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This chapter examines the surreal and ghostly elements in Fruit Chan's films. Hong Kong in Chan's “Handover Trilogy” is frequented by surreal, ghostly intrusions of various kinds. They are the allegorization of recalcitrant elements of the past that resist erasure. The surreal in Chan's films evokes the heavy weight of melancholic sentiment in “The Swan” and reminds us of the ambiguous status of the ghostly subjects. As ghosts always return with a story to tell, the ghostly subjects in Chan's films stubbornly persist in the space of the present that does not want them.

With the decline in cinema attendance in the early 2000s eerily mimicking the same pattern in the early 1950s, television programs have become a new and potent source of noir. From CSI to Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Moment of Truth, television depicts the true ‘reality’ of life in the twenty-first century; rapacious greed, fear, violence, endless war, terrorism and the continual droning of either threats or assurances from impotent authority figures. The new breed of television reality shows, such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, I Want a Famous Face and The Swan, create the impression that one can ‘buy’ whatever one wants. In a post-9/11 cinematic landscape, we must fight to find a path towards reason and understanding of a new cinematic landscape in which violence and catastrophe are viewed as constants. Even the news has become noir, dealing in paranoia, fear and obsessive speculation. In the world of film noir, our lot is to seek continually the phantom reassurance of a new social construct that can never fulfill our spectatorial desires.

Greed is often demonized as a cause of the recent crisis. Marasco views this modern “value” not as a cause of the crash, but as a consequence endemic to our society. It is not greed for money and wealth that produces socioeconomic inequalities. Rather, it is a society structured by the principle of socioeconomic inequality that unleashes a particular form of greed that chases after money. The author argues that what is needed in analyzing the “intellectual foundations” of the financial crisis is the vexed term: neoliberalism. The essay dissects neoliberalism into five related theses, contextualized by the Great Recession. At the root of her analysis is the insight that neoliberalism is, at root, a mode of political rationality that is antithetical to chance. On the one hand, neoliberalism refuses chance. On the other hand, it imagines crises as unpredictable chance occurrences that are simply part of the capitalist system. Marasco argues that neoliberalism both refuses and needs the idea of chance in ways that reveal its desire to be seen as a necessary and unquestionable mode of political organization.