Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III”

A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle

If we believe psychoanalysis, life itself is an ongoing contest of censorship, part political, part mythical, part dreamt. In the Freudian schema, the primal, sexually domineering father held sway over his jealous, oppressed horde until the sons rebelled with patricide. Plagued by a self-interested if not wholly rational guilt, the sons thereafter imposed upon themselves sexual restraint and moderation to curb their destructive ids and distribute female pleasures more equitably throughout the clan. From this proposed equitability and self-censorship was born the seed of law, the cultural taboos that legitimate law, and the reality principle that transforms law into cultural ideology. In Freud’s fairy tale, ironically tainted with the fatalistic residue of Christian myth, we forever pay for the sin of the original, tabooed patricide. Though the primal father’s murder was politically necessary, its taboo could never be repeated; we thereafter were indemnified by infinite other, if lesser, taboos, as an escalating series of libidinal prohibitions checked and balanced every new human attempt at revolutionary political freedom. Because this psychic indemnification had always exaggerated perceived societal dangers, however, the reality principle it produced also exaggerated the need for mass repression. Logically, democracies should have no need to overstate the subversions of the id or the dangers of the pleasure principle, but they repress nearly as well as primeval dictatorships still awaiting their fathers’ falls. With modernity, the pleasure principle becomes not merely repressed but explicitly neutered by the culture industry; the new freedoms proposed by postmodernity, sadly, become likewise manipulated and contained by the genres of the culture industry, now more amok than any infantile id. Even the most savage neutering of the pleasure principle is insufficient: society, in whatever guise, remains paranoid of the daemonic libido, and doubly ensures the proposed safety of its reality principle with what Herbert Marcuse had called an overcompensatory “surplus repression” — “surplus” because this politico-legal censorship is unreasonably layered over the inescapable, more organic censorships of our symbolically coded dreams and guilt-ridden, patricidal history.

Society’s surplus repression — its cultural expectations, coercive punishments and rewards, and paranoid censorships — becomes the thin dividing line between freedom and safety, id and ego, privacy and publicity, libido and (to use Norbert Elias’ historicized term) the “civilizing process.” The obvious results of surplus repression are cultures of gratuitous fear and individual lives of futile revolt, for we can rarely, if ever, convince society that perceived threats are in fact unthreatening. (When liberalization occurs in areas of individual or sexual freedom, it happens Oedipally, with the death of elder generations.) If we successfully suppress our ids and stave off any unsettling returns of the repressed, we are, as Marcuse says, rewarded with a mediated “culture” that can be lived, albeit ideologically. Under the aegis of the reality principle, the individual is “geared to a rationality imposed upon [him] from outside . . .”1 and, acting under mass culture’s paternalistic rule, “lives his repression freely as his own life — he desires what he is supposed to desire . . .”2 Thus does the reality principle make freedom and repression indistinguishable, for every perceivedly free content is lived within a repressed form. As we exchange unknown and true (or natural) freedoms for known and false (or societal) freedoms, we persist not under what Peter Sloterdijk has mordantly called an “enlightened false consciousness” — because the hoi polloi may not even subscribe to Enlightenment rationalism — but merely a “functional false consciousness,” much as functionally illiterate citizens can perform minimally according to the conventions of a given reality without being able to either unrepress their pleasures or decode reality’s signs.

Yet if we submit to living our post-industrial alienations as highly rationalized — or even unrationalized — pleasures, society will barely let us have even those, for surplus repression, codified as cultural or political censorship, returns with a venom, condemning non-reproductive sexualities, delegitimizing protest, demanding consumerism, and paradoxically encouraging both bodily self-denial and materialist acquisitiveness. Between the tribal warrior’s exaggerated phallic sheath and the anatomical incorrectness of a child’s plastic doll lie the traces of an unnecessarily bizarre history — humor becomes not only the antipode of censorship but its end result. In fascistic scenarios, the censorships are unequivocal; in liberal-democratic ones, the censorships are more intellectually insulting, for legal and municipal authorities never bother to claim truths but merely reconcile arbitrarily inherited prohibitions with slowly evolving “community standards.”

Because the reality principle — reality as we experience it under dominant ideology — is itself a genre subject to political and cultural censorship, the breaking of taboos should ideally reframe reality, restoring us, as Marcuse suggests, to an unrepressed, unalienated society of Orphic and Narcissistic pleasures, in which the self is wholly re-eroticized. The limits of our generic reality should tear apart, giving way to a Nietzschean revaluation of all values, a world that ideally places side-by-side the formerly sacred and profane, the beautiful and the abject. But the word “ideally” is the rub — we know too well from the past decades’ throes of postmodernism how easily the culture industry absorbs, repackages, and eventually negates attempted oppositions and pseudo-subversions, particularly those of the cinema, which are predicated on marketable style far more than toxic contents resistant to appropriation.3 Even Marcuse’s own examples of “healthy” Orphism and Narcissism in Eros and Civilization are merely literary (and elitist) possibilities and in no real way threaten the reality principle’s overlording genres and censorships.

