Max Nobel

Passed Along The Way: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong

Max Nobel

In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard thus instituted the term ‘postmodernism,’ previously found only in the critique of art, into the context of philosophy with the following quotation: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” The metanarrative, understood by Lyotard as an essential attribute of modernity, is a larger master narrative that aims to order and explain knowledge and experience within a single account of culture and history. It offers societal legitimization by the progressive realization of a presupposed “transcendent and universal truth.” The modernist metanarrative is the story of progress through ecumencial human reason. Art in modernism serves to clarify and further this metanarrative, with individual creative expression meant to conform to the realities of technological progress. The postmodernist incredulity towards this artistic philosophy manifests itself in its advocacy for dissident subjectivity and the intertextuality of smaller, often contradictory narratives, with truth lying within the discourse between them. It posits that the spaces between a film’s scenes, and the words and images they encompass, are no less meaningful than the scenes. It aims to break down the social, political, economic and technological cultural demarcation of modernist structuralism through positioning itself as a cultural response to social, political, economic and technological changes.

The transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the colonial rule of the United Kingdom to the postcolonial rule of the People’s Republic of China occurred on July 1st, 1997. Internationally, it was referred to as “the Handover”; in China, it was referred to as “the Return.” It was interpreted by many as marking the end of the British Empire. The British Empire acquired the territories encompassing Hong Kong from three separate treaties. They were the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the Treaty of Beijing in 1860 and The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory in 1898, giving them control of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, respectively. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to the United Kingdom in perpetuity. The control of the New Territories was obtained with a 99-year lease.

By 1997, the New Territories were fully integrated into and home to nearly all of the economic production and developments in Hong Kong. As the 99-year lease neared its end, the status of the New Territories following its expiration was intrinsically tied to Hong Kong’s economic future. From the start of negotiations in 1984 to the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, nearly 1 million residents emigrated from Hong Kong, with a sharp uptick following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, leading to a significant loss of capital.

In July, 1992, former Member of Parliament Chris Patten became the 28th and final Governor of Hong Kong. Unlike the majority of his predecessors, he had been a career politician, not a diplomat. The Legislative Council elected by the election of 1995 was originally meant to serve past the handover, providing institutional continuity to Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China. Beijing had expected this Council to be elected by functional constituencies with limited electorates. This changed upon Pannen’s enactment of election reforms in 1994, expanding the constitutional definition of functional constituencies to allow nearly every subject of Hong Kong to “indirectly elect” the members of the Legislative Council. His actions were condemned by Beijing and given unprecedented support by the citizens of Hong Kong, with his institutional push towards democracy seen as a championing of their rights. Following the handover, the Legislative Council elected under Patton was dissolved and replaced with an unconstitutional Provincial Legislative Council lacking any democratic functions. An election was held in 1998 with the rules in place prior to Patten’s reforms.

Historicity was defined by Frederic Jameson in 1989 as “a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.” It achieves “the brutal transformation of a realistic representation of the present... into a memory and a reconstruction.” Jameson posits this as a consequence of postmodernism, defined as cultural narratives of experience and representation, understood in historical, economical, political and aesthetic form. This aesthetical form is self-fulfilling, being that, as Jameson puts it, “the ‘search’ automatically becomes the thing itself: to set it up is by definition to realize it.” Jameson describes postmodernism as a “cultural dominant”, a classification (un) informed by culture’s place, within this postmodern space, as a communicative dominant. In viewing postmodernism as a product of history, Jameson finds it in accord with his

Marxist historical narrative, a product that, for all his lamentations, Jameson argues must be represented and experienced as such.

In citing a “crisis of historicity,” Jameson comes upon the postmodern problem: that being the experience of time in a culture governed by the representation of space. This experience is itself a function of language, be it historical, economical, political or aesthetic. Postmodernism is the expression of this language of experience through tableaux, wherein the experience is one of cumulative subjectivity. This language is interrogated, interpreted and communicated through culture, a response to a modern that cannot be.

