Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium 9789048523016

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Unredeemable Images
2. Love Your Enemies
3. Serial Sexualities and Accidental Desires
4. The Face and Hospitality
5. Forgiving the Unforgivable
6. Global Cinema in the Age of Posthumanity
Conclusion: Afterlives of Sovereign Violence
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Sovereign Violence

Sovereign Violence Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium

Steve Choe

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Film still from Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010) Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 638 5 e-isbn 978 90 4852 301 6 doi 10.5117/9789089646385 nur 670 © S. Choe / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 1. Unredeemable Images Address Unknown (2001) and the Ethical Question Bad Guy (2001) and Visual Demoralization Coda: The Other Repetition in Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (2003)

33 37 54 69

2. Love Your Enemies Sophie’s Choice in JSA: Joint Security Area (2000) The Moral Economy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) Oldboy (2003) and Sovereign Judgment

73 76 85 100

3. Serial Sexualities and Accidental Desires Repetition and Critique in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) The Temporality of Modern Romance: Woman is the Future of Man (2004) Coda: Camel(s) (2002) and the Cinema of a Generation

115 116 132 150

4. The Face and Hospitality N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love (2003) and the Name of the Other Face Memories of Murder (2003) and the Unreadable Face Kim Ki-duk’s Untimely Critique: The Face in 3-Iron (2004)

158 166 183

5. Forgiving the Unforgivable Forgiveness as Exception in Lady Vengeance (2005) Secret Sunshine (2007) in the Light of Political Theology Cinema Beyond Melodrama: Poetry (2010)

199 201 215 229

155

6. Global Cinema in the Age of Posthumanity 241 The Restoration of Romance in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006) 242 Plastic Love and Time (2006) 252 The Profanation of the Priest: Thirst (2009) 263 Conclusion: Afterlives of Sovereign Violence

279

Notes 287 Bibliography 307 Index 317

Acknowledgments This study extends a number of ideas introduced in my previous work, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2014. The particular cultural and historical context of millennial South Korea is vastly different from that of Weimar Germany, yet I was nevertheless struck by the way Korean cinema raises questions of violence and ethics that resonate with those explored in my previous work. My formulation of these questions in this study is deeply informed by a short essay called “The Critique of Violence,” written soon after the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1921 by Walter Benjamin. By describing how violence becomes a means toward a predetermined end while implicating the other as responsible for crime, I wanted to describe how ethical concepts such as revenge and forgiveness become globalized as they are constituted through the language of global narrative cinema. A number of individuals have provided much appreciated support for the present work: Paula Amad, Rick Altman, Robert Cagle, Youngmin Choe, Corey Creekmur, Melissa Curley, Mayumo Inoue, Qing Jin, Jiyeun Kang, Se Young Kim, Jesse McLean, Alyssa Park, Morten Schlütter, and Linda Williams. They have encouraged my thinking and writing in Korean film and culture. Sections of this book have been presented at conferences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Iowa City, Taipei, Osaka, Lisbon, San Francisco, and Chicago. I appreciate the comments and questions I received at these presentations by Joseph Forte, Aaron Kerner, R. L. Rutsky, Britta Sjogren, and Valerie Wee. The anonymous readers of the manuscript also provided key insights and recommendations that were incorporated into the text. I thank Jeroen Sondervan, acquisitions editor for AUP, who supported this project from its inception and shepherded its development from manuscript to book. I am grateful to Kristi Prins and Chantal Nicolaes for facilitating the book’s production and extend my warm thanks to Anna Yeadell-Moore for meticulously copyediting the final draft. I was fortunate to have corresponded with the filmmaker Park Ki-yong and he was gracious in sharing ideas about his films and those of his colleagues. My colleague Jennifer Feeley offered key comments on both the content and language of the entire manuscript. I also want to thank Chris Berry, who encouraged my interests in Asian and Korean cinema long ago. Portions of this book have appeared previously in revised form, by permission of the publishers. Sections of the introduction appeared in “Catastrophe and Finitude in Lee Chang Dong’s Peppermint Candy:

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Temporality, Narrative, and Korean History,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 27:3 (Summer 2008): 132-144. Chapter one is derived from “Kim Ki Duk’s Cinema of Cruelty: Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Economy,” positions: east asia culture critique 15:1 (2007): 65-90. Sections of chapters two and five appeared in “Love Your Enemies: Revenge and Forgiveness in Films by Park Chan-wook,” Korean Studies 33 (2009): 29-51. Portions of chapter four were first published in “Kim Ki-duk’s Aporia: The Face and Hospitality (on 3-Iron),” Screening the Past, September 2012. And sections of chapter six originally appeared in “The Good Priest and the Vampire: Park Chan-wook’s Thirst,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 40:2 (September 2014): 83-103. I extend my gratitude to the editors for their permission to publish these essays in revised form. Finally, I thank CJ Entertainment, Kino Lorber, and Lifesize Entertainment for granting permission to reproduce film stills throughout the text and on the cover. The transliteration of Hangul follows the Revised Romanization rules of July 2000. Following Korean convention, surnames precede given names unless an author indicates otherwise in their work.

Introduction I. The opening scene of Lee Chang-dong’s 1999 film, Peppermint Candy, begins with a picnic and ends with a suicide. A disheveled, middle-aged hwesawon, or “company employee,” named Young-ho (played by Sol Kyunggu) stumbles into a gathering of friends near a small river. The dozen or so happy picnickers, dancing and singing to a karaoke machine, seem at first not to notice the grey-suited, unkempt man, but they soon recognize him as an old friend from twenty years ago. Young-ho is offered soju, a Korean rice liquor, but he is not in a particularly celebratory mood. He volunteers to sing a song, but the sad melody the salary man belts out, with great anguish, only casts a somber pall over the party. Silently returning the microphone, Young-ho wanders off into the shallow river toward a nearby railroad overpass. While his friends resume their merriment, Young-ho somehow has managed to climb to the top of the bridge. He stands on the suspended tracks, looking grim and miserable. Soon a train rumbles toward him while repeatedly blowing its whistle. Tension builds with the nearing confrontation between Young-ho and the train, underscored by accelerated shot-reverse shots. A worried picnicker has left the party and stands beneath the tracks with a helpless look on his face. He frantically screams his suicidal friend’s name above the loudening rumble: “Kim Young-ho!” As the heavy train comes treacherously close, Young-ho turns to face it. The film quickly cuts to a perspective from the train and he yells out, with outspread arms and a wide-open mouth, “I want to go back!” The camera-train relentlessly rails toward Young-ho, until it stops on a close-up of his anguished face, signaling the moment of impact. Over the freeze frame, the clanging of the train continues on the soundtrack. Lee’s film obeys Young-ho’s desire to go back by narrating the course of his life backward, depicting significant scenes from his personal history: Spring 1999, Summer 1994, Spring 1987, Fall 1984, May 1980, and Fall of 1979. These moments provide snapshots of one South Korean man’s life and allow the viewer to piece together how Young-ho’s misery in the present is connected to a series of regrettable decisions made in the past. Each episode is flanked by a short interlude. Repeating the camera angle that captured the image of Young-ho’s death, the interludes depict moving shots above railroad tracks, taken with a stationary camera placed on a moving train. The first two look

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as if they move forward on these tracks, but with the third, the spectator comes to realize that the camera is positioned on the last car of the train, and that the film itself is projected backwards. Cars and vans are shown driving in reverse, children run the wrong way, and smoke grows smaller and thickens rather than disappearing into the air. While these interludes pull the diegesis backwards in time, they unfold in accordance with the spectator’s inexorable, forward experience of the film. In lieu of a linear cause-effect relationship, Lee’s film proceeds by an effect-cause movement, reiterated in the reverse movement of the train. By its end, Peppermint Candy will have spanned twenty years, taking the viewer back to the moment when Young-ho, singing songs with friends at a picnic near a small river in 1979, emerges into the sparkle of life and dreams about his future. Travelling back in time, the film links moments from Young-ho’s personal history to key moments from South Korea’s democratization process. As the spectator gradually comes to realize, the fictional world of Peppermint Candy cannot be separated from the historical events to which it constantly refers. Young-ho’s third episode coincides with political uprisings that took place in early 1987, during the dictatorial presidency of Chun Doo-hwan. At this historical juncture, a twenty-one-year-old student activist at Seoul National University, Park Jung-chul, was detained by authorities in January and died when he was tortured to disclose the names of fellow activists. His death inflamed the public and became the cause célèbre for the June Democracy Movement that took place later that year. In Fall 1984, when Young-ho is depicted joining the KNPA (Korean National Police Agency) in Lee’s film, progressive groups became increasingly vocal in their demand for human rights and called for the end of Chun’s authoritarian regime. In this year, college campuses saw a sharp rise in student activism while the Council of People’s Democratization Movement mobilized workers and peasants to become aware of their disenfranchisement. The primal scene, or the originating trauma, of Young-ho’s misery in Peppermint Candy, however, is inextricably linked to one of the most dramatic political events in modern Korean history: the Gwangju Uprising in May of 1980. What began as a student demonstration protesting the closing of Chonnam National University, located in the South Jeolla city of Gwangju, quickly escalated over a ten-day period. Chun swiftly implemented martial law in response to the demonstrations. In solidarity, tens of thousands of student activists, workers, and citizens of the city rallied against his dictatorship while Korean army soldiers and paratroopers were dispatched to the city. They began beating and shooting the political dissenters. To this day, the number of civilian casualties remains in contention.

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Young-ho’s life may be read as a national allegory for these watershed historical events, as standing in for the South Korean nation in its struggle toward modern democracy. However, Peppermint Candy does not focus on the victims of the state’s repressive power, but on Young-ho’s violent exercise of this power. He is called up as a member of the national military to put down protesting students and workers in Gwangju. When Young-ho joins the KNPA, he is quickly indoctrinated into their inhumane methods of extortion. His violence causes a radical sympathizer to lose control of his bowels on Young-ho’s hand during an aggressive interrogation session. He brutally extracts information from dissenting leftists by forcibly dunking their heads in water, techniques that were utilized to torture and presumably kill the progressive student, Park Jung-chul. In these events, Young-ho’s originating trauma is equated to the South Korea’s historical trauma that began in May of 1980: one act of violence is linked to the next, constituting a chain of brutality that links the progression of his life to the life of the nation. And with each repetition, Young-ho stubbornly disavows the possibility of reflecting and working through the past. His inability to mourn, as film scholar Kyung Hyun Kim suggests in his reading of Lee’s film, cannot be separated from his idyllic romanticization of innocence, of a time before May 1980, and the impossible hope of rekindling innocence lost.1 Young-ho acts out, exercising sovereign power over the people he tortures as well as sovereignty over his past. When Peppermint Candy premiered on December 31, 1999, South Korea was still reeling from the crisis that devastated the economy in 1997 and still suffering from the sudden mass layoffs and drastic restructuring of the financial sector imposed by the IMF. As a consequence of the $57 billion bailout that prevented national banks from defaulting on their international debts, the IMF demanded that the Korean government implement a series of structural adjustments that included market deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization. Interest rates rose to as high as 30 percent, and about half of the thirty largest chaebols (“business conglomerates”) collapsed. Among those that survived, policies protecting the hiring and replacing of workers were repealed while companies promptly fired about 30 percent of their labor force. The middle class was subsequently drastically reduced and undermined. Many unemployed male head of households were overcome with a sense of failure, reflected in Young-ho’s character at the beginning of Peppermint Candy, and turned to divorce or suicide. Some became despondent and stopped looking for employment altogether. In February 1999, the unemployment rate was the highest ever recorded at 8.7 percent, but if those who

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simply stopped looking were added to this figure, the unemployment rate would have been well over 10 percent or around 2.5 million people. The history of modern South Korea and the story of Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy are contemporaneous and inextricably intertwined: each informs the other and each provides the opportunity for historical reflection. In the midst of social and economic upheaval, South Koreans were therefore willing, even if Young-ho was unable, to “go back” and recollect with the reverse telos of the film. Following the trajectory of how South Korea emerged as a major economic player and ending with the widespread consequences of personal and financial crisis through the national allegory of Young-ho’s life, Lee’s film proved to be a sobering and humbling experience. In an interview about Peppermint Candy, Lee explains that the double movement between the audience’s forward experience of the film and the backward narration of Young-ho’s life places the viewer in a place of contradiction: The audience project themselves onto the characters while watching a film. Through this act of projection, we can either absorb a character, or take objective distance and reflect on ourselves. Film viewing is innately contradictory because it functions in both ways. Cinema itself is full of contradictions. I wanted neither full identification nor objectification. This was my intention in the case of Peppermint Candy.2

Eliciting an “objective distance” from the drama, Lee’s f ilm compels the viewer to reflect upon Young-ho’s ethics and his or her own means of identifying with his ethics. As he brutalizes leftist sympathizers and radicals, Young-ho’s sadism distresses and disturbs because his merciless cruelty seems unmotivated, his actions somehow nihilistic. And as the film unfolds and the spectator is led into his personal history, connections are encouraged between the trauma of Gwangju, Young-ho’s inability to work through past trauma, and his subsequent acting out. Yet, while the viewer makes these connections, he or she may be compelled to ask: is it possible to sympathize with the hardened Young-ho and his acting on the wrong side of history? Projecting themselves onto a victimizer who has been victimized by history, the viewer is placed in a position of ambivalent moral judgment. Can he or she forgive him, even when he cannot forgive himself? And to what extent is the viewer’s capacity to forgive related to his or her ability to be emotionally engaged in the cinema? Vacillating between sympathy and aversion, which is, as Lee remarks, “neither full identification nor objectification,” the viewer is placed in a position of contradiction as

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Peppermint Candy unfolds, compelling judgment and questioning with regard to Young-ho’s ethics. Elucidating how this judgment comes about, describing how this questioning produces an aporia, or an irresolvable problematic, specific to the cinema, while highlighting the historico-political urgency of this aporia will be the subject of the present book.3

II. Although a number of studies have been written about this period of Korean cinema history, none directly address the images of violent brutality and narratives of bleak nihilism frequently noted by audiences, academics, and critics. Sovereign Violence attempts to fill this gap. Far from dismissing this violence as gratuitous spectacle, I aim to reveal how some of the most significant and provocative films from South Korea, released in the first decade of the twenty-first century, imagine a critical, post-ideological ethics of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism. In addition to works by Lee Chang-dong, I will focus on selected films by Bong Joon-ho, Hong Sang-soo, Gok Kim and Sun Kim, Kim Ki-duk, Na Hong-jin, Park Chan-wook, and Park Ki-yong. Like Peppermint Candy, many of the incendiary films I have chosen to discuss in this book induce experiences of spectatorial discomfort and moral unease. They have divided audiences with their harrowing, graphic depictions of physical degradation and narratives of psychological cruelty. Yet, these disturbing films remain strangely compelling, having won the admiration of cinephiles around the world and top prizes at international film festivals. In this book, I will consider Korean films of the new millennium not merely as products of the culture industry but also as works of art that pose urgent ethical dilemmas and subsequently point toward new modes of social existence. We shall see that they critically reflect on the relationship between the spectator and screen while teaching human viewers how they may relate to racial and ethnic others, strangers, outsiders, visitors, animals, and other non-humans. Akin to what Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” these films train audiences how to think ethical questions critically after 1997 – that is, how to love, how to hate, as well as how to cohabit with others in an increasingly cosmopolitan, increasingly modern South Korea.4 As we shall see, these films exploit capacities specific to the film medium, and help us to understand the cinema as a machine for generating empathy.5 In the span of historical time depicted in Lee’s Peppermint Candy, South Korea experienced an unprecedented rate of modernization and capitalist

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industrialization. Korea did not enter the modern era by overcoming feudalism and by gradually replacing traditional worldviews with scientific rationality over hundreds of years. In the span of roughly three decades, Korea emerged from its former status as a “Third World” nation, inseparable from the politics of the Cold War, to become one of the most economically developed democracies in the world. As Gi-wook Shin has argued, nationalism, globalization, anticolonialism, authoritarian politics, and democratization have informed, in complex and unique ways, the politics of South Korean modernity in the twentieth century.6 Korea’s exceedingly rapid development, which sociologist Chang Kyung-sup has called “compressed modernity,” came about not without its social and moral consequences. He notes that, “As modern (Western) values and institutions literally poured in with many traditional (indigenous) values and institutions still remaining effective, the absence of systematic principles for their harmonization and integration has led to a situation of accidental pluralism in the systems of values and institutions.”7 As tradition encountered modernity through Korea’s incredible rate of economic development, the clash of generations brought a plurality of formerly non-synchronous discourses – local and global, urban and rural, superstitious and rational – into irresolvable tension. Moreover, technologies such as fast broadband internet, available cheaply to most of the population, has reshaped how information is received and disseminated, while restructuring and remaking social relations.8 The upheavals of twentieth-century modernity in Korea, inseparable from the experience of colonization and military dependence, have upended the ethics of how individuals and institutions relate to each other as well as challenged established moral principles for their integration. The films I will analyze in this book directly reflect on the legacy of these upheavals, focusing on key ethical and political issues that have been brought into crisis in the new millennium: changing definitions of sexuality and gender, new formations of class politics, the legacy of authoritarian governmentality, shifting ethnic distinctions between Koreans and nonKoreans, the increasingly significant role of Christianity in Korean culture, the legacy of minjung politics, and novel definitions of the human being that implicitly critique those circumscribed by Western humanism. These films appeared in a socio-political climate when an economic state of emergency bolstered the mandate of the government to decide between those who may be supported as productive citizens and others who would be allowed to fall through the social safety net. As anthropologist Jesook Song has shown, only “deserving” members of the homeless and the unemployed were granted public housing, education, and the opportunity to rejoin the workforce

