英雄 (Hero)

I just finished watching “Hero”. I was fascinated by it, but found it to be a deeply disturbing movie. In fact, it is a very difficult movie to review. The movie’s basic story surrounds the attempts of a group of assasins to kill the ruler of the kingdom of Qin. The movie alternates between Jet Li’s conversation with the king of Qin and the various battles and stories of the assasins themselves.

On the one hand, it is a very simple movie. It is possible to describe the movie as one with a simple story, very simple images, simple characters, and a very simple message. You could either criticize the movie for its simplicity, or pour praise on it for its beauty and sincerity. It has and doubtlessly will continue to receive awards and admiration for its perfection of a kind of purity of style we are used to seeing in the best of Chinese cinema.

On the other hand, the movie, or specifically, its message, is disturbing. I think Chinese and non-Chinese alike who are familiar with the history of Qin, or at least understand the basic ideas of the movie will, after seeing this movie, feel at least torn and at most horrified. I would like to think (and I have yet to read any reviews or web sites discussing the director’s own thoughts about the movie) that we are meant to feel deeply torn and disgusted by the movie, but the final images and captions of the movie suggest otherwise.

The king of Qin is not some fictional character dreamed up to be the villain of an action movie. His character, and the magical assasins with their amazing powers of swordsmanship and the usual array of flying/spinning/arrow-dodging skills are certainly all distorted but the king is none other than the first Emperor of China. There have been countless movies, books, and stories surrounding his life and almost without exception (at least from my own limited experience), he is portrayed as he is in textbooks and my own history classes: an evil, merciless, tyrannical, and calculating ruler who slaughtered thousands. He is the book burner, the slave driver who began the Great Wall, and the great “standardizer” who united the writing system and weights and measures of China but in doing so virtually destroyed all of the diversity of Chinese culture during that time. This is merely what my poor memory can remember from undergraduate intro classes, I’m sure there is lots more dirt we can dig up on this guy. He is the very epitomy of tyranny, an example, as it were, for all the tyrants of Chinese history to follow.

The assasins seem to mostly hail from the kingdom of Zhao, one of many which apparently fell to conquering Qin. They want to avenge their dead relatives and their fallen kingdom. They are not darkly clad prowlers wielding daggers in the night, but assasins who prefer to dress in colors like pastel green (to better match the curtains of the king) and they prefer slicing through the three thousand elite guards at the front gate to any more traditional entrance through the back door. Now so far, we seem to have all the pieces we need for a good action movie or historical drama. Sprinkle a little conspiracy, some betrayal, and a hefty dose of martial arts, and the audience will be pleased. If, on top of this, we add a dose of that amazing eye candy familiar from Crouching Tiger the movie becomes so many beautiful portraits of the gorgeous Chinese landscape, seasons, and the bright matching colors of our characters’ attire. There is no doubt that the movie is not only suspensful, exciting, but breathtakingly beautiful in a very clean and simple way. Both the settings and the movements of the characters bear a striking resemblence to a ballet or other dance performance (but not the more complex and contrastive beauty of, say, the Chinese opera).

The movie employs a storytelling style reminescent of the classic Japanese movie 羅生門 (Rashômon) in which the same story is repeated several times but with different events and character motives. While it doesn’t take this style to the nihilistic and deeply contemplative extremes that made Rashômon the subject of so much study, there is enough of this to reproduce the discomfort in the audience which pulls us onward towards the final conclusion.

There is something much more disturbing about this movie, however, than shifting plots and motives. One of the assasins has, through calligraphy, discovered that the “essense” of swordsmanship is peace and nonviolence, or as the Qin king puts it when he realizes the same through an interpretation of the assasin’s calligraphy for the character 劍 (Sword), the ultimate essense of swordsmanship is when we can achieve our ends without a sword in either our hands or our hearts. Of course, we can also find similar words in Sun Zi’s oft-quoted manual of strategy.

