Bruce Lee was on the cusp of superstardom when he died on Friday, 20 July 1973. You could argue – and with no small amount of justification – that he was already a legend at that stage, but the premiere of his biggest film project yet, Enter the Dragon, was still a month away, and although hindsight is always 20/20, it’s generally accepted that the martial arts action extravaganza would have catapulted Lee’s career into the stratosphere.
Sadly, it was not to be. Poring over a script at the apartment of his colleague and mistress, Betty Ting Pei, Lee complained of a headache. Pei gave him a painkiller and Lee took a nap. He did not wake up.
The official cause of death is attributed to a cerebral oedema – swelling of the brain – brought on by an allergic reaction to the medicine Pei gave Lee. But for many, such a simple, random explanation is not enough. How could this man, a paragon of physical performance, die in such a prosaic manner? Surely there’s more to it?
The new documentary The Death of Bruce Lee, seeks to put the mystery surrounding the Dragon’s demise to rest at last. At the behest of Bruce’s younger brother Robert, now a musician in Los Angeles (one of his songs is “The Ballad of Bruce Lee”), retired Hong Kong police detective Philip Chan re-examines the case of Bruce’s death, running through a number of popular theories in order to pin down the real cause.
And there are theories aplenty. Was Bruce poisoned, either out of jealousy or professional rivalry? He was, after all, sleeping with Betty Ting Pei while married to his American wife, Linda Lee. Indeed, Lee’s producer and business partner, Raymond Chow, initially announced that Bruce had died at home rather than at his girlfriend’s apartment, and that initial lie fed to the press is one of the reasons so many people find Lee’s death suspicious.
Was he the victim of a vendetta by a rival kung fu school? A student of Wing Chun before developing his own style of fighting Jeet Kun Do, Lee had rumbled with students from other schools in the narrow alleys and backstreets of Hong Kong and Kowloon before decamping to the United States. Indeed, one interview subject recalls seeing a 17-year-old Lee brawl on the rooftop of an apartment building.
Did he run afoul of the organised crime elements that had inveigled themselves into almost every element of the Hong Kong entertainment industry? The Hong Kong triads were notoriously ruthless and violent, and there’s a certain sleazy glamour in the idea of them murdering the film industry’s brightest star – indeed, it forms part of the plot of Lee’s posthumous release, Game of Death.
Jackie Chan with Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’. Source: Warner Bros.
And there are yet more theories, as the documentary shows. But there’s more going on here; Lee fascinates us in part because of his early death. We can grieve the loss of such a huge talent on the cusp of greatness, we can puzzle at the cruel irony of it all, we can postulate what might have been in terms of his potential life and career – and we can take some comfort in the fact that, due to his early death, Lee never “went bad”; there are no late career embarrassments to make excuses for, no unforgivable scandals or trespasses (the same can be said for Lee’s son, Brandon, who died in an accident on the set of The Crow in 1993).
So, while The Death of Bruce Lee purports to give us the “real story” behind Lee’s death, what it really shows is that he’s already passed into legend. People will believe what they want to believe, and will ask questions that have no answers for as long as his name still lives. It may be framed as a true crime narrative, but really, the film is an epitaph for an artist whose early death still wounds us almost 50 years on.
The Death of Bruce Lee is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
