taiwan and that he was a “late bloomer” pursuing a career in the arts. Although Lee’s father said nothing about the “father knows best” trilogy, featuring ethnic Chinese families,^v he did go to see Hulk. Reportedly, he had a favorable impression of his son’s version of the comic book. By playing a Chinese drama in white and green, Lee freely explores the demands the Confucian patriarch makes on his offspring and the ways in which his progeny resist the demands of filial piety.

In Hulk, both David Banner and General Ross represent patriarchs in a Confucian universe where family relationships mirror the welfare of the nation-state. Visually, no boundary exists between the desert military installation in which they work and the suburban tract homes in which they raise their families. The younger generation out of control not only threatens the hierarchy based on age and gender within the nuclear family; it threatens the very foundations of the nation as Bruce Banner becomes a potential weapon of mass destruction and Betty his potential accomplice.

The conflict becomes classically Confucian. The welfare of the individual family is at odds with the greater good of the nation. David Banner cannot refuse his wife’s request for a child, and the need to perpetuate his lineage (even if it is mutant and monstrous) becomes a greater imperative than the wellbeing of the state. The individual patriarchal unit out of synch with the state can only bode ill for all involved, and David Banner struggles throughout the narrative to regain control of his offspring.

No doubt, David sees Bruce as belonging to him, and he demands the respect and filial devotion that he sees as his due. David treats Bruce’s body as his rightful property—taking the blood of the toddler and demanding the flesh of the adult. When David describes lunging at the toddler with a knife, he calls it “doing a father’s work.” Just as filial Chinese children dutifully give their flesh and blood to concoct medicines to cure ailing parents, David demands Bruce’s flesh in order to “stabilize” his own mutant condition. The film steps back from articulating whether David’s attempt to kill Bruce as a child springs from loyalty to the state or insane rage at interference with his own control of his progeny, but it does not remain mute on the tender, as well as cruel, nature of patriarchal privilege. The reoccurring image of Bruce and David playing out a fight by using a stuffed toy dinosaur and a monkey indicates the way in which warmth and violence cannot be separated in their relationship. Bruce’s first and last memories of his father involve tenderness, and an image of Bruce’s father as a young man wishing him “sweet dreams” precedes the Hulk ’s descent into oblivion at the hands of the massive force David Banner has become at the film’s climax. As in the rest of his oeuvre, Lee pulls back from any absolute condemnation of the patriarchy, although he visualizes its violence and inevitable self-destruction.

The scene in which David insists on seeing Bruce in exchange for his surrender to the authorities, for example, unleashes all the nightmares sons face when confronted by paternal power. It is a very theatrical scene. David makes his entrance in a large, dark, cavernous room, with two spotlights crisscrossing the stage on which Bruce sits opposite a second empty chair waiting for his shaggy, ill-kept father to sit. Taking his seat, David has the advantage in not being strapped down like Bruce. He can freely move around, gesticulating wildly, during the conversation that turns into a harangue. He looms close to Bruce as he expresses extreme disappointment in his son whom he calls a “superficial shell.” He has come to see his “real” son; i.e., his virile son, the son capable of serving him and perpetuating his ambitions. Bruce has broken down in tears, and, angrily, David tells him to stop “balling” as if his son were still four years old and not living up to the patriarch’s expectations that the boy “act like a man.”

While the broken Bruce has issues with the man he loves who also killed his mother, David has another axe to grind—not with his son, his family, but with the nation-state. Even David’s mad scientist veneer cannot really take the sting out of his tirade against the U.S. military: “Think of all the men out there in their uniforms, inflicting pain around the globe, think of all the harm they’ve done to humanity.” While David may have megalomaniacal dreams about The Hulk as a new hero who can “save” the world from civilization, he does have a point about the mess his own complicity with the American military-industrial establishment has created. At this point, David Banner comes close to J. Robert Oppenheimer with second thoughts about the purposes to which his scientific discoveries may be put. His experiments were originally designed to strengthen the “men out there in their uniforms,” not destroy himself and wreak havoc on his own family line.

The crisis in Confucian orthodoxy comes when the older generation of fathers cannot clean up the mess they have made of their families and the state. Bruce is pulled apart by the rivalry between the General and his father. Mad scientist David Banner wants to continue his experiments with “his real son,” The Hulk , while the General wants to keep The Hulk /Bruce imprisoned indefinitely. Bruce has fond memories of the man who tucked him in at night and rage against the man who killed his mother. He knows he is out of control, but likes it, since the virile Hulk, ironically, brings him closer to Betty. However, the order the men strive to reestablish has been irredeemably destroyed—the patriarchy cannot continue, The Hulk has no access to a mate, and Bruce cannot get past the General’s protective net around his daughter. Neither Bruce nor The Hulk can be filial sons by perpetuating their father’s name.

