The Foul King (Banchikwang) 2000

Kim Jee-woon is famed for his beautifully crafted and violent films, so it was a bit of a reminder for me to see The Foul King (2000), his sophomore feature and until now the only one I had not seen form his filmography. It was a swift reminder that his films were not always as polished, however the film is definitely Kim’s as it showcases his trademark dark humor and fascination with the dark human psyche.

One of the most visible Korean films of the moment is Kim’s sixth film, the brutal I Saw the Devil (2010), an uncompromising vision of just how primal our instincts can be and how our hypocrisy can excuse even the most horrific behavior. As far as its aesthetics, plot, and casting are concerned, it brings to mind A Bittersweet Life (2005) the most, which also stars Lee Byung-hun as a man driven to merciless and unrelenting revenge. From a thematic standpoint though, it recalls Kim’s inspired debut, The Quiet Family (1998), a very original black comedy that was remade by Takashi Miike as The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001). This film, about a family that runs mountain lodge, follows their misfortune, as accidental deaths taint their new venture until they become violent and amoral by the narrative’s conclusion. Just like I Saw the Devil, The Quiet Family assumes that everyone has the potential for unspeakable violence. 

Dae-ho in the grip of his boss' headlock

The Foul King is not quite so dark, but it cannot escape the director’s interest in our questionable morality as human beings. Song Kang-ho plays a discontent and ineffectual bank clerk (Im Dae-ho) whose sole ambition is to be able to break out of the grip of his boss’ headlock. When his frustration becomes too much, he pursues wrestling in order to attain his goal. The narrative doesn’t get much denser than this, there’s subplot involving his colleague and we meet his disinterested father a few times.

It is not uncommon to hate your boss and to want to beat him, so at first Dae-ho’s focus on it does not seem strange but it is the catalyst for all the violence that he surrounds himself throughout the film. He gets in touch with his aggression and this has two clear effects: on the one hand, it spurs his ambition, he becomes dedicated to wrestling, trains diligently, and eventually gains people’s respect, including his own; on the other hand what starts as a venture to defend himself against his bully boss leads him to stab people in the head with forks and other acts of violence which are less and less fuelled by revenge and become geared towards entertainment.

Just like The Quiet Family, The Foul King exhibits Kim’s knack for black comedy, this is ultimately the film’s greatest strength and due in no small part to Song Kang-ho-s central performance, one of his first leading roles. This is also the role that made him a star and it's easy to see why. I've spoken many times about the emasculated males that are so prevalent in Korean film and it makes sense to bring it up again here as Song's character and performance carry all the traits commonly associated with this phenomena, such as the hierarchical nature of his professional life and the unconventional, and comical, nature of his fight scenes.

The climactic fight

The film may not be the technical masterpiece that Kim’s later films would be but it does employ some clever techniques, especially in it’s dizzying, brutal, and lengthy wrestling finale. Slow motion and other editing techniques are used effectively and framing, as well as props and production design add a welcome note of absurdity to the proceedings.

Perhaps the film’s most important theme, and certainly an important one for moviegoers around the world who seek the confines of musty theaters for escape and respite, is the search for and confirmation of identity. Dae-ho is shy and unassertive but he becomes a decent wrestler, although he needs to wear a mask, and since he is the cheating ‘Foul King’, he has no honor. This helps him in his private and professional life but he must still do away with the mask, as he can ony confront his father and profess his love for a colleague from behind it. In the film’s visceral and climactic wrestling scene, his mask is finally torn off. This spurs him to equally match his superior opponent but Kim has a little fun with this ‘self-discovery’ when Dae-ho confronts his boss for a final showdown, which is scored with Western musical cues, only to slip as he charges towards him. Very funny but also telling, how much can a person really change?

Memories of Murder: Part VII - The Host

Bong Joon-ho is a filmmaker who is meticulous and knows what he is doing at all times, his intelligence and acute understanding of the needs of Korean audiences have made him incomparably successful in the theatre of contemporary Asian cinema.  With Memories of Murder he took the image of the emasculated male and he subverted and subjugated it and yet at the same time deified it to created a box office sensation that was choke-full of sociological pertinence.  His next film was even more successful and possibly more ambitious, certainly from a technical standpoint.  Essentially he took his lens and did for the South Korean melodrama what he had already done for masculine identity with Memories.  The Host is the highest-grossing Korean film of all time, and still sits comfortably on that laurel.  lt is a difficult film to label; when it was released overseas it was billed as a Jaws-like monster movie but to simplify it to that level does it a great injustice.  At its core it is a family melodrama that is punctuated and informed by the genre’s lengthy evolution in Korean cinema.  It is also monster movie, a comedy, and a political and social critique.  Song Kang-ho, although no longer employed within the civil service, reprises his stereotype as the post-traumatic emasculated male.  Here he is Park Gang-du, who runs a riverside store hut with his father, the archetypal family head, who was also in Memories playing the local chief inspector.  Song Kang-ho's character also has a young daughter and two siblings: a sister, who is a gifted archer and an alcoholic brother.

The family 'grieving' the loss of their youngest

The family is most definitely scarred. There is no mother as she has died, and the young daughter's mother ran off after she was born.  The archer sister is an extremely talented but intensely reserved individual who crumbles under the slightest amount of pressure.  The brother is a former student activist who has now more or less been cast out of society and idles his time drinking on unemployment. The father is also a mess and probably most like Gang-du, he desperately tries to keep the family together and attempts to stop all the in-fighting.  Whenever he opens his mouth, his demeanor seems to suggest the temperament and nobility of a wise old man but after a sentence or two the spectator along with his children recognize an old crackpot who takes himself more seriously than everyone else does.  The granddaughter is mortified by her embarrassing father and serves to represent a bored generation that has little respect for their parents; however she is portrayed in a positive light as she would likely outfox the whole bunch.  The narrative unfolds when a monster emerges from the Han River and after going on a rampage, steals the daughter.  Then against the oppressive and bumbling military rule which is attempting to contain the situation, as well as the antagonizing influence of the American military, the family draws together to retrieve their youngest and most valuable family member.  The film is extremely sophisticated in its approach to a plotline that could easily veer off course but it carries on with verve and winds up being so entertaining that it is totally irresistible.  The film, just like Memories, succeeds enormously in representing the Korean family and the engrained obstacles that it must face as a unit. "Commercially driven Korean melodramas serve to illustrate some of the defining features of Korean films and the societal contexts in which they are produced".

