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Death and Hong Kong cinema

Laikwan Pang

Lecturer of the General Education Center , Hong Kong

Polytechnic University ,
Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Laikwan Pang (2001) Death and Hong Kong cinema, Quarterly Review of
Film and Video, 18:1, 15-29, DOI: 10.1080/10509200109361508
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509200109361508

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Death and Hong Kong Cinema

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Laikwan Pang

This study investigates "death" and Hong Kong cinema in two senses of the word
"death": indicating at once the idea of death as a recurrent theme found in Hong
Kong cinema, and the idea of the deterioration (and possible death) of Hong
Kong cinema not only in terms of the rapid decline of the recent box-office receipt
and therefore the number of productions, but also in regard to its local concerns
and cinematic forms. However, this is not a report analyzing and suggesting
ways to rescue the failing industry. I am less interested in viewing such "death,"
referring both to the industry and the city metaphorically, as a problem seeking
solutions than a cultural phenomenon with its own structure and meanings. In
this essay I will illustrate that the theme of death as represented in two recent
Hong Kong trilogies. The first one is the "1997 trilogy" directed by Fruit Chan:
Xianggang zhizao/Made in Hong Kong (1997), Qu'nian yanh.ua tebie duo/The Longest

Summer (1998), and Xilu xiang/Little Chang (1999), from which I will concentrate
on the analysis of Made in Hong Kong. The second trilogy is collectively produced
by a group of filmmakers in the studio Milkyway Image: Anhua/The Longest Nite
(Patrick Yau, 1998), Feizhang duren/Expect the Unexpected (Patrick Yau 1998), and
Zhenxin yingxiong/A Hero Never Dies (Johnnie To 1998). I choose these films to be
the focus of this paper because, justifiably, they represent an array of examples
demonstrating the recent Hong Kong cinema in its finest. But more to my interests,
both the two trilogies attempt to investigate, explore, and exploit the theme of
death. While Fruit Chan's trilogy uses death to represent the subjectivity of Hong
Kong people in the confrontation of 1997, the deaths in the Milkyway trilogy are
no longer the self-reflections of Hong Kong people but that of Hong Kong cinema,
challenging the granted role and achievement of this cinema as a direct mirror of
society and people. I will argue that the "deaths" represented in these Hong Kong
"autobiographies" are no mere simple thematic metaphors. Subject to the changing
set of social conditions, this cinematic (re)presentation of "death" inevitably transfers its functions from one structure to another, and heads for a possibly

LAIKWAN PANG recently received her Ph.D. at Washington University in Comparative Literature. She is now
a Lecturer of the General Education Center at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her book, titled Vision
and Nation: Building a New China in Cinema, The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema, 1932-1937, is forthcoming
in 2001 by Rowman and Littlefield.

15

16 Laikwan Pang

"dead end" for both the city's identity and its cinemaa cultural phenomenon of
tremendous fascination and ambiguities of itself.

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THE METAPHOR OF DEATH

But before our investigation of the two trilogies, I would like to provide a brief
background of the representation of death in Hong Kong cinema, which reveals the
intimate relationship between Hong Kong cinema and the cultural identity of
Hong Kong. Sek Kei, one of the most respected film critics in the city, has proclaimed:
"In point of fact, only a handful of film industries in the world have been able to
follow Hongkong's example of closely integrating its film industry into the entire
spectrum of prosperity achieved by its society" (54). This comment characterizes
the general impression of many critics to this cinema, attributing its success among
local audience to the movies' reflection and release of people's collective values and
passions, that the close affinity between films and society has contributed significantly to the success of Hong Kong cinema as one of the world's most original
and dynamic cultural industries. In fact, Sek Kei's comment refers not only to the
cinema's ability in reflecting the city's soaring economy but also to its relationship
with the city's fluctuating political ambience. "Death," for example, is a frequently
used metaphor in this cinema to illustrate people's sense of insecurity, particularly
in those periods when political stability is at stake. This is not to suggest that the
portrayal of death is the only means for filmmakers to come to terms with the
political unease of Hong Kong people; quite the contrary, it is only one technique,
probably the most simple and direct one, among many others to represent despair
and impotency. My interests in the use of "death" as a political allegory resides in
the notion's directness or even naivete that can be loaded too many meanings or
none at all.
There are abundant films found in the history of Hong Kong cinema that
employ death to allegorize people's changing attitude towards the city and
towards the future. In the left-wing cinema in the early 1950s for example, we see
the portrayal of the death of young children and babies as a common metaphor
for the filmmakers to project their view of demise of this British colony, as found
in the famous multi-episodic Renhai wanhua tong/'Kaleidoscope (1950) and equally
important Tiantang Chunmeng/Illusion of Paradise produced in the subsequent
year. Kaleidoscope was produced by the South China Film Industry Workers
Union, the most politically aggressive studio of the time, and involved almost all
major left-wing directors, scriptwriters, and talents of Cantonese cinema. Among
the six episodes, there are two directly depicting the death of children, attributing
the parents' impotency to save their children to the city's corruption and philistine culture. Illusion of Paradise was also co-directed by a group of famous leftwing filmmakers around that period. Not only did the film criticize and ridicule
the corruption of GMD expatriates in Hong Kong after their defeat on the mainland, it also brought a miscarriage to an illicit pregnancy between the tycoon's
scoundrel son and the sister of the progressive hero, demonstrating the narrative's
determination to terminate the young progressive generation any link to the
colony.

