When’s the last time you gasped, while watch­ing a movie, at a pure bit of phys­i­cal com­e­dy? Of a clever move, over a stunt that left you breath­less, because you knew that no way was com­put­er graph­ics or green­screen involved? There are indeed some–that hall­way fight in the first sea­son of Dare­dev­il, the end­less apart­ment melee in Atom­ic Blonde, and, bear with me here, most of Jack­ass. But those are few and far between. Dur­ing the Jack­ie Chan hey­day, that gob­s­mack­ing dis­be­lief hap­pened every sin­gle film. We laughed, we winced, we cheered. For a moment, Jack­ie Chan was the king of action com­e­dy.

Per­son­al­ly, I can’t believe we *haven’t* talked about this Tony Zhou YouTube essay, because I have shown it near­ly every semes­ter in my film pro­duc­tion class. Part of me wants to turn the young’uns on to Jack­ie Chan (the HK films, not the Rush Hour series), and anoth­er part hopes that these future direc­tors will go on to cor­rect what Hol­ly­wood gets so so wrong these days.

Chan was com­pared ear­ly on to the giants of silent cin­e­ma like Buster Keaton, but as a young cinephile I couldn’t see past the obvi­ous homages in films like Project A, which famous­ly had Chan hang­ing off a clock tow­er like Harold Lloyd. It was only lat­er that the true com­par­i­son became appar­ent, and Zhou lays it out for us in one of his best essays.

His main points are thus: 1) Chan starts at a dis­ad­van­tage and must fight his way back to the top, which links him with Chap­lin and Keaton, but not like action heroes at the time like Willis and Schwarzeneg­ger, who come ful­ly formed. 2) Chan uses any prop to fight, not just the usu­al guns and swords. 3) He fights in clear­ly light­ed scenes, with cos­tume design to make him stand out.

And here’s the main direc­toral point: Jack­ie Chan and his group of stunt­men can actu­al­ly fight, and fight well. So the cam­era does not need to move a lot and the total­i­ty of the human body in space can be appre­ci­at­ed. This could only hap­pen in a film­mak­ing scene like Hong Kong where pro­duc­tions took time and spent mon­ey to get absolute­ly per­fect takes. Hol­ly­wood, on the oth­er hand, does not hire actors who can fight or act physical–instead they film and edit around the actors’ lack of skill. When we applaud a clever stunt in a Jack­ie Chan film, 50 or more imper­fect takes lay on the cut­ting room floor. (Zhou finds some good behind-the-scenes inter­views explic­it­ly lay­ing this idea out.)

Zhou also blames West­ern edi­tors for cut­ting too fast and cut­ting too much on every hit, ruin­ing the rhythm. Most direc­tors, edi­tors, and stunt coor­di­na­tors don’t know edit­ing, says Chan. There’s a tech­nique in Hong Kong edit­ing where you show the impact twice that to an audi­ence feels like one, strong impact.

One of the final points is that these Jack­ie Chan films focus on the pain of the pro­tag­o­nist. (Which, by the way, is why Jack­ass suc­ceeds as com­e­dy as well.) But so many Hol­ly­wood films skip this bit of real­i­ty, as our heroes tend to be invin­ci­ble. There is a larg­er social-polit­i­cal cri­tique to be made about the par­tic­u­lar lies Hol­ly­wood tells itself, and you can have at it in the com­ments if you wish. But for now, queue up some clas­sic Chan–my jump­ing off point all those years ago was Drunk­en Mas­ter II–and see how the mas­ter does it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Salute to Every Frame a Paint­ing: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Fine­ly-Craft­ed (and Now Con­clud­ed) Video Essay Series on Cin­e­ma

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 Movie Fea­tur­ing the Most Icon­ic Scene from Silent Film Era, Just Went Into the Pub­lic Domain

Judd Apa­tow Teach­es the Craft of Com­e­dy: A New Online Course from Mas­ter­Class

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

“There are a lot of dystopias around these days,” writes Kim Stan­ley Robin­son in his recent essay “Dystopia Now.” This, of course, “makes sense, because we have a lot of fears about the future.” We also have a lot of fears about the present, which get mapped onto the future in dystopi­an fic­tion, a genre that has become “part of our all-encom­pass­ing hope­less­ness.”

