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

7 The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean: Violence, Morality, and the South Korean Extreme Film

Robert L. Cagle

Two days after the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech University, the focus of news coverage abruptly shifted from details of the tragedy itself to reports of a possible link between the actions of Seung Cho (referred to in news coverage by his full name, rendered Korean style as “Cho Seung- hui”), the young man identified as the lone gunman, and images from Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film, Oldboy. The decidedly tenuous logic that transformed Park’s film into Cho’s motivation hinged solely on similarities between two (of more than twenty) photographs sent by Cho to NBC network headquarters and two images from Park’s film. This sudden swing was not entirely unexpected, given the lack of other newsworthy events taking place during that time period; the absence of any real developments to report (there was no manhunt, the suspect died at the scene of the crime); and the surplus of individuals ready, willing, and able to get in front of the television cameras and talk about anything even remotely related to the case.

This shift in focus from individual to inspiration opened the floodgates for “experts” to rush into a heated crossfire of debate over violence in the media and its supposed role in desensitizing today’s increasingly alienated youth, turning everyone with a Game Boy into a potential Charles Whitman, Eric Harris, or Dylan Klebold.1 Although the argument that violent entertainment promotes real-life brutality is hardly new, what made this particular instance so noteworthy, judging from the prominence it was given in news reports, was the fact that both Cho and the film from which he arguably drew his inspiration shared a single national origin. Like virtually

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all coverage of the case, stories linking Cho to Park’s film insistently characterized Cho as Korean, despite the fact that he had lived in the U.S. for nearly fifteen years — far more than half of his brief life. This Korean connection prompted Korean-American civic leaders and even the South Korean government to issue apology after apology, and provided the basis for claims that, as one online respondent to New York Times writer Mike Nizza’s April 20, 2007 piece put it, “Koreans make weird and violent movies [that] inspire other Koreans like Cho to fly off the handle.”2

The rhetorical strategy of identifying the agency behind such tragedies as foreign constitutes a reaction known in psychology as projection — a phenomenon by which the subject “attributes tendencies, desires, etc. to others that he refuses to recognize in himself.”3 In a larger cultural context, projection can take more generalized forms as for example in the perpetuation of various stereotypes4 and in the persecution of ethnic, racial, or other types of social groups.5 This practice creates an artificial dichotomy of “us” (or in the case of Cho/Park, “U.S.”) versus “them,” “good” versus “evil,” and “sane” versus “sick.” As the reader’s comments above illustrate, a similar project can be found at work in U.S.-based journalistic criticism of recent South Korean films. In a scathing review of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), for example, Rex Reed unleashes a malicious tirade of racist slurs, conflating Korean, Japanese, and Chinese cultures, and, in a fit of tangible exasperation, asking:

What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave, and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs? . . . Part kung fu, part revenge-theme Charlie Chan murder mystery, part metaphysical Oriental mumbo-jumbo, all of it incomprehensible.6

Manohla Dargis, in her review for the New York Times (March 25, 2005), shares Reed’s disdain for the work, opening her critique with a question clearly intended to shock readers into dumbfounded agreement with her assessment of Park’s film as “symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism.” “What,” Dargis asks, “does art have to do with a guy eating a live octopus and then hammering a couple of (human) heads?” Dargis’s rabid denunciation of the film for its purported excesses poses, however unintentionally, another question: What is the impetus that has so surely driven American critics to dismiss South Korean films as “extreme” while lauding films from Europe and North America that veer into equally excessive territory as “art”?7

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Of course, the allegation that South Korean films are any more violent, any more sadistic than American films is as ludicrous as it is unfounded, a fact that crowd-pleasers such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) and Saw (James Wan, 2004) more than adequately illustrate. Indeed, as one of the editors of the present volume indicated, the same kind of moral ambivalence that marks these works can be found in numerous other films, both past and present. Why, then, have American critics been so quick to voice their disapproval of Korean films, and what role does this disapproval play in American views of Korea, its culture, and its citizens? What drives the censure of these works, and why is it that the slippage from criticism to racial persecution (as evidenced in the comments above) occurs so easily in this specific case? What makes these films so dangerous, so scary that not only they, but also the nation that produced them deserves such utter and complete condemnation?

Perhaps the most obvious reason is that although contemporary South Korean films share a set of common stylistic devices and high production values with Hollywood blockbusters, South Korean films rarely, if ever, conform to the same narrative codes as Hollywood feature films, especially with regard to the role played by violence in the organization and unfolding of the plot. Furthermore, the refusal of these works to identify characters with moral positions drawn along distinct and unwavering lines is clearly critical of the overwhelmingly dominant American model. Thus, although they must conform to Hollywood standards on some level in order to win audiences and become commercially viable products, Korean films still find ways to subvert what are seen from a culturally defined perspective as problematic elements of the classical Hollywood text.

Violence, for example, in the Hollywood film generally fulfills one of two functions: it signals the disruption of order — a violation of the law — that sets the narrative into motion and triggers spectatorial desire for resolution — for the restoration of order. Alternately, it provides the means by which order is restored and the narrative is resolved. Along the way, the film assigns specific moral values to different acts of violence by creating a system of parallelisms that identifies the agents behind the violence as either good or evil, depending upon whether these acts lead to further disruption or work toward resolution.

In his seminal study of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) entitled “Symbolic Blockage,” Raymond Bellour aligns this process of narrative development with the Oedipal trajectory of the male subject theorized by Freud. Bellour argues that the classical Hollywood narrative develops through a series of repetitions and differences — blockages of sorts — articulated on all levels of the representation, from the film’s stylistic basis in the shot/reverse- shot formula to the protagonist’s journey from immature subject to

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Oedipalized adult. Bellour remarks that “this Oedipal itinerary [coincides] with the hero’s trajectory”8 and goes on to illustrate that resolution rests directly on the restoration of the masculine power and privilege of the lead character; the subordination, usually through marriage or some form of heterosexual coupling, of the female subject; and the reestablishment of the “law,” as represented by the family.

