Vivian Lee City University of Hong Kong

1. Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Memory, Schizophrenia, and the Pathological Cop-hero in Hong Kong Action Cinema • Vivian Lee • City University of Hong Kong

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

7. Falling from the Rooftop

8. 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

10. Torn into Pieces: Parasitic Selves/Memories

11. Schizophrenia: the pathological hero and his ‘para-text’ • 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.

12. 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

13. Framing the Hero

14. 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.

15. A Happy Ending? : The Denial of Redemption

16. Ominous Locales • the city re-appears as an overseeing power • the top-down perspective: a ‘third eye’ witness • the urban space: affective connections

17. The Spatial Intertext: two lovelorn cops in a postmodern city

18. A Darkening Post-card City

19. 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?

20. 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.