Noncommittal and seriousness in Johnnie To

Shin is shot, Fats thoughts he is injured, but it turns out that he wears a bullet-proof jacket. The audience’s worry is released by Shin’s playfulness. Shin (or Mike, not sure) puts in matches into cigarette so that it sparkles when Curtis and Frank smoke, creating another moment of ease. The film is anxious not to sentimentalise brotherhood, where men sacrifice themselves for their comrades. This kind of detachment effect is achieved by  the trifling played among the guards. Another example would be kicking the paper ball in the office. That scene is not so much a scene of solidarity, but a moment of childishness and not being serious. The brotherhood bonding is glimpsed but never sentimentally presented. The film depicts a cool brotherhood – that which operates with silence and tacit agreements. When Mike struggles to kill or not kill Shin, it is a glimpse of the uncoolness of the guard. But interestingly he is also the most accurate and calm gunman among the five.

 

Johnnie To and the ethical

Both PTU and The Mission are driven by an ethical motive. By that I refer to moments where the character makes a decisive cut between his following action and the normative view of things. In PTU, the sergeant chooses not to report his colleague/friend’s lost gun, trying to help him find it before dawn. The decision is ‘unprofessional’ and not fully supported by colleagues. The voice of the real world chips in from time to time in the film, reminding the audience that the sergeant’s search for the gun is subversive and risking the whole team’s career prospect. But do not think the sergeant is all the way selfless – he said that if he can’t find the gun before dawn, it’s his friend’s ‘bad luck’. The film plays with this undecidable motive of helping. No single doer behind the deed.

In The Mission, the same thing happens when Roy insists on defending for his disciple, who has committed adultery with the boss’s wife. The ethics here is more complicated because it operates on the inner world of the triad. Adultery is a prime sin in that world and the result of it is death. But because Roy is partly responsible for his disciple’s mistake, he can’t help by put himself into this position of a protective father. The point here is ambiguous because he is both guilty of causing this to happen, and he has to play the role of a saviour. Roy’s decision is both honourable and forced. Another undecidable moment.

Johnnie To’s The Mission (1999)

The film finishes with a dissemblance. A junior gang member is supposed to be executed by his master. But his gun is intentionally misfired. The junior leaves the execution at the backdoor. The observer, representing the master’s boss, has thought the junior is killed. The master has ‘completed’ his mission, and at the same time, managed to save his comrade from being killed.

The scene fakes the audience into thinking that the junior is dead. It should be remembered that the junior has to be killed because he committed adultery with the wife of the master’s boss, an ‘unforgivable’ sin in the triad culture. So when the gun is fired, the audience is led to the idea that ‘adultery is wrong’ and killing the junior is somehow justified and reasonable.

Another impression the audience may get is that the master is cold and professional: he kills by order. He rates his loyalty to his old boss higher than the fraternity built among his comrade (within a year).

But the film’s very last shot presents the junior walking out from the backdoor at ease. This shot is criss-crossed with the master driving away with a self-satisfying smile. The smile implies at least two things: he is proud of the show he put up in misleading his boss; he is glad that the junior is safe and the brotherhood remains unharmed.

The ending shows that brotherhood triumphs over the control of the over-powerful financial boss. The wife who commits adultery is killed by her husband, but the junior is saved by the master, suggesting that first, man’s involvement in adultery is relatively more forgivable and second, the consolidation of brother is founded upon certain approval of unethical act.

Amid solitary hills

Since about 9 years ago, contact between K and M became unnoticeable. From time to time, K would fancied how M was, and M would sometimes be distracted by flashes of K’s body parts. K for several times considered reconnecting with M – they knew each other’s address – but the will was never strong enough to materialize the plan. It occurred to K – thinking retrospectively – that plans like this are weak and unhealthy. ‘They do no good to me and my family’. In fact, K could be easily affected. His shoulders are unbalanced when he walked; and he often found difficult to express a categorical ‘no’ to his life. In the past few weeks, K’s work table filled with heaps of documents awaiting to be processed. The immediacy of dealing with them made him forget the high meaning of life. He began to lose his bearing, but at the same time he could not let himself fall mechanically into the bureaucratic drudgery. He suddenly desired some dramatic happening – perhaps a fairy would knock at his door and praise his hard work and sacrifice for his family. He knew very well such thing would not happen. And even if it happened, it would not really alleviate his pressure in the long run. At this moment in time, M’s face flashed by. ‘Why is it every time when I am alone and struck with emptiness that M’s face appears? Before the question was answered, K had already shoveled his documents and dug out his typewriter from the cabinet. It came to K’s mind that, some time ago, M had written to K, but the latter did not reply. For what reason he did not reply we do not know. All we know is that K’s desire had overpowered his better reason. The typewriter and the paper were ready. He is left alone in his office and no one would interfere him at this time of the day. But K’s fingers were frozen on the surface of the buttons. His gaze fixed on the blank sheet, making his emptiness even emptier. K had nothing to say. Or more precisely, he had no idea how to say what he wanted to say and at the same time kept the writing formal and appropriate. ‘I need a form’. K came to realize how intense his imaginary connection with M was, but also how fragile and misunderstood it was. His spasmodic passion only made the long ended relationship more ridiculous. K finally decided not to write anymore. He returned to his work and decided to make better use of his freedom once again.

We live, not life.

Threat is one of the most powerful, and perhaps violent, strategies in influencing others’  behaviours. It is foremost a speech act, most suitable for those who prefer sitting there and witnessing his own power of manipulation. Threat requires a term or condition: if you do not…I will (not)… The psychological structure of posing threats resembles the building of a stadium: circumscribing the self with concrete, making sure no one can get to my nerves.