Attempts at subversion usually fail because they deal in quantity rather than quality, offering up sensational extremes of content rather than qualitatively new genres. Supposedly “controversial” texts that trade in libidinal violence rarely if ever challenge extant genres, and in fact are too easily appropriated by or repositioned within existing genres that — like capitalism itself — craftily absorb and commodify outside threats. Attempting to avoid this pattern of initial opposition, temporary censorship, and eventual synthesis or absorption, many studies of censorship follow the work of Annette Kuhn, who abandons the one-way “prohibition model” of censorship, which naively assumes censors interfere with a pure, unconstructed reality. Arguing along familiar lines of 1980s anti-essentialism, Kuhn posits a “productive” model of censorship that sees the censorship not as a direct intervention but as part and parcel of the construction and consciousness of early film grammar.4 But while all potential lives are obviously constructed through reality principles — even those in Marcusse’s Narcissistic state would still act within historical moments — no degree of cultural-studies wishful thinking can veil the fact that constructed realities are not cooperative, egalitarian affairs but systems of domination dependent on the masses’ tacit, alienated consent. Furthermore, if our realities are the products of both willed construction and unwilled interference — the two variables are entangled, not exclusive — the result is still inherently alienated, for we are allowed to participate only within the generic sociopathy created by the culture industry’s overlording surplus repression. Though postmodernism would deny any unmediated state of being, and while sociology might suggest that Freud’s primal father is merely an allegorical starting point for charting a history of bureaucracy, we might reasonably imagine with Marcuse an unrepressed, pre-bureaucratic life that judges pleasures — and indeed every category of experience — with rational discrimination but without irrational prejudice. Unfortunately, even “productive” censorship remains irrational as long as it develops from the paranoia of surplus repression.

The phenomenon of Hong Kong’s “category III” films provides a useful case study in a censorship that is both a social construction and an intervention, as HK filmmakers have used this more liberal rating category to express previously disallowed social, political, and/or sexual concerns.5 The category III marker, created in 1989, pan-generically indicates a variety of films HK colonial authorities deemed socially threatening: glamorized gangster dramas, such as Triads, The Inside Story (Wo zai heishehui de rizi, 1989)6 and The Tragic Fantasy: The Tiger of Wanchai (Zuisheng mengsi zhi Wanzi zhi fu,1994), whose screenplays use underground triad slang forbidden by HK law; nihilistic horrors, like Run and Kill (Wushu, 1993) and The Untold Story (Baxian fandian zhi renrou chashaohbao, 1993), whose unaccountable sadisms are often interpreted as expressions of sublimated, ineffable anxiety over the 1997 handover; self-explanatorily titled sex-and-violence potboilers, such as Escape from Brothel (Huajie kuangben,1992) and Bloodshed in Nitery [sic] (Xuejian hongdengqu, 1993); costumed bawdry, of which the seriocomic Sex and Zen (Yuputuan zhi touqing baojian, 1991) and A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (Manqing shida kuxing, 1994) are best known; and more recent art films dealing with sexual politics, such as Lan Yu (2001) and Amphetamine (Anfei taming, 2010), whose gay fictions have introduced into local cinema frontal (if flaccid) male nudity in a liberal, film-festival manner. Though category III was instituted in 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square, there is, notably, no direct correlation between the two phenomena; the new category was apparently created as a reaction against the previous year’s censorship of imported prestige films, such as Hollywood’s The Accused (1988) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Nevertheless, this marginal, often low-budget, and less surveilled category made available to genre filmmakers spaces of cultural resistance, especially as the 1997 handover prompted repressed political anxieties to rise climactically to the surface.

Such a claim is hardly surprising, I realize, and it is now fairly hackneyed to argue that shadowy exploitation filmmaking offers “spaces of resistance,” “modes of subversion,” “opportunities for oppositional discourse,” and so on. These are all academic clichés, and they are true up to a point. The films’ moments of resistance and oppositionality cease to the degree that they are based solely on content — for instance, extreme violence becomes quickly absorbed into horror genres, which then become both more violent and more all-encompassing with every new film absorbed. Violent extremes in themselves are hardly subversive; on the contrary, every warfare and civilian massacre is predicated on the most conservative notions of masculinity, whose heroism (or lack thereof) is in the mechanistic cum virtual world reduced to the automatous reflexes of video games. I therefore will not argue that even the most unusual category III films are startlingly transgressive, oppositional, subversive, and so forth, despite their important moments of unconventionality. Indeed, their shortcomings will call into relief the singular film — 1993’s Hero Dream — that is genuinely transgressive, a film that doesn’t merely expand the limits of acceptable content but disrupts the assumptions and operations of genre itself. That the film is not a literarily elite text but gutter trash aimed at mass audiences also helps alleviate Marcuse’s main shortcoming.

