I Need a Hero

One of my generalized complaints of the current artistic community is its penchant for brash editorialization. Opinionated works have long been hallmarks in the artistic canon and, with good reason, the art world takes a hard stance against human suffering. I can't say all overt editorializing is bad; I'll admit that. Even so, Picasso's Guernica isn't totally upfront with a viewer and Pablo himself said of the piece, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."

But why in a relatively relativist, post-post-modern age are we so incapable of transcending the opinion piece and exploring the interconnectivity of philosophies? Politically charged work has largely failed in recent years, from Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" to that Beastie Boys single I can't even remember the name of. They've enjoyed popularity in circles, sure, but talk radio earns the same type of audience. The drive may be that if you've only got three words to be heard, you're going to make sure those words are "Four More Years" or "Cheney Eats Babies".

My hope is that it's just immaturity; we've had so little of any monumental importance to discuss in the past 25 years that we've forgotten how to deal with such things. Faced with actions which will determine how the course of our civilization will continue, we suddenly find that we're out of practice and out of shape. All the meta-construction we've learned in this era is useless to expressing strong convictions coherently. So, we naturally reach for propaganda because, unlike art, it gets results. My hope is that we outgrow this. My hope is that we're not just ignoring the good political art because of our convictions.

All of that said. Hero is fantastic, in great part because it treats the political turmoil at its heart (the unification of China through war) as a three-dimensional issue. Through an increasingly honest repetition of the story's central events, Zhang Yimou makes clear that the pivotal decisions a civilization must face are not as clear cut as our zeal would have us believe. There is an outcome and that outcome is tied to a certain degree of historical accuracy, but what's important is how Zhang portrays it, how he explores the decision the torn Nameless Hero must make. It's successful, and it leaves room for the audience to sympathize with any of the chorus of characters around Nameless depending on their own understanding of Zhang's symbols.