Chinese national allegory goes West: Let the Bullets Fly

Abstract This article will look closely at a Chinese western, Jiang Wen’s Rang zidan fei/Let the Bullets Fly (2010). It will argue that Jiang’s film continues the tradition of national allegory and cultural critique of 1980s Fifth Generation films, albeit in a more postmodern mode. Incidentally, these 1980s films have in Chinese film criticism also been described as xibu pian (westerns), which was understood as an indigenous type of film that told stories set in China’s hinterlands. Let the Bullets Fly makes the connection of the xibu pian to the American/spaghetti western more explicit, exploiting the allegorical potential of both genres to present Jiang Wen’s personal vision of Chinese society and history, and the role of revolution in both. By doing so, Jiang re-nationalizes the de-nationalized model of the spaghetti western. While Jiang’s adoption of the iconography, settings, character types and plots of the western ends up strengthening the allegorical power of his film and led to widespread speculation about its potentially subversive political messages, his use of the genre in the final analysis also limits the film’s politics.