Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

158 Allan Cameron and Sean Cubittown ways attract the audience’s loyalties: Sam, as played by Eric Tsang, isa thoroughly charismatic gang boss, while Wong carries an air of quietintegrity (the latter’s clarity of motive will be made far more murky in thetwo sequels, but it is never questioned here). Crucially, neither man providesa monopole around which the film’s moral universe can be gatheredinto a coherent whole.In the absence of a clear moral and identificatory center, responsibilityfor completing the narrative falls to the audience. Indeed, this responsibilityis delivered to the audience on two levels. On the one hand there isthe cognitive task of filling in the plot holes and providing a coherent explanationfor the events and the actions of the characters. On the other is thefar more demanding task of rounding out the film’s moral sphere. The lackof a moral center in the narrative itself invites, indeed, given its genre precedentsdemands, the audience to provide this center. Yet the density ofthe narrative challenges the moral task, to the point where we may abandonthe latter in order to survive the film. In other words, we may be punishedfor our dedication to a certain moral position or character, either throughthe death of those characters who most clearly embody a morallyjustifiable or at least coherent principle of action, or through the either-ordilemma posed by the fact that if the narrative makes sense, the moralitydoes not, but if the morality makes sense then the narrative does not. So,the film may place responsibility upon us to provide moral judgments, butour freedom to do so is challenged by the twists, turns, and contradictionsof the narrative.In place of ethics, it may well appear, we are offered an aesthetic: ofpersonal systems of morality generated in the loneliness which only greatcities can engender. Such a conclusion cannot but recall Walter Benjamin’s(2003, p. 270) strictures on the aestheticization of politics under Nazism– an anti-democratic and fundamentally amoral pursuit of aestheticwholeness purchased through a carefully mediated control of informationresulting in the technologically assured erasure of truth. We have alreadynoted the generational distinction between those who understand or failto understand the vertical dimension of the urban landscape. Writingof an earlier generation of Hong Kong films, Esther Yau notes that they“demonstrate a skillful adaptation of the ideological codes and functionsof Hollywood to a context in which the public’s preoccupations are survivaland upward mobility” (1994, p. 181). Such films often “rationalizethe modes of existence available within the social context as much as express,often in narrative terms, the breakdown and redefinition of these modes”