Justin Gao

Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung’s characters in the acclaimed masterpiece In the Mood for Love are exemplary psychoanalytic patients. The piece aims to introduce a socio-historical and neuroscientific account of how Wong Kar-Wai’s two homes, Shanghai and Hong Kong, can create—to infinity—a self-sabotaging subject who interacts with others through obfuscation and desires through frustration.

In a time of intense political tension and a seemingly unresolvable resentment felt across the political spectrum, Bugonia functions as a direct and scathing critique of modern political extremism. Quite simply, through its depictions of delusion and conspiracy, the film exposes the narcissicism, hypocrisy, ignorance, and animalistic aggression of the Greta Thunbergs of the world.

Introduction Trauma, in its very essence, is a persistence of pain. And if emotion is a story and persistence the canonization of that...