Post-1997 Hong Kong cinema, masculinity crisis, and generational hegemony : the baby-boomers, post-70s generation and beyond

Abstract

After the global financial crisis in 2008, youths across the world are among the hardest hit social groups, suffering from unemployment and social vulnerability. Riots or protests flared across countries such as the U.K., the U.S., Spain, et cetera. In Hong Kong, the “post-80s” and “post-80s generation” have become buzzwords used to designate the new generation since the anti high-speed rail movement and Choi Yuen Village protests in 2010. Leaving political agendas or positions aside, the generational labels have gained currency in public discourse since the protests. In connection to the debates, sociologist Lui Tai-lok and writer Chan Koon-chung argue that there is an outstanding generational hegemony in post-1997 Hong Kong, through which baby-boomers dominate their successive generations in different ways. How is this hegemony manifested in Hong Kong cinema from the Hong Kong New Wave to the present?

This thesis aims to demonstrate how generational hegemony operates together with the so-called masculinity crises represented on Hong Kong screens, through which men with subordinate masculinity, women, youngsters, children, sexual and other minorities are otherized and marginalized in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema. In addition, it explores how the younger generations of Hong Kong filmmakers, especially the post-baby boomers, post-70s and post-80s generations, agree with or differ from their predecessors in renewing or rejecting the generational hegemony in imaging Hong Kong around and after the 10th anniversary of the handover through their precarious emergence.

The introductory chapter first discusses the predominance of generational hegemony in post-1997 Hong Kong, tracing it back to the historical formation of Hong Kong society, identity and cinema. Having reinterpreted Hong Kong New Wave classics from a non-baby-boomer perspective, it then stresses the gender and generational specificity of most previous discourses on Hong Kong society, its culture and most importantly its cinema, using The Longest Summer as a representative crystallization of 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 then locates the local and transnational presence of the post-70s and post-80s generations in Hong Kong cinema, illustrating the filmic rapport between them and the baby-boomers with the aid of 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 deal with father-son relations in the context of the 10th 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.