I CHOSE: Oldboy

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

Must choose one film from the list here:

Film list:

1. Ring

2. One Missed Call

3. A tale of Two sisters

4. the host

5. Oldboy

Do not choose other film, must use required 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 …

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 …