For aficionados of HK new wave cinema, the issue of “1997 syndrome” became something of a deadening cliché, yet it was never a reification of the Western spectator, as handover anxiety cropped up endlessly in film texts, implicitly and explicitly. From Hong Kong Hong Kong (Nan yu nu, 1983) to Police Story 3: Supercop (Jingcha gushi 3: Chaoji jingcha, 1992), from On the Run (Wangming yuanyang,1988) to Rock n’ Roll Cop (Shenggang yihao tongjifan (1994), from The Bodyguard from Beijing (Zhongnanhai baobiao, 1994) to Fruit Chan’s The Longest Summer (Qunian yanhua tebie duo, 1998), the theme of 1997-ism appeared irrepressibly. Yet political commentary in pre-1997, mainstream HK cinema — perhaps excluding the more verbose films of Allen Fong or Evans Chan — was generally coy and hardly contentious, limited mainly to offhand remarks, the non-confrontational humanism of Ann Hui, or perilously light satire, as in Her Fatal Ways (Biaojie, ni haoye!, 1991). But if the newly installed category III manufactured subgenres in which the repressed could return more freely, what exactly was returning, and why had political subjects been repressed earlier with such surplus zeal? An answer to these questions requires a brief summary of prior film censorship in the former colony, where British censors automatically tended to equate “politics” with radical leftism.

Earlier film censorship under British colonial rule had been a set of reactionary policies designed to repress the post-1949 leftism of Mainland Chinese filmmaking — any hints of ascendant Marxist nationalism were to be overanxiously erased. Innocuous huangmei diao (folk opera-films) generally passed censorship, though dramatic films came under closer scrutiny. As Zhou Yi notes, HK’s government-controlled Dian Jian Chu (Film Censorship Authority) banned well-regarded films such as Wang Bin and Shui Hua’s White-Hair Lady (Baimaonu, 1950), a popular Communist Chinese tale about oppressive landlords brought to justice, and Xie Jin’s classic Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (Nulan wuhao, 1957), censored for its perceived nationalism.7 Predictably, pro-Western colonial censors banned war movies like Wei Guo’s The Taking of Huashan (Zhiqu Huashan, 1953), which glorified the victory of The People’s Liberation Army over the KMT, as well as films betraying “insurrectionist” tendencies, such as the black-and-white epic Song Jingshi (1955), whose titular hero became a popular communist icon for his leadership during the anti-imperialist Nian Rebellion. According to Zhou, between “1950 to 1958, seventy-two movies produced in China were banned by Hong Kong’s colonial government and twenty-six” were bowdlerized, either for their bald communist doctrine or perceived socialist sympathies.8 Also forbidden were milder propagandas in the socialist realism mold, such as Fang Weixe’s The Railroad of Chengyu (Chengyu tielu, 1952), which extols the construction of the Communists’ first railway, and films such as The Joyful Xinjiang (Huanle de Xinjiang, 1959) and The People of New Hangzhou (Renmin xin Hangzhou, 1952), which lionize rural minority identities according to the Stalinist model of pan-ethnic solidarity.

In accordance with the usual ideology of censorship, the Censorship Authority withheld consistent or even rational explanations for its policies, allowing itself enough flexibility to improvise, back-pedal, or manufacture paranoia as needed. Generally, censors bandied the euphemistic term “political reasons” to raise suspicions of real or imagined communist ideology, particularly after 1958, the year the Great Leap began and Maoist modernization exploded in full force.9 Films and textbooks published in the 1950s couldn’t display the words “the People’s Republic of China,” show Mao Zedong’s visage or communist China’s five-starred national flag, or “indicate that China’s capital is Beijing.”10 Perhaps most tellingly, approved history textbooks in Hong Kong were disallowed to discuss Chinese history beyond the 1911 republican revolution. While the British presumably might have liked to recount fully the fall of Qing dynasticism, one imagines that broaching post-1911 republicanism would raise the specter of its demise, the ensuing warlordism of the 1920s, and the communism that would later “resolve” China’s internal contentions.

