The Woo-Xia in The Killer: John Woo’s Modern Cinematic Wuxia

Xia (侠) is a concept that developed in the philosophies of the Warring States period. According to the court historian Sima Qian, who recorded the lives of real youxia (wandering errant swordsmen) and assassins, they were commoners and untenured warriors available for hire, who upheld a professional code of conduct based on the major philosophical schools of their time, “righteousness (yi), trust (xin), meritorious service (gong), tidiness (jie), tolerance (rang)”. Among these, yi and xin have become the defining qualities of Xia in literature and cinema.

The concept found literary expression during the Tang Dynasty, eventually developing into a genre and absorbing influences from various popular literary forms through the centuries. Since the 1920s, when the Shanghai film industry began adapting Xia novels, the wuxia pian has evolved through multiple different phases, though most works in the tradition feature a historical or historicist setting. This is not always necessary. In his book Chinese Martial Arts Cinema (2009), Professor Stephen Teo observes that “the genre is unified by its cultural history and its historicism but at the same time is ruptured and torn apart from its historical continuity by history itself”.

Over the last few decades, numerous works have engaged with wuxia in a modern diegetic space, such as David Lai, Jeffrey Lau and Corey Yuen’s Saviour of the Soul, which retells Jin Yong’s novel The Return of the Condor Heroes as an artistic future fantasy; Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio, known for its gimmicky martial arts presentation; Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, which parodies the tradition. One of the few directors that have achieved this modern transposition most thoroughly and profoundly, is John Woo. His engagement with the wuxia tradition have been widely acknowledged by scholarship and by Woo himself, in an interview with Marcin Krasnowolski for Five Flavours Film Festival in 2015, he states, “in my films, the sword is really just being replaced by a gun. In some sense, I’m shooting a modern wuxia film”. Yet there seems to be few explorations of precisely how he has done this. I will examine his work in this essay, in terms of its construction of the jianghu space, transposition of the aesthetics of violence and dialogue with key wuxia themes. Among Woo’s films, The Killer (1989) seems to me the best representation of this transposition.

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