"Hero" and Subversion

[fabrisse]

eanja and I went to see Hero earlier today.

In our current political climate, I consider this to be a subversive movie. This has come from two lines.

The first is part of the written prologue: "In any war, there are heroes on both sides."

This is not, generally speaking, an American point of view. We're bad at recognizing the humanity of our enemies, and, I think, without recognizing the humanity we can't see the heroism.

Can anyone give me a U.S. equivalent to the "Christmas Armistice" from the first year of WWI?

The only time that we come close to looking at both sides and seeing the valor of both is during our Civil War. And I'm not too sure that's true from the Yankee side.

The second line is an actual line of dialogue which I'll paraphrase from the subtitles: "Remember that the ultimate goal of any warrior is to lay down his sword."

When I was a teenager, even though I was already coming to a pacifist point of view, I romanticized my father's profession. It was he who took me down a peg by referring to himself as "one of our country's elite killers."

That perspective of soldiering is one that we don't see while we're sending the troops off to war with the marching bands. The other side is a bunch of killers; our side are heroes. Neither side will lay down the sword -- them because they're evil, us because we fight evil.

The truth is both sides prefer to live in peace.

I only got a C in my first International Relations course. The main reasons were that I informed the professor (of International Systems) that I believed a single person's action or inaction could affect history. The second was that I agreed with a statement by Michael Howard in his book The Causes of War that the teacher characterized as ridiculous.

Howard says (and I recently discovered that the Dalai Lama agrees with him *g*) that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the absence of the threat of war.

The movie Hero shows us lands that are rarely peaceful because the threat of war is always there.


The film is ravishing. The fight between the two women in the autumnal forest was so sensual and powerful that I couldn't tear my eyes away. And seriously, I hate blood so I find it really easy to tear my eyes away from fight scenes.

Yimou Zhang use of color and sound was stunning. I wish I could find the words to explain the impact.

"Our land" makes far more sense than "Homeland" does to me.



Jet Li is pretty.

So is Zhang Ziyi.

I think I can say "Yes," in Chinese now, though as any two year old will tell you, "No," is more useful.

Did anyone else notice that the assassin Sky is still alive?