In Zhou’s account, as the HK public became increasingly aware of the government’s blatant censorships, the Authority had little choice but to slightly liberalize, reluctantly granting licenses in February of 1958 to Mainland documentaries on heroic dam constructions and satellite launchings and later passing with only two cuts the full-color Maoist propaganda Hurrah for the Success of Our Country’s Three Nuclear Tests! (Huanhu woguo sanci heshiyan chenggong, 1966). Nevertheless, leftist filmmakers were often openly persecuted. After Yuek Feng, director of the award-winning The Deformed (Jiren yanfu, 1960) and Bitter Sweet (Weshei xinku weishei mang, 1963), was blacklisted for his communist sympathies and his films banned, he released a scripted recantation in the Oct. 30, 1967 edition of the Gong Shang Daily: “I have already avoided personalities with leftist tendencies, and I have already broken with many friends once I learned they were leftists.”11 Such coerced recantations obviously bear ironic similarities with the public self-criticisms and atonements prevalent during the Cultural Revolution.

If commercial HK filmmakers working within this history of rightist surplus repression unsurprisingly avoided political controversy, it was equally unsurprising that colonialism’s impending finale demanded opportunities for long-denied catharsis. Though category III did become a kind of “productive” censorship in the early and mid-1990s, I should stress that its attempted metaphors are often crude, ritualistic, and rarely progressive in the liberal-humanist sense. The films’ obsessions with bodily violation tend to be as generically repetitive as those of the Japanese pinku eiga of the 1960s and early 70s, which ritually reified leftist dissent with materialistic images of rape and juvenile sexual rebellion. On the other hand, numerous category III sexploitations feature ambisexual or bisexually curious plotlines that, in the mid-1990s, were more enlightened than the openly homophobic HK films which preceded them, such as as Tsui Hark’s Don’t Play with Fire (Diyi leixing weixian, 1980) and The Big Heat (Chengshi tejing, 1988), or Sammo Hung’s lamentable Pantyhose Heroes (Zhifen shuangxiong, 1991). Category III cinema reached a dense concentration between 1992 to 1994, and in 1993 — the year that most conspicuously marked the pre-1997 devolution of HK cinema’s production values — approximately a third of all films were rated III, even top box office items such as Flirting Scholar (Tang bohu dian qiuxiang, 1993) and (rather inexplicably) Once Upon a Time in China IV (Huang feihong zhi si: Wangzhe zhi feng, 1993). By the late 1990’s and especially 2000’s, category III films had faded into obscurity, partly because the post-1997 film industry as a whole deflated economically, and partly because recent films must be marketable in the tightly censored Mainland,12 where even apolitical films dealing with folk superstition and ghosts are deemed “regressive.”

Hong Kong filmmakers are generally pragmatic in their own assessments of category III, frustrated by its gross exploitations but also eager to take advantage of whatever uncensored opportunities the industry might momentarily offer. Classically trained actor Anthony Wong — resentful of his infamously sadistic roles and probably wishing audiences would remember him for Allen Fong’s Wuniu (1990) — has bemusedly wondered why foreigners would even be interested in category III.13 On the other hand, director Herman Yau has suggested that category III films have vital “anti-society” tendencies and that in Ebola Syndrome (Yibola bingdu, 1996), a virulent underclass antihero symbolically enacts a “proletarian revolution.”14 In Ebola, Wong plays one of cinema’s most abject sub-proletariat losers, a homicidal illegal immigrant whose emigration saga becomes not the contrived tragedy of Alex Law’s The Illegal Immigrant (Feifa yimin, 1985) or Clara Law’s Farewell, China (Ai zai biexiang de jijie, 1990) but an anti-nationalistic horror farce as unlikely as HK’s colonial history itself.

After cuckolding and murdering a gangland boss in Ebola‘s opening scene, Wong flees to post-apartheid Johannesburg, where he works illegally in a Chinese restaurant, suffering penurious wages and rampant anti-Chinese discrimination. Even more repellent than the antihero of Yau and Wong’s previous The Untold Story (which this film openly parodies), the shabby protagonist cannot even find a whore willing to fondle him and is reduced to the ignominy of masturbating into a raw chicken breast while eavesdropping on the nocturnal rapture of his middle-class boss. When venturing into an Ebola-afflicted tribal area to purchase discount swine, Wong cannot help but rape a semi-comatose tribal woman he fails to realize is infected with the disease. After he becomes a carrier of Ebola, he not only finds time to carve his petit bourgeois employers into “African pork buns” but embarks on an infectious spree throughout Johannesburg and later Hong Kong, bloodily liquefying an oppressive reality principle with his primeval, organ-dissolving lusts. For director Yau, Wong’s character is an “instinctual child” and a “primitive” whose desperate, random acts of violence demonstrate that “the lower class has many ways of revenge” against a patriarchal cum bourgeois regime.15 Of course, the attempted metaphor has clear limitations, and actor Wong is more realistic. “But their revenge is helpless . . . they have no knowledge and no money,” Wong responds16, reminding us that while category III shock may provide subversive pleasures to sub-proletarian audiences, such pleasures are in fact the very problem, for the temporary, alienated release they offer to the disenfranchised excuses and masks the reality principle’s overarching oppressions. In Marcusian fashion, pleasure — at its most controlled and transitory — becomes a tool of the oppressor.