In her “Melodrama Revised,” Linda Williams analyzes Hollywood narrative form from a slightly different perspective: Although she maintains a focus on the importance of repetition and difference, and on the ultimate goal of restoring order and “innocence,” Williams sees these elements not as steps in the path to Oedipalization, but rather, as the defining qualities of melodrama, “the fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures.”9

Furthermore, in a related essay she notes that the melodrama “most often typifies popular American narrative in literature, stage, film, and television when it seeks to engage with moral questions.”10 She characterizes the basic melodramatic structure as “an evolving mode of storytelling crucial to the establishment of moral good”11 that “begins and wants to end in a ‘space of innocence.’ ”12 The threat to this innocence propels the narrative forward, prompting the development of a dialectic of pathos and action, and fostering the desire for resolution in the form of retribution, redemption, or some combination of both. Williams cites Peter Brooks in her explanation that the melodrama ultimately concerns itself with the simultaneous projects of uncovering hidden evil and acknowledging virtue that has gone unrecognized. Far more than mere entertainment, then, these works function as object lessons of a sort, reiterating the national ethos and, shoring up “American culture’s (often hypocritical) notion of itself as the locus of innocence and virtue.”13 Thus, the closure offered by the standard Hollywood “happy ending” represents a particular kind of realization of the American Dream — a reaffirmation of both dominant cultural ideas about gender and sexuality (as theorized by Bellour), and at the same time, a flattering, if unrealistically idealized view of the United States and its history of expansion and acquisition.

South Korean film, too, exhibits a clear affinity with the mode theorized by Williams, and like its American counterpart, it too reflects its own nation’s self-image, but in more decidedly self-reflexive terms. Whereas American films consistently retell stories of success in the face of adversity, South Korean films generally revisit instances of historical, political, and cultural trauma, examining these events from more contemporary perspectives and rarely providing any sort of resolution, but more often than not, offering important insights on these events and their significance to modern-day Korea. As critic Kyung Hyun Kim explains in his book, The Remasculinization of Korean

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Cinema, contemporary South Korean cinema has “engineered a master narrative that engages with trauma” — the narrativized representations of the seemingly endless suffering that the Korean nation has faced throughout its long history — that is at the same time “intricately tied to the . . . conventions of melodrama.”14 As Kim points out, “[t]he depictions of emasculated and humiliated male subjects set the stage for their remasculinization, and occasioned a revival of images, cultural discourses and popular fictions that fetishized and imagined dominant men and masculinity.”15

The end result of this process, though, is not the establishment of a strong Korean male, but rather, as Kim argues, a simulation “of Hollywood action heroes,”16 a sign of the national cinema’s colonization by U.S.-based images and ideals.17

To understand the specific historical and cultural environment that gave shape to these images, we must first review some key events in Korea’s recent past. For nearly three decades, South Korea’s economy grew at an amazing pace, reaching a peak of sorts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, by November of 1997, the economy faced overwhelming obstacles and eventually collapsed when a number of large-scale investments failed to pay off and went into default. Because the companies (chaebol) involved in these business ventures enjoyed privileged connections to the government, they were able to absorb an ever-increasing amount of capital investment. Ultimately, though, all of the temporary solutions failed, and South Korea suffered a crippling economic disaster. By 1998, Korea’s gross domestic product had fallen by nearly 7 percent, triggering the intervention of the International Monetary Fund, which responded by awarding Korea “an emergency rescue package amounting to fifty-five billion dollars — the largest loan in the IMF’s history.”18 Although this move saved Korea’s economy, it also opened up opportunities for outside influences to control and shape its economy, and be extension, its political and cultural life.

In the period of time immediately following the IMF crisis, the South Korean film industry underwent a massive transformation. This change represented the realization of a uniquely Korean model of globalization known as segyehwa.19 Proposed in November of 1994 by President Kim Young-sam, segyehwa combined strong nationalist sentiments with the implementation of Western methods of production, reclaiming domestic markets while simultaneously pursuing global initiatives — a formula that must have sounded promising in the gloomy days following the IMF’s intervention. However, although this formula allowed the South Korean film industry to win back Korean audiences from Hollywood and to trigger the pan-Asian phenomenon known as Hallyu (the Korean Wave), it did so by copying the style of

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Hollywood productions20 — a situation that resulted in a kind of representational identity crisis.

One of the most successful productions to emerge from this early renaissance was Kang Je-gyu’s Shiri (1999), a film that restages the conflict between North and South Korea as a Hollywood action film. Shiri takes its name from a freshwater fish that lives only in the Demilitarized Zone, the area that both separates and unites the two Koreas. Like this fish, one of the central characters is trapped, at least symbolically, between the two countries. She has both North Korean and South Korean identities and is romantically involved with agents on both sides of the border. At stake in this film, then, is not the conflict of “good” South Korea and “evil” North Korea, but rather, the negotiation of identity in a world where the political import of one’s identity is both formulated and assigned by others, a fact that even has bearing on the form and content of Kang’s film, modeled, as it is, upon American action films as a way of guaranteeing its commercial success both at home and in other pan-Asian and international markets.

It is important to remember that South Korea is, after more than half a century, still occupied by American troops. Indeed, the presence of these troops — supposedly deployed in South Korea to defend the Republic of Korea against invasion by the North — seemed for a while to be more threatening than reassuring — especially in light of the George W. Bush administration’s initially aggressively negative stance against North Korea and statements following the 9/11 tragedy in which Bush simplistically divided the world into two camps: those “with us” and those “against us.” According to recent surveys, “South Koreans are more concerned with the threat posed by the US than by North Korea . . . [fearing] that the US might be bent on invading North Korea.”21

That the violence in Kang’s film takes such an obviously American (read “Hollywood-inspired”) form serves to underscore the extent to which the animosity between North and South Korea is — like the Hollywood aesthetic that the film espouses, perhaps not entirely voluntarily — not something natural, but rather is a product of the powerful political and cultural influences imposed upon Korea by the United States.22 While the violence itself recalls the Hollywood film, the anxieties that lie underneath it — the powerful motivations that prompt the violence — arise as a reaction to the recognition of this undue influence.

In his essay “Detouring through Korean Cinema,” Paul Willemen argues that the imposition/acceptance of Western representational conventions on/ by the East creates a disparity between Eastern experience and Western standards, resulting in “a compromise between foreign form and local

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materials.”23 The inability of Western narrative forms to accommodate Asian realities results in moments of textual disjuncture — disturbances that point toward incongruities arising from the inadequacy of the representational form to express culturally specific desires and anxieties.

Willemen refers to such disturbances as “blockages,” echoing Bellour’s earlier use of the term, thus shifting the focus away from the psychosexual development of the male subject and toward the cultural, economic, and political subjugation of the nation — from the personal to the political — illustrating, in the process, the disconnect that takes shape at the juncture of Western-style narrative and Eastern experience. Willemen’s analysis shows that although both types of story operate along similar structural lines (due in no small part to the adoption of the Western model of storytelling), the negotiation of a political identity (as typified by the South Korean films that he examines) is far more fraught with contradiction, less easily reconciled, than the dissolution of the Oedipus complex (characteristic of the Hollywood feature). Willemen cites the freeze frame, a popular motif for ending films of the 1970s and 1980s, as a key example of this phenomenon. The freeze frame, Willemen explains, functions as metaphor for the impasse in which South Korea found itself at the time, emerging from the painful experience of condensed modernization and lengthy occupation. With “both the way back to tradition and the way forward to modernity . . . blocked” Korea had nowhere to turn. Although modernization was a desirable, indeed, necessary step in asserting economic and political autonomy, the cost of achieving this transformation was the loss of tradition and identity. The imperfect synthesis of Eastern content and Western form has yielded a hybrid that, despite phenomenal international success, has resulted in a crisis of identity that consumes these works.

