I CHOSE: Oldboy This is a film analysis paper. Word count at least 2300. Must choose one film from the list here: Film list: 1. Ring 2. One Missed Call 3. A tale of Two sisters 4. the host 5. Oldboy Do not choose other film, must use required rea

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10 “Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling”: Reading Park Chan-wook’s “Unknowable” Oldboy

Kyung Hyun Kim

Oldboy is one of a slew of Korean films recently distributed in the United States (a list that includes Chunhyang, Memories of Murder, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Tae Guk Gi: the Brotherhood of War, Take Care of My Cat, Tell Me Something, Untold Scandal, and Way Home among many others) — but, unlike the others, it has been met with surprisingly negative reviews.1

New York Times critic, Manohla Dargis, acknowledged Oldboy’s director Park Chan-wook as “some kind of virtuoso [of cool],” but she also wrote that the film is “symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it’s all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys”2 Disappointed by the all-too-apparent nihilism Oldboy putatively promotes, Dargis argues that it fails to undertake the kind of tangible philosophical inquiries which Sam Peckinpah and Pier Paolo Pasolini explored in their films during the 1960s and 1970s. Dargis’ criticisms and others like hers undoubtedly dampened Oldboy’s chances to perform well.3 Despite the fact that Oldboy won numerous awards internationally, including the Grand Prix (second prize) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, and despite the cult status it has achieved among young fans of action films, the film managed to generate only mediocre box office receipts in the U.S.

I begin this chapter with Dargis’ critique of Park Chan-wook because it indicates a number of vantage points from which Oldboy must be considered when discussed in an international context. Oldboy, like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksu-neun na-ui geot, 2002) and other Park Chan-wook films, does

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not conjure up the kind of humanist themes that Dargis implies to be properly associated with art-house films such as the ones directed by not only Pasolini and Peckinpah, but also Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Instead of preaching values of tolerance and salvation, Park’s protagonists plot revenge by brandishing sharp metal instruments and impatiently waiting for their turn to spill the blood of others. Moreover, the exaggerated male icons featured in Park Chan-wook’s films seem to be direct quotations of Japanese manga characters or Hong Kong action heroes created by John Woo and Tsui Hark. These contrast with the realism of his predecessors in Korean cinema such as Park Kwang-su or Jang Sun-woo, who, as I have argued elsewhere, have demythologized the masculinity of Korean cinema.4 While many of Dargis’s points are worthy, she fails to point out that Park is not the only filmmaker recognized by Cannes in the recent past who has similarly been uninterested in asking epistemological questions about life. Cannes winners Lars Von Trier, Wong Kar-wei, and Quentin Tarantino have similarly created distance from philosophical or political issues, seeking instead to leave their viewers with an indelibly “cool” impression of violence. Secondly, Dargis’ article sidesteps the controversy surrounding filmmakers like Peckinpah, whose intentions and philosophical depth have been continuously questioned by critics. Jettisoning some of the exaggerated claims made by critics such as Stephen Prince, who celebrated Peckinpah’s “melancholy framing of violence,” Marsha Kinder proposes instead that Peckinpah was the first postwar narrative filmmaker in America who “inflect [ed] the violence with a comic exuberance.”5 Peckinpah choreographed scenes of explicit violence as if they were musical numbers, and was considered a pioneer in American cinema. However, the question of whether or not the violence used in his films truly inspires philosophical questions or simply feeds an orgasmic viewing experience of the kind that has spawned the films of Quentin Tarantino or Park Chan-wook is a serious one. My contention is that Peckinpah and Park Chan-wook are, for better or for worse, similar as filmmakers, not categorically different.

In the three films of Park Chan-wook’s “revenge” trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), one can trace the emergence of “postmodern” attitude that takes up not only the point of view that the grand ideologies (humanism, democracy, socialism, etc.) are faltering, if not entirely dissipated, but also a belief that the image is merely just that: an image. Image here is that which is not an impression of reality, but a perception of matter that approximates the verisimilitudes of both space and time that may not have anything to do with reality. This renders a sense of the “unknowable,” which irked many Western critics who have

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problematized Park’s films for having failed to produce social criticism. But is this all that there is to this debate? Are there no history, no significant meaning, and no profound idea behind Park’s images? How conveniently indescribable is the “unknowable”?

The aim of this chapter is threefold. First, I will try to identify the ways in which the main tropes of Park Chan-wook’s work — including flattened mise-en-scène, the commodified body, the mystification of spatial markers, and the disjointed juxtaposition of images and sound — all aim to explore the potential of cinema in ways that may have vexing epistemological implications. Second, I invoke the Nietzschean ressentiment in examining Park Chan-wook’s assertion that personal vengeance is a plausible kind of energy in a society where its law and ethics have been virtually ratified by the combined interests of liberal democracy and capitalism. Third, in my conclusion, I will entertain the question whether or not the post-politics or anti-history of Park Chan-wook can yield a political reading when placed in a Korean historical context, just as Peckinpah’s work, when contextualized in an American sociopolitical context, was perceived to have cited the violence of Vietnam and the civil rights movement.