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Death and Hong Kong Cinema 17

Meanwhile, while more and more sojourners saw the prospect of staying in this
city longer than they had expected, the deaths represented in some other films
assumed the opposite meanings. For example, in Weilou chunxiao/In the Face of
Demolition (Lee Tit 1953), the one who dies in the film is no longer the youth but
their parents. Death portrayed in this film is no longer morbid at heart but represents a hope for rupture and renewal, for the death of the older generation gives
way to the younger ones. Other famous films using "death" to connect the collective
emotion of the people to the city's social circumstances can be found in Fumu xin/
Parents' Hearts (Qin Jian 1955), which connects the death of the opera singer to the
decline of this traditional art form, and therefore the good old Chinese values, in
the materialist and westernized Hong Kong, and Zuotian jintian mingtian/'Yesterday,
Today and Tomorrow (Lung Kong 1970), in which the whole city is declared a
plague-stricken territory that projects, once again, the filmmaker's critique of the
city's moral decadence.
All the above-illustrated films interpret death in a metaphorical way; that is to
say, the deaths of the characters are directly employed as representing a certain
social comment to society; the ending of a life signifies either a pessimist or optimist
remark about the future. Whether the filmmakers intended a complete abandonment of the city's identity or wished for a new identity to be born after the old
one, death suggests a hostility, a renunciation, and a finale, which is presumably
a reflection of people's concerns. This representation politics of linking characters'
death with the audience's collective feeling toward the city's political future continues its tradition to its confrontation of 1997.
As the year 1997 approached the city, Hong Kong cinema ironically experienced
a burgeoning development both in artistic and commercial terms. The city's collective anxiety seemed to be transformed into a surge of creative power that
intensified cinema's vigor. It is also during this period that we again see the use of
death as a handy metaphor to express people's sense of insecurity closely linked
to the city's political environment. As soon as the 1997 issue first started to crystallize in the public sphere, the Touben nuhai/The Boat People (Ann Hui 1982)
started to "kill" its major figures, casting a pessimistic glance at the 1997 handover.
Such cinematic practice becomes more and more visible in the 1990s. One of the
most prominent examples is Xin buliaoqing/C'est la vie, Mon cherie (Derek Yee 1993),
which uses the death of the vivacious young street singer Min to project a pessimistic
future to the city. The film obviously attempts to connect her charming and
optimistic personality on the one hand and her tenacious vitality on the other
hand to the development of Hong Kong in the last decades, yet her death in the
end almost denounces all of these admirable qualities already established.
Although Kit, Min's boyfriend, is able to pick up a new life at the end, obviously
the emotion of the film focuses on the audience's sorrows and incompetence
toward Min's death. The last parallel cutting sequence depicting the failure of the
"last-minute rescue" reveals most dishearteningly the fear of the historical "deadline"
Hong Kong was facing.
Following C'est la vie, Mon cherie there are a number of other Hong Kong films
connecting death with the city's political future, like Sange shoushang de jingcha/
The Log (Derek Chiu 1996) and Baolie xingjing/Bullets over Summer (Yip Wai-shun

1998), in which the deaths of the protagonists, also members of the Royal Police

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18 Laikwan Pang

Force, project a pessimistic end of the colonial era. There are also other films
depicting deaths in a more positive tone. In Tianmimi/Comrades, Almost a Love
Story (Peter Chan 1996), for example, the death of the popular singer Teresa Tang
leads to the revival of a love affair between two Hong Kong mainlanders meeting
again in New York, prophesying a new transnational Chinese era. In Tianya
haijiao/Lost and Found (Lee Chee-ngai 1995), the dying female protagonist finds
her paradise not in her dreamland in Scotland but ultimately in Hong Kong, the
place she has been trying to escape throughout the film. The film ends not only
with her death but also with her newborn baby, who can easily be interpreted a
metaphor of the new post-1997 Hong Kong.
Although conceived under a different historical and political context, the
convoluted sentiments of the above-mentioned "1997" films toward the city's
future through the portrayal of death are in fact similar to those made decades
ago. The deaths portrayed are allegorical to the city's political prospects, and most
of them, like that in Face of Demolition, hint at a new beginning after the death of the
characters, covertly hoping for a renaissance of the city after the end of British colonialization. These late pre-1997 Hong Kong movies are characterized and dominated by the city's political environment, in the sense that the deaths portrayed can
be seen as direct metaphors of the city's political crisis. In other words, although
the significance of the 1997 issue to the development of recent Hong Kong
cinema is beyond doubt, these films do not introduce a new panorama to relate
themselves to their socio-political environment; cinema continues to remain mostly
as social reflections.
DEATH AND SUBJECTIVITY