The Hero, we discover, is probably not the nameless (无名) Jet Li but the assasin 残剑 (Broken Sword) who sacrifices himself in an attempt to prove his sincerity to his lover 飞雪 (Flying Snow) after she attacks him for being the ultimate obstacle in her ambitions to kill the king of Qin.

The details may be a little confusing, but what on earth could be so objectionable about a movie which ultimately tells a story of peace, even if everyone, when they realize this, come to grizzly ends through murder, execution, or suicide? There is certainly nothing new here in the latter respect. When was the last time a Chinese cinematic masterpiece ended in anything other than the tragic death of at least 90% of its cast?

Things start to go horribly wrong when our hero Broken Sword plants the seeds of doubt in our nameless martial artist Li. To give away the secret, 残剑 does this by drawing two Chinese characters in the desert sand where they meet for one last time: 天下

These two characters, Tianxia, are usually translated as “All Under Heaven” and quite literally means Heaven-Under. The implication is obvious to most from or familiar with the region, as the characters were used when describing the ambitions of those who unified China and Japan (and Korea?). Kurosawa’s movie 影武者Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior or Double) opens with a monologue by the general Takeda Shingen in which he discusses all of the horrible crimes he has committed in order to near his goal of uniting “all under heaven”. We also get to watch the king of Qin shed a few tears when he declares that only his most feared enemy, Broken Sword, has understood his virtuous cause. Kurosawa starts with this self-piteous babble, but by the end of the movie we are, along with Takeda’s double, sickened observers to the bloodshed which it prescribes.

In contrast, Hero ends with “All Under Heaven” and ultimately, the life of the king of Qin is spared in order that he may realize that elusive goal of unifying China. This would end the violence, and make the sacrifices of assasins and minor kingdoms alike be to the noble end of building the nation. The man who spares the king’s life is riddled with arrows by the same ruler who claims to have realized the supreme virtues of mercy and peace, but the men and women of Zhao are asked to look beyond their petty loyalty to some small kingdom and devote themselves to that greater dream that is….China?

I think it is important for viewers to realize that this is not a movie about peace and non-violence. If there are any doubts left in the viewer’s minds, they should be vanquished by the final image of the movie: The Great Wall of China. Superimposed on this symbol of Chinese greatness is a historical postscript describing Qin as the unifier of China and essentially annointing the assasins of our story as the first patriots who laid down their lives for their “country” (?)…their bodies entombed in the very wall itself, presumably along with the thousands of other victims of Qin’s tyranny.

It is perhaps dangerous to take the message of this movie too far, but it is certainly tempting to see parallels with modern China, or for example, claim that Zhao represents Taiwan. There is, however, an unmistakable overlap between the Chinese political mantra of national unity, stability and sacrifice and the movie’s own worship of unity over the war and violence of the period. Just as the movie doesn’t hide the fact (since the history of the first dynasty is so well known) that unity comes at a high cost and at the hands of tyrants, even the Chinese government no longer hides the fact that their own ruling party’s history has a darker side to it. But even on the mass level, even among those who regret the violent government crackdown of ’89, there is something “greater” that everyone is sacrificing themselves for, the stability and unity of China itself.

Perhaps we should ignore the fact that Hero is ultimately a nationalistic movie in the most raw sense, this is hardly unusual these days, but there are broader questions being posed by the movie. The assasins are classic figures of noble rebels that most of us, especially Americans, are familiar with. Their cause, of resistance against tyranny, is just, and the movie takes no issue with this (this works just as well for those opposed to the US as for those who recall its own rebellious history). By rejecting this model, and by elevating a character who is not peaceful as a means of resistance but in retrospect, someone who is positively contributing (Broken Sword vows at one point to do anything to stop the killing of the king) to the status quo (the continued victories of Qin), the movie is essentially rejecting not only “just wars” but “just resistance” itself. This, of course, becomes particularly problematic when we extend the argument beyond China and apply the idea globally. It is this that makes the movie more timely than any domestic realities might suggest.

(I wanted to post this review of the movie in the “reviews” section but the idiot which programmed the review module didn’t make it Unicode so I couldn’t post non-Roman characters and will instead post the review here as a blog entry.)