The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man learns that he is third. Not third-best at anything you would want — third on Taiwan's most-wanted list — and he is insulted. Chen Kui-Lin is dying of cancer, so he decides the dignified move is to murder the two criminals ranked above him and die at number one. It is the vanity of a man who wants a better seat at his own funeral. Hold onto that wounded pride, because it is the whole film, and it is also why Deleuze's least glamorous category fits this movie better than any heist vocabulary would.

Deleuze called it the impulse-image, and he parked it between feeling and action, in the cinema of pure drives he traced through Stroheim and Buñuel — what he named naturalism. The idea is simple and bleak. Beneath the visible social world (here, the orderly hierarchy of the criminal milieu) there is what he called an originary world: raw appetite, with no manners on it. People in this register don't deliberate and act. They are driven. The film's Buddhist title says exactly this and says it first. The three poisons — the pig of delusion, the snake of hatred, the bird of greed — are nothing but Deleuze's drives wearing iconography. Each act gives Chen one poison and one target. The structure is a diagram of compulsion.

What makes this an impulse-image and not just another gangster picture is the slope. Deleuze said this kind of film runs on a line of slope — an irreversible entropy that pulls everything toward exhaustion and death. Most crime movies borrow death as a threat hanging over the hero. This one starts with the diagnosis. Chen is already dying, so the cancer isn't suspense; it's gravity. And that is the argument for reading him this way: notice that his violence never resolves anything. In an action-image, a man perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the killing transforms the world. Here each kill just moves him one notch down the slope toward the same end. The most-wanted list itself becomes the fetish — a part-object charged with absurd compulsive force — and the wish to top it is a symptom, the greed-poison made legible as behavior. You can almost feel Deleuze's point that in naturalism, acts read as symptoms of a drive the character cannot see.

The spaces carry it too. The dossier describes a film that splits its light: hard, pragmatic interiors for interrogation rooms and cult dormitories and safehouses, and bleached, sun-flattened exteriors for the provincial roads between sites of violence. Those roads are Deleuze's any-space-whatever — deserted, disconnected stretches that have stopped being a setting for action and become an affect of emptiness. The film even tells you the road offers "the illusion of escape." In an impulse-image there is no escape; there is only the slope. The cult compound is the sharpest version of this. Its institutional serenity and performed calm are the originary world of appetite wearing a peaceful face — a derived milieu whose orderliness is exactly the lie.

This is also where the film stakes its place in a tradition and then turns on it. Its bones are Hong Kong heroic bloodshed. From A Better Tomorrow it inherits the operatic honor code and the slow-motion that elevates a gunfight into moral self-expression; from The Killer, Woo's mobile camera that treats action-space as emotion; from Hard Boiled, the layered, physical sound that makes a body taking a bullet register as an event with weight. That grammar is pure action-image: violence as a situation-transforming deed, the outlaw as a man who means something by shooting. Wong keeps the craft and reverses the meaning. Run through the Buddhist machine, the same gunfire stops being expression and becomes symptom. The palette comes from Wong Kar-wai's crime mood in Fallen Angels — bleach as moral exhaustion, not decoration. The deeper template is Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, where every act of revenge compounds the first harm; that is precisely Wong's three-poison architecture, each pursuit producing the opposite of the redemption Chen imagines. And behind all of it sits The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the Buddhist ordeal as a ladder of transformation — except Wong is openly unsure the ladder goes anywhere. He has reached back past the Buddhist frame to the Jin-dynasty legend of Zhou Chu, the bully who slew two monsters and learned the third and worst was himself.

That is the film's real invention, and its significance for the genre. It takes the most self-glorifying tradition in Asian popular cinema — the one that ranks and lionizes its outlaws — and X-rays the ranking itself as greed. The most-wanted list is the perfect emblem of a whole cinema's appetite, and Wong holds it up as the joke and the sickness at once. The achievement is to make an impulse-image that is genuinely funny and genuinely sad, where the picaresque quest-comedy and the elegy are the same motion downhill.

So rewatch it with one question. Does Chen ever actually choose anything, or does he only obey the poison he happens to be carrying that act? Watch Ethan Ruan's body — the long passages of animal stillness, then the explosive release. That alternation is the impulse-image in a single performance: a body that is a carrier of drive before it is ever an agent. The film's final mercy is to wonder whether a man can step off the slope, and its honesty is to leave you unsure he can.