In the following, I will continue to trace the depiction of death in the recent Hong
Kong cinema, and I will demonstrate that in these films what we witness is rupture
and violence being inscribed in the exposure of a "post-1997" subjectivity, resulting
in confusion, incomprehension, and impotency. I will use Fruit Chan's 1997 trilogy,
particularly Made in Hong Kong, to illustrate that the films' 1997 is not a simple
threshold representing a passage between "death" and "rebirth" but implies the
courage to embrace death and the subsequent void thereof. From this explication
I will continue by the Milkyway Image's trilogy to connect this cinematic subjectivity
of Hong Kong to the subjectivity of Hong Kong cinema. I will use these films to
illustrate that Hong Kong cinema might finally farewell its social mission as the
(allegedly) authentic site of expression and reflection of the city's communal sentiments and social conditions, and I will analyze what "death" might really mean
to the recent Hong Kong cinema. My aim is to illustrate that both the two trilogies
pose the ontological question of death that might be the end of itself than an
attempt to resurrect a "worthy subject," that Hong Kong cinema is really facing a
unique moment of its own that paralyzes itself.
The independent production Made in Hong Kong, which received the Best Film
and the Best Director titles of the 1997 Hong Kong Film Awards, is the first of
Fruit Chan's 1997 trilogy; it can be seen as both the epitome of Hong Kong cinema's
tireless probing into the doom of 1997 and its breakthrough. It illustrates that

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Death and Hong Kong Cinema 19

death and Hong Kong could be connected in a more intimate and ambiguous
fashion, allowing the audience to connect the characters' deaths not only to some
pre-ordained fate but also to an investigation of what the affirmation of Hong
Kong identity entails. The deaths signified, as I will argue, function not only
thematically but also semiotically, examining the difficulties in establishing a
Hong Kong identity in the current political environment along with the difficulties
in acquiring identity in a structural sense.
The story begins with the suicide of a high school girl Susan. The last two letters
she wrote, one to her lover and another to her parents, are picked up by a
retarded boy Sylvester who brought them back to his buddy Moon. At the same
time Moon also falls in love with Ping, a girl suffering from a terminal illness. The
film then shows the death of Ping, Sylvester, and Moon one after another. Death
is like a contagious disease that affects all the three youths who have read and
touched Susan's letters soaked in her blood. The four main characters in the film
are teenagers, and the course of the narrative depicts the process of their growth
and attempts in acquiring individual identity; but none of them ultimately enters
the adult world. Instead, they are trapped in the threshold between youth and
adulthood, and their deaths can be seen as a willful challenge and refusal to pass
through the rite of passage provided by the institution in order to remain infinitely
in the enjoyment of "non-identity."
However, their deaths can also be read as affidavits affirming their identity.
There are many moments in the film showing Moon being haunted by Susan in
his dreams. Interestingly, his washing his underpants after waking up suggests
that the dream in fact has been a wet one. The film constantly reminds the audience
of the intimate, instead of threatening, relationship between the dead Susan and
the three protagonists, visualized in the change of the color of Susan's blood from
red to white in Moon's dream. Another scene shows Ping, Sylvester, and Moon
visiting the graveyard for fun and finding a paradise in the foggy and dreary
scene. Holding the bloody letters at hand, the three begin to search for Susan's
tomb, looking at the engraved names one after another to match their unknown
friend. After some futile efforts, the three begin to yell her name to the empty
graveyard, hoping that Susan would respond. Interestingly, earlier they search
for Susan's tomb to confirm her death, and it seems they are trying to locate her
silence. But once they begin to cry out her name, the three render a subjectivity to
the dead one; they hope that they can start a dialogue and communicate with
Susan, that is, death. As the three will one after another join Susan, this scene
shows that the youths in fact have been trying to look for death in order to establish
a relationship with it.
This flirtation with death is in fact closely related to the notion of communication,
and therefore to the desire of the youths to be understood and recognized. Of
Susan's two letters, one is addressed to her high school teacher, supposedly her
lover. But right after receiving the letter from the three protagonists, the teacher
immediately tears up the letter without reading it, aborting Susan's first attempt
of communication. At the end of the film, the second letter, sent to her parents,
finally reaches the hands of the addressees, but now it also bears the imprints of
Ping's and Moon's last words. Susan's second attempt of communication finally
succeeds along with Ping's and Moon's experience of their own deaths. The film

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20 Laikwan Pang

is highly critical of the adult world and demonstrates the evil ways of the grown-ups
throughout, epitomized in the toilet scene when a teenager chops off his father's
hand in an outraged reaction to his father's rape of his sister, the man's own
daughter. However, Susan's second letter finally establishes a communication
between the two generations, between the deceased and her parents.
At the end of the film, when Moon is found dead at the graveyard by a group of
playful and merry kids, we hear the fantasized People's Radio of Hong Kong
announcing a speech by Mao to youth leaders off-screen: "This is your world, and
so is ours. By the end of the day, it's still yours." This statement is equivocal, because
Mao's relation with youths can be seen as parallel to the Chinese government
with Hong Kong: the "you" mentioned here corresponds not only to young Chinese
people but also to Hong Kong and the four now dead characters. In this case, this
statement is clearly sarcastic in tone, for the film's youngsters, who are promised
to own the world, are now rejected by the same world. However, although the
four Hong Kong youths choose death as a way to express their anger in this alienated
world of the adults, to complain about their impotency to determine the city's
political future, their subjectivity is also revealed through their deaths. On the one
hand, through the detour of the deaths of the other three, Susan's words are ultimately brought back to her parents, facilitating a means of communication between
the two generations. On the other hand, after death Moon's voice is heard once
again, revealing that his off-screen voice heard throughout the whole film is
always already posthumous. Moon might have failed to communicate with the
other adults in the film, but because of his death he establishes a direct relationship
with the audience, which might be the most courageous and affirmative way to
embrace the 1997 mastered by oneself. As Moon states in the ending off-screen
narration, they are now immune to face an uncertain world and finally able to
claim a being of their own.
This representation of subjectivity is further explored in the film's sequels,
although they are less structurally coherent than the first film. However, as the
more the films are reluctant to be made sense of through truncating and confusing
their narratives, they are more committed to reveal the internal world of the characters. While Made in Hong Kong exhibits the subjectivity of Hong Kong youths in
the confrontation of 1997, The Longest Summer is about Hong Kong's middle-aged
males and Little Chang about children in the same context. The Longest Summer
tells the story of a group of Chinese solders being disbanded by the colony's British
garrison in 1997. These veterans find themselves cast off by society and ending up
bank robbers. Ga Yin, the leader of the group, is dragged into a gang fight at the
end of the film. He shot a bullet through the jaws of a juvenile gangster; and in
turn he is also shot at his head. While the audience assumes his death in this
injury, in the very last scene of the film he is shown being a coolie on the street.
With a scar on his skull, he has lost, or pretends to have lost, his memory when
the daughter of the Mafioso meets him on the street. In Little Chang, we see 1997
from the perspective of the nine-year-old Little Chang, who loses his beloved
grandmother, his best friend Ah Fan, and his Filipino maid/surrogate mother during
the year. This heavy theme of initiation is set in and contrasted with a much more
light-hearted domestic environment and childhood innocence. This story is also
told along a real social setting in Hong Kong: we are constantly shown television