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within the neoliberal welfare state.9 Reinscribing the capacity of the sovereign to decide upon the exception, the Korean government implemented social policies that excluded unmarried women, progressive activists, and unemployed youth without computer skills from public assistance. The films allegorically critique the formations of power that hierarchize and categorically dehumanize human beings in the post-IMF economy. Yet, by illuminating the metaphysics that grounds these dehumanizing biopolitics, we shall see that they also propose an ethics of “harmonization and integration” appropriate to contemporary postmodern South Korean life. While the 1997 financial crisis marked a watershed trauma for many Koreans, it also led to new forms of venture capital investment for film production in the 2000s. The diverse films produced by dynamic directors such as Na Hong-jin and Bong Joon-ho reflect the radically changed conditions of production in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Some have bigger budgets and higher production values, while others are more gratuitous, and perhaps, due to the filmmakers’ distance from the traumas of the 1980s, are less explicitly political. This book will explore the ethical ramifications of Korea’s rapidly liberalizing economy during this key decade and think about how the watershed cultural changes, concomitant with what Rob Wilson calls “killer capitalism,” are thematized in the films of this period.10 If neoliberalism after 1997 insistently interpellates pro-capitalistic, productive, exemplary, docile human beings, then we shall see how contemporary Korean cinema interrupts these discourses of sovereignty by baring the violence that underpins them, utilizing brutal imagery that, in turn, interrupts the discursive suturing of spectator to screen. A number of contemporary global cinemas, for instance “extreme” European cinema (including films directed by Catherine Breillat, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, and others), have also utilized violent imagery to pose ethical and spectatorial problematics. US filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah, whose most articulate commentator has called his a “savage cinema,” have also produced similarly critical work.11 Nevertheless, millennial Korean cinema remains unique in the way its concern with ethics is realized through the depiction, as described by Walter Benjamin, of a violence of “pure means.” For this reason, I believe contemporary Korean cinema has something significant to contribute to notions of moving image spectatorship in our technologically mediated world. In his essay called “The Critique of Violence,” Benjamin lays out two uses of violence in its compensatory role within the norms set out by law and modern notions of justice. On the one hand, “mythic” violence may be quickly recognized as corresponding to our everyday, rational notion of

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politics – the give and take of generosity, outrage, excuses, regrets, apologies, punishment, and reconciliation between political actors. These ethical actions belong to a world organized by the logic of means and ends. As long as a predetermined telos exists for the individual who seeks political action, regardless of whether this aim is considered moral or immoral, the violent means for realizing this goal are considered to be not only just, but also necessary. Mythic violence is compliant with the law of cause and effect and, as such, is often tacitly understood as “natural” and therefore legitimate. Yet, as Benjamin suggests, the carrying out of mythic violence is essentially an act of idolatry and should be understood as a secularized or political theology, for it is constituted through a decision made by a mortal human who desires to become God. Mythic violence is concretized through its “bastardized”12 codification in positive law; it imposes guilt and retribution, instills fear and can be “bloody.”13 Through bloody vengeance, the punishing sovereign gains power over the one who has been deemed the enemy of the people, blamed as the initial perpetrator of violence, and demonized as the embodiment of evil. Antithetical to the blame-attributing righteousness of mythic violence, Benjamin tells us of a politics of violence that does not conform to the linear reasoning of means and ends. He suggests that this violence is a “pure means,” one with ambiguous ends.14 It destroys the idolatry of mythic violence and with it the moral certainty of the sovereign who exercises it. This form of violence is “lethal without spilling blood,” it expiates and atones, releases the punished from the endless suffering of guilt, and does not take recourse to a pre-existing concept of justice.15 Through the representation of such violence, it paradoxically renders the ethics of violence inoperable as it appears to have no reasonable telos. A violence of pure means is essentially critical and promises a “new historical epoch” that is to come.16 Benjamin names this critical violence, which deposes sovereignty and makes way for a new ethics, “divine violence.” While I will explore both formulations of violence in contemporary South Korean cinema, my aim in the later chapters of the book will be to excavate the ethics of divine violence in these films, a violence that carries the potential to undermine the experience of narrative cinema itself. As we shall see, the ambiguities of divine violence accord with what Lee calls the “contradictions” of film spectatorship. The ostensible pointlessness of the violence depicted in millennial Korean cinema compels the viewer, provoked and offended, to take up a position of objective distance in relation to their cruel protagonists. And through this alienation, the spectator is given the opportunity to allow mythic violence to pass over into its expiatory

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antithesis. These and other key theoretical terms, crucial for my analysis of the experience of Korean cinema, will be clarified and elaborated upon as I move through the individual films. The one who asserts power over another and justifies the carrying out of mythic violence exercises a power that resonates with our modern concept of sovereignty. The work of Giorgio Agamben, who himself has engaged with Benjamin’s writing on violence, has renewed philosophical interest in the problem of political power within modern governmentality, specifically in the critique of its seemingly groundless metaphysics, which is at once unrestricted yet simultaneously bound to law. Referencing a key formulation from political theorist Carl Schmitt, this critique has reminded us that the sovereign is he who decides on the legal exception.17 I will draw from Agamben’s work at key moments in my analysis of contemporary Korean cinema, not in order to explain the articulation of authoritarian state power, but to articulate the discourse of sovereignty itself and the justification of violence that is legitimated through the exercise of sovereign power. In The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea, Henry H. Em lucidly shows how Korea’s tumultuous struggle for national sovereignty in the twentieth century deeply informed questions of national historiography.18 Indeed, many minjung intellectuals worried that Koreans were not subjects of their own history, and they took it upon themselves to reevaluate major historical events in order to consolidate renewed formations of national identity. As modern Koreans emerged into a position of knowledge with respect to the past, they were striving toward a position of sovereignty in relation to how the past is to be represented. Such a struggle is continued and allegorically embodied in the individuals depicted in the new millennial Korean cinema. Their main protagonists seek not only self-mastery and mastery over the past, like the men in the films of Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo, but also pursue mastery over others, their surroundings, and their futures. These are authoritarian individuals, emboldened by their power of decision, who engage in the politics of the other and pursue emancipation from the constraints of normative morality through recourse to mythic violence. The definition of sovereignty that concerns me in this study may be aligned with the humanist self, which resonates with the definition of the “sovereign man” put forth by Friedrich Nietzsche. He writes: This man who is now free and who really does have the right to make a promise, this master of the free will, this sovereign [souveraine Mensch] – how could he remain ignorant of his superiority over everybody who

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does not have the right to make a promise or answer for himself, how much trust, fear and respect he arouses – he ‘merits’ all three – and how could he, with his self-mastery, not realise that he has necessarily been given mastery over circumstances, over nature and over all creatures with a less durable and reliable will?19

I will discuss Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, from which this reference is derived, in greater detail. The one who performs sovereignty believes him or herself to be exceptional, liberated, privileged, and unified, behaves without controversy, remains at home in the world, and is empowered to create laws in response to chaotic disorder. In films such as N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love (2003) and Secret Sunshine (2007), sovereign individuals cast judgment, and in so doing exhibit a profound lack of empathy for the other. Their aspirations toward self-legislation are simultaneous with acts of violence committed against others, and both are inseparable from the reification of the other within capitalist modernity. Working with specific films produced in the new South Korean millennium, I will explain how this quest toward sovereign subjectivity, of becoming an untroubled human agent, is inextricably linked to the compacted development of modernity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Korea. Perhaps no other cinematic form has dominated film production in Korea more than melodrama, particularly as a narrative means of moving the viewer’s emotions and eliciting his or her sympathies. Within the field of Film Studies, cinematic melodrama has often been understood as a genre that exists in a relation of excess to realist cinema, featuring exaggerated, “over-the-top” acting and sentimental narratives that, at least in the US context, have pejoratively been called “weepies,” “tearjerkers,” or “women’s pictures.” In this book, I will not consider cinematic melodrama simply as a genre, but will follow the claim, put forth by both Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, that melodrama should be understood as a dominant “mode” of popular cinema. Williams observes that key to this mode, and key to the construction of realistic characters with which the viewer may sympathize, is the recognition of suffering victim-heroes as virtuous human beings. The melodramatic mode is constituted by figures, “who embody primary psychic roles organized in Manichean conflicts between good and evil,” and who play out this drama in order to make his or her moral virtue legible to the film spectator.20 With the normative expectation that a feature film will unfold through a clear, linear logic of means to ends, from plot to dénouement, a viewer is encouraged to be entertained and moved by the narrative drama presented by a film through its solicitation

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of pathos and character sympathy. In the popular melodramatic mode, victims realize justice precisely by exercising mythic violence, as we shall see, thus convincing the viewer once more of its legitimacy. The melodramatic mode enables spectators to believe that human beings depicted in the cinema embody a coherent interiority or a moral “soul.” The sovereign individual coincides with the individual constituted through melodrama, who embodies a will, a psychology, identif iable feelings, thoughts and values, who possesses “a moral compass,” a point of view, a unique personality, or an invisible, but nevertheless real, essential humanity. Melodrama is what allows spectators to believe that they can “get inside the head” of a character on-screen, a traversal that, as Gledhill writes, leads “inward to where social and ideological pressures impact on the psychic.”21 Both analyses by Gledhill and Williams suggest that the presumption of such an interiority is an attribute of the viewer’s anthropocentric look. He or she is compelled to know the “heart” of fictional characters in the cinema so that they may be sympathized with. Yet, to sympathize is also to moralize, to ascertain virtue, and to evaluate the justness of their actions. Millennial Korean cinema tests the limits of this compulsion and the capacity to know the other through melodrama. When Chris Berry observes that the South Korean film industry has produced high-budget films that have effectively “de-Westernized” the blockbuster film, he observes that they do so by ambivalently mimicking its popular forms and modes of narration.22 If melodrama constitutes the dominant mode of US popular cinema, the most important Korean films in the post-IMF decade aim, in a manner akin to postcolonial mimicry, to overturn this mode from within.23 Violent films by Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, and others critically foreground the ethics of their victimized characters, who are rendered morally ambiguous, unsympathetic, and one-dimensional, thus revealing the interlock between resentment and their exploitation of mythic violence. The shocking imagery depicted in films such as Bad Guy (2001) and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) aim to induce audiences to recognize and critically assess the epistemological underpinnings that make the other knowable at all. On-screen characters in these films seem at moments elusive and devoid of moral character and, as such, operate at the limits of melodramatic mode. From the films’ refusal to depict characters that perform humanist assumptions about the melodramatic individual, frustration and spectatorial unpleasure ensues. Historical violence and the bitter feelings of the disenfranchised beget the violent imagery depicted in contemporary Korean cinema, which, moreover, violently assaults the spectator. Films such as Camel(s) (2002),

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Lady Vengeance (2005), and I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006) offer plot conclusions that frustrate the expectations of most escapist cinema, providing the viewer with the experience of exasperation and deep unease rather than narrative closure. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes that the body of the wrongdoer, “displayed, exhibited in procession, tortured, served as the public support of a procedure that had hitherto remained in the shade; in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all.”24 By making a grotesque spectacle of the mythic violence exercised on the wrongdoer, Korean cinema radicalizes and undermines from within, amplifies and critiques the spectator’s capacity to ascertain a character’s humanity through the image of their suffering body. Pushing this logic to the limit, these films function to question the ethical presuppositions intrinsic to the melodramatic mode. We shall see that the circuit of violence, between contemporary Korean culture, cinema, and the spectator of this cinema, opens the way toward a line of fundamental critique necessary to the expiatory power of divine violence. To affirm the affective encounter with these violent, inhumane films is to make way for the possibility of a new ethics, new ways of looking, hearing, and perceiving the world. Korean cinema destabilizes settled expectations associated with the consumption of popular cinema, producing the experience of difference and not of identification, and which calls on us as human spectators to reflect on how it may be possible to cohabitate with our ontologically precarious others.25 After having glanced at the table of contents, the reader may notice that I have omitted a number of films or genres in this study. I do not discuss horror films, such as A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) by Kim Jee-woon, Cinderella (2006) by Bong Man-dae, and Death Bell (2008) by Yoon Hong-seung, as these so-called “extreme” films have recently received detailed treatment.26 I occasionally make quick reference to films such as Eye for an Eye (2008) by Ahn Kwon-tae and Kwak Kyung-taek, Breathless (2009) by Yang Ik-joon, I Saw the Devil (2010) by Kim Jee-woon, A Company Man (2012) by Lim Sang-yoon, and New World (2013) by Park Hoon-jung, but I do not discuss these otherwise fine films in detail. These omissions are, in part, due to my belief that the most original contemporary films from South Korea emerged from the first half of the millennial decade, before the screen quota was slashed from 146 to 73 days in 2006, and before the global financial crisis of 2008. This was a moment when a number of key economic and social reforms helped set the tone for life after the IMF crisis, as new relations between South Korea and the world were sought out and forged. From 1998 to 2007, Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy laid out a set of guidelines that encouraged interaction and economic assistance

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between the two Koreas. The reflective humility and self-critical tone inspired by the financial crisis gave way to compromise and forgiveness in South Korea’s dealings with the North. Although the films I listed above utilize representations of violence to raise ethical problematics, works such as Oldboy (2003) and Memories of Murder (2003) remain innovative and fresh, even after repeated viewing, in their conceptual sophistication and play with genre conventions. Address Unknown (2001) and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) still provoke viewers in their daring experimentation with narrative form and unflinching critique of social power. All of them express the spirit of self-reflection and risk-taking in the realm of reconciliation that seemed to pervade the spirit of the times, a spirit that is paramount to the ethics I will develop throughout Sovereign Violence. Recent book-length scholarship has tried to account for the meteoric rise in interest in contemporary Korean film, taking either a cultural studies or genre oriented approach. In her 2011 study, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption, Sun Jung looks at the dissemination and consumption of hallyu and cinema in Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave,” has been the catch-all term that signifies the incredible success of Korean pop culture – music, television shows, films, and stars – that has been exported regionally and globally. Drawing from participant observation, group questionnaires, and other empirical methodologies, Jung shows how and why images of hallyu masculinity, associated with the actor Bae Yong-joon, the singer and performer Rain, K-pop idol bands, and the “cool” masculinity depicted in Park’s Oldboy, have been appreciated outside the Korean context. Jinhee Choi’s 2010 book, The South Korean Film Renaissance, illustrates how the Korean film industry modernized itself after the financial crisis, arguing that it responded to the increasing threat of Hollywood cinema by combining blockbuster aesthetics with nation-specific content. Arguing that the success of Korean film in the age of hallyu is based on this appropriation of recognizable American formulas, Choi’s book is divided into chapters that treat some of the most successful genres in Korean cinema: the gangster, romance, and teen films, among others. As her incisive close readings elucidate, the traditional binary between commercial and art cinemas is not so clear-cut with respect to the cinema of contemporary Korea. While I will reference these studies throughout this book, I remain, with Kyung Hyun Kim, wary of scholarship that “avoids analyzing the forms, structures, and ideals of hallyu.”27 If, as I contend, contemporary Korea films do not simply represent national culture, we should remain sensitive

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to the way they put into motion forms of critical thinking and feeling that interrogate the forms, structures, and ideals of Korean cinema. Kim’s two books, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (2004) and Virtual Hallyu (2011), have laid down important groundwork for our understanding of Korean cinema’s “fantastic, elusive, and even erratic identifications.”28 He believes that his role as a film scholar is to “unveil the latent meanings” that lie beneath the surface of the film text and to read the culture symptomatically through the cinema.29 Utilizing a similar approach, Hye Seung Chung’s 2012 monograph on Kim Ki-duk reads the films of this controversial director to similarly diagnose their pervasive sense of Nietzschean ressentiment, expressed through the many male characters that allegorically stand in for the auteur and who remain excluded from Korea’s post-IMF economy. Her insightful and creative analysis recuperates the intense structures of feeling that are too often excluded from the ideological forms of dominant cinema. It is impossible to ignore these studies when one speaks about this period of Korean cinema and I will make regular reference to some of their insights. However, in this book I aim to place emphasis on the ethical consequences for the viewer of these intense films in order to show how the damaged characters depicted in them, their narratives of unjust consequence as well as their formal experimentation, compel alternative ways of worldly being. The symptomatic reading of the Korean film, one that “unveils the latent meanings” of the film text, helps to illuminate the parameters of the modern Korean subject, but such an approach does not help explain the explosive effect of these films on their audiences. Directly addressing this effect will be crucial for drawing out their ethics. Although the reader may turn to a section of this book and find a focused reading of an individual film, each chapter is organized so that it cumulatively builds upon previous chapters. It is therefore best that this study be read sequentially from beginning to end, as my aim is to induce a singular but continually developing line of fundamental questioning. Chapters one to three will perform various critiques of mythic violence. Chapters four to six will show how this critique gives way to an ethics of exception associated with divine violence. In chapter one, “Unredeemable Images,” I examine two early films by Kim Ki-duk, Bad Guy (2001) and Address Unknown (2001), and an early film by the twin brothers Gok Kim and Sun Kim called Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (2003). My aim in this chapter is to introduce a number of themes that will be explored throughout the book: namely, the ethics of the face and its relationship to melodrama. I begin with Kim’s Address Unknown and argue that it stages an encounter

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with the otherness of the marginalized, postcolonial South Korean, while illuminating the discursive contours of the film spectator’s sovereign, narcissistic gaze. Kim’s film pushes the episteme of this spectator to its limit, such that the film apparatus forces a confrontation with radical difference. Working with writings by Emmanuel Levinas, I move beyond an identity politics approach to film toward a more nuanced reading of the spectator’s relationship to the moving image in order to raise ethical questions relevant to modern Korean film history and broader aesthetic concerns within Film Studies. In Bad Guy, an envious pimp forces a college student into prostitution; the film’s final images do not end with her liberation, but invert the film’s melodramatic dénouement, thus problematizing one of the most basic assumptions of narrative film: the imputation of the moral self. I show how Bad Guy introduces a mode of untimely critique that is a feature of all his films. Capitalist Manifesto, an irreverent avant-garde work about the ubiquity of exchange relations in everyday life, dispenses almost completely with narrative continuity. Through this, in conjunction with repetitive dialogue and split screen techniques, Capitalist Manifesto critically depicts the circulation of morality and money among the disenfranchised. In chapter two, “Love Your Enemies,” I take a close look at Park Chanwook’s JSA (2000), and the first two films of his so-called “Vengeance Trilogy.” JSA dramatizes the enduring political tensions between North- and South Korea through the friendship of individual soldiers on each side. In this year, Kim Dae-jung held an historic summit meeting with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-il that initiated a temporary thaw in the Cold War relations between the two Koreas. In this reconciliatory spirit, JSA introduces a number of themes that will be worked through in his next few films, namely revenge and forgiveness. Reflecting upon the experience of those who were marginalized by the neoliberal economy, Park’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), tells the story of a recently laid-off factory worker who pursues revenge against his former boss. Oldboy (2003) depicts the desire for retribution stemming from a past rumor. Both films reiterate the interlock between subjectivity and cinematic narrativity, as well as the struggle for the consolidation of sovereign identity in South Korean modernity. Both push the logic of vengeance to its point of untenability, shedding light on the affinity between “payback” and the logic of capitalistic exchange, a connection that is motivated by ressentiment felt toward the rich. Getting even is, as Park asserts, “the most foolish thing in the world to do,” and in this chapter I describe the phenomenology of revenge, identifying the metaphysics of exchange that subtends both films.30 I suggest that by forcing audiences to confront the logic of revenge, the foolishness of