Oldboy

Loosely adapted from an eight-volume manga (manhwa in the Korean pronunciation) mystery novel of the same title,6 Oldboy follows in the footsteps of other Korean films such as Alien Baseball Team (Gongpo-ui oein gudan, Lee Chang-ho, 1986) and Terrorist (Kim Young-bin, 1995) that have adopted the narratives and style of manhwa into live-action films. Before Park Chan- wook, the most prominent among the directors who adopted a manhwa approach to filmmaking was Lee Myung-se (Yi Myeong-se), whose films during the late 1980s and the 1990s stubbornly departed from the realist trend of the then-New Korean Cinema. Most of Lee’s films, such as Gagman (1988), My Love, My Bride (1990), First Love (1993), and Nowhere to Hide (1999), have insisted on a cinematic worldview that treats live-action characters as animated ones, thus presenting a distorted vision of the real world. As such, some similarities can be drawn between the works of Lee Myung-se and those of Park Chan-wook. However, it should be noted that Park Chan-wook’s cynicism differs radically from Lee’s heavily thematized romanticism. Park Chan-wook’s films have created an impact so powerful that it has nudged the Korea film industry to look into manhwa as its treasure trove for original creative property. Oldboy was followed by box office blockbuster films 200-

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Pound Beauty (Kim Yong-hwa, 2006), adapted from a graphic novel by Suzuki Yumiko, and Tazza: High Rollers (Choi Dong-hun, 2006), which was originally a manhwa series created by Lee Hyun-se.

Oldboy is the second film in Park Chan-wook’s “vengeance” trilogy, which has been successful both in the domestic marketplace and on the international film festival circuit.7 In these films, vengeance is carefully restricted to the realm of the personal, never crossing over into the public domain: it is always aimed at other individuals and almost never against state institutions. This in itself is hardly original. However, in Oldboy as in the other two films of the trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi, 2005), the police play only a perfunctory role. This erasure of authority accomplishes several things. First, it emphasizes the fact that the heroes and villains operate outside the domain of the law. They mercilessly abduct, kill, blackmail, threat, unleash violence, and engage in series of reprisals without ever even implying the existence of a public judicial system of the kind that typically occupies a central position in dramas dealing with individual liberty and freedom. (Examples of this mode can be seen in realist films such as Chilsu and Mansu [Park Kwang-su, 1988] or Peppermint Candy [Bakha satang, Lee Chang-dong, 1999], which foreground the police as sources of corruption or social malaise who meet all acts of transgressions, personal or public, with a violence.

Second, it enables Oldboy to suggest a mythical, transhistorical world beyond the mundane realities of a legal system in which figures such as the protagonist Dae-su and the villain Woo-jin freely roam. Philip Weinstein writes about something he calls “beyond knowing,” a common symptom of modernist narratives that “tends to insist that no objects out there are disinterestedly knowable, and that any talk of objective mapping and mastery is either mistaken or malicious — an affair of the police” (Weinstein 2005, 253). Although it is difficult to classify Park Chan-wook’s films as modernist, they do exploit such Kafkaesque devices by deliberately rejecting “objective mapping and mastery” and consequently aim to dispel the “knowing” sometimes even when the lights are turned on at the theaters. Park unwaveringly refuses to claim the “knowable,” despite having been labeled as superficial by several prominent critics.

This unknowable attitude can also be seen stylistically in Park’s reconstitution of the visual plane, which deliberately rejects realist depth-of- field and instead opts for a flattened mise-en-scène that relies heavily on wide- angle lenses and reduces the distance between the camera and its subjects. These techniques, which deny any density beyond surfaces, once again underscore the relentlessly superficial domain of the unknowable.

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Complementing the “unknowable” also is the landscape that remains deleted in films such as Oldboy. If the discovery or emergence of landscape, as argued by critic Karatani Kojin,8 is absolutely vital to the structure of our modern perception, is the erasure of landscape essential in shaping a postmodern perception? Instead of nature, what gets accentuated in this flattened space are dilapidated concrete cells, meaningless television images, anonymous Internet chats, and chic restaurants and penthouses that condition Korea’s postmodern environment.

Also in Park Chan-wook’s realm of the unknowable, the police are useless. Park’s visual invocation of pastiche helps readdress and essentially efface modern history of Korea — one that is marked by tyranny of uniformed men. There is one notable exception to this absence of police in Oldboy. At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), appears in a scene that takes place in the police station. Jump cuts centrally figure Dae-su, who is drunk and unruly. He has apparently been brought into the station after having caused some disturbance — in short, he is a public menace. This sequence is shot with a minimum of affect. The realistic lighting and natural acting style differ radically from the saturated colors and highly choreographed action sequences that will later constitute the bulk of the film. Although this police station sequence lasts about two-and-a-half minutes, uniformed policemen rarely appear in the frame. Only their voices are heard, presaging the absence of police throughout the film. Although Dae-su verbally insults the police, going so far as to urinate inside the station, the authorities allow him to leave the station unscathed. The police act as if they were from the 2000s, though this scene is set in 1988. Dae-su’s obstreperous acts may be trivial, but as films like Park Kwang-su’s Chilsu and Mansu (Chilsu-wa Man- su, 1988) and Hong Sang-soo’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Dwaeji-ga umul-e ppajin nal, 1996) have proven to audiences time and again, South Korean authorities rarely overlook even the slightest disagreeable incident stirred up by unruly drunkards.9 Made fifteen and eight years respectively after the release of these other films, Oldboy shows the police as having lost their teeth. In this post-authoritarian era, it is not surprising that abuses of power by figures of authority no longer occupy the central concern of the drama.

Dae-su, an ordinary salaryman with a wife and a toddler daughter, is released from the police station only to find himself locked up minutes later in an anonymous cell. No particular reason for his incarceration is cited, and no indication is given as to the duration of his confinement. Days and nights pass, and Dae-su is forced to repeat the same routine every day. Having no one around to talk to, he watches television and masturbates, inhales hypnotic gas that puts him to sleep, eats the fried dumplings (gunmandu) fed to him,

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undergoes rigorous self-training of his body, and digs an escape route through the wall with the tip of a hidden spoon. In other words, he eats, sleeps, masturbates, and labors as if his life inside a prison is a microcosm of a life outside. Before he can escape, however, he is released. Fifteen years have passed since the night of his kidnapping and confinement. Not only is his imprisonment unexplained to him or to us, neither is his release. When he wakes up after a session of hypnosis conducted in his cell, he finds himself on the rooftop of an apartment building.

