Conversations with Ben IV

On today’s agenda: Zhang Yimou’s Hero

Ben sed:

I was all set to dive into the three hours that is Red Beard but the others pushed for something shorter and lighter, hence Hero. Turned out Monica and Jacob had seen it already at the theatre. They didn't remember the title. They've also seen House of Flying Daggers. Anyway, is this the same director who did Raise The Red Lantern and another one (?) set in an handicraft dye factory? At the time, I remember really liking these, especially the latter, what with all the rich color. Anyway again, as to Hero, well, after studying Kurosawa, it was, well again, shorter and a lot lighter... a lot lighter.

I was really impressed by the flying-by-computers when I first saw it in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it was still purdy cool dude when they were zipping around in The Matrix. As of now, however, it strikes me as not only tired but a poor excuse. It's not just that such special effects are considered the main feature of the film. It's that there is a phony visual texture to them that cannot substitute for actual things actually photographed. It's the same problem that we encounter all the time today with music that is produced digitally out of real time. So much of it fails to deliver the soul that we hear in analogue recording. The visuals in Hero are flat, two-dimensional somehow. I suspect it has to do with the fact that they are not created in real light. They look great but they do not feel like anything. (Have I mentioned recently that I think The Seven Samurai is a really fine movie?)

As for the meat and potatoes of Hero, it's false profundity of the first rank. At one point I thought that it was going to be a footnote to Rashomon, with respect to the problem of truth from different points of view. But that failed to pan out. The political ramifications are not entirely clear but they are definitely reactionary in the current world situation, Hong Kong/Mainland reunification parable notwithstanding. Last and certainly least, the Oriental style and motifs of the movie are for me quite bogus. This is pretty sad considering that the actors are indeed speaking Chinese. Correct me if I am wrong Dan but you are a sucker for Oriental cultures. I can dig the real thing but not this Epcot Center stuff. Honestly, don't you find it homogenized and commodified to the point of being McChinese? (By the way, The Seven Samurai is superb cinema. Check it out.)

But I am such a snob. Truth be told, it was fun to watch and I wanted to have sex with either one of both of the female leads whenever they were on the screen. So thanks for that. (Have you ever heard of a movie called The Seven Samurai? I like it a lot.)


Dan replied:

Yes, you are a terrible snob. But I forgive you your snobbery. There are so many greater sins in the world of cinephilia. Like being a fan of Michael Bay movies, for instance.

Yes, the director of Hero and Flying Daggers is also the same director of Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou (the one set in the dye factory), both mighty fine films. He (Yimou) considered Hero a dry run for Flying Daggers, though I consider Hero the superior film (despite its flaws) because Daggers descends into the kind of romantic melodrama that only a fella like Shakespeare can get away with (she's dead. No, she's not really dead. Wait a minute, I think she's dead now. Nope...)

I like Hero quite a bit more than you, but I'm not so worried about where the film finally falls politically (because I think it is somewhat ambiguous), and much more interested in the journey that the film takes us on. I like the way it plays around with an unreliable narrator and the way that the future emperor/villain is charismatic, intelligent and completely ruthless. I LOVED every second that Maggie Cheung was on screen (you may remember Maggie and Tony Leung, who is her partner in the calligraphy school, starring in In the Mood for Love, another film I liked considerably more than you), and was captivated by the way her story kept getting revised according to the bits and pieces of new information that trickled into the discourse between assassin and emperor. It's also one helluva beautifully photographed film. The fight sequences are awesome, but more importantly, also deeply moving. When the two warriors battle it out, dipping their swords into the serene waters of the lake, while the beautiful Maggie Cheung lies on her deathbed, well, it just took my breath away. And there were several scenes of similar visual poetry in this film--you really could turn off the subtitles and enjoy it for the visuals alone and have a mighty fine time, regardless of the story, characters, themes etcetera ad nauseum. I also enjoy a good Bollywood film, generally for similar reasons--the gorgeous use of colour and skilful compositions, and the beautiful people doing dopy things. Then, all you have to do is toss in some dancing (which becomes martial arts in a Chinese film) and a whole lotta singing and a-waaay we go!