Just as the daughters give in to filial obligation in Eat Drink Man Woman and Wei-wei ends up sacrificing her own heterosexual ambitions to perpetuate the Gao family line in The Wedding Banquet, Betty, the figure who should be the “new woman,” liberated, and beyond patriarchal control, ends up as the post-feminist figure of compliancy in Hulk. If the patriarchal state can continue to exist at all, it is through Betty’s complicity. Following a neo-Confucian model, the General does not take much interest in his daughter. Betty intimates that he is “emotionally distant,” and Bruce assumes she is estranged from him. Quite the contrary, when Betty has problems first with Talbot and later with Bruce, she immediately turns to the General with implicit trust.

Betty invites the General to use her body as bait on more than one occasion. She sets Bruce up to be tranquilized in her mountain cabin retreat, she dangles herself from a helicopter to grab the Hulk ’s attention, and Medusa-like she shrinks the massive Hulk into a whimpering Bruce by just looking at him. Each time Bruce falls into Betty’s clutches, the General comes close to destroying him. Still, Betty continues to trust in her own ability to manipulate her father, blind to the fact that he is the one in control of her. Even when the General drops the A-bomb on the poor Hulk, Betty comforts her father by putting a hand on his shoulder—paralleling the hand that he put on her should when they watched the desert lab go up in atomic smoke thirty years previously. Although Betty seems to have finally gotten the message that her father is not a “nice guy” by their final phone conversation, she also must admit it is far too late to make amends. If Bruce is still around, he must, by now, know that contact with Betty spells trouble. Even if she does not turn him in at this stage, the General’s wiretaps will do the job for her. Sequestered in her lab, she remains the filial daughter in spite of herself.

Even though he may have nostalgia for paternal authority and continue to hope for the “sweet dreams” of his boyhood, the rebellious son, rather than the pseudo-liberated daughter, remains the bulwark against Confucian orthodoxy in Hulk’s universe. He carries within him the anger against the power of male authority, the outrage at the injustice of the dominant system, and the constant threat that he may come out of hiding, return, and end the repression upon which the social order is founded.

From Bruce to Wen Ho Lee

Two diasporic Chinese directors—one from Malaysia who has settled in Taipei and one from Taiwan, the child of displaced KMT (Kuomintang) mainlanders, who has settled in the United States—meet around this image of a father and son. Before Nixon went to Beijing in 1972, the buildup of all that military power in the American desert was there to fight a Cold War in which Taiwan, the Republic of China, was a major player. Hulk traces the origins of the plot to 1966 as the war in Vietnam was escalating, as Taiwan’s importance as a staging ground for U.S. military operations in the Pacific was becoming even more vital. Certainly, David Banner’s as well as General Ross’s misguided allegiance to the U.S. military parallels the KMT’s faith in American support against the PRC (People’s Republic of China). Ross and Banner, like their KMT counterparts, represent a generation of old men out of touch with reality, creating weapons for a war that will never be fought, and ruining the lives of their children in the process.

Furthermore, it does not take much of a leap to see the Hulk , as the creation of the American military, expressing his anger against betrayal of the bond between father and son as parallel to Taiwan’s relationship to the U.S. The Hulk , as a specifically Taiwanese creature, has certain affinities with the film’s director. Both continue to drift globally as a result of a father’s commitment to a government with dubious intentions and questionable authority. The Hulk’s innate talent for qing gong gives the character an even clearer Chinese identity, linking him to a tradition of lighter than air Chinese martial heroes favored by the Hong Kong/Taiwan martial arts tradition in the cinema, and it seems appropriate that Ang Lee goes back to “Bruce” for the Hulk ’s given name.