Fifteen years of solitary isolation have transformed Dae-su, who first appeared as an unruly charlatan at the police station. No longer an ordinary man, he now speaks in a succinct monotone that accords him a god-like transcendental status. Throughout the film, several characters ask, “Why do you speak that way?” His sentences are almost always in present tense, and they lack any modifying clauses — future, conditional, or past. The erasure of the past and future tenses marks Dae-su as a man who is devoid of history, thus achieving for him a status of a-temporality. This mystifies his presence even more as a man who possesses neither temporality nor basic human emotions. The lack of emotions makes Dae-su seem larger-than-life. Furthermore, years of martial arts training while imprisoned has allowed him to achieve a seemingly superhuman agility and strength that he puts to use as a ruthless warrior in search of vengeance. While in captivity, Dae-su had helplessly watched as news reports framed him as the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Upon his release, he finds out that his orphaned daughter Bora had left for Sweden. With no family to rely on, and no authority figure to appeal to, Dae-su finds himself utterly alone.

The only person he can rely on is his new friend, Mi-do (Kang Hye- jeong). The first place Dae-su visits after he was released from his private cell is a sushi restaurant called Jijunghae. He was served by Mi-do, a young woman who has become a sushi chef despite the discriminatory belief that women’s hands are too warm to maintain the proper rawness of cold sushi. The two quickly trade lines that mutually invoke a feeling of uncanniness — that is, in Freud’s definition, the feeling of “something familiar (homely) that has been repressed and then reappears.”10 Dae-su, who has been given a wallet filled with a sheaf of 100,000 Won bills (US$ 100), quickly orders and consumes an entire octopus, served by Mi-do to him raw and cut. Dae-su loses consciousness when Mi-do reaches out to grab his hand and tell him: “I think I am quite unusual. My hands are very cold.” As is later revealed, Mi-do is actually Dae-su’s grown-up daughter Bo-ra, who had supposedly been given up for adoption to a Swedish family.

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Dae-su overcomes his initial suspicions of Mi-do, who takes him home, and the two of them work as a team to investigate the man behind the arrangement to keep Dae-su in captivity for fifteen years. Feelings grow between the two. Mi-do promises Dae-su that she will serenade him with the 1990 hit “Bogosipeun eolgul” (“Face I Want to See Again”) when she is sexually ready for him. This promise — one that is predicated on a future action — ironically restores for Dae-su temporality and historicity — something that he has been denied ever since his release from the cell. Mi- do and Dae-su move closer to the immanent copulation (future action), which ironically enables Dae-su to move closer to the truth behind the reason of his incarceration that knots him to a piece of memory from his high school (past). When Dae-su rescues Mi-do from the thugs threatening to kill her soon thereafter, she sings him her siren song, sending Dae-su into dangerous waters. Unbeknownst to the two of them, they have entered into an incestuous relationship. And only when their incestuous relationship materializes, will Dae-su be given the reason behind his imprisonment.

The only clues with which Dae-su has to work in tracing the origins of the crime unleashed against him are the taste of gunmandu (Chinese dumplings) he was fed during the entire period he was locked up and a small piece of chopstick wrapping paper that was accidentally found in one of the dumplings. The paper is printed with the characters for “cheongryong” (blue dragon) — two characters of the restaurant’s name. After combing through Seoul, where literally hundreds of Chinese restaurants contain both characters in their names, Dae-su finally locates Jacheongryong (Purple Blue Dragon), the restaurant that matches the taste of the dumplings which he has eaten every day for the last fifteen years.

This in turn leads him to the “business group” that specializes in illegal abductions and detentions. Only a few days elapse before Dae-su is confronted with the film’s villain, his high school classmate Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae). Both Dae-su and Woo-jin had attended the Evergreen (Sangnok) High School, a Catholic school located in the provinces of Korea. Even after identifying the man responsible for his long imprisonment, Dae-su still fails to understand what could have motivated Woo-jin to commit such heinous crimes against him. After further investigation, Dae-su remembers an event from the past that had completely evaded him during his fifteen-year captivity. This is shown in a flashback in which he remembers a younger version of himself. The young Dae-su is wearing a high school uniform, and is watching a girl riding a bike. It is his last day at Evergreen High School before he transfers to another school in Seoul. Soo-ah (Yun Jin-seo), the pretty female student whom he has been watching, entices young Dae-su’s interest even more when they meet briefly

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on a bench. For no apparent reason other than curiosity, he follows Soo-ah and discovers a dark secret about her: Soo-ah is sexually intimate with her own brother.

“It wasn’t my dick that impregnated my sister. It was your tongue,” Woo- jin explains when the two finally meet. One of the most intriguing points of Oldboy is that linguistic communication almost always falls outside the sphere of rational dialogue. Verbal miscues, infelicitous remarks, and gaps between signifiers and signifieds produce not only miscomprehensions between two individuals, but also help create a world that is “beyond knowable.” Was she pregnant or not? Once rumors began spreading that Soo-ah fooled around with her brother and had become pregnant with his child, she committed suicide. After his sister’s death, Woo-jin also suffered from heart disease and was forced to replace his heart with an artificial one. What first started as innocuous chatter in high school between Dae-su and his friend about Soo- ah’s illicit affair, later resulted in Soo-ah’s death and Woo-jin’s cardiac arrest. This consequently led Woo-jin to seek revenge against Dae-su, who could not remember any specific wrongdoing that would have earned him fifteen years of incarceration.

