Hero Express
An attractive blonde Chinese woman in a light brown trench coat and cool dark shades quickly and confidently strides through dazzling flashes of coloured lights, undefined figures in-motion, blurry oily faces, and packed neon-lighted alleyways while being accompanied by a dark and upbeat score is the explosive opening scene of the movie by Wong Kar-wai, Chungking Express (1994). The camera follows the domineering woman through greasy streets and tiny dimly lit rooms filled with Indian immigrants and then pans to a rooftop scene that shows the passing of clouds in a deep blue wash that highlights Hong Kong’s crumbling skyline complete with shabby television antennas and rusty air vents. The mood of the kaleidoscopic scene echoes the mood of the period of uncertainty mentioned in Charles Baudelaire’s Salon essay, On the Heroism of Modern Life (1846). Baudelaire states that ‘the great tradition has been lost, and that the new one is not yet established’ (Baudelaire, 1846, p.949) implying a period of vagueness felt by the inhabitants of Paris. The art writer Anne Coffin Hanson mentioned that ‘in France at mid-century there was a sharp consciousness of imminent change’(Hanson, 1977, p.3), while some still believed that the past tradition still provide a model for a new ideal and moral integrity, others feel strongly towards progressing for the better, following diligently to the new and it’s possibilities. The latter feels that there are ‘new challenges to be met for the glory of the country’ (Hanson, 1977, p.3) and this sense of duty and heroism is possibly what is needed to push through that grey hazy period.
Baudelaire argues that his ‘age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages’ (Baudelaire, 1846, p.949). He feels that a work of art should resonate the atmosphere of its time. France’s urban heart was going through social and economic shifts thus makes life more complex. John Middleton Murray describes Paris to be in an ‘age of rampant industrialism and violent and abortive revolution; of the hideous and uncontrolled eruption of the great cities; of all squalor of a victorious and hypocritical materialism’ (Murray, 1962, p.94). It was a confusing Paris and painting was also in the same boat. ‘One view held in common by conservatives and radicals alike’ ‘was that art was in a bad state and in urgent need of change’ as ‘what was being produced in the noble manner was of the same quality as the art of the past’ and ‘the old themes were losing their meaning’ (Hanson, 1977, p.4). Art now draws a larger public but is less educated; they are unaware of the biblical and mythological stories of grand historic paintings and do not bother to read the long explanations in the entries of the Salon catalogues. Therefore traditional scenes proved cryptic. Théophile Gautier even said in L’Art Moderne that earlier subjects had so lost their relevance and that ‘historical landscapes were seen as being like wallpapers in provincial inns’ (Gautier, 1856, p.256).
The idea of looking at one’s immediate surroundings championed by Baudelaire can be found in the oil paintings by the heroic painter of wooden life, Edouard Manet. Hanson wrote that Manet was a ‘cosmopolitan with his enthusiasm for life but a flaneur resistance to explosive emotion, equipped with dazzling technical facility might have met Baudelaire’s ideal, but the timing was wrong’(Hanson, 1977, p.21). Baudelaire was aware of Manet’s artistic practice though a huge age gap denies Manet of being an example in his essay The Painter of Modern Life (1964). Nonetheless, Manet used Baudelaire’s writings as a catalyst to examine life in Paris and to fuel his rebellious practice which involves reconciling his love for tradition and desiring to propose a novel outlook.
Manet clever exhibiting strategy and his ‘eye’ for understanding the current atmosphere of Paris subsequently questions the hierarchy of genre championed by the Salon’s conservatives and the political nature of the exhibition space. When the painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882, it gave birth to a new hero. The hero or to be more exact, the heroine’s name is Suzon and is depicted as working in the bar, elegantly dressed in a black sombre jacket and face detached from the noisy crowd. An air of melancholia lingers around her like a sombre melody and is made more vivid due to its juxtaposition with the cheerful reflections of the busy scene in-front and lights from the shimmering chandeliers hanging over the heads of the predominantly bourgeois crowd. The painting could be read as a woman alienated from her surroundings and appears as though to be clinging to the bar as she is in a ‘floating existence’ and is ‘drifting about in the underworld’. A lady from the suburbs struggling to pay rent, buy modern outfits for her leisure times and keep herself afloat in the harsh city was given the same symbolic spatial dignity in the exhibition space as the war hero or the important social leader. This overwhelming current of modern life requires courage to brace through. When the painting was displayed in the Paris Salon, a humble figure from a questionable background stood tiredly though proudly next to bold generals, steadfast war heroes and legendary politicians.
