Failings of commodity capitalism and emergence of
temporal disappearance anxiety in
Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995)

In her dissertation on how the 1997 handover informed a swathe of Hong Kong films in the decade leading up to it, Wai Yee Ruby Cheung argues,

“The distinct visual style in [Chungking Express] reflects Wong’s self-exilic mentality as a Shanghainese inhabiting the Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, and Wong’s status of Hong Konger contemplating his uneasiness and helplessness when facing the imminent Handover.”[31] [open endnotes in new window]

However, Cheung does not offer a detailed analysis of the aesthetics in the film that would support the assertion. A sensual aesthetic of anxiety is prominent in Chungking Express, Wong’s 1994 film for which the original title, Chun Hing Sam Lam, actually translates to Chungking Jungle, a reference to the dilapidated Chungking mansions in which the first part of the narrative occurs conflated with the metaphor of urban jungle for its crowded and labyrinthine cityscape. Both Chungking Express and Fallen Angels depict the frantic lives of subjects living in contemporary Hong Kong who frenetically move from place to place in the exigencies of their daily lives.

A protagonist of Chungking Express, involved in a drug trade at Chungking mansions.	The U.S. currency symbolizes Hong Kong’s increasing levels of globalization, its ties with the West, and its integration into an openly materialistic culture.

Laura Rascaroli and Ewa Mazierska describe the Hong Kong in these films as a “metropolis which encapsulates the rush, efficiency, and obsession with money characteristic of contemporary capitalism.”[32] They find this frenetic experience a characteristic of a “throw-away society” “where everything is constantly in the process of change.”[33] Rascaroli and Mazierska refer to Hong Kong’s ever-changing socioeconomic space as one in which the films’ protagonists find it difficult to form connections with those around them. In this environment, alienation and invisible identities mark native Hong Kong subjects in the age of transience.

Wong embeds this sense of rushed and alienated anxiety directly into the framing and cinematography in Chungking Express. Both compositional aspects play a significant role in the film’s meaning-making, obscuring clarity at times, inviting and displacing viewer identification at others. Visually there is a destabilization of identificatory suture, repeatedly moving in and out of first-person perspectives.

Cop 223 runs through the crowded streets of Hong Kong. The sequence toggles between first and second person perspectives.

In the opening scene, Wong’s use of step-printing also creates a blurred visual. Step-printing is accomplished by filming at 16 frames per second, printing at 32 frames per second, and displaying at 8 frames per second. The resultant image, especially when filming the fast motions of a character, create a heightened sense of motion and crowding, highlighting the contradiction of simultaneous overcrowding and loneliness—a side effect of atomizing and alienating urban overpopulation. This style in the opening scene highlights the dream-like and fast-paced experiences of residing in the city.

Only once the tempo is slowed to allow the insertion of commodities into the narrative do the characters begin to realize and resolve their loneliness. More specifically, the film offers a witty critique of efforts to mediate social relations through commodities. In Tsung-Yi Huang’s two articles on Chungking Express, she focuses on the motif of urban flaneurism in particularly neo-Marxist terms. She describes the main characters as flaneurs of compulsion and details how the characters negotiate social relations and create meaning within the labyrinthine streets and passageways of late twentieth-century Hong Kong. She considers these characters as “alienated walkers” mired in their own urban delusions.[34] Indeed, “global capital flows continuously promise local people the dream of ... their global city as a space of convenience and chance for everyone.”[35] This alienated urban flaneurism operates as a vehicle to critique commodity fetishism and reification (under global capitalism) as it occurs in Chungking Express. Huang’s Marxist language suggests notions of the commodity fetishism seen in a number of instances in the films. Finally, Huang observes the entire city as a commodity with a detrimental mediating influence. She states that the characters “cannot see the dubious nature of the inflated global city: a convenient door that invites them to fantasize all kinds of possibilities camouflages an invisible wall that hampers their desires and dreams.”[36]

In the first of the two extended vignettes that comprise the script, Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) replaces his ex-girlfriend with canned pineapple. He buries his sexual and social frustration in food, but specifically food as a commodity. He counts the cans of pineapple, the number of chef’s salads, etc. that he eats. Extending the same motif, a blonde-wigged femme-fatale makes her living from the drug trade. In the second longer vignette, Cop 663 (Tony Leung) manages the long absences from his girlfriend that his career as a Cop demands of him by buying her food. She leaves him, and the counter-girl, Faye (Faye Wong), becomes enamoured of him. In order to negotiate her attraction to him, Faye buys things for his apartment including a giant stuffed Garfield toy, goldfish, soap, hand towels, and, of course, different food. (Her purchase of the Garfield is the Easter egg scene embedded in the first part of the narrative.) The silly variety of purchases highlights the significance of commodities as a way in which otherwise disparate subjectivities are brought into social intersection. This social activity of consumption is in perpetual motion in the city, collected amongst the anonymous behaviors of everyone occupying its spaces, loosely and abstractly connected through mutual ties to the market. In the film Cop 663 talks to the objects in his apartment as an empty panacea for his loneliness.