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retributive justice is depicted as radical critique in Park’s films, which, in turn, paves the way toward the possibility of unconditional forgiveness. Chapter three, “Serial Sexualities and Accidental Desires,” considers two works by film festival favorite, Hong Sang-soo, in order to analyze narrative and formal repetition, not as figures of sameness, but of difference. The men in Hong’s films seem doomed to repeat the traumas of their pasts, but I show that their repetitions may be read as producing the very terms of that which remains other to their hermetic narcissism. In Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), the story of a love triangle is told in flashback, twice; first, from the point of view of the main male, and then of the female protagonist. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s critique of free will, I show that these differing versions of the past pique the relationship between desire, coincidence, and intentionality. In Woman is the Future of Man (2004), two male friends reconnect with a shared former girlfriend. In doing so, both men awkwardly repeat their previous missteps in love and confront their inability to work through their own fears and anxieties. This inability to overcome past loss is particularly acute when Hong’s men go on holiday. I end this chapter with an allegorical analysis of Park Ki-yong’s Camel(s) (2002) that expands on the notion of futurity through the filmmaker’s searching attitude toward the digital medium. This analysis is inextricably linked to the individuals of the so-called “386 Generation” that make up so many of the filmmakers, writers, and actors that were key to the new millennial Korean cinema. Chapter four, “The Face and Hospitality,” returns to the face to begin delineating the ethics of divine violence. Park’s short film, N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love, is part of an omnibus film called If You Were Me (2003). It tells the true story of a Nepalese woman who was mistaken to be mentally ill and incarcerated for six years. N.E.P.A.L. highlights the problem of accepting the otherness of the foreigner in Korean society, reflecting the ethics of affirming the immigrant worker. Similar in its critical scope, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003) stages an encounter between the viewer and the cinema, pushing the reading of face, as a surface that expresses moral interiority, to its breaking point. The film’s penultimate close-up shot of the killer’s face deposes the sovereign judgment of the detective’s gaze in a manner that is reminiscent of divine violence. Kim’s 3-Iron (2004) performs an “untimely critique” through the silence of the film’s main protagonists. Showing how the face may be interpreted as an image of openness and hospitality, I argue that Sun-hwa and the drifter Tae-suk problematize the paternal law and the ordinary course of historical temporality. At the beginning of 3-Iron, Sun-hwa suffers from a violent

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and dysfunctional relationship with her husband; however, by the end all three characters, the couple and Tae-suk, manage to find a way to co-exist. Recalling the original Korean title of the film, “Empty House,” I argue that their ethics are not ontologically “full,” and that they exist as non-sovereign exceptions to the ethics of neoliberalism and its organization of private property. I begin chapter five, “Forgiving the Unforgivable,” with Park’s last film of the Vengeance Trilogy, Lady Vengeance (2005), arguing that it utilizes visceral imagery to foreground the collusion between the logic of melodrama and post-1997 subjectivity. In its bloody climax, the child killer, Mr. Baek, is ceremoniously punished with kitchen knives, a hammer, an axe, and a custom-made gun. The film’s critical foregrounding is definitively affirmed when Geum-ja realizes a discourse of profane forgiveness, put into relief in my analysis through writings by Jacques Derrida, which breaks out of the endless cycle of vengeful payback in a manner that is also intrinsic to the logic of exchange. After having served as the Ministry of Culture and Tourism from 2003-2004, Lee Chang-dong returns to filmmaking with Secret Sunshine (2007). I look at a number of key scenes from this film that problematize Christian forgiveness as a political gesture. Far from granting the pure gift that will end her suffering over her murdered son, the female protagonist, Shin-ae, reveals that the linguistic performance of forgiving the hated other is always already implicated in the everyday exchange of suffering and debt. At the film’s conclusion, Shin-ae remains profoundly at a loss with respect to her inability to work through trauma. With my reading of Lee’s Poetry (2010), I return to some themes raised by my discussion of Peppermint Candy. Though Lee’s 1999 film ends tragically for Young-ho, I explain why Poetry ends with the affirmation of the life of cinema in the face of death. Lee’s 2010 film moves allegorically between the main protagonist, an elderly woman named Mija, and the vitality of the film medium. Mija must deal with the responsibility of her grandson’s crimes as well as with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Struggling in her poetry class, she comes to terms with her deepening involvement with her disaffected grandson and her own mortality, writing an inspired poem about a victimized girl who committed suicide. Chapter six, “Global Cinema in the Age of Posthumanity,” begins with a discussion of I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006). Park’s film tells the story of two young psychiatric patients, Il-sun and Young-goon, who fall in love. In stark contrast to the generic “rom-com” film that depicts human characters who embody seemingly transparent interiorities, Cyborg presents Il-sun and Young-goon as hermeneutically problematic for the film spectator.

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Because of their odd behavior and flights of irrational fancy, depicted through surreal CG effects, their motivations remain mystifying, defying the recognition of human virtue that is paramount to the melodramatic mode. Taking recourse to psychoanalytic discourse and passages from Søren Kierkegaard, I argue that Cyborg presents the spectator with an extreme instantiation of love, one that asks how romantic love between two people is possible at all. In Kim’s Time (2006), Ji-woo and Seh-hee’s relationship has become routine. Ji-woo off-handedly and cruelly remarks that he has become “tired” of seeing Seh-hee’s face. She seeks plastic surgery to reignite their lost passion and a number of surrealistic incidents ensue. Kim’s film reflects the social reality described by Cho Joo-hyun and the booming, post-IMF cosmetic surgery industry where both men and women have been increasingly subject to social competitiveness and approval based on having the “right” face.31 Referencing ideas around narcissism and cinema, I argue that the depiction of love in Time allegorizes and criticizes the sovereign spectator, compelling affirmation of the posthuman face. Finally, the good priest Sang-hyun in Park’s Thirst (2009) models a form of self-questioning that speculates on a life that must be lived at the expense of others. When Sang-hyun is profanely resurrected as a vampire, his thirst for blood, and therefore for murder, forces him to question his own morality. Other human beings become not precarious forms of life, but a means of sustenance, mere objects to be used, bags of blood. In the conclusion to Thirst, the vampire protagonists, Sang-hyun and Tae-ju, commit suicide and implicitly come to terms with their deaths and, by co-extension, the death of cinema. Like an overexposed photograph, in the very last scene they dissolve when exposed to the harsh light of daybreak.

III. In order to demonstrate how we can move from mythic to divine violence, I would like to quickly return to Peppermint Candy, continuing my reading with questions of cinema and the ethics of the spectator in mind. As we will see, this ethics is inextricably linked to the phenomenology of the cinema experience. I began with the suicide of Young-ho that concluded the first scene of Peppermint Candy. We saw how the film’s structure, reverse episodic narration, contributes to the poignancy of its final moments. With two tears falling from his eyes, a naïve Young-ho lays beneath the train tracks that will be the very site of his death twenty years later. In the manner of

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films such as Citizen Kane (1941), Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), Peppermint Candy produces a split between fabula and syuzhet. Moving backwards three days, five, twelve, and then twenty years, Young-ho at every moment steadily progresses away from the sense of crisis portrayed in the film’s opening scene. And while disappointment is added to failure, tragedy and catastrophe accumulate like the pile of debris that grows skyward before Benjamin’s angel of history.32 The imminence of Young-ho’s death contained in the image of him at the start of his life startles the spectator who has been present since the film’s beginning. Its cyclical structure, ending where it began, makes the contrast explicit. The first scene reiterates the certainty of Young-ho’s futural death and the juxtaposition of its inevitability with the naïveté presented in the film’s final shots attest to his being-towards-death that subtends the f ilm as a whole. In these f inal moments, when Young-ho is most vulnerable, the viewer registers the futural certainty of his life trajectory in its full tragedy. As Williams notes, melodrama “begins, and wants to end, in a space of innocence.”33 Its pathos stems from the spectator’s awareness of the loss of innocence as the film unfolds in time and is heightened by the awareness that what was lost cannot be regained. “Time is the ultimate object of loss,” Williams continues, “we cry at the irreversibility of time. We cry at funerals, for example, because it is then that we know, finally and forever, that it is too late.”34 Her observations remain true for these last moments of Peppermint Candy, when Young-ho is at his most innocent and his eyes well up with tears. Yet, this image of innocence is suffused with the spectator’s awareness of his future suicide, made particularly poignant if we understand Young-ho as a victim of the violence and trauma of modern Korean history since 1980. We can better understand the melodrama of this moment, and its self-critique, if we pursue the ontology of Young-ho’s life and the temporality of the moving image as intertwined and inseparable from each other. Death throughout Young-ho’s life persists as a latent, continuous possibility, but it is made especially so at this moment, such that, as Martin Heidegger writes: “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is. ‘As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die’.”35 Present and future are fused in Heidegger’s claim, revealing to us that the constitution of Dasein is contingent on the persistent possibility of non-being, as a “way to be.” In the last scene from the film, Young-ho aims to become a photographer and to develop his love for Sun-im. But taking this logic much further, a more significant implication reveals itself in

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Peppermint Candy, for death is made explicit as Young-ho’s most futural possibility of being. Young-ho will die and he already has in the film’s last shot, presented as a kind of tableau-vivant that summarizes the film while heightening its melodrama. The tears he sheds underneath the train tracks allude to the certitude of this possibility and an uncanny awareness of that final certainty, which is part and parcel of what he is to become. The recurrence of the camera given to Young-ho by Sun-im and his desire to produce photographs thus compels inquiry into the ontology of the photographic image. The still image plays a key role in understanding the temporality of Young-ho’s life and its presentation in Lee’s film, particularly at the moment of his death and at the conclusion to the film. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes looks at an 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne, the young man who attempted to assassinate then Secretary of State W. H. Seward, and takes notice of a “new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity.” He calls this punctum “Time, the lacerating emphasis of the no-eme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation” – the representation of Time itself, not in the moving image but in the still photogram.36 How does he read its temporality? Continuing, Barthes writes: Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is at stake. By giving me the absolute past of the post (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicot’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.37

For Barthes, the photograph embodies two temporalities: it consolidates the past, what he calls the “this has been,” and the future, the “this will be.” The former is the ontology of the photograph as it is most familiar to us. It attests to a reality that once was and is no longer. The latter is a feature that points decisively toward the future, the inevitability of Time and the certitude of death. Key for this passage is that he reads both simultaneously in the still image, observing “with horror” the anterior future of the photographed subject. Lewis Payne will have been: at some past moment he posed for this photo and he will soon be hanged for his crime. The photo then tells Barthes of a catastrophe that has already occurred, the realization that Payne will

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surely die and that he already has. This knowledge subtly reconfigures the undead body captured in the still image. Whether or not death has already occurred, the ontology of every photograph is riven with this catastrophe. This double temporality characterizes the final image of Peppermint Candy, when a young Young-ho lies beneath the train tracks where he will commit suicide twenty years later. It embodies the tension between the film’s reverse narration and the irreversible unfolding of the film in time. Lee called this double movement a “contradiction.” But Barthes’s interrogation of the photograph’s ontology provides us with a way to bolster the filmmaker’s claim with an analysis of the still image that stops on Young-ho’s face, while revealing new hermeneutic possibilities of the conclusive still image so ubiquitous in Korean film history. Like Heidegger’s Dasein, Young-ho will have died. The image collapses clear-cut distinctions between past, present, and future, telling us of a catastrophe “which has already occurred.” The ostensible dynamism of the moving image is here supplemented by the paradoxical temporality of the photograph as Barthes reads it. And here, another contradiction emerges, between stillness and movement, for though the film stops on a freeze-frame, the film nevertheless continues to unfold, as a series of identical frames that produces the illusion of stillness. Both are suffused by Time. Accordingly, the image that concludes the first scene of Peppermint Candy, Young-ho’s suicide in Spring of 1999, may be understood in a similar manner. Everything that follows thus serves, as Barthes might understand it, to illustrate the “will have been” of Young-ho’s existence, for while the film proceeds backwards in his life trajectory, the living spectator is also aware of the inevitable death that will take place in Young-ho’s future. Every frame of the film foregrounds this logic, for “there is always a defeat of Time in them.”38 The images of Young-ho irreversibly becoming a broken man: each of these images is haunted by the possibility of his ontological impossibility. “[T]hey have their whole lives before them,” Barthes continues, “but also they are dead (today), they are then already dead (yesterday).”39 The temporality of the image is underscored with each passing episode, as the temporal gap between today and yesterday widens. Death is immanent to the duration of Peppermint Candy; movement is constituted through flickering of still frames, death 24x a second. 40 And throughout, the signifiers for the photograph and the camera intermittently interrupt the inexorable movement of the cinematic image, as if to grant Young-ho opportunities to see what Barthes sees, and finally to understand how his own temporality is intimately linked to his finitude. But in the end, in Fall of 1979, it is he who is photographed. The last shots of Peppermint Candy

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make this explicit, as it concludes in the same way the opening scene ended, with a still frame on Young-ho’s face. Lee’s film not only premiered during a time of unprecedented economic crisis but also during a moment when sentiments for working through the traumas of Gwangju were gaining momentum in the public sphere. In 1994, the May 18 Memorial Foundation was formed to acknowledge and commemorate the victims of the violence as well as to promote the continuing struggle toward democracy. A 24-episode television series, Sandglass (1995), one of the highest rated dramas in Korean history, centered around the aftermath of May 1980 and weaved footage of the events into its fictional diegesis. Jang Sun-woo’s film A Petal (1996) confronted the reverberations of the Gwangju Uprising on the present, utilizing non-linear montage, experimental techniques, and provocative depictions of violence and cruelty. In the year of Jang’s film, former President Chun was sentenced to death for his role in the 1980 Uprising. And in 1997, he was pardoned by Kim Young-sam, on the advice of incoming President Kim Dae-jung. Two years after this momentous gesture of forgiveness, Peppermint Candy was shown to Korean audiences. In this year, Korea Journal published three essays that provided new interpretations of the Gwangju incidents and its historiography. Each of them stays close to the historical material, while eschewing rhetoric that openly reproaches the perpetrators. They account for the ways in which the citizenry actively came together in the face of state violence, beyond their characterization as passive, helpless actors. The temporality of death and the ontology of the photographic image coincides with the conditions of precariousness that gave rise to what Choi Jungwoon calls an “absolute community”: a communal ethics that arose in the midst of Gwangju’s state of emergency in May 1980. In his essay, “The Kwangju People’s Uprising: Formation of the ‘Absolute Community’,” Choi argues that the outbreak of the citizens’ revolution should be seen as a culmination of a number of historical factors that were galvanized by pro-democracy demonstrations. Frustration due to regional discrimination and class differences, the ideology of the minjung people’s movement, and the existing communal structure culminated in the realization of an ethics beyond identity, one based on the shared finitude of the protestors. As KCIA paratroopers indiscriminately killed students, beat the elderly, and inflicted barbarisms upon women, the citizens of Gwangju came together to support the students, locking arms and singing Arirang. “Citizens helped each other in the streets, sharing kimbap, rice balls, beverages, towels, cigarettes […]. As if an unspoken understanding existed between them, all of the citizens simultaneously overcame their fear and joined together

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in the demonstrations.”41 And so, in the face of death, according to Choi, the people “reaffirmed their humanity,” freely sharing their possessions while offering support at a time of extreme precariousness. 42 The absolute community momentarily transcended class distinctions and gave way to mutual recognition of each other as participating in an experience of shared struggle. “At the same time,” Choi writes in an evocative passage, insofar as individuals had freed themselves of their fear of death, they had overcome finitude. In this place, then, time possessed no meaning whatsoever. In addition, the experience of having overcome the fear of death by means of community engendered a liberation from the sensations and anxieties of the mundane world. Everyday ideals and desires lost their meaning – all that remained in this community was absolute life itself. 43

It is through a communal ethic of care that finitude is “overcome.” Choi describes it almost as a religious experience, as an event that flashes up in the moment of danger, lifting the everyday world into another existential register altogether. The recognition of the other and concern for his or her safety became the grounds for a new civil order. Community here is spontaneously conceived as an alternative to martial law, dissolving and transforming the mythic, legalistic violence of the military state, which coerces the binding of its citizens to the law, into the divine violence of the people in the continuing protests. It recalls the proletarian general strike that Benjamin appropriates from Georges Sorel, a non-violent violence that operates as a pure means without ends. “For it takes place,” Benjamin writes, “not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a whole transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes or consummates.”44 The violence against the metaphysics of the current legal order is, as he continues elsewhere, contingent upon the sacredness of life, “or however sacred that life in him which is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife.”45 Young-ho is consistently shown to be on the wrong side of contemporary South Korean history. He is much too stubborn to give up his fiction of an idealized masculinity. The image of Young-ho as a young man, lying underneath train tracks, could be said to be pregnant with this possibility. Indeed, even the perpetrators of violence were once naïve and even they must die. Is it possible to forgive Young-ho for the violence he committed

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as an enlisted soldier during the Gwangju massacre? Is it conceivable to imagine him a finite human being, possessing a particular dignity, even as he treated his victims inhumanely and perpetrated countless cruel acts against his political adversaries? Perhaps the broader lesson that could be gleaned from Lee’s film, taking into account the history to which it refers, revolves around this: not only the political price South Korea has paid for its spectacular economic rise since the late 1960s, but also the fundamental vulnerability of this achievement. 46 The temporality of Young-ho, and his still image, makes this lesson all the more poignant and melodramatic. Peppermint Candy gives us a chance to reflect on the ways in which Young-ho has willfully forgotten the historical legacy of Gwangju in contemporary South Korea. The original source of his trauma, intertwined with personal and national history, seems to repeat itself, for Young-ho refuses to remember the ontological precariousness that has constituted his being all along. His achievements as a hwesawon or as working for the KCIA only served to cover up the possibility that was present at the beginning of his life, occluding as well the ethical possibility opened up by the absolute community that spontaneously emerged under martial law in Gwangju in May of 1980. As contemporary spectators of the film, Peppermint Candy teaches us how to consider the death of the other, even when he is a hated figure. Yet, this consideration of death also compels consideration of a profound precariousness that subtends the existence of the modern democratic nation. As I shall argue throughout this book, some of the most important Korean films that appeared in the new millennium insist on such questions of ethics, grounded in the experience of the cinema.

1.