Another painting by Manet depicting a modern heroine is Olympia (1863) and is often described as ‘the most Baudelairean of all Manet’s paintings’ (Adler, 1986, p.62). The painting depicts a self-conscious ivory-skinned young prostitute resting on a white soft bed in a simple sparsely-lit interior with a black servant presenting a luscious bouquet of fresh flowers probably from an admirer. An ebony cat with an arched back is depicted in a surprised position at the foot of the courtesan and seems to melt into the darkness. The art-writer Kathleen Adler states that the ‘courtesan, maid, and cat, may be seen as creatures in captivity’ and the prostitute is ‘as much the fierce aggressive kitten, was ultimately powerless, dependant of a protector’s benevolence’ (Adler, 1986, p.62). This image evokes a sense of danger and recklessness in the pursuit of pleasure which ‘offended to the core the double standard of which decreed that bourgeois respectability and illicit pleasures be kept separate’ (Adler, 1986, p.62). Again, Manet who had always considered the exhibition as a battle-ground displayed the painting in the 1865 Salon to challenge the dominant conservative taste of the period and by using a contemporary subject matter of such ‘underworld’ origin, he suggests the public to turn away from cherishing traditional characters and scenes that are no longer relevant in modern Paris but look into the ‘real’ lives and stories happening deep in the belly of their beloved city. Artists, writers and other creative thinkers began rebelliously to question society and culture in a way responding to traditional structures.
The iconic film scene from Chungking Express in the introductory paragraph echoes the build-up of the dramatic period where there is a need for definition of the current reality. Baudelaire’s proposition of the characteristics of the modern hero is re-examined in a contemporary setting by Kar-wai. This changing in perspective is due to a paradigm-shift. Characters in the film, such as the blonde female who turned out to be a drug-dealer played by Bridgitte Lin, float in-and-out of colourful scenes like ghosts in a hungry festival. She comes from the heart of the ‘underworld’ and unwilling to commit in concrete gestures and signs similar to the modern inhabitants of Manet’s painted world but in this new paradigm, defining heroism would not be an easy task. As life is tough in ‘modern’ Paris, life becomes even more complicated in postmodern Hong Kong.
The intellectual complexity of the period is explained by Terry Eagleton as ‘a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of the idea of universal progress or emancipation of single frameworks, grand narratives, or ultimate grounds of explanation’ (Eagleton, 1992, p1-19). This attitude is further fuelled by feeling of scepticism of modernity’s heroic masculine gestures for progress and truth (examples of the female characters in Manet’s paintings that are under the gaze of the male artist) and ‘sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities’ (Eagleton, 1992, p1-19). Eagleton explains that this way of seeing ‘has a real material conditions: it springs from an historic shift in the west to a new form of capitalism- to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics’ (Eagleton, 1992, p1-19). He further concludes that ‘post-modernism is a style of culture which reflects something of this epochal change, in a depthless, decentered, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, as well as between art and everyday experience’ (Eagleton, 1992, p1-19). Thus the classical ‘centered sytem’ does no longer exist; there is no longer a noble end or a higher purpose to be fulfilled. A ‘self-reflexive’ hero is not such an honourable hero. A protagonist that changes his cause everyday seems like an undependable character. Jirina Siklova in her essay Courage, Heroism, and the Postmodern Paradox (2001) which talks about political heroism in Czech Republic in the mid-1990s argues that ‘in postmodern times we are therefore obliged every day to decide repeatedly whether our actions are right or not. It is tiring. We suffer from a dearth of unquestioned rituals’ (Siklova, 2004, p.144). An instant reaction of a heroic act requires a internalized system of values that is rigid and structured or an endeavour to achieve a specific goal that is deemed imperative enough to sacrifice other values require a belief that one is truly right. Siklova states that ‘where such goals require courage or even heroic actions, scepticism is an insurmountable obstacle’ (Siklova, 2004, p.144). The woman with the blonde wig said to Cop 223, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro in a shadowy bar scene, that people’s characters are always in a state of flux and ‘that knowing someone doesn’t mean keeping them. People change. A person might like pineapple today and something else tomorrow’.Thus if the hero might not be a person as he or she in unstable emotionally, could it then be an object that is emotionless? Could it be a large object that contains a large number of other objects and people such as a city?