By the mid-1990s, Category III horror’s dominant theme was the annihilation of the Confucianist family structure, as framed through contemporary true-crime stories about serial killers, who come to signify deviant ids lashing out arbitrarily against the reality principle. Yau’s The Untold Story (1993) and Billy Tang’s Run and Kill (1993) both climax with what remains among commercial cinema’s final taboos: the graphic, onscreen slaughter of young children, here at the hands of psychopathic, unreproductive loners (scenes still less alarming, though, than Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents). In the former film, Anthony Wong’s deviant dismembers a family and grinds the bodies into filling for his meat buns, prompting an unwitting public, in a sense, to consume itself. In the latter, Simon Yam’s war-scarred Vietnamese psycho burns alive a cuckolded father’s young daughter, whose charred corpse the maddened father then accidentally decapitates (a detail trimmed from the HK theatrical release but present in the Taiwanese version17). Other horrors obsess with patricide rather than infanticide, as do Love to Kill (Nue zhi lian, 1993), Daughter of Darkness (Miemen canan zhi niesha, 1993), Brother of Darkness (Titian xingdao zhi shaxiong, 1994),18 and innumerable others that posit sadistic patriarchs — or, in the case of Daughter of Darkness and Daughter of Darkness 2 (Miemen canan 2 zhi jiezhong, 1994), entire patrilineal clans — who must be cathartically slaughtered.

Onto this dichotomy of infanticide and patricide is frequently layered the theme of male impotence. In the extremely violent A Day without a Policeman (Moujing shifen, 1993), Simon Yam’s divorced cop must regain his lost manhood and overcome his fear of the villains’ phallic AK-47s,19 while the perennially abused male hero of Brother of Darkness (1994) decries his powerlessness when frontally displaying his limp penis before his girlfriend (a shot censored in the HK release but present in the Taiwanese version). In some scenarios — such as those of Dr. Lamb (Gaoyang yisheng, 1992), The Untold Story, and Twist (Zeiwong, 1995) — themes of impotence and patricide are symbolically combined when the villainous sociopath, rather than suffering the murder demanded of a truly potent primal father, is revealed as ultimately powerless or infantile when tortured at the hands of fascistic police. In Twist, the torture becomes openly sodomitic and effeminizing, as Simon Yam’s incorrigible, charismatic, and eventually captured thief must endure penile electroshock and anal penetration with an industrial water hose as part of police interrogation. The subgenre’s rebounding system of sadistic infanticide and vengeful patricide gives rise to an admittedly too-convenient allegory: the films apparently attempt to rationalize the impending political scenario of a child (HK) endangered by an all-consuming father (Mainland China) who must be either cathartically destroyed or tortured into passivity and infantilism. Themes of patricide and infanticide rebound and mix so freely, in fact, that the rebounding itself renders the two themes nearly indistinguishable after one has seen enough of these films. The resultant “patri-infanticide” proposes a synthesis that recalls Freud’s explanation for the paradox of the Christian Trinity: the father and son must be mixed into a single (if still magically separable) entity such that the otherwise usurping son and otherwise domineering father might reconcile transcendentally and guiltlessly. If we accept that patricide and infanticide in category III horror become nearly indistinguishable themes, then beneath category III’s unrepressed sadism and much-discussed “anxiety” lurks the optimistic hope that former colony and fatherland may confusedly coexist.

The theme of the patriarch’s penetrability becomes more subversive in Billy Tang’s Red to Kill (Ruosha, 1994), a minor cult item whose true sexual object is not a passive (and in this film, mentally retarded) female rape victim but the handsome rapist himself. Unlike the primeval, animalistic rapists of earlier HK rape-revenge thrillers, such as The Beasts (Shangou,1980) or Her Vengeance (Xue meigui, 1988), here the rampaging id-monster (Ben Ng) is handsome, adopts a civilized façade by daylight, and in no less than five scenes is on display nude or semi-nude.20 In one scene, the camera stares up worshipfully at his bare, flexing buttocks, perversely inviting the film’s straight male demographic to identify the rapist himself as an object of sodomy. The rapist, when clad in a skin-tight unitard, later bends his head down between his spread legs as the camera gapes squarely into his prone region. By the film’s gruesome, castrating buzz-saw finale, he has inexplicably shaven his head, appearing at once phallic and infantile, predatory and purified, his very body synthesizing the problematic politics of the colonial parent-child dialectic. The film’s unadvertised homoeroticism, moreover, transcends the usual identifications of rape-revenge horror, forcing upon a heteronormative horror audience a disruptive, subversively sodomitic gaze. If the scenario’s shock value borders on absurdity, it’s worth noting that many category III films, from the wild fantasy The Eternal Evil of Asia (Nanyang shida xieshu,1995) to the self-conscious genre deconstruction Daze Raper (Mijian fan, 1995), are openly farcical in tone, feeding a subgenre that emphasizes poker-faced comic discomfort over outright horror.

