Zhang Yimou’s Hero and the globalization of propaganda

Another film commentary, I wrote this … today. For the journal Millennium, published here in London. A favourite piece of writing about one of my least favourite films.

China and the West have rich places in each other’s imaginations. In the cultural life of the English-speaking world, in just the last century, we have passed through a range of tropes and stereotypes: China as dangerous and corrupting in the form of the evil “oriental” Fu Manchu, China as woman, to be consumed and to be saved in the character of Suzy Wong, and ambivalent masculine versions of China – macho, camp, comic and cool in Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-fat, and more recently, geo-political understandings of China as a new superpower. For the Chinese-speaking world, the Western models of consumer culture and modernity and simply the presence of the pre-eminent economies of Europe and the US have structured Chinese thinking on how it establishes its post-imperial place in the modern world.

Rey Chow has written with great subtlety and sophistication about the problematic of China’s representation in cinema1, the way Chinese films have both represented China to itself and to the Western world, across a boundary of unequal global power. For Chow, in its modern global cinema, China comes to know itself as a coherent socio-cultural imagining. Key to this is the invocation of cinema as a self-conscious moment in which the awareness by Chinese filmmakers that their cinematic representations of China will cross global cultural boundaries and speak to the world encourages them to produce films which implicitly open the possibility of translating an imagined Chinese experience for a non-Chinese audience.

For Chow, this is a positive development. The understanding that cinema is a translatable and translated medium allows films to be a bridge between cultural imaginaries which both recognizes the contingencies of those cultural boundaries, but nevertheless acknowledges the incommensurability of cultures in a heterogeneous world.

Chow writes about Chen Kai-ge and Zhang Yimou, but perhaps the exemplar of her argument about Chinese film’s possibilities is Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. The wuxia genre of imperial-era popular literature had been reinvented cinematically over and over again in Shanghai in the 1930s and Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1950s and 1980s, but Ang Lee’s classic film self-consciously offered its conventions of heroes, melodrama and righteous practitioners of ancient martial arts into global culture with a knowing warmth and wit. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon delivered at one level a series of clichés of the Chinese experience, but it elevated them with high production values and the skills of its director and actors, and transcended them with a universally appealing story of love, tragedy and redemption, as well as its stunning fight scenes.

But if Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is an exemplar of global Chinese culture, then Zhang Yimou’s Hero is the nadir. The film takes the self-reflexive globalization of Chinese popular cultural forms to a new level of excess, presenting China as a challenge rather than an invitation, in an exercise in cinematic bombast which denies universality and insists on a singular and totalizing version of Chinese culture.

Largely character-less, Hero is the story of an attempt to assassinate the Emperor Qin, constructed out of a series of flashbacks of different versions of the journey of the assassin, from his recruitment to sitting before the emperor with the opportunity to strike. Each version is told back and forth as he wins the emperor's trust and advances closer each time. Zhang makes extreme use of colour for each episode, so that they are presented almost monochromatically in brown and grey, red, blue and green, and more, creating a series of tableaux which have been critically and popularly celebrated for their artistry and directorial boldness.2

Contrasting with the muted, earthy colours of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero’s imagery does indeed a deliver a stunning looking film, wholly unrestrained in its use of saturated colour and dramatic visual forms in ways which few films have had the audacity to attempt. Its fight sequences are spectacularly choreographed and staged, wielding colour, form and movement with virtuosic skill. The cast, too, is beautiful, and A-list Chinese – Zhang Ziyi, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Jet Li.

At the same time, the film has no real plot and no character development and its dialogue is made up of declarations of fortune-cookie clichés. This points to empty spectacle, to a Chinese version of the worst excesses of high-concept Hollywood cinema. However, Hero is far more than an empty exercise in visual technology and marketing.

That it is apologia for the contemporary dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party is self-evident. The film leads inexorably to the moment for the assassin to strike, at which he demurs. The emperor has explained, and the assassin has understood, that what looks like his cruelty, authoritarianism and oppression of his people is actually for their own good, so that he can enforce peace and unity to bring greatness to the people of China. He must live to fulfil this national mission, and of course he does. It is a grating rehearsal of the urban nationalist ideology of the CCP – invoking a great Chinese national future and a unified people, but condemning “the people” as being unable to be trusted with this national mission themselves. This great future promised by the emperor, and the Party, is emphatically non-democratic.

Hero shows the disheartening trajectory of Zhang Yimou’s career, who early on had contended with the cultural and political controls of the CCP in films such as Red Sorghum and The Story of Qiu Ju. In Hero his co-option by the party-state is complete.

But if the film’s apologia is obvious, more disturbing is the direction in which it takes the possibilities of Chow’s self-reflexive mode of global cultural expression, one which Chow fails to anticipate. More than merely Party ideology, Hero expresses a totalitarian mentality in mainstream Chinese cultural production.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon spoke from the margins of the Chinese-speaking world, from the diaspora, Chinese-America, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan, and from this position addressed both the rest of the world and mainland China itself. Hero has stepped up to speak from the centre in an indignant register, aiming to be more spectacular, more impressive and more successful than its marginal rival. Hero can be understood as an emphatic and wholly deliberate response by mainland cultural producers to both the globalization of Chinese culture and the presumption of other “Chinas” to speak for China.

Therefore, the simple awareness that one’s cultural products speak to a global audience is not sufficient to infuse them with a translatability which might make possible a greater cultural understanding. A film must be made in a positive and inclusive spirit and not dictate and insist upon the legitimacy of only one version of that culture.

In Hero’s perfectly framed set-pieces, and programmatic use of colour and movement is a renunciation of plurality, of difference, and of historical contingency. Where Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon offered rich glimpses of a multiplicity of possible social worlds in a fantasy Chinese past, Hero reduces all of its characters to singular representations of China’s crisis as divided from itself, and as redeemed through authoritarianism. Its characters, locations and temporality are wholly abstracted, an historical China without history, and a social terrain without territoriality.

But if Hero offers a totalizing and totalitarian cultural vision to the world, it does so fully cognizant of the most sophisticated global cinematic mechanisms, both in terms of its spectacle of imagery on screen and also its incorporation into the global machinery of cultural commerce. The saturation of trailers, teasers, and promotions at the multiplex and then on DVD shows Chinese cinema operating decisively and confidently in the global market of images.

In this way, Hero might be seen as a radical film. It might possibly represent the invention of a new kind of globalized propaganda. Like all propaganda, it conveys a profoundly reactionary message as it excludes the possibility of a plurality of views through a totalizing vision of socio-political life. But it does all this with a full grasp of the techniques of the most sophisticated global image-making. Like an expensive global advertising campaign for a multinational company, it dazzles with the spectacle of its saturating imagery, but rather than a product, it is promoting a state-sponsored political ideology.

1. See Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

2. See for example, Daniel Auty, http://www.thespinningimage.co.uk (accessed 13 October 2005).