Chungking Express tells two stories of lovelorn Hong Kong policemen that are woven together into the fabric of the urban soul. The first, Cop 223 (Kaneshiro) is a regular at the Midnight Express takeaway has been abandoned by his long-time girlfriend and sadly counts the date for their possible reunion by purchasing and consuming tinned pineapples of a specific date which is a favourite food of his former lover. He then met a blonde-wigged drug dealer (Lin) that becomes his new love-interest. The second is about Cop 663 (Tony Leung), who also is a regular at the takeaway joint and had been dumped by his air hostess girlfriend and mourns the loss by talking to inanimate objects in his tiny flat such as a ragged towel and a used bar soap. He then met Faye (Faye Wong); a free-spirited girl that sneaks into and fills the cop’s apartment with new objects of her own such as canned food, goldfish and towels. The cop eventually catches her while in his apartment though she escaped. A request for a date by the cop was later unfulfilled as Faye quits her job at the Midnight Express and became a stewardess bound for California. A year passes and she returns to the takeaway bar to find that the cop is the new owner. The film ends with an unresolved enigma of their future.
Hong Kong was in a peculiar state when the movie was filmed. Surprisingly, echoing the cultural and social mood of Paris during the time of Baudelaire, Hong kong in the mid-1990s, was according to the writer Janice Tong as ‘experiencing the state of its own disappearance’ and a ‘shroud of uncertainty has bathed the city-state since the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration returning Hong Kong to China’ (Tong, 2003, p.19).
Sean Radmond, in his film analysis of the movie stated that people in Hong Kong are ‘perceived to be always on the move, rushing about, on their way to work, to eat, to buy, to sell, in a city where so much on offer is equivalent of the world’s fastest fast-foods’ and that it is ‘an unstable place and the people are unstable within it’ (Radmond, 2008, p.22). It is ‘in this city of aching dreams, people suffer an identity crisis, very much like the city itself- caught between East and West, Cantonese and Mandarin, tradition and modernity, independence and governorship, wealth and poverty, nothing sit easily in/on Hong Kong’ and ‘its mix of people, its unresolved history, its break-neck trajectory, its commodification, its teeming spatial organization and its ‘collective’ identity crisis is central to the way, Chungking Express can be read and understood’ (Radmond, 2008, p.27). The modernist’s ‘floating existence’ is exaggerated and zipped as explained by Tong as a ‘place we find a mobile state of rupture where images, space, time, characters and narratives fold in upon each other, weaving a skein of images that threaten to slip from our gaze’ (Tong, 2003, p.54). This postmodern Hong Kong seems like as unstable as the characters that inhabit it but there must be a set of constants that govern its logic and it must have affected the way the inhabitants function.
The character Faye illustrates the ‘modern hero’ in a new context. As a ‘postmodern heroine’, her daily habitat and situation are surprisingly similar to Suzon’s, the character in Manet’s painting. While Suzon is placed behind a glittery counter, Faye is stuck behind a greasy one subsequently also serving something unhealthy, oily American quick takeaways. The both seemed trapped and powerless in their existence. While Suzon’s bar is elegantly European in its decor, Faye’s slimy metallic counter-top and glass counter hold advertisements from Coca Cola, with menu of unwholesome Western food and the air is repeatedly poisoned by a Western song from the mid-1970s. The recurring song is California Dreamin and alludes to her dreams of escaping to California and leaves her immediate reality to a place that is freer. A post-modern hero may jump ship and abandon his or her cause at any time, never tied to a cause. This phenomena could be explained in term of time and space, and that ‘our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve’ (Jameson, 1985, p.125). Is this un-heroic symptom suffers by Faye carved by the conditions of living in the city? Her desire to leave is due to her condition of being quicksand in a greasy mindless job but regardless she still returned, though in a new uniform (airhostess) and job that allows to escapes whenever she desires.