Less self-conscious but more surprising is The Sweet Smell of Death (Luoming geluofang, 1994),21 by all conventional standards a laughably bad film that nevertheless does what supposedly outré cult films refuse to do: consider without irony an authoritarian male protagonist as a passive object of rape. The film’s hero is a chauvinistic, misogynistic cop who mocks rape complainants but soon becomes the target of a bisexual, chloroform-using rapist. Detaining the suspected rapist for questioning, the cop demands a sperm sample and then, when the suspect refuses, proceeds to masturbate the rapist at gunpoint to procure a specimen, whereupon the rapist licks the officer’s gun in lascivious defiance. After much ludicrous cat-and-mouse, the film finally arrives at its raison d’etre when the flabbily bodied, rather dim cop is drugged by the rapist, stripped, and sodomized. Humiliated, he hesitantly raises his gun to his desecrated temple, but there will be no simply suicidal cleansing. Nor, apparently, can there be the feminist consciousness-raising that attends the victim of the female rape-revenge formula, for after the cop shoots his rapist dead, the credits roll abruptly, even defensively, forestalling any enlightened denouement. Obviously, there is nothing progressive about this homophobic scenario as such — notably, the rapist’s death, like the hero’s violated anus, remains offscreen, as if the film cannot confront the generic ramifications of a male rape-revenge plot whose hero is not a civilian (like Ned Beatty in Deliverance) but a representative of supposedly inviolable legal authority. Nevertheless, the continually stretching boundaries (and low budgets) of category III do allow for the simple existence of such an unsellable plot, whereas mainstream Hollywood or HK cinemas would balk at the very possibility of having their action heroes illegally penetrated. More importantly, the stealthily nonheternornmative scenarios of Red to Kill and The Sweet Smell of Death do what Marcuse says the reality principle never does: ask a repressed audience (here, young heterosexual males) to consider an object of desire radically different from the objects it is ideologically expected to desire.

If besieged masculinity is the dominant theme of category III’s “Confucianist” horrors, other category III films reveal a converse scheme of female empowerment by repositioning the avenging femme castratrice within recognized action-film or martial arts tropes. Most frequently cited in this respect is queer director Clarence Ford’s Naked Killer (Chiluo gaoyang, 1992), which posits a universe of man-hating lipstick lesbians who evince not penis envy but a desire to negate (rather than claim) the dangling monstrosity of masculine dominion. Often overlooked in Naked Killer is that the lesbian heroine’s ultimate demise is prompted by a heterosexual transgression with a cop (again, Simon Yam) that violates her lesbian code of honor. The nether regions of category III elsewhere rewrite HK cinema’s rules of the woman warrior to allow her increasingly sexualized (if exploitative) participation. Offense Storm (Nutongdang xingfengbao, 1993) features a gang of pretty, bat-wielding castrators, while in Rock on Fire (Jimi dangan zhi zhiming youhuo, 1994) female killers tear out men’s jugulars, gouge their predacious eyes, and fight with them one-on-one in the boxing ring. Marginally more enlightened, the action-rape revenge hybrid Passionate Killing in the Dream (Yunyu diliugan, 1992) includes a promiscuous, kung fu lesbian who spends much screen time scolding rogues for their homophobia.

While these exploitations may seem caricatured and unexceptional, they should be understood within Chinese film traditions that typically allowed women to become martially formidable only to the degree that they adopted a masculinized persona and forsake their feminine sexuality, much like Mulan of Chinese folklore. The fighting woman’s Mulan position can be seen in classics like Chang Cheh’s Golden Swallow (Jin yanzi, 1968), whose heroine ultimately sacrifices her martial power for heterosexual feasibility; in new wave policiers like Righting Wrongs (Zhifa xianfeng, 1986) and The Blonde Fury (Shijie dashai, 1989), wherein butch, short-haired Cynthia Rothrock is an improbable heterosexual icon; in action vehicles like Under Police Protection (Jinpai shijie, 1990) and Dreaming the Reality (Mengxing xue weiting, 1991), in which desexualized, gun-wielding women dress and act like gun-wielding Chow Yun-fat; and in once-popular martial fantasies such as Dragon Inn (Xin Longmen kezhan, 1992) and The Heroic Trio (Dongfang sanxia, 1992), in which Maggie Cheung’s loveliness and delicacy militate against her plausibility as a truly skilled warrior not requiring stunt doubles or special effects. Though lowbrow sexploitation, category III’s action-rape hybrids restore to women the sexualities they sacrificed for martial power, and remind us, too, of the etymological and transformational links among the words gender, genre, and generate (from genus). As the recasting and regeneration of genres allow for the regeneration of gender, the binary position of the Mulan woman here dissolves into possibilities for less circumscribed female expression within the “constructive” censorship of category III.

