Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy

Michel Foucault avers: «one should totally and absolutely suspect anything that claims to be a return. . . . there is in fact no such thing as a return.» It is, however, in rigid irredentist claims of the return that Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese rule in 1997. To the natives of Hong Kong, this postcolonial turn is actually less a decolonization than a recolonization of the capitalist Cantonese city by the mainland Mandarin master. They find themselves helplessly trapped in the dual nationality of overseas British and Chinese nationals. This existential agony is deftly cinematized in the Infernal Affairs trilogy under the disguise of a police epic. The 2002 box-office success and its 2003 prequel and sequel tell a story about an undercover cop and a mafia mole. A crisis of consciousness arises from both the former’s desire to regain his true identity and the latter’s struggle to become a real cop. The identity crisis is not only about, as critics suggest, split personalities between good and evil, but also political tensions between the colonized and colonizers. This paper argues that the collective failure of identity change before and after the fin de siècle changeover characterizesthe Special Administrative Region’s schizophrenic return