Lost in the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone: Johnnie To’s Urban Legends

Abstract

This chapter, together with Chapters 5 and 6, investigates the changing aesthetic of Hong Kong’s action cinema. In particular, it examines the recent productions by Johnnie To and his Milkyway Image Productions as representatives of a new aesthetic of police and gangster films, a major branch of Hong Kong’s action cinema since the 1980s. While the action film has played a central role in the internationalization of Hong Kong cinema since the days of Bruce Lee, the 1980s saw the emergence of a new type of action aesthetic that is closely connected to the political events leading up to the territory’s reintegration with Mainland China, an aesthetic steeped in a ‘crisis consciousness’ triggered by the awareness of impending doom and the fragmentation of time-honoured beliefs and traditions that used to inspire the cinematic imagination of kung fu and wuxia films. This new aesthetic is epitomized in John Woo’s ‘cinema of crisis’,1 which persistently portrays Hong Kong as a lawless city where violence and bloodshed erupt at random at any moment. As Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar observe, in John Woo’s films ‘Hong Kong is a city beset by extreme lawlessness and graphic violence’, where ‘[c]ompeting regimes of justice merge’.2 Such a vision of the city on the verge of a material and cultural disappearance is symptomatic of a nostalgia for the lost time and lost values of the traditional jianghu, the idealized world of the wuxia where good and evil have relatively well-defined parameters, and the heroic virtues of loyalty, brotherhood, and justice are actively engaged in the resolution of conflicts and restoration of the moral order.