As for the film's politics, since pretty much all of Yimou's earlier films are clearly anti-authoritarian and were poorly received by the Chinese government, I'm less inclined to see Hero as an unequivocal embrace of authoritarianism. I'm pretty sure that the elevation of the calligraphy school into an icon of artistic integrity in the face of authoritarianism is central to the film's message, and that while the emperor certainly has his way at film's end, and the assassin willingly sacrifices himself to the emperor's vision, that does not speak to me in the same way as the extended passages in the calligraphy school. It seems more denouement than climax--the film's central values being expressed in the earlier brutal and crushing assault on the calligraphers, with admission of the historical reality (this man was ruthless, and he DID become the first emperor of China, after all) the main impetus behind the film's finale. But, there's no escaping that the film appears to promote the really questionable assertion that this war lord's drive to unify China was borne out of a desire to end all conflict and bring peace to the nation, considering that history does not support such an interpretation of his reign, which was apparently pretty damned bloody, despite his character's assertions otherwise.

[sidebar one: There's an interesting difference in the final captions in the two versions of the film I've seen. In the Miramax-produced version of Hero that you watched, the emperor's move to unify China is dubbed "One World" or something like that (can't remember) whereas in the imported DVD, the slogan is translated as "All Under Heaven" which strikes me as carrying slightly different connotations.


[sidebar two: Here's the thing about the flying trope in Asian martial arts films. There's a school of martial arts film called wuxia films wherein the participants, zen-like masters of these arts, are actually able to perform the gravity-defying feats of wonder that you witness on screen. So, these are not merely gimmicks, but a reasonable recreation of the wonders that these highly trained individuals are supposedly able to achieve.]

Ben:

Ibelieve I said in my review of Hero that the politics are not entirely clear and given this I have no problem with the way you juxtapose the meaning of the calligraphy school with the movie's conclusion. Of course, this begs substantiation for your interpretation of the school as representative of anti-authoritarian goodness, questionable in itself considering that the school was a sort of conditioning factory under a code of craft paternalism. More slippery, even if your take on the school is granted, the relationship of the assassins to the school is vague, to say the least. Only Broken Sword explicitly unifies the two disciplines of calligraphy and martial art - and look, he embraces pacifism in order to accept the imperial program of the state. So it really does run in circles as far as I can see. Honestly though, can the film withstand this level of political interpretation? I think not. It's mostly a bunch of quasi-philosophic fluff.

This brings me to your sidebar on a certain school of kung-fu movies. And now we really are at a crossroads, in which you will end up with the likes of the Quentin Tarantino chop-socky appreciation club that I simply refuse to condone. You explain that the special effects are valid because they are artificial reproductions of actual gravity-defying acts of martial arts achieved by certain, real masters, who have been captured "live" on film in the past. Bullshit. Have you seen these reality shows of which you speak? I am calling your bluff. Because I am skeptical to the nth degree. Believe it or not, another life ago, I attended Shotokan karate classes for two years (green belt). The second of these two years I was living in New York. Our dojo went to New Jersey one weekend to watch an international free-style sparring competition between Fifth Dan (no not you, [and higher]) black belts. Fucking amazing. But I didn't see one of these brilliant and often artistic pugilists take flight. Even if I took your point too literally, even if I am supposed to grant that the special effects are intentionally exaggerated, hyper-real, or what have you - bullshit I say. And please know that my beef now is not that these sorts of movies are not realistic, (not this minute anyway). I am not currently demanding realism. My objection has to do with the bogus Orientalism at the heart of these angelic combatants. If it was a good ol' cowboy movie, with guns, a Western with Western technology, no one would buy this crap. But because it is bathed in exotic Eastern cultural trappings, with lots of dime-store "rub my head for luck Grasshopper" mysticism, and the fighting is with ancient weaponry - everyone is happy to suspend disbelief, to put it mildly. (Incidentally, I think I could make a critical case for regarding The Matrix - all of its futuristic, high-tech setting notwithstanding - in terms of this same sort of jive Eastern-ish mode of physical transcendence. Yes, ultimately I AM on a rampage for realism. On this ticket, I don't care if there are a few Zen-masters in the world who can fly around in the air with swords. I agree with the ex-biker turned underground cartoonist, Spain Rodriguez: "Ten guys can kick the shit out of anybody.")

One more thing. You do not respond to my feeling about the computer-look of these special effects. Considering that they are, according to you, meant to "mimic" or stylistically allude to actual moves documented elsewhere on film, my sensation of them as visually unreal, as "flat," seems to me to constitute a critique on a visceral level.