C. Fred Alford argues that this crisis is the result of globalization, pointing out that although Korea has experienced various forms of imposed Westernization and modernization, from the mid-eighteenth century forward, “globalization,” in this particular instance refers to a specifically contemporary phenomenon, that is, a project of Neo-Colonialism with far-reaching economic, cultural, and political consequences. Globalization is a phenomenon with “roots in economic and social developments arising at the end of the Second World War,” but only recognized as a “cultural process with vast and profound implications . . . in the 1980s.”24 As such, Alford’s understanding of globalization is perfectly in line with the prevailing usage of the term in contemporary cultural studies. As historian and cultural critic Charles Armstrong explains in his study of the phenomenon in a specifically Korean context, “globalization is nothing new; such processes have existed

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since the beginning of human civilization. What is new is the rapid acceleration and intensification of these processes in the last one hundred years, and especially the last fifty.”25

Alford explains that although Koreans do not possess a concept synonymous with the Western idea of evil, they do see the obligatory acceptance of American cultural norms — the very modes of thought that create such binary divisions as good versus evil — as immoral. Instead of dualities, Alford asserts, “Koreans create relationships among people, relationships that are woven so tightly that the duality on which concepts like evil depend cannot find expression. Conversely, evil depends on a type of separation and division that is so terrifying it cannot be allowed to exist.”26

To call something evil is to bestow upon it the quality, the power, of other- ness. But even this process, seemingly simple, is actually quite complicated, as Alford explains, asking at one point:

What if it is not otherness that one most fears? What if what one fears is the quality of being the other, alienated, isolated, and alone, bereft of attention? Then evil may become unspeakable, too close to home. The experience of evil cannot be projected onto an other because it is the very experience of otherness that is so terrifying.27

Globalization demands that Koreans surrender their cultural identity and become “global” citizens, a move that exchanges the security of cultural sovereignty for the promise (not guarantee) of financial gain. The erasure of tradition that results from such an arrangement recalls Korea’s traumatic past as occupied and oppressed nation, and its current political situation, too, “experienced largely in terms of division and in terms of the national security state that necessitates oppressive laws and makes south [sic] Koreans depend, to some extent, on U.S. military assistance.” This experience, in turn, creates han, “a consciousness of ongoing trauma and a lack of resolution . . . a path for the movement from the present into the past, and for a fresh and creative movement from the past and present into the future.”28

Since throughout its history Korea has been invaded, occupied, and oppressed by foreign powers, han has been widely theorized as a national trait unique to Korea, arising from years of internalizing anger rather than resorting to violence. An excess of han results in what is known as hwabyeong or “anger illness.” This condition, recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as a “culture-bound illness . . . attributed to the suppression of anger,”29 significantly resembles, both in form and etiology, what in the West is referred to as conversion hysteria30 in that in

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both of these phenomena anxieties find expression through outward physical symptoms. Like hysteria, then, which has successfully been used as a model for interpreting Hollywood melodramas, hwabyeong may provide a key for interpreting the psychic and cultural motivations behind the unique dynamics of South Korean film. Of interest to the current study, then, is not the status of han as a psychological disturbance, as a clinical phenomenon, but rather, as Nancy Abelmann has characterized it, as an “idiomatic convention . . . [that] connotes both the collective and individual genealogical senses of the hardship of historical experience [that] relaxes the temporal and geographic patchwork of passive and active, resistance and nonresistance — by not forcing the distinction.”31

Roy Richard Grinker situates han similarly when he writes:

. . . Korean tragedies do not “speak for themselves” but are always distilled, filtered, converted into something else; han is a culturally distinctive manner of conceptualizing and experiencing misfortune, but it is also a method for thinking about the relationship between historical experience and the future. It provides for sufferers a means of converting their tragedy into a dynamic and active process — whether externally through revenge or internally by self-reflection and the development of a new identity or art. This might also be explicated by saying that han expresses a continuous tension between enduring one’s misfortunes and doing something about the misfortunes and the personal hardships and resentments that result from them.32

Thus, for Grinker, han represents not only the ongoing suffering of the Korean people, but also the means by which they may express this grief, much in the same way that the symptom that allows the expression of the neurosis has its parallel in artistic creation.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith uses the model of conversion hysteria to explain how, in seeking to represent the psychic and social determinants that influence its form and content, the melodrama often makes use of a discourse of symptoms. Since the melodrama is a work of representational art, these psychic and cultural factors cannot merely be reflected or described, but rather, must be signified — that is, they must be expressed through standard representational conventions. As Nowell-Smith explains, because of the limitations of this process — for example, the overpowering imperative of such narrative conventions as resolution — any troubling contradictions must be repressed. This inevitably generates what Nowell-Smith refers to as “excess” — emotionally charged material that the narrative cannot accommodate.33 Thus,

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the question is not so much that there exists no means for representing this material, but rather, that this material resists representation.

“The ‘return of the repressed’ takes place, not in the conscious discourse, but displaced onto the body of the patient,” writes Nowell-Smith. In the case of the film, “where there is always material which cannot be expressed . . . a conversion can take place into the body of the text.”34 These messages find representation through conversion into visual or acoustic glitches and excesses or what the author refers to as “hysterical moments” — breakdowns articulated through excesses in music, performance, and mise-en-scène, moments that shift the burden of representation from the narrative to the detail. This movement from realism to a more symbolic mode allows the work to, as Christine Gledhill notes, “[deal] with what cannot be said in the available codes of social discourse; [to operate] in the field of the known and familiar, but also . . . to short-circuit language to allow the ‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ — the unthinkable and repressed — to achieve material presence.”35

In the films of Douglas Sirk, for example, the excesses that mark the mise-en- scène, the performances, and the musical accompaniment, all point toward an overpowering “unconscious” unrepresentable by other means.

Similarly, the violent outbursts that characterize some South Korean films, and in turn, lead to their marginalization as “extreme” in the U.S.,36 can be read much in the same way as the moments of textual rupture or excess discussed by Nowell-Smith and Gledhill, as symptoms, as instances of material once repressed (in the case of South Korean cinema, a culturally identified resentment) seeking expression in the body of the text. However, unlike violence in Hollywood films, the interruptions in these works are not associated with agents of “good” or “evil,” but rather, arise at moments of crisis in which, as Alford theorizes, the protagonist recognizes that he/she has become an Other to him/herself.

