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Infernal Affairs and the Ethics of Complex Narrative 159(ibid.). Linking this mindset to Britain and China’s economically motivatedaccommodation with regard to Hong Kong, Yau goes on to suggest that“the political identity of Hong Kong is thus the product of a pragmatickind of complicity conducive to ideological ambivalence or dubiety”(pp. 183–4). Writing during the run-up to the restoration of Hong Kongto Chinese rule, Yau notes the ambivalence of “1997 consciousness,” whoseparticular relevance to this analysis of a film made six years after the newregime came in concerns the destabilization of not one but two modes ofsocial and spatial orientation. For Wong and Sam, the world offers a place,one that has to be attained, but which preexists the person who occupiesit: gang boss, police superintendent. Ming and Yan belong to a generationfor whom upward mobility is the central experience, based on the powerof the Hong Kong economy in the later years of British rule, during whicha discredited colonial regime embarrassed itself by demanding from theChinese a democracy they had never themselves extended to their subjects.The film’s aestheticization of upward mobility exists in ironic counterpointto systems of spiritual morality, which tend to be predicated upona vertical orientation. In tune with the lowest level of hell named in thefilm’s title and opening epigraph, morality and spatial elevation go handin hand. Accordingly, rooftop real estate in the film is the domain of thepolice. Wong and Yan, for example, stage their covert meetings in theselocations. Upon working his way up to the Department of Internal Affairs,Ming is invited to hit golf balls from the top of the building. By the endof the film, when he has his climactic elevated confrontation with Yan, Mingis prompted to ask: “Do all undercover cops like rooftops?” Yet Ming’s infiltrationof the police force severs the link between this vertical hierarchy andthe moral hierarchy that it appears to underwrite (in which criminals belongin the underworld, while cops overlook the city from on high). The invocationof Buddhist mythology thus serves to emphasize the emphaticallysecular and amoral world in which the characters appear to rise and fall.Yet what is striking about the aestheticization observable in Infernal Affairsis that while the narrative contains many vertical motifs, the film is, stylisticallyspeaking, wedded to horizontal mobility. The camera is rarely still,dollying in or out of shots, panning across a room, and when holding aface in frame, often enough observing that face through the windshield ofa moving vehicle. Similarly, Ming’s office environment is surrounded byinternal windows. This suggests not only the tension between such a spaceof transparency and the opacity Ming must maintain with regard to hismotives; crucially, it also suggests that this tension is played out along a