Dan:

No, no, you mistake my comment. I'm not saying that the wuxia films are meant to be realistic interpretaions of actual events. What I'm saying is that there is a long line of filmmaking that uses such techniques--I remember seeing them first in the 1980s series of Chinese Ghost Story films--and that Hero's tradition stretches much farther back than Crouching Tiger and The Matrix, which you suggested as a starting point for such films. So, I was merely trying to offer up a larger cinematic context for the character's superhuman feats in Hero.

As for the computer-generated look of the effects, I am not sure I get you because I'm pretty sure that the majority of the film's fx were accomplished through wires (which are later erased by computers) rather than through CGI. So, these characters really are moving through the space you see them inhabiting on the screen and in the manner that you see them moving on the screen. They're just being propped up, a la Peter Pan, by a sophisticated series of wires and/or bungy chords.
I'm wondering if there's a cultural divide here, and that your interpretation of the cow-towing to authority of the calligraphy school is a distinctly western view of said events. Are you saying that, rather than passively accepting the brutal oppression of the emperor's men, the students and teachers in the school should have, in the fashion of a Byronic hero, physically rebeled against this authority? Wouldn't hat have been equally as futile? I believe the point of the scene was to suggest that while this particular calligraphy school might have been doomed to extinction, the art itself would transcend this moment in time, in the manner of the sculpture in Ozymandias, or Sonnet 18("So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see/So long live this, and this gives life to thee). Not that I'm putting Hero on that level of brilliance--as you say, it is pretty fluffy stuff--but simply that it stands at the end of that long line of thought.

Ben:

I'm glad you straightened me out, ('cause I really was bent out of shape wasn't I?)

About the CGI - look at me using abbreviations I never even heard of before! what next, emoticons? - I find your observation instructive. I think I was conflating the CGI of the massive armies and their arrows and vast landscapes and so forth on to the hand-to-hand combat scenes. It was really the former that bugged me with respect to the no-genuine-visual-depth issue. Clearly, I have problems with the dueling swords in their own right (more on this next paragraph). But it may be correct that I was blaming these somewhat on the CGI. Having conceded this, I do want to clarify that originally I was not bugged by the flying as such. I got grumpy about this only after I misunderstood your sidebar on wuxia. No, it was the flying in relation to the physical environment that pissed me off. And if you think about this, I think you will concede that this goes far beyond the Peter Pan stage-strings you are trying to sell to me. Come on, the rain of leaves when the two ladies go at it, the bouncing off the surface of the water when the two gentlemen duke it out - this is fantastic CGI... rubbish. Perhaps for you it is poetry in motion and I will admit that it does look neat, but I am a boring dogmatist insisting that it is little more than style... and you don't need to listen to me shout this critique yet again. (Besides paragraph two is near commencement.) So, yes, it may be the case that the unrealistic relationship between the fighting and the material world was really the thorn in my side and not the visual vibe of the CGI.

Look, I am wholly ignorant of wuxia. But frankly I don't care because I am an intellectually arrogant loud mouth. No doubt wuxia is a "genre" with its "conventions." Make it stop. Seriously, it's all so much Marvel Comics. By now you must have picked up that I have very little interest in stories - film, literature, whatever - about demi-gods. It doesn't matter if they are cosmically created (Superman), technologically created (Spiderman), mystically created (Dr. Strange), or what-have-you. Yes, even Greek mythology and the metaphysics in Shakespeare engage me only to the extent that they speak to basic human psychology and sociology. I am especially bothered by Marvel Comics that pose as sophisticated cultural paintings and sensitive philosophy. Hero for example. Again I say, doesn't it strike you as so much McChinese?

Almost done. I mentioned the biker motto that ten guys can kick the shit out of anyone. This is not just realism. It is socialist realism, or at least collectivist or communitarian realism. The "duel", understood as a ruling class motif, is the ideology of the aristocrat. The honor between combatants from the same social strata, the refinement of violence to a single pure act, the containment of the contest to a rule-regulated arena cordoned off from larger social struggle - I could unpack a nice short essay; this is the mystique of the lord. I take umbrage with this ideology. It is not just bogus. It is actively anti-democratic, anti-proletarian (yes, I still find it necessary to use the word), and generally a reactionary bulwark against radical political aspiration. (By the way, this holds for most traditional mythology in most "civilized cultures. Indeed, the concept of the "hero" is ripe for overly-individualistic values on behalf of the legitimacy of a ruling minority rather than power-to-the-people majoritarian principles.) But enough political theory. The point now is that the number one convention of all these genre action movies is the duel. The hero always gets to take on the gang of faceless hoods, one stylistically sexy move at a time. The gang never gangs up. They each step forward in a choreography of successive mini-duels. The aristocratic artist of fighting, the Zen-master of Kung Fu, duels and duels and duels. And wins and wins and wins. No thank you, not enough political theory. Ten guys can kick the shit out of anyone.