Jameson found his influence most potently exerted in the theorization of the postmodern in China. Introducing postmodernism through lectures during the dawn of the cultural fever in 1985, his most significant contribution was his 1987 book Postmodernism and Cultural Theories. This work would go on to shape the Chinese scholarly engagement with postmodernism in the 1990’s, reaching its apex from 1994 to 1997. Its critical approach allowed it to be interpreted as both an endorsement and criticism of postmodernism’s Chinese manifestation. Its most popular Chinese reading was that of its endorsement of mass culture as a space newly created by and for popular freedom, which exists in tension with Jameson’s description of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”. Where Lyotard rejected the possibility of freedom within the master narratives he mistrusted, Jameson acknowledges the possibility of freedom within the spaces between the micro narratives that the master narrative is imposed upon, a freedom expressed, as it is in Chungking Express, through Pop Art.

Pop Art emerged as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, a movement that, in its rejection of representation, sought to create a universal visual language through which a psychological and interpretive interior could be expressed and understood. Rejecting such an attempt to construct the pinnacle of the creative process, Pop Art reasserted the authority of representation, appropriating popular iconography through its recontextualization. Chungking Express evokes the aesthetics of Pop Art in its execution of hyper-stylized, antirealist space. Imparted with déjà vu, the film condenses complexities of meaning and association into objects, examining them through their contextualization. Acknowledging and engaging in its audience’s search for romance, the film is both indebted and committed to its popular tradition. The film exists within a transition, reflecting and responding to the fluidity in which it resides. The film is electrified. It captures a moment in Hong Kong, a transient tableaux of a setting in the process of fading. It is a moment that is vibrant, fleeting, and floating all the while, passed along the way.

The transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China announced a postcolonial transition for the British postcolony. As Hong Kong entered a new era in its history, there emerged a need to define its new identity. As Hong Kong was confronted by an ambient modernity, it turned to postmodernism to respond to a narrative still in development. This engagement with its culture illuminated a remembrance that had yet to be understood.

Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express features two stories, told in sequence, of lovelorn police officers ruminating over their relationships, both fading and floating, with women in contemporary Hong Kong. The characters in one story can be found drifting through the background of the other, nearly intersecting at the film’s midpoint. The original title translates to “Chungking Jungle”, referring to the metaphoric concrete jungle of Hong Kong and the Chungking Mansions where much of the film’s first story is set. The english title refers to the Chungking Mansions and the Midnight Express, a fast food outlet featured most prominently in the film’s second story.

The first story concerns 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), an undercover police officer (his name, He Qiwu, is provided as an afterthought). Dumped by his girlfriend May on April 1st, he spends much of the story obsessively buying pineapple cans with the sell-by date of May 1st, the one month anniversary of his breakup with May that corresponds with his birthday. When the day arrives, unable to rekindle any former romantic connection, he vows (through voiceover) to fall in love with the next woman to walk into the bar where his sorrows are being drowned. This woman is the unnamed drug mule in a blonde wig (played by Brigitte Lin) whom we have followed as she settles (and struggles to settle) scores journeying through the the hyper-stylized Hong Kong underworld. The potentially amorous encounter is cut short when she, visibly worn-out) falls asleep in their hotel room, leaving 223 more alone than ever, with the hotel food failing to successfully serve as consolidation. The story ends on a hopeful note, with the woman paging him a birthday greeting the following day.

The second story follows 633 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a uniformed police officer recently rejected by his flight attendant girlfriend who, like 223, searches for solace in the fast food joint Midnight Express. There he meets Faye (actress and diva Faye Wong), a fey young woman who quickly becomes obsessed with his private life. After the keys are dropped off by 633’s flight attendant ex, she proceeds to remodel his apartment, with 633 attributing the changes to the capabilities of the inanimate objects contained therein. Upon finally noticing her he asks her out on a date, with them set to meet at the California Bar. Faye sends him a message revealing her choice to go to the real California instead, complete with the promise that she will return in one year’s time. 633 is the new owner of the Midnight Express when she returns, and Faye is a flight attendant herself. The story ends with the possibility of them ending up together after all.

