Jopok Week: The Alice in Wonderland Trajectory and Other Thoughts on Lee Chang-dong's Green Fish (Chorok mulkogi) 1997

My third review of 1997’s important Korean gangster films is actually on the first one that was released (February) during the year.  Lee Chang-dong’s Green Fish repositioned concerns of the Korean New Wave filmmakers, such as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sung-woo, into a narrative with much more commercial appeal.  After Gangster Lessons, Born to Kill, and Boss all featured in the top 10 Korean films of 1996, the gangster movie was a hot trend and Green Fish did indeed perform very strongly, landing at No. 8 the year it was released.  After penning Park Kwang-su’s To the Starry Island (1993) and A Single Spark (1995), Lee burst onto the scene with his debut, starring Han Suk-kyu, hot off the success of the previous year’s No. 1 Korean film The Gingko Bed and Song Kang-ho in a smaller role.  Both would feature later that year in No. 3.

“The refiguration of the urban space reconstitutes the familial relations that in turn destabilize the premodern values and ethics.”

Kyung Hyun Kim makes this point early in his ‘At the Edge of a Metropolis in A Fine, Windy Day and Green Fish’ chapter in his seminal volume The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema.  Lee’s film very pointedly and adroitly examines the encroaching urban crawl as it swallows Green Fish’s protagonist’s humble countryside home upon his return from conscripted military duty.  Lee presents the effect of this rapid urbanization in a very literal manner as Mak-dong’s large family unit has been shattered.  His father is dead, his mother seems to have gone a little cuckoo, his brother is a paraplegic (a precursor to Lee's third film Oasis, 2002), and his other siblings, including a young club girl and a degenerate, drunk detective, have spread apart.  The large brood cannot seem to function in the new urban and suburban space, chiefly the home of small nuclear families.

After an opening credits sequence which features a collage of pictures of Mak-dong’s family and home from years past, before Seoul loomed on the horizon, Green Fish begins with a scene on a train.  Mak-dong is returning from the army and is sticking his head out between carriages.  He looks to the left and sees an attractive woman do the same, though she is oblivious to him.  Her red shawl comes undone and floats down towards him, whipping across his face.  Back in the carriage he notices a trio of young thugs harassing her and gets involved only to get soundly beaten.  They get off at the next stop and he trots after them with a heavy object and whacks one of them across the head before scampering back to the train, but it’s already leaving so he must run away. 

Having left his bag on the train, he is now without any possessions.  This, coupled with the new landscape he comes home to, indicates an inevitable new beginning for him.  As he stands in his house’s door frame, he discards his military jacket, Lee opts to shows this using slow motion.

The train motif indicates the modernization of society, much in the same way that locomotives featured in some of the greatest Hollywood western films like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969).  Lee would employ train motifs even more prominently in his next film Peppermint Candy (1999) as his camera followed one in backwards shots in between the film's reverse chronological sequences. 

The red shawl is important because of its color, which indicates lust, love, blood, and the criminal underworld and because it covers his face. From the moment this happens, Mak-dong has begun to tread on a descending path into the underbelly of modern Seoul.  The woman is Mi-ae, the lover of Mak-dong’s future gang boss and she serves as an unwitting femme fatale.  It is his infatuation with her that ultimately leads to his downfall.

But Mi-ae is not Mak-dong’s only reason for eventually assuming a role as a low-level gangster.  His masculinity is put into question since he can’t fend a few young bullies and because at the time of his return, he is unable to prevent his mother and sister from performing demeaning duties for income.

The thugs who disrespect Mi-ae and gang up on Mak-dong represent an apathetic and displaced youth prone to violence.  Chung Doo-hwan’s autocratic regime fell in 1988 and with it a certain respect for authority.  Despite Mak-dong’s uniform which identifies him as a soldier, the youths attack him anyway.  Another example of this in the film is when Mak-dong rides in his brother’s egg truck.  After he gets pulled over for running a red light he manages to convince the cop to take a 5,000 won bribe.  He gives him a 10,000 note and the policeman agrees to go get him some change but then drives off.  Mak-dong and his brother then drive after him, swerving beside him and yelling at him to stop the car over an intercom.  It’s a funny reversal of roles but also a little alarming that they feel they can behave this way in the face of authority even if the cop is shown to be corrupt, though they are complicit in this.  Such behavior would never have been tolerated in Korea in earlier years.

