Antigravity Dreams in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

 
Humanity's communal dream life is haunted by a sense of flying. Yes, you must be able to remember those nightly visions in which your body has floated free of gravity, letting you soar through the sky with a magical power that's both thrilling and taken for granted.

As has been pointed out by any number of observers, experiencing films shares a good deal in common with dreaming dreams, so it should come as no surprise that floating and flying feature largely in contemporary cinema. For reasons related to their long obsession with mystical martial arts, the Chinese are particularly likely to portray the human body as an Antigravitarian object.

I'll allow stills taken from one recent Chinese martial arts movie to represent and dramatize this trend. The movie is Zhang Yimou's Hero, which was released in 2002 and stars a perfect cast that includes Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Maggie Cheung, Jet Li, and Zhang Ziyi.

Here in Hero, the special effects suggest that you can slough off gravity at will, as you might dead skin, which always makes for a very satisfying fantasy experience:







Unfortunately, fascism appears to triumph at the end of Hero, which mars the movie badly. For fascism is not an Antigravitarian form of government. In fact, it's got the worst kind of gravity written all over it.
 

Higher Vistas and Lower

 

Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By :

"I have noticed . . . when flying -- particularly over oceans -- that the world of sheerly physical nature, of air and cloud and the marvels of light there experienced, is altogether congenial. Here on earth it is to the lovely vegetable nature-world that we respond; there aloft, to the sublimely spatial . . .

". . . with each expansion of the horizon, from the troglodytal cave to the Buddhist temple on the hilltop -- and on now to the moon -- there has been, as there must inevitably be, not only an expansion of consciousness, in keeping with ever-widening as well as deepening insights into the nature of Nature (which is of one nature with ourselves), but also an enrichment, refinement, and general melioration of the conditions of human physical life."

A little commentary on Campbell:

What this means is that our minds are expanding whether we want them to or not, and so our more conventional thoughts are just as doomed to obsolescence as the worldview of medieval people. There is, therefore, no immortality in going along with the crowd and lazily believing what everyone else believes.

If you would avoid becoming a ridiculous little footnote to a worldview that is disappearing even as you continue to dedicate your life to it, if you would avoid being erased and nullified by the continuing evolution of human consciousness, then you have no choice but to rise up above the gravitational pull of the mass culture of your time -- you have to choice but to embrace Antigravity.