Having reviewed about 200 category III films over the past two decades, it would be impossible — and horribly tedious — to provide a full accounting of their every generic, sexual, and political permutation and eccentricity. That aside, I’d to like focus on some obscure category III films that transgress both the commercial expectations of mainstream cinema and the generic expectations of category III sexploitation. We can begin with director Joe Hau’s22 deliberately opaque erotic thrillers of the mid- and late 1990s, which wilfully deny an unsuspecting and presumably straight category III audience any clear sexual object choices. Passion Unbounded (Siji sharenkuang, 1995) features a lesbian serial rapist who fixates on butch, masculine women, a deviant antihero who seduces a male-to-female transsexual, and a cast of victims who, rather than fervently resist, submit somnambulistically to lunatics’ murderous pathologies. Offering continual, blue-filtered semidarkness instead of obligatory female nudity, Passion Unbounded offers no clear sexual identifications or allegiances, and, shifting its focus among characters who queerly experiment rather than identify as either straight or gay, disrupts the generic-erotic expectations of its audience, much as Red to Kill inserted a homoerotic gaze into an assumedly heterosexist text.

Hau’s next “ambisexual” film, the barely released Crazy (Siji sharenkuang 2: Nanfeng,23 1999), comes across as a perverse, unsentimental variation on Julian Lee’s category III art film The Accident (Xinyuan yima, 1999), as a married yet bisexually curious taxi driver, Ah Huei, meets the man of his dreams, Michael, while adrift in a noirish sea of existential loneliness. While in bed with his distant wife, Ah Huei masturbates thinking about Michael, whom we later learn is (of course) a homicidal lunatic; here, actor Vincent Lam (as Ah Huei) commences one of numerous semi-nude scenes that apparently attempt to coax a latent homosexual gaze from a category III audience expecting the usual sexploitation. After a typically nonsensical serial killer plot develops, Ah Huei, wanting revenge on insensitive killer Michael, asks his wife to seduce Michael’s girlfriend, as if their lesbianism will transitively fortify their own homosexual bond. Just as Michael’s lustful killings remain conspicuously offscreen, so do the characters’ sexualities remain in a transitory, intermediate limbo, for the contortions of the film’s double-crossing murder plot never truly allow consummated sexual relations to come into existence. Though sometimes opaque to the point of incoherence, Crazy is ultimately about the polysemous spaces between sexual identities, successfully sidestepping the essentialist humanism that has informed many mainstream Hong Kong LGBT films of the past two decades.

If films such as Run and Kill and Ebola Syndrome only hint at political allegory, writer-director-actor Julie Lee’s Trilogy of Lust (Xuelian, 1995)24 takes a far bolder approach, and is arguably the most “political” of all category III films. In the opening, a Mainland Chinese pimp exhorts his customers to “Worship the Chairman,” while also insisting that, “In Hong Kong, capitalists are just the same as [our communist] leaders.” He thereupon charges gouged prices especially for Hong Kong patrons who wish entrance to his underground female immigrant auction, where economically desperate Mainland women sell themselves for passage to HK. Ah Chi (director Lee), billed by the middleman as “an intellectual who likes Hong Kongers,” is sold to an abusive HK fishmonger (and disbarred doctor) who never climbed from poverty. After the husband sexually molests her with a limp, bloody fish symbolic of his phallic inadequacy and capitalist failure, she traumatically flashes back her childhood, when she witnessed her anti-Revolutionary parents perish at the hands of Cultural Revolutionary soldiers. (We learn, too, that her brother was murdered in Tiananmen Square, an event rarely broached in mainstream HK cinema.) Ah Chi’s spirits are raised when she meets Ah Un, a handsome farmer with whom she experiences gentle adultery and liberated orgasms, at which point she realizes HK’s capitalist propagandas are as false as the Mainland’s Maoist ones. Realizing that as an illegal immigrant she has no legal means of solving her dilemma — and not wishing to enact the murderous, sub-proletariat rampage of so many category III losers — she follows the old courtesan aesthetic of compulsory martyrdom by jumping from a cliff, after which Ah Un faithfully follows suit. The film ends, however, with a former communist soldier, glimpsed for only a brief moment earlier in the film, discovering their dangling bodies while ironically singing an anthem extolling Maoist prosperity. Screaming in terror, the white birds he traps by profession fly from his cage, a freeze frame of their bounding flight becoming the film’s coda. Though its final moments pessimistically equate the heroine’s suicide with uncaged political freedom, Trilogy of Lust nevertheless uses the generic spaces of category III pornography to advance an overtly anti-communist (and, for that matter, anti-capitalist) agenda several years before respectable auteurs such as Stanley Kwan or Fruit Chan would even begin broaching political themes.

