GHOST FROM THE FUTURE: HONG KONG TEMPORALITIES IN THE FILM ROUGE

Abstract

This paper explores how the film Rouge (1987) adapts and transforms traditional ghost narratives and how the cinematic anxiety of time is associated with the countdown temporality of Hong Kong in the 1980s. I argue that Rouge transforms two narrative structures of traditional Chinese literature — Caizi-jiaren (scholar-beauty) and the “historical ghost tale” — to foreground the particular temporality of Hong Kong. Firstly, the returning of the female ghost and her failure in pursuit of love intensifies the conflict between the modern linear time and the cosmological ghostly time and poignantly manifests the impossibility of a fifty-year unchanged commitment. Secondly, unlike traditional “historical ghost tales” in which ghosts were called back by traumas of the collapse of old dynasties, the revenant of the heroin in this film returns to the living world for the prearranged trauma of the future, due to the particular temporality of countdown Hong Kong has confronted since 1982. The countdown forced Hong Kong to enter a circular time and to experience the prearranged calamity in the future. Thus, I contend that this film rehearses a demise of Hong Kong, which exacerbates, rather than alleviates, the anxiety and pain associated with the traumatic experience.