7 Infernal Affairs and the Ethics of Complex Narrative Allan Cameron and Sean Cubitt The opening images of Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau Wai Keung Lau and Alan Mak Siu Fai, 2002) offer an oblique rendering of hell. Against a black background, a series of Buddha figures skirt the edges of the frame, to be replaced by the fierce brows and distorted maws of gargoyles. This is an image of descent, but as these nightmarish features surface through layers of darkness and smoke, the orientation of the movement becomes unclear. Is the camera still descending, or is it traversing the statues laterally? This initial sense of disorientation captures much about the formal and thematic direction the film will take. The film’s Chinese title, Mou gaan dou, and opening quotation (from the Nirvana Sutra, verse 19), refer to the lowest level of hell in Buddhist mythology, “Continuous Hell.” 1 Similarly, the rest of the film will be oriented around a spatial and moral hierarchy of levels. Yet we also argue that this hierarchy is undermined by a countervailing insistence on lateral orientation that is linked to the film’s complication of ethical questions. In relation to its complex network of duplicitous char- acters, simultaneous actions, and technologically mediated communications, Infernal Affairs challenges its viewers to orient themselves both cognitively and ethically. Released in 2002, Infernal Affairs is set in contemporary Hong Kong, five years after reunification with China. The Special Administrative Region main- tains its distinctiveness, firstly in its use of Cantonese as opposed to the governmental language of the People’s Republic, Mandarin; and secondly in the urbanity of its protagonists, whose knowledge of their city is inte- gral to both their self-image and the plot. That the film’s initial invocation of Buddhism coexists with its insistence upon its contemporary urban context should not, however, be seen as contradictory. As David Morley argues, “we have to begin to entertain the possibilities for a wide variety of (not necessarily secular or Western) modernities, in different parts of