Hidden Dragon

Oliver Stone wrote what was to become one of the most beloved and most frequently quoted screenplays of the eighties when he scripted Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983). Insufficiently appreciated is that Stone is responsible for two of that decade’s epic organized crime films, the second being Year of the Dragon (1985), which he wrote in collaboration with director Michael Cimino. Like Scarface, Year of the Dragon depicts an immigrant criminal underworld, with Mickey Rourke starring as Stanley White, a New York City police captain determined to put an end to official complacency in Triad domination of Chinatown. As in The Pope of Greenwich Village, Rourke’s character is a tough guy “from the old neighborhood”. In this case, however, he is a “crackpot racist” with “a thing for chinks”. Year of the Dragon courted controversy with its unflattering depiction of Chinese-Americans, and viewers of the Blu-ray released by Warner Bros. this year are confronted with a hokey disclaimer when they click to play the movie:

This film does not intend to demean or to ignore the many positive features of Asian-Americans and specifically Chinese-American communities. Any similarity between the depiction in this film and any association, organization, individual, or Chinatown that exists in real life is accidental.

Captain White and a colleague tangle with Tong toughs

Are Chinese really the ones who ought to be upset about their depiction in Year of the Dragon – or should another group be aggrieved? Stone and Cimino, speaking through White, suggest that most people “accept the surface of things”, indicating that something deeper presents itself to those prepared to peer beyond superficial appearances. This theme is reinforced at the end of the film, when television reporter and love interest Tracy Tzu (Ariane), with whom Captain White has been carrying on an affair, muses for TV viewers:

There are those who liken Chinatown to a skating pond. On the surface, we see a lovely, picture-postcard landscape of snowflakes and skaters. But underneath, the cannibal fish – the gangs, the sharks – those who control the gangs, and the whales – the big bosses – all move in deadly swarms. These bosses, some people are beginning to say, are tied into an international crime network with its headquarters in Hong Kong. Everyone denies it […]

Is there a hidden and taboo content to Year of the Dragon for those not prepared to content themselves with the mere “surface of things”? The theme of ethnic crypsis is introduced when Captain White’s real name is revealed to be Wizynski – he is not, after all, a WASP, but, as he puts it, “a stupid Polack, a peasant.” Are the movie’s Chinese really Chinese – or are they, perhaps, like the “Japanese” in Murdoch Murdoch’s “Return of the Swede”, stand-ins for another ethnicity? Furnishing one potential set of clues is the fact that the Chinese antagonists in Year of the Dragon are businessmen who act in concert through their “merchant associations” and have interests in banks, gambling, real estate, shipping, drug smuggling, and even film distribution. The Chinese, the screenplay insists, “are always involved in something. They’re never involved in nothing. Remember that.” “They’re smart, Lou. They’re smarter than you are,” Captain White tells Chief of Detectives Louis Bukowski (Raymond Barry), indicating a probable IQ disadvantage for law enforcement.

The Chinese constitute a parallel, insular, and secretive society with its own code of laws, and they use their considerable wealth to purchase collective political power. “Let me make this real clear to you, White, here and now,” NYPD Commissioner Sullivan (Mark Hammer) explains to the hero in a scene in which a photograph of New York’s Jewish Mayor Ed Koch is displayed on a table behind him:

Joey Tai goes to the Manhattan borough president, who he contributes $100,000 a year to, right? The borough president goes to the mayor, the mayor goes to me, and the word is lay off. That is the way the game is played, okay?

“That’s the way it works,” Michael Cimino affirms at this point during his audio commentary¹. He also observes that “New York, Tokyo, and Peking are all on the same latitude” – which, by the way, is not quite an accurate statement in the literal sense. In a more telling geographical reference, White refers to corrupt police official Francis Kearney (Daniel Davin) as an “Irish Sphinx”. A peppering of religious references also evokes the Middle East. Principal villain Joey Tai (John Lone), indicating both his strong in-group preference and contempt for White’s Christianity, explains, “To us, your good Samaritan was a fool to risk the security of his family to help a stranger.” “You’re too impressed with yourself,” White assesses Tai’s sense of ethnic exceptionalism, adding “Fuck you” before elaborating:

You people, you think gambling, extortion, corruption are kosher because it’s a thousand years old? Well, all this thousand-year-old stuff, it’s a lot of shit to me. This is America you’re living in, and it’s two hundred years old, so you better get your clocks fixed. You’re not special, and you’re not beyond the law, any more than the Puerto Ricans or the Polacks.