For me the most successful element of the film is the staging of Mak-dong’s descent into criminal life.  I’ve already examined his initial encounter with Mi-ae but the next time he sees her it is as a reflection in a telephone booth in an unseemly part of Seoul.  He follows her through evocative red lights and past a clownish, foreboding club marketer, who pretends to shoot him in the head, into a big club.  She is a singer and appears on stage as a vision of white.  Mi-ae is the white rabbit and Mak-dong has followed her down the rabbit hole.

Later, Mak-dong gains entry into the gang world not by showing off his wits but by being violent and recalcitrant in the face of perceived authority in the form of Song Kang-ho’s hoodlum character.  Just before he is asked to do a job by the gang boss, he is in the main hall of the club.  The boss and Mi-ae enter and sit at a booth, she whispers something in his ear and he then shouts for the music to come on.  She gets up to dance to a spooky Tom Waits song and ambles in a slow, sultry fashion.  It’s a delightfully odd sequence that could nearly be part of a David Lynch film but it fits into Mak-dong’s Alice in Wonderland trajectory.

Next he is in a karaoke hall which features a scantily clad American exotic dancer performing on giant collage of TV screens.  Does this indicate that Korea’s globalization and contemporary fetish with American culture coincide with a debasement of morals?  Mak-dong goes to the bathroom and sings along to the song being performed, he stops at: “An unworthy son has this sin”.  He stares at himself in the mirror and then hangs his head before smashing his fingers with the door of a stall.  At first this seems like an act of self-mutilation borne out of guilt for the path he has embarked on. 

In the next scene he begins to harangue the patron who sang the karaoke song until he becomes annoyed enough to take a swing at him.  Mak-dong pretends that the patron has broken his fingers.  It turns out that this is his first job for the gang but he seems to revel in this self-destructiveness and willingly takes on the pain and he is later admonished by his boss for his youthful disregard for his own health.  Mak-dong’s self-destructive behavior continue when later he smashes a bottle over his head as people boo at Mi-ae on stage.

In a famous scene that was given tribute in Ha Yu’s exceptional A Dirty Carnival (2006), Mak-dong murders a rival boss in a bathroom and stuffs him in a stall.  Just before this he burns Mi-ae’s shawl.  Does he do this as he recognizes that he has become an active agent in his own debasement?

I find Mak-dong’s character arc to be brilliantly handled by director and writer Lee and performer Han.  The story itself is not very original but it is executed well and reappropriates the construct to highlight certain pressing themes in contemporaneous Korea.  Besides the few elements I’ve briefly discussed, Green Fish has an enormous amount to offer, a lot of which reveals itself on subsequent viewings.  It may not reach the heights of Lee’s later films but it stands as one of the most important works of 90s Korean film.

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

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Jopok Week: No. 3 (Neobeo 3) 1997

Though not as slick as later works like Shiri (1999) and Joint Security Area (2000), No. 3 was a presage of things to come in Korean cinema.  A vibrant film made by young people, reveling in anarchy, chaos, poetry, and philosophy. More than the other successful gangster films of 1997, No. 3 ended up being a significant breeding ground for future stars of Korean cinema.  Ask any western cinephile what Korean film stars they know and the most likely answers you’ll get are Choi Min-sik and Song Kang-ho.  Choi, as one would expect, is quite excellent but the stand-out has to be Song.  While he featured in Hong Sang-soo’s debut The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well the year before, it was in No. 3 that he made a name for himself. 

Rather than focussing on plot, No. 3 is more of a character piece involving gangster Tae-ju (Han Suk-kyu), his aspiring poet girlfriend Hyun-ji (Lee Mi-yeon), an aggressive prosecutor (Choi Min-sik), and a very strange hitman (Song Kang-ho).  Through a series of set pieces and discussions between characters, the film covers a huge amount of ground.  It is self-reflexive in its use of black humor, underscoring the absurdity of modern Korean society.  Much has been written and said about No 3 but I would like to draw on a coupe of points.