The Hong Kong depicted in Chungking Express is one of living contradiction, vivid inconsistencies of changing sense and sensibility, where the distance of space informs identi-

ty. It is this search for a local identity, coupled with an encroaching global urbanity, that drives this construction of an image of a city inflected by its own transience. As Wong Kar-wai explains, “things change very fast in Hong Kong. The locations for my first two films have disappeared already… I’m trying to preserve [the lifestyle of Hong Kong in certain periods] on film.” This sense of loss pervades the film’s context of an emerging local consciousness, a sense confronted by its characters response to both their emotional and physical space. Time is itself a mercurial character, its appearance and dialogue permeating across the film’s frame. Marc Augé defined non-spaces as “spaces of circulation, consumption and communication”, spaces defined not by their own narratives, but by the transitions they play host to. The semi-titular Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express exist as such non-spaces, as does the airport so many characters pass through. It is telling then that the film’s greatest moments of intimacy occur within these non-spaces, meaning resides not within personal narratives or environments, but rather within the spaces between them. It is then not lost in but within translation that clarity is transiently found.

Placelessness was defined by Edward Relph as “the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place.” It is a phenomenon whose presence in Hong Kong is contingent on the metanarrative of globalization. It is characterized by its absence of local memory, its presence is not derived from Hong Kong’s narrative and identity but by the globalized one imposed upon it. For its international audience, these placeless locations: airports, business districts, hotels, and restaurants represent the urban glamour invoking both the necessity and the opportunity of the global city. This metanarrative is subverted by Wong Kar-wai in his intentions of making Chungking Express “like a postcard of Hong Kong.” The fly-over of a neo-futurist neon metropolis is passed over in favor of a walk through the city hidden beneath it. We are instead taken a tour of the places that remain, observing the remnants of local life in tandem with the questioning of the postmodern definition of local identity. The Kai Tak airport we continue to come back to was in the process of closing as the film was being made, once the gateway to modernity of old Hong Kong, unable to handle the continual increase of traffic. Like the Kai Tak airport, the places from which those memories of old Hong Kong were formed are in the process of disappearance. Memories of the present rest in similar uncertainty, formed from a context increasingly aware of its own transience.

Where then, do our characters find themselves? The Kai Tak airport is the clearest marker of this evolution. Its identity as an airport, a space of placelessness, is contradicted by its ties to local memory, a space of place. And so, like so many other things in postmodern space, it lands somewhere in between, in the aforementioned non-space shared by the semi-titular Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express. Another occupant is the McDonald’s Brigitte Lin’s drug mule takes the Indian girl she kidnaps to for an ice cream. A product of globalization adapted by local culture, it shares the distinction of being, with its fellow non-places, the homeliest space depicted in the film; more so than the apartments our two cops find themselves increasingly detached in. When 663 finally develops a personal connection to a space beyond the objects it contains, it is upon taking ownership of the similarly non-spaced Midnight Express. With the placeless inherently detached and the place increasingly so, it is within the shared ambience of the nonspace, between global representation and local experience, that relationships in postmodern Hong Kong are formed.

The manner in which the characters respond to their emotional milieu marks a transition in Wong Kar-wai’s filmography. As he explained, “Chungking Express represents a real break: the characters accept their loneliness, they’re more independent, and they see in their quest not a kind of despair but a kind of amusement.” As Faye confesses at one point to 663, “I just want to enjoy life.” This transition reveals itself within the space between the film’s doubling.

The film’s dual narratives, with their similar plots, themes, visual motifs and characters, use doubling to both examine the malleable temporality of collective memory and the ubiquity too inherent in chance. As they continually refer to each other, a narrative is formed of the fluidity of individual identity in postmodern space, rendered as the regions of modern communications. In this heterotopic urban environment of contemporary Hong Kong, subjectivity is called into question. Memory becomes the means through which time is perceived. Even as life occurs, its experience is that of memory.