A final showdown between the hero, unfairly imprisoned for fifteen years, and his former captor would, in a commercial film, normally favor the victim. But it is Woo-jin who ironically has the last laugh during this confrontation. Once his revenge is complete, Woo-jin descends from his penthouse in an elevator, where he puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Woo-jin’s death is a dramatic one, but it could be argued that his heart had already died many years earlier. The only thing that had kept him alive was his desire to seek revenge for his sister. Woo-jin had wanted Dae-su to sleep with his own daughter, as Woo-jin had once slept with his own sister. That mission was accomplished once Dae-su, prostrating himself to protect Mi-do from the knowledge that he is both her lover and her father, voluntarily cuts off his own tongue. Once this happens, Woo-jin has no intention of seeking a further extension of his life. Woo-jin, who resuscitated his life through technological means (an artificial heart), claims his subjectivity through the completion of his revenge, not by foregoing it.

Revenge

As explicated in my book, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, memory is a crucial site where contestations between individuals and the state take place.11 The question of whether or not one is capable of remembering the

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site of one’s trauma is directly linked to the question of whether one can achieve a salient form of subjectivity, usually a male one. Many films made during the ten-year period that stretched from the heyday of the Minjung Movement in the late 1980s to the inauguration of President Kim Dae-jung in 1998 centered around the demand that official historiography, especially surrounding the Korean War and postwar human rights violations, be revised. The personal remembrances found in many films from this period, such as Silver Stallion (Eunma-neun oji anneunda, Chang Kil-su, 1991), A Petal (Kkonnip, Jang Sun-woo, 1995), A Single Spark (Areum daun cheongnyeon Jeon Tae-il, Park Kwang-su, 1996) and Spring in My Hometown (Areum daun sijeol, Lee Kwang-mo, 1998), are crucial to this overarching preoccupation with representing alternative histories that work against hegemonic, distorted representations of the state. Given that public history is at stake, these remembrances accompany an objective that reaches far beyond the realm of the individual. For instance, in A Petal, the traumatized girl who lost her mother during the 1980 Gwangju massacre must remember what has happened and articulate what she saw on the fateful day when her mother was among those killed by the soldiers. The girl’s personal remembrances cannot be disassociated from the public need for a witness who can narrate the truth about Gwangju and contest the official, state-authorized historiography, one which denies any civilian casualties.

The girl from Gwangju is briefly able to remember the day in her hometown where the soldiers ruthlessly opened fire on demonstrators gathered to protest the never-ending military rule, but she quickly relapses into mental disorder. The viewers of A Petal in 1995 are offered the truth about Gwangju, but in Oldboy, like Park Chan-wook’s other vengeance films, remembrance remains in the domain of the personal and never ventures out further. Dae-su’s remembrance of himself witnessing the incestuous relationship between Woo-jin and his sister has absolutely no implications beyond a personal matter — its only purpose is to identify the essence of the resentment, the root cause of the revenge that has demanded such a high price of him.

Since the last three films of Park Chan-wook’s identify vengeance as the reactive action of resentment, Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment (resentment) may serve as a useful reminder of how to better read these works. In On the Genealogy of Morals, as well as in other works, Nietzsche uses the concept of resentment to further elucidate the relationship between master and slave, and also between good and evil. The dreadful power of resentment, Gilles Deleuze wrote as he summarized Nietzsche, is that it is “not content to denounce crimes and criminals, it wants sinners, people who are responsible.”12 Deleuze,

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following Nietzsche, further continues to explain that society ends up acquiring the sense of the evil and good as opposites of each other from the idea of ressentiment: “you are evil; I am the opposite of what you are; therefore I am good.” This derivation of morality (“slave morality” according to Nietzsche) justifies the spirit of revenge, which is conditioned by a hostile world. In this sense, even destructive energy can potentially become creative, good energy.

All of the main characters in Park Chan-wook’s films rely on this Nietzschean (or Old Testament) idea. They continuously assert that vengeance is neither evil nor unethical. Woo-jin tells Dae-su, “Revenge is good for one’s health.” The invocation of “health” in this statement implies not only physical health, but mental health as well. Woo-jin’s acquisition of incredible amounts of wealth, though unexplained in the film, is tacitly understood as the fruit of the drive for revenge he conceived while in high school. Analogously, Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) in Lady Vengeance and Park Dong- jin (Song Kang-ho), the factory owner, in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, both seek revenge because they are good, not because they are bad. Is revenge according to Park Chan-wook an ethical decision that ironically renders a judiciously responsible subject, not a savage one? Must one seek revenge, rather than forgoing it, to reclaim subjectivity? Are these questions even relevant in Park Chan-wook’s entertainment films?

Nietzsche and Deleuze seem to agree that revenge is not antithetical to salvation. Deleuze echoes Nietzsche’s idea that no religious value, including Christianity, can be separated from hatred and revenge. He writes, “What would Christian love be without the Judaic power of ressentiment which inspires and directs it? Christian love is not the opposite of Judaic ressentiment but its consequence, its conclusion and its crowning glory.”13 In the closing sequence of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Park Dong-jin shudders and sheds his tears before brandishing his knife in front of his daughter’s killer Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun). Park states, “I know you are a good man. So, you understand that I have to kill you, right?” Herein lies the paradox of Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy — revenge comes not from hatred, but from love and pity. Park’s tears are genuine, and he seems to believe that Ryu had no choice but to abduct his daughter in order to pay for his sister’s medical bill before inadvertently killing her. Like the acts of terror (kidnap and demanding of ransom) that in Park’s films are sometimes seen to be good and at other times bad, revenge in his films is not always bad, and in fact almost always good, if it is executed with good intentions. Revenge, as such, is both harmful and beneficial, and consequently, in Oldboy, the sharp distinction between good and evil crumbles. Derrida once similarly deconstructed Plato’s pharmakon

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by showing how this term possesses not a singular but a double meaning of “remedy” and “poison.”14 Park Dong-jin chooses to remain faithful to his feelings of resentment, which thus leads him to react violently against Ryu.