Song Kang-ho in The Host

The Host also displays a certain and very recent trend in South Korean, namely the process of using multiple genres within the same narrative and successfully creating post-modem and accomplished works of entertainment whose main focus is to deal with certain sociological and historical issues. Another such film is the delightfully off-kilter Save the Green Planet (2003), which involves aliens, a punk version of Over the Rainbow, extreme torture and a swarm of killer bees “Korean filmmakers found that by blending and bending existing genres, they could create works that appealed to audiences who wanted something new”.  The Host has been the most successful of these films and to date the most fully realized.  The film is highly melodramatic and manipulative but steers us very smoothly to certain emotions and conclusions on certain sociological issues that pervade the narrative and all the while it is highly amusing.  By blending these different genres, the hybrid that has resulted, much like the monster (or The Host of the title), is clear evidence of the "transmutation of historical genres that engage this process of recuperation".

The film's narrative ends with the death of the girl in a show down which harkens back to the brutal student demonstrations of the 1980s, it is highly emotional and while it is set in the present, it does bring us back to that time.  The loss of the new generation as well as the  destruction of the eldest generation (as the patriarch also perishes in the narrative) leaves the 684 generation forced to band together and face their own traumas without the help of others.  However, the film's coda makes light of this as a year later the events are replayed on the news but those watching turn it off as they are too busy filling their bellies.

Previous: Part VI - Psychoanalysis and Scarred National Identity

Next: Part VIII - Conclusion

Memories of Murder: Part IV - Subversion of Genre

Bong Joon-ho is well known for his deft handling of generic conventions; he not only understands and respects their limitations but know how to manipulate them to his advantage without compromising their effectiveness. Memories draws heavily on the long line of detective thrillers that have spewed forth from Hollywood consistently for decades on end. It is a very established genre with extremely recognizable codes and characters: the dual protagonist detectives, the patterns, the anticipation of the next murder, all these things form part of what has consistently remained one of the most popular filmic formulas worldwide. With Memories Bong creates a visceral and extremely effective detective thriller that highlights all of these codes and yet subverts many of them to very satisfying effect.

First of all, it is worth examining the position of this genre within contemporary South Korean cinema. Memories is not the only recent example and it is also not the only one that has some fun with it. An early commercial example after the boom in the industry before the start of the new millennium is Tell Me Something, which stars Han Suk-kyu, easily the biggest star at the time (it was the year after he made Shiri which broke box office records at the time). It was a thorough success and it even garnered an audience overseas and is now available in many countries. In his essay on Tell Me Something, Kim Kyu-Kyun credits how “director Chang skillfully manipulates the expectations of the audience to a generic melodramatic plot in which Su-Yon would fall in love with Detective Cho, only to shock us with the revelation that the serial murders are motivated by a gender-related reason", the director engages with the genre in a very conscious way and ends up subverting it. Since then there has been a rush of modern Korean films that have featured male victims and female antagonists instead of the other way around. In these examples the denouements often show the audience the various motivations behind the brutal murders which often include scarred pasts where fathers or other authoritarian figures end up as the narratives’ real villains. Princess Aurora is an excellent example of this; the end features a flashback sequence that inculpates all of her victims in the murder of her daughter. This revenge formula is quite prevalent in South Korean Cinema, and can be found in Beautiful Boxer and the internationally renowned Park Chan-wook film, Lady Vengeance, both of these films also deal with mothers having to cope with the loss of their daughters and how society has placed them in their precarious situations.

Beyond these serial killer narratives, there are also films like Public Enemy, starring the inimitable Sol Kyung-gu, as a gruff detective who has difficulty juggling his professional and personal life and treads the narrative without ambiguous morality. He is a character who is corrupt, violent and very unprofessional. From a western perspective it is difficult to understand how he could have risen to his current position but this is not unfamiliar in Korean cinema. Much like Det. Park in Memories, his journey is a much more progressive one, which ends in a tidy resolution where he earns the respect of his colleagues and there have now been two sequels to date where he is no longer so incompetent. These subsequent films are not as interesting but were successful at Korean box office although not as popular overseas. Another point worth noting in Public Enemy is the mention of the immensely popular television show Chief Inspector which aired in the 1980s and featured a very famous opening credits song. In Public Enemy, an internal affairs inspector is being shooed away from the homicide department by the chief inspector and in defense he then recites a plotline from a Chief Inspector episode to intimidate him, as if he were reciting from a police manual. The show is so engrained in South Korean pop culture that in this send-up it is taken as fact. Similarly, early in Memories, the local inspectors and Baek (the first big suspect) take a moment to eat and commune in front of the television set as Chief Inspector starts. They all hum along to the tune and comment on it. It’s a great piece of dark humor to see homicide detectives watching a cheesy police show in the midst of investigating Korea’s first reported series of serial murders. In both Public Enemies and Memories, the mention of Chief Inspector speaks volumes about the perceived credibility of law enforcement by the general Korean populace.