Olympia’s heroic gesture and femme-fatale personality are interrogated by Kar-wai’s character of the confident drug-dealer in trouble. The self-assured concubine, with a dominant gaze and supple skin showing openly is compared with the unnamed blonde criminal who is contrastingly layered like an onion by her striking wig, dark shades and trench coat in comparison to the naked prostitute. Her dominating character controls her surrounding though when a drug trafficking exercise turned sour, she becomes like a woman who is trapped and hunted, almost like Olympia’s kept position. Both represent characters that exist at the fringe of society, from the dark and grimy ‘underworld’, whether stark naked or clothed, exposed or hidden, their existence is due the nature how society functions.
Both cops in the movie allude to the stereotypical masculine nature of heroic modernism though in contemporary times, these male figures, instead of upholding law, fighting for truth or committed to protecting society, are busier trying to fill their hearts with love or lusting over real and fake women. Their responsibilities as male heroic figures are challenged by meaningless selfish acts they commit on a daily basis. The male modern artists’ gaze apparent in Olympia and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère are echoed especially in the beginning scene when Cop 223 was distracted by a blonde female mannequin carried in street while he was escorting a hooded criminal thus allowing him to escape. Self-interest prevails over selfless heroism. Their presence in the city creates awareness that there is law present but this is just a façade as they will not implement them.
Kar-wai’s fast-paced film illustrates a city teeming with life as scenes appear cluster phobic and packed from frame to frame. People live in small areas in the concrete jungle and their interactions with each other create complex and deep though fleeting relationships. The city constructs lives, realities, desires and futures. It’s the power of the city to influence the inhabitants’ lives and the scale of it justifies it as a ‘heroic’ object that vomits a ‘heroic’ stream or current that act as mini arenas for valiant acts to happen. It’s a single object that itself constantly changing and in return creates a fluctuating society within its ribs that seems to viciously spin in constant circles.
Postmodernity has created a shift in perception of heroism and that the characteristics of the modernist heroes are questioned. It’s harder to be heroic than before. Scepticism over truths and grand narratives make great heroic acts impossible to encounter therefore maybe we should appreciate smaller heroic acts or merely just kindness to each other at any given moment that are created by the fact that people live closer to each other. Though the interactions are always fleeting and short such as holding the door for a stranger, these instances stop this swift current of life for a split second for us to realize that our social condition and reality which is due to our immediate urban architecture need to be re-evaluated and appreciated. We need not be self-enclosed and lonely amidst strangers like our modern heroine Suzon but create links with our immediate surroundings. As confessed by the young lovelorn Cop 223, the sparse condition for him to rapidly fall for a woman is to be physically close to her for as much as 0.01 cm and for a blink of an eye, these conditions are sufficient enough for intimacy to be kindled and the seed of love to be planted.
Bibliography
Books and journals.
Adler, K. (1986) Manet. Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited.
Baudelaire, C. (1846) On the Heroism of Modern Life, Salon of 1846, Complete Oeuvre.
Eagleton, T. (1996) The Illusion of Postmodernism. UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Gautier, T. (1856) L’ Art modern. Paris.
Hanson, A. (1977) Manet and the Modern Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jameson, F. (1985) Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press.
Murray, J. (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essay.New Jersey: by Prentice Hall
Radmond, S. (2008) Studying Chungking Express. UK: Auteur Press.
Siklova, J. (2004) Courage, Heroism, and the Postmodern Paradox. Social Research: An International Quarterly. Volume 71, Number 1 /spring 2004. Page135 – 148.
Tong, J. (2003) Chungking Express: Time and its Displacements in Berry Chris (ed.) Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, London: BFI.
World Wide Web document.
Jones, J. (2000) Portrait of the Week. [internet]. Availabe from [Accessed 19 January 2012]
Film.
Chungking Express. (1994) Directed by Wong Kar-wai. Hong Kong: Jet Tone Production Co. [Video: DVD].
Works of art.
Manet, E. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), oil on canvas. London: Courtauld Institute.
Manet, E. Olympia (1980), oil on canvas. Paris: Musée d'Orsay.