Hummnn... I'm still pretty bent, aren't I?


Dan:

Yes, you remain bent.

So the only fictional field of endeavour that has legitimacy is the realist school? What about magical realism? To hell with Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Screw Robertson Davies? Isn't there room in serious cinema for the fantastical?

As for the failure of super hero flicks, I'm no Ayn Rand, but jeez, don't the proles need inspirations too? I understand the appeal of the collective action of working class heroes, but without guidance, isn't there the danger that mobs will behave like mobs? Without a cohering agent, the collective will threatens to dissipate. We will always need the ideas and deeds of a few wise folk. Would the proletariat have tossed off their chains without the spirited leadership of Vladimir and Leon? Where would the Marxist be without Karl, or the Maoists with the Chairman? Whither Gandhi? Martin Luther King Jr.? Nelson Mandela?

Ben:

I am not taking the bait. Far from being a talent scout for Stalin, I am quite confident that if we consulted one of the major rants on behalf of realism that I sent you this summer, we will see that I made room for fantasy. As much as I would like to take up this topic, it is not the one at hand. In my critique of Hero I confessed to my realist dogmatism but this does not mean that I was attacking the fantastic flavor of the film as such. What I was picking on precisely was the relationship between the fighting and the physical environment. Now, for you, this may be nit-picking but for me it is the difference between the portrayal of reasonably credible heroes and fantastic superheroes. This is what I was after when I spoke of Marvel Comics and demi-gods. Perhaps I did not express myself well because this critical point was braided into my political assessment of heroes in general and their aristocratic form in particular as contained in dueling.

As for your promotion of certain individuals in history who have truly made a difference, as a fellow history teacher I do have to say that the so-called Great Man theory of history is only so compelling and really does require qualification by genuinely substantive social history. Nevertheless, I certainly agree that there are special individuals who are... what exactly? To answer this we need to depart from historical methods and, sorry, return to political theory. These individuals you highlight, I insist on understanding them as not "heroes" but rather "leaders." These are two very different categories. For leaders really emerge from the people in the first place and represent them. This emergence is riddled with contradictions and all too often leaders evolve into rulers. But this is a separate matter. Heroes, quite differently, are ideological entities who have at best a legendary reality but more often are purely mythical. They are literary cultural creations that inform the people about who they are as a people. Unlike a leader who is human all too human, to quote Neitzsche, a hero is, well let's let Friedrich say it again, an ubermensch, an over-man, a superman. And it's the darnedest thing. As leaders turn into rulers, the law of the land and the codes of the culture evolve away from the celebration of leadership and towards the worship of heroes. Next thing you know, the king has the mandate from heaven and all the rest of that hierarchical class mystification. Ironically - ironic because he became a poster boy for exactly what he condemned - Stalin had the best catch-phrase for political hero-worship: "The cult of the personality."

Were you meaning to keep me bitching about Hero? I think I blew my wad already but if you want I'm sure I can piss you off some more, by sheer repetition if nothing else. When I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I gave it the following review: "The thinking man's Jackie Chan." Following up on this, I have to say that Hero is the feeling man's Jackie Chan. Or to put it politically incorrectly, the gay guy's Jackie Chan. It's very pretty and very sensitive and a load of bullocks. It initially hints of being a footnote to Rashomon but does not deliver. It's political ambiguity may allow for some sort of emancipatory interpretation but the ultimate statement is one of submission to imperial domination. And the aristocratic dueling is an ideological model that mystifies both the reality of violence and the nature of ruling class power and privilege. I am hardly a fan of gore, but the bloodlessness of Hero is a dirty lie, a clean lie actually. In a way, I am more offended by this sanitary elite militarism - it's always martial "arts" - than I am by lumpen proletarian gratuitous blood-letting, lowest-common-denominator slasher action.