Watching Chief Inspector during an interrogation

In Memories, many generic codes litter the screen and while they are often recognizable they are twisted in a way to serve to emblematize the post-traumatic nature of the main protagonists. The second scene of the film is a deliberately generic Hollywood thriller montage in which a theme straight out of a 1980s action film plays over a series of intercut shots of Det. Park interviewing suspects at his police headquarters. He is giving it his best shot but his questions do not seem to be getting him anywhere. His insecurities lead him to insulting the suspects, constantly referring to them as “Damn punks!” or making fun of their physical appearance. He is constantly undermined by the general inefficiency of his procedural skills. Even at this early stage it is easy to see that Park is very much a part of a societal system that he has very little control over. As a detective he has some authority which he exerts by acting rough with younger, less intelligent or less privileged people but once he is confronted by a suspect in suit his tone is immediately more respectful, as if speaking to an elder. He is embarrassed as he tries to mention the female victim’s sexual attractiveness.

The film playfully references Body Heat as Det. Park types up his report at a snail’s pace with his indexes. The content of the report seems trivial and the length of time it will take him to complete point to an inefficient use of time and resources. What’s worse is that when the ribbon is stuck it is the suspect beside him who is cowering in his chair that help him fix it. Instead of thanking him, Park berates him and calls him a “damn punk”. This is the first in a long line of instances where Park will be undermined by those around him when he doesn’t do something right. His reaction to this sort of emasculation throughout the narrative is invariably verbal abuse or physical violence.

The well-constructed montage continues with quick editing and the fast tempo theme as he makes his way through various odd-looking potential suspects. He is friendlier to his last interviewee and this could be for two reasons: he respects a youth that is trying to enter the Military Academy; or he is happy that his lunch is arriving. He argues with the delivery about having asked for a receipt at which point a colleague offers him another one, but this turns out to be a receipt for a bicycle shop and during this time the delivery boy has left. The same shot crossfades to the late in the evening where Park is now alone and sleeping at his desk, he wakes up briefly but goes right back to sleep. He does not seem too pressured to produce results in this murder investigation.

Det. Park asks for his receipt

Detective Such, who is Parks’ much more capable foil in the narrative is a carefully utilized character who at first embodies but later undermines typical generic codes. He is a investigator with a degree who comes from the big city (Seoul) to help with the case. He is very quiet, intelligent, he is a good detective and he is also quite cool, often looking very mysterious while crouched in the background smoking a cigarette. At first he makes many significant breaks in the case and identifies patterns and predicts further murders. However, at around the halfway point of the narrative he begins to hit dead ends and becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to catch the killer. Early on he demonstrates an unwavering faith in the bureaucratic system when he says that "Documents never lie", but this stance is compromised at the end when he receives the forensic test results that he believes will condemn the suspect that he is certain is guilty of the killings. When the results turn out to be negative he suffers a breakdown and says "this document is a lie, I don’t need it" and tries to administer vigilante justice only to be foiled by Det. Park, the characters have swapped roles in a way.

One scene in particular in the middle of the film is very effective in the way that it depicts both of the Detectives and their affiliation with the generic codes that helped to create them. Having followed bogus leads based on idiotic conjecture and superstition Det. Park and his equally pea-brained partner Inspector Jo have returned to one of the murder scenes at night in an attempt to decipher the face of the killer with the aid of a shaman’s scroll, some ink and some dirt. Clearly, for Park the investigation has hit rock bottom. They hear someone coming into the clearing and hide. It is Detective Suh, he lights a cigarette and begins to survey the crime scene, he has a tape player in his hand and turns it on. It plays the pop song that the killer has been requesting on the radio on those rainy nights before he commits a murder. Det. Park rightly, although hypocritically, points out to his partner that this is a ridiculous technique and it isn’t going to achieve anything when he says "we need science here!" as he hides evidence of his own folly by stuffing the shaman’s scroll into his jacket. Jo then points out "Still, he’s got style"; Suh may not be using a great investigative technique but he looks cool as he doesn’t achieve much, Bong is making light of the proclivity exhibited by Hollywood thrillers of mostly favoring style over substance. Bong injects a great deal of substance into his “generic" narrative but he utilizes the codes so well that he can make fun of the material while also using it to its fullest potential.

Soon another man is heard approaching and Suh ducks away also. This time it is an unknown man who removes a woman’s bra and panties from his underwear and lays them out carefully on the ground and begins to masturbate. It is our natural inclination to assume this might be the killer returning to the scene of the crime, Park even says so. Jo accidentally steps on a twig and after a pause, the man runs off and the Detectives give chase in a thrilling scene through the narrow back alleys of a rural village. They lose his trail and Park begins to berate Jo for scaring him off, he surprises them however by following the sound of dog barks and managing to find the trail of the suspect. This chase leads them into a busy rock mine, where everybody looks the same. Here it is Park who recognizes the man, against the odds, when he catches a glimpse of his red underwear.

Det. Park spots the suspect

Suh has been in control and successful with his techniques up to this point but in this scene it is the other detectives who succeed in apprehending the suspect. Park gloats with his eyes when Suh looks at him, surprised at his skill. Of course, during a ridiculous confession it becomes very clear that this man is most certainly not the killer and we are back where we started. The juxtaposition of these events is very interesting as after having criticized and subverted some generic tropes, Bong immediately injects a huge contrivance with the improbability of catching a sexual deviant at the exact spot of the crime while both detectives are there unaware of the presence of the other. It is most certainly an improbable scenario, yet it shows that Bong engages with these conventions (returning to the scene of the crime, psycho-sexual nature of the suspect, etc.) in a very affectionate manner and knows how to evince an effective thriller from them.