The startling climax of Oldboy, singled out for its supposed role as cinematic agent provocateur in the Virginia Tech shootings, provides an example of this phenomenon. Near the end of the film protagonist Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) and Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), the man who has orchestrated Oh’s kidnapping and fifteen-year imprisonment finally confront one another. Their exchange, repeatedly delayed and thus highly anticipated, is not direct, but mediated by various objects. Lee does not address Oh face to face, but first showers and then, while dressing, directs his comments to Oh’s reflection.

The sequence graphically positions Lee in glowing close-up on the left, with Oh, in half-shadowed long shot on the right. Although Oh has the power of evidence and recollection on his side (he stands in front of a wall of photos of Lee’s deceased sister, the focus of their exchange), the asymmetry of the shot reveals that these are no match for the class-related privilege signified

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by Lee’s clothes, demeanor, and home. In addition, the composition of the shot suggests that Lee (who is visible as both subject and reflection) has reduced Oh (who is visible only in the mirror) to an image — like the photos, a representation, an element of the mise-en-scène (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) confronts Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae) in the mirror in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003)

Figure 7.2 Oh and Lee switch positions in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003)

This all changes when Oh remarks that, given the presence of a photo taken at the reservoir, Lee must have been present the day of his sister’s suicide. His words transform the photos on the wall from mere decorations and memorabilia to evidence. Suddenly the perspective changes: Oh is no longer shown as reflection, but in medium close-up. Lee, momentarily annoyed, is no longer shown on the left of the screen, but on the right, Oh on the left, and as reflections (i.e., Lee’s body is no longer visible in front of the mirror) (see Figure 7.2). Lee then sneers, “This is no fun,” regaining narrative authority by describing how he arranged for Oh to be hypnotized and coerced into a sexual relationship with a woman who is, unbeknownst to Oh, his own daughter.

Oh reacts with a look of horror as the visuals shift away from the present: Lee continues to speak as abstract techniques — flashbacks, split screens, and superimpositions — create the cinematic equivalent of condensation, equating

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Oh (who is now guilty of the very act for which he earlier condemned Lee) with Lee, visually completing Lee’s project of reducing Oh to what Oh, through his actions, once made Lee. Even Oh’s clothes and accessories, all provided by Lee, create the illusion that he no longer exists as an autonomous subject — the visual symbol of which takes the form of a split screen and partial superimposition uniting both Oh’s and Lee’s faces.

Reeling from the shock of the revelation, Oh begs Lee not to disclose this secret to his daughter. In an effort to atone for having revealed the secret of Lee and his sister’s relationship, an act that resulted in the sister’s hysterical pregnancy, Oh cuts off his own tongue. Through this act of Oedipal significance — an action tantamount to castration, given Lee’s earlier comment that “it wasn’t Lee Woo-jin’s dick, but Oh Dae-su’s tongue” that made his sister pregnant — Oh both confesses his own guilt and administers his own punishment, collapsing the binary structure that has developed between them and between the past and present of the narrative, thereby signaling Oh’s “passionate submission” to Lee.37

Lee later exits, dropping a small, pen-like device that he has earlier told Oh controls his artificial heart. As Lee pushes the button for the elevator, Oh presses the button on the remote device, believing that his actions will kill his tormentor. He is horrified to discover that instead of stopping Lee’s heart, the remote control activates a reel-to-reel tape player that broadcasts the sounds of Oh’s sexual encounter with his daughter. The recorded sounds and voices parallel Oh’s earlier revelation of the indiscretion between Lee and his sister, an act that leads to both the suicide of Lee’s sister and, after Lee’s revenge is complete, the end of Lee’s own life.

It is only after the cathartic completion of this highly perverse equivalent of analysis that the origin of all of this excess can finally find expression. As Lee boards the elevator the film flashes back to the reservoir again. Lee reaches out and grabs onto an arm that appears to reach up from the space in front of him (see Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 Lee (Yoo Ji-tae) hallucinates in the elevator in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003)

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At once all dualisms collapse — past and present, fantasy and reality come together as the film re-enacts the tragic suicide of Lee’s sister at the reservoir. As Lee watches his sister fall into the abyss (he is, at this point, shown alternately as both his younger self and present self), he slowly pulls back his hand, forming the shape of a gun with his index finger (see Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4 Lee’s hand/gun. Park Chan-wook, Oldboy (2003).

With his thumb he cocks an imaginary hammer (the sound of which appears on the track) and as the visual register cuts back to the present, Lee, obscured by the elevator door, fires the gun into his own temple and falls dead onto the elevator floor. The transformation of Lee’s hand into a gun (a hand/gun) echoes the analogy at the heart of the joke he made earlier, equating Oh’s tongue and his own penis. It also provides yet another example of the functional collapse of signifier into signified that characterizes this sequence.

Far from being an example of purloined Tarantinian style (as Dargis suggests), this representational excess pulls the spectator into a vortex of sights and sounds that undercuts — in fact, effectively obliterates — the artificial distinction between good and evil, desire and representation. Indeed, the spectacular finale of the film suggests that the characters who, up to that point have been (mis)understood as the hero and villain of the film are, in fact, both victims. Moreover, because the violence found in Park’s film (and in other films as well) takes a form clearly reminiscent of the American action film, it redirects the very cinematic techniques by which, in Hollywood films, the distinction between good and evil is solidified, and conflicts between these terms resolved, to, in effect, reject such divisions as invalid. Furthermore, it radically reconfigures a trope common to many mystery and serial-killer films, by which the desire for the solution of the crime becomes, through a series of narrative shifts, the desire for the successful union of a heterosexual couple. The romantic/sexual pairing of the father and daughter refuses to be repressed, shut down, and flies in the face of the Oedipal formula that dictates the design and form of the classical Hollywood film. And although the end of the film does, at least technically, respond to the beginning (father and daughter are reunited), it does so only in the most radically subversive of ways.

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Like Oldboy, Lee Jeong-hyeok’s H (2002) makes explicit use of the mirror as a symbol of the loss of agency and wreaks havoc on the Oedipal narrative model. H details the investigation of a series of murders that exactly replicate those committed by an already incarcerated psychopath, Shin Hyeon (Cho Seung-woo). Although the police identify and arrest a suspect responsible for two of the murders, the killings continue. The film eventually reveals that the murderer is not single person, but a series of individuals, all acting under the influence of post-hypnotic suggestion. This group includes the two police officers assigned to the case: Detective Kang Tae-hyeon (Ji Jin-hee) and Detective Kim Mi-yoon (Yeom Jeong-ah).

