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.