Previous: Part III - The Evolution of the Post-Traumatic Male

Next: Part V - Female Representations

The Significance of 'Manly Tears' for the Reclamation of the Male Id in Korean Cinema

Korean cinema features a lot of male characters that have either tried to shelter themselves from the past trauma of their lives, or have been directly confronted with it.  The Man From Nowhere, which I watched last night, may not be the best example of this, but when it's protagonist, Tae-sik, embraces So-mi, the child he saved, he breaks down in tears.  Throughout the film, he has been emotionless, and characters have mentioned that guns being fired right beside him haven't even fazed him.  Just before he cries, So-mi remarks that he is smiling and that it is the first time she has seen him do so.  His embrace with So-mi forces him to confront the loss of his family, I would argue that the sheer force of his history and the trauma he has borne for the last four years overwhelm him the moment the slightest crack appears in his armor.

Won Bin's manly tears

Tears are a very powerful image, and the more seldom their use, the stronger their impact.  The less we expect to see them, the more engaging they are.  They have the ability to convey a great number of emotions: fear, desperation, love, relief, grief, joy, and more.  Often they are more effective than words.  Korean cinema has a strong undercurrent of grief wich stems from its troubled history, and the closer you look, the more you will find.

Manly tears in Korean cinema are a very successful motif that elicit an emotional response because they hint at something greater.  When these characters break down it feels as though their trauma stems from more than their films' narratives, their tears are pervasive and multi-faceted and draw you into something deeper than mere escapism.  The emotional resonance of modern Korean films is a result, in equal parts, of the tremendous, highly-literate talents involved in the industry, and of the historical and psychological trauma that scars them all.  The 386 generation (or 486 by this point) brought all their baggage to these film sets and the tears of the leading men feel like their tears, or indeed a whole nations' tears.  Relief for the end of oppression and grief now that the release forces them to confront it.

Lee Byung-hun's manly tears

Kim Ji-woon's A Bittersweet Life features Lee Byung-hun as the hard-as-nails, ever-composed Sun-woo.  He goes through a narrative that seems him tortured, beaten, stabbed, shot, and of course betrayed, with barely a flicker of emotion.  In the climactic showdown with his boss and all his goons, he asks his former employer why he wants to kill him.  At this point he breaks down and out come the manly tears, he devoted his life to him for seven years and was an obedient and effective servant, but his boss only registers a small grin on his face and doesn't answer his question.  I would read this as the boss representing either the Korean government (of the past) or Korea itself, despite having been subservient to it so long, it could still betray you.  Lost in his boss' silence, he stares into space.  What he sees there is his own reflection in a window, he remembers who he is and his brief loss of composure evaporates.  His employer seems to think he's broken him, what he doesn't realize is that Sun-woo is unable to face his trauma and thus will revert to all that he knows.  This is a poor judgement on his part because all that Sun-woo knows is the cold brutality and cruel efficiency which he passed on to him.  It shoots straight back at him in the form of a bullet to the heart.  Sun-woo dies soon after this act and is thus unable to reclaim his identity, although since his moment past and he refused to embrace it there was nothing left for him to do but die.

The Host features a great deal of crying, although I wouldn't call it manly.  I think there is a lot to be said about it but it will need to sit with me for a little while.  Mainly I wanted to mention it briefly so that I could include the following photo.

Song Kang-ho's unmanly tears

The reclamation of the male Id is an important part of Korean cinema whether it wishes to acknowledge it or not.  The image of men crying in the cinema of Korea is a motif which allows for significant catharsis among the nation's post-traumatic population and is therefore an integral part of it.

These are just two (and a half) examples that come to mind but there are many more out there.  As I list a few more and allow for my thoughts on this topic to germinate, I will expand on this post.  If you can think of other good examples, of other reasons why it may be important, or if you think my theory is baloney, please let me know!

Memories of Murder: Part III - The Evolution of the Post-Traumatic Male

"Either physically handicapped or psychologically traumatized (sometimes both), many of the characters emblematized the period's frustration when protest against the military government was disallowed." 

Waiting for the inevitable force of time and society

There is an evident progression of character representation if we trace the relevance of this statement from the start of the New Korean Wave, through its end and into modern Korean cinema. At the start, characters that fit this description were either college students or working class protagonists who had no chance to engage positively or successfully with society. Both of these character types, while worlds apart, suffered from an inability of expression and were both systematically oppressed by a government which tolerated nothing but uniformity and obedience. 

This began to change over time and in the year 2000, Peppermint Candy, arguably one of the last New Korean Cinema films, was released.  In this narrative we follow a character's entire life story, although we do not engage too much with him personally as he is more of a window to see certain political events through. The trauma that his character suffers from emblematizes the many consequences of the social ills committed during the periods highlighted in the film. What is important, regarding the previous quote, is that he starts off with artistic and optimistic aspirations for the future but as his life becomes consumed and destroyed by the government and military  he is eventually forced into civil service, where he becomes a detective and is broken down to become part of the system as he begins to reign his own oppression by beating people senseless under the guise of the law. Only in the end of the narrative (the start of the film as it plays in reverse chronological order) does he recognize what society has done to him and what he has become. At this point he removes himself from the tarnished society he admits to living in and being a part of. In Peppermint Candy the suicide of the principal protagonist at the beginning of the narrative very clearly spells disaster, when the character puts himself on the road (more specifically a train track here) and waits for the inevitable force of time and society to finish off his chronological narrative. His induction and subsequent denial of society left him with the knowledge that he had no home to go to and any attempt at recuperation would have been impossible. What  happened in this narrative is that a character that started off by "emblematizing a period's frustration" with the government ends up with him becoming a part of it. 

Back at the original scene of the crime

The natural progression of this logic bings us to Memories of Murder which places the emasculated male as a part of the civil service (again a detective) right from the start and we are never given a clue  about his background or why he may have joined the police. We do not necessarily see him as an oppressive agent, although he is certainly not wothy of much praise, but he is part of the system and  he has no understanding of the consequences of most of his actions although to a cetain extent he learns to deal with this throughout the narrative. By the end, after suffering dificult psychological trauma he leaves the force (we do not know when or exactly why, although we can guess) to become a civilian. He becomes a travelling salesman, permanently doomed to travel the roads of South Korea. We last see him exactly where he started, still trying to make sense of something that has no easy answers on a road that seems long and narrow and may not lead anywhere at all.