The language Wong Kar-wai uses in the film is one of heightened expressivity, employing stylization to reveal depth upon the surface on which the film functions. The abstraction of movement through audiovisual composition provides musicality and vitality to the ambient freneticism of the film’s urbanly textured mise-en-scène. Accompanying the stylized veracity of the film’s Hong Kong is its fascination with American popular culture. This is most prominently demonstrated through Faye’s devotion to and hypnotically incessant playing of The Mamas & the Papas 1965 song California Dreamin’. Its inclusion is a reminder of the deracinated globalization of American culture, and its increasing utilization of young people in Hong Kong and everywhere else to communicate both with themselves and each other. Its repetition subconsciously establishes it as an essential component of the film’s setting, one found incomplete in its absence.

Chungking Express uses its obsession with numbers and deadlines to contemplate the meaning and arbitrariness of signs and relationships. Our protagonists are identified not by their names but by their numbers. 223 uses the expiration dates on pineapple cans to assess the transient nature of time and love. As his story nears its close, he poses a rhetorical

question: “Is there anything in the world that doesn’t have an expiry date? If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.” This sentiment brings the political subtext to the forefront for a colony facing an expiration date of its own.

The handover of Hong Kong from a British colonial rule to a Chinese postcolonial one on July 1st, 1997 was the question dominating and anchoring cultural and sociopolitical definitions of its identity in a postmodern space. Boarding passes are found in many characters possession, and many scenes show them watching others leave Hong Kong from airports. The flight attendant with which 663 is involved leaves him and Hong Kong, with a message announcing their breakup reading “change of flight—your plane cancelled”. Faye leaves them as well, before returning to him and Hong Kong as a flight attendant.

Wong Kar-wai has related the film’s political subject to the evolution and normalization of urban alienation, saying, Days of Being Wild centers on various feelings about staying in or leaving Hong Kong. That’s less of an issue now that we’re so close to 1997. Chungking Express is more about the way people feel now. In Days, the characters are not happy with their solitude; it’s the same with the characters in Ashes of Time. The people in Chungking know how to entertain themselves, even if it’s just by talking to a bar of soap. They know how to live in a city.

Chungking Express visualizes postmodernity through the experience of time, not the depiction of space. Various techniques are used to illustrate the varying paces at which life is perceived. The interest in the divergence of physical and emotional distance regarding a continually progressing modern communication is made explicit at the film’s beginning, with voiceover remarking: “Every day we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet, or people who may become close friends.” This notion of missed connections is seen in the manner the two stories barely fail to overlap, and in the fact that the most important of these within the film occur not between the characters who never meet, but within the relationships between the characters who do. While the failure of spatial coexistence to bring people together is demonstrated in the film, also demonstrated is the understanding that those who spatially coincide are still very much emotionally alive, if emotionally complicated by, and complicating perceptions of, their surroundings. With the world defined by a mercurially perceived freneticism, individual spaces like homes provide areas of respite and expressive control. 663 uses his apartment as a stand in for people and places (through the anthropomorphized objects he keeps collected within) and as an emotional outlet (he believes it can cry on his behalf). Technology is also demonstrated to have the capacity to fulfill these purposes (such as Faye’s CD from which California Dreamin’ plays). Chungking Express illuminates the complications presented by the postmodern condition on developing and finding meaning in modern interpersonal relationships and communications.

Postmodernism is a fragile term, as defined as the modern it responds to. Postmodernism is a tool to question and understand a modern not yet sufficiently developed to answer. Postmodernism is used in Chungking Express and to contextualize and confront the presence of an ambivalent and ambient future in the floating present and fleeting past.

Chungking Express. Dir. Wong Kar-wai. Perf. Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Faye Wong. Criterion, 1994. DVD.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.