Unredeemable Images

Films by Kim Ki-duk are bound to ignite heated controversy, even in the context of the international film festivals at which they are generally shown. A screening of The Isle (1999) at the Philadelphia Film Festival I attended in 2000 began with an in-person disclaimer by the festival programmer. He stated that Kim’s work would be the most graphic of all the films that were to be screened that year and advised audience members to brace themselves for the violent images that were to be presented. The programmer reminded the audience that one was allowed to leave the theater if the experience of the film became too intense. As The Isle unfolded, scenes of sadistic emotional and physical torture, blatant cruelty to animals, frustrating codependent sexual relationships, and humiliating subordination of women by supermacho, fascistic Korean men were abundant. I was almost compelled to take the programmer’s suggestion to leave the theater when one of the film’s characters swallowed a bunch of barbed hooks and was later fished out of the water. These excessive images could be said to have affected the spectator’s body viscerally while forcing him or her, to quote Linda Williams, to “share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm – of the body ‘beside itself’ with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness.”1 The appalling ecstasies of The Isle went beyond the acceptable limits typical of Williams’s “body genres” however. I wondered why I was being subjected to the film’s senseless brutality and felt that I was being forced to share in its sadism. To be sure, a panoply of pejoratives may be invoked when discussing Kim Ki-duk and his films: misogynistic, lurid, caricatured, gratuitous, juvenile, sociopathic, exploitative, among others. He has become infamous as the enfant terrible of Korean cinema. Films that feature unforgettable, seemingly unredeemable images of corporeal abuse, involving objects such as golf clubs and cut glass, and whose vulnerable victims include social outcasts, the poor, and impressionable teenagers may also be recalled, with descriptions of outrageous scenes from titles such as Birdcage Inn (1998), Real Fiction (2000), The Bow (2005), or Pieta (2012). Men are unpredictable, sex-obsessed ego-maniacs, while women are jealous, vindictive, and deeply insecure. These are not human characters with which the viewer identifies, but typologies that are to be derided and criticized. Kim’s films are said to be unrelenting in their desperation and sad melancholy, offering little hope of narrative redemption and thus may be called “feel bad” movies. A screening of Address Unknown (2001) in Rotterdam, which I will analyze

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in greater depth in this chapter, began with a conspicuous proviso assuring the audience that “No animal was harmed in any way during the making of this film.” It seemed, on the one hand, to pique the morbid curiosity of the viewer while, on the other, to temporarily inoculate the audience against the shock of the brutal images that were to follow. Film critics have expressed that they suffered a kind of aggressive punishment during screenings of Kim’s films, feeling that they themselves were traumatized by his images of gratuitous cruelty. In his review of Bad Guy, Chicago Reader critic Hank Sartin pejoratively writes that, “The audience is subjected to a series of emotional contortions, encouraged to experience them like a voyeur, and then scolded for doing so. The pathetic music Kim favors is profoundly at odds with his chilly attitude toward the characters.”2 Tony Rayns, in a piece for Film Comment titled, “Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk,” disparagingly calls the director “an authentic primitive, an autodidact who has successfully parlayed his limited talents into an international career.”3 He then proceeds to denigrate the few critics who have praised Kim Ki-duk’s work, claiming that they implicitly fetishize the strange beauty of his films such that “their bullshit detectors stop working.”4 After a screening of Address Unknown at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, one reviewer wrote of Kim’s “own unfortunate compulsion to maim and kill the characters in ever more lurid ways for lack of anything better to do.”5 Detractors point to the narrative implausibility of his films, complain about the absurd behavior of the characters, criticize moments of surreal, elliptical fantasy, and condemn plot dénouements that do not empower and subsequently leave the viewer with a sense of inexorable hopelessness. It is as though the violence among the characters in the film results in another kind of violence – an assault on the spectator him or herself. These are “bad” films, it has been remarked, made by an ostensibly “bad” filmmaker.6 Korean critics have also been harsh in their treatment of Kim’s films, often equating the filmmaker with his violent male protagonists. One writer even observed that, based solely on depictions of the family in his films, the director’s mother must not have loved him. “It makes me sad,” Kim responds, “to read these false and humiliating statements about my family. There are no excuses for these kinds of statements. Although I previously mentioned that my mother is illiterate, she has been a great mother to my siblings and me. Personal attacks like this should not have anything to do with my work as a filmmaker.”7 Because of these criticisms, particularly those coming from Korean scholars and reviewers, and because of what he believes to be serious misunderstandings of his films, Kim announced after the release of Bad Guy that he would stop giving interviews altogether. He is also highly

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suspicious of the few critics who actually have something positive to say about his films, such as Paek Sang-bin, a psychiatrist who has called for psychoanalytic readings of Kim’s work. Although most of the characters in Address Unknown are based on the director’s childhood memories and personal anecdotes, he remains skeptical of analyses that attempt to unlock the meaning of the films through recourse to his biography. However, critical response to his films has not been limited to indignation and outrage, for adherents have praised his body of work, albeit in a number of very specific ways. These provocative films are expressive of a unique artistic vision, making Kim a cineaste “of the wild beauty,” as a 2007 documentary by French film scholar Antoine Coppola proclaims. In such accounts, the agonizing sadism of his films is validated as the counterpart to their exotic splendor. Where acts of extreme violence take place, they do so against a backdrop of lush, beautifully shot scenery. For example, film critic Adrien Gombeaud writes that, “Violence in Kim Ki-duk’s films only exists to let out a moment of gentleness […] and vice-versa. The propensity for a character to appear nasty has as equivalence only the need to be comforted.”8 These validations of the convulsive beauty found in Kim’s films remain nevertheless in danger of pardoning the brutality committed upon the bodies of the inexplicable, presumably less grievable, Oriental others portrayed in his films. His work has been recognized internationally in film festival and art house theater circuits and has garnered numerous awards often along these exoticizing lines. Since the acceptance of The Isle into the Venice International Film Festival, which introduced Kim’s work to Europe, his films have been shown regularly at the major festival locations and won numerous international accolades. At the 2004 Berlinale, Kim’s status as an auteur was secured when he won the Silver Bear Award for Best Director for Samaritan Girl (2004), a film about two teenage girls who prostitute themselves in order to fund a trip to Europe. The jury at the 2004 Venice festival awarded him the Silver Lion for 3-Iron (2004), hailed, curiously, as the “moral winner of the festival.”9 Kim’s reception in the United States has followed a similar pattern, with distribution of his films limited almost exclusively to the festival circuit, although his relatively tamer Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (2003) has proven to be an exception. In 2008, Kim was given a retrospective at the New York MoMA, the first of its kind for a contemporary South Korean filmmaker. Film scholar Hye Seung Chung expresses sympathy with those who cannot and do not forgive his thuggish cinema, yet she nevertheless refrains from fully siding with their disapproval. In her illuminating monograph on

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the director, Chung aims to challenge misunderstandings of Kim’s work by both Korean and Western critics, and to “initiate a new set of inquiries reflecting the director’s own transnational movement across literal and figurative borders.”10 Kim’s films are “necessarily brutal” because they reflect “the cruelty of a classist society blind or indifferent to the misfortunes of others.”11 Thus Chung, who explicitly identifies herself as a Korean-born woman, sympathizes with critics who disapprove of the misogyny depicted in Kim’s films, yet she maintains that these brutal images of power relations, overdetermined by issues of class and gender, reflect structures of masculine hegemony, cruelty, and violence that exist in contemporary Korean society. His abject protagonists are not adept at speaking the discourses of competing Cold War or neoliberal ideologies, but can only express their profound resentment toward their more advantaged others through violence. Thus, the cruelty depicted in The Coast Guard (2002) functions not only to provoke but also corresponds with the callousness produced by the politico-military deadlock between the North and South Koreas. Chung writes that its scenes of cruelty “can be seen as a desperate (and desperately needed) exclamation point – a kind of corporeal exclamation point – emphasizing the excruciating pain suffered by abject heroes, who often serve as semiautobiographical portraits of the filmmaker himself.”12 “Desperately needed,” apparently, because an ongoing critique of misogynist brutality concomitant with militarization remains desperately urgent. His films do not simply exploit in their gratuitousness but provide spectators the opportunity to pose provocative ethical questions and critically confront the violence that too often is elided in everyday life. This chapter develops Chung’s line of argument. Audiences and critics have disparaged the violence or gender politics raised by Kim Ki-duk’s films, but their observations often assume that we are in a position to make ethical judgments about films in a relatively unproblematic manner. In the following discussion I argue that Kim’s cinema and its circulation through the international film festival produces a crisis around this very issue, raising the question of the meaning of ethics for the spectator of his cinema. I will show how this crisis is produced in Address Unknown and Bad Guy, two early films by Kim, both from 2001. His disturbing, offensive, and aggressive works cannot be separated from the post-1997 climate in which they were conceived and produced. Beyond its characterization as extreme or exotic, Kim’s cinema may be read to raise the broader question of ethics as intrinsic to the experience of film, such that ethically looking toward the other is related to ethically looking in the cinema. Through examining these works, we shall see how the criticisms that have been typically leveled against

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Kim and his films presuppose a moralistic manner of looking, criticisms that are themselves complicit with the ethics of contemporary capitalism.

Address Unknown (2001) and the Ethical Question Address Unknown tells the story of a gijichon (“military camp town”) stricken by postwar dilapidation and poverty. The film is set in Pyongtaek, situated about seventy kilometers south of Seoul. The time is the Fall of 1970, at the height of Park Chung-hee’s military rule, when rapid economic developments were being realized while the struggle toward democracy floundered. Kim’s film focuses on four young Koreans, whose past emotional and physical traumas remain tragically intertwined. Chang-guk (Yang Dong-kun) is the son of a former military bar hostess and an African-American soldier. He is ostracized and taunted by others for his biracial identity and unable to cope with anything American, such as speaking English, that reminds him of his absent father. Chang-guk works for Dog-eye (Cho Jae-hyun), the local dog butcher, who strings dogs up by their necks and beats them to death with a baseball bat, eventually selling their meat to the local dog soup restaurant. He shows only cruelty and violence to others around him, with his girlfriend, who happens to be Chang-guk’s mother, being the lone exception. Ji-hum (Kim Young-min) is an adolescent living with his disabled father and experiencing love and sex for the first time. His gentle character and innocence prove to be hindering however, for he is unable to defend himself against two local bullies who severely thrash him several times throughout the film. Finally, teenager Eun-ok (Ban Min-jung), whom Ji-hum loves, albeit rather awkwardly, has a cataract in her left eye, resulting from a childhood game of William Tell with her older brother that went terribly wrong. She remains withdrawn from the world while frequently lashing out at her fatherless family. Her only pleasure is “playing” (that is, sexually) with her little puppy. Like Ji-hum, she is learning to survive in a hostile world while trying to negotiate her budding sexual desires. Every character in the film has someone to harass and batter, and each is the principal recipient of violence from yet another character. Paradoxically, a form of community is secured through this circle of cruelty, revolving around the passing of pain and misery from one to the next. As the film proceeds, it seems that every ten minutes or so someone or some animal is beaten. The static melancholy and seemingly endless cycle of violence that pervades Address Unknown clearly disturbed the audience

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at the screening I attended. Some were audibly disgusted at the image of dirty skeletons of North Koreans being dug up and unceremoniously thrown onto a cart. Others nervously shuffled in their seats when Ji-hum defecated the steel wire he will use later to strangle one of his bullies. Frustrated audience members left the theater in the scene where Changguk cut off his mother’s tattooed breast with a knife. When a film evokes such responses among festival attendees, there is little wonder why critics complain about Kim’s “unfortunate compulsion” to kill off his characters “for lack of anything better to do.” The individuals in Address Unknown only act and react in relation to their surroundings and are motivated by primitive impulses, existing only to kill or be killed. Set against a barren, rural Korean landscape, they seem more like cruel animals and less like civilized human beings. Indeed, they are “human animals,” described by Gilles Deleuze in his chapter on naturalism in cinema, who behave in accordance with the logic of the “impulse-image” thrown into a surreal, originary world. “The originary world,” he writes, “only exists and operates the depths of a real milieu, and is only valid through its immanence in this milieu, whose violence and cruelty it reveals.”13 Address Unknown does not follow a singular narrative arc but constantly cross-cuts between the sad lives of the individuals who reside in this village and whose livelihoods are dependent on the economy that has developed around the US military base. The tragic conclusion to the film remains unsettling and unsatisfying, as the main protagonists die and no redemption is offered to the viewer. Chang-guk’s mother has been sending letters to her African-American GI husband, who is abroad, but they have all been returned with the stamp, “Address Unknown.” At the very end of the film she receives an enigmatic letter from a man named “Clint” who owns a small deli in California. She has already committed suicide, however, and her long-awaited response arrives too late. As Deleuze notes, the originary world of naturalism is inseparable from a specific historical milieu – in Kim’s film, the history of neo-colonialism that has characterized Korean-US relations since the Korean War. Like Kim’s violent and ethically problematic images, this milieu is difficult to confront. Since 1946, tens of thousands of US soldiers stationed at dozens of bases throughout Korea, such as the “Camp Eagle” depicted in Kim’s film, have continued to co-exist with the local populations who live in the towns adjacent to these bases. The economies of these gijichon thrive by catering to the needs and desires of Americans. Their commercial areas can be quite extensive, featuring bars, clubs, convenience stores, barbershops, photo shops, drug stores, tailors, and brothels selling sex to soldiers.

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American-style ranch houses with swimming pools, two-car garages, and a golf course may be found in Yongsan, for example, the large headquarters for the US military situated in Seoul. As an enclave separated from Korea culturally and geographically, the postcolonial Pyongtaek depicted in Address Unknown illustrates how money, promises, desires, and violence circulate between Koreans and US soldiers. The trade of a Hustler porn magazine, the utilization of broken English by Koreans, and the tattoo on the breast of Chang-guk’s mother, which marks her as the “property” of a missing American GI: in and around the gijichon, the lives of Koreans and Americans remain inextricably intertwined through exchange and possession. These exchanges do not pass into the geopolitics of national citizenship however, for while US soldiers are allowed to walk where they please, Koreans are not allowed access inside the military bases. As such, Kim’s film does not provide any images of what happens inside Camp Eagle. In his essay on Address Unknown, f ilm scholar Chuck Kleinhans argues that Kim’s film should be understood as a critique of institutional power that structures relations between individuals, between US military soldiers and Korean civilians, men and women, and between urban and rural inhabitants. He explains that the film depicts the ingrained misogyny of the camp town in 1970 not as ethnography, but as critique: In Address Unknown, Kim represents women’s sexuality as a way of addressing the political issues he wants to deal with, always linking it to a distressing violence. Theme and topic are dealt with using the fundamentally misogynist force of sexual and physical violence. Thus violent imagery is represented in the f ilm as part of a socio-political critique; but that representation is not per se misogynist.14

In Address Unknown, Kim seeks to critique the socio-political structure that constitutes the bleak lives of these marginalized women, not to morally indict them individually. For Kleinhans, a key example of this is embodied in Chang-guk’s mother, who very likely was a prostitute in the gijichon around the time of the Korean War. Evidence of this may be gleaned in a scene that takes place about one-third of the way into the film, as Ji-hum is to receive another beating from his two tormentors. Chang-guk steps in to stop the anticipated thrashing. He challenges the bullies to speak English and declares that the one whose skills are the least fluent will be physically punished. One of the tough guys tells Chang-guk, in broken English, “Your mom was a yanggongju [“western princess”] who sold herself to American soldiers, right?” Grabbing his collar, the mixed-race Korean responds, in

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assured English: “Yeah, my mom was a western princess, whatcha gonna do about it?” Losing the game, the tormenter is assaulted by both Chang-guk and Ji-hum. Not only does the scene confirm Chang-guk’s mother as a former prostitute that catered to US soldiers, it also depicts her stigmatization by patriarchal South Korean culture, and thus gestures toward the history of “sexual and physical violence” identified by Kleinhans. The figure of the prostitute within the modern Korean context must be considered within hierarchical, highly moralizing conventions that reductively figure women as either virtuous or fallen. According to Confucian tradition, women are to remain chaste until marriage and afterwards stay at home to raise the family’s children. Women who engage in prostitution are considered to be morally depraved, stigmatized as “bad women.” Moreover, and beyond this legacy, the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” women cannot be separated from the intertwined histories of Korea’s modernization process and struggle toward national sovereignty, histories that are deeply imbricated within discourses of gender and sexuality. Chang-guk’s mother embodies this history of the oppression of women through generations, by Koreans and non-Koreans, by both colonized and colonizing men. I would like to delve briefly into this history so that we can properly contextualize the diegetic world depicted in Address Unknown. Perhaps no other f igure has symbolically stood for the injustice of sexual exploitation by foreign colonizers in Korea’s modern history than the so-called “comfort women,” women who were sexually subjugated by the Japanese army during wartime. Throughout the Japanese Empire, about 2,000 “comfort stations” were set up to serve Japanese soldiers during the war. Military leaders perversely believed they were protecting the moral and physical character of their troops by forestalling Japanese soldiers from raping civilians and preventing the transmission of disease through contact with unauthorized prostitutes. Of the hundreds of thousands of women that were coerced into sexual slavery from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia, a majority of them came from Korea. According to a recent study by anthropologist Sarah Soh, the personal tragedies of comfort women cannot be separated “from the institutionalized everyday gender violence tolerated in patriarchal homes and enacted in the public sphere (including the battlefront)” that characterized life for these women in both colonial Korean and Imperial Japanese society.15 In her research, Soh has found that compatriot Koreans were, at times, complicit in providing women for the Japanese army. Her research complicates received notions that Korean sex workers were victimized and coerced by only the Japanese, emphasizing the extent to which women were victimized by