More than any Korean film that came before it, No 3 employs a myriad of stylistic tricks such as:  Colors; chiaroscuro lighting; composition; monochrome; music; fastforwarding; point-of-view; slow motion; freeze frame; strobe; and breaking the fourth wall (like staring into camera).  That last point in particular showcases how self-reflexive the film can be and braeaks up the narrative for the purpose of enticing the viewer to read the film differently.  The film is also entrenched is Western literature, citing authors like Virginia Wolf and even having a wispy, diminutive characters named Rimbaud, after the famed romantic French poet.  As Korea has changed throughout the 1990s, it has embraced new ideas and progressive Western thought.

One of the more interesting relationships in the film is the one between Tae-ju, the titular gangster No. 3, and Dong-pal, the aggressive, foul-mouthed public prosecutor.  They engage in a couple of discussions which explore the nature of their conflicting lifestyles.  In one, Choi criticizes people who judge a crime’s act rather than it’s perpetrator, a significant question in moral philosophy.  Regarding a crime, do we evaluate it in terms of the act, the perpetrator, or the consequence, as the utilitarians do?  I dare not get into any deep discussion on this subject, lest I expose myself as clueless charlatan but I am fascinated by this distinction. 

On the surface it seems pretty simple as we tend to judge crimes on the act themselves, but it’s easy to consider a few variations which expose the weakness of such a proposition.  Conspiracy to murder is an offence that carries a heavy sentence and does not necessarily feature any act at all if it doesn’t come to fruition.  In such a case, we judge a defendant on intent and the potential grievous harm that would have been inflicted.  Looking at the other side of the coin, it is also possible to judge an act on its consequence rather than the thought and action that led to it.  Utilitarian philosophy, chiefly a product of John Stuart Mill’s mind, and in large part responsible for today’s judiciary system, concerns itself with the aftermath of an act.  How much good came out of it versus bad?  The deliberation as to the balance of the consequence judges the severity of the crime or the benevolence of the good deed.  The most famously cited example for this is the dropping of the hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima during WWII.  Over 100,000 people died, the act it is responsible for the largest toll of human suffering in any single act.  However, the argument stands that countless more people were saved because of it.  Therefore judging on the consequence of the act, the bombing was just.

Dong-pal in No. 3 is part of the legal system that means that he should be principally concerned with crimes but he seems to go beyond his mandate by harassing criminals whose intentions are to commit crimes.  Normally this role is occupied by detectives which his character, with his moral philosophy, violent physicality, and foul language would seem to be a better fit for.  Late in the film Dong-pal shares a drink with Tae-su’s girlfriend Hyun-ji, who says “What I hate is not a sinner, but a sin itself.”  This is in direct opposition to Dong-pal’s philosophy but she asks him to help Tae-su and look on him as a younger brother.  Instead of vilifying the sinner, is it possible to reform him.  Essentially I think the point is to what extent is society to blame and can a figure of authority like Dong-pal prevent crimes by reforming the perpetrator and therefore removing the bad intentions?  Perhaps I’m reaching a little far with this but since the fall of the autocratic Chung Doo-hwan administration in the late 1980s, the role of authority in Korean society has changed an enormous amount.

More than just about any other Korean gangster film, No. 3 features a very strong and well fleshed-out female character in Hyun-ju.  The boss’ wife, while less clearly drawn, acts as a classic femme fatale who, as a result of her domineering affair with Rimbaud, plays a part in setting off the irreverent and chaotic climax, one of the greatest sequences in 90s Korean film.

While later Korean gangster comedies would frequently lampoon hoodlums, cutting them down in size, No. 3 does so in a more interesting fashion.  Tae-ju briefly becomes No. 2 in his gang after displaying his loyalty and wit but he is demoted after being stabbed and Ashtray takes his place.  Ashtray is a big lump of a character who brutally beats people with his namesake, which he stores down his pants, and does little else.  The violence is shocking and far from glorified and demonstrates how unseemly this facet of Korean society can be.  Darcy Paquet’s piece, posted earlier today for Jopok Week, on ‘The Rise and Fall of the Korean Gangster Comedy’, explores what went wrong with later gangster comedies after this promising start.

