It has long been thought in Hollywood that you can persuade an
American to do just about anything but pay money to watch a
subtitled foreign movie. This confidence in Homo
americanus’s xenophobia and illiteracy can now, I think, be
abandoned for good: on the weekend of August 29, Zhang Yimou’s
two-year-old Chinese film Hero enjoyed the largest
late-August opening in the history of the North American box
office, pulling in a gross of $18 million from 2,031 screens.
Western fans of Asian cinema might regard this as great news —
but for what it signifies in itself, Hero might fairly be
considered a little more troubling. Its propagandistic overtones
have been overlooked by most reviewers (with the unsurprisingly
keen-eyed exception of the American Conservative’s Steve
Sailer). There is an even bigger elephant-in-the-chicken-coop here
than the crypto-Christian subtext of The Lord of the
Rings.
The movie is about a moral crisis encountered by four brilliant
assassins as they plot to do away with the shrewd, paranoid King of
Ch’in, who is in the process of ending the Warring States period
(475 BC-221 BC) and transforming himself into Shih Huang-ti, the
First Emperor of a unified China. To make this man a major
character in a Chinese movie is to tread on, shall we say,
geologically hyperactive ground.
Hero would have you believe that the secret to Shih
Huang-ti’s success in overcoming neighboring states was a corps of
ruthless, talented bowmen. In truth, the key to his unification of
China was a revolution in morality. Confucianism, hitherto the
unrivaled animating ideology of China, had encouraged a feudal
style of government based on personal, reciprocal obligations. The
need to govern through such vital linkages limited the size of any
political entity sharply, just as it did in medieval Europe before
the emergence of the nation-state. Confucianism, then and now, has
been an anti-radical strain in the Chinese soul. Shih Huang-ti,
influenced by the anti-Confucian Legalist philosophers, poured a
dissolving acid on the old framework of relationships and
ritual.
He built the first Chinese mandarin state, a powerful and
meritocratic instrument capable of seducing the loyalties of
talented men regardless of the station they had been born into. He
disarmed and terrorized the populace, cultivated Soviet-style
informants in town and countryside, exterminated Confucian
intellectuals as a class, diverted staggering amounts of labor to
personal obsessions and monuments, and tried to burn every existing
book in his empire with the exception of a few practical
instructional tracts. Chinese Confucians later regarded these as
among the “ten crimes of Ch’in” which led to the dynasty’s
precipitate downfall. But the official view of Communist China is
the view expressed by the “Broken Sword” character in Zhang Yimou’s
movie — the view that Chinese unity cannot be purchased at too
great a price. (That the turmoil which followed on Shih Huang-ti’s
death was far more sanguinary than the relatively stable disharmony
of the Warring States is, apparently, a mere trifle.) Zhang depicts
the model tyrant of Asian history as profoundly alert, and even
rather matey, once you approach within ten paces of him.
Hero is a beautiful movie, but I began to feel after a
while that its Rashomonic reiterations of love and death were a
rather shallow stunt, and when the political angle suddenly hovered
into open view about two-thirds of the way through, I felt the
sting of a schoolmaster’s wearisome lesson being plunged into the
narrative structure with a thumbtack. It’s the same kind of clumsy
Commie distractedness that was more noticeable in the Italian hit
Il Postino. But for most Western viewers, the plot turn is
too heavily encoded in Hero to create any quarrel: we are
too busy just trying to make sense of the plot.
In the past Zhang has had trouble with the Chinese authorities,
most specifically about his period dramas. In the post-Dengian era,
any sort of looking backward by a filmmaker was mildly chancy; Deng
was, historiographically, a sort of Whig on amphetamines who wanted
to push the country forward aggressively in the natural,
“progressive” direction. (He changed the literal course of Chinese
history when he decided that Mao had been wrong about the relevant
definition of “progress.”) Hero, which was underwritten to
the tune of $30 million without initial hope of a Western release,
suggests that a new intellectual tone may have taken root in the
upper echelons.
As Sailer says, it is not exactly encouraging — especially for
the Taiwanese — that the resulting product is something Chairman
Mao would have relished. It was the First Emperor’s academicidal
example that permitted the historical desecrations of the Cultural
Revolution; it was the fetish for “unity” that poured out rivers of
blood in Tiananmen Square. Nobody should celebrate a brilliant
artist’s co-option to such a cause. Fortunately there is almost
room to believe that Zhang is being ironic about the delirious
nationalistic tone struck here — that the movie’s postmodern
structure is itself a coded message within a coded message, a sly
auteurial suggestion that one not take anything in Hero at
face value.
