Hero · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the leaves. Two fighters circle in a grove gone wholly gold, autumn suspended around them, and at the instant grief arrives the entire screen floods to blood-red — the foliage, the air, the silks, the world. Nothing in the plot turns the leaves red. A feeling does. This is the key to Hero, and it is also the easiest way into a stubborn idea of Gilles Deleuze's: that cinema can abandon its old promise to tell us what happened and instead use falsehood as a creative power.

Deleuze called this the powers of the false. For most of film history the camera carried an unspoken contract — the documentary reflex Bazin built realism on, the sense that what the lens records is, however framed, true. The image was evidence. Deleuze noticed that a certain kind of modern film breaks the contract on purpose: it offers versions of an event that cannot all be true and refuses to rank them, so that truth stops being something the film reveals and becomes something the film forges. Zhang Yimou builds his entire structure on this. Nameless (Jet Li) tells the King of Qin how he killed three assassins; the King, unconvinced, reconstructs a different account; a third telling corrects both. Each is a complete, internally coherent world — and Zhang gives each its own color so you feel the swap in your body before you reason it out. The lovers' story told in red is jealous and operatic. Told in blue, the same encounter is tender and self-sacrificing. The walls change hue and the dead change motive.

The craft debt here is exact, and the film never hides it: this is Rashomon (1950), Kurosawa's machine for retelling one event until the truth withdraws. What Zhang adds is falsifying-narration raised to a visual principle — Deleuze's term for mutually exclusive versions presented as equally real, with no master account to settle them. Kurosawa left his contradictions in plain grey daylight. Zhang assigns each lie its own saturated reality, so contradiction becomes gorgeous rather than anxious. Watch how each telling doesn't just describe the last one differently; it overwrites it. The blue version doesn't sit beside the red — it replaces the bodies, the room, the meaning of a sword going in. Deleuze had a name for images that compose an object and then dissolve it to compose another: crystalline description. The film keeps describing the same duel and keeps substituting a new duel for the one you just believed.

And the color is not decoration laid over the drama; it is the drama's substance. Deleuze's colour-image is a hue that absorbs a whole scene and its emotion — color as the affect itself, not a label for it. Christopher Doyle and designer Emi Wada (who dressed the color-divided armies of Kurosawa's Ran, and brought that graphic logic straight here) don't tint the grove red to signal anger. The red is the grief, total and ambient, with nowhere for the eye to escape. When two tellings contradict — the same lovers loyal in one pass, betraying in another — Deleuze would point to coexisting peaks of present, incompatible "nows" the film holds at once rather than melting into a single settled past.

This is where Nameless himself becomes Deleuze's central figure of the false: the forger. He is the man whose account creates the situation it claims to report, whose identity shifts with each telling until even his purpose — has he come to kill the King, or to be talked out of it? — is something he forges in the act. The film's boldest stroke follows from this. A wuxia epic promises a climactic kill; the whole sensory-motor engine of action cinema is a hero who perceives a wrong and strikes to right it. Zhang withholds the strike. Nameless, a sword's length from the King, chooses tianxia — "all under heaven" — over vengeance, and lowers the blade. Deleuze called this collapse of the deed the crisis of the action-image: the moment a character can no longer convert what he sees into the act that would resolve it. Hero spends two hours building the most kinetic action imaginable — the lake duel skimming its own mirror surface, the calligraphy school writing on under a sky gone black with arrows — only to dissolve all of it into renunciation. That dissolve is the film's greatness and the root of its political trouble, since the peace Nameless dies for is an empire won by force.

The lineage runs both ways, and Zhang wears his debts openly. He inherits the painterly-landscape wuxia and trampoline-light aerial combat of A Touch of Zen (1971), the dance-edited duel and woman swordmaster of Come Drink with Me (1966), and choreographer Ching Siu-tung's weightless wire-fu perfected in A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) — fabric and bodies floating on near-invisible wire, the exact vocabulary he repeats in the lake and forest fights. What he does with that inheritance is bend the Rashomon structure into pure chromatic abstraction, and in doing so he proves something to the spectacle cinema that followed: a blockbuster can be built on undecidable truth and still open at number one. Watch it again for the colors. Then notice that by the end you can no longer say, with any confidence, which version was real — and that the film never once wanted you to.