The Hulk /Bruce Banner’s circumstances also seem to resonate with the misfortunes of another diasporic Chinese from Taiwan. As Ang Lee and his collaborators were creating their cinematic Hulk in 2002, Wen Ho Lee’s battle with the United States government was still quite topical. Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman’s A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage was published in 2002 by Simon and Shuster, and Wen Ho Lee’s own account, written with noted Civil Rights advocate Helen Zia (who had established her reputation with another case involving a miscarriage of justice revolving around an Asian American, Vincent Chin), My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused, came out around the same time from Hyperion Press. After being incarcerated for nine months, much of that time in solitary confinement, without bail or the benefit of a trial because he supposedly posed a “threat to national security,” Wen Ho Lee finally pleaded guilty to charges considerably reduced from treason and espionage and was sentenced to time served. However, the case exposed a raw nerve involving racial profiling and the xenophobic targeting of Asian American, specifically, ethnic Chinese immigrants. Janet Reno’s characterization of Dr. Lee could easily apply to either Dr. David or Dr. Bruce Banner and echoes David Banner’s desire to make a new kind of “hero” out of the Hulk:

Dr Lee is no hero. He is not an absentminded professor. He is a felon. He committed a very serious, calculated crime, and he pled guilty to it. He abused the trust of the American people by putting at risk some of our core national security secrets. He had one of the highest security clearance levels possible, granting him access to the most sensitive of nuclear weapons information…He had access to the Los Alamos computer system that was designed precisely to be secure against unauthorized intrusions.^vi

Born in Taiwan and himself married to an ethnic Chinese scientist (a microbiologist, thus, closer to the Banners’ field than to Wen Ho Lee’s), Ang Lee may have felt some particular affinity to the plight of both Drs. Banner because of the Wen Ho Lee case. Given the film’s mise-en-scene is peppered with nuclear explosions, desert laboratories, and dense concentrations of computer screens, the world of Wen Ho Lee’s Los Alamos does not seem to be far removed from the desert military installation that gave birth to the Hulk . Like Wen Ho Lee, both David and Bruce Banner are incarcerated in the narrative. Bruce’s incarceration is vividly depicted on screen, and many of the specifics directly mirror Wen Ho Lee’s imprisonment—bound hand and foot, placed in solitary confinement, and kept in isolation. Bruce’s unconscious face in his coffin-like box transported under heavy guard by military helicopter provides a particularly eerie evocation of Wen Ho Lee’s confinement. The nine months that Wen Ho Lee spent in custody may well have started as the “indefinite” sentence given to Bruce by General Ross because of the Hulk/Bruce’s “threat to national security.”

In fact, except for their Caucasian exteriors, the Banners appear to be playing a “typical” Chinese (or more generally Asian) American family. If the Banners can be seen to engage in racial masquerade in reverse, certain details of the film begin to make more sense as depictions of Chinese American attributes within a racist screen culture. Santa on the roof, the canned ham in the kitchen, the Christmas stocking on the refrigerator, the cinder block prefabricated ranch home all ring false. These K-Mart emblems of Americana form a veneer that covers up the desert experiments, on one level, and erases ethnicity, on another. The Banners live in a rootless, plastic world that new immigrants sometimes construct to assimilate into the white, middle-class, American mainstream. Ethnic details evaporate as dime store Santas and sterile ice cream parlors take their place in the anonymous suburbs.

Taking up the trappings of other Asian American stereotypes, Bruce emerges from this ersatz vision of Americana as a parachute kid in white America, or an Asian adoptee, in another white, suburban home, where he is equally “different” (even his adoptive mother remarks on this) and ill at ease (e.g., subject to reoccurring nightmares). He finds temporary solace in Berkeley, where he can ride his bicycle to work, look like a “geek” in his helmet, act like a “nerd” with his experiments and computer screens, and still “fit in.” This seems to resonate with many young Asian Americans who “find themselves” for the first time in the UC system where they may not be in the “minority” as Asians in some classes—often, for the first time in their lives.^vii

Things begin to go sour when Bruce becomes romantically involved with a white American woman Betty. She rejects him because of his “lack of passion” and “emotional distance”—both stereotypical attributes of Asians in the Western imagination. However, Bruce’s unrequited longing turns him into the “green” peril, when her father tries to put an end to the relationship with the totally unsuitable Bruce. The General objects to Bruce because of his family background, i.e., his dislike for David Banner, implying something genetic or racial as well as personal. At one point, the General even intimates that some sort of family conspiracy exists, since he finds it difficult to imagine Bruce working in the same field as a father with whom he has had no contact in thirty years. Again, American popular cultural accounts of massive Asian conspiracies, the machinations of secret societies, and clannish families engaging in monopolistic practices seem to be behind the General’s question. As much as he tries, Bruce cannot divorce himself from his father and, therefore, cannot assimilate into mainstream white America. He is genetically—i.e., racially—“different” and forever “alien.”