People are similarly treated as commodities by both the viewing audience and the diegetic characters. Huang describes the femme-fatale in the narrative as “an enigmatic beautiful sexual object whose walking in the city attracts the male gaze.”[37] And throughout the film, social choices are repeatedly coded as food options. When Cop 663 offers his girlfriend a variety in her menu, it prompts her to leave him. In this regard, she treats him as a commodity, as readily exchangeable as the items on the menu at The Midnight Express. His commodification becomes the source of his loneliness. Huang also introduces a thematic motif of blindness into her commodity critique. In the first narrative, from behind her obscuring sunglasses, the femme fatale cannot see the abject Indian refugees residing in the Chungking Mansions as anything but money-motivated objects ripe for exploitation. She is just as unable to see 223’s discussion of pineapples as an attempt to create a social bond in the only language he knows, commodity. Similarly, in his commodity-mediated relationships, 223 chooses to be blind to the fact that his infatuation is, in fact, a violent criminal.

In the second narrative, 663 is also blind to the fact that Faye has been infiltrating his apartment and even replacing his commodities. Faye, in turn, is blind to the fact that her obsession with The Mamas and the Papas’ song California Dreamin’ indicates her desire to travel, not to generate romance. She negotiates this fantasy by getting lost in her own commodity-based imagination within 663’s private space, significantly preoccupied with his toy plane. The narrative aperture of both plotlines emphasizes the consequence of such commodity-mediated social relations—there can be no satisfying resolution and the characters’ “yearning for intimacy appears to be doomed.”[38] In both narratives, commodity fetishism and reification fail to produce satisfying social relations and do not align with any traditional convention of narrative closure.

However, it would be reductive to suggest that the film operates merely as a critique of urban commodity culture. Chungking Express might be read as subversive in how it confuses hermetically sealed categories such as profit and survival, and progressive in how it critiques the way capitalist motivations are unconcerned with morality (the femme-fatale drug smuggler is not a significantly less sympathetic protagonist than any of the others). Nevertheless, its critique of capitalist social relations should not be read as a proactive validation of the imminent introduction of so-called socialist political dynamics as a result of the handover to Chinese rule. It is merely the backdrop of the already established failings that are known which will be rendered even more anxiety-ridden by the imminent unknown of the post-handover socio-economic environment.

While scholars have brought attention to Wong’s use of mise-en-scene and character portrayal, one important aspect that has been oft-overlooked is the director’s use of specific visual techniques to create anxiety-ridden thematics of space and time. Bettinson argues that Wong’s use of visual techniques is worth exploring as these stylistics not only narrate Hong Kong’s culture of disappearance but also respond to the collective desire to conserve a culture threatened with disappearance.[39] According to Bettinson, Wong’s visual technique is “generally self-conscious and noticeable…(and) generally motivated by story concerns, compositionally rooted in narrative, character, and theme.”[40] Bettinson further argues that every element of Wong’s film plays a role in creating a social comment on Hong Kong’s larger political situation. Bettinson echoes Huang’s analyses that suggest that Wong’s characters and themes are a representation of Hong Kong’s people and their experience within this ever-changing space.[41]

Wong combinesstep-printing, wide-angle lenses in close-up, and black-and-white cinematography in Fallen Angels to establish a mental landscape completely isolated and detached from its surroundings.	This scene in Chungking Express depicts an individual who once again fails to connect with another figure (Faye and Cop 663). Filmed from the exterior of a window, it conveys Faye’s disconnection from her physical reality.

Aesthetically, the use of overlapping editing and serial repetition keeps the audience in the moment and acts as a resistance towards the future in the way it delays cinematic time.[42] Wong communicates his resistance to time through particular visual editing techniques, including “shot duration, editing, camera movement, slow-and fast-motion techniques and stepprinting.”[43] Shohini Chaudhuri adds that Wong’s distinct use of smudge motion captures “an evanescent perceptual and sensory present: both here and already vanished.”[44] In doing so, this technique produces the visual effect of a slowly fading moment,[45] an aesthetic reflection of Hong Kong’s fading cultural space. Bettinson describes how these examples of Wong’s visual techniques disturb “the viewer’s perception and comprehension” as he commits “to making the image ‘difficult’ yet intelligible.”[46] For example, the use of step-printing in Chungking Express manipulates cinematic time and the use of wide angles in Fallen Angels manipulates cinematic space.[47] Such a manipulation of cinematic time and space disturbs the viewer’s perceptual and cognitive facilities.[48] The visuals transfer the native Hong Kong subject’s anxiety about the disappearing cityscape onto the active viewer experience.

