written and directed by John Woo

Yes, this is Criterion Collection #8.

Okay, I’m going to get this right.

Obviously, the English title is The Killer. But that’s not literal. This is the Chinese title as it appears in the film (see above):

喋血雙雄

This film was made and set in Hong Kong, so the language is Cantonese (rather than Mandarin) and the characters are “traditional” (rather than “simplified”). Wikipedia tells us that the “pinyin” romanization of the title is “Dié xuè shuāng xióng” but that’s inappropriate for Hong Kong Cantonese, which apparently calls for the “jyutping” system: “Dip hyut soeng hung.” (Actually, the full jyutping rendering includes numbers indicating the pitched “tone” of each word: “dip6 hyut3 soeng1 hung4.”)

喋 = “dip” = flow/chatter
血 = “hyut” = blood
(喋血 = bloodshed/bloodbath)
雙 = “soeng” = pair
雄 = “hung” = male/hero

The internet tells us that this adds up to “Bloodshed of Two Heroes,” though there are also votes for “Two Men Covered in Spattering Blood” and “A Pair of Blood Spattering Heroes.”

I myself would venture something like “The Bloodbath Duo,”* which is lame but at least sounds vaguely like the English title of a movie. Unlike “Two Men Covered in Spattering Blood.” Though if it wasn’t the result of clumsy translation, that would actually be a fantastic and charismatic title; similarly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sounds like a confused Chinese import if you have reason to hear it that way.

Now thoughts:

You can say that these slow-mo gun battles are joyful choreography rather than real, vicious gore, and in a sense that’s very true. This is a movie made by and for those who have fetishized movie violence to the point that it has lost most of its intrinsic, mimetic meaning. But I can’t wrap my enthusiasm around that. Numbing fetishization does not free us from meanings, it just diminishes our ability to master them. As non-schlock artists know, stylization is not the same as dehumanization. Dehumanization, in fact, is the cheapest, most insensitive form of stylization.

We are aware, watching this movie, of both its complete indebtedness to, and non-participation in, American culture. It is neither a well-formed American action movie, nor is it a direct imitation of one. Its relation to American film seems to be one of fascination at a distance; the considerable cultural distance at which Hong Kong lies. Individualism, a keystone concept in all American movies, is here emulated, but seems to have been understood only as an aesthetic, a fantasy, rather than as a genuinely felt philosophy or a personal reality. The movie is all about the epic, soulful charisma of the eponymous Killer, but it’s really only about the idea of epic, soulful charisma; the character has no true personal identity at all.

I was aware of the missing human element as a gap – not just in the character but also at the level of showmanship. Where is the “I,” in this movie, either making it or in it? At a subconscious level, I felt this gap as a sense of repression. Here’s where my thoughts begin to take on a naive and potentially racist quality; brace yourselves. The void at the heart of this movie reminded me of my recent experience with Seven Samurai, and suggested a line of thought about East Asian cultures generally; take it or leave it. In these movies, cultures that have not truly embraced the idea of the individual are at play with that idea, because they’ve been told it’s the stuff dreams are made of. But either their dreams are repressed to a greater degree than we know, or these aren’t their actual dreams at all.

The dialogues about the self, in The Killer, are like imitative poems written by enthusiastic aliens. “He looks determined without being ruthless. There’s something heroic about him. He doesn’t look like a killer. He comes across so calm… acts like he has a dream… eyes full of passion,” murmurs the cop to the sketch artist, apparently entranced by the apparently mysterious apparent personality of The Killer, while the synths dig deep into that minor tonic chord looking for love. Is that really the flavor of life, for anyone? It only relates to life via elements misunderstood from other movies.

It’s like Jack Skellington making Christmas. The movie is passionately enamored of the things that it doesn’t comprehend, because they are so fantastically unlikely. What’s this? A man with a dream? Eyes full of passion? How marvelous!

I’ll say it: I find East Asian mindsets very hard to crack and I think it’s because they are genuinely different in how they perceive the self. I still recall my amazement upon seeing Japanese WWII propaganda cartoons wherein the Japanese enthusiastically portrayed THEMSELVES as a ravening horde of identical creatures, led by an individual who served only as a representation of the national spirit. That psychological culture has obviously weakened but it seems to live on in many ways; it has not been truly supplanted by the Western idea of the individual.

In the present movie, viewers are not supposed to identify with The Killer, or his associate, or the cop – they are only supposed to recognize them from other movies. It seems not to be appropriate to identify with characters. Perhaps this is felt as a kind of intense propriety – the inner sensations of an individual are seen as bodily functions that ought not leak out. In theory, this would seem to be contradicted by movies where individuals fight and love and cry, but watching the movie you sense that there is no contradiction at all. These are not individuals, they are MOVIE CHARACTERS, large and fascinating and not like us.