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Death and Hong Kong Cinema 21

programs narrating the chronology of the family dispute of the popular opera
singer Tang Wing-cheung (or New Ma Shi-zhan) when he was dying, which was
a real-life soap opera to many Hong Kong people during those months.
Although death is not as foregrounded in the two sequels as in Made in Hong
Kong, both films are attempts to reveal the subjective world of the protagonists
associated with death. As one of the veterans in The Longest Summer claims, one of the
biggest shame in their lives is being a soldier but fought never in a war, suggesting
that they need a battle to define and legitimate their identity. The film can be seen
as both a realization and a mockery of their flights of fancy. Although the narrative
does not stay with any single character's perspective throughout the film, everywhere
the veterans passed by turns into a battlefield, which ultimately always becomes a
stage for farce. This search of subjectivity is grotesquely visualized in the young
man with a hole in his head who appears both in the beginning and at the end of
the film, whose head is blown up by Ga Yin at the final fighting scene. Parallel to
this man-with-a-hole is Ga Yin's scar on his head. It is not until his head is being
shot is Ga Yin able to come to terms with the discord between reality and his own
subjectivity. To Ga Ying 1997 is this permanent injury that brings an end of memory.
In contrast to the carefully choreographed mise-en-scene in The Longest Summer
that accords with soldiership, both the narrative and the visual of Little Cheung is
carefree, fragmented, and boisterous, reflecting a subjective world of children. It
is a film about as much the death of the opera singer Tang Wing-cheung as the
death of Little Cheung's childhood, which is made up of his simple loves and
hates being completely disordered at the end of the film. The most beloved ones
of his leave him one by one, and he ends up embracing the rascal he has been trying
to ridicule throughout the film. Another important component of the film is Little
Cheung's search for his elder brother, who was kicked out from family by his
father years ago. His brother is like a ghost in his mind defining the mystery of his
past and future.
Paul de Man has argued that autobiography is ultimately a defacement of one's
identity because of the impossibility of closure of all textual systems (67-81). The
paradox of autobiography remains that writing is ultimately always about death:
the death of subject caused by the death of language. There is an unbridgeable
distance between the subject who writes and the subject written about, although
the two occupy the same subjectivity. In an autobiography, presuming a subject
capable of self-knowledge and understanding will only lead to disappointment.
Not refuting this famous hypothesis of de Man, Slavoj Zizek, illustrating Lacan's
notion "metaphor of the subject," provides us another perspective to complicate
subject formation in linguistic act. He states: "We somehow 'feel' that no words
can adequately represent our innermost subjectivity, that its proper content can
only be alluded to; yet simultaneously we 'feel' that a speech which functions as
pure, transparent medium of designation is in a way 'subjectless'; that one can
detect the presence of a subject through the elements of style, metaphor devices,
and so on" (49). In other words, while language always misrepresents the subject,
the subject is also laid bare in the style and process of enunciation. De Man might
be right in illustrating the impossibility in establishing an essential identity in any
linguistic act, but Zizek reminds us that a subject, or a subjectivity, is precisely
composed of and identified through language in its stylistics and devices.