No. 3 features a number of wonderful scenes, including a great playground fight between Han Suk-kyu and Choi Min-sik, and just about every scene with Song Kang-ho who is hilarious and delightfully strange.  There’s much more to be said about this film than what I have explored but I will wrap up my discussion here.  I look forward to revisiting director and writer Song Neun-han's minor Korean gangster masterpiece in the near future.

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

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Jopok Week: The Rise and Fall of the Korean Gangster Comedy

By Darcy Paquet

(This essay was originally published in Korean translation in the film weekly Cine21, in January 2009.)

Han Suk-kyu in No. 3 (1997)

Sometimes I wish that Song Neung-han's No. 3 had been made four or five years later than it actually was.  I imagine it being released in 2002 or 2003, and stunning both critics and audiences with its distinctive characters and elegant staging of one gangster's epic, self-inflicted fall.  I guess it would have sold between 5 and 6 million tickets, providing a bridge between popular hits My Wife Is a Gangster and Hi, Dharma and the "well-made" auteur films of 2003: Memories of Murder, A Tale of Two Sisters, Oldboy (never mind that it would have been impossible to assemble the same cast in 2002 as in 1997).  If I could rewrite the recent history of Korean cinema, this is how I would assemble the plot:  No.3 would have saved the Korean gangster comedy.

As it was, No.3 appeared ahead of its time. Korean audiences were not as tuned in to local films in 1997, so word of mouth was slow to spread, and it did not perform very well commercially.  More importantly, the model of a commercial genre merged with a strong auteur sensibility did not really exist at that time.  Song Neung-han stands as somewhat of a lonely pioneer.  This is not to say the film did not have influence:  it helped to launch the career of Song Kang-ho, and it bears some elements in common with the films of Kim Jee-woon, Bong Joon-ho, and Choi Dong-hoon, among others.

Kang Seong-jin, Yu Oh-seung, Lee Sung-jae, and Yu Ji-tae in
Attack the Gas Station (1999)

Some critics point to No. 3 as the starting point of the Korean gangster comedy, but it seems to me that the character and attitude of the sub-genre sprung from another source:  Kim Sang-jin's Attack the Gas Station (1999).  It's not just that Attack the Gas Station was a huge commercial success that featured a prominent brawl with gangsters.  It tapped into the mindset that would provide the foundation for later works.  Anthropologist Nancy Abelmann and education professor Jung-ah Choi analyzed the film in an essay published in the anthology New Korean Cinema in 2005.  To them, the core attitude of the film is contained within the reason given for robbing the gas station:  'geunyang,’ loosely translated as "just for the hell of it."  The casual self interest and rejection of social responsibility contained within that word were representative of broader changes in Korean society, they argued.  For decades, the state had asked Koreans to subordinate the personal and the indulgent for the greater good.  'Geunyang' was a rejection of this logic.

This "geunyang" attitude also reverberated throughout the gangster comedy, re-emerging, for example, in the poster copy for the 2001 film My Boss My Hero ("That's right, more gangsters... Got a problem with that?").  It may not have been a noble sentiment, but it imparted to the films their particular energy.  Many critics considered the famous gangster comedy quartet of 2001 – Kick the Moon, My Wife is a Gangster, Hi Dharma!, My Boss My Hero – to be a shameful regression in the development of Korean cinema, but the films themselves are interesting in many ways.  My personal favorite is My Boss My Hero, for the way it combines melodrama with an ironic sense of moral outrage (given the fact that it is gangsters fighting school officials, in the name of social justice) leading up to a very Korean-style emotional climax.  Hi Dharma is structured more like a Hollywood film, even if it feels very local in its details (its setting in a Buddhist temple, Korean games, provincial accents, etc.).  Both films benefit from a good sense of comic timing and effective narrative plotting, and they are genuinely funny – an achievement that is more difficult to attain than many people assume.

Jeong Joon-ho in My Boss, My Hero (2001)

My Wife is a Gangster may not have been as well crafted as the two films mentioned above, but it remains the iconic example of Korean gangster comedy.  Perhaps the most defining characteristic of these early gangster comedies was their high-concept nature:  you could summarize the plot in a single sentence, and even that one sentence could motivate viewers to see the film.  A friend once told me about a film director from the Philippines, who after hearing just the title of My Wife is a Gangster, burst out laughing and said, "I gotta see that film!"  The movie itself could have been improved in many ways, but its central character played by Shin Eun-kyung (thrown into relief by the great supporting role by Park Chang-myun) is one of the most enduring characters of contemporary Korean cinema.