The film comes to a violent conclusion as Kang, prompted by the cues of music and sunlight, kills his own mother, thus mirroring the only unexplained link in Shin’s killing spree (Shin’s dying words, “I killed my mother,” finally put the case to rest). Thus, like Oh in Oldboy, he becomes the object of his own hate — the Other that he has relentlessly pursued. Upon arriving at the scene, Detective Kim first lights a cigarette (an action she does habitually throughout the film) and after passing the cigarette to Kang, fires a fatal shot into his temple. Kim’s action, also motivated by a post-hypnotic suggestion (triggered by the lighter), represents the completion of an action started and stalled earlier in the film.

The scene takes on greater significance when considered in the context of the earlier scene in which Kang and Kim interview Shin in a visiting cell. Shin examines Kim’s lighter and notes that it once belonged to Kim’s deceased fiancé, who, as another victim of Shin’s murderous hypnosis, killed himself while investigating the first set of crimes. Enraged by Shin’s arrogant cruelty, Kim, who has remained almost pathologically calm throughout the entire investigation, stands and points her gun at Shin’s head, cocking it and preparing to shoot (see Figure 7.5).

Figure 7.5 Detective Kim (Yeom Jeong-ah) takes aim at Shin (Cho Seung-woo) as Detective Kang (Ji Jin-hee) watches, in shock,

in Lee Jeong-hyeok’s H (2002)

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Instead of directly stopping her, Kang stands and hits Shin across the face, knocking him to the floor and temporarily defusing the tension. Kim’s killing of Kang, who has, in a sense, become Shin, brings to a conclusion both Kim’s earlier suspended action, and the investigation itself, and perhaps most important of all, destroys any possibility for the formation of what Barbara L. Miller refers to as the “investigative couple” — the establishment of which stands as a guarantee of narrative resolution and successful Oedipalization — in her exhaustive study of the serial killer film.

The film’s use of repetition (the copycat nature of the crimes) and doubling underscores its ostensible debt to the Hollywood thriller. Marketed in the U.S. as “Se7en meets Silence of the Lambs,” the manner in which the film clearly plays with these intertextual references gives an impression of self-aware, self-reflexive critique. In other words, by so obviously playing with Hollywood conventions and references in a film about the investigation of copycat crimes carried out by characters operating in a post-hypnotic trance — carrying out actions scripted by someone else — the film links its own representational strategies with the action of the narrative. Viewed in this light, the film’s focus on copycat crimes and hypnotic control both parallels and comments on its status as created under the controlling influence of American culture.

Figure 7.6 Actor Ji Jin-hee as Detective Kang in Lee Jeong-hyeok’s H (2002)

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The poster for the film features a stark black and white photograph of Detective Kang staring wide-eyed into a water-splattered bathroom mirror — a scene that notably does not occur, at least in this particular set-up, in the film (see Figure 7.6). A cigarette hangs limply from his lips. With his right hand he rests a handgun (aimed listlessly, almost unintentionally, at his own reflection) against the mirror; in his left hand he holds the gun’s magazine, evidently preparing to lock it into place.

Of course, the use of the doppelgänger is not specific to South Korean films. Otto Rank wrote a psychoanalytic investigation of some of the first instances of mirroring in early German cinema, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, in 1914, and in 1919 Freud dealt extensively with the subject as an enduring theme in art and literature in his study, “The Uncanny,” which itself was clearly influenced by an even earlier work (1906) by Ernst Jentsch. However, the appearance of doubling in a South Korean context underscores the extent to which the distinction between “good” and “evil” in these works is, like the motif of the double, something foreign, something borrowed, and as such, the source of disturbance, of splitting in a specifically South Korean context. In a sense, the two images of Detective Kang not only represent two opposing moral positions (his potential to act in the name of the law and against the law), but also the dual identity of the film itself (Korean/American).

Both Kang and his mirror reflection are visible in the photo, shot from behind and to the left of Kang’s shoulder. Under the film’s title (the ambiguous letter “H”) appears the line “The name that summons murder — [H].” A second inscription, written vertically, reads, “I thought this would end after I caught him.” Both the “him” in the second inscription and the “H” of the first can be read as references to Shin (Hyeon), the serial killer already incarcerated at the start of the film, as it is he whose agency Kang hopes to destroy, and also he whose control (through hypnosis, the real referent of the film’s ambiguous title) transforms Kang into the “him” implicated in the second inscription. The success of Kang’s mission, then, hinges upon his own capture and execution. The poster takes this final psychodrama and restages it, distilling it into a single image frozen at the moment of greatest narrative conflict: Kang stares into the mirror and sees in his own reflection the face of the murderer.

The title of the film plays with the ambiguity suggested by this single letter — a signifier that, freed from its association with other signifiers, becomes loaded with possible associations and potential significance. Instead of “The End,” the film closes with the mysterious letter “H,” once again, this time revealing its symbolic value as the initial letter of the word “Hypnosis.” It

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 139

is interesting to note that despite the fact that there does exist a term for “hypnosis” in Korean — — “Hypnosis” is rendered in English, while the definitions are presented in Korean. In other words, the title, or the means of identification of the film, is a letter from the Western alphabet, while its interpretation comes in the form of a Korean dictionary. In making this narrative play, the film both explains the motivations behind the events that have preceded it, and, more important, serves to reinforce the interpretation of the mind control that leads to violence with the English language, and arguably, by extension, with the influence of American culture on Korea. In this respect, H represents a uniquely Korean reinterpretation of a characteristically American sub-genre, the serial killer film.

A similar confrontation between self and image occurs just before the bloody gunfight that brings Kim Ji-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (Dalkomhan insaeng, 2005) to its conclusion. As protagonist Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) washes his face and bandages a deep knife wound in his abdomen, he pauses for a moment and looks into the mirror. Sun-woo, a hit man, has recently fallen out of grace by refusing to kill the unfaithful (and much younger) girlfriend, Hee-soo (Shin Min-ah), of his boss, Mr Kang (Kim Young-cheol). As punishment he has been shot, stabbed, and buried alive (twice). He now stands in the men’s room of the club La Dolce Vita,38 loading a variety of semi-automatic firearms that he has stolen from an arms dealer, and steeling himself for what will most certainly be a final confrontation. His face, seen only as a reflection, is shown in close up — his eyes are bloodshot, his face filled with despair. “Why did it turn out like this?” he sighs, “It’s ok . . . it’s ok.” As he turns, the camera cuts away to a medium shot of him from behind (a shot similar to that used in the poster for H). Both Sun-woo and his reflection are visible again for an instant before once again, as he stands, the camera refocuses on his reflection. As he exits the bathroom his reflection is eclipsed momentarily by his own figure, thus creating a visual disturbance that motivates a cut to the space of the next scene, and also reiterating the character’s own mortality by privileging corporeal presence over specular image.39

The exchange in the mirror represents the final phase of Sun-woo’s reclamation of his own agency from not only his boss, but also the oppressive system in which he has accepted a position. Sun-woo has effectively surrendered his own desires, his very identity, to the gang in which he is a member, a fact illustrated by his lack of a personal life — we know nothing of his parents, his family, or even his tastes. Even his clothes — the stylish black suit, starched white shirt, and impeccably knotted tie — although very chic, provide Sun-woo with the means to suppress his identity, to manipulate

140 Robert L. Cagle

his own self-image in such a way that allows him masquerade as cold, uncaring — something that the film ultimately reveals, he is not (see Figure 7.7).

