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Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Memory, Schizophrenia,
and the Pathological Cop-hero in Hong Kong Action Cinema
Vivian LeeCity University of Hong Kong
Memory, Schizophrenia, and the Pathological Cop-hero
• Action, Nostalgia, and the Post-1997 Cinematic Landscape
• From John Woo to Johnnie To: the Hero and the City
• Schizophrenia and the Pathological Hero: Infernal Affairs and Confession of Pain -- between global screens and local space
The Inferno of No Rebirth
• Wu jian dao: the Avicci Hell -- a “high concept” apocalypse
• Gina Marchetti: - political allegory rising on the ashes of a failed moral tale; - schizophrenia as HK’s postmodern condition -- depthless nostalgia and a weakening of historical consciousness;- schizophrenia as HK’s identity crisis -- the chameleon's mental breakdown
Failed Nostalgia? Schizophrenia as Meta/Intertext
•obsession with memory as psychological symptom
•temporal disorder: the continuous hell?
•nostalgia as decadence or resistance: an open dialogue between Infernal and Confession
Falling From the Rooftop, Dropping on the Ground,
Recycling in Pieces: the Trilogy
• the High Concept and the pre- / se-quel: invoking ‘pastness’
• the ‘Good Guy’ and the ‘Bad Guy’: the double as lost ideal and parasite
• from ‘Heroism’ to ‘Corporatism’: but the Group disintegrates...
• the rooftop, the return to 1990’s gangster films, and the schizophrenic finale
Falling from the Rooftop
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History at the Ground Level: returning to the 1990s
• cinematic nostalgia operates in the trilogy, intensifying the sense of temporal disjunctions as the narrative return to time past compels a return to the visual codes and motifs of the previous decade that are either absent or de-emphasized in parts 1 and 3
Torn into Pieces: Parasitic Selves/Memories
• memory malfunction and failed nostalgia are the origins of schizophrenia, a psychological/existential condition that not only affects the psychotic hero as spectator, but also becomes part of our experience as the spectator of his vision.
• If the schizophrenic/chameleon and the last man standing is a representative of post-colonial Hong Kong, he is also a figure of the film itself – a schizophrenic mind/narrative trying to crossover from one life to another, to reincarnate into something different by hybridizing images old and new.
Schizophrenia: the pathological hero and his ‘para-text’
Confession of Pain: Memory, Retribution, and
Redemption
• HK 2003 to 2006: death of the vengeful hero and the recovery of an ordinary cop
• the hero’s guise: a “good cop” and family man
• the hero’s pathology: the alcoholic, the psycho, and the cold-blooded murderer
Framing the Hero
Framing the Hero
• the film distances the viewer from the hero, although he is persistently in the foreground in many key scenes.
• Instead of encouraging an affective connection between the viewer and the hero, the close-ups and the murder sequences reveal a psychotic behind the hero’s enigmatic face.
A Happy Ending? : The Denial of Redemption
Ominous Locales
• the city re-appears as an overseeing power
• the top-down perspective: a ‘third eye’ witness
• the urban space: affective connections
The Spatial Intertext: two lovelorn cops in a postmodern city
A Darkening Post-card City
Shang cheng, or the Wounded City
• “ Have you ever lost everything?”
• the ending denies its avenging angel the chance of a rebirth, but places this hope on the “everyman” (Takeshi Kaneshiro)
• down-beat banality: self-critique?
• Confession of Pain is in dialogue with the Infernal Affairs trilogy and its other contemporaries. This intertextual dialogue is motivated by a persistent questioning of pre-existing modes of cinematic representation, the filmmakers’ awareness of their own implication in the making and remaking of such modes of representation, and in effect the displacement/deconstruction of the heroic prototype into fragmented, pathological, and even schizophrenic variants as a response to and comment on the cinematic imagination of the previous decades and the transitory present.