Taken individually, any of these films would have been interesting but not especially noteworthy – but the emergence of a new trend created something that was greater than the sum of its parts. Viewers who went to see a "new gangster comedy" approached it with a particular set of expectations, and directors could play off those expectations in interesting ways.  Internationally as well, the Korean gangster comedy (however briefly) become a sort of brand.  It's rare for a film industry to successfully create a specialized sub-genre of its own, but there are both commercial and creative advantages to keeping such sub-genres alive.

Park Sang-myeon and Sin Eun-kyeong in My Wife Is a Gangster (2001)

Ultimately, however, the girls high school horror film (launched in 1998 with Whispering Corridors) would prove to be far more successful at perpetuating itself than the gangster comedy.  To ensure that a specialized sub-genre lives on, it isn't necessary to produce only good films.  In fact, even a string of unremittingly bad films can keep a sub-genre alive if they attempt something new and create a sense of forward movement.

Initially, Marrying the Mafia (2002) provided some hint that the gangster comedy might enjoy a long life, but somewhere along the line, producers began to view the Korean gangster comedy as a lemon to be squeezed until all the juice was gone.  I sat through all of those "lazy sequels" that appeared in the subsequent years – films which introduced nothing new to the genre and merely cashed in on fading memories of old jokes.  If the plots of the early films could be summarized in one intriguing sentence, the plots of the later sequels could be summarized as "more of the same."  Sometimes a big hit can do more damage to the lineage of a sub-genre than a commercial flop, if millions of viewers buy tickets only to see for themselves that the creativity is gone.

Seong Ji-roo, Yoo Dong-geun, and Park Sang-wuk in
Marrying the Mafia (2002)

It's perhaps understandable that film critics might look down on the gangster comedy, but it's sadder when the people actually producing the films don't consider them worthy of good craftsmanship.  Personally, I regret the fall of the gangster comedy – I think it had a good start, and it could have evolved into a tradition worthy of pride.  But now, I think it is too late.  With deepest apologies for the sexist metaphor, the Korean gangster comedy is like a Chosun-Dynasty era yangban family that has failed to produce a son.  It will be no easier to revive it, than to start a completely new lineage.

Darcy Paquet is the founder of Koreanfilm.org, and the author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves (2009).

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema. For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

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Jopok Week: Kim Sung-su's Beat (비트, Biteu) 1997

1997 was a pretty big year for Korean gangster films, no less than three of them wound up in the year-end top 10.  Song Kang-ho had his breakout performance with No. 3, Lee Chang-dong released his excellent debut Green Fish, and Jung Woo-sung, Ko So-young, Lim Chang-jung, and Yu Oh-seung made a name for themselves in Kim Sung-su’s Beat.  1997 was also an important year because of the disastrous IMF crisis in Korea.  After numerous big corporations failed the country had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund to the tune of over $50 billion.  After nearly a decade of enormous year-on-year gains, Korea’s economy drew flat and nearly dipped into a recession. 

Many critics and academics, assert that “the revival and popularity of the jop'ok cycle in the post-IMF period can be seen as a consequence of  and a response to, the national economic crisis” (Shin, 2005: 123).  Friend (2001) in particular is mentioned in this argument.  While I agree to some extent that the prevalence of social identity crises and anxieties in young men depicted in contemporary Korean cinema can be attributed to this cataclysmic financial event, I believe there is much evidence that would argue that this trend was already in evidence before the crisis.

None of the aforementioned films could have been designed with the crisis in mind since it happened in July, months after all of the productions had wrapped.  The gangster film made its comeback earlier in the decade with Im Kwon-taek’s The General’s Son trilogy, of which the first two installments topped the Korean box office charts for 1990 and 1991 (as far as locals films are concerned).  Earlier this week, as I examined gangster films at the Korean boxoffice, I also noted that three gangster films from 1996 wound up in the top 10 as well.  However, the works from 1997 are more notable as they bear much more similarities with the supposed post-IMF crisis gangster cycle of films.  Each has its own stake to that claim but I want to talk about Beat which was not only produced before the crisis but I believe to be the precursor to Friend.  Aside from a similar narrative, they share the same themes and explore similar social mores and anxieties of the young male in modern Korea.

Min (Jung Sung-woo) is a high school student who likes get into fights with his friend Tae-su (Yu Oh-seung).  He is sent to a new school and makes a new friend, Hwan-gyu (Lim Chang-jung), and meets Ro-mi (Ko So-young) while Tae-su gradually falls in with the local mob.  As the narrative progresses Min is torn between joining Tae-su down his criminal path and a more virtuous life with the upwardly mobile Ro-mi.

As many films would do subsequently, such as Die Bad (2000), Friend, Conduct Zero (2002), and Gangster High (2006), Beat examines apathetic youth violence and how it can lead to gang integration.  Though in addition to quantifying the role of male peer pressure, machismo, and home situations in this violence, it also throws in something remarkably modern:  brand fetishization.  Min’s love interest, Ro-mi, asserts early on that anyone interested in “sex, screen, or sports is a loser” and she is relentlessly studious though she presents a vain and feckless exterior to her equally studious classmates.  Min wears a Nike shirt modeled after the Chicago Bulls player Dennis Rodman and covets Tae-su’s motorbike.  Inaddition, early on in the film Min is auctioned off at a bar by Hwang-gyu and Ro-mi buys him for $100.  This in effect commodifies him, which can provide an interesting reading of Jung Woo-sung’s star status.  He’s never been viewed as a consummate actor and relies more on his looks and physique.  Aside from fetishizing him, Ro-mi’s purchase of Min switches the genders roles as he becomes her servant.  She is very frank with him and puts him down at every opportunity though eventually she can’t help herself, she loses her composure and falls for him.

It’s interesting to consider the purpose of the brand worshipping in Beat as it coincides with frequent references to America.  Examples include Min’s shirt, Hwang-gyu’s rapping and ostentatious clothing, and especially Ro-mi’s use of English aphorisms and her made up enrollment in a New York university.  While the ideal of America may no longer be quite so vaunted in these times, back in 1997 it very much embodied a dream of escape, personal gratification, and the pursuit of happiness.  Min dreams of achieving something, though it is not clear what, and moving past his childhood marred by his promiscuous and absentee mother.  For Ro-mi, her lie, machinated by her parents who wish to live vicariously through her, hides the truth of a psychiatry stint.

Much of the first half of Beat focusses on the extraordinary pressure put on children to succeed academically.  Ro-mi’s stay at a mental institute seems to result from this, though it is never explained.  Of course it was probably triggered by her friend’s suicide on a subway platform before her very eyes, after failing a test.  She probably blamed herself as immediately before she had boasted of a top score, keep in mind her friends believe that she does little work at all and socializes most nights.

Min’s stay in high school may be brief but he suffers similar problems as his mother berates him for not doing better but clearly she is not a good motivator and her behavior, which incongruously coexists with her aspirations for him, may be what leads him to his violent behavior, though at heart he seems rather sweet-natured.  Eventually he disrupts the school order by smashing up the teacher’s office which, after a brief rush of power and adrenaline, gets him thrown out of the system and will eventually lead to gang integration, despite an honest and initially rewarding attempt at a business venture with Hwang-gyu which gets violently shut down by the government as their establishment is demolished.  The sequence brings to mind the brutal repression of the student demonstrations of the 1980s.

I’m rambling a bit but the more I think about Beat, the more impressed I am by it, it seems to combine some of the social relevance of the Korean New Wave, which unofficially ended a year earlier with Jang Sun-woo’s A Petal, and the aesthetics and themes of modern Korean film.  In light of this analysis the leap between Beat and Friend seems far less pronounced, indeed production values sem to be the greatest disparity.  Though the film is no stylistic slouch as it employs Wong Kar-wai’s cool step motion film style that he employed throughout the 1990s, though later Korean films would be far more important to developing Korean film style.  There also something to be said about the homoerotic vibe between Min and Tae-soo, I suppose it might be a facet of their shared machismo and hyper-masculinities.  Beat stands as one of the first great jopok films of new Korean cinema, see it if you get a chance.

