Hero notes -

History in Film

Episode 7 – Hero

Hello, and welcome to History in Film. I’m Rich Simmons.

Today we’re looking at 2002’s Hero staring Jet Li.

This in only the second movie on the list so far that I had seen before and the first on the list that I actually consider one of my favorite movies. It was fascinating to rewatch it with an eye for detail I hadn’t given it before. Similar to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the bulk of Hero is telling the same story three different times. Jet Li plays a Nameless warrior– his character is called Nameless–who is coming to meet the Emperor of Qin after defeating the three assassins who have been plaguing the kingdom. Nameless’s first reward is simply a one-on-one audience with the Emperor. He is allowed within 20 paces of the Emperor who wants to learn how he defeated the assassins. The first is Long Sky, played by Donnie Yen–the blind monk in Rogue One. The other two are Broken Sword and Flying Snow, a romantically involved couple–played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung who also co-starred in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Tony is probably my favorite non-English speaking actor. He was the lead in 2046 and Infernal Affairs which was remade as The Departed. with Tony originating the DiCaprio role.

Anyway, the structure of the film basically breaks down like this: Nameless tells the Emperor how he defeated the assassins, the Emperor then tells Nameless that he doesn’t believe him and gives his own version of what went down. Then, finally, Nameless agrees that his first version was false and tells the Emperor what REALLY went down.

So, when is this set and who are these characters? I don’t believe it says in the movie, but Hero is set in 227 BCE. The most significant character is, not surprisingly, the Emperor of Qin [pronounced “chin”], Qin Shi Huang(“Chin Shih Wong”) also known as Ying Zheng [Zjung] who becomes the first Emperor of unified China. This was all at the end of the Warring States period in China–over 200 years of fighting between the seven main kingdoms of China at the time.

That was proceeded by another 300 years of fighting during the Spring and Autumn period during the Zhou (Jzoh) dynasty. It’s hard to even comprehend how old China is. Written records date back approximately 3500 years to the Shang dynasty which itself is predated by a legendary dynasty–legendary in the sense that we’re not sure to what extent it actually existed, not in the it-was-so-awesome, Barney Stinson sense of the word. If I understand all this correctly, during the Spring and Autumn period, the Zhou (Jzoh) dynasty lost most of its central authority and local leaders were fighting each other for various levels of power. This basically evolved into the Warring States period with the seven main kingdoms that had consolidated during the Spring and Autumn period.

Qin Shi Huang seems to have just been a great commander. In just nine years, by 221 BCE, he conquered the other kingdoms and unified China for the first time. Granted, this was just a fraction of the China we see today, but it is considered the beginning of China as a nation and the beginning of the Imperial China that last until the Communist takeover in the 20th century. So, from what I can tell, while the preceding Zhou (Jzoh) dynasty last for approximately 800 years, it didn’t have control over what anyone would consider a unified China (in fact it had little control over anything the last half of its existence).

So, what about all these assassins? The exact assassins themselves would appear to be invention though there were attempts on the Emperor’s life. First was a failed coup that sounds like something out of Game of Thrones. Qin Shi Huang was just 13 when his father died and left him as heir with his trusted advisor Lu Buwei as regent. Well, Lu Buwei was likely having an affair with the new king’s mother (at least since the death of her husband). As Qin Shi Huang got older, Lu Buwei brought in another man to sleep with the king’s mother so as the throw heat off himself. Well, that new lover tried to stage a coup before being captured and torn apart by horse drawn carriages. Lu Buwei was exiled for his role and later committed suicide while Qin Shi Huang’s mother was placed under house arrest. The king was probably 21 at this time.

11 years later, the leader of one of the smaller kingdoms sent two men to approach Qin Shi Huang with gifts as a rouse to get close enough to the king to kill him. They failed miserably with one would-be assassin getting too nervous and the other accidentally dropping his dagger while presenting a map as a gift. One of the attackers was wounded by the king and both were killed by guards. This was in 227 BCE, (when they chose to set the movie; and we’ll come back to that) when Qin Shi Huang was about 32 years old.