Yet, even though Park Chan-wook’s violence is not an act that is categorically severed from salvation and love, one must ask whether a film such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is truly Nietzschean. The open acknowledgement that the enemy is good cancels out the possibility of Nietzschean ressentiment, since resentment vanishes once the other is re- evaluated to be anything but evil. The question of “what is he seeking justice for” becomes a complicated one. Is Park Chan-wook suggesting that the famous New Testament credo, “love thy enemy,” can be just as good when it is reversed into “kill thy brother,” a story also found in the Bible (the Old Testament)? What is the point of this if Park does not believe in God? Then, is “kill thy brother” just a playful, if perverse, speech-act and nothing more? Even if an act of violence committed against the “virtuous” accommodates a postmodern sentiment that negates any cogent correlation between the signifier (the subject’s violent act) and the signified (the accomplishment of justice against evil), the conclusion Park comes to does not make Nietzschean theory any more relevant. What is the point of giving Park a line telling Ryu that he is good, only if he is to be executed seconds later? The moment a person finds the other to be good, the excitation that arises out of resentment and hostility should cease to take hold of the subject. Once the subject abandons resentment or revenge, he or she, according to Nietzsche, is capable of achieving a sovereign identity based on a superior sense of morality rather than a slave one. Is Park Dong-jin himself then killed for failing to adopt an alternative perspective that is endowed with superman-like power to recognize values beyond good and evil? Are deaths of Ryu and Park, who both fall into the pitfall of mediocrity by trying to be good and avenge the loss of the victims, simply affirmations of Park Chan-wook’s cynicism, which deliberately stands to contradict Nietzsche’s firm belief that each human being is capable of becoming an “over-man” or a superman? Humans, in other words, rather prefer being pitiful beings by voluntarily choosing not to abandon ressentiment — an inferior mentality often associated with slaves.

Body

In the Western philosophical tradition, the body is often figured in opposition to speech and language. Ineffable, impenetrable, and unintelligible, it is the perfect articulation of the unknowable discourse. A healthy, virus-free, whole

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body rarely exists in Park Chan-wook’s films, and often the failed heart, the infected liver needing a transplant, or severed body parts constitute the intrusions through which the alliance between the logic of capitalism and the postmodern commercial genre mechanism of thriller becomes naturalized. Bodily pain or dismemberment is such an important characteristic of Park Chan-wook’s trilogy that through this recurring motif, his films achieve what I think are an aesthetics, ethics, and politics of the body. In his films, body parts are often dismembered, and human organs such as kidneys or hearts become detached from the human body. They are either sold for profit or replaced with healthier, or artificial substitutes. They are acquired, bartered, relinquished, and redistributed — sometimes legally, but more often outside the law. The body falls far short of sacred in a postmodern capitalist society, where the body’s function is configured quite differently than in pre-capitalist ones. A healthy body is a mandatory prerequisite to feeling pleasure and sensations. In nomadic societies, the body was regarded as belonging to the earth; in imperial societies, it belonged to the despot; in the capitalist societies which Park Chan-wook depicts, it belongs to capital. Debunking the mantra of the Confucian society, which posits the familial collective and consequently the nation as being organically linked to individual bodies, the bodies in Park Chan-wook’s films are regarded as commodifiable, their organs usually quantifiable in terms of monetary value that can be bought and sold.

Oldboy furthers Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’s thematization of living flesh and organs that metaphorize and make explicit the extreme conditions of late capitalism by attaching price tags to body parts. Park Cheol-ung (Oh Dal-su), the president of the underground business that specializes in private incarcerations, is a minor yet important character in the film. When Dae-su identifies the correct Chinese restaurant and locates Cheol-ung, he tortures him by tying him up and starting to take his teeth out with the aid of a hammer. By the time six teeth are removed from his mouth, Cheol-ung surrenders and provides Dae-su with the leads he wants. The next time Dae- su and Cheol-ung meet, the power dynamics between the two has been reversed. Dae-su has fallen into a trap set by Cheol-ung and is on the verge of having the same number of teeth — six — extracted with a claw hammer. Before Cheol-ung is able to exact his revenge, however, he receives a phone call from Woo-jin asking him to stop in exchange for a briefcase filled with cash. Cheol-ung reluctantly agrees on this exchange and gives up his spirit of revenge for this undisclosed amount of cash. Since the “spirit of revenge” has initially demanded the removal of six teeth, Park Chan-wook sets a price (a briefcase filled with cash) for approximately one-sixth of the entire gallery of teeth.

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Cheol-ung accepts this money, and it turns out that he also trades in his right arm in exchange for a building from Woo-jin. Although only a minor character, Cheol-ung’s agreements to trade parts of his body for monetary compensation are not insignificant. In recent Korean history, where sacrificial acts such as workers self-immolating themselves or cutting off their own fingers to protest human rights violations or to express nationalist ideologies have become ubiquitous, Cheol-ung’s willingness to sacrifice parts of his body for monetary gain deliberately scoffs at and renders profane the sacred and political condition of corporeality. The body of an individual is almost a site of transgression that moves from “serv[ing] to protect the entire community,” to use René Girard’s description of sacrifice, to a crude repository of private assets where each body part and organ can be exchanged for money in order to help realize the goals of capital gain.15