"The depictions of emasculated and humiliated male subjects set the stage for their remasculinization", this may not necessaily be true of this narrative but by rejecting his image as a civil servant or pawn of an oppressive government he has to some degree become engaged with his own narrative. He understands the society he lives in that much better and sees how he relates to it however,  he is still far from recuperating his own male subjectivity, to quote Kyung "The dawning of a new modern era is normally punctuated by hope and optimism, but the weight of intense history and its attendant violence loomed so excessively large that it ended up traumatizing, marginalizing and denaturalizing men". The government and the history which it created was so vast and oppressive that, coupled with the pre-existing historical traumas from the rest of the century, it became impossible for post-traumatic males to be given any chance to heal their psychological wounds, within or without the civil service and the society it dominated.

Previous: Part II - The Wandering Male

Next: Part IV - Subversion of Genre

Memories of Murder: Part II - The Wandering Male

"Korea's emasculated and traumatic men pour out onto the road. The characters are visually encased with overwhelming landscapes and victimized by historical pathos, which refigure their constant wanderings."

While detective Park, unlike his cinematic predecessors, may not traipse around the peninsula aimlessly, he does wander around the narrative of the film and around the small town where the film takes place, and often find himself chasing down ridiculous leads that lead him nowhere. Ultimately, with the crime unsolved, he will end his journey, within the film's narrative at least, exactly where he started: on the side of the road, in the same overwhelming landscape, looking into the past having not perceived or attained any specific destination. It is also worth pointing out that Memories goes on step further than the Korean New Wave: as Kyun asserts, “while the hope for reclamation of home and recovery of individual persisted in these stories, the endings desperately fell short of reunions, love, and overcoming life’s obstacles.” , so while these film’s narratives can be followed by a spectator who is led to hope for resolution, Memories, which ironically is a far more commercial film, never even lets the audience hope for any kind of resolution since before entering into the film’s narrative, Korean spectators would already have known the events which the film was based on: a serial killing spree which was never solved. Even for a foreign spectator, a quick glance at the blurb would immediately fill one in on this information.

Park eyes a suspect

Memories is, of course, conceived around the notion of memory. However, it is not the memories of the film’s characters that are important, as we learn nothing of the histories of the film’s central protagonists. Any back story we receive on minor characters is only present to serve as a signifier to a historical moment or to symbolize a collective national trauma. The film is a representation of a national memory of historical traumas. Kyung, while examining South Korean films that directly reference important historical moments that have created a national collective trauma, speaks more broadly about the use of personal trauma and amnesia as a means of representing national trauma. “National cinemas in countries trying to come to terms with their own humiliating pasts by confronting the task of self-reflexively engaging a history that resists both remembrance and representation” , Memories does exactly this by explicitly representing a period of trauma and challenging, very successfully as evidenced by the film box office returns, the audience to remember their scarred history and to engage with it through the surrogate of the ever-popular and emblematic symbol of the emasculated male, here South Korea’s biggest star Song Kang-Ho.

“In any new national cinema that has long endured political terror, a “post-traumatic” identity often emerges whose mission is to help viewers remember what is too difficult to recuperate.”

The detectives work together

This happened in South Korean cinema starting in the late 80s when auteurs such as Park Kwang Su, Jang Sun Woo and later Hong Sang Soo and Lee Chang Dong made films that centralized the post-traumatic concerns of the masculine characters and shaped what are now seen as the typical stereotypes that are prevalent in modern Korean cinema. “The New Korean Cinema of the last two decades has incessantly pursued themes, characterizations and narratives that center on a particular notion of subjectivity: the image of an individual modern man desperate to free himself from institutional repression, familial responsibilities, and personal anxieties” , today this can still be identified as one of the main focuses of Korean cinema. While not as prevalent since the beginning of the new millennium, it has found a very prominent place within the newly commercialized hybrid of domestic cinema. Any film that deals mostly with male characters cannot help but be influenced by this dominant strand of theory and most of these films will corroborate the masculine position as created and formulated by the cinema of the 90s but some, indeed very few, may try to challenge it. Most notably perhaps in this new sphere of filmmakers is Kim Ki Duk, who, while often labeled a nihilist and a sexist, engages far more with the female gender in South Korean cinema than almost any other director, however, he has not seen success beyond the festival circuit and is not particularly in his native land. The trend can go further and infiltrate films aimed at women, such as the ever popular melodrama, which at this point seems equally informed by the golden age of the Korean melodramas of the 1960s but also by Korean cinemas’ masculine identity rhetoric of the 1990s. While it is unfortunate and somewhat typical that a ground-breaking amalgamation of idioms that works successfully to examine a nation’s scarred history would then be invisibly assimilated into mainstream and commercial multiplex fare, it has also served some purpose in contrast with many successful national cinemas. The result: South Korea’s biggest blockbusters have a much healthier propensity for socially interacting with their audiences. Bong Joon-Ho with Memories and The Host has been at the forefront of this but other filmmakers such as Park Chan-Wook and Kim Ji-Woon have also made extremely successful films that can’t be ignored with regards to their social or historical subtexts. It also helps that South Korea, besides Iran, is the most cinephilic nation in the world. How else could an art film like Lee Chang Dong’s latest, Secret Sunshine (2007) be a runaway hit at the box office? An award at Cannes is worth a lot of money for a Korean film, indeed it is a symbol of national pride. Korean auteurs who have won awards at prestigious festivals have made a name for themselves within Korea and their foreign recognition has invited them to become bigger names within an industry which is mostly motivated by finance. Central to this is the continued popularity of the post-traumatic male who has made the leap from the art house to the mainstream without too much damage. Song Kang Ho, as already mentioned, is the biggest box office draw in the country and most likely this is because he has come to embody the traumas felt by Korean males and presents them in a highly sympathetic package as well as injecting a heavy dose of humour into his performances. “He is a camouflaged man who cannot easily reveal his past, a past that surely embodies a “trauma””, which Slavoj Zizek defines as “an impossible kernel which resists symbolization, totalization, symbolic integration” . In most films of this nature the spectator is hardly ever presented with any background information on the central male protagonists and we must see them less as original characters and more as sociological and historical symbols. Throughout the course of a narrative we observe how they interact or fail to interact with the people, circumstances, events and societies which surround them and through this we are shown a window into the scarred emotional psyche of legions of Korean males, particularly of the 386 generation. There are also other actors who have come to be famous and known for these kinds of characters, namely Choi Minh Sikh and Sol Kyung Gu.

Detective Park explains a theory

Bong Joon Ho, more than any other New Korean Cinema luminary, probably takes after Park Kwang-Su. His more or less exclusive focus on masculine identity  (within Memories in any case) and its social and historical context very much continues where Park left off. “Park’s films focused on the problematics of Korea’s repressive history and present reality by featuring male characters” , more importantly, because of Bong’s enormous popularity, Park’s ability to align intellectuals with the minjung (people) has percolated into Bong’s aesthetic and therefore proliferated into a wider audience. His structure and ideas are extremely intelligent and developed but they are not so far removed that they are lost on the public. Korean audiences have engaged fully with his narratives and characters and have celebrated him for it. Detective Park cannot find a stable ground for himself, by trying so hard to conform with the surrounding aspects of his society, he has created an uncomfortable balance for himself that ultimately pushes him out of this closed society altogether. The sight of Park on the road at the end of the film strengthens this and hints at the destiny of such a character in Korean film. They are never allowed to return home or recuperate any of their male subjectivity.

Previous: Part I - Introduction

Next: Part III - The Evolution of the Post-Traumatic Male

Memories of Murder: Part I - Introduction

1
Introduction

 “There is a sight of horror that invokes the loss of… …memory and sanity.”

Kim Kyung-hyun, one of the foremost scholars on the depiction of masculine identity in contemporary South Korean cinema, argues for the “narcissistic recasting of masculine figures”  in the new wave of Korean cinema as a means of dealing with post-traumatic identity in a heavily emasculated culture. For him, this was a prevalent trait in South Korean cinema in the 80’s through to the 90’s but beyond this point, as he states:

“The Korean film industry since 1999 has scrupulously followed the path of Hollywood and has shown more interest in making deals and formulaic genres than in innovating and devoting itself to the creation of art.”

A young boy snatches a cricket

Kim’s arguments for representation of masculine identity in Korean cinema before this point are brilliant and insightful but I would argue that they do not stop at the dawn of the most popular era of Korean cinema. The male characters constructed by New Wave auteurs such as Park Kwang-su, Lee Chang-dong, Jang Sung-woo and Hong Sang-soo still exist in the more generic Korean cinema of today. I will try and demonstrate this through a detailed examination of Bong Jong-Ho’s 2003 masterpiece Memories of Murder (hereby Memories), which, while ostensibly a film about the chase for an elusive serial killer in a provincial town in northern South Korea, is in fact a revisionist exploration of a post-traumatic and confused South Korean society which is attempting to come to terms with its scarred national identity but ultimately fails to do so due to its stunted cultural and political growth. However, Memories, which was an enormous box office hit in Korea, is in fact a hugely effective thriller which affectionately engages with all of the codes and tropes associated with its genre.

Since 1999, the South Korean film industry has positioned itself in a more commercial direction and has subsequently become one of the most successful industries in the world and one of the only ones to best Hollywood domestically. To dismiss its social relevance on this basis however, would be a mistake. Within the limitations of genre and tried and tested formula, contemporary South Korean films have had an equally articulate social agenda and with higher production values and attendance rates they have arguably been more successful in conveying their ideas to Korean and international audiences than previous art house fare that may have never found an audience beyond the festival circuit. From Joint Security Area (Park, 2000) to The Host (Bong, 2006), South Korean films that have successfully engaged with social issues have consistently broken records and topped the domestic box office.

Memories opens by stating that the following events are based on a true story in a time set under a military dictatorship. This information is key to understanding Bong’s motives, the fact that the story happens in 1986, in a difficult period of South Korea’s history, informs almost all of the narrative at an implicit level. Camouflaged under the guise of formulaic genre, there lies an extraordinarily dense sociological narrative.

The man tries to shoo the children away

Before the first shot, we hear the wind and bustle of a field. As the image fades in, we see a young boy crouched in the field examining a lone cricket before snatching it. Then we hear a tractor coming from the distance, the young boy also does, so he gets up and the camera moves up with him. At this point, when we see the golden wheat field in the summer eve, a nostalgic melody seeps into the soundtrack. The boy walks out onto the dirt trail where down the road he sees the tractor and some children playing beside it in a burnt out car. As the tractor passes them, they follow it and jeer its driver with taunts of “Junk car!”, all the while the music and beautiful cinematography evoke a heavy and heady nostalgia. Next we see that a man is riding in the back of the tractor. He is middle-aged, a little chubby and he is smoking a cigarette, he tries to shoo the children away but this only inspires more raucousness on their part, so he taunts them back with hand gestures. As the tractor nears the young boy, it stops and its driver and passenger disembark and walk past him. The man in the back ruffles the child’s hair as he passes. He then crouches down at a roadside ditch that is partially covered in concrete. The music stops.

Aside from being an extraordinary display of cinematic technique, these opening few minutes hint at a lot of the themes that will be explored throughout the narrative. The style employed evinces a highly effective nostalgic air, which is universal but ultimately very specific to South Korea. The film is set in 1986, in a troubled time of recent South Korean history. So while the music and cinematography imply a sweet reminiscence, the sight of a burnt out car, decrepit tractor and youths that seemingly do not respect their elders injects a bitter tone into what ultimately becomes a very bittersweet narrative. Aside from the tone, the location itself is foregrounded and very central to the film's ideological motives. Not only do we start in a wide open space and a wheat field but on a small dirt road that may not have a real destination.

Park Doo-man crouches down at a roadside ditch

Memories is a film that is part of the new, more commercially viable trend of Korean cinema. It is of a very high production calibre and was ultimately hugely successful but its roots are clearly evident from the start as it harkens back to the New Korean Wave that manifested itself in the mid to late 1980s and probably finished with the release of Peppermint Candy (Dong) in 2000. A lot of the films in this movement were road movies that followed emasculated males that suffered from post-traumatic anxiety and wandered aimlessly and ultimately towards death or insanity. Kim in his seminal exploration of male post-trauma, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, states "The loss of homes or the fragmentation of families suffered by many then amplifies the meaning of the road as a site of neither transit or freedom. It is where people suffer: traumatized beyond recuperation, disenfranchised without a place to return, and the prospects of leaving behind the road unrealizable" , much of this anxiety stems from the difficult separation of the Korean peninsula but also speaks of the emasculation of males during the Korean War and other military occupations throughout the 20th century. Especially that of family men whose families were broken as wives became prostitutes for foreign soldiers and the men could do nothing but look on.

In Memories, the central protagonist is Detective Park Doo-man, played by Korea's biggest star, the surprisingly normal and bumbling Song Kang-ho, who effectively took on the mantle of Park Joong-hoon, the mainstay star of the New Korean Wave. His character, like so many that he plays, is not particularly attractive. Although not wholly unmasculine, he isn't very smart and is easily moved to jealousy or ridicule. However, he is an affable character who is not completely lost and is therefore indicative of a legion of post-traumatic males, at least coming from the perspective of New Korean Cinema filmmakers.

A cricket on the mutilated body

Back to the opening sequence, as we watch with the child as Park investigates the scene of what turns out to be a gruesome crime when we see a young women's naked body in an advanced state of decomposition, this is the first of many examples of visceral contrast in the film. It clearly places us in a state of discomfort that can't be shaked throughout the narrative. Within these opening minutes it is quite clear the direction that the film wishes to pursue. We are entering a time in history that would have coincided with the youth of the filmmaker and while beginning in a nostalgic tone we are quickly subjected to the horrors that allegorically represent the time. On top of this, Bong also challenges the masculine character created by New Korean Cinema, so what we have is a highly revisionist exploration of history from the male perspective of the 386 generation, which is the term for people who were born in the 60’s, went to college in the 80s and are now in their 30s (this terms can be labelled on most contemporary Korean filmmakers). The opening scene also adds another link between these two states of nostalgia and revisionism: the opening shot has the boy snatching a cricket, a minute later we see that he is holding a jar full of crickets and just afterwards, once the mutilated body comes into focus, we see that there is a cricket on it. Not only does this contrast the two states of remembrance but it also associates death with the past as well as informing the narrative of the military dictatorship that the film’s story unfolds under. The boy can in fact represent both nostalgia and the military dictatorship, this becomes more pertinent when he is shooed off but refuses to leave. This could represent the omniscient presence of the government and its reach into everybody’s affairs. He also never says anything, save mimicking every word of detective Park: symbolic of a government which refuses to explain itself and subjugates all its civil employees. Park clearly feels unable to do anything about this mockery and lets it lie. The scene ends with him looking at the corpse and then directly at the boy. He tilts his head and squints his eyes and then the boy does the same. Park looks defeated already and is clearly terrified of the task of finding the killer which now faces him. At this point the nostalgic melody comes in again and we cut to the title shot which is a perfect postcard image of the wheat field and the huge space in which it lies.

The title shot, a perfect postcard

As any good opening scene should, this one hints at all of the major themes that will be explored throughout the narrative and is therefore a good sounding board to start off a discussion about post-traumatic masculine identity in contemporary South Korean cinema. Since there are many small strands that need to be addressed in order to get a full picture of the representation of males and Bong’s sociological motives throughout the running time of Memories, I have broken down this essay into six short chapters followed by a more comprehensive conclusion. The first thing to look at and what has already been mentioned in the dissection of the opening scene is the loss of home and it’s impact upon a male generation in South Korea and how the principal protagonist is used to elucidate upon this phenomenon. Next I will discuss the evolution of the character of the post-traumatic male from its first notable appearances in the films of the 1980s up to its most modern incarnation in Memories. Following on from this, a look at Bong’s use, adherence to and subversion of generic staples and codes and how his approach strengthens the sociological impact of the film. Then we will look at the compromised representation of females within these male-dominated narratives and specifically whether or not they are only symbolic and cannot be seen as whole characters. In the next chapter, I will present a case for Bong’s use of psychoanalysis as a means of representing a scarred national identity within a very specific historical framework and how the films’ specific genre ultimately leads to this. Before the conclusion I will briefly examine Bong’s subsequent film The Host and determine whether or not his sociological agenda has continued into an equally important aspect of Korea’s society, namely by representing family with melodrama. Finally in the conclusion I will wrap up all of the arguments presented throughout with a detailed analysis of the closing scenes of the film which serves as an excellent bookend to the film and closing point to the essay.

Next: Part II - The Wandering Male

Memories of Murder (Salinui Cheok) 2003

Post-traumatic masculine identity in contemporary South Korean cinema: Revisionism and the male id through genre in Memories of Murder.

I realize that my ruminations on Korean films are sometimes a litte abstract so I thought it high time to post my college thesis on Memories of Murder entitled: 'Post-traumatic masculine identity in contemporary South Korean cinema: The revisionist filtering of the male Id through genre in Memories of Murder' which is where the genesis for a lot of my current thinking on Korean cinema can be found. It is quite long so I will post it in installments in the coming weeks and at the end I will provide the filmography and bibliography. I hope you enjoy this analysis of my favorite Korean film.

Part I - Introduction

Part II - The Wandering Male

Part III - The Evolution of the Post-Traumatic Male

Part IV - Subversion of Genre

Part V - Female Representations

Part VI - Psychoanalysis and Scarred National Identity

Part VII - The Host

Part VIII - Conclusion

Feedback would be much appreciated!

The Show Must Go On (Uahan segye) 2007

Gangster comedies are something of a specialty in Korea and have been among the most popular films on the Korean box office charts for over a decade. While the outright Korean gangsters films, such as A Dirty Carnival (Biyeolhan geori, 2006) and A Bittersweet life (Dalkomhan insaeng, 2005), have been technically-proficient and high-quality, it is those that have blended family and comedy into the mix that ultimately have brought in the most viewers. Both Marrying the Mafia (Gamunui yeonggwang, 2002) and My Wife is a Gangster (Jopog manura, 2001) were so popular in this regard that they spawned trilogies. The Show Must Go On probably falls in between these two categories. While certainly being an effective comedy, its violence and ruminations on failure, betrayal and family loyalty ultimately set it apart from the slighter fare mentioned above. However, despite the presence of Song Kang-ho, the biggest star in Korea, this effort barely made it over a million admissions.

Melodramas has been a staple for Korean audiences ever since there have hade their own industry and the so-called 'Golden Age' of Korean cinema in the 1960s was dominated by them. Since the resurgence of Korean films in the late 1990s very little has changed in that respect. The most successful Korean film of the 1990s prior to 1997 was Im Kwon-taek's venerated Sopyonje (Seopyeonje, 1993) and in 1997 The Letter (Pyeon ji, 1997) and The Contact (Cheob-sok, 1997) landed at the top of the chart in what was the first year that the industry began showing real signs of life.

In the last ten years, there have been numerous films that have blended family melodrama with other genres. Perhaps this phenomenon began with Kim Ji-woon's feature debut The Quiet Family (Choyonghan kajok, 1998), a black comedy that draws on melodramatic conventions which was popular enough to warrant a Japanese remake by Takashi Miike (The Happiness of the Katakuris). There have been many examples of this cross-blending of film genres, notable examples include: Bong Joon-ho's The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), a melodrama that also plays out as a monster movie, a comedy and even a political allegory, and Youn Je-gyun's Tidal Wave (Haeundae, 2009), a disaster movie that set up its effects-laden climax by being a convincing melodrama for most of its running time.

Han Jae-rim's The Show Must Go On at first seems like a gangster movie but it turns out to be a film about a man trying to keep his family together. Unlike other depictions of gangsters in the Korean peninsula, nothing is glorified in this narrative. Kang In-goo (Song Kang-ho) is a high-ranking mob boss, he wears nice suits and drives a Mercedes and yet he lives in a small, squalid apartment with his wife and child. He does act like a gangster whether he is forcing a hostage to sign a contract or bribing his daughter's teacher for better grades, but these actions never solve any of his problems, as Darcy Paquet said in his review of the film "What works so smoothly in other gangster movies only seems to bring on further complications and embarrassment here. The methods are the same, but the results are slow in coming". Perhaps In-goo is trying to conform to the idea of being a gangster as opposed to being naturally inclined towards this sort of behaviour.

What is very clear from the very start is that In-goo works quite hard. When we meet him in the first scene he has fallen asleep at the wheel of his vehicle during evening traffic and throughout most of the narrative he seems fatigued. Compared to the gangster portrayals that we are used to seeing, In-goo doesn't seem to get too hot under the collar (although he is not altogether levelheaded either) and the only time he ever really shows any energy is when he is forced to fight for his life. What is clear is that he cares very much for his family and seems to want to amass enough funds to buy them a house and send his daughter to study abroad in Canada, just like he did his son. Like other middle-aged males in Korean cinema he seems powerless to do right by his family, despite good intentions and a position of authority. In-goo, the gangster boss who can't handle a few construction workers is just like the hordes of detectives and cops who make so little money that they need to take bribes and can never solve any crimes.

Korean cinema has long made a point of showing citizens who conform to society and do everything it asks and still end up betrayed and left for dead. Considering that I am discussing a gangster film, the following point may be pushing it a little far, but I think In-goo's relationship with his boss is a similar representation: his boss believes In-goo to be more capable than his brother, yet he is ranked below. When the boss's brother tries to kill In-goo because of petty jealousy, In-goo is the one who ends up paying the price.

Roads have often been used symbolically in Korean cinema, most famously in Sopyonje where a pansori practicing family constantly wander along the road. Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok, 2003), also starring Song Kang-ho, begins and ends by a roadside in the country, which represents the circularity of a futile search. The protagonists in these films seem to be searching for lost homes, which can just as easily be interpreted as identities. With the separation of the peninsula and the troubled history and politics of the country many filmmakers simply placed their characters on roads that never seemed to lead anywhere.

In-goo ends up on a road with the corpse of his boss's brother in his trunk, after narrowly escaping his henchmen and a big car pile-up with his life. He is a wounded animal who has been driven to desperation and when is boss arrives, sees what has happened and pulls out a rifle from his trunk, it looks like the end for In-goo. Fortune smiles on him this time though as he is the one who prevails. However, the narrative does not stop here, he goes to jail briefly, joins his friend's gang and finally gets the house he wanted for his family. They don't stay for long, he sends his daughter to Canada and his wife goes with her. Thus, In-goo ends the narrative in a higher socio-economic rank, with his big house and big tv but he is now alone and miserable.