Cinema at the City's Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia

Interlude 2: Workspace

Slavoj Žižek has written that sites of mass industrial production only appear in Hollywood films during the decisive moment when James Bond is captured and taken on a tour of the villain’s lair, with its half-completed tool of world domination on display and legions of uniformed workers scurrying around the shop floor as they build it. Bond then manages to escape and eventually to blow up the factory and its workers, and even the surrounding island, if necessary.Work environments, especially the spaces of large-scale industry, are as rare in East Asian city films as in Hollywood blockbusters, except in documentary or social realist exposés. A brief allusion to work life helps establish a character’s identity without commanding too much screen time, unless, of course, the character’s occupation is one of the glamorous few consecrated by genre cinema, most notably the gangster or detective. The streets of the city are the equivalent of the factory for the mobster or the hard-boiled detective; and in the movies, the labor of crime and justice, unlike most other jobs, is inseparable from its site of production. INTERLUDE 2 Workspace James Tweedie Fig. ii.1 Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2002) 50 Interlude 2 The Infernal Affairs trilogy is an unusual gangster and detective story because over the course of three films the locations shift from the familiar haunts of the genre — a relatively mundane police headquarters,the city streets,and the various spaces of concealed criminal activity, ranging from a warehouse to a parking garage — to increasingly rarefied and spectacular spaces, including an expansive, virtually empty office space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hong Kong harbor. (The first in the series was in fact filmed in humdrum but authentic locations like a parking lot at the old Kai Tak airport or the roof of the North Point Government Offices Building.)1 The fundamental conceit of all three films is that a criminal and a police officer can infiltrate the other’s organization without being discovered, the crook becoming the ideal and rapidly promoted cop, and vice versa. That basic premise is also inscribed on the spaces of the film. By the end of the trilogy, the more typical locations of the detective film, the streets and underground hideouts that define and distinguish the genre, have merged with the visually stunning but less obviously dramatic milieu of the high-level business services that organize transnational capitalism. The trilogy begins by situating its action in the environments that spawned the genre and concludes in an office suite more appropriate for an investment bank or advertising firm. In the second and third installments of Infernal Affairs, the Andy Lau character returns from his execution after a final shootout (or his arrest, in an alternate ending) to star in two subsequent variations on the same theme, and he remains a member of an elite unit of the Hong Kong Police Department, though his surveillance work involves covering all traces of his criminal past.The trilogy as a whole is also a tale of revenance and infiltration: the gangster’s inside man shifts fluidly back and forth between the spaces associated with crime and those controlled by the police; but over the course of three films, and even after his bloody demise, he migrates into another universe entirely, a space connected to the mean streets of the gangster film only by computer networks and surveillance cameras. With a blue glow emanating from the ubiquitous computer monitors and cell Fig. ii.2 Infernal Affairs Workspace 51 Fig. ii.3 Infernal Affairs III (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2003) phones, and with cavernous office spaces laid out with an infinitely flexible design, the police headquarters in Infernal Affairs has severed its ties with the streets of the city and joined a more ethereal network of globalized spaces linked by virtual flows of images and information. Andy Lau’s gangster-turned-detective returns from the dead only to find himself surrounded by an increasingly spectral city where the decaying architecture and infrastructure of Hong Kong, concrete spaces that endure, has given way to the paradigmatic environments of global capitalism defined less by their structures and rootedness than by their adaptability and their links to communication systems. Viewed as a record of Hong Kong environments, Infernal Affairs becomes an allegory of the global city: it begins by occupying...