Space

In realism, the use of provincial accents clearly marks identity and boundaries that in turn provide a sense of “knowability” and “familiarity.” Modernism tries to take away that sense of familiarity. For instance, Kafka’s novels erase specific national or regional markers, and thus seem deliberately elliptical, anonymous, and atmospheric. The spaces in these non-realist novels become uncanny, unbound by the specificity and particularity of each and every setting.16 In postmodern novels like those of Haruki Murakami or arguably films like Oldboy also achieve a similar sense of the unknowable or the uncanny, but these works register a different kind of impact than Kafka’s. The fried dumpling and the chopstick wrapper inscribed with the restaurant name “blue dragon” invoke a sense of easy familiarity for many Koreans. However, precisely because of this ubiquity that is trans-Asian (and perhaps even as global as McDonald’s or Starbucks), they slip into the anonymity of unfamiliar territory. As such, the search for a restaurant that both matches the exact taste of the dumpling and has a name that includes the characters for “blue dragon” is a complicated one. There is nothing more disconcerting than the effort to find a particular restaurant that matches a ubiquitous and anonymous taste like a Big Mac or a gunmandu. Compounded by the sense of global anonymity, the postmodern space constituted in Oldboy remains outside a specific locale or time. All of the spatial configurations depicted in this film such as Cheol-ung’s private cell enterprise, Dae-su’s high school, the cyber chatroom shared by Mi-do and Woo-jin, Mi-do’s sushi restaurant, and Woo-jin’s penthouse suite located on the top of a high-rise building are framed within post-national, a-historical or virtual realms.

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Earl Jackson Jr. writes that “[t]he way Oh[O Dae-su] tastes each gyoza, comparing that taste with his specialized knowledge of the gyoza he has eaten for fifteen years, seems a darker parody of the Japanese trope of gourmet nostalgia, exemplified most vividly in popular culture in the film Tampopo, on the quest for the perfect ramen.”17 With both globalization and modernization in full swing, Seoul has actively participated in the global, border-crossing culture. Chinese food, particularly Jajangmyeon (black bean paste noodles)18 became the first and only ethnic cuisine to which the general Korean populace had access during the 1960s and the 1970s, but its exoticness was quickly erased, and it became a part of Korean food culture.19 The use of gunmandu (gyoza) in Oldboy as the primary evidence that leads Dae-su to his captor is significant not only, as Jackson suggests, because it transforms taste from a high-brow pursuit in the vein of Tampopo into a survival skill, but also because it erases the kind of regional identity that is often clearly marked by taste.

“Tell the kitchen that there’s too much buchu in the dumpling,” Dae-su tells the delivery boy from the restaurant that bears the name Purple Blue Dragon and produces dumplings with taste that he had grown accustomed to during his fifiteen years in captivity. Excessive use of buchu, or thin spring onions, has made it possible for Dae-su to track down the organization which Woo-jin has outsourced to lock him up. But what is the significance of this statement? First, Dae-su’s request contains both a complaint and a kind of compliment. He had grown sick of the onion-like vegetable over fifteen years, but if it had not been for the excessive use of buchu in the dumpling, Dae- su would never have been able to find the “company” that had held him captive. Even though gunmandu has achieved a kind of taste anonymity in Korean food culture, the excessive use of buchu in the Purple Blue Dragon’s dumplings made them sufficiently unique for Dae-su. Second, the buchu statement could be read as cynically reducing one of the most important modern periods of Korean history into a vacuous, insignificant one. Locked up alone in the private jail, this is the only significant memory Dae-su has from the critical years between 1988 and 2003, during which time South Korea became one of the most successful economic and technologically advanced democratic countries in the world. Dae-su does not remember the deaths of numerous demonstrators during rallies held throughout this period of democratization, or the workers fired during the so-called IMF-bailout crisis. What matters most to him is the unforgettable taste of excessive buchu that he has had to remember to put his trauma behind him.

The gunmandu is one of many references used in the film that also makes space both familiar and unfamiliar. The sushi restaurant where Mi-do works

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while wearing a kimono, for instance, is called Jijunghae, which means the Mediterranean Sea. The high school Dae-su and Woo-jin attended, Evergreen High School, lacks any mention of regional ties in its name, though most high schools, like the one here, are named after their towns or districts. Since all of the high school friends whom Dae-su visits to find out about Woo-jin speak in thick regional accents, the viewer can guess that Evergreen High School is located in the provinces. But where exactly is it located? Do the regional accents offer us any other clues beyond this? Oldboy makes the regional accent recognizable, but simultaneously pushes its corresponding spatial identity past the familiar, rendering it anonymous. In so doing, the relationships of the characters in the text to spatial coordinates become largely discombobulated. Our sense of “what is what” has become so disengaged that even when “culinary taste” or “provincial accent” is invoked, it only adds to the mystification. Oldboy’s effective underscoring of the sense of “unknowable” makes globalization almost synonymous with anonymity. The abandonment of the “knowable” suggests the end of epistemology, achieving instead a postmodern condition marred by schizophrenia.

Language

There are two modes that Park Chan-wook’s vengeance films typically use to disrupt narrative linearity: first, the use of balletic action sequences that become attractions in and of themselves; and, second, the use of performative language. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, much of the dialogue that takes place throughout the film is in sign language because the film’s protagonist, Ryu, is mute. Park Chan-wook’s creative use of subtitles and intertitles, which feature characters other than Ryu speaking verbally while using sign language to Ryu, help the audience to understand the narrative. However, such performative use of bodily gestures and linguistic images complicate the communicative channels of language. The vocal punctuations of sound, the variety of titles, and seeing the movement of bodies and the expressions on faces force us to consider how Oldboy may have been influenced by modernist filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, who explored the possibility of pure visuality and sound in cinema. In the third and final film of the trilogy, Lady Vengeance, the villain is an English teacher who sometimes communicates in English, and the heroine’s daughter is an adoptee in Australia who speaks only English. When English is spoken in the film, Park slows down his enunciation so that Korean subtitles can appear word-by-word, choreographed in the exact rhythm and order as the words being spoken so that the audience can witness the process of translation laid bare.