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22 Laikwan Pang
The above trilogy gives us some interesting perspectives to illustrate and complicate this predicament in establishing an identity/subjectivity. In Made in Hong
Kong for example, the deaths of the Hong Kong subjects suggest the impossibility
of acquiring a post-1997 Hong Kong identity. However, as I have illustrated, the
voices of the four characters are heard only after their deaths: while the film hints
that the identity of Hong Kong can never be properly signified, its subjectivity is
clearly revealed in the very process of communication. If Made in Hong Kong is a
film about the impossibility in constructing a new postcolonial Hong Kong identity,
this negation of identity is accompanied with an affirmation of disclosure. Death
crystallizes the communication difficulties between the two generations, and
allegorically between the two lands of Hong Kong and the mainland; but at the
same time it also makes dialogue possible. The Longest Summer and Little Cheung
also tread on the same path, that the symbolic deaths of Ga Yin and Little Cheung
serve less as points of departure of the characters' new beginning than as their
justification to make sense of and reorder and reconstruct their past subjectivity.
The relationship between death and the denial of a Hong Kong subject as revealed
in the three films, I would argue, helps fathom de Man's and Zizek's elucidation
because it most intimately connects some linguistic speculations to identity politics.
All the three films associate death with 1997, but the deaths are less a sentimental
metaphor of anxiety than a structural position in any identity formation. In the
confrontation of a new political order, Hong Kong does not simply die and is
reborn. We witness a complex process of betrayal, resistance, coercion, and irreplaceable destruction. The deaths represented in the films are neither just pessimism nor optimism to a Hong Kong identity; instead, a subjectivity is being
disclosed and observed that challenges the formation of any new postcolonial
Hong Kong identity.
Interestingly, the commercial-cum-artistic success of Hong Kong cinema in the
1980s and 1990s coincided with the city's political uncertainty. However, when
Hong Kong steps into the relatively stable post-1997 period and bears witness to
the emergence of a new Hong Kong political identity, and when Hong Kong cinema
hits the peak of its popularity in the West, the local film industry confronts the
threat of complete break down. Other than the Asian financial crisis and the
exhaustion of creativity in Hong Kong cinema, the filmmakers and production
companies' inability in comprehending the market needs is also one major reason
leading to the cinema's rapid downfall. Hong Kong cinema can no longer as easily
find a communal emotion it can hang onto, as a post-1997 identity is no longer as
transparent as that in the transition period when the fate of the six millions people
are socio-politically connected by the fantasized demise of 1997. As the city enters
its postcolonial period, the 1997 "hangover" (as it were) begins to fade among its
people and cinema. If the audience finally discovers that Hong Kong films no
longer, or always fail to, release their collective sensations and provide them identity,
does that signal the "death" of this famous "domestic" cinema, as its "social
reflective" ability has been considered key to this cinema's success? To further
explore the relation between Hong Kong cinema, Hong Kong subjectivity, and
death, let us turn to our second trilogy: The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, and
A Hero Never Dies, and see how the films upset the gangster genre, one of the most
important cinematic form in Hong Kong.

Death and Hong Kong Cinema 23

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A HERO NEVER DIES?

The Longest Nite is a gangster movie set in contemporary Macau. In the film two
gangs, the one led by Mr. Lung and that by Mr. K, control the city. After eight
months of violence and struggles for domination, the two dons decide to give a
meeting and settle their conflicts because these savage battles have outraged the
Godfather Mr. Hung, who is planning to eliminate both of them. However, right
before the meeting, there is a rumor about a five-million-dollar contract put up by
K on Lung, a rumor in fact spread by the Godfather to prevent the planned deal.
The story takes place in the night before the meeting, and it narrates how Sam,
a cop and also K's subordinate, is called in to protect Lung, therefore K. It turns out
that Tony, Hung's assistant, has predicted and manipulated all of Sam's actions,
so that at the end Sam becomes the one condemned for killing both K and Lung.
Sam knows that the only way to escape Macau is to become Tony, whom he must
kill and replace. Tony is decapitated in the final fight with Sam, and Sam succeeds
in arriving the dock, where a boat is waiting for Tony, at the end of the film, but
he fails to escape his doom because the Godfather allows no one, including Tony,
to survive.
The drama is set against a real social context. The Portuguese colony is famous
for its gambling industry, which explains frantic gangster activities. The mafiosi
went wild in 1998 and committed ongoing violence because of their fear of the
1999 handover of Macau. They struggled for power, deeply worrying that their
activities and profits will be terminated by the coming "legitimate" power, which
might embody more fierce violence. The film's narrative can easily be compared
to the real situation Macau is facing, with the Chinese government represented
by the old Mr. Hung, who in the film has not been back to Macau for more than a
decade. Expect the Unexpected, which also features crimes and violence, focuses
instead on cops. In the narrative two criminal gangs intersect, causing much
violence in Hong Kong, and a police unit attempts to tackle both of them. The
first criminal group has just arrived in Hong Kong illegally from the mainland;
the gang is supposed to be an inexperienced rabble committing impromptu
crimes in order to grasp quick money and return home. The other group, in
contrast, is a sophisticated team of local criminals headed by a brutal but clearheaded mastermind. There is a culture of recent Hong Kong cinema representing
the mainlanders as criminals. But the general stereotype falls into two polarities:
the stupid and clumsy thieves, as abundantly represented in Stephen Chiau's
comedies, and the fearless but brutal lawbreakers, as seen in the famous Long
Arm of the Law (1984). Expect the Unexpected seems to be aware of this stereotypical
representation and plays with these two seeming opposing but in fact mutually
reinforcing images.
The film begins with an incident when the two groups are spotted in one building,
and the narrative proceeds with the police unit chasing of the two groups separately. Along with the detective narrative, the story also reveals the different
dilemmas the individual cops face. Macy is hiding her true love from her colleague
Jimmy. Instead, she is assumed by the others to be the secret admirer of Ken, the
head of the unit. Ben, the shooter, is caught between his wife who is expecting a
triplet and his mistress who is suffering from cancer. Sam and Ken, the film's

