Learning from Bruce Lee: Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts Cinema

In recent years I've been troubled by the return of a ploddingly sociological approach to cinema in academic as well as media criticism. By plodding, I don't mean a sociology which goes out to explore the dense social contexts of film consumption today; in cinema as distinct from television studies, we've had very little of that. I mean a strictly armchair way of seeing or not-seeing films which first views them as evidence of some sort of social or political mess, then treats them as guilty stand-ins for that mess – and wages a war of attitude on other viewers.