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Infernal Affairs and the Ethics of Complex Narrative 155their history in swift, elliptical fashion. By the time the adult Yan and Mingare introduced after the main title-card, a significant amount of plotinformation has been presented in a very short period of time, testing theviewer’s cognitive abilities. As Yan and Ming perform their fake roles (oftriad member and police detective, respectively), the quick setups and reversalsof the plot demand an active and alert audience. “Can you keep up?”the film seems to ask. Spectatorship thus becomes a type of informationmanagement, just as the characters’ plots, ambushes, and double-crossesare also enacted through information management. This applies also to theuse of flashbacks in the film. The turn from color to grayscale, and the frequentuse of jump-cuts in reprised scenes, as well as the reinsertion of echotrackedvoices as audio flashbacks, at once suggest the subjectivity of thememories evoked and their distance from accuracy, as the scenes acquirelayers of meaning from their repositioning in the narration. At the sametime, many of these flashbacks appear as rapid-fire barrages of narrativeinformation, somewhat akin to the comical flashforwards in Run Lola Run(Tom Tykwer 1998). In a sense, we do not inhabit the times and spacesdepicted in these flashbacks; we are never inside the flashback. Instead, weare made acutely aware of the flashback’s status as a narrational and informationaldevice. Indeed, their function as informational devices suggestsfurther that the past exists only as a resource, not as a personalized culturalstore from which an evolving identity draws its permanence.Ultimately, terminal identity is made literal in the sense that one of themain characters apparently must die. This death is anticipated by the scenein which Ming deletes Yan’s identity from the police computer system.After confronting Ming atop a skyscraper, Yan is challenged and then shotdead by a police officer who turns out to be another of Sam’s minions.Descending in the elevator to the waiting contingent of uniformed policeofficers, Ming kills Yan’s assassin, an act that serves on the one hand toavenge Yan’s death but also, conversely, to conceal Ming’s deception. Thedeath of Yan reflects obliquely upon Hong Kong’s own “terminal” identityin the wake of the 1997 handover to China, and the question of how, if atall, Hong Kong identity somehow survives Chinese assimilation. InfernalAffairs thus takes its place in the cycle of 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong filmsthat evoke “both intimacy and unease” around the Hong Kong–China relationship(Teo 1997, p. 207), an issue that is dealt with even more directlyin the film’s two sequels. 2 Among post-1997 films, argues Sheldon Lu,anxieties around Hong Kong identity tend to be refigured as an embraceof flexible identity (2000, p. 276; 2001, p. 137), a notion that is particularlyrelevant here.