Figure 7.7 Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) faces his reflection in the mirror in Kim Ji-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005)

The intensity and magnitude of the violence as Sun-woo engages in an extended gunfight with an army of gangsters gives some indication of just how profound this repression is. However, as he dispatches each successive opponent with an ever-decreasing arsenal of weapons, Sun-woo himself loses strength and suffers additional injuries, the implication being, as is commonly the case in narratives that involve doubling, that in killing off these opponents — the people who represent his choices in life, his experience — Sun-woo is also killing himself.40 Violence is not, therefore, seen as liberating or positive, but rather, as wholly destructive.

As Sun-woo sits dying amidst the shattered ruins of the club, he opens his cell phone and dials Hee-soo, the woman whose life he spared, and in so doing, triggered this catastrophic tragedy. As Hee-soo speaks into the phone, the film switches modes as the image track slows and Hee-soo’s voice echoes on the soundtrack. Sun-woo stares into space, thinking back to a moment from his past — a seemingly insignificant event — when he spent an afternoon listening to Hee-soo play the cello in a recording session. As “Romance” by Yuhki Kuramoto plays on the soundtrack the film reveals information that it withheld before: Sun-woo sits listening to Hee-woo and her companions play, closes his eyes, and smiles.

Although some reviewers have cited this sequence as evidence that Sun- woo is secretly in love with Hee-soo, it seems far more likely that this fleeting instant of happiness represents Sun-woo’s experience of not only a shared act of kindness (something that, as the film reveals, does not occur in his other life) but also of his own (temporary) autonomy, freed from Mr Kang’s grip and the criminal life into which he has fallen. Indeed, when viewed from

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the perspective offered by Bellour in his reading of classical Hollywood film, this scene can be read as an unmistakable refusal of psychosexual and cultural forms of Oedipalization — revealing that the promise of power and privilege associated with accession to the Father is an empty one, only serving to further distance the subject from the possibility of realizing his/her desires. The image track cuts back to the present, and Sun-woo is shown from the left, rather than straight on, as tears roll down his face. Sun-woo’s sudden experience of emotion signifies not the regret of lost romance, but rather, like the “behind” and “beneath” theorized by Gledhill, “something that cannot be put into words,” 41 because it exceeds language, defies representation.

This reverie is cut short, as the image track quickly shifts to a long shot, filmed from Sun-woo’s right, as he is shot point-blank by the brother (Eric Moon) of the gun dealer he has earlier murdered. It is worth noting here that, as in Oldboy, the startling sound of a gunshot merges with a jarring edit and brings to a sudden and unexpected close a highly emotional musical accompaniment that signals a recollection — a memory of loss and despair. In one respect, the gunshot that kills Sun-woo is, like the gunshot that kills Lee in Oldboy, self-inflicted. In his haste to leave the hideout where he has murdered the gun dealer and his companions, Sun-woo, who has been meticulous throughout the film, leaves behind his business card. Sun-woo thus becomes the agent of his own death — the double from whom he cannot escape — an interpretation that is underscored by the fact that the gun dealer’s brother tosses the lost business card onto Sun-woo’s lifeless body, thus delivering Sun-woo’s message to its proper final destination. Like the violent acts that conclude Oldboy and H, this final gesture both brings to a close a circle of deception and double-crossing, while at the same time, by providing formerly withheld information, redirects the spectator back to the narrative again, encouraging reconsideration and reinterpretation.

This reading is further supported by the fact that following a brief spoken epilogue the image track dissolves to an earlier unseen shot of Sun-woo, shown only as a reflection in a window, sipping a cup of espresso and staring out into the night. After he finishes his coffee, he looks up, adjusts his tie, and suddenly begins boxing with his reflection. The camera cuts to a medium shot from outside — from the other side of the mirror/window — as Sun- woo continues to throw punches at himself, stopping occasionally to laugh and readjust his tie. This final shot, like the earlier reverse shot that reveals Sun-woo smiling while listening to the musical performance, reveals a perspective that has, up to this point, remained unconsidered, unrepresented — Sun-woo as playful, almost childlike. In introducing these images, the film performatively directs spectators to reconsider what they have just seen. It

142 Robert L. Cagle

points toward its own inability to represent characters or events with the complexity necessary to make them “real.” In other words, like the melodramatic mode theorized by Gledhill, it indicates a level of narrative that remains beyond or behind the images that have just passed. Unlike the illusory resolutions that conclude Hollywood films, the endings of A Bittersweet Life, H, and Oldboy, not to mention those of numerous other South Korean “extreme” films, do not impose closure on the stories they have presented, but rather, in the spirit of han, push the viewer from the present into the past, suggesting that it is only by way of such contemplation that the true meaning of the film can be understood.

Ultimately, it is this refusal to espouse the most conservative elements of the Hollywood film — the binary opposition of good against evil, the insistence upon closure — and the resulting exposure of this system — the basis, as Williams has argued, of the Hollywood film — as false that makes these works so horrifying to American critics. Although South Korean films emulate Hollywood films, they undercut the basic belief system at work in the Hollywood film, illustrating that the violence glamorized in the Hollywood picture is not in any way productive. They likewise reject the moralistic distinctions between individuals or groups that structure the Hollywood picture and American popular culture since they do not use it to scapegoat or vilify a convenient other, suited to fit the current political or social climate. To Western audiences raised on the Hollywood film, these works must seem dangerously irresponsible. Ultimately it is not that the violence in these works is more graphic or explicit, it is not that the characters are somehow more pathological, and it is not even, as some have argued, that violence is more personalized in South Korean film, instead of being glamorized or abstracted in Hollywood film. Rather, these works illustrate the invalidity of the simplistic view of the world as divided into camps of good and evil as was the monolithic rhetoric that characterized the Virginia Tech reports, soullessly transforming a tragically disturbed young man into the personification of evil. Moreover, as Williams has illustrated in her work on melodrama, such a view is a defining characteristic of the American ethos. This simple fact is what renders them scary and dangerous — it is what makes them extreme.