The final noted attempt was by a musician who was friends with one of the previous would-be assassins. He was living under an assumed name and was invited to court to play for the king. Someone recognized him as an enemy and Qin Shi Huang ordered his eyes removed as he didn’t want to kill him and be deprived of a skilled musician. The musician still later tried to kill the king by bludgeoning him with a flute weight down with iron. But he missed and was executed.

How does all this compare to the movie Hero? The details of the story in the movie seem to be largely invented. If you want to pause until you have watched Hero, now is the time to do so.

Again, our main character is Nameless and he’s telling the Emperor how he defeated the three assassins. The first time through the story Nameless says that he tracked down and defeated Long Sky in a chess house. He then got Broken Sword and Flying Snow to turn on each other by exposing a love triangle between them and Long Sky. He claims Sky told him he was in love with Snow and will never find another love as great as she. This pits Sword and Snow against each other and through a rapid series of event they both end up dead. So Nameless says this is how he beat them.

The Emperor, however, says he has met Sword and Snow and insists Nameless is lying. He said they were both much too honorable for something like that to be true. The Emperor then guesses at his own version of events. In fact, he even suggests that Nameless has tricked him in order to gain an audience. He now thinks that Nameless is himself an assassin–that Long Sky willingly let Nameless kill him so that Nameless could get close to the Emperor. He says Sword and Sky probably then fought over who would die to Nameless so that he could get even closer to the emperor. The idea was he could get so close for killing one assassin and close enough to kill the Emperor if he had killed two assassins.

Nameless says that the Emperor is correct, he is an assassin. The Emperor then wonders why he hesitates–you’ve bested me, my guards are too far away; if you want me dead, I’m dead. Nameless has more to tell. He says the Emperor’s version isn’t quite right. He says, yes, he has perfected a move that can kill if he’s within 10 paces, but he also has a move that can make it looks like he’s delivered a fatal blow, but that you’ll survive it. So he didn’t kill Long Sky at all, just injured him in front of the Emperor’s guards in a way that made it look like he killed him. Nameless then met with Broken Sword and Flying Snow to convince one of them to take the wound as well. Snow quickly volunteers. But Sword surprises them both (as well as the Emperor now listening to this story) by saying that the Emperor needs to live and he will stop any attempt to kill the Emperor-he’s changed his mind. Snow then fights Sword and injures him enough to keep him out of the way while she takes the non-fatal blow in front of the Emperor’s men. Nameless encounters the injured Broken Sword on his way to the capital and Sword explains that though the Emperor is their enemy, he is the only one who can unite the kingdoms and ultimately bring peace.

The Emperor, hearing this, is baffled and touched–he even sheds a tear, that an assassin saw the true motivation behind his conquest: peace. He leaves his fate up to Nameless–he turns his back to him and says do what you will. Nameless does indeed spare the emperor’s life, a decision he may not have made until he got there and met the Emperor. As he marches away, the Emperor reluctantly orders his death at the insistence of his counselors. I would argue the title Hero refers simultaneously to Nameless, the Emperor, and Broken Sword. The Emperor for uniting the country, Broken Sword for seeing the bigger picture, and Nameless for putting aside his personal vendetta to leave the Emperor alive.

So while the details here are fictional, we can definitely see how the writers drew elements from real life. There were assassins who knew each other and conspired to trick their way into the emperor’s presence. Even the sacrificing of themselves for another to gain an audience occurred. I mentioned the gift of a map. Well the other gift that day was the head of another enemy of the Emperor’s who committed suicide so that the would-be assassins could present his head to the Emperor as proof of their loyalty. Talk about commitment to a cause–and they completely botched it.

Unfortunately too, the magnanimousness of Nameless and the Emperor are likely invention. Nameless, of course, if fictional and the real assassins didn’t fail on purpose. And I doubt the conquests of Qin Shi Huang were as noble as Hero would have us believe.