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24 Laikivan Pang

protagonists, fall for the same woman and are perplexed by her choice between
them. The intricacy of the narrative lies in the sophisticated coils caused between,
on the one hand, the convoluted identities of the two gangs and, on the other
hand, the personal predicaments these cops individually confront. Audiences are
deceived in mastering the narrative; they turn out to be as ignorant as the characters,
assuming mistakenly that both Macy and Mandy fall for Ben, that the mainland
gang is less violent than the local one. The film at the end reveals that the identities
of the two gangs have been confused both by the cops and the audience. Right
after killing the entire group of local culprits, all the cops are in turn killed even
more brutally by the supposedly intimidated and inexperienced mainland criminals.
At the end of the film, the audience and the dying cops are all perplexed by the
fallacies of their earlier expectations.
Jack and Martin are two mobsters of distinguished valor in A Hero Never Dies.
They work for two rival gangs but personally admire each other's talents and
courage. They are badly hurt by each other in a battle between the two gangs in
Thailand. While Jack falls into a coma, Martin has to amputate both his legs to
keep his life. It turns out that their lovers suffer the most from their defeats,
through taking care of them and protecting them from further disgrace. Later
they find out that their bosses have long been threatened by their forte and have
decided to get rid of Jack and Martin after this incident. Their lovers are killed as a
result. The two gang leaders are also chickened out by their year-long mutual
slaughtering and seek peace from the General in Thailand. There they make the
deal and agree to collaborate on developing their business together. The film then
traces how Martin plans to assassinate his traitor, but he dies before Jack comes
back to help. The final scene shows Jack and the dead Martin in collaboration killing
everybody, including themselves, in a night club in the most extravagant and
surrealist way, carrying the aesthetics of heroism, although a collective one, to
the extreme.
Produced by the same creative team within a short period, although the three
films are not advertised as a trilogy, they are seen by many as a coherent unit. The
Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected are interconnected most obviously in the
common name and identity of their protagonistsSam the police. The films
indeed can be seen as each other's mirror image. The Longest Nite is about gangsters,
set in a summer's night, employing downbeat music and melancholic ambiance
to portray the themes of betrayal and conspiracy. On the other hand, Expect the
Unexpected is a story about cops, shot mostly on rainy days, saturated with joyful
color and music to depict romance and brotherly trust. In fact, this form of mirror
pairing can be observed in the individual films: Tony and Sam are portrayed as
doubles in The Longest Nite, so are the two criminal groups in Expect the Unexpected,
as well as Jack and Martin in A Hero Never Dies. In addition to the films' content,
they also share common generic conventions. All the three films reveal general
traits of the gangster story, that the films emphasize the establishment of the male
characters through the celebration of violence and masculinity.
Regarding the character development of the heroes in the films, the most
remarkable and surprising moments take place at the end when the major characters) die(s). The films constantly show the struggles between the characters and
the narrative, revealing the protagonists' battles with a certain unknown "fate"

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Death and Hong Kong Cinema 25

that dooms their efforts. The deaths of the characters at the end of all the three
films can be seen as punishment for their self-assurance established earlier in
assuming their autonomous individual being. In The Longest Nite, Sam is chosen
to be the focus and victim of the entire conspiracy because he has doubts and does
not succumb to Hung's potency. The film can be seen as Mr. Hung's revenge on
Sam for his noncompliance. In Expect the Unexpected, right before the final chase
sequence, all the cops decide to confront their personal perplexities and resolve
their dilemmas immediately. But the narrative prevents such a liberating resolution
by killing all the characters. The death of Martin in A Hero Never Dies is also unanticipated, because a major part of the film is about Martin's painful efforts to overcome his physical inability, turning himself to a robot-like killer. His sudden
death made all his earlier efforts futile.
The hero's struggle against the status quo or social injustice through violence
and crime is featured and celebrated in most gangster films. In the three films,
such masculinity is also established by earlier triumphs of the heroes in destroying
the supposedly main rival forces: Sam killing Tony, representing the authority of
Mr. Hung, in The Longest Nite; the cops subduing the local group of criminals in
Expect the Unexpected; and Martin overcoming his crippling injuries in A Hero
Never Dies. The final deaths of the heroes come completely unexpected because
their authority is already established before they are brutally destroyed. Rejecting
all calculations and wisdom of the heroes and the audience, the films ultimately
mock the sense of heroism instituted both within the film and the gangster stock
by refusing the consummation of that ideology. This theme of (dis)protection of
the heroes is particularly epitomized in the two Sams' wearing of bulletproof vest,
which saves their lives in the earlier gunfire scenes in The Longest Nite and Expect
the Unexpected. However, the vests ultimately fail to protect the heroes from those
final bullets that also catch the audience in surprise. We can argue that the films
"disprotect" both Sam and the audience from the genre formula, resulting in the
latter's destabilization. A Hero Never Dies carries such mockery of heroism to an
extreme, not only condemning Martin's premature death but also bringing the
dead hero back to the battlefield. When Jack is alone fighting two or three dozens
gangsters with at least twenty bullets in his body, when the dead Martin can still
pull the trigger of his guns killing several more, the filmmakers cannot but play
parody with Hong Kong's gangster stock and put a question mark after the film's
title.
The violence is indeed as much a punishment to the characters as to the audience.
By toying with the audience's pre-established expectations to the genre formula,
these three films refuse to grant the audience a secure grip of the progression of
the plot. As Torben Grodal discusses about audience reception in crime films, that
we the spectators "actively construct our emotions and interests in accordance
with the mental states of the detective; we are 'on a guided tour'" (241). David
Bordwell also argues that the detective genre often controls the audience's emotional
states by making us share the detective's knowledge (65). This sense of confusion
and paralysis is indeed featured in the films' last scenes. In The Longest Nite the
men hired to kill Tony/Sam fall into an argument after the killing of when and
how the plan should be executed. More obvious in Expect the Unexpected, there is a
group of passing police at the other end of the street helplessly watching the

