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

4. Postmodern Allegory: The Global Economy and New Technologies

All of the signifiers of modernity only go one way — down — in Infernal Affairs. The elevator, riddled with bullet holes, which boxes in Lau with Chan’s and Billy’s corpses embodies the hellish trap of modern life that can only descend. SP Wong falls from the heights of a modern office building only to land crushed on a taxi — the promise of upward mobility dashed in one image that also drags down the legitimacy of state power. All the indicators of modern “progress” point in a downward direction. Liberation from colonialism, the promise of modern technology, and the potential pleasures of global consumer capitalism fall from the heights as well. Postmodern texts tend to favor allegory. Fredric Jameson, among many others, has commented on the parallels between the slippery signifiers of allegory in which the sign always stands in for something else and the uncertainty and contingency that characterize postmodernism. As Jameson notes, this newer type of allegory demands a process of interpretation that is: ● 4 Postmodern Allegory: The Global Economy and New Technologies ● 98 ANDREW LAU AND ALAN MAK’S INFERNAL AFFAIRS — THE TRILOGY … a kind of scanning that, moving back and forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modification of a type quite different from our stereotypes of some static medieval or biblical decoding, and which one would be tempted (were it not also an old-fashioned word!) to characterize as dialectical. 1 In fact, Infernal Affairs slips among allegorical associations with religion, morality, nation, as well as with a more general condition of postmodern life. The certainties of time, space, and identity have evaporated. Like many postmodern texts that allegorize speed, compression of time, and reconfiguration of the past as part of the present moment, Infernal Affairs has an obsessive interest in time and dates as well as a pervasive atmosphere of nostalgia, mourning, loss and abandonment. This interest in time can be interpreted as allegorizing Hong Kong’s change in sovereignty or as an exploration of the processes of globalization under late capitalism.2 Esther C. M. Yau notes the way in which the local and global crises parallel one another within Hong Kong’s film culture: … Hong Kong movies are as much about this world city’s paradoxes in a politically unusual and compressed time (that is, the 1997 handover) as they are about a technical culture’s race for global economic opportunities and cultural capital. These movies equally anticipate and register the impact of a high-speed race for profit against the barriers of time and distance. 3 James A. Steintrager makes a similar point: It appears that the combination of uniqueness — there is no other situation quite like Hong Kong’s at this time — and generalizability — are not capitalism and technology pushing all of us in a similar direction? — has produced a cinema that has a purchase on critical spectators everywhere.4 ● POSTMODERN ALLEGORY 99 As Jameson notes, within postmodern culture, allegory moves far beyond the national: On the global scale, allegory allows the most random, minute, or isolated landscapes to function as a figurative machinery in which questions about the system and its control over the local ceaselessly rise and fall, with a fluidity that has no equivalent in those older national allegories … 5 Like many films about drug trafficking, Infernal Affairs chronicles changes in patterns of consumption, the production of commodities, leisure and labor within late capitalism. The drug becomes a special commodity — and favorite screen fetish. 6 In the postmodern turn, the commodity can be stripped of its substance and become an image, which, in turn, becomes a commodity. The cinematic fantasies surrounding drugs mirror a seldom articulated anxiety surrounding the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities more generally. Like coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, rum, silk, cotton, and the other key products that built colonial empires, drugs generally come from impoverished former colonies — countries still ravaged by neocolonial and dependent economies. They are processed, repackaged, and re-exported through entrepôts like the port city of Hong Kong, and they make their way back to the former colonial centers for consumption. Instead of providing a happy picture of “economic development,” however, the drug trade symbolizes the fear of transnational trade, the exploitation of labor as those involved in the trafficking risk their lives and the lives of others for profit, and the ill effects of the commodity on the consumer whose body becomes consumed through...