Editor’s Ink -- By: William David Spencer

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 21:3 (Summer 2007)
Article: Editor’s Ink
Author: William David Spencer


Editor’s Ink

William David Spencer

When Aída and I were living and ministering in the center of Newark, New Jersey, first as interns in the summer of 1970 and then as missioners in the years between 1974 and 1978, we slowly came to realize that the complex set of social, racial, and economic problems in which our city was enmeshed originated not in itself, but extended as a legacy of oppression from the conquest of the New World itself. More than a decade later, I dissected those problems in the chapter I wrote for our book, The Global God. The deeper we involved ourselves in the imprisoned lives in our neighborhood, the deeper we realized the issues ran with spiritual, practical, and historical attitudes and behaviors that were inexorably intertwined. You can lead someone to water, but they may no longer have the heart to drink it.

One solace we enjoyed along with the rest of our neighborhood was the kung fu movies at the local theater. Life was so complex, evil so entrenched, good so compromised within a corrupt and complex environment. But, in those punchy parables, large and zoverbearing evil met small and scrappy good, and—especially in the case of the Bruce Lee versions—evil took it on the chin and went down for the full count. When I say the neighborhood turned out, I mean mothers with babes in tow went into the theater at 10 a.m. and stayed all day, watching the same double feature over and over again. By the time we arrived in the evening, the audience was shouting the dialogue before it happened, all of us—yours truly included—commenting on each scene with a kind of communitarian exegesis in our best standard northern urban New Jersey patois: “Watch dis fool! Bruce gon’ kick his butt!” And then we would cheer loudly with a gusto unleashed in the suburbs solely during Thanksgiving Day football games. At the end of each evening, the crowd, black, Hispanic, and me, would say goodbye to each other, wandering back into the urban morass, but with back a little straighter, eye a little brighter, step a little surer. It was purgative in its own way, especially in the metamorphosis following The Chinese Connection, when the protagonist stopped dying in the respected, age-old Eastern way and began to live and win.

But, as kung fu movies matured, art caught up with them. Today, a breathtakingly beautiful set of Eastern films has been released, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; The House of Flying Daggers; and so on, that return the tragic legacy—inevitable death within quintessential beauty. After watching the phenomenal success of the Hong Kong film industry, mainland China, basing its work in Beijing, released an exquisite film, The Curse of the Golden Flower, that is the most chilling portrayal of patriarchy gone awry that one...

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