The closing on-screen notes before the credits also say that this was the Emperor who completed the Great Wall. This seems to be an odd thing to say. He did throw extensive resources into tearing down certain existing segments of the wall that divided China and building many new segments in the north to protect them, but the majority of the existing wall was built more than 1500 years later and little of the ancient walls of the Qin period still exist.

So, in closing, it’s a great movie with surprising parallels to actual events especially when those events occurred over 2200 years ago. Hero was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film of the year and received almost exclusively glowing reviews, with a few, however, claiming the film puts too happy a face on conquest and slaughter. It’s definitely in the category of something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which came out just two years earlier. It’s visually stunning with a great score – check it out. As of this recording, it’s available to stream and download on Netflix. The first emperor of China also appears in several other movies including The Emperor’s Shadow, The Emperor and the Assassin, and Jet Li himself portrays him in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Elsewhere in the world at this time, as we saw last week, Ashoka’s reign has just come to an end in India.

Hannibal will cross the Alps to invade Rome in 9 years.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, a wonder of the ancient world, is soon to be built in Egypt.

I do want to talk a little more about Qin Shi Huang outside of the context of our movie today. Again, he became king of Qin at 13 and unified China by the time he was about 39. To help secure the country, the new Emperor abolished feudalism and reorganized the country into new administrative territories. Units of weights and measures and the currency were all standardized. In addition to working on the Great Wall, an important canal was also built in the south to help transport supplies to his army.

He was also involved in an interesting quest that they alluded to in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, though it sounds like pure fantasy. He had alchemists in search of the elixir of life in an attempt to gain immortality. The tale includes a 1000-year-old wizard living on a mythical island. A large sailing expedition he sent never returned–with one legend crediting those who sailed away with exporting many Chinese innovations to Japan. When Qin Shi Huang died, it was about 17 years after the events in Hero and possibly due to one of the concoctions he had his alchemists brew up in his search for immortality.

The Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor is a tourist site you can visit in China. This is where the iconic Terracotta Army guarding Qin Shi Huang was discovered in the 1970s. If I understand correctly, I guess the tomb itself has yet to be excavated.

The Qin dynasty would last only four years and two emperors after Qin Shi Huang’s death before being replaced by the Han dynasty–though our word “China” does derive from the Qin dynasty. And We’ll return to China and the Han dynasty in a month or two.

The last few weeks, we’ve talked largely about who conquered who and who ruled where. Let’s take a moment and talk about the idea of the known world. I couldn’t find much research material about this exactly, but let’s just think through it. We’ve seen kingdoms and empires from the Mediterranean in the west, this includes Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, plus North Africa and Rome to China in the East with Mesopotamia, Persia, and India in between. The brush of conquest has been painted back and forth for a thousand years in our timeline. These places either dealt with each other directly or knew of each other through stories. These people were surely aware of tribes up in northern Europe, and there were tribes and lesser kingdoms in northern Asia and central and southern Africa – lesser in terms of their influence on the larger, diverse world we’ve been discussing so far. Though Somalia, for example, was a significant player in maritime trade and the domestication of camels. There was no contact with the peoples of the Americas. No knowledge that they existed.

Trade of goods is a key feature of early human civilization that we haven’t discussed. Don’t think of it as Chinese merchants traveling to Egypt or Rome, but as a giant sort of bucket brigade. I trade with the guy down the road who trades with those on the opposite of him and so on, allowing goods -and stories- to travel the world–the known world. The conquests of Alexander helped open up new cities and new trade routes. By the beginning of the 1st century BCE Roman made glass, for example, had found its way into China. And that’s about the best segue I can make from the unification of China in 221 BCE and Italy 150 years later in 73 BCE where we’ll finally meet the Roman Empire and see a revolt against them led by the slave Spartacus!

What’s going on in the rest of the world at this time?

Ashoka’s reign has just come to an end in India.

Hannibal will cross the Alps to invade Rome in 9 years.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria is soon to be built.

What’s there today?

There was a video from 2011 that noted the most typical person on Earth is a 28-year-old Chinese man.

Hero available on Netflix. I was actually able to download it and watch it on the plane on my way home from Portland in June.