Patricide Allegory in Palace Intrigues—A Critique of Shadow From the Cultural and Gendered Perspective

This paper examines the filming practice of Zhang Yimou’s Shadow (2018) in the context of Chinese culture and from the perspectives of contemporary gender theories. It argues that Shadow constructs a male-dominated patriarchal culture and a patricide allegory of the Father and Son structure of power in palace intrigues. Furthermore, it is a history of the acts that the Son takes to get the Father’s woman, absolve the tyrannical Father’s threat of castration and attain the supreme power. To suit the motif of palace intrigues, Zhang adopts quasi-back-and-white palette to create stunning visuals like traditional Chinese ink paintings. He also constructs a web-narrative of dualities around the yin-yang paradigm, the taichi diagram in particular. The film’s central gender relationship is a triangular one, in which Woman is positioned between the Father/the master and the Son/his “shadow”. Woman is marginalized in the film. She is not represented as the central subject, but as the object of sacrifice who functions to satisfy male desire and construct male subjectivity and sexuality. Moreover, the film explores how toxic and violent Chinese masculinity can become when it deviates from wen-wu prowess. Thus, Shadow becomes a violent movie that intensifies the viewer’s experience of violence as the Son/ the “shadow” must be absolutely brutal and ruthless in order to slay the Father/ the master and create new order.

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