Zhang Yimou's Hero: dismantling the myth of cultural power

Abstract

Zhang Yimou's 2002 film Hero has been acclaimed by audiences and attacked by film and cultural critics, who often interpret it as an example of fascist aesthetics that supports totalitarianism in general and the Chinese authoritarian state in particular. I analyse Hero as an investigation into the viability of culturalism, or a meditation on aesthetics and its relationship to political power under the conditions of the nation state and the ‘community of nations’ to which modern countries belong. Culturalism refers to the implicit nation state mandate that each nation must have a set of distinct cultural practices, ideas and forms that inspire love and delight in the homeland, are readily represented and performed, and are powerful enough to lure and capture the gaze of the outsider while simultaneously appearing authentic in the eyes of the insider. Hero shows the false underpinnings of culturalism, in the process dismantling a powerful twentieth-century myth.