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both the colonizers and colonized. When Korea was liberated in 1945, the US military government abolished the system of legal prostitution set up under Japanese colonial rule, but the livelihoods of these women persisted for decades thereafter. Since the Korean War, the buying and selling of sex in military camp towns has played a highly contested role in the maintenance of KoreanUS military relations. Military general Park Chung-hee, as one of his first administrative actions upon seizing the presidency in 1961, passed the socalled “Law Against Morally Depraved Behavior,” which made prostitution illegal. Despite this prohibition on individuals who buy and sell sex, social meanings surrounding prostitution persisted and became increasingly imbricated with postwar politics. As political scientist Katharine H. S. Moon powerfully argues, the culture of military prostitution is a “system that is sponsored and regulated by two governments, Korean and American (through the U.S. military),” where biopolitics intersects with geopolitics.16 Maintained in order to appease the US soldiers’ demands for regular “R&R” while far away from home, gijichon prostitution took place in spaces of legal exception, where women who worked in bars, clubs, massage parlors, and barbershops were legitimated as “special entertainers,” “businesswomen,” and “bar girls.” Following the “Clean-Up Campaign” in 1971, which directly addressed the pandemic of venereal disease among women and US soldiers, both governments collaborated to micromanage the sexual behavior of gijichon women. Policy discourse about the epidemic attempted to validate these women as “public ambassadors” who would improve US-ROK civilmilitary relations, but the publicity surrounding VD only reinforced the perception that gijichon prostitutes were depraved, morally contaminated women. Korean women who worked in these camp towns were ostracized and stigmatized, called yanggongju or yanggalbo (“western whores”), terms that vilified and underscored their moral and racial defilement by having slept with foreign men. In literary and cinematic representation, the yanggongju has frequently functioned as a melodramatic allegory for the modern Korean nation, “raped” by colonial Japanese and American powers. For instance, in Ahn Jung-hyo’s novel, Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea, the protagonist’s mother, Ollye, turns to sex work for American soldiers in order to support her family.17 She eventually earns redemption by returning to conventional motherhood, at great cost to herself and her reputation. In her essay on Obaltan (1961), or The Stray Bullet, a film that tells the story of a poor family whose daughter turns to sex work for the US military, Hye Seung Chung remarks that in this and other South

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Korean melodramas, “the emphatic focus on the yanggongju as a signifier of modernity function[s] not only as an allegory of the (neo)colonized nation but also as a symptom of Korean male trauma precisely because she bears the traces and thus is a reminder of the infiltration and domination of American masculinity in South Korea.”18 More broadly, the fallen woman has been read as a tragic victim of historical forces beyond her control in the history of Korean cinematic representation and thus understood as the object of scorn, heartbreak, and sympathy. Film scholar Kim Soyoung corroborates this, observing of works such as Hell Flower (1958), Youngja’s Heyday (1975), and Black Republic (1990) that, “From the 1950s on, South Korean films sustained themselves largely by treating women characters as tropes of traumas about modernity and the post-colonial condition.”19 Especially stigmatized were women who worked with African-American soldiers and who were subject to Korean misunderstanding and racism, like Chang-guk’s mother in Address Unknown. Historically, a so-called “DMZ” (“Dark Man’s Zone”) was designated in some camp towns, which was a segregated area for black Americans where bars tended to be smaller and more run-down than those on the main strip. Children born from American fathers and Korean mothers were, as sociologist John Lie writes, “some of the most discriminated against and underprivileged people in Korean society.” Addressing the xenophobia of Koreans, Lie additionally notes that, “The situation is especially perilous for children of African-American fathers,” as in the case of the biracial Chang-guk.20 Kim’s film takes place against this historical backdrop and it thus should be read as an anti-colonial critique of the power relations that structure the camp town. Certainly, as Kleinhans suggests, the film exposes the everyday cruelty that is exchanged between individuals in these postwar contexts. But I believe that Address Unknown may be read in another way, such that this critique may be made more self-reflexive, particularly with regard to its cinematic specificity. In an interview with the film critic Kim So-hee, Kim expresses that he was “quite critical of the U.S. military” at the time he was writing the script.21 But through the production process he came to adopt a different attitude, as he explains in his 2001 interview: However, as I was hunting for shooting locations, I began to feel a kind of sadness, looking at the shabby and filthy clubs surrounding the military bases in great numbers. It was isolation and loneliness I felt from the G.I.s wretchedly returning to their military base after spending time with Russian or Filipino girls they bought for a couple of dollars. For the first time, I asked myself if I had ever tried to understand them.22

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Corroborating Kleinhans’s point that Kim’s film tries to critically address misogyny, the production of the film allowed the filmmaker to “see another side to the issue of sex-crimes committed by U.S. soldiers.”23 Kim does not seem to forgive these soldiers for their sex crimes and their complicity with colonial power, but his encounter with the gijichon spaces call into question his own pre-formed, moralistic view of them. Indeed, it seems that previously he did not reflect much on the lives of these young men, perhaps because his resentment of US neocolonization loomed so large in his understanding of modern Korean history. Yet, for the first time, the filmmaker asked himself an uncomfortable question, one that seemed to problematize his own viewing position: is it possible to empathize and grieve with those who have been deemed unsympathetic and ungrievable, not only with ostracized Koreans, but also with lonely, miserable US soldiers stationed in Korea? Moreover, Address Unknown not only allowed Kim to understand the lives of those who have been demonized by history, but also seems to pose these ethical questions to the film spectator as well, to question his or her means of understanding the problem of the other. I believe that it is precisely this attempt to understand those who have been demonized, in this case the stationed US soldiers, that helps explain the disturbing effect of Address Unknown’s provocative images. Though the film’s diegesis is based in historical reality, a camp town situated in Pyongtaek in the Fall of 1970, its surreal imagery and illogical plot seem to indicate a marked departure from this ostensible reality. As Kim attempts to reflect upon and depict the lives of those who have been marginalized by history, this accounting of history cannot fully encompass the peculiar aesthetics of Address Unknown, its originary world, and its affective power. The violence depicted in Kim’s film seems to resonate with Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger,” which aims to provoke and change the film viewer. “In moral terms,” Rocha writes, this violence is not filled with hatred; nor is it linked to the old, colonizing humanism. The love that this violence encompasses is as brutal as violence itself, because it is not the kind of love which derives from complacency or contemplation, but rather a love of action and transformation.24

With affinities to Third Cinema, Address Unknown does not depict violence in order to straightforwardly depict hatred and brutality, but rather to induce transformation in the spectator. Thus, in order to explain the ethico-aesthetics that seems to be at the heart of Kim’s self-reflexive questioning, I turn to a short scene that takes

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place about twenty-seven minutes into the film. Working with writings by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in conjunction with a close reading of this scene, I wish to illustrate how these radical questions are central to the film, while addressing criticisms levied at the filmmaker and his work by showing how the cruel and unusual punishment that seems to be levied at the spectator is meant precisely to raise the question of spectatorial ethics itself. The film’s violence functions partially to remind the spectator of his or her status as an embodied viewing subject and vulnerability as a finite being. These questions are inextricably intertwined with the notion of the human and its relationship to the other and, moreover, to another species altogether: that is, to the category of the canine. Ethical questioning, the embodiment of the spectator, and the many figurations of dogs in Address Unknown revolve around the site of the eyeball, the primary human organ of spectatorship in the cinema. The scene is a short face-to-face dialogue. The sensitive Chang-guk, after being beaten for not beating a dog with a baseball bat so that it may be slaughtered, runs off and makes a half-hearted effort to find work at a local factory. He fails and comes sulking back to his boss, Dog-eye. Chang-guk seems to resign himself to his brutal work by aggressively stringing up another dog and beating it senseless. The dog butcher, calmly watching all of this, tells him to rest a while and take a swig from a bottle of soju. Breathing heavily from the physical exertion, Chang-guk takes a seat next to his boss and drinks down the Korean rice vodka. “To be a dog dealer,” Dog-eye says, “you gotta outstare them! When a dog looks straight at you it’s scary, right? You know what the scariest eyeball of them all is? It’s the human eye. You know why dogs look away from me? Because there’s fire in my eyes! Here look!” A close-up of his grimy face is followed by a counter shot of Chang-guk’s sweaty physiognomy. Chang-guk turns sheepishly away, unable to face the other. Dog-eye explains that English was “beaten” into Chang-guk, so that someday he would be ready to travel to the United States, his father’s homeland. But “to speak good English is no good thing – you gotta do everything those Yankees tell you to, everything! Everything!” As he continues to voice his escalating anger and resentment, Dog-eye uses this opportunity to reproach Chang-guk for battering his own mother, telling him, “You hit my girlfriend one more time. She may be your mom but she’s my girlfriend! From before you were born!” Suddenly, something is revealed, for Chang-guk finds the audacity to look directly at Dog-eye, his face expressing surprise coupled with disbelief. And as their gazes engage and hold each other’s constituting look, Dog-eye commands, “Look at me like Dog-eye!” The dog dealer cannot sustain his animal gaze before

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Fig. 1: Chang-guk turns away. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

Chang-guk’s. He f inally averts his eyes and remarks, almost under his breath, “Stop looking at me. My eye’s about to explode!”25 Dog-eye’s challenge pushes the epistemological limits of the look to crisis. Structured through the traditional shot-reverse shot, the juxtaposition of the two faces underscores the possibility of the ethical relation to the other at the same time as it is rendered impossible – a logic of aporetic singularity that I believe is crucial to the Korean cinema of the new millennium. Indeed, the impossibility of the ethical relation is well represented throughout Address Unknown. Dog-eye pummels Chang-guk, Chang-guk beats up his mother, his mother shows only nastiness to the local grocery store owner. Other chains of cruelty link other individuals: Chang-guk beats up the two bullies, the two bullies continually harass Ji-hum, and Ji-hum explodes at the end of the film to commit fatal acts of violence against the bullies, the police, and James (Mitch Malem), an isolated American soldier stationed in Pyongtaek. These interlocking chains channel flows of desire toward the other along lines that are overdetermined by a postwar situation of misery and hopelessness. In the world of Kim’s film, violence becomes the sole means of interaction for individuals who are atomized from discoursing human beings to their lowest common denominator, at the level of the body. Much of the pathos stems from the inescapable repetition of this violence, both horizontally throughout the community and vertically from one generation to the next, and from a seeming inability to “work through” past trauma. This vicious dialectic replicates itself without any possibility of progression. It circulates, multiplies, and permeates every

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interpersonal encounter depicted in Address Unknown, constituting Hegelian encounters of master to slave and foreclosing the possibility of other modes of relationality that do not force a battle to the death. There is little room for the protection of another’s precarious being. During moments when some residue of care seems to emerge, these gestures become quickly instrumentalized in the service of some other profit or gain. For Levinas, the ethical moment is embodied in the face-to-face encounter, whereby the face of the other appears and allows itself to be looked at, exposed and vulnerable. As if to command, “Thou shall not murder,” the appearance of the face places its very being at stake. “The face is exposed,” Levinas remarks, “menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. But at the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill.”26 Its vulnerability is the foundation of the ethical prohibition to murder. The face appears to challenge us to aggression, but this challenge, in turn, makes us even more responsible for its well-being. As such, an oscillation between preservation and murder begins when the other is introduced as “separate” and “different,” rupturing the seamlessness of totality and the fantasy of a sovereign ego. The appearance of another’s face, exterior to the self, is the watershed moment that violently decenters the centered subject. For Levinas, this encounter – an everyday, familiar experience – is rendered radically unfamiliar through its alienating, self-questioning power. As he reminds us in Totality and Infinity, it is the very presence, or presentation, of the other’s face that generates the concept of otherness.27 Following Descartes’s definition of the Infinite in his Third Meditation, where he proves that an infinite God must exist because it exceeds its own categorization, the category of otherness overflows with its own content.28 For the rationalist philosopher, human thought cannot produce something that surpasses thought. He thus concludes that the infinite “something” of God must have originated outside the finite cogito, like a gift from elsewhere. Levinas finds a corollary logic in the infinity of the other, whose appearance is a gift of radical alterity that reconfigures the ground for the ego-centered totality of the self. What is truly other always exceeds our means of signifying it, outstrips the purview of the finite self, and so to be hospitable to this gift is to respond ethically to its radical heterogeneity. However, in our everyday existence, we actively suppress this rupture by binding what we already know to that which appears from the outside through an endless series of reified categories, roles, and names. The shock of the radically unfamiliar is forcefully reduced to the familiar and assimilated back into our totalized field of comprehension, reiterating the certainty of the self. Difference is absorbed into same. We commit these acts

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of violence by refusing the other its “faceicity,” its phenomenal appearance, as soon as his or her countenance originates its own situatedness outside our pre-formed means of knowing. Yet, to critique this refusal and to seek the enigmatic otherness of the other is to affirm the experience of profound ambivalence and to adopt a comportment of self-questioning humility before the face of the other. What I call “ethics” throughout this book stems from this radical critique – of that which violently forecloses the otherness of the other, a critique that prepares the way for a relation that allows for the flourishing of their finite life. This is how the drama between Dog-eye and Chang-guk seems to unfold. At first, the biracial Korean cannot bring himself to look back at his superior, for he is too meek to meet his gaze. But as Dog-eye explains that Chang-guk’s mother has been his girlfriend “from before [he was] born,” he suddenly understands some hitherto unspoken past bitterness and seems to remember that the dog dealer and his mother had a life before she became pregnant with Chang-guk. This outburst implants in him a notion of a primordial past, an existence before his own coming into being – before his mother became a mother, perhaps before Dog-eye became the dog butcher, and before the presence of American military in South Korea. It seems to be a watershed moment that divides a “before” from an “after” and, coextensively, a “now” in which it becomes clear that Chang-guk’s birth is inextricably linked to American colonialism in postwar Korea. His very existence is a constant reminder of the intertwined histories of the two nations. For Dog-eye, Chang-guk’s existence takes on a supplementary meaning. He embodies Dog-eye’s distant love for his mother that persists like the memory of an idyllic past, before she worked as a prostitute for American soldiers. It is clear that something was lost between before and after, between the past and now. The bitterness of this loss remains unresolved and is expressed when Dog-eye complains that “to speak English is no good thing – you gotta do everything those Yankees tell you to, everything!” Chang-guk suddenly sees that his master has been constituted, in turn, as a slave to the Americans and that Dog-eye has become vulnerable to him. It is at this moment that the violent dog dealer “lays down his gaze,” as Jacques Lacan puts it, and exposes himself, defenseless, before the half-American face of Chang-guk.29 But this moment of vulnerability is quickly foreclosed when Dog-eye challenges Chang-guk to “Look at me like Dog-eye!” This command reinstates the face-off where only one can emerge as master over the other. Dog-eye commands Chang-guk to gaze at him “like Dog-eye,” like himself, and through a mode of looking that will placate his own ego-centered

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Fig. 2: Chang-guk looks back. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

totality. He does not want him to gaze as Chang-guk, whose alterity carries the menacing potential to annihilate his already vulnerable being. With the opening of this possibility, Dog-eye finds himself defenseless against the other’s intense stare and, for a moment, allows Chang-guk a bold victory while muttering, “Stop looking at me! My eye’s about to explode!” The shotreverse shot pattern that structures these lines of vision further underscores the ensuing battle. At important moments in the dialogue, Kim shows the viewer an alternating montage of two silent faces staring and aggressively addressing the camera, as if the presentation of one precludes the possibility of the other. The fleeting moment of relationality, which seemed to allow for a different mode of visual exchange, is immediately folded back into a violent either/or logic – that if one is, then the other simultaneously cannot be – with the challenge to “Look at me like Dog-eye.” When Dog-eye explains that the human eyeball is the scariest of them all, scaring away the dogs he eventually beats and butchers, he reiterates a mode of violence that circulates throughout the film. “To be a dog dealer you gotta outstare them! You know why dogs look away from me? Because there’s fire in my eyes.” The battle for recognition and the mutually exclusive, either/or relationality it fosters is clear here, but what is even more fascinating is its appropriation of the human-dog relationship. Dog-eye takes great pride in the mastery he has achieved over the canine solely by means of the human gaze. Although the narrative of Address Unknown never explicitly invokes the master-slave dialectic, this rhetoric effectively maps the human-dog relation onto that of the Hegelian dyad. Following this logic, we see the

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existential vulnerability of the face repressed in the name of its seeming invulnerability before the animal other. “When a dog looks straight at you it’s scary, right? You know what the scariest eyeball of them all is? It’s the human eye.” The otherness of another species is thoroughly effaced before the gaze of the human eye, whose stare is mobilized to be even more hostile, more aggressive, and the scariest of all living beings. Constituted as objects of its gaze, dogs are put in their place as slaves that should implicitly fear their human masters. The substitution of masters for humans and of slaves for dogs has ramifications for the relations between the Koreans and Americans GIs in Address Unknown. One of the most significant occurs in a scene after the face-off between Chang-guk and Dog-eye. The young US soldier, James, by chance meets Eun-ok just outside the military base. He offers her ice cream and while unwrapping it sees two military patrol soldiers approaching out of the corner of his eye. He pulls Eun-ok aside and they escape for a moment into a narrow alleyway. James quickly stashes something in her schoolbag (which later turns out to be psychedelic drugs) and spins his body toward the wall. The soldiers catch up with them and interrogate James, asking why he ran away. “Who ran away?” he answers, “I needed to take a leak!” One of the soldiers responds, “You think we American soldiers are dogs, sir? To take a leak anywhere?” – the implication being that only dogs urinate in public and that because Americans are explicitly not dogs, and coextensively not Korean, they should not do like dogs do. We have already seen several Korean boys from Pyongtaek either urinate or defecate near the rice field or outside their homes. Eun-ok concocts ideas about her own sexuality by seeing two dogs copulating on her way to school. The steel fence that separates them from the space of the military base further underscores the canine status of local Koreans. Like caged animals, they are not allowed to roam free. Chang-guk’s mother begs through the fence to be let into the military base, claiming that she is the wife of an American soldier named Michael who has disappeared without a trace. She seems to believe that if only she could pass beyond the fence, she could find a way to contact him. The soldiers on the other side look at her stone-faced, totally impassive to her increasingly impassioned pleas. Koreans are not allowed to enter the military grounds, while American soldiers are allowed full access to the territory between the base and the camp town. The most controversial aspect of the human-dog dialectic in Address Unknown is the images of dog meat consumption. For audiences who think of dogs as a companion species, the restaurant scene of customers heartily eating bosintang (“dog stew”) violates received assumptions about

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the relations between the human and the canine. In her Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway explains that, “generally speaking, one does not eat one’s companion animals (nor get eaten by them).”30 Kim’s film has no problem transgressing this line, offering up images of dog meat consumption that materialize the profoundly unethical, such that the other is literally absorbed into the same. Dogs are killed, effectively annihilating their otherness from humans, and incorporated into Korean bodies. Indeed, dog meat consumption is considered uncivilized by many in the West, notably Brigitte Bardot, who, several months before the 2002 football World Cup, wrote an open letter to the people of Korea to end the slaughter of dogs. Dogs are “friends,” she protests, “not animals […]. Cows are grown to be eaten, dogs are not. I accept that many people eat beef, but a cultured country does not allow its people to eat dogs.”31 Indeed, Bardot’s selective disapproval cannot be separated from her ethnocentrism; yet, it cannot be denied that she voices an outrage held by many toward this ostensibly barbaric practice. These images of dog meat consumption corroborate other images of unethical behavior pervasive throughout Address Unknown. Thus far I have tried to account for and critique the violence in Kim’s film, aligning it with the unethical and the refusal to reveal any trace of vulnerability while seeking to dominate and master the other. This mastery is manifest in Address Unknown – through cruelty, the invocation of fear, colonialism, murder, and finally consumption and incorporation – but I have restricted my analysis thus far to the moment of the face-to-face encounter between Chang-guk and Dog-eye. Bringing these ideas to bear on the convulsive effect Address Unknown has had on its audiences, we might see what happens when we let the cinema turn its face toward the viewer. The face-to-face relation in the encounter between Dog-eye and Chang-guk may be read as an allegory for the encounter between cinema and spectator, one that poses the question of what it means to look ethically, or what it means to look so as to allow the otherness of the other to appear. As I have argued through my reading of Address Unknown, this ethics is brought to crisis, to a profoundly ambivalent aporia at which it is rendered impossible. When Dog-eye’s naked, vulnerable face is projected onto the screen, it becomes the face of Kim’s cinema more generally, compelling the viewer to be hospitable to its appearance. His face challenges the viewer to pose the ethical question, “Look at me like Dog-eye!” and, though it deeply unsettles the moral fiber of looking in the cinema, to consider the possibility of an ethical impossibility. The viewer does not identify with Chang-guk; rather it is Dog-eye’s countenance that confronts viewers to engage his spectatorial dialectic.

