Salon.com has posted some letters in response to their review of the film HERO. (You may have to click through an ad to get to them.)

The gist of the anti-HERO argument seems to be that directo Zhang Yimou is a tool of the communist government because his film espouses a pro-fascist agenda, in which invidual freedom and justicie is sacrificed at the altar of patriotism.

Curiously, the film itself makes no such argument. What is sacrificed is not freedom or justice but an individual's life for the greater good. This is not a particularly "fascist" argument. People across the globe and across the political spectrum revere tragic tales of heroes who give up their lives in order to save their loved ones, their homes, their villages, or their countries.

The real grounds for criticims of the film seems to be its historical context, not from the film itself. The plot revolves around an assasination attempt against a king who has been warring on rival provinces in order to bring them under control. In the film, one assasin gives up his mission because he has come to believe that the king's conquests will eventually bring peace by unifying China and putting an end to the endless inter-provincial conflicts that have left the country in chaos for years. A second assasin also abandons his mission, but only after the king convinces him that he (the king) has had a philosophical revelation and attained a kind of enlightment that would qualify him to bring peace to China.

Seen without any awareness of the actual history of China, it's diffiuclt to understand why anyone would accuse this of being dangerous fascist propaganda. The king is allowed to live not simply because he is the king. A single individual has the king's life in his hands and decides spares him. The king in effct at the mercy of one of his subjects, and he earns back his life by living up to the standards that the subject demands of him.

This is not an endorsement of blindly loving your country's leaders no matter what, although it may be interpreted as a suggestion that China's leaders only seem like tyrants; when you get to know them better, they're really idealists with the country's greater good at heart. One of the letter writers in Salon (named Jackie Yuen) reminds us that the king portrayed in this film was, in actual history, a bloody tyrant on a scale with Stalin. If that's truly the case, then the film does deserve to be taken to task for white-washing an ugly piece of history.

But HERO is so layered in stylist fantasy motifs that it's impossible to take it seriously as history. One just as well might rip GUNFIGHT AT O.K. CORRAL to shreds because of its manifest inaccuracies. Neither film is about what really happened. Each film takes a an incident that is more legend than history and spins an entertaining yarn around it, creating larger than life characters who are far more idealized than their historical counterparts could ever be. In this modern era of DVD, it would be nice if both films arrived in special editions with documentaries explaining the difference between the reality and what the filmmakers chose to make. But we shouldn't let an ugly reality blind us from enjoying good filmmaking.

In his letter, Yuen makes a second charge: that the story of HERO is a fable repeated over and over like a mantry to justify support for the communist government in China. If this is true, it's a worthy point. We should be suspicious of foreign films that support quesitonable governments (just as we should be suspicious of questionable American TV movies that portray a flattering portrait of George W. Bush as a decisive man of action on September 11, when we all know that, in reality, he sat for seven minutes reading "My Pet Goat" and then hid out for the rest of the day). But are we talking about a film that intentionally makes a pro-fascist argument in favor of an oppressive government, or are we talking about a film whose interpretation can be twisted to seem to support an oppressive government. (Related question: if James Cameron went mad and decided to film Wagner's Ring cycle of operas, would that mean he was pro-Hitler?)

Bottom line: Seen in its historical context, HERO maye hav elements that should be viewed with a critical eye. However, the film can be ripped out of its historical context and shown to a Western audience that despises communism and  yet still finds something admirable in the film. This is because HERO is not a simple pieceof jingoistic political propaganda. It elevates its plot elements and characters to an archetypcal level that appeals to the best, not the worst, in us. As such, we can debate the film's relative merits, and even find fault with it, but we should not simply dismiss its undeniable greatness.

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