Infernal Affairs and The Departed or Cultural Transnationalism in a colonial context

It is February 27, 2007, and the climax of the 79th Academy Awards is approaching. On the stage, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson open the envelope containing which of the nominated films has been judged best picture. The winner, they announce, is The Departed, a gritty mob drama set in the heart of darkest Boston. Considering that the films director, has already been awarded Best Director, this is perhaps unsurprising. With this victory Scorsese takes home two Academy Awards, his first and to date only in a lifetime of playing the bridesmaids to other nominees. However, while this may be where the story ends, it is far from where it begins.

The Departed, like many of Scorsese’s other works, was an adaptation. However unlike films like I Hear You Paint Houses, The Last Temptation of Christ, or Goodfellas, Scorsese was adapting another movie rather than a book. Or rather, he was adapting a trilogy of movies, the Infernal Affairs series. This was a Hong Kong set series of crime thrillers dealing with dirty cops and undercover agents, all hunting each other. Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, the films cleaned up on the international awards circuit, but had little impact on America. This was left to Scorsese’s adaptation. Scorsese’s film also had significantly greater commercial success, making more in one film than Lau and Mak made in three. For a long time, this would have been accepted as almost natural. Of course an East Asian film would meet with little critical or commercial success in America, and could only hope to get close to that through adaptation. However now, as Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite wins big at the Oscars and even achieves moderate commercial success in America, it is worth returning to and re-examining this transnational relationship between East Asian cinema and American adaptors, and how exploitative it can be.

An irony of the transnational situation Infernal Affairs finds itself in is that it is itself a transnational series. The span of the series covers Hong Kong as both Crown Colony and as a relatively autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China. Both situations are very distinct from the traditional transnational context. In fact Infernal Affairs 2 is set over the period of transition between British and Chinese rule, highlighting the chaotic situation and the way different people and groups saw different opportunities in this liminal situation. That a movie about colonialism ended up in a sense colonised is bleakly amusing. And this is not an isolated occurrence. Western remakes of Asian films are very common, from Oldboy to Dragonball to even a mooted Parasite remake. That these movies are often less well regarded than the Asian originals is also an issue. Lau has said that he prefers his movies over The Departed, and critics have generally agreed that it is one of Scorsese’s lesser works. And the less said about the Hollywood Dragonball remake the better. It is easy to see these as a form of colonial exploitation, albeit one far less damaging than resource extraction.

However, it is a mistake to see the relationship between Scorsese and non-American cinema in an entirely exploitative context. Scorsese’s canon includes far more reflective films actually set in and starring Asians, such as Silence and Kundun. Beyond that, he has been an important advocate for the preservation and mainstreaming of Asian cinema in the US. In fact Bong Joon Ho thanked him for such during his Oscars acceptance speech, having beaten him for the award. This is not to provide apologia for the flaws of The Departed. It is to point out how multi-layered the relationship of members of the culture industry in so-called “core” countries is to those that exist on the periphery culturally and economically.