Threat is a quick attack to the enemy who is not quick enough to refute with the unwanted action. The goal of posing threats is not to revert the enemy’s value, but merely a desperate attempt in forcing a desirable visible effect. The enemy may succumb to your threat and do what is expected. But that is all – in order to get the expected outcome the same threat will have to come to place again. Eventually threat turns camouflaged, becomes part of the everyday structure, closing down possibilities. The labyrinthian world remoulded into a familiar maze. Subservient to threat, behaviours are motivated by external conditions rather than cognitive commands. That means next time the subject will not be able to carry out the same action by himself, but need the authoritative people shouting from outside.

Threat is an economical activity. Encountering a threat, I compare what I want and what is wanted to see if it is worth to postpone or even sacrifice my desire. There begin to arise a tendency to quantify the values of everything, or seeing life as a means but not an end itself.

The reason I am reflecting on this is that I saw so many parents threatening their children in order make them follow their orders. What touches my nerves is the parents’s malicious faces. I had an impression that the hatred, even though it may disappear soon, is spreading to the kids, and they will automatically repeat what was done to them. Our children will make themselves more and more distant from what they instinctively want. Life becomes a contract, negotiable and reactionary.

It reminds me of the quote, ‘Life does not live’. It is men who are living, not life.

Mencius and instrumentality

M’s student says human nature is like the wood of a willow tree, whereas benevolence/ grace/ altruism is like a wine cup crafted out of the unharmed wood. Mencius questions that analogy, as it assumes human nature is neutral and can be framed into the good by force. The good is therefore abstract, illusory and fake!

Stael on English passion for business and their uncritical use of leisure

‘continual labour, whether mental or corporeal, disposes the mind to be contented with every kind of diversion…[as long as it is extravagant enough to puncture our habitual ennui and “dejection”]’ (quoted by David Simpson in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Romanticism, p. 60)

Notes on living with/in others

There is a difference between wanting to know the others and wanting to agree with the others. In fact, can we say they are opposite to each other? The process of understanding the other should involve a continuous drive to distinguish the self from the other. Only by doing so can we fully understanding the other, which is by definition NOT me. If I always tend to agree with the others, I am looking for similarities between myself and the other, which will then reduce the OTHERNESS of the other. 

But does it mean that we should disagree with others? No. But first of all, we should understand the other’s point of view as much as possible, and at the same time, we should be aware that our perspective is limited. That means there’s something that we can never understand about the other. 

One of the obstacles in ‘applying’ this principle is that when there are many others whom you need to deal with at the same time, there comes the need for so called fairness. Every other has to respect a bigger Other, which is an abstract quality that makes sure everyone enjoys the same rights and is treated the same by me. 

Justice therefore necessarily reduces differences each individual makes by abstracting each of them into identical citizens. 

Another issue about understanding the other is that, the more heterogeneous the other is, the more attractive it is. So we may say that the most difficult task is to locate otherness in close proximity to the self. To seek the unfamiliar in the familiar. To reassess established beliefs about the closest persons. To unseal the cartoon boxes stored at the back of your head. This goes hand in hand with Husserl’s ‘back to the things themselves’ in a sense that the reassessment removes the framework previously set up in apprehending the other and try to understand the other DIFFERENTLY – that the other is different from me, and that the other is different from the other whom I perceived before.

Are these rules to be followed or some seemingly objective description of the other? The ethics of the other is no Confucius philosophy; it is not concerned with what one SHOULD do. The purpose here is to present the phenomenon of the other, emphasizing the ineradicable difference the other contains. It is as if the other exists before we came to this world. A new topic in research is as old as the Scriptures; a new born is an ancient to his parents. 

It is tempting to plot such relationship by reverse the self at the centre in a big circle and the other at the periphery. To visualize the other will run the risk of seeing the other RELATIVELY. But the other is bigger than anything I can relate; the other is beyond visualization. Rather, as mentioned above, the other should be thought temporally. it exists prior to my existence. This may sound impossible as in the case of the new born son. But to think the other precisely means to think the impossible. Unthinkable time is more unrepresentable than unthinkable space.

Heart ghost

Just like the other nights, F was taking a shower before his wife returned home. Inside the bathroom, veiled by the star-pattered dark yellow curtain, the image of someone opening the gate and the front door regurgitated in his mind. Yes, the wife never had keys with her: ‘someone will open the door’. F was not thinking her wife, but someone, a stranger perhaps, would break into his space and see him naked in the shower. This was one of the many showers when he could not relax but kept thinking about his failure in guarding the door. ‘The door is opened’.  He gave anonymous knocks and voices from other flats a doer without a name. The horror mounted as the stranger’s faces begin to form shape. ‘I will first hear the gate slides on the rail, then the hinges squeak’. Often times he shout ‘You are back, aren’t you?’ hoping (perhaps not) someone will reply with a soft and submissive yes. The shout hanged in the dark sitting room. His vacuum swelled. He knew she would eventually be there. And he knew very well no others could possibly knew the door was unlocked everyday at this time. All the same. The lead circle above him bound his movement with judgment; towards nights, it chained him into many assassination plots. Shower finished. No one came. ‘I will heat up the food’. F heard the sliding and the squeak; the wife arrived as usual. Her face would decide the mood of the remaining night.

ramnant in time

There is a time, when you feel like doing nothing productive, and yet worry the fact that you are doing nothing. Your mind goes adrift, recalling painful memories, as if the body is so dull that it wants pain for the sake of stimulation. The further you sail the further you are away from day light, from the requests and obligations. You see yourself falling into this abyss having no idea how to escape by thinking something else. Consciousness is a disease. Returning to reality gives you a placebo effect, but that doesn’t cure melancholy. The cure shall come when you have liberated the past, letting it go, and take things flits by as that will never be seen again.