Acknowledgements

This project was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Korean Film Council. The author wished to thank KOFIC, the editors of the present

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 143

volume, and the anonymous readers who provided helpful critiques of earlier versions of this work, and to recognize Margaret Montalbano, Lalitha Gopalan, Cynthia Childs, Frances Gateward, David Desser, Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, and Mac Kang for their thoughtful suggestions, continued support, and valued friendship.

37. Kinoshita Chika, “Sen’yusha tatch no kukan” [The space of appropriators], Yuriika [Eureka] 35 no. 10 (Special issue on Kurosawa Kiyoshi, July 2003): 188–99.

38. For a foundational critique of this dichotomy, see Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103–57.

39. Carol Clover persuasively presents the economic and cultural gap, or uneven development between city and country, as a framework when discussing I Spit on Your Grave. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 124–37.

40. Kurosawa, Kurosawa Kiyoshi no eigajutsu, 269. 41. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,

trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25. 42. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist

Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1984), 83–97.

43. From the perspective of gender and space, Kurosawa’s latest horror Retribution, featuring a female ghost (Hazuki Riona) firmly localized in the ruin of the prewar asylum in the Tokyo Bay Area, does not pursue this direction, for all interesting experimentations of representing a ghost.

44. Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Shinozaki Makoto, Kurosawa Kiyoshi no kyofu no eigashi [Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s film history of terror] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2003), 186.

45. For a succinct account of the prewar “Return to Japan” and its historical context, see Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian, “Japan’s Revolt against the West,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207–72.

46. Asada Akira, “J kaiki no yukue” [The future of the return to J], Voice, March 2003, available at http://www.kojinkaratani.com/criticalspace/old/ special/asada/voice0003.html.

47. Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,” in Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 47.

Chapter 7 The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean: Violence, Morality, and the South Korean Extreme Film

1. Whitman shot and killed fourteen people and wounded more than thirty others during a shooting spree at the University of Texas at Austin on August 1, 1966. More than thirty years later Klebold and Harris killed thirteen people and wounded several others at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. These individuals were white males, as have

236 Notes to pp. 118–123

been the majority of individuals who commit mass murders and so-called “spree killings.” (See Holley; Kelleher; Newman, Fox, Harding, Mehta, and Roth for discussions of similar cases, as well as public and professional reactions to them.) Cho and Gang Lu, a Chinese national Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa, who shot and killed five people in Van Doren Hall on the school’s Iowa City campus, represent two notable exceptions to this rule. Although Cho and Lu had little in common with one another, the “Asian connection” between the two was evidently perceived as so great that the release of a film based loosely on the Iowa event, Dark Matter (Chen Shi-zheng, U.S.A. 2007) was indefinitely delayed for fear that it would upset those who lost family and friends at Virginia Tech. According to Lawrence Van Gelder in an article on the topic (New York Times, February 18, 2008), producers, evidently undeterred by non-Asian Steven Kazmierczak’s attack just two days earlier at Northern Illinois University, announced plans to release the film on April 11, 2008. The film was eventually released as planned in several major cities across the US, and received generally positive reviews.

2. Adrian Hong (The Washington Post, April 20, 2007) succinctly discusses the issues of blame and responsibility in the context of national identity. Mike Nizza (The New York Times, April 19, 2007); Stewart MacLean (The Mirror, April 20, 2007); and Jake Coyle (The Washington Times Daily, April 20, 2007), all detail the anti-Korean backlash that these “theories” provoked. Ironically, after disseminating, and thus lending credence to such accusations, news sources were forced to admit that there was no evidence to suggest that Cho had ever seen Park’s film.

3. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 351.

4. Oleysa Govorun, Kathleen Fuegen, and B. Keith Payne, “Stereotypes Focus Defensive Projection,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32:06 (June 2006): 781–93.

5. Peter Suedfeld, “Reverberations of the Holocaust Fifty Years Later: Psychology’s Contributions to Understanding Persecution and Genocide,” Canadian Psychology 41:01 (Feb 2000): 1–9.

6. Rex Reed, “Bobby Short, King of Pop,” New York Observer, March 28, 2005, 20.

7. See, for example, works by directors such as Catherine Breillat, João Pedro Rodrigues, Gaspar Noé, Virginie Despentes, and François Ozon. The use of the term “extreme” to describe a significant wave of recent features from countries throughout Asia is attributed to Hamish McAlpine, head of U.K.- based Tartan Entertainment. McAlpine reportedly came up with the term after watching two Japanese thrillers, Audition (Takashi Miike, Japan 1999) and Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, Japan 2000). This use of a single, transnational category to accommodate such a wide variety of films with very little in

Notes to p. 124 237

common is decidedly problematic, given that to group these diverse texts from different nations under one single heading perpetuates a prevalent and highly Orientalist worldview (as illustrated by Reed’s comments above) that categorizes all of Asia or “the Orient” as somehow culturally homogeneous, significant only insofar as that it is different from — indeed, the binary opposite of — the U.S.

8. Raymond Bellour, “Symbolic Blockage,” [1975] (trans. Mary Quaintance) in The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 81.

9. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42.

10. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 50.

11. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 12. 12. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 28. 13. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 50. 14. Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2004), 28. 15. Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, 9. 16. Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, 10. 17. Kim (2004) discusses the crisis of masculinity in the post-IMF era using the

1999 feature, Happy End (Jeong Ji-woo). However, it is Cynthia Childs, in her essay, “Jung Ji-woo’s Happy End: Modernity, Masculinity, and Murder,” who most clearly maps out the relation of Jung’s film to the post-IMF Americanization of South Korean culture.

18. Charles Armstrong, The Koreas (London: Routledge, 2007), 32. 19. Jeeyoung Shin characterizes the segyehwa strategy thus: “This economically

oriented globalization was not simply designed to enhance the Korean economy’s international competitiveness by encouraging Korean companies to operate on a global level. Regarding increasing demands for market liberalization, it was also meant to improve Korean firms’ competitiveness with foreign corporations in the domestic market.”

20. Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, 271. 21. Seung-ho Joo, “U.S.-R.O.K. Relations: The Political Diplomatic

Dimension,” in The United States and the Korean Peninsula in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Tae-hwan Kwak and Seung-ho Joo (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 53.

22. For other analyses of South Korea’s views on American military occupation, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun (New York: Norton, 2005) and Selig S. Harrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

23. Paul Willemen, “Detouring through Korean Cinema,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3:2 (2002): 169.

238 Notes to pp. 126–129

24. Elayne Rapping, “Globalization,” in The Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory, ed. Roberta Pearson and Philip Simpson (New York: Routledge, 2001), 200 (italics in original).