To me, East Asian celebrities seem arbitrary somehow, like they don’t really have their heart in it. Japanese television etc. seems bewilderingly wacky to us because its priorities are so different. I suspect it has gotten so absurd because is not the content of culture but the fact of culture that is important to that audience. The real purpose of such culture is to disseminate the comforting, proud knowledge that one is a member of a society that is full of celebrities and noise and products and bullshit. The people on Japanese TV don’t seem like real people because obviously they’re not and, says Japan, why should they be? The whole notion of “real people” is beside the point – it’s beside any point. It goes without saying that real people are an embarrassing subject – the one truly, painfully shameful subject – and thankfully have no direct role in culture.

We see in Japan (yes yes, I know the movie is from Hong Kong; like I said, this is all irresponsible and racist) a culture of people learning how to be individuals from movies instead of from humans. They are the offspring of the West’s dreams, which the West can hardly recognize. There should be a version of the velveteen rabbit scenario where a kid wishes for his toy to be alive but when it comes to life it has a personality and mind totally and disturbingly alien, the way a toy’s really would be. Is there a story like that?

When I was in college, Isaac Stern came to speak and take questions at some event or other, and was audience-asked why there are now so many classical musicians of East Asian descent. He answered by saying that a century ago there were many Jewish classical musicians – because, he thought, the culture of classical music presented itself to Jews as a way “out of the ghetto” – and that he thought something similar was in effect for East Asians and Asian-Americans today; that classical music offered them a way out of the “cultural ghetto” of their ossified thousand-year-old traditional cultures. This answer immediately created a stir in the audience and provoked several indignant responses. I’m told that later in his visit, Isaac Stern was unambiguously unpleasant to several Asian musicians, so perhaps there was more in the air at that moment than I knew. But I wasn’t sure then how offensive that answer was, and I seem to be disseminating a variant of it now. Phenomena like the undeniable affinity of contemporary Asian cultures for classical music would seem to justify some kind of generalizations of this sort – the question is getting the generalizations right, and I doubt that I have since I’m pretty much just making it all up. But I believe there is, at least, some grain of truth in this: that Asian cultures have a distinctly different impression of the self from ours, descended from their historically different impression of the self, and perpetuate it subtly, through small behavioral cues that are not quickly subsumed by general assimilation, internationally or as immigrants; which accordingly creates a slightly different relationship to work, to the external world as a whole, and at least partially accounts for large cultural phenomena like the absurdity of Japanese TV and Hong Kong action movies, or the widespread East Asian enthusiasm for classical music.

Maybe even that’s offensive too but at this point I’m not sure why it would be. Offended parties, by all means please show up in the comments and set me straight.

Anyway, for all that I’m saying they don’t know from “the self” over there in East Asia, I’m surely there is in fact plenty of contemporary Chinese (and Japanese, and Korean, etc.) literature and film that is articulate and sincere and astute about it, and might open a window for me, but I haven’t gotten there yet. A glance down the list suggests that I might not get there through Criterion, either. Right now I’m just watching this silly shoot-em-up movie.

Film-buff multiculturalists are generally either nerds (who feel reassured and comforted by fetishistic, enthusiastic-alien abstract manipulation of social reality) or scholars (who are occupationally prone toward evaluating things in the abstract rather than feeling them – and thus tend toward the same lack of direct engagement) and so it is not a surprise to me that twisted-mirror fetish-variants of Hollywood fare are the Asian cinema most enthusiastically imported to the US. I don’t really have any sense of what “high,” “literary” “intellectual” culture from the East looks like.

Also, in this movie, when he takes the girl to the hospital, the sign says “Scared Heart Hospital.” Those crazy Chinese!

So, I didn’t really talk about this movie at all. Probably the most offensive thing about all the presumption above, in fact, is that it takes The Killer as its starting point. But stay tuned because the next selection is another John Woo bullet-fest starring Chow Yun-Fat and I stay much more on topic in that entry.

This Criterion disc is long out of print and rare, and though I did manage to find a rip of the movie itself, I couldn’t get my hands on the disc as a whole, so I didn’t get to experience the commentary or anything else. Hence no image of the disc menu above.

Music here is by Lowell Lo, a Hong Kong composer/actor who apparently owns a synthesizer almost as good as mine. No official soundtrack release. Here’s the main title; cue it up, release the doves, and look like you have a dream.

Apologies, again, that I dared think these things. I deleted the ugliest stuff. Open minds and open hearts, people! Not scared hearts! Let’s talk.

* I’ve now (later) found several sites that suggest “Bloodshed Brothers,” which is pretty good.