Ma, Chun-Lung. “Traversing Hong Kong’s Non-Places and Heterotopias in Films of Global Crises.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 50, no. 3 (2023): 364-385. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crc.2023.a992072.
Excerpt:
Global cities are places where globality manifests itself most prominently, and where global flows are grounded as they “form a network that spans the globe, and, in many ways, this global city network constitutes globalization” (Timberlake and Ma 269). Hong Kong, as a major global city, is often depicted alongside other global cities in film narratives that explore both the material and the imaginary interconnectedness that result from globalization. In this way, Hong Kong as an urban setting can be examined to investigate the performance and expression of notions of the global and the global imaginary, especially when the cinematic construction of Hong Kong is circulated through globally distributed and consumed films.
Globality, as defined by Manfred Steger, is a social condition characterized by interconnections that allow for global flows of people, goods, information, and ideas (7). Global interconnectedness relies on information technology that constantly generates new possibilities for simultaneity and instantaneity, transcending national borders and conventional geographically defined boundaries. As globalized social relations are increasingly formed between people located anywhere on the planet rendering geographical locations irrelevant or, using Scholte’s terms, “transplanetary” and “supraterritorial” (1478), boundaries present fewer and fewer barriers and obstacles and as Giddens has argued, local happenings can have global consequences and vice versa.
The increasingly complex ways in which global linkages are formed and the unanticipated systematic risks and dangers that such global interconnections bring about are what Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan call the “butterfly defect” (6). The transformative global processes that facilitate transnational flows of capital, people, goods, and information could create unforeseen aggregate consequences that turn local and national risks and dangers into networked and global ones. The invisibility and intangibility of some global interconnections make it difficult to identify potential risks. 2003’s SARS and the later COVID-19 demonstrate how difficult it is to trace and contain a global pandemic in a highly interconnected world. In the digital realm, constant connectivity facilitated by communications technology happens through a network much of which is disembodied and hidden, and people’s digital footprints are unknowingly being monetized and exploited.
This article will examine films revolving around narratives that address the dangers of transnational interconnectedness through scenarios of global threats and crises. The three films under discussion are inspired by true events and realist in style. Hong Kong is constructed as a significant place in these narratives depicting global crises: the ground zero of a global virus pandemic in Contagion (2011), the site of a hacker cyberattack on a nuclear power plant in Blackhat (2015), and the hiding place of the most wanted man on the run in Snowden (2016). In these three films, Hong Kong is situated in the nexus of a global network of people, goods, and information. Globalized social conditions and twenty-first-century cybertechnology have complicated the nature and spread of financial, health, and environmental crises. Enmeshed with the visible networks are invisible global networks of a deadly virus pandemic, clandestine intelligence operatives, and the dark web of transnational cybercrime hackers. These films suggest that tackling the risks and problems caused by establishing closer ties between nations and peoples requires concerted global efforts, which may not be as readily forged.
This article will first address the factual and ideological implications of the choice of Hong Kong as a setting and consider how these films factor in recent global risks as well as the city’s perceived ideological “in-betweenness” connecting China and the world. It will then examine the cinematic construction of Hong Kong by paying attention to the spaces and places depicted in these films to express visible, invisible, and in-between global connectivity using the spatial categories of Augé’s non-place and Foucault’s heterotopia.