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162 Allan Cameron and Sean Cubittsafety is taken off. As the dialogue proceeds, a critical moment of ethicalchoice arrives when Ming asks for a chance to turn over a new leaf. Yanreplies, “Good. Try telling that to the judge.” A beat. Ming: “You want medead?” Yan: “Sorry, I’m a cop.” Ming: “Who knows that?” Here, Ming hintsat the flimsiness of Yan’s institutionally sanctioned moral code, connectedin turn to the tenuousness of his professional identity.Although there will be at least two more narrative twists before the filmends, this is the ethical crux. Here, a series of six swift jump cuts and atrack-out frame Yan with his gun to Ming’s forehead, emblematizing a judicialsystem that will only execute, the culmination of a moral code basedon a trust that no longer exists, and the main characters’ mutual loss offaith in the notion of their shared experience. Acted out above the city streetsis a minimalist reading of the terminal fate of any virtue ethics groundedon immutable principles, any value ethics, or even the felicitous calculus,in a world in which dissimulation leads directly to the loss of trust. It ishere perhaps that the film most clearly reveals the moral complexities ofwhich complex narration is capable. Unlike other recent films in which goodmen lost in complex systems struggle to find a moral root (such as Syriana[2005], Lord of War [2005], and Crash [2004]), Infernal Affairs clearly anchorsits moral judgments in personal responsibility. It does so, however, in thefull knowledge that in order to take such responsibility, its central charactersmust actually and fully exist as coherent and therefore action-capableagents. It is here that the film’s moral universe collapses.This collapse is a function not so much of a crisis of subjectivity per se:it would be inaccurate to ascribe a Western modernist individualism to HongKongers’ experience of their own particular modernity. Rather, since narrativedepends upon relationships between people, and here, we believe,narrative meets a limit point, then the inference must be that the collapseis not within but between, not subjective but inter-subjective. That collapseis the result of a regime of betrayal and camouflage that pervades the plot.It is strictly speaking interpersonal rather than either individual or social,belying both capital’s myth of individual freedom and the Durkheimianmyth of a social consciousness which, once recognized, provides the basisfor religious awe and moral action. It is the isolation of each, not at themoment of death (each fatality in the film is in fact accompanied by amoment of recognition, either of or from a witnessing character), but inthe moment of communication that dominates the film’s framing, staging,and use of focus and lighting. In this sense too we are dealing with terminalidentities.