David also embodies several Asian stereotypes. As the shady janitor, David exists somewhere between the coolie laborer and the triad member. As the “mad scientist,” he functions as the nerd gone wild, the assimilated, educated Asian, who suddenly snaps because of the glass ceiling. The play between assimilation and exclusion, tolerance and danger, that structures Hulk’s narrative resonates with similar American popular portrayals of Asian Americans as “honorary” whites who can be assimilated or as “forever alien” threats who must be excluded.

Certainly, this same dialectic is at play in the Wen Ho Lee case. A model American scientist with top security clearance at a nuclear laboratory, he remains under constant suspicion and surveillance because of his race. Like many members of the KMT and children of the KMT who ended up in Taiwan after 1949, Wen Ho Lee would seem to anyone with an ounce of historical or political sense a highly unlikely candidate to sell anything to Communist China. However, Ang Lee provides another angle on the situation for Asian American scientists frustrated by the glass ceiling and lack of control over their intellectual labor by introducing Talbot, not as a minion of General Ross, but a former member of the military establishment who has gone over to the much more vicious and unscrupulous industrial establishment. The steps from military secret to basic science to bankable intellectual commodity for corporate exploitation are not that hard to imagine. Fed up with the federal payroll, scientists go corporate on a global scale.

In fact, Talbot emerges as a much more sinister villain than either of the battling patriarchs. As a representative of Atheon, the industrial rather than the military establishment, Talbot terrorizes Bruce for profit rather than any semblance of “national security.” In a nightmare of privatization, Talbot, at one point, wrests authority from General Ross and takes over the experiments involving The Hulk . The machinations that turned the tables on Ross and allowed Talbot, a civilian, to take command remain opaque. However, the film intimates that, at some level, the profit motive, and tacit government support for the corporate sector, outweighs any consideration of the national good. Transnational profits trump national security. Just as Talbot and Ross dance around control of The Hulk , the United States government waltzes around the profound contradictions between official foreign policy and corporate interests. Money drives America’s push and pull policies, for example, in relation to Taiwan, in which it is heavily invested both financially and militarily, just as Ross and Talbot struggle over the fate of The Hulk with little regard for Bruce’s, The Hulk ’s, or the general welfare of either the nation or the planet.

Rooting for The Hulk

The massive, “primitive,” angry Hulk, however, shows as little concern for making a profit as he does in furthering U.S. military interests. The Hulk is non-aligned. The Hulk takes command of the desert, leaping through Monument Valley (and all it represents from its appearances in John Ford’s Westerns), to the strains of Middle Eastern-inspired, techno-world music. While the American Western and Bruce’s mother (again going back to the Western genre’s reliance on the white woman as the symbol of Western civilization in the American wilderness, even the “desert flowers” from Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) turn up as Mrs. Banner’s favorite perfume) dream of a garden in the desert, the Hulk sticks to the barren landscape, preferring its majesty to the “puny” attempts of white civilization to destroy its beauty. Even after the U.S. military has turned his territory into a “parking lot” as so many bombing missions of Hanoi and Baghdad were supposed to do, the Hulk emerges unscathed.

The Hulk inside of him, Bruce hides out in the jungles of Latin America, another Third World realm under assault from white “civilization.” He knows he is a creature of the Third World, and, like the rest of the Third World, he is a creation and victim of Euro-American military expansionism and neo-colonial corporate greed. The Contra-like bandito who harasses Bruce at Hulk ’s conclusion keeps the penetration of the First into the Third World in the foreground. As Trinh T. Minh-ha has pointed out, within every Third World there is a First World and vice versa, so that the Hulk’s “primitiveness” comes directly from the most advanced Western science and his rage cannot be disengaged from that fact. The Hulk lurks in the shadows of the First World, always ready to reemerge from the margins if provoked.

The U.S. military has nuked him, corporate America has tried literally to bleed him dry, and liberal humanism has thrown up its hands after its intimate links to the military-industrial establishment have been exposed. Saying “sorry,” as General Ross does near the end, may simply not be enough. However, the Hulk remains ambivalent. After threatening the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the monuments often listed as imperiled by foreign terrorist groups, The Hulk latches onto a military jet out of control to save this symbol of Americana. The image is reminiscent of King Kong harassed by planes atop the Empire State Building. However, in Hulk, unlike King Kong (1933, 1976), the symbol of American technological mastery is saved by the creature not the American planes—redeeming another image of airplanes penetrating another American icon, the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11. Again, the Hulk ’s allegiance vacillates and his sympathies remain unclear.

