Hong Kong’s cinema of cruelty : visceral visuality in Drug War

Abstract

This essay argues that repulsive images of the violated internal body can function as political resistance in modern political cinema. By examining the visceral visuality in Johnny To’s action film Drug War, this study illustrates how the internal body resists, aesthetically, China’s socialist judiciary and Hong Kong’s capitalist economy. When such forcefully imposed sociopolitical ideology becomes too contradictory for the people to accept, common narrative strategies no longer suffice. In turn, visceral images of disgust may appear as rationally uncontrolled reflections of the social reality. In Drug War, these reflections are characterised by onscreen involuntary bodily reactions, when the cinema virtually becomes a disembodied extension of a political abject’s body. With reference to the theories by Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, George Bataille, Julie Kristeva, Fabio Vighi, and Gilles Deleuze, this article finds that the corporeal expressions in Drug War signal that a modern political cinema of Hong Kong can emerge, even without the presence of positive Hong Kong characters, but only with a type of corporeal abjective subjectivity of Hong Kong consciousness.