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Fig. 3: Ji-hum voyeuristically looks at Eun-ok. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

This challenge seems to register especially with those spectators who find the experience of Kim’s film to be a form of cruel punishment. They find it impossible to continue looking and are thus forced to turn their own faces away. But it is precisely this “punishment” that confronts safe, voyeuristic viewing positions and defamiliarizes the overly familiar film-going experience. It is the radical heterogeneity of the face of the screen, distinct from the viewer’s own physiognomy, which troubles hegemonic modes of film spectatorship. A scene where Ji-hum and Chang-guk voyeuristically look through a peephole at Eun-ok, as she undresses and plays with her dog, at first invites the viewer to take visual pleasure in the spectacle of her young body. As in the peeping scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the shot takes a first-person perspective, aligning the camera hole and the peephole explicitly. When she discovers that she is being looked at, Eun-ok grabs a sharpened pencil, which moments ago she utilized as a tool to study English, and jabs it into the peephole. As Chang-guk’s eye bleeds, the film viewer experiences visual unpleasure, perhaps not unlike that felt before the infamous eyeball slicing sequence in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Kim will further develop the ethics of voyeurism in Bad Guy, as we will later see. While on the one hand, cruel and unusual unethicality is represented in Address Unknown as spectacle, on the other, it is through this assault on the spectator that the film challenges the viewer to allow it to look back.32 The visual standoff gains in significance when read as an allegory for the ethical relation organized around the exchange of looks. Dog-eye maintains

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that the human eyeball is the scariest “of them all,” so much so that it scares dogs into submission, clearly establishing the master-slave relation. This relationship is defined through the logic of mutual exclusivity, an imaginary separation that is reinforced by the egoistic fantasy of autonomy and wholeness. This fantasy is especially poignant for the observing eye, which interpellates the other as an object to-be-looked-at. The look is constituted as a disembodied eyeball that treats the world as an object to be judged and manipulated, while the looker’s own subjectivity remains at a distance, believed to be impervious to harm from the gaze of the other. This human eyeball calmly observes the world as if it were free of a body and as if it were free of the possibility of self-exposure.33 Address Unknown pushes this visual episteme to its limit by making a spectacle of its own discursive workings and revealing the possibility of a profoundly productive ethical impossibility. The film contains no characters with which the viewer can immediately identify. They all behave in ways that seem to indicate a lack of moral center and commit unethical acts apparently without guilt or responsibility. By foreclosing emotional investment in the characters and diegesis, Address Unknown forces the viewer to observe from a place exterior to it. This place is not realized simply through a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, which alienates the viewer from the cinematic illusion to create a space for cogitation, but is produced through the ambivalent experience of a Levinasian exteriority that problematizes the moral fiber underpinning the typical position of film spectatorship. The face-to-face encounter between Chang-guk and Dog-eye reveals how a totalizing, dominating logic has seeped into our available epistemes and theories of looking in the cinema. Putting this relation into critical relief through allegory, the scene leaves the viewer with the experience, not of spectatorial certainty, but of profound questioning in relation to conventional binary logics of illusion versus reality, human versus animal, pride versus humiliation, or good versus evil. Address Unknown attempts to envision a cinema of amorality that confounds quick and easy assimilation, as one might consume a Hollywood or commercial Korean film, enabling the otherness of the screen to originate its own radiance. It could be said that Address Unknown, whose discourse revolves so much around the spectacle of the Hegelian logic, imagines a world in which it is possible to look in the cinema without all the accretions of modern spectatorship. Yet, within the current moment, this world is barely comprehensible, for the violence of Kim’s untimely film continues to repulse and frustrate many contemporary viewers. The “East,” produced over against the “West”

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by Orientalist discourse, is made radically and irreducibly other once more. Yet, as such, the encounter between contemporary modes of face-to-face viewing with images that threaten the viability of those modes throws into relief an authentic form of difference against the flat backdrop of the screen. Affirming this disrupted and disruptive form of spectatorship seems to me the first step toward making space for visualizing otherness. Address Unknown remains hospitable to this possibility by bringing these modes of cinematic viewing to their epistemological breaking point. Looking at the film with this in mind, one can begin to understand when Dog-eye finally exclaims, “My eye’s about to explode!” I should be clear that, in making this argument, I am not apologizing for the unethicality represented in Address Unknown. I am not requesting that the spectator accept sadistic physical violence, emotional torture, and narrow-minded misogyny simply because of the way Koreans have suffered since the Korean War. Nor am I promoting a simplified cultural relativism that forbids criticism of Korean culture because it is distinct from the West. Both commendation and condemnation run the risk of acceding to an either/or rhetoric. I have taken the text at face value in order to open up questions, rather than close them down by accusing or excusing too quickly. Accusational gestures not only foreclose other responses to Kim’s film, but also presuppose a metaphysics that equates filmic representation and national culture. Rather than moving too easily between representation and reality, Address Unknown operates at the level of the surreal, or on the “borderline where,” as Kim himself says, “the painfully real and the hopefully imaginative meet.”34 By lending the film image too much power to represent the truth, little separates this visual certainty from the danger of claiming cultural superiority over the ostensible barbarity of Korean culture or the backwardness of Korean people. This mode of valuation has the potential to disembody the eyeball yet again. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from Address Unknown is the critique of this visual episteme with a subsequent move toward the ethical, a kind of Nietzschean “revaluation of values.” This critique becomes even more pressing in an increasingly globalized situation, as the universal narratives regarding the human, animal, and world, and the distinctions among them, come up against the irreconcilability of actual ontological differences that govern these distinctions. The continuing debate surrounding the consumption of dog meat in Korea and the animal rights organizations that are unwavering in the belief that all dogs are “man’s best friend” highlights the conflict between what can be called the “local” and a universal ethics. If we accept that the film festival functions as the principal site of globalization

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for the cinema, perhaps we can also say that the film festival serves as the principal site to stage these ethical problems. Kim’s film does not offer an apology for the “uncivilized” Korea depicted in Address Unknown, but rather raises the ethical question itself while preserving its interrogative power through a phenomenological potentiality that belongs uniquely to the cinema.

Bad Guy (2001) and Visual Demoralization At the start of Bad Guy, a young college-aged woman sits on a park bench in a bustling, affluent part of Seoul. Attractive, fresh-faced, and wearing a pink headband, her cell phone and books rest on her lap as she patiently waits for a friend. As she looks into the crowd of people, the film cuts to the face of a tanned man wearing dark clothes. Evidently, this working-class figure is not the friend the woman is waiting for. He is eating a hot dog on a stick and shamelessly leers at her. The contrast between the two of them, between man and woman, ostensibly rich and poor, and looker and lookedat, is striking. Cutting to his point-of-view, the camera slowly pans over the body of the college student, starting with her pale face then moving down to her white shoes. Through this shot, the spectator is uneasily implicated in his visual pleasure. The stranger approaches the park bench and sits next to the young woman in a two shot. The camera zooms in slowly to frame both of them more tightly. As the shot gradually excludes the shops and passers-by around them, a confining intimacy is created between the two. The woman still does not notice the person seated next to her. She calls someone on her cell phone, evidently her boyfriend, asking when he is supposed to arrive. After finishing her call, she finally notices the sweaty-faced man. A look of disgust appears on her face. Standing up to walk away, her boyfriend finally appears. The young college student quickly sizes up the dark-clothed man and deems him a threat, taking a protective stance and shielding his girlfriend. The boyfriend assures her not to worry about the thug, who has been staring at her without interruption. As the couple tease each other playfully and discuss a class on Western art history, the tanned man rises up from the bench and walks toward them. Suddenly, he grabs the young woman’s head and roughly forces her to kiss him. There is no sexual desire expressed in this shocking action, only violence. He seems to act only out of a desire for revenge, for being thought of as socially inferior, and to unleash his resentment against those

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more privileged than himself. A crowd has already gathered to watch the struggle while the boyfriend picks up an ashtray and proceeds to beat his girlfriend’s aggressor with it. Military soldiers rush in and attempt to take him down. They demand that the immobilized thug, the ostensible “bad guy” of the film’s title, apologize. The young college student demands an apology as well. He does not say a word. Looking at him with anger, she calls him a “crazy bastard” and spits in his face. As she walks away, the credits for Bad Guy appear. This opening sequence sets up a situation allegorizing the dynamic of social power in modern Korean society, a situation that Kim repeatedly depicts in his films. A disenfranchised individual is ostracized by the privileged and well-off, those who exemplify dominant standards of exemplary Korean subjectivity. Although little dialogue is spoken in this scene, Kim utilizes close-ups on faces to reveal the defiance of both the shamed and the smug. As a reflection of how centuries-old habits of Korean Confucian culture have entered the age of globalization, rapid technological change, and a society of winners and losers determined by the market, the opening scene from Bad Guy depicts the moral fallout of this modernization process. Traditional markers of class and distinction have undergone radical transformation, while the criteria for the valuation of the other has become increasingly complicit with the ethics of late capitalism. Kim’s film expresses the resentment felt by those who remain profoundly dissatisfied with the sweeping societal changes concomitant with the neoliberal economy and who have been excluded by those who have procured professional collusions through familial and university connections. Following the opening, the young college student, who is called Sun-hwa (Won Seo), is alone at a bookstore browsing in the art section. She flips through a monograph containing work by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele and tears out a page with a reproduction of The Embrace (The Loving) (Die Umarmung [Die Liebenden]) from 1917. Looking up from the image, Sun-hwa sees a thick wallet on a stack of books (it was planted there by one of the bad guy’s minions). Eyeing to make sure no one sees her, Sun-hwa snatches it up and quickly leaves the bookstore. In a bathroom stall, she removes a large wad of money from the wallet and runs out. A hwesawon in a grey business suit follows her into a nearby alleyway. Catching up with her, the man accuses her of pickpocketing and demands that she pay back the money that went missing, including interest. Sun-hwa does not have the money and is taken to a loan shark. In order to procure the funds, she signs and fingerprints a contract that tawdrily stipulates: “I give up all rights to my body in case I fail to pay $15,000.” The debt collector does not fail to

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emphasize her collateral: “Don’t forget, your security is your face and body,” making explicit the relationship between debt and sex. Throughout this ordeal, Sun-hwa becomes withdrawn, deadened to these decisive events taking place around her. She is taken to the lurid red-light district of Seoul to become a prostitute. The bad guy, who is called Han-gi (Cho Jae-hyun, Dog-eye in Address Unknown), returns as her pimp to confine and protect his newly acquired commodity. Her blackmail and bondage is now complete. For the remainder of Bad Guy, Sun-hwa will service men to reimburse her financial debt. As the film unfolds, she descends deeper into sadness and melancholy. The young college student will lose her vivacious spirit as she acclimates to the violent, uncaring world of prostitutes, thugs, and johns. By the end of Bad Guy, there will be no redemption for these characters. Perversely, however, she falls in love with her captor in an unlikely relationship consisting of codependence and business. And lamentably, by the last scene of the film, Sun-hwa has completely resigned herself to her role, taking customers in the back of an old utility van as she and Han-gi nomadically travel together, driving into the horizon. Because she is never redeemed, and because Sun-hwa is never allowed an identity outside of her sexualization, Kim’s film seems to willfully frustrate viewers’ expectations for narrative closure and satisfaction. As in Address Unknown, images of violence and misogyny prevail. Its political incorrectness has caused one South Korean feminist writer to call Bad Guy a form of “dangerous penis fascism.”35 Nevertheless, Hye Seung Chung believes that Kim’s film “is a far cry from conventional sexploitation fare.”36 In line with her argument that his films provide “a kind of corporeal exclamation point,” she contextualizes the diegetic world depicted in Bad Guy with the historical world of prostitution and pimps in South Korea, writing that Kim’s “multilayered film skillfully interweaves reality and fantasy as well as soft-porn melodrama and indictments against Korea’s class system.”37 The social problems depicted in his film apparently derive from the director’s personal experience of having lived in the red-light district and reflect his critical commentary on them. In this way, Bad Guy does not espouse violence, but it utilizes the representation of violence to bare the cruelty that already exists between individuals in Korean culture. As we shall see, Kim’s film also reveals ethical possibilities and impossibilities within this context that are expressed through the medium of film. In my reading of Address Unknown, we saw how the history of postwar colonization informs the dynamics of social power between American soldiers, Korean civilians, and gijichon prostitutes. Though this film depicts

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South Korea in 1970, both Address Unknown and Bad Guy were produced in 2001, at a time when many South Koreans were still working through the traumas of the financial crisis and adjusting to the austerity measures imposed by the IMF. Referring to the sense of historicity implicit in the former, Kleinhans notes that Address Unknown should be read in a “double register”: “The depicted events must refer to historical events of the Korean state and capitalism, while the film appears in 2001 at the dawn of a new century with a new configuration of government and Korean and global capitalism.”38 Both of Kim Ki-duk’s films from 2001 should be understood within the historical moment of their production, as national concerns became increasingly inseparable from global ones and as new political ideologies came to the fore in conjunction with the new liberal economy. A brief rundown of this economy, its development, and its relationship to social policy will help us contextualize the social issues depicted in Bad Guy. With the election of president Kim Young-sam in 1993, South Korea actively began to implement wide-reaching policy measures to liberalize its tightly-controlled financial market. Kim’s five-year plan aimed to deregulate interest rates, grant more managerial autonomy to banks, ease barriers to entry for foreign exchange transactions and other financial activities, and abolish policy loans in selected sectors of the economy (some export industries and small and medium-sized firms). Conceived largely as a response to demands set out by the US and the OECD, Kim’s vision of globalization, or segyehwa, involved policies that liberalized capital accounts. More controversially, his presidency opened direct foreign investment in Korean stock markets and allowed foreign commercial loans without government approval. As time wore on, the Korean economy would become less and less obligated to domestic state regulation. The decoupling of the national government and the national economy was exponentially accelerated with the 1997 financial crisis. It has widely been understood that the crisis came about due to protectionist economic policies involving the state, banks, and the chaebols, policies that were nevertheless instrumental to South Korea’s export-oriented growth since the 1960s. The reform program implemented by the IMF attempted to restructure the economy based on the Anglo-American model, limiting the regulatory powers of the state while encouraging short-term financial profitability. In his essays on the crisis and the global response to it, economist Ha-joon Chang has reminded us that this response was based on a fundamental misreading of Korea’s “traditional” economy and its ostensible need for modernization.39 The policies that resulted compelled the IMF to

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demand more deregulation and full opening of the Korean economy, to which the Kim Dae-jung administration largely complied. Some of these economic measures carried stipulations that breached into the realm of social policy. Because of this, the history and legacy of prostitution in post-colonial South Korea, at least since the period depicted in Address Unknown, came to a head when the government was pressured to adhere to international human rights standards. A number of incidents took place in the post-1997 economy that drew national attention to the need for reform in the buying and selling of sex. On September 12, 2000, about one year before Bad Guy premiered (in November 2001 at the Busan Film Festival), a fire broke out in the red-light district in Gunsan, a city situated in North Jeolla province. Five women, who were locked in a room by the owner of the brothel in which they worked, were burned to death. In January 2002, another fire in Gunsan killed twelve women and one man. Both incidents raised public awareness on the exploitation of trafficked women and prompted women’s rights groups to seek legal reforms to protect the victims of prostitution. Organizing under the Korean Women’s Associations United, these groups forcefully argued that prostitution violated international human rights and demanded the legal protection of women involved in the sex trade. In 2001, in the first Trafficking in Persons report conducted by the US State Department, Korea received a Tier 3 rating, the lowest ranking possible for combating the transport of “young female Koreans […] primarily for sexual exploitation.”40 The report embarrassingly contradicted the efforts of Kim Dae Jung’s administration to promote gender equality and human rights in the new, more transparent Korea. With national and international pressure mounting, combined with the desire to integrate more fully with the global community, the government was ready to decisively confront this increasingly public issue. In March 2004, the National Assembly passed two anti-prostitution laws that would replace Park Chung-hee’s “Law Against Morally Depraved Behavior.” The “Act on the Punishment of Procuring Prostitution and Associated Acts” penalized the purchasers and traffickers of sex workers with substantial fines and imprisonment of up to ten years depending on the activity. And the “Act on the Prevention of Prostitution and Protection of Victims” ensured the provision of medical assistance and counseling for individuals who provide sexual services. Notably, for the first time, sex workers were considered “trafficking victims” (“seongmaemae pihaeja”) within the language of the law and treated as such. The government quickly proceeded to shut down red-light districts and deter would-be johns by enforcing their criminalization according to the new laws.