Dystopias feel famil­iar, even com­fort­ing, in that no mat­ter how bad things are, they are per­haps not quite as bad yet as the dark­est visions of sci­ence fic­tion. We might still change course if we can final­ly heed the warn­ings. But lit­er­ary and cin­e­mat­ic pes­simism, either as grim escapism or a wake-up call, “has done its job,” Robin­son argues, “it’s old news now, per­haps it’s self-indul­gence to stay stuck in that place any more.”

Anoth­er leg­endary sci-fi writer, Ursu­la K. Le Guin agreed. “We keep writ­ing dystopias,” she remarked in a 2017 essay, “instead of envi­sion­ing a bet­ter world.” Le Guin, who passed away last year, wrote of “ambigu­ous,” “clear­sight­ed,” and “trou­bled” utopias. And she prac­ticed, over the course of her long career, what Robin­son calls our cur­rent “task at hand”—“to imag­ine ways for­ward to that bet­ter place.” We may not see much rea­son for opti­mism, but utopi­an think­ing, “is real­is­tic: things could be bet­ter.”

An anar­chist, fem­i­nist, and envi­ron­men­tal­ist, Le Guin might be called an “ide­o­log­i­cal” writer, but not in the deroga­to­ry sense the word implies. All artists have ide­o­log­i­cal frame­works, whether they’re aware of them or not, and Le Guin was very much aware of the lens­es she used to see the world, what Robin­son defines as “the imag­i­nary rela­tion­ship to our real con­di­tions of exis­tence.”

She con­scious­ly restruc­tured her work to imag­ine new worlds in terms out­side the oppres­sive­ly hege­mon­ic norms that gov­ern ours, norms cre­at­ed by what she called the “yang” desire for absolute con­trol.  “I had to rethink my entire approach to writ­ing fic­tion,” she says above in Worlds of Ursu­la K. Le Guin, a new PBS doc­u­men­tary direct­ed by Arwen Cur­ry, avail­able free to stream for a lim­it­ed time.

“It was impor­tant,” Le Guin goes on, “to think about priv­i­lege and pow­er and dom­i­na­tion in terms of gen­der, which is some­thing sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy had not done.” In so doing, Le Guin showed her read­ers it was pos­si­ble to imag­ine func­tion­al, believ­able, even attain­able alter­na­tives to stark real­i­ties that seem too deeply entrenched to ever change. She showed oth­er sci-fi and fan­ta­sy writ­ers that they could do the same.

The doc­u­men­tary fea­tures appear­ances from con­tem­po­raries and suc­ces­sors to Le Guin’s world-build­ing bril­liance, includ­ing Mar­garet Atwood, Samuel R. Delany, Analee Newitz, Chi­na Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, and David Mitchell, all of whom cite her as an influ­ence and inspi­ra­tion. (“I read A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea,” says Mitchell, “and things rearranged in my head.”)

In a way, read­ing Le Guin for the first time feels like being giv­en a pair of VR glass­es through which to see what’s tru­ly pos­si­ble, if only we had the will to col­lec­tive­ly imag­ine it into being. She did not think of utopi­anism as an eter­nal state of per­fec­tion or a thought exper­i­ment, but as a “process,”as Kel­ly Lynn Thomas writes at The Mil­lions, of “reflec­tion and adjust­ment, learn­ing and growth… com­mu­ni­ca­tion and respect, self-aware­ness and hon­esty.”

Though the word is typ­i­cal­ly deployed to describe dan­ger­ous naivete or pie-in-the-sky think­ing, utopi­anism need not be a grasp­ing after “ratio­nal human con­trol of human life,” Le Guin wrote. Utopias always con­tain some mea­sure of dystopia, she rec­og­nized. But she pro­posed that we find bal­ance by imag­in­ing what she calls “yin utopias,” spaces that involve “accep­tance of imper­ma­nence and imper­fec­tion, a patience with uncer­tain­ty and the makeshift, a friend­ship with water, dark­ness, and the earth.”

Such are the ideals that informed her vast imag­i­na­tive out­put over the course of near­ly 60 years, includ­ing 21 nov­els, 11 vol­umes of short sto­ries, essay col­lec­tions, children’s books, and poet­ry. In Worlds of Ursu­la K. Le Guin, we learn how she devel­oped and refined her cre­ative vision, and her cri­tiques of total­iz­ing “yang” utopi­anism and its despair­ing oppo­site. The film is avail­able to stream in full online for a lim­it­ed time. Watch it above or on PBS’s Amer­i­can Mas­ters page before it’s gone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: The Dis­ci­pline That Fueled Her Imag­i­na­tion

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness