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

20200315080017tell_the_kitchen1 20200315080025the_good__the_bad__and_the_south_korean1 20200315070126term_paper_guidelines_2018__3_1
 

CHOSE: Oldboy

This is a film analysis paper. Word count at least 2300.

Must choose one film from the list here:

Film list:

1. Ring

2. One Missed Call

3. A tale of Two sisters

4. the host

5. Oldboy

Do not choose other film, must use required readings from I attached.

The detailed writing instruction is post in the attached file, need to check and read carefully before writing this paper.

This essay should be more analytical than evaluative, should offer film analysis not film review.

Considering the issues raised, include in your analysis consideration of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound design.

ATTACHED are required readings, need to choose at least specific readings.

 

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

Oldboy

Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

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

180 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 181

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

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

Oldboy

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

182 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 183

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

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

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

184 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 185

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

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

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

186 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

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

Revenge

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 187

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

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

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

188 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 189

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

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

Body

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

190 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 191

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

Space

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

192 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 193

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

Language

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

194 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 195

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

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

196 Kyung Hyun Kim

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

“Just Look at the Surface”

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

“Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling” 197

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes to pp. 173–183 245

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

246 Notes to pp. 184–196

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

Robert L. Cagle

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

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

124 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 125

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

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

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

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

126 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 127

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

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

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

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

128 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 129

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

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

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

130 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 131

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

Roy Richard Grinker situates han similarly when he writes:

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

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

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

132 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 133

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

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

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

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

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

134 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 135

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

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

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

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

136 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

in Lee Jeong-hyeok’s H (2002)

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 137

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

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

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

138 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 139

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

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

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

140 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

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

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

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 141

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

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

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

142 Robert L. Cagle

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

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

Acknowledgements

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

The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean 143

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

236 Notes to pp. 118–123

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes to p. 124 237

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

238 Notes to pp. 126–129

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes to pp. 129–132 239

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

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

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

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

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

240 Notes to pp. 134–139

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

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

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

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

41. I thank Bryn Scheurich for this observation.

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

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

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

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

Notes to pp. 139–146 241