Over-determined ideologically as a disgruntled worker, an angry minority professional outraged by the glass ceiling, a displaced child of the KMT, an Asian American targeted by racial profiling, and as a rebellious son unable to cope with the patriarchy, The Hulk can never represent a clear political position. Although Wen Ho Lee happened under Clinton, for example, General Ross reports to a young African American woman, resembling Condoleezza Rice, and she, in turn, reports to a president off on a fishing trip, resembling George Bush II. Just as the specific political administrations remain difficult to pin down in Hulk, the Hulk himself remains a figure of general frustration, as much in tune with the dilemma of teenage nerds who cannot get a date on Saturday night as with Wen Ho Lee, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or any other real or imagined threat to the U.S. government and the American nation.

The Hulk is also something “more,” as David Banner enjoys reminding his son, since Hulk, additionally, concretizes the cutting edge of CGI. In many respects, he is less a character and more an “image,” computer generated, subject to the abilities and limitations of digital technology at Industrial Light and Magic.^viii As a product, Hulk circulates as much as psychological drama, comic nostalgia, action adventure, and digital virtuosity as it does as any sort of ideological critique or political intervention.

Against the Hollywood Grain

Perhaps asking Hulk to carry the burden of the complex interconnections between Taiwan and America within global film culture demands too much of the big green guy. In fact, other filmmakers operating somewhere between Taiwan and America have looked at this relationship more critically. Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill (1994) provides just one example of a film that resonates with Hulk in certain key respects.

Filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang actually has quite a lot in common with Ang Lee. They have known each other for many years, and both spent a good portion of their careers in New York City. Because of the strong political, economic, military and cultural ties between Taiwan and the United States during the Cold War era, many in Lee’s and Cheang’s generation chose an American education either as a path to advancement in Taiwan or as an escape from the constraints of martial law, the rule of the KMT (Guomindang), and a conservative, Confucian, patriarchal cultural environment. In New York, both Lee and Cheang found a fecund environment for artistic exploration in film and video.

In the feature film Fresh Kill,^ix Cheang creates a science-fiction vision that links the cavalier treatment of nuclear waste and industrial pollution to global politics stretching from Taiwan’s Orchid Island to New York’s Staten Island. As in Hulk, Taiwan is imaginatively linked to the American military, corporate greed, and Western technology out of control.

Arguably the most remote point under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Orchid Island is home to the smallest minority group, the Yami.^x Because of its strategic importance, the island became an important military site under the KMT (Kuomintang) after 1949. In the early 1980s, controversy arose surrounding the dumping of nuclear waste on the remote island. The Yami successfully stopped the dumping and have been agitating for increased autonomy from Taipei. However, the development of tourism on the island has undermined some of the force of this movement.

Through editing, Fresh Kill connects the urban spaces of Staten Island with the remote rural fishing villages of Orchid Island. However, more than just cleverly matched montage connects these spaces. The squatters' village in New York really does not seem that different from the fishing village on Orchid Island. Ang Lee has made a similar point in an interview:

…Although their bodies are not in the United States, they are immigrants psychologically…What is the difference between living in Flushing, New York and Taipei? Except that one knows America better and sees more Americans, there is not much difference.^xi

Televisions, tee shirts, and tourists penetrate both spaces. Both environments allow for military and corporate dumping, and both suffer the contamination of these excesses of American capitalism.

As Seth Silberman has pointed out in his analysis of Fresh Kill,^xii Cheang's film fits into the category that Fredric Jameson has termed the "conspiratorial text." An argument can be made that Hulk fits within this category as well. For Jameson, the conspiratorial text has less to do with the veracity of what is brought to light and more to do with modeling a process of cognitive resistance:

…whatever other messages it emits or implies…may also be taken to constitute an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality…Nothing is gained by having been persuaded of the definitive verisimilitude of this or that conspiratorial hypothesis: but in the intent to hypothesize, in the desire called cognitive mapping--therein lies the beginning of wisdom.^xiii

Both Fresh Kill and Hulk blend fictional issues that resonate with actual events, which seem more incredible than fiction, and are subject to elaborate cover-ups. As Jameson points out, in this type of work, the veracity of any given incident is beyond the point. However, while Hulk allows its protagonist to wallow in the jungle, Fresh Kill outlines a way of examining the world system that models critical thinking and allows for the imagination of resistance. In fact, Fresh Kill refuses to envision a world beyond the need for political action demonstrating the continuing currency of political critique outside the confines of Hulk ’s cartoon frames and the generic conventions of the Hollywood action fantasy.

Notes