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Despite these and other measures to eliminate the sex trade, as well as improve the human rights standing of South Korea in the world, the response among sex workers was somewhat unexpected. In October and November 2004, over 2,700 women went to the streets to protest these new policies, claiming that they delegitimized workers who entered into the trade voluntarily. They publicly refused the belief that they were coerced into the sex industry and, in the name of universal human rights, affirmed their status as laborers who willingly chose their profession. Some engaged in hunger strikes, others shaved their heads, and a few even attempted to commit suicide in protest. The crackdowns on the red-light districts that took place after 1997, they argued, disrupted their income flow and threatened their livelihoods. Many that were already living in poverty and functioning as the primary breadwinner of their households lost their only source of income. In September 2011, over 1,600 prostitutes took to the streets again to protest Korea’s anti-prostitution laws, donning baseball caps, sunglasses, and masks to hide their identity. According to the 2004 law, a “victim” of sex trafficking is legally defined as a “person who is forced to sell sex by means of deceptive scheme, force, or other forms of coercion.” In Bad Guy, Sun-hwa is violently coerced into prostitution by Han-gi and never successfully escapes the circumstances of her victimization. Indeed, Kim takes coercion to the extreme, ending his film with the image of their codependent love, one that is inseparable from the dynamics of power that conventionally subtends the relationship between pimp and prostitute. Meanwhile, Korean sex workers at this time refused their status as victims, rallying like minjung workers protesting the forces of neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, the minjung movement of the 1980s and 90s raised the public awareness of the plight of sex workers in Korean history and galvanized the historical injustice perpetrated by Japanese and US imperialist forces on yanggongjus (even if it was in the name of nationalist activism). Offering a reading of the history depicted in Address Unknown, sociologist Hyun Sook Kim, in her essay on the allegorical trope of the yanggongju, reminds us against fetishizing and inadvertently reproducing the relations of power “inscribed in the reading, writing and public presentations of women as the victim, the oppressed, and the exploited. Instead of essentializing the experiences of the women of Kijich’on as categorically ‘Yanggongju,’ we must begin acknowledging the agency, subjectivity, and resistance of working-class women.”41 Still, anthropologist Sealing Cheng notes that, despite the reforms put in place by the 2004 laws, the political stakes for the naming and protection of victims persists. Over against the category “victim” remain “prostitutes”

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who are still criminalized due to the gendered logic of nationalist biopolitics and its articulation through state power: With the introduction of the term ‘victims of prostitution’ and its silent counterpart ‘prostitutes,’ the laws highlighted that only innocent women who have been coerced deserve protection from the state, distinguishing between good women who are worthy of help and the bad ones who need to be punished. The laws thus perpetuate the stigma of prostitution and the virgin/whore dichotomy. The protection offered by the new laws is therefore only for ‘authentic’ victims – whose sexual purity has been violated. 42

At stake here is the capacity of sovereign power to make distinctions between “good” and “bad” women, between authentic victims and criminal prostitutes. Who makes these distinctions and how is their power to decide legitimated? Indeed, the protests and resistance expressed by sex workers to the 2004 laws seem to call for a new ethics between the state and its citizens. An alternative mechanism for sympathizing with suffering, beset upon individuals seems necessary, one that does not depend on a predetermined, juridical definition of victimhood. Though at first sight they may seem to differ in their claims to victimization, both Bad Guy and the contemporaneous history of sex work in Korea nevertheless pose a similar question, and both point toward a singular critique – specifically of the normative morality that underpins modern understandings of prostitution. Kim’s untimely critique of a post-colonial, victimized subject seems to call for a new politics, one more appropriate to a new millennial Korea. For both Bad Guy and the historical reality to which it corresponds reflect on, and are reflective of, notions of sex work in transition, from patriarchal imaginations of the “western princess” in 1970 to the juridical definition of the “victim” in the 2000s.43 Indeed, Kim’s film does not provide easy identifications of the “virgin,” the “whore,” or even the “bad guy.” Depicting a world of sex workers and hooligans, Bad Guy challenges the viewer to ask how such a world has become so morally problematic in the first place and who deems it so. In order to show how this critique is made possible, we need to know how the movies have conventionally brought morality together with victimhood. As I hope to show, the representations in Kim’s Bad Guy work precisely in tension with these conventions and in turn bridge film art with the new ethics of contemporary Korean subjectivity. In her ethnography of eight Korean women, based on interviews conducted between 1992 and 2001, anthropologist Nancy Abelmann argues for

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the pervasiveness of melodramatic forms in contemporary South Korean culture. She notes that, “there is hardly a page of my field notes without mention of a television soap opera or melodramatic film,” and observes that for these women television dramas and films provided a vocabulary for understanding their life struggles. 44 In her analysis, Abelmann argues that emotional excess, traditionally understood within theatrical, literary, and cinematic convention, is conveyed through melodrama, thus pointing to broad social transformations in the public sphere. This model has remained particularly effective for thinking through a number of historical narratives including national trauma, the geopolitics of the peninsula in relation to Japan, China, and the US, the tragedy of national division, and the experience of Korea’s compressed modernity. According to this line of thinking, these larger cultural and societal upheavals are refracted through melodrama and made legible through the private drama of human individuals depicted in the cinema. In the year Address Unknown and Bad Guy were shown in international film festivals and select domestic theaters, Failan (2001), which tells a melodramatic story about a Mainland immigrant who searches for her relatives in Korea, was released to some commercial success. One of the most successful Korean films of all time, Tae Guk Gi (2004), tells the heartrending story of two brothers who are split apart along ideological lines and are forced to fight each other in the Korean War. The political division of the peninsula into North and South is understood through the melodrama of division between blood relatives. Finally, the hit romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (2001) tells the story of a young couple whose pursuit of individual love contradicts the parents of the female lead, played by Jun Ji-hyun. Suffering because their love remains impossible, they make plans to meet after two years under an old tree, where they buried a time capsule. They miss their planned meeting but the melodrama is resolved through their coming together at the film’s conclusion as if by fate. For our purposes, we need to consider how victims and perpetrators are implicated, not only in relation to morality, but also in relation to the spectator’s capacity to sympathize and grieve with victims in the cinema. The modern representation of the prostitute in South Korea corresponds with a key aspect of Linda Williams’s revision of cinematic melodrama: the victim-hero of historical circumstance who, over the course of a film, is recognized for their virtue. In her 1998 essay, “Melodrama Revised,” as well as in her 2002 book, Playing the Race Card, Williams calls melodrama “the fundamental mode” of popular American moving pictures. 45 She describes a number of assumptions that subtend character development within the melodramatic mode, including the presence of a psychological

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interiority or “moral occult,” the pursuit of a state of innocence, the dialectic of “too early” and “too late” that accounts for the emotional excess and tears shed by the spectator, and the Manichean binary between good and evil. Williams reminds us that viewers attend the cinema “not to think but to be moved” and that viewers come to feel for suffering, selfless, and virtuous characters. 46 By allowing victims to be recognized as virtuous, melodramatic films also allow spectators to sympathize with their plight and be cathartically moved before the image of their pathos. When their interior virtue is exteriorized for the film viewer, the viewer is also offered the opportunity to take up a position of moral judgment in relation to diegetic characters and to decide which of them are to be liked or despised. This pursuit of determining a moral interiority, grounded in the belief in an irreducible soul, guides the sympathies of spectator and allows him or her a position of sovereign judgment. Victimhood therefore solicits sympathy and mobilizes the moved spectator’s demand for retribution against the perpetrator of violence, to decide who is to be rewarded and who is to be punished. When traditional social institutions and beliefs have lost their legitimacy to consolidate culture in modernity, melodrama emerges as a particularly compelling means for producing notions of virtue that will stand in for these lost institutions and beliefs. Melodrama is, as Williams summarizes Peter Brooks, “a quintessentially modern (though not modernist) form arising out of a particular historical conjecture: the postrevolutionary, post-Enlightenment, postsacred world where traditional imperatives of truth and morality had been violently questioned and yet in which there was still a need to forge some semblance of truth and morality.”47 The melodramatic emerges in modernity when the aims of modern democracy cannot be realized, when traditional victims agonize, not because of fate, but because of circumstances beyond their control. When a character suffers because he or she has been victimized by violence, rendered incapable of exercising their humanist self, wronged in a manner that inhibits their freedom of expression or their capacity to compete fairly within neoliberal capitalism, melodrama ensues. The viewer’s “heart” may be said to “go out” to such characters. He or she subsequently “roots” for these virtuous “underdogs.” By sympathizing with a virtuous character, the viewer feels the narrative gain momentum, is “moved” by a film, as their destiny unfolds. Williams calls melodrama a “mode” because such freedoms, capacities, and notions are thought to belong essentially to the human individual and because melodrama’s aspirations are integral to an already global cinematic metaphysics in our time.

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The personal becomes of utmost significance in that it becomes a theat­ rical, yet hidden realm to be discovered by the film viewer. This hidden domain Brooks calls the “moral occult,” whose invisible presence assures the spectator that the individuals who inhabit our world embody predictable and meaningful interiorities. Film scholar Christine Gledhill notes in this regard that the notion of personhood is derived precisely from this interiorization of modern, societal contradictions: “Melodrama sets out to demonstrate within the transactions of everyday life the continuing operation of a Manichean battle between good and evil which infuses human actions with ethical consequences and therefore with significance.”48 In a post-sacred world where premodern notions of good and evil have lost their legitimacy, melodrama provides a narrative form for ascertaining morality in the midst of such a world perceived to have fallen. Indeed, as characters become increasingly complex with respect to their morality, they may be said to become “fleshed out” or “three-dimensional.” Sympathetic characters are said to possess a “heart of gold.” In Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy, Young-ho’s virtue coalesces around the presence of a moral occult and its allegorical expression of modern South Korean history. As we saw in the film, the cost of producing a virtuous, human subject remains high, for it can only be consolidated through the spectacular violence of his suffering. Yet, it is precisely this intensified form of melodrama that piques the breaking point between spectatorial identification and alienation. Williams’s insights not only concern the way spectators imbue on-screen bodies with interiorities that are to be judged morally. This power of judgment is also aligned with the look of the camera. Like human beings that exist in reality, the content of characters that appear in narrative cinema may be discerned through their facial expressions and physical behavior, as the body becomes a surface where virtue is made legible. Distanced from the diegesis, the film spectator is afforded the right to decide on the moral legitimacy of the characters and offered the opportunity to ascertain their guilt and innocence. Images of human bodies become human beings imbued with plausible emotions, guided by goal-oriented actions, and, as such, acquire grievability. Seeing bolsters the right of moral judgment through the viewer’s voyeuristic position, for by seeing and not being seen, he or she is allowed to judge in relative safety. Acquiring a power not unlike that associated with Plato’s Ring of Gyges, who grants its owner invisibility, the voyeuristic viewer, sitting in a darkened room, is relieved of moral consequence while retaining the righteous power of judging the justifiability of character action. In her famous essay on visual pleasure, Laura Mulvey notes that the power of the look is “backed by a certainty of legal right” that

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legitimizes the judgment of the guilty woman, who is the object of the male gaze. “True perversion,” Mulvey writes, “is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness – the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong.”49 The cinematic apparatus imputes a transcendental, phallocentric subject whose look totalizes the visual field, bolstering the normative presumptions of its judgmental acts of viewing. Williams’s elucidation of the melodramatic mode shows us that this transcendental subject is one who possesses the power of moral discernment and is the all-seeing subject who is entitled to recognize the virtue of the victim-hero. Kim’s Bad Guy adopts the narrative strategies of the melodramatic mode, not to move spectators to sympathize with the victim-heroes of the film, but to undo the discursive means for producing this sympathy. In precisely this sense, Kim’s films perform a deconstruction of the fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures. Thus, the sympathetic human victim that is the hallmark of melodrama is subverted from within by figures that have been deemed unsympathetic or even inhuman – thugs, prostitutes, those living in poverty, half-breeds, dogs, etc. Returning to specific moments from the film, we can see that the critical ethics of visual pleasure that was so insistent in Address Unknown is reiterated in key moments throughout Bad Guy. The scenes where Sun-hwa solicits customers for sex pique the curiosity of the viewer in the lurid and taboo through the voyeuristic look. She brings men into her small, dimly lit room, where a one-way mirror has been installed along one of its walls. As in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), the one-way mirror enables the scopophilia of the viewer, instigating a dynamic of looking and not being looked-at that constitutes a highly ambivalent spectatorial sovereignty. In the American film by the German director, the character who performs the looking (Travis Henderson, played by Harry Dean Stanton) is largely sympathetic, yet in the South Korean counterpart, the spectator is forced to see alongside a largely unsympathetic character: the pimp Han-gi. On the one hand, he watches in order to secure Sun-hwa’s safety. When customers become violent, forcing themselves upon her and demanding that she work when she is unwilling, Han-gi calls in his henchmen to beat and remove the unruly john. On the other hand, as Sun-hwa reluctantly acclimates to her indebtedness and somehow adjusts to life as a sex worker, the one-way mirror enables a visual pleasure that reiterates the phantasmatic experience of fullness belonging to the coherent ego. Han-gi observes Sun-hwa undressing and sleeping with men she met only moments ago. His face remains expressionless as the film cuts between his point-of-view and his reactions to what he sees. These shots

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recall those in Address Unknown when Ji-hum peeps in on Eun-ok’s sexual play with her puppy, placing the film spectator in a position of complicity with the voyeuristic camera. At one point, one of the working girls tells Han-gi, “It’s strange. It feels like somebody is watching me.” Surveillance and scopophilia: these modes of looking, both intrinsic to Kim’s cinema, are self-reflexively thematized throughout Bad Guy. However, this position of spectatorial complicity soon undergoes critique. Out of a desire to make Sun-hwa his girlfriend, one of Han-gi’s henchmen, Myung-su, helps her escape. She runs off, wanders the streets of Seoul, and approaches the house of someone she knows, possibly that of her family. As soon as she knocks on the door, Han-gi pulls up next to her and drags her back into his small SUV. They drive to a nearby beach, and in a moment that alludes to Kim’s film, Birdcage Inn, Sun-hwa finds a ripped up photo in the sand, whose pieces she quickly pockets. She is returned to the red-light district and is physically beaten by the brothel madam. Back in her room, Sun-hwa assembles the pieces of the photo together like a puzzle. It depicts a couple embracing each other on the beach; however, the image is missing the pieces of their faces. As Sun-hwa becomes acclimated to her entrapment, she also seems to relinquish her claim to victimization and through this, renounces the spectator’s sympathy with her plight. Following her failed escape, she becomes increasingly insistent in her designated role as a sex worker. A turning point occurs after Han-gi chases a local gangster, a violent and feared man among the prostitutes, away from the brothel. The gangster is murdered and Han-gi is sent to jail (Kim will reuse the same jail four years later in 3-Iron). Feeling the absence of her guardian pimp, Sun-hwa becomes short tempered and easily enraged. The madam observes her irate behavior and remarks that, “He’s the one who made you like this. Isn’t it good for you [that he’s in jail]?” Later, they visit Han-gi in the prison’s visitation room. Unlike the one-way mirror that separates them in her bedroom, a clear pane of glass allows for a dialogue between the jailed man and his visitor. Sun-hwa chastises her pimp, expressing anger underpinned somehow by affection: “You cannot die like this! You ruin me and die just like that?” Bursting into tears, she tells him, “Come out, you dirty son of a bitch! Hurry and come out! You can’t die like this.” On the way back to the brothel, Sun-hwa is given the opportunity to leave, but she refuses, choosing to return to her sex work. If the safety of the film viewer is secured through the dramatization of the look behind the one-way mirror, this position is threated in a key scene later in the film. As Sun-hwa is in the process of taking another customer into her room, the madam tells her that Han-gi has been released from

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Fig. 4: Han-gi allows himself to be seen. Courtesy of Lifesize Entertainment

prison. She suddenly becomes irate again, screaming and slapping the male client until he leaves. Sun-hwa then approaches the mirror and looks into it, peering beyond her reflection. On the other side, Han-gi flicks his lighter on. Its flame illuminates his face and allows her to see him. The one-way mirror becomes, like the transparent glass in the prison, a medium for a two-way visual dialogue. While Han-gi’s eye is not impaled with a sharp pencil, as with Chang-guk in Address Unknown, the ethical critique is similar. He allows himself to see and be seen, and through this relinquishes the epistemological and moral privilege that is typically claimed by the voyeuristic spectator. By giving himself over to becoming the object of other’s gaze, he consents to the exposure of the self. Sun-hwa grabs a plastic ashtray and shatters the glass that separates her from Han-gi. She looks into the hole and stares at him directly. The film then cuts to a point of view behind the mirror once again, except that the spectator is allowed an unfettered view of the couple facing each other as they sit on the bed. Sun-hwa slaps Han-gi out of anger, and he quickly embraces her. In tears, she eventually gives in and returns his embrace. With Han-gi released from jail, from this moment they will enter into a relationship, characterized by exploitation, dysfunction, social marginality, and love. If, as I argued in the previous section of this chapter, Kim’s Address Unknown and its visual ethics coalesces around the face-to-face encounter, in Bad Guy the sovereignty of the viewer is dethroned and demoralized in this scene, foregrounding the discursive structure of power that legitimates his or her constituting look. Both films problematize the

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dynamic of power conventionally associated with the binary between looker and looked-at, while dismantling the righteous morality that governs the difference between “virgins” and “whores.” And both films pave the way toward a new humility toward the other through critique, moving beyond the melodramatics that ascribe, in advance, the strict binary between victim and perpetrator. Indeed, in the history of cinema, perhaps no other figure has been the subject of female victimhood and misfortune more than the exploited and suffering prostitute. In films such as Traffic in Souls (1913), The Life of Oharu (1952), Nights of Cabiria (1957), Taxi Driver (1976), and The Flowers of War (2011), the prostitute has elicited strong feelings of sympathy and tragedy. However, in Bad Guy, Sun-hwa falls in love with her pimp and accepts her fate in a way that pushes the viewer’s melodramatic sympathy to the limit. Kim’s film works with the melodramatic mode, utilizing its means of constituting victim-heroes with which the spectator is to sympathize, in order to upend it from within. This undecidability is perhaps why spectators of his films experience visual and narrative pleasure and then seem to be “punished” immediately for partaking in such pleasure. Bad Guy violates the ideological assumption that all human beings are to realize their full potential in capitalist democracy and of the inherent “rightness” of its grounding principles. If melodrama “begins, and wants to end, in a space of innocence,” at the end of Bad Guy Sun-hwa’s innocence is far from being restored, as her fate seems to hang between tragic oppression and unexplainable desire.50 Kim’s film initially compels the viewer to acquire sympathy for her oppressed state. Yet, at its conclusion, the film puts into radical question the discursive mode that constitutes Sun-hwa as grievable character in the first place. As their rickety van drives into the hills in the final shot of Bad Guy, the moral outrage typically elicited by images of sexually coerced women is made problematic and the visual regime that enables quick moral judgment is rendered inoperable. The inhumane “bad guy,” the pimp Han-gi, is not narratively punished for his sins. Like the evil Anton Chigurgh at the end of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), he is allowed to go free, dissatisfying viewers’ desire for retribution and frustrating their demand to see those who have been deemed evil receive their due penance. For viewers who believe that human beings exist in an implicitly moral universe, the worlds depicted in Kim’s films remain hopelessly pessimistic, inhabited by others who cannot be trusted and who cannot be sympathized with. And for spectators who have been habituated to the melodramatic expectations of dominant cinema and its

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discursive structures of righteous visual pleasure, their demand for justice remains unfulfilled at the end of Bad Guy and their moral certainty is left unsettled. This experience of melodramatic destabilization is where both of Kim’s films from 2001, Address Unknown and Bad Guy, converge on a critique of the expectations of film spectatorship. Both of Kim’s films problematize the assumptions and prejudices of dominant spectatorship so that moral judgment is withheld. The binary between good and evil and its generic representation in the cinema undergoes critique, so that the other may be approached without the ideological crutches associated with the melodramatic mode. To borrow from Linda Williams again, specifically from an essay about Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991), it is precisely because Bad Guy sets “[itself] up so grandly to fail,” to fail to satisfy the melodramatic expectations of the film viewer, that Kim’s film “actually succeeds.”51 This unsettling, political critique is inseparable from the films’ aesthetics, and, in this sense, Kim’s cinema resists discourses of identity and identification in order to produce an experience of radical difference so that one may begin to understand. In an interview conducted in 2002, Kim speaks of this: In the case of Bad Guy I first have to say that I really don’t like people like Han-gi, but there was an incident when I met somebody who worked in the red light district. He beat me up for no reason, and at the time I hated that man. In that situation I did not understand him at all, but I wanted to try and do so. Through this movie I tried to probe into the character’s psyche to find out what makes him do these things.52

Rather than continue the cycle of hatred and violence, Kim produced Bad Guy in order to try and “understand” his tormentor, to make a spectacle of difference in order to overcome it. “Filmmaking is my attempt to understand the world, which I have failed to understand,” Kim remarked in 2001, “a world of kindness and warmth overlooked by my habitual ignorance with different perspectives.”53 His films implore the spectator to do the same. They confront the means by which film viewers understand victims and perpetrators of violence, and challenge spectators to affirm forms of ethnic, gendered, and socioeconomic otherness outside the expectations associated with melodrama mode. Not to do so would itself be an act of violence, one that imposes onto the faces of worldly others the determinations and meanings always already circumscribed by the self.