I attempted to get at this when I spoke of the relation between the fighting and the physical environment. At the heart of the aristocratic mystification is an anti-materialism, an idealist take on mind over matter. I won't go down this road any further except to say - on behalf of fantasy, go figure - it is not necessary to trash matter and embrace stupid spiritualism in order to explore unrealistic fictions. So I ask you. When they bounce off the surface of the lake? What's up with that Dan? I have confessed that I see the beauty of it. But what does it mean? Are they little gods or what?

Dan:

Okay, after all your five dollar word association games, I will blushingly confess that I was tryin gto bait you. But, I think you're over-reaching and over-reading it. Hero is ballet with swords. I know squat about ballet, but I'm pretty sure there's no blood in Swan Lake either. And the grand swashes of movement and colour are pretty damned cinematic, and don't really need much excuse as such, but I'm pretty sure that much of this aspect of the film is a direct lifting of Bollywood conventions, particularly in the tortured romance of the two assassins (three, I guess, if you count Zhang Ziyi's character, who assists Tony Leung's). Bollywood films are renowned for their operatic excess of emotion, particularly when it comes to tales of unrequited love, and bathe their films in a stomache-swirling orgy of colour and movement in order to reflect the character's emotional states. It is corny as hell, but it sure looks spectacular.

What all this has to do with China's first emperor I have no idea, and might be yet more proof that Zhang Yimou is not the most rigorous of thinkers, preferring to revel in the material rather than work his way through it intelligently. I'm not terribly bothered by that, in that I'm not sure he's expecting us to take the film all that seriously from an intellectual or philosophical standpoint. However, given the appropriation of actual real historical context, he must certainly take some responsibility for the political interpretations that are going to emerge as a result of folks looking for contemporary relevance (why else make such a film if there is no connection to today's world?), and I will grant that Hero is pretty confused about its politics. And I can see why, on the heels of seeing Rashomon, this film would look like so much tripe by comparison. Fortunately for my enjoyment, I saw Hero many, many years after I'd seen Rashomon, and wasn't terribly bothered by its inability to stand up to the comparison. Rather, I saw it in the midst of a string of typical Oscar bait films, which made it come out looking pretty damned decent by comparison.

Oh, and Jackie Chan? Love him. LOVE him. A modern day Buster Keaton. Too bad he decided that he had to make a string of shitty Hollywood pictures in order to become known here.

Ben:

You must know that I am a failed academic. I was in grad school for five years reading those five dollar words, a dollar per year it appears, and I still can't stop myself from trying to spend them from time to time. So often when I do, I find that my currency is not accepted, but at least you let me down with such sweet legal tender. But come on man, I usually warn you when a lecture is coming and I just about always apologize afterwards, sorta like Woody Allen after sex.

I know I am a snob. I know. You watch all sorts of movies, anything and everything, from what I gather from your various postings. You are right that it is not fair to judge Hero a week after watching Rashomon and all the rest of that Kurosawa to boot. At the same time, I make no bones about thinking most movies are junk and I do not watch them. Call me a poseur, a pretentious bore, yup, a snob. But I am also sincere. I can't help it. All I can offer in my defense is that I do have a sense of humor. Hell man, you'll grant me that, eh? So, for example, when you speak fondly of Bollywood product, I can only go there for about ten minutes, ironically with tongue planted firmly in cheek. It's just camp crap, a laugh in technicolor. And I have seen quite a bit of it, I'll have you know. Remember, I lived in Malaysia for a year and a half. But enough about me. I hear you, really I do.

Listen, though, I was not dissing Jackie. When I spoke of "thinking man's Jackie Chan," this was demeaning but not an insult, so to speak. You compare him to Buster Keaton. OK. And who would be the thinking man's Buster Keaton? Charlie Chaplin of course. But now the analogous argumentation breaks down. Because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ain't no Chaplin. Verily, Chaplin is beyond compare.
Dan:

Ben, you can't be a failed academic. I mean, shit, what would that make ME? A toady's flunky?

Plus, you have skills that cannot be undervalued. You can cry on demand, which is clearly the sign of the sort of heightened sensitivity gifted only to the greatest thespians like Tom Cruise, and after reading every one of your lectures, I feel just a smidgen smarter.

Just remember, as Frank Capra once said, no man is a failure who has friends.