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In Oldboy, Dae-su makes a dramatic transformation after being locked up for fifteen years. As mentioned earlier, one significant change is signaled through his voice. Not only does he speak in a terse monotone, he also speaks through voiceovers.20 What makes the voice so unusual is that it detaches itself from the social and the personal, becoming transcendental. If Woo- jin’s artificial heart metonymically underscores his heartlessness and ruthlessness, Dae-su matches Woo-jin’s inhumanity through the transformation of his voice. Even before Dae-su loses the battle with Woo- jin, and as a consequence, loses his tongue, it is possible to perceive him as a quasi-mute. Michael Chion elaborates that, according to Jacques Lacan, voice — along with the gaze, the penis, the feces, and nothingness — is ranked as object petit a, a part object “which may be fetishized and employed to ‘thingify difference’.”21 Sexual differences, prohibition, and the law can all be established through the voice. However, Dae-su’s transcendental voice (sometimes spoken only through voiceover narration) rises beyond the law and everything that is of the social. I argue here that it is through this extraordinary voice, artificially permed hair, and super-athletic body of Dae- su which the audience engages the sensationalized tension between human and non-human. If the origin of modern literature was embedded in the new discovery of landscape and nature, not only have they become irrelevant in Oldboy, they have also been ostensibly replaced by this supernatural indestructible being that is positioned between god and human. This anchors a strong sense of the “unutterable” or the “unspeakable,” underscoring the film’s invocation of the taboo that remains at its heart. Since Dae-su has achieved a non-human voice, it is assumed that a mundane code of ethics, with all of its prohibitions, do not apply to him — that is, until the very end of the film when it is revealed that he has slept with his daughter. It is at this moment that his voice departs from the transcendental and becomes human again — the precise moment that he also decides to cut off his tongue.

In addition, the medium of television emerges a penultimate postmodern instrument through which the relation between subject and space is concretized as dysfunctional. As Dae-su is forbidden from communicating with anyone during his imprisonment, his only access to information is through a television set placed in his cell. Before he is released, Dae-su narrates to the audience that television is capable of being everything from “a clock, a calendar, a school, a home, a church, a friend to a lover.” When he states that television is like “a friend,” the image on the television in his cell features classic 1931 footage of Frankenstein. The corresponding visual image chosen for the linguistic signifier of the “lover” is an image of Min Hae-gyeong, a popular singer from the late 1980s and the early 1990s, singing “Bogosipeun

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eolgul” (“Face I Want to See Again”). But can an image on television be classified as a real “lover”? Is Min Hae-gyeong, who dances only on the television monitor — untouchable, unable to interact, and therefore un- affective — capable of becoming Dae-su’s lover? Being equipped to address every desire and fantasy, but without being able to deliver on any of them, is like simultaneously possessing a perfect dream and one’s worst nightmare. This contrasts with more traditional “realist” takes on alienation such as The Road Taken (Seontaek, Hong Ki-seon, 2003), a Korean film that was released the same year as Oldboy. They are both dramas about men unfairly put away in jail. An irreconcilable gap, however, remains between Kim Seon-myeong, the protagonist of The Road Taken, and Oh Dae-su: the former is a prisoner convicted by the state for believing in an ideology (Marxism) deemed subversive to the state; the latter is a prisoner put away by a private man for having been a “loud mouth.” Despite having been locked away for over thirty-five years, a world record for the longest serving prisoner-of- consciousness, Kim has comrades around him who are equally misfortunate. They have no television or any other electronic devices to keep them entertained, they celebrate birthdays, play games, and plan political actions together. In contrast, Dae-su spends all of his time with his only surrogate friend: the television — not unlike the average person in a postmodern condition who spends far more time communicating with machines than with real human beings. Like the gunmandu, Min’s dance to the samba beat of the Korean song, “Face that I Want to See Again,” underscores an anonymously global pop culture that has lost its genuine regional authenticity while perfectly accommodating the cliché of the television medium.

Postmodernism, which is predicated on the pleasurable use of the difference between the signifier and the signified, is also conditioned in Oldboy through the use of voiceover and other creative juxtapositions between image and sound. Gilles Deleuze lauds Jean-Luc Godard’s achievements, claiming that Godard is “definitely one of the authors who has thought most about visual-sound relationships.”22 Deleuze continues on to say that “[Godard]’s tendency to reinvest the visual with sound, with the ultimate aim of . . . restoring both to the body from which they have been taken, produces a system of disengagements or micro-cuts in all directions: cuts spread and no longer pass between the sound and the visual, but in the visual, in the sound, and in their multiplied connections.”23 Deleuze insists that the visual and the voice are most often taken from human bodies in film, but as soon as they are processed and textually manipulated through the machine — the camera, sound recording devices and other post-production gadgets — they do not remain natural to the body. What Godard aims at accomplishing is

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what could be considered the cinematic equivalent to cacophonous sound, but achieved through the potentially disjunctive relationship between sound and image. Park Chan-wook aims for something similar: his soundtracks are designed to transgress beyond the boundary of real and instead to expand the chasm between the human and his vocal signification. He re-appropriates and self-references the unnatural relationship between sound and image that Godard once experimented with in his films, and the one between the real and its representation that narrative cinema had seamlessly sutured together over the years in order to produce admittedly coy comical gags and “cool” effects. But the question remains. Has the contradiction between image and sound or between reality and its representation not already manifested itself to be humorous and playful (for example, in the silent days of cinema)? In other words, isn’t this unnaturalness natural to the medium of cinema itself?

