Post 1997 Hong Kong cinema, masculinity crisis, and generational hegemony: the baby boomers, post 70sgeneration and beyond
After the global financial crisis in 2008, the youths across the world are among the hardest hit social groups, suffering from unemployment and social vulnerability. Riots or protests flare across countries such as the U.K. the U.S. Spain, et cetera. In Hong Kong,"post 80s"has become a buzzword since the anti high speed railway and Choi Yuen Village protests in 2010. Political agendas aside, the use of generational labels has gone mainstream, and it is hard to ignore the generational issues surrounding the term despite one's political stances regarding the debates or the lack thereof. Echoing the debates, the sociologist Lui Tai Lok and cultural critic Chan Koon Chung argued that there is an outstanding generational hegemony in post 1997 Hong Kong, through which baby boomers dominate the successive generations in Hong Kong to varying degrees. How is this manifested in Hong Kong cinema starting from the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s until now? This thesis aims to demonstrate how generational hegemony operates together with the so called masculinity crises represented on Hong Kong screens, through which women, youngsters, children, sexual and other minorities could be Otherized and marginalized in post 1997 Hong Kong cinema. It also explores how the younger generations of Hong Kong filmmakers, especially the "post 70s/80s"generation, agrees with or differs from their predecessors in renewing or rejecting the generational hegemony in imaging Hong Kong around or after the tenth anniversary of the handover through their precarious emergence. This thesis first introduces the prevalence of generational hegemony in post 1997 Hong Kong. Subsequently, it charts the historical development of Hong Kong society and identity, re reading key Hong Kong films from a non baby boomer perspective. It then stresses the gender and generational specificity of most previous discourses of and on Hong Kong society, culture and most importantly its cinema, using The Longest Summer as a representative example crystallizing generational and masculine hegemony. Chapter 1 moves on to the post handover and post SARs era, using Breaking News and PTU directed by the auteur Johnnie To and his team Milkyway Image to explicate the synergic relation between auteurism, localism, masculinism and generational exceptionalism. Chapter 2 first locates the local and transnational presences of the post 70s and subsequent generations in Hong Kong cinema, then it illustrates their communal adhesiveness through using industrial information and textual analyses of Exodus and Nightfall. Chapter 3 finally makes a case for generational difference by comparing After this Our Exile with High Noon and Glamorous Youth, which all depict father son relations in the context of the tenth anniversary of the handover. The three films would be analyzed through the lens of the modern/postmodern divide, the mainland connections, the politics of mundaneness and the representations of queerness.