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26 Laikwan Pang

onslaught; they can be seen as occupying the position of the audience as onlookers
too impotent to make out the confusion and save the heroes.
Closely related to the gangsters is the detective genre. Both The Longest Nite and
Expect the Unexpected withhold crucial events in the narratives in order to invite
the investigation of the audience and the detectives. In a cafe scene in Expect the
Unexpected for example, Ben accuses Sam of not listening carefully to people's
words, reflecting on the narrative's solid demand for the audience's attentions to
details. However, the suspense does not resolve itself at the end. The Longest Nite
first invites the heroes and audience to subjugate the conspiracy by emphasizing
numbers all through the film, placing close-ups on many different telephone
numbers, room numbers, and locker numbers through the point-of-view of the
characters. These shots can all be seen as tricks to solicit audience's desire to
decode the master plot, also inviting identifications of the audience with the involved
characters who are constantly subject to and haunted by the environment. But
none of these clues lead to any resolutions to the detective plot, and they all
remain as empty signifiers. Telephone numbers are particularly featured in the
film to suggest the mutual search of characters for each other, climaxed in the
warehouse fighting scene between Tony and Sam who attempt to locate the other
by calling each other's cellular telephone. To Tony's surprise, the telephone ringing
only leads to his discovery of a mirror image of himself, because Sam appears,
including the tattoo and the skinhead, exactly like him. This failure of the narrative
to locate the signifieds of these seemingly meaningful signifiers transforms the
detective quest, as illustrated by Torben Grodal, into an "obsessional" one, turning
the clues into saturated symbols that cannot be fixed any definite meaning any
more (168-69). And the intricately related signification of deaths and the empty
clues combine to create a strong sense of loss and vulnerability that both the form
(the genre) and the content (the characters) can no longer master their own being.

DEATH AND IDENTITY

The above discussion is not to argue that the gangster genre in Hong Kong cinema
disintegrate. What is at stake in the three films, that when the films' heroes are
prosecuted and when the audience's expectations are offset, is a self-awareness
and self-interrogation of the genre that is, however indirectly, not dissimilar to
the case we have analyzed in Fruit Chan's 1997 trilogy. I would not consider this
self-interrogation of genre the same as Rick Altman's "genrification" (50-53, 64),
which constitutes the development and dissociation of genre type that links to
the capitalist need for product differentiation, because here we witness a strong
sense of impotency, paralysis, and despair that call attentions to, instead of conceal,
the form. In Made in Hong Kong, the subjectivity of the four characters evolves in
the process of realizing death. In the three Milkyway Image's films, the delicacy
and vulnerability of the genre order also allows its form and structure seen and
heard. In his recent study of American gangster movies, Jonathan Munby proclaims
that the gangster captures the antagonistic imagination of a population afflicted
with unresolved social problems in the industrial urban environment of the time.
Mark A. Reid also argues that "censorship laws and social taboos determined

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Death and Hong Kong Cinema 27

how gangster heroes celebrated criminality and how they died as a result in this
game" (468). Most scholars of gangsters read the films as venues for the discharge
of people's discontent and, therefore, as mirrors of society. As Munby argues
that: "The battle... to control Hollywood's representation of American life illuminates the extent to which the mass cinema was at odds with power prerogatives.
For the latter, the gangster film and 1940s crime cycle constituted the most unacceptable face of the popular culture, a site where memory could be served, where
audiences could be reminded of the things power would prefer them to forget" (185).
However, I would argue that the violence and transgression in gangster films
could be as much a reflection of conventional understanding of "law and order"
in society as the films' comments to their own form and stylistic conventions. In the
case of this Hong Kong gangster trilogy, the aggression signified in the last killing
scenes is mostly directed toward its narrative form. As shown in these films, no
humanity of brotherhood, wisdom, and romance can overcome an omnipotent
narrative, that, for example, even Mr. Hung cannot completely master in The Longest
Nite, as at the end of the film he still assumes that the one killed by his men at
the pier is Tony. Unknown to him is that Tony has already died, quite randomly
indeed, in the earlier fight with Sam. This aggrandizing of the narrative power
towering above all human forces and calculation is in fact less a salutation than a
condemnation of classical cinematic form that fails to tame the saturated narrative.
But it is also at the point of this negation that the "subjectivity" of an important
genre of Hong Kong cinema reveals itself.
In Hong Kong cinema the "spectacle" often reigns over the plot: "action" is
generally conceived as its tour de force. This cinema's incessant fascination with
violence and speed constantly revives itself by introducing new mechanics of
movement in rhythm, choreography, mise-en-scene, and editing. Narrative disruption, as a result, is generally tolerated as "motion/' which is one of the most
essential "compositional motivations" in Hong Kong cinema that can glue fragments
into some form of coherence. The Milkyway Image trilogy we have discussed also
ensures this tradition of energy, but the significance of the films resides in their
reflective use of violence, which functions not only on a thematic level but also
structurally serving as forces to destroy and reveal the film form. The ideology of
masculinity is often concealed by the embedded social discontent in gangster
films, in which the sexist appeals are legitimized by the hero's execution of justice.
Roland Barthes calls "myth" a self-disguising process of the bourgeoisie who
obliterates its name in passing from reality to representation to maintain its discursive control in society (138^11). This notion of myth can also be applied to the
study of film genre, that its formulaic plot development, and therefore its hidden
values, is taken as natural and factual, that the dominant philosophy of the film
type can be perpetuated without waking the audience's awareness. Here in these
two films we observe not the features of violence or masculinity being celebrated
and erected; instead, they execute self-interrogation that reveals, overwhelms,
and paralyze themselves.
However, I would like to point out that this cinematic reflexivity is not context-free.
Instead, the sense of insecurity reflected in the films is ultimately underscored by
the general pessimism lingering around Hong Kong film circles about the
impending financial doom. The years of 1998 and 1999 witnessed one of the most

