Stardom in participatory cyberspace

The success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is a phenomenal cinematic and cultural occurrence: a Mandarin-language, martial–arts–romance crossover hit, starring a highly celebrated Chinese cast became the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever in America in 2000 (Wu and Chan 2007: 196). It has also broken the box-office record for foreign-language films in England, Germany, France, Australia, and New Zealand (ibid.). In addition to the commercial acclaim, the film has nearly every component necessary to make it an ‘authentically’ Chinese production, for example, an iconic Chinese sett ing, period costume, and the Mandarin language the film adopts, assisting the film's market success of ‘repackaging an ethnic story for a global audience’ (Wang and Yeh 2005: 179). Among all these components, what thrilled viewers most was the magnificent martial arts action – leaps and bounds, fights and flights – in the film. A favourite scene features megastar Chow Yun-fat and then-newcomer Zhang Ziyi duelling while standing on slender, bending branches in the bamboo forest. Under the coaching given by renowned Hong Kong choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, the stars display acrobatic agility and dexterity, which is far from the result of mere wire-work. Their kinetic, dance-like movements carry the reinvented art of a longstanding tradition that is both captivating and mystifying. Some years after the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, scenes from the movie continue to circulate among the audience on the Internet. On YouTube, a platform that makes possible the virtually instantaneous broadcasting of moving images recreated by anybody, approximately 6,000 entries show up with the search words and the tags marked by the English film title. Some movie clips are directly cut from the movie's digital video disc (DVD) version; some others are the remix of elements from other films. Among the ‘remix’ entries, a constellation of videos feature the swordfight between Jen (Zhang Ziyi) and Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), with the heroines’ swords turning into the lightsabers in Hollywood's all-time classic Star Wars (1977) (Figure I.1).