White has "a thing for chinks" - in this case reporter Tracy Tzu

“You’re a smart guy,” the hero tells Tai. “But you made one mistake. I’m not Italian. I’m a Polack – and I can’t be bought. I’m gonna burn you down.” This association of Polish ethnic warfare with conflagration may carry either a horrifying or humorous association for those who have seen Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). White is contemptuous of the “arrangement” according to which the police have turned a blind eye to Tong activities. “Well, what is this arrangement?” he demands of Bukowski. “I mean, is it carved in stone? Did it come out of a burning bush or something?” Deepening the movie’s religious motifs, public crusader White and his undercover subordinate Herbert Kwong (Dennis Dun) are both characterized as Christ figures, each man receiving a wound in the hand in the line of duty. “Shot through the hand like Christ,” remarks Cimino.

In the furtherance of his “crusade”, White enlists the help of investigative reporter Tracy Tzu, who, as a half-Japanese Chinese-American, is unreliable from the standpoint of ethnic solidarity. Like screenwriter Oliver Stone, Tzu is a Mischling and, in the context of Chinatown, is arguably a race traitor. In her work reporting on the Chinese ethnic underworld, she plays the critical role of a Max Blumenthal or a Gilad Atzmon. Again indicating that Year of the Dragon’s Chinese might not really be Chinese, White scolds this representative media figure after meeting her:

The first time I saw you, I hated your guts. I think I even hated you before I ever met you. I hated you on TV. […] You want to know what’s destroying this country? It’s not booze. It’s not drugs. It’s TV. It’s media. It’s people like you. Vampires. […] I hate the way you lie every night at 6:00. I hate the way you kill real feelings. I hate everything that you stand for. Most of all, I hate rich kids.

Tzu, who meets Captain White in a Chinatown restaurant to discuss his proposal that they collaborate to take down the Chinese mafia (and promote Tzu’s career in the process), is reluctant to be of assistance until she witnesses Chinese assassins with Israeli Uzis invade the restaurant and spray the place to pieces.

A Chinese mafia hitman makes chop-suey out of restaurant diners

Cimino, in his commentary, reveals that when he drafted Stone to assist him in writing Year of the Dragon, Stone was “furious” over attacks on Scarface in the press. “Oliver then was living in New York, kind of in retreat from Hollywood at that moment.” Stone was “a bit off Hollywood” and “really wasn’t that excited about plunging into something like this.” He also offers these reflections on his and Stone’s experiences with the press and the critical world:

When I did Thunderbolt [and Lightfoot] with Clint [Eastwood], they said I was homophobic. When I did Deer Hunter, they said I was a right-wing fascist. When I did Heaven’s Gate, they said I was a left-wing Marxist. When I did this movie, they called me a racist. Well, which is it? Can I be all of those things? I don’t think so. So Oliver’s a lot more savvy with the press than I am, and he loves it. I hate it, I hate dealing with the press. Oliver loves to take the press on, like he did with Natural Born Killers. He loves to duke it out with them. […] Anyway, I don’t enjoy these superficial, made-up sort of battles. If somebody wants to talk about something deeper, I’m all for it, but you don’t get that in American journalism – or rarely. I mean, you get it in Europe, but you won’t get it here.  Not on the level at which you would like the dialogue to take place. There’s a shallowness […]

Cimino, who shares Stone’s contempt for the media, specifically calls out The New York Times, which he castigates for initially denying the existence of the Chinese mafia in America. He stops short, however, of calling it the Lügenpresse.

Stone, perhaps because he felt his Jewish heritage would provide him with cover from charges of “anti-Semitism”, has been rather more forthcoming. Though he later apologized, Stone once decried “Jewish domination of the media” with its “focus on the Holocaust”. “Israel has fucked up United States foreign policy for years,” he also told London’s Sunday Times². Was Year of the Dragon an earlier, more circumspect and covert articulation of these same concerns about Jewish power in America?

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of the recently banned books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.

Endnotes

1. Cimino, Michael. “Commentary” (special feature). Cimino, Michael, Dir. Year of the Dragon [Blu-ray] (1985). Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, 2019.
2. “Oliver Stone Slammed for Anti-Semitism”. The Hollywood Reporter (July 26, 2010): https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oliver-stone-slammed-anti-semitism-25928