★★★★☆

See Also:

Born to Kill (1996)

The General's Son (1990)

The General's Son 2 (1991)

The General's Son 3 (1992)

Further Reading:

Shin, Chi-yun, "Two of a Kind: Gender and Friendship in Friend and Take Care of My Cat," in New Korean Cinema, ed. Shin Chi-yun and Julian Stringer (New York, NYU Press, 2005), 123.

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

To keep up with the best in Korean film you can sign up to our RSS Feed, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Jopok Week: Comedic Representations of Gangster Culture in Korean Cinema

The Flipside of Realism: Analysing the attraction of comedic representations of gangster culture in contemporary South Korean cinema.

By Connor McMorran 

Ryu Seung-Beom in Conduct Zero (2002)

Gangster comedies are undoubtedly a popular genre in South Korea, and have enjoyed continued success since their initial appearance in the mid-nineties with notable films like No.3 (Song Neung-Han, 1997) and Two Cops (Kang Woo-Suk, 1993).  As they have grown in popularity, these films have become highly successful, creating multiple franchises and bringing in large profit margins for relatively low budget films.  In her book The South Korean Film Renaissance, Jinhee Choi discusses their lucrative nature:

“Gangster Comedy targets two holiday seasons; the Korean Thanksgiving holiday, Chuseok, and the Lunar New Year’s Day, Seol. With its growing and proven popularity, gangster comedy can secure the saturated booking that blockbuster films enjoy and be seen on up to five hundred screens nation-wide.”

This provides a valuable insight into the holiday/business relationship surrounding this genre, and it seems akin to the business model behind Lunar Year comedies in Hong Kong, or horror movies released in the West to coincide with Halloween.  Yet despite the obvious conclusion that a holiday season will bring in more ticket sales through there being a more available audience, I feel that for a film to be successful there has to be a deeper connection with the audience beyond availability.  After all, if a film fails to deliver what the audience wants, then surely it would fail at the box office regardless of what time of the year it was released?

Song Kang-Ho in No.3 (1997) 

Could the answer be found in Korean celebrity culture?  There's certainly a case for big name Korean actors and actresses being a main draw for audiences, but on quick analysis it becomes apparent that it tends to be the gangster comedies that brought these stars into the spotlight in the first place.  No.3 is a perfect example of this, which made stars out of Song Kang-Ho and Choi Min-Sik, both of whom could now be seen internationally as figureheads of contemporary Korean cinema.  According to Jinhee Choi, in Korea these comedies are referred to as Sammai, which originates from the Japanese Kabuki Theatre term Sammaine, or third-tier actor.  The Korean usage of the word, applied to film, can be seen as meaning 'cheap'; so with this in mind, we can establish gangster comedy as mid-budget films made with little-known, cheap actors that are released on certain holidays.  Whilst this certainly improves the chances of a generous profit being made, it doesn't provide an answer to why they generate such large profits and, in some cases, create successful franchises.

Which really only leaves two aspects that could hopefully provide an answer, and they both have to do with the content of the film itself – narrative, and characters.   Comedic narratives tend to be fairly nondescript and for the most part generic, relying heavily on set-pieces and cultural/film-orientated nods or references to carry the majority of the film.  Whilst this can prove successful initially, lack of progression breeds familiarity, leading to falling audience numbers – especially in franchise comedies.  So that leaves us with the characters that exist in these films, and whilst undoubtedly comedies tend to feature basic stock personalities – cops, gangsters, slacker students – I think that it is because of the characters that these comedies are successful.

If that is the case, then why does a comedic representation of gangsters equate to high profit margins and cultural acceptance?  I feel that it's human nature to distort perceptions of things we fear to help us cope with them.  Therefore, it's certainly possible that in castrating the masculine aspects of gangster culture, either through male-orientated comedy or by placing the concepts in a female body with franchises such as My Wife is a Gangster (2001-2006), it allows society to escape from the realistic threat that gangster society potentially poses.   After all, films are considered by many to be a means of escapism, and gangster comedies provide the opportunity to laugh at a representation of something threatening, and it allows this to be done anonymously, in a cinema theatre full of people doing the same – with no repercussions for doing so.