25. Armstrong, The Koreas, 4. 26. C. Fred Alford, Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2. 27. Alford, Think No Evil, 145. 28. Roy Richard Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished

War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 78. 29. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders: DSM-IV-TR (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 900.

30. Alford, Think No Evil, 80. 31. Nancy Abelman, Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social

Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 37. 32. Grinker, Korea and Its Futures, 80. 33. Although some Korean critics have voiced skepticism regarding the use of

han, especially by non-Koreans, in the present manner, the author feels that, given the formative role played by the melodramatic mode in both U.S. and South Korean cinema, and given the affinities that exist between conversion hysteria in the West and han in the East, that the comparative methodology used in this work is valid. It is not the assumption of the author or any of the authors whom he cites that han emerges exclusively from the experience of modernization or globalization, but rather that the concept of han can, like hysteria in the work of Nowell-Smith, provide a productive metaphor for representing and understanding the unconscious workings of South Korean media texts. Jongju Kim explores the possible connections between Korean conceptions of han and various Western psychoanalytical approaches in his “Psychoanalytic Approaches to Han and its Correlation with the Neo- Confucian four-seven thesis,” while Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park examines the important cultural roles played by the related concepts of han, jeong, and hwabyeong in his forthcoming study, “South Korea’s Cinema of Jeong Consciousness.”

34. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 73.

35. Christine Gledhill, “Dialogue on Stella Dallas and Feminist Film Theory,” Cinema Journal 25:04 (Summer 1986), 45.

36. Although some of these works are viewed as “extreme” in Asia as well — for example, the films of Kim Ki-duk have never garnered the kind of popularity in South Korea that they have at international film festivals around the world — the term “extreme” is unquestionably Western in origin. The term was coined by the president of Great Britain’s Tartan Entertainment to describe a collection of Asian films he was to eventually market as a kind

Notes to pp. 129–132 239

of new sub-genre in Europe and the U.S. Furthermore, although, as mentioned above, a moral ambiguity similar to the one that marks these works manifests itself in films by European directors, these films are, in general, not marginalized in the same way as the Korean films, nor are they used as a means by which to make broad identity-based judgments of individuals from the countries in question. In other words, neither the reception of these works as “extreme” nor the moral ambiguity that identifies these works as such is significant in and of itself. Rather, it is the reaction to moral ambiguity of these works, their subsequent characterization of them as “extreme” or dangerous, and the eventual misuse of these texts as the basis for leveling unfounded criticism that is at stake in this reading.

37. I borrow the phrase “passionate submission” from the work of Kim So- young, who uses it to describe events in films in which dualistic oppositions (the traditional versus the modern) are destroyed in the interest of finding “new ways of thinking about Korean cinema and Korean modernity — or, I would venture to say, cinema in Korean and modernity in Korea.” Kim So-young, “Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema,” Traces I (2000): 301–17.

38. The film’s original Korean title, Dalkomhan Insaeng, actually translates as “sweet life” (as does the title of Fellini’s film). The reference to Fellini and notably to several other works clearly illustrates the film’s debt to Hollywood, Europe, and Japan. Here I would like to point out that media related to both Kim’s film and Park’s Oldboy use references to Hollywood (and other) motion pictures in ways that point toward a project of contextualization, albeit in different ways.

The DVD release of Kim’s A Bittersweet Life features chapters named after specific films. The titles of these chapters (and the content of the films to which they refer) sum up the material that each chapter contains. The films referenced on the DVD are: La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, Italy 1960); Trop belle pour toi (Bertrand Blier, France 1989); True Romance (Tony Scott, U.S.A. 1993) [Film written by Quentin Tarantino]; Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, France 1993); Battles without Honor and Humanity (Jingi naki tatakai, Kinji Fukasaku, Japan 1973); and Way of the Gun (Christopher McQuarrie, U.S.A. 2002). The titles both appear to comment (ironically in some cases) on the content of specific chapters, while at the same time unmistakably situate the work within a framework of influences from modern world cinema.

Likewise, all of the tracks on the original soundtrack for Park’s film (with the exception of an excerpt from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons) bear the titles of feature films, most of them Hollywood pictures, and the majority of those, Hollywood classics from the studio era. The films referenced are as follows: Look Who’s Talking (Amy Heckerling, U.S.A. 1989); Somewhere in the Night (Joseph Mankiewicz, U.S.A. 1946); The Count of Monte Cristo

240 Notes to pp. 134–139

(adapted to the screen numerous times, from the silent era to the present); Jailhouse Rock (Richard Thorpe, U.S.A. 1957); In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, U.S.A. 1950); It’s Alive! (Larry Cohen, U.S.A. 1974); The Searchers (John Ford, U.S.A. 1956); Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, U.K. 1958); Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, U.K. 1959); Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1972); Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, U.S.A. 1998); For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood, U.S.A. 1943); Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, U.S.A. 1947); A bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, France 1960); Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, U.S.A. 1980); Frantic* (Roman Polanski, U.S.A. 1988); L’ascensceur pour l’echafaud* (Louis Malle, France 1958); Cul de Sac (Roman Polanski, France 1966); Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, U.S.A. 1955); Point Blank (John Boorman, U.S.A. 1967); Farewell, My Lovely* (Dick Richards, U.S.A. 1975); Murder, My Sweet* (Edward Dmytrik, U.S.A. 1944); The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, U.S.A. 1955); and The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, U.S.A. 1978).

* = In both of these cases (i.e., Frantic and Farewell, My Lovely) the titles used on the DVD might refer to either of two distinct titles. I have included both here because they seem equally well suited to the themes of the film, although the latter adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, and notably, the only one of the two films to be released under that title, matches the trajectory set forth in Park’s film.

39. Jinhee Choi has noted other significant elements of this film that reflect its commentary on South Korea’s tenuous position in a new global society, citing the presence of Russian arms dealers and Southeast Asian hitmen as signifiers of a different kind of “globalization” (perhaps “internationalization” might be a more appropriate term here) presently affecting Korea.

40. See Otto Rank (1914), The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (London: Karnac-Maresfield, 1998).

41. I thank Bryn Scheurich for this observation.

Chapter 8 Magic, Medicine, Cannibalism: The China Demon in Hong Kong Horror

1. Stephen Teo, “Ghost, Cadavers, Demons and Other Hybrids,” in Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI Publishing, 1997) and Cheng Yu, “Under a Spell,” in Phantoms of the Hong Kong Cinema: The 13th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1989).

2. Stephen Teo, “The Tongue,” in Phantoms of the Hong Kong Cinema: The 13th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1989), 45.

3. Yu Mo Wan, “Hong Kong Horror Cinema,” in Phantoms of the Hong Kong Cinema: The 13th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1989), 77.

Notes to pp. 139–146 241