Male Socialization And The Warrior Path To Enlightenment In 'Circle of Iron'

A 1978 classic film based on a Bruce Lee concept

The intergenerational transmission of accounts of real journeys is far older than written language — and the chain of transmission has always been male to male

“Bruce set the story in a land that never was and always is,” a title card informs us at the opening of the 1978 film Circle of Iron. Unfolding as a series of Zen koans, the movie is ostensibly a kung fu flick, becoming a meditation on communication between the generations, specifically between older and younger men. Which is ironic, given that Jeff Cooper, the actor who plays the protagonist Cord, was the same age as David Carradine, the elder blind man that Cord meets and follows. But that is why they call it ‘acting’.

Bruce Lee was dead long before the film ever became more than a script, originally titled The Silent Flute, co-written with James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant in 1969. Still, there are two huge stars, Christopher Lee and Roddy McDowall, in the film made from the rewritten script, along with the legendary Eli Wallach as the man dissolving in oil. Marketed with the tagline “Bruce Lee’s spirit lives on,” the fantasy film “challenges your courage, tests your manhood, and throws you into an arena of life and death,” according to the original promotion poster.

In fact the hero’s journey is in our human DNA, specifically the Y chromosome. On a cellular level, males are driven to procreate, regardless of whether we ever do. On a cellular level, men are driven to conquer challenges, overcome odds and distances, exceed our own expectations for ourselves. Cultures worldwide that have never encountered one another still share these basic evolutionary drives, being human, so they share the hero’s journey. The circle of iron is universal because it mimics a universal experience of being male. The film Circle of Iron shows that this universal experience is inescapable, for it is intrinsic to becoming an adult male — a man.

In 2025, the very idea that men can have experiences that a female cannot is practically forbidden knowledge. Human sex difference is denied when it is not ignored, in contemporary popular culture. Deprecated as ‘toxic’, the masculine hero on a journey of discovery has been replaced with the anti-masculine antihero who needs no character arc, for she is already perfect. No wonder young men in our culture feel so aimless and dejected: they are told they are wrong for being young men, for needing the hero’s journey in their very genes. No wonder entertainment in our time is so dull: compared to most of the fare produced by Hollywood in 2025, this low-budget film, critically-panned on release, seems almost a golden age artifact.

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