Lee Sung-Jae and Cha Seung-Won in Kick the Moon (2001)

Films also are used to convey messages about society; No.3 is quite famously seen as a criticism on the vast majority of South Korean society, not just gangster culture.  This also extends to the majority of gangster comedies, but it's not surprising to see that a lot of their messages coincide with the gritty, realistic gangster films – it's just that with comedies the chances of characters changing their ways and being forgiven is more likely.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a gangster comedy that ever glorifies the gangster lifestyle; instead characters are portrayed as either lazy or stupid, and in many cases these two "qualities" are combined.  The film will then present the gangster lifestyle as the wrong way to live, and chances are the wannabe gangster will either end up falling for a girl and changing his ways, or decide to become a respectable member of society and, you guessed it, change his ways.

Such endings are not usually allowed or offered to characters in realistic gangster films; to let the character get away without being caught or killed is generally seen as a morally corrupt ending, as it could inspire imitators.  This provides another possible reason for the popularity of light-hearted gangster comedy – it provides the gangster film experience but without any (or not as much) of the realistic violence, hard-to-watch scenes and dark or disturbing subject matter.   Instead these comedies provide light-relief scenarios to usually intense, exhausting characters.  Films that provide a humorous outlook on stereotypical characters tend to draw a generous audience, and South Korean cinemagoers in particular seem drawn to the gangster archetype.

Not that gangster comedies are ever aggressively mocking gangster culture, in fact it's only really a variation on the "dumb criminal" archetype you see in films all over the world.  You only have to look at the child-versus-criminal comedy of Home Alone (1990) or the black-humour that fleshes out Guy Ritchie films such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) to notice that not only is it a stereotype that can be found anywhere, but it's a stereotype that (judging by box office) audiences seem to respond to well.  Not that this should undermine the success of South Korean gangster comedies, as they have undoubtedly created a successful business model rarely seen with other reference-based comedy.

Won Bin, Shin Ha-Kyun and Jung Jae-Young in Guns and Talks (2001)

It's almost an obvious statement to make, but without the incredible rise in popularity of the gangster genre in the 90s these comedy offshoots would not exist – it's the fate of anything that achieves a popular cultural status to be parodied.   Ultimately, despite all that marketing and release dates try to help, for films to be successful they need to provide something that the audience is looking for.   It’s clear that gangster comedies, in which characters provide not only laughs but also ease social fears, fulfill those needs.

Recommended Viewing:

·       No. 3 (Song Neung-Han, 1997)

·       Attack The Gas Station (Kim Sang-Jin, 1999)

·       Kick the Moon (Kim Sang-Jin, 2001)

·       My Wife is a Gangster (Cho Jin-Gyu, 2001)

·       Guns and Talks (Jang Jin, 2001)

·       Marrying the Mafia (Jeong Heung-Sun, 2002)

·       Conduct Zero (Jo Geun-Sik, 2002)

Further Reading:

·       The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Choi, Jinhee, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010)

Connor McMorran currently lives in Scotland, and has been a fan of Asian Cinema since stumbling across a late night screening of Hideo Nakata’s Ring on TV in 2002.  He has just this year received his Bachelor’s Degree in Film Studies, currently reviews films at his blog Rainy Day, and is hoping to enter further education next year.


Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

To keep up with the best in Korean film you can sign up to our RSS Feed, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Korean Gangsters: Next week is Jopok Week on MKC!

Next week will be Jopok (Korean Gangster) week on Modern Korean Cinema!  I'm currently panning an essay on Ha Yu's exceptional A Dirty Carnival (2006) and in seeking to develop my arguments I have gone back to rediscover older Korean gangster films.  Sadly I have not been able to get my hands on any of those made in the 1960s and 70s but next week I plan to review some of the following significant Korean gangster films of the 1990s:

The General's Son (1990)

The General's Son 2 (1991)

The General's Son 3 (1992)

Beat (1997)

Green Fish (1997)

No. 3 (1997)

If anyone would like to contribute a feature or piece on any Korean gangster films please feel free to drop me a line at pierceconran [at] gmail [dot] com.

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

To keep up with the best in Korean film you can sign up to our RSS Feed, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.