“Just Look at the Surface”

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” Warhol famously told the press, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”24 As suggested earlier, the emergence of Park Chan-wook in recent years is symptomatic of a Korean cinema that has been ushered into a definite kind of post-remembrance and post-political mode. The gap between the mode of representation and the mode of symbolization from which metaphors and allegories can be figured is reduced in Park’s film to the point where only the surface can be perceived. So we can also ask: Does anything exist beyond the surface of Park Chan-wook’s films? Or does something lurk behind this deliberately flattened space, something to which we must accede? In Korea, where the film industry developed out of both colonial and anti-colonial interests during the first half of the twentieth century and communist and anti-communist interests during the latter half, one could bluntly say that Korea has made nothing but “social problem” films throughout the last century. Is Park Chan-wook then making a political statement by churning out excessively, rigorously, and relentlessly superficial films that defy politics in a country where politics are discussed on every street corner? One of the best memories to be found in contemporary Korean cinema comes from the last scene in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, in which the factory owner, Park Dong-jin, whose daughter had been kidnapped, is multiply stabbed by a terrorist organization called the Revolutionary Anarchist Alliance. “Who the hell are you guys?” asks Park Dong-jin of his assailants. Instead of verbally answering, the anarchists peg a

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prepared note on Park’s chest with a knife. If this were a film by Godard, such an abrupt and incoherent insertion of violence would have been welcomed as an allegory of class conflict. However, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, like Park Chan-wook’s other films and unlike Godard’s films, is a tightly structured, entertainment film in which every scene is knotted to clear reasoning and causality. Did Park Chan-wook think that he could afford one Godard-ian moment at the end? There are a number of superfluous possible answers to Park Dong-jin’s final question. There’s the public one (class hostility), the private one (revenge against Ryu’s girlfriend who was also an anarchist), none-of-the-above, or all-of-the-above. The final scene refuses to give us an answer. As such, Park is able to maintain the premise that representation (which assigns certain mimetic symbols to reality) is untenable — and therefore, that any kind of agency to be excavated from it is inconceivable. While gasping for his last breath, Park tries desperately to read the note pinned to him. Without the strength to move his body, he can only tilt his head, but the note remains beyond his range of sight. Credits soon roll and no one is spared from the frustration.

Hitchcock), 6. It is perhaps useful to make a note of the irony, with which Žižek refuses to give this materially based, concrete object a fixed name whereas he readily categorizes the empty signifier with a determinately concrete name.

21. Ibid., 8. 22. Pam Cook, “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann

Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 79. 23. Seo Hyun-suk, “To Catch a Whale: A Brief History of Lost Fathers, Idiots,

and Gangsters in Korean Cinema,” in The Film Journal, Issue 2 (2002), http://www.thefilmjournal.com.

24. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 175. 25. Ibid., 187.

Chapter 10 “Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling”: Reading Park Chan-wook’s “Unknowable” Oldboy

1. New York Times and LA Weekly, both enormously important publications for any independent films opening in the U.S., printed harsh reviews of Oldboy.

2. Manohla Dargis, “The Violence (and the Seafood) Is More than Raw,” New York Times, (March 25, 2005): B14.

3. Oldboy failed to reach the US$1 million gross mark, which is usually held as a benchmark of moderate success for limited release films. It eventually recorded $707,391, which is not a bad figure for a Korean film, but certainly well below the U.S. box office record ($2.38 million) set by a Korean film: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring.

4. Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

5. Marsha Kinder, “Violence American Style: The Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions,” Violence and American Cinema, edited by J. David Slocum (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 67.

6. The Japanese manga version, first published in 1998, was written by Tsuchiya Garon and illustrated by Minegishi Nobuaki.

7. Both Oldboy and Lady Vengeance were bona fide blockbuster hit films while Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was not as successful in the box office.

8. See particularly the chapter, “The Discovery of Landscape,” in Karatani Kojin’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 11–44.

9. In Chilsu and Mansu (Park Kwang-su, 1988), drunkard Mansu’s bar brawl lands him at a police station where he is detained overnight for additional questioning. A small misdemeanor that should have only led to a small fine

Notes to pp. 173–183 245

escalates into a far more punitive action because Mansu, as it is revealed, has a father who is in jail as a long-term political prisoner. The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Hong Sang-soo, 1996) also includes a scene in which its protagonist Hyo-seop is sentenced in court to a three-day detention for instigating a fight with a restaurant worker at a Korean barbeque spot.

10. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 152.

11. See particularly Chapters 3 and 4 in The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema: “‘Is This How the War Is Remembered?’: Violent Sex and the Korean War in Silver Stallion, Spring in My Hometown,” and “The Taebaek Mountains and Post-trauma and Historical Remembrance in A Single Spark and A Petal.”

12. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 119.

13. Ibid., 122. 14. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–84. 15. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press 1977), 8. 16. On “Kafkan uncanny,” see Weinstein (2005), 101–6. 17. Earl Jackson Jr., “Borrowing Trouble: Interasian Adaptations and the

Dislocutive Fantasy.” Paper presented at “Film Aesthetics in East Asian Countries and Transculture” panel, Asia/Cinema/Network: Industry, Culture and Technology Conference, Pusan International Film Festival (Pusan, Korea, October 12, 2005).

18. Young-Kyun Kim, “Jajangmyeon and Junggukjip,” Korea Journal 45.2 (Summer 2005): 60–88.

19. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, protagonist Ryu’s girlfriend, Cha Yeong-mi (played by Bae Doona), orders a bowl of jajangmyeon. After placing her order over the phone, she mistakenly thinks that her intruder, Park Dong- jin, is a Chinese delivery man. Instead of getting her jajangmyeon, she receives electric torture.

20. Park Chan-wook began experimenting with voiceover narration in Oldboy. In Lady Vengeance, he employed a 60-year-old female narrator with long experiences in radio and television narration, whose voice nostalgically reminded the viewers of radio dramas or popular television documentary programs such as Ingan sidae (Human Life) from the 1970s and the 1980s.

21. Michael Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 249.

23. Ibid., 249. 24. Entry on “Andy Warhol,” Wikipedia.org (February 26, 2008).

246 Notes to pp. 184–196