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28 Laikwan Pang

desperate moments of Hong Kong cinema since its full blossom in the 1950s. The
domestic box-office receipt fell far short of their production costs. The foreign
markets in the mainland, Taiwan, and the South East Asian Chinese communities
also begin to refuse embracing Hong Kong's productions indiscriminately. Ironically,
the industry is on the verge of complete disintegration when international film
circles display the most fervent enthusiasm for this alleged center of "Asian cult
films." Two major reasons have been attributed to this bankruptcy: the Asian
financial turmoil and the prevalence of and easy access to the pirate VCD versions
of the films. There is a general sense of panic within the industry that Hong Kong
cinema will follow many of those in Europe and Asia by being helplessly
engulfed by the global Hollywood machine.
The narrative experimentation and disorientation demonstrated in Expect the
Unexpected and The Longest Nite are, I would argue, also responses to the confusion
experienced in the industry. As Johnnie To, the producer of the two films, admitted
in an TV program "Gesu jijian/Opinions" that there are no longer any commercially
viable formulas like the star system, huge budgets, or prior successful genre conventions that filmmakers or studios can hold on to as guarantee to lucrative boxoffice returns. The deteriorating market is so unpredictable that any films can fail
or succeed. Such phenomenon reflects a reconstruction and amelioration of the
industry, which is integral to the city's overall economic development after the
Asian financial crisis, and which encourages the experimentation of filmmakers
who introduce new cinematic sensibilities to their audience. As evident in the
three films I have just discussed, challenges to normative notions of heroism and
to classical film structures might only be the byproducts of such experimentation.
The ultimate objective is to locate and captivate a new generation of viewers who
can identify with the films and go back to the theatres. Almost all recent Hong
Kong filmmakers are experimenting and attempting to develop new practices
and ideas for the simple purpose of survival.
As I have illustrated, many Hong Kong films connect the deaths of characters
with a failure to acquire identity, and they often interpret such failures as conditioned
by the city's social and political circumstances. Fruit Chan's 1997 trilogy is one of
the few that does not see death simply as an aporia or a new beginning but as
means of revealing one's subjectivity, a fatal way to allow oneself heard. The
other trilogy we have discussed could also be read in a similar fashion, that their
violence towards the film form most "violently" calls attentions to the film form
itself. Both the films and the audience are left stunned, and what "death" entails in
all the three films is a stupefaction when we are finally aware of ourselves. As
Kwai-Cheung Lo argues, under the new post 1997 political order, "Hong Kong
people are now solicitedor interpellated, as Louis Althusser puts itby a new
system of representations" (151). Although the three films do not directly comment
on this new system of cultural political representations, they present the self-reflexive
side of Hong Kong cinema that might be able to resist and lay bare such "interpellation" by constantly falling back to the investigation of how Hong Kong identity
and Hong Kong cinema are constructed.
It is almost a truism to argue that a pure identity is impossible. Any attempts in
defining identity are doomed to failure, as is any cinematic effort to capture Hong
Kong's identity. "We come across identity when predicates fail" (Zizek, 36). However,

Death and Hong Kong Cinema 29

what is at stake in the identity politics of the present Hong Kong cinema is more
than a structural impossibility. On the one hand, economy recessions reign in the
major markets of Hong Kong cinema that its survival is in jeopardy. On the other
hand, the complicated and hard-to-grasp political changes the city experiences
also problematize any naiVe claim of the formation of a new Hong Kong identity.
Although the two trilogies address death with their own different concerns, they
all come to an end that overwhelms both the narrative and the audience. It is at this
juncture that the survival of the "local" Hong Kong cinema seems most vulnerable
and ephemeral.

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Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1973.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
"Gesu jijian/Opinions," News Channel 1, Cable TV, Hong Kong, 28 March, 1999.
Grodal, Torben. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. London: Clarendon,
1997.
Lo, Kwai-Cheung. "Look Who's Talking: The Politics of Orality in Transitional Hong Kong Mass Culture,"
Boundary 2 25: 3 (Fall 1998): 151-68.
Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Ceasar to Touch of Evil.
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Reid, Mark A. "The Black Gangster Film," Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of
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Sek Kei. "Achievement and Crisis: Hongkong Cinema in the '80s," Hong Kong Cinema in the Eighties:
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Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London, New York:
Verso, 1991.