Many of the category III films we’ve discussed challenge certain of the reality principle’s expectations, generic conventions, and symptoms, placing within generic filmmaking sexual or political ideas disallowed under previous categories of censorship. Nevertheless, it will be rightly argued that even at their least conventional, none of these films really undoes the fabric of the reality principle itself — the fabric is merely stretched a bit further to accommodate, appropriate, or absorb new themes. Critics influenced by Lacanianism or culturalist zeal may champion the psychic liberations of cinematic “pleasure,” but we cannot lose sight of our original Marcusian problem: generic pleasure, no matter how subversively it may be framed, merely numbs our alienations and masks our overriding cultural-industrial oppressions, for without shattering the genres of the reality principle, even our most savage, sybaritic pleasures can be nothing more than prearranged narcotics. As Marcuse says, “The most orgastic Liebestod still celebrates the most orgastic renunciation”25 of existence, for the Liebestod is neither a Nirvanic quietude (as it was for Wagner or Freud) nor an ecstatic rebellion (as it was for Camus) but simply another of the culture industry’s alienated illusions.26

If the problem with newly subversive genres is that they are inevitably absorbed into existing, hegemonic frameworks, the film that will break the reality principle will not be one that merely advocates novelty or shock — shocking content becomes wearisome anyway — but one that by its very nature can never be culturally assimilated or synthesized into existing genres. If the reality principle presently defines what is rational, such a film would have to be irrational on its own generic terms — unlike, for example, Dada or abstract expressionism, which employ irrationality as a tool for arguably rational ends. While the notion of a film totally irrational on its own generic terms seems improbable, category III has fortunately provided one such unique film, director Lau Keung-fu’s Hero Dream (Yinyao haoqing, 1993),27 a low-budget oddity that includes within its narrative two antithetical, irreconcilable genres without attempting to resolve or synthesise them, comically or otherwise. According to the film’s posters and video box covers, audiences should expect a generically macho Hong Kong action film. However, the film is unaccountably interpolated with — in addition to a few prosaic scenes of heterosexual rape and one sequence featuring a nude male bodybuilder — explicit, lengthy, X-rated sex scenes between male-to-female transsexuals equipped with both penises and breasts. The nominal plot involves cop Chin Siu-ho, hero of Mr. Vampire (Jiangshi xiansheng, 1985) and countless mainstream B-films, journeying to Thailand to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of Thai gangsters. There he joins forces with the machine gun-toting yam yiu (“transsexual”) gang and occasionally lounges on a bed while transsexuals have tender intercourse featuring full-frontal nudity. One of the transsexuals falls in love with the hero secretly, and comes rushing to his rescue wielding an automatic rifle when he is overpowered by the villains. Taking a fatal bullet for his beloved, the transsexual dies in Chin’s arms, a gesture that unintentionally parodies both heterosexual tragedy and the dying embrace of male “buddy” vehicles.

Though the film is undoubtedly trans-phobic (the yinyao of the title can be translated as “flirtatious freaks” or “flirtatious monsters”) and frames Thailand as a site of the exotic other, the film, in its textual audacity, both transcends the polysemous subversions of Red to Kill and Crazy and dispenses with the coy transgender games of Tsui Hark’s The East Is Red (Dongfang bubai: Fengyun zaiqi, 1993) and other cross-dressing wuxia scenarios of the early 1990s. In Hero Dream, interpretation is rendered obsolete: the repressed vision of “monstrous” sexuality has not only surfaced without hermeneutic effort but has been placed in direct, clashing opposition with the reality principle that generic, heterosexist action films signify. (Mis-)directed at two conflicting audiences, Hero Dream presents a thesis (macho action film) and antithesis (transsexual pornography) that sit dissonantly unrequited, resulting in — depending on your viewpoint — a disorienting Eisensteinian clash, a Brechtian alienation effect, or something like the old surrealist game of exquisite corpse, in which multiple authors contribute to a single text without knowing of the other authors’ contributions.

The film’s denial of reconciliation and generic synthesis is its unique if unintentional triumph. While the reality principle and culture industry are in the business of absorbing and digesting attempted subversions, Hero Dream presents a dominant, formulaic element and a marginal, subversive element that ideologically refuse to be absorbed into one another. Here the two elements sit side-by-side, the subversive, queer half unrepressed by the normative, rigid half, the anarchic id visible in the same frame with the ego, the other in bed with the self. If the two elements are to be reconciled, the synthesis will occur in the minds of the audience, not in the text, for when the abject and the normative are finally presented equivalently, side-by-side, the audience will be newly empowered to judge which side is real and which is the ideological illusion.