In what reads like a nod to Bettinson’s notion  of sensual aesthetics and Wong’s elusive style, Ackbar Abbas affirms that “disappearance refers not just to a rapidly changing space, but more importantly to a space changing in ways that challenge description and representation.”[49] However, Abbas dissolves the local experience into a larger global phenomenon and argues that it is more appropriate “to think about disappearance as the mutations in space and our perception of space brought about by ‘globalization,’ of which the 1997 handover can be seen as merely one event in a much larger reorganization of global space and power.”[50] Even with his dismissal of the specificity of the handover on a local level, it is remarkable the way that he describes Chungking Express in a way that might be understood as an aesthetic of anxiety:

“Chungking Express (1994) is constructed almost entirely with images of disappearance. Take the opening shots of the city. Instead of giving us an establishing long shot with Chinese junks in the harbor against a backdrop of modern ‘Western’ architecture or focusing on recognizable landmarks like the Tsimshatsui clock tower and so on (clichés that effectively erase the city), Wong gives us a medium shot of roof-tops and TV antennas. This is a space that is anchored in the local and particular, at the same time as it is a space that could be almost anywhere in Asia: a nondescript space. The ‘local’ has become dislocated, so that the real we are all too familiar with is now overlaid with the uncanny. Unlike stereotypical images that frame Hong Kong as an east–west city, to take a standard example, the nondescript image subjects the city to a radical deframing that allows it to float free.”[51]

This contradiction in the free-floating and deframed experience of the city on a local level is exactly the aesthetic of anxiety that points specifically to a city bracing itself for such political destabilization as the 1997 handover.

The date on the can represents the deadline imposed on the drug dealing operation, the same day the femme-fatale shoots the man who sets her up for failure to save herself from this mission.	The hitman in Fallen Angels, whose real identity the viewer knows little about, is constantly on the move to complete his missions.

On the script level, disappearance and time running out are aesthetically and thematically connected. The femme-fatale drug smuggler, for example, while she may be blind “to the changes taking place in a global city,”[52] is just as vigilant towards what appears to be the biggest threat of her life: time (or a lack thereof). She is cautiously anxious of the deadline imposed on her missions, similar to Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai) in Fallen Angels. Both of their professions require them to complete tasks to exacting schedules which must perpetually remind them of the life-threatening uncertainty of every moment of their daily intrigues. Similarly, Cop 223 in Chungking Express appears to be living under a constant reminder of time. Having broken up with his former girlfriend on April 1st, he buys one can of pineapple a day for one month, but only cans with an expiry date of May 1st. Again, he embeds the expiry of his social relationship into the expiry of the commodity and decides that if his partner does not return to him by that deadline, then their romance will expire. Buttressing the same motif, in another scene, the drug smuggler gets handed a food can with the same expiry date. In this conflation, Cop 223 laments that “somehow everything comes with an expiry date.”

Wong conveys that almost every process that takes place in Hong Kong comes to an end in order to announce that Hong Kong subjects are essentially living in a space where time has become both a luxury and a limited resource that is running out. Hong Kong’s time runs out in 1997 with the initial handover, and then again in 2047 with the merging of the economic and social political legalities, a lingering and anxiety-ridden double-disappearance over time.

While the use of step-printing creates the effect of slow-motion and thus appears to be Wong’s desire to suspend time, it also helps to communicate the anxiety of a disappearing sociocultural space made unfamiliar to the Hong Kong subject. In the context of Hong Kong’s “imagined community,”[53] what forms the characters’ sense of communal belonging is not the physical space that surrounds them but rather the shared experiences of urban alienation. In turn, this alienation sends them into atomized psychological realms of escape, an experience they share separately. In the second storyline, when Cop 663’s relationship ends, the keys to his Hong Kong flat that his departing ex-girlfriend wants to return wind up in the hands of young daydreamer Faye, a food-server in a street-café. After many apparently self-foiled attempts to return the keys to Cop 663, she uses them to infiltrate his flat. Every time she sneaks in, she cleans, rearranges, and replaces his items. Despite these changes to his physical space, Cop 663 appears to be nonchalant about it. Wong portrays how Cop 663’s recognition of space is not merely based on what is physically around him but, instead, it is constructed by his mental projections. His own emotions and feelings define and build his physical space, regardless of their material anomalies. He proceeds to anthropomorphize these objects into substitutes for genuine human social connection. For example, when he notices that his diminishing bar of soap has been replaced with a new one, he expresses, “you’ve gained weight so fast.” Similarly, when he comes home to find his home flooded, he asks,

“Is the apartment getting more tearful? I always thought it would cope okay. Didn’t expect it to cry so much.”

Faye similarly creates her own fantasy space of escape by repeatedly playing a specific song that she associates with the state of California, her dream travel destination. Whenever she is working at the food outlet or cleaning Cop 663’s flat, she plays the song to lift her mood and distract her from boredom. Eventually Cop 663 sets up a date with Faye at a social club called California. Although he meant to meet her at the club, she does not turn up that night and when he asks one of her coworkers where she had been, he tells her that she went to another California, the one in the United States. While Faye’s version of California is one that is sunny and Cop 663’s version of California is quiet and lonely, the film highlights that the space that one creates for themself may not be one that is familiar to everyone, making one’s perception of it subjectively contingent. Similarly, although Faye and Cop 663 are embedded in the same geographical spaces of Hong Kong (until she flies away), these spaces are not defined for them by their physical surroundings but by their own mentally manufactured or fabricated desires and anxieties, and hence the same space becomes something which they cannot identify or observe for each other.

Cop 663 talking to his beer bottle at the “California” restaurant after he fails to meet Faye.	Cop 663 and Faye run into each other a year later, and he reveals the boarding pass that she wrote for him as an invitation to California a year ago.