Hong Kong Horror Cinema by Gary Bettinson Daniel Martin

Author:Gary Bettinson,Daniel Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

CHAPTER 8

Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films: Police Procedural Colludes with Supernatural-Martial Arts Cinema

Kenneth Chan

Introduction: Transfiguring Genre

In this chapter’s examination of the Chinese supernatural-martial arts film (wuxia shenguai pian) and its contemporary iterations, I approach Hong Kong horror at a tangent, specifically as a border-crossing cinematic modality that haunts other popular genre forms. What I have in mind as a case study are Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s most recent reinventions of the wuxia shenguai genre: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) and Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013). As Christine Gledhill rather artfully argues, ‘The life of a genre is cyclical, coming round again in corkscrew fashion, never quite in the same place’ (Gledhill 2000: 227). This visual metaphor of the recycling patterns in genre history which Gledhill conjures is a critically productive one, in that it forestalls the reductive assumption of genre repetition as a mark of popular cinema’s predictability and creative ennui. The helical motion of genre reinvention mobilises a temporal schematic of cinema’s historicity – an acknowledgement of a genre’s cultural and historical precedence – while materially shifting its form to meet the exigencies of contemporary politics and cultural concerns. Or, as Gledhill puts it, ‘Revealing patterns or usages lost to view … enables us to trace the movements of cultural history, carried forward or intruding into the present, revealing hidden continuities and transformations working under new or disguising names’ (Ibid.). These continuities and transformations of the wuxia shenguai pian, as evident in early Shanghai film and in Hong Kong cinema, I address briefly in the next section as a way of contextualising the Detective Dee films as hybrid fusions of martial arts cinema, Chinese supernatural horror, and, even, the recent American fascination with detective dramas and police procedurals, all in an era of Chinese transnational co-productions.

In updating the wuxia shenguai pian for twenty-first-century audiences through creative genre transfigurations, Tsui Hark is doing what he has always done best in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s: maintaining the cultural currency of the martial arts film for mainstream Chinese (and now global) audiences and, hence, retaining the box office viability of the genre. But beyond this rather obvious observation, which one could make of most financially successful blockbuster films, I also argue, through a close reading of Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame,1 that the Detective Dee films’ successful appeal to local and global Chinese audiences is based on an updated rendering of the familiar cultural trope of modernity versus tradition, as mirrored in the supposed tensions between the police procedural and the horror/supernatural elements. I problematise these tensions precisely because their narrative and rhetorical purpose is, ironically, to shore up the deterministic logic of Chinese cultural history, the interpellative call of Chinese political power, and the cultural nationalist logic of being Chinese. In other words, even as lighter mainstream entertainment, these films can be read as ideological twins of the more didactic and overtly problematic Hero (2002) by Zhang Yimou.

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