Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs - The Trilogy

1. Introduction: The New Wave and the Generic Abyss

A classic story of cops, robbers, and the difficulty of telling them apart, Infernal Affairs deals with the tale of two moles — one a triad in the police force and the other an undercover officer in the gangs. As a figure of the imagination, the mole has taken hold on global screens. The character embodies the predicament of hidden and uncertain identities, concealed motives, moral ambiguity, conflicted loyalties, and the inability to take a stand or find roots in an increasingly complex world of new technologies and post-industrial, transnational economies. With the added factors of its change of sovereignty from British to Chinese rule, the Asian financial crisis, and SARS, Hong Kong’s obsession with the hidden malevolence behind the quotidian exterior takes on a particular local significance as well, and, in a film industry plagued by triads and the infiltration of Hollywood product, the mole symbolizes the alien within the familiar — the competitor or the parasite within the ranks. When Infernal Affairs appeared in Hong Kong cinemas in 2002, the film industry had been in decline for several years. ● 1 Introduction: The New Wave and the Generic Abyss ● 2 ANDREW LAU AND ALAN MAK’S INFERNAL AFFAIRS — THE TRILOGY Competition from an increasingly aggressive Hollywood distribution system, the infiltration of the triads into the industry in the 1990s, the impact of satellite television, videos, and video piracy, the “brain drain” that had sucked talent from all sectors of the Hong Kong economy including the film industry since the signing of the Joint Declaration in 1984, and the continuing uncertainty of the consequences of the change in sovereignty in 1997 all fed the crisis at the box-office. Emerging at a time when Hong Kong was shaken by SARS, a depressed economy, and waves of political disaffection culminating in the July 1, 2003 demonstrations, the Infernal Affairs trilogy speaks to the times. The challenges facing the Hong Kong film industry during this period mirror not only Hong Kong’s economic and political problems, but a more general global crisis of labor, national political authority, social structure, cultural authenticity, and personal identity at the turn of the century. In City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover note: In various ways Hong Kong cinema is revealed to be “crisis cinema,” one that finds itself in a historic conjuncture where new patterns of language, time and space, place and identity, and meaning itself, are emerging. 1 As part of this crisis cinema culture, Infernal Affairs holds up a mirror to the industry that created it, the local society that spawned it, as well as the global market that embraced it. The Internet, video piracy, corporate raiding, and the rise of the remake have been able to “white-wash” Asian popular cinema for a wider Euro-American audience. There is a need to appeal to a “young and dangerous” global youth audience by moving to a new generation of Hong Kong film stars while maintaining the established “brand” of recognizable faces. Not surprisingly, along with other Asian box-office hits like The Ring (1998), My Sassy ● INTRODUCTION: THE NEW WAVE AND THE GENERIC ABYSS 3 Girl (2001), and The Eye (2002), Infernal Affairs has been snatched up, not for distribution in the United States, but to be remade by Martin Scorsese into The Departed (2006, starring Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio). Fantasies, like capital, commodities, and labor, circulate globally, and Infernal Affairs , itself indebted to a slew of Hollywood creations, including The Godfather Trilogy (1972–90), Heat (1995), Internal Affairs (1990), Miami Vice (1984–89), The Sopranos (1999–2006), and, of course, John Woo’s Face/Off (1997), provides a case study of how films travel as popular narratives and as commercial products. Taken as a whole, the Infernal Affairs trilogy provides the illusion of an epic sweep (from 1991–2003) that covers the issues of government legitimacy, global capitalist expansion, individual alienation, and the implosion of a system that blurs “legitimate” political authority with an underground “illegitimate” economic reality. As part of the New Hong Kong Cinema Series, this short book attempts to highlight the significance of Infernal Affairs within the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema as well as within global film culture by examining all three films in the trilogy. Exploring the way Infernal Affairs has crossed borders as a story, a commercial product, and as a work of art, this...