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Coda: The Other Repetition in Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (2003) The viewer of Kim’s cinema is offered no respite from the unending gloom, for a pattern of repetition prevents any sense of character development and no relief is offered in the space of the home or family. Eun-ok, Chang-guk, and Ji-hum each sustain an injury to the eye. The repetition of the same letter sent, each time returned, underscores what Deleuze calls the “bad repetition,” indicating a failure to work through trauma.54 The static melancholy of the film confirms a world lost to the logic of the eternal return, a world that seems to have just emerged from catastrophe. But while the circles of cruelty that link characters together seem to preclude any escape from Pyongtaek in 1970, or Seoul in 2001, we may still ask ourselves if redemption is possible at all. For the moment, we can say that Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown and Bad Guy put into motion an oscillation between redemption and its impossibility, staging the ethics of looking and its concomitant critique within the context of a rapidly globalizing world. In 2003, a film called Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! had its premiere at the Busan Film Festival. Written and directed by the twins Gok Kim and Sun Kim, Capitalist Manifesto is a low-budget, feature-length film that revolves around a small community of poor, marginalized individuals: a young man who sells pornography, an old man who peddles toy piggy banks, three thugs who incessantly play hwatu (a Korean card game), an old woman who lures young men into her brothel, and a student ostracized for selling her body. As in Address Unknown, this community, doleful and without happiness, is forged through the logic of exchange. Fashionable clothes are given for sex, sex is given in exchange for “satisfaction,” and violence is traded for pornography. Capitalist Manifesto depicts the hopelessness of life for the underprivileged and oppressed, marginalized by the neoliberal agenda of the IMF, as the logics of capitalist exchange and commodity reification have become increasingly total and determinative of modern life. Kyung Hyun Kim, in a poignant commentary on the world depicted in the Kims’ film, writes: Human life has been reduced to the mechanical repetition of the same moralistic lines, the traversing of the same spaces between work and home, with occasional side trips to convenience stores and restaurants, the consumption of the same junk food and junk movies, and the struggle to get ahead in the rat race the capitalist system has prescribed. The

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twins’ upside-down world disturbs us even more once we realize that their apocalyptic drama is actually our own reality.55

The film depicts the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Korean thinking and desiring, and the moral fallout resultant from the monetization of the world. The opening scene of Capitalist Manifesto sets up a seedy situation. A young man is enticed by an old woman, standing next to a garbage dumpster, to purchase the services of a prostitute. He asks whether the girl will “do anything I want” and is led down a dark alleyway, up the stairs of a sordid, concrete apartment building and into an unclean hall lined by doors. They argue once more about the price of the service, relative to other brothels he has visited. The old woman remarks that, “We make little profit in this business.” Finally, she opens the door to an apartment and announces that a customer has arrived. Cutting to a dark room, he pays the money and switches on the light. The camera pans and shows, not a woman selling sex, but three men playing cards. The john then enters the frame and bows to the men, calling one of them his “boss.” Following a jump cut, they begin talking about “how many” were sold – of what, it is not clear. “To make money you have to work hard,” the boss explains. The man then leaves. He inexplicably enters, not the dirty hallway from which he came, but an internet café. Before he is given an opportunity to speak to a woman at the front desk, the film cross-cuts back to the room of gangsters playing cards. The young man, who is called Booja, is then shown grilling meat in the room and drinking soju. The film continues in this manner, disrupting linear continuity in time and space, and radically violating narrative continuity. The narrative fragmentation elicited by these strange traversals emphasizes the logic of commodif ication and exchange that subtends the relations between diverse people and disparate things throughout Capitalist Manifesto. A butcher explains to Booja that each part of a pig, side pork and shoulder butt, carries a different price according to the cut. “The more you want, the more it costs,” he remarks. The f ilm then cuts to a cheap motel where a woman lies naked on a yo, a Korean mattress, underneath a blanket. She speaks to a man smoking next to her and demands to be paid. “My service was the best today! We did it two times with my mouth and three times with my anus,” she protests. The price depends on which part of her body is used during the sex act. A cut of an animal is equated with a part of a woman’s body: the juxtaposition of shots underscores how commodification enables the monetary exchange of qualitatively different entities. As if to express the closed cycle of money

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and ethics, both men in these situations repeat the question, “How much?” In another sequence, a female student negotiates sex with a male professor in a train station. The conversation is both mundane and sleazy. However, their interaction is filmed in split-screen, underscoring the ontological distance between them through their prescribed social roles. Each of their heads is in a frame of their own, as if to depict a kind of an everyday ethics, circumscribed by the violence of objectification and pure exchange-value, between a young prostitute and her middle-aged customer, woman and man, self and other. Address Unknown, Bad Guy, and Capitalist Manifesto do not simply represent the historical world and they do not merely depict Korean culture. In Cinema 2, Deleuze reverses the hierarchy that underlies the assumption that film mimetically represents an already existing reality, writing that, “It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.”56 It could be said, correspondingly, that everyday life under contemporary neoliberalism has increasingly come to look like a “bad” melodrama. These films respond to this social reality, not by straightforwardly reflecting it, but by provoking, by appropriating this reality and radicalizing it. Earlier I aligned the worlds depicted in Kim Ki-duk’s films with the impulse-image and the oblivion of naturalism. Deleuze characterizes the films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel in this manner, particularly in their depiction of eternal repetition. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie (1972) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), cycles of Nietzschean eternal return rob time of the assumption that it must progress to some teleological end. The repetitions of a dinner party, or scenes in which the same two guests are repeatedly introduced, resist the moral order of a film’s conclusion whereby good and evil are to be clearly delineated. Instead, repetition reveals its secret intention to fail (the failure to gather friends for dinner in Discreet Charm and the failure to leave a room in The Exterminating Angel). Nevertheless, Deleuze holds out hope for redemption, even in the face of imminent failure: “But is not repetition capable of breaking out of its own cycle and of ‘leaping’ beyond good and evil? It is repetition which ruins and degrades us, but it is repetition which can save us and allow us to escape from the other repetition.”57 Similarly, Capitalist Manifesto presents the viewer with Kafkaesque, repetitive diegeses that produce negative reactions in the viewer. Yet it does so in order to draw attention to the presence of colonialization and the commodification of human subjectivity that has become inseparable from the moral melodrama of everyday life. Capitalist Manifesto instigates lines of critical questioning how we typically look, hear, and moralize the world.

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Address Unknown, Bad Guy, and Capitalist Manifesto expose the hidden violence and resentment of those whose lives were affected negatively by the financial crisis and who were not offered redemption through government assistance. And while they confront the bad film of the increasingly neoliberal world in different ways, they all revolve around the problem of violence that is inherent in the ethics of this economy. In the next chapter, I will expand on these themes introduced by Capitalist Manifesto. Specifically, I will discuss how capitalist exchange deeply informs the problem of ethics by focusing on a narrative logic that underpins a great deal of melodramatic cinema: revenge.

2.

Love Your Enemies

In an interview conducted in 2002, the year after Address Unknown and Bad Guy premiered in South Korean theaters, Kim Ki-duk was asked to describe the source of his “han” (恨). This concept, sometimes characterized as uniquely Korean, encompasses a number of subjective meanings, including “resentment,” “unresolved suffering,” and the “feeling of inferiority.” Explaining these feelings, Kim remarks with his typical provocativeness: My Han stems from my belief that I am not able to fit into either mainstream society or its cultural fringes. Other Koreans who are in the same situation have inferiority complexes. Fortunately, I could overcome my own feelings of inferiority a few years ago by leaving Korea and going to France. This international experience helped me discover myself.1

In the previous chapter, I tried to show how the violent imagery in Kim’s films produces the experience of alterity, an experience that reflects the inability of dominant ideology to account for subject positions that have historically been excluded from it. Address Unknown and Bad Guy make visible the lives and histories of the ostracized, forcing viewers to experience these histories as radically different. They depict individuals who may be characterized through their han, for their lives do not conform to the narrative precepts of popular melodrama and its moral occult, and like the filmmaker himself, survive in the blind spots of commercial cinema. Kim remarks that he “overcame” his feelings of inferiority when he left Korea and temporarily lived in France as a sidewalk artist. Cinema played a role in this process of overcoming through his attempts to understand those who have been misunderstood. In the following discussion, I would like to show how three films by Park Chan-wook perform a similar critique. The spectacles of violence in both Kim’s and Park’s films function analogously: they interrogate the moralizing gaze of the film spectator and raise fundamental questions revolving around the ethics of the other. However, as we shall see, Park is concerned with a specific aspect of this ethics, namely the logic of revenge and its relationship to cinematic narrativity. We can begin by thinking about the relationship of han to violence. Kim suggests that his han was associated with the awareness of an irreconcilable ontological difference between himself and others who have maintained their class position through university and family connections. Han is a

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historical term that gained political legitimacy through minjung theology and historiography to consolidate the feeling of Koreans who have been victimized and made to feel inferior by feudal, colonial, patriarchal, foreign, or authoritarian powers. Han is often described as accumulating, thus making way for the possibility of a violent lashing out, as anthropologist Nancy Abelmann describes in the following: Its latency makes it powerful; when the experience, collective or individual, is not the source of self-conscious action, han is only further ‘building up,’ becoming a greater force to fuel an eventual ‘blow-up.’ Indeed, in the very way that people talk about han, they talk about something that eventually explodes.2

When individuals are wronged, resentment builds. Beset victims melodramatically elicit the moral outrage of the viewer and become sympathetic actors of history. And when resentment accumulates and explodes, violence ensues. Another way of considering the violence unleashed by the accumulation of han is in terms of revenge. Just revenge, which pursues righteous ends through violent means, is another way of defining han that has found someone to blame, an other who has become the focus of its explosive violence. This logic is precisely that depicted in three films by Park Chanwook: JSA: Joint Security Area (2000), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), and Oldboy (2003). When these films were first shown, they were hailed as showcasing a unique auteurist vision that skillfully renegotiates popular genres within the constraints of the culture industry. Park was touted as a director of international renown when Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. In all of these films, as well as in his other work, Park’s protagonists are motivated by the passionate desire to right a wrong that was done to them in the past. During the time of their victimized suffering, their resentment toward the other, their han, builds and explodes in the carrying out of their vengeance. To be clear, by deploying the concept of han in this way, I aim to avoid all essentializing uses of the term. As an analytic category, han cannot wholly explain the ethnic specificity of Koreans and thus the resentment signified by the word cannot be said to belong exclusively to the Korean “race.” It is a concept that is culturally constituted and inseparable from the contingencies of Korean history. On the other hand, some have claimed that han remains conceptually indef inable and thus its use should be avoided altogether. I believe that the analytical use of han can maintain

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some critical force if it is understood, as it is within minjung thinking, as a category to designate a condition of unresolved suffering. As we will see, the meaning of han gains global and philosophical depth when thought in relation to contemporary Korean cinema. Hye Seung Chung, for instance, links this concept to the mobilization of melodramatic feeling: From the point of view of genre studies, han can be better understood as a historically and culturally specific mobilization of what Peter Brooks def ines as the ‘melodramatic imagination’ or ‘melodramatic mode.’ Han indeed connotes melodramatic affect and sensibility in the Korean context.3

Seen in the context of the melodramatic mode, Chung’s formulation allows us to see how, at certain key moments, the narrative trajectory implied by han overlaps with the narrative of beset victims who seek to discharge their suffering. We should remind ourselves that melodrama is not simply a genre, but a dominant mode of popular cinema, a way of sculpting viewer expectations such that morality appears continuous, legible, and predictable in a post-sacred, post-traditional world. The victim-hero that Williams describes in her essay thus may be said to embody han, and because of this, acquires grievability issued from the judgmental gaze of the film spectator. The spectacle of violence, of wounded souls and injured bodies, has an intimate connection to melodrama. It is not simply a “women’s” genre, comprised of weepy, overly emotional films about tragic love that are meant to induce tears and feelings of pathos in the spectator. Melodrama as Williams describes it also helps explain the paroxysms viewers experience in “masculine,” action-oriented films that facilitate the recognition of virtue through the spectacular suffering of the heroic, male body. For example, she explains that when the self-reliant and virile John Rambo in First Blood (1982), traumatized by the experience of the Vietnam War, weeps in the arms of his former commander, his pathos stems from his loss of innocence and the impossibility of turning back time. Through the spectacle of Rambo’s suffering, the spectator sympathizes with this victim-hero and recognizes that the war veteran virtuously and selflessly acted in the way he felt was necessary to restore his lost innocence. The action sequences leading up to this moment of recognition function to delay and therefore heighten its melodrama. As Williams reminds us, “the cost of this melodramatic virtue is high: it must act out the very violence that it wants to deter.”4 Her claims are insightful for illuminating the nature of melodrama in the cinema, and the films by Park I will discuss in a moment certainly

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feature male bodies in action. However, her definition of melodrama does not delve into why, as a mode of popular cinema, it must be accepted to be “true.” In other words, Williams does not speculate specifically on why melodrama is compelled to inscribe virtue onto characters in the first place. She does not elaborate in detail on how melodrama is subtended by capitalism and democracy, nor does she elucidate the philosophical presuppositions about the moral human being and the kind of spectator implied by the melodramatic film. In what follows, I wish to elaborate on Williams’s claims regarding melodrama and its justification of revenge, taking recourse at moments to writings by Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, in order to connect them to the construction of narrative and the temporal nature of the cinematic medium. Through this analysis, I hope to show how Park’s films continue to exploit the ethics of cinematic violence.

Sophie’s Choice in JSA: Joint Security Area (2000) “It’s unfavorable evidence to the South. Shot him again after he was already down. The murder was carried out in execution style. It’s usually then when revenge is the motive.” So remarks Sophie Jean (Lee Young-ae) in a scene set in a morgue in Park Chan-wook’s blockbuster-style film, JSA: Joint Security Area. As Sophie speaks, she extends her arm downward to reenact the pose the executioner must have taken. Sophie then turns and inspects the dead body of a North Korean lying immobile on an autopsy table. She peers intently at the gaping bullet hole in the back of his head and ascertains that he was mercilessly shot by a South Korean. A Swiss national with a Korean father, Sophie is considered politically neutral and speaks Korean fluently. She and a Swedish investigator have been assigned by the United Nations to reconstruct violent events that occurred on October 28 (year not indicated) between soldiers from the North and South, three days before their arrival. So far, we know that two grim murders took place in Panmunjom, a small village situated between the two Koreas. The task now is to analyze their lifeless bodies for clues about how they died. The male pathologist turns to the second body and motions for his assistants to turn the corpse over. He calmly remarks to Sophie that there were “a total of eight shots. Unbelievable […] shot from such a close range, they went right through him.” The excessive number of bullets for the second murder prompts Sophie to comment gravely that, “the shot that killed Jeong was carefully aimed and fired to kill. But the rest were fired at Jeong impulsively – an interesting difference.” They continue to examine the

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Fig. 5: Sophie demonstrates how a North Korean was murdered. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

corpses, but the clues seem only to shroud the motive behind their killing in deeper mystery. In order to continue her investigation, Sophie will verbally interrogate all the surviving officers. With the quickly escalating possibility of war breaking out between the two Koreas, Sophie is under increased pressure to explain what happened. “Our job is to find not who, but why,” Major General Bruno Botta (Christoph Hofrichter) remarks during a briefing, “also what’s important is not the outcome, but the procedure.” She jokes that, “So my job then is to stand at the borderline and ask, ‘Could you please tell me why you pulled the trigger?’” Her non-aligned position, at the borderline between North and South, is presumably that of an unbiased arbitrator. Through her position of political impartiality, Sophie will enjoy the privilege of legitimizing the truth of what transpired in Panmunjom. Vengeance requires the existence of a past transgression or trauma, which demands that it be met with equal compensation in the present. As an investigator, Sophie interprets testimonies and other traces of the past to understand exactly what happened and why. The film’s formal structure supports this, in that JSA presents the past through a series of subjective flashbacks, each reenacting the official deposition given by the three survivors of the incident. Sophie’s insinuation that the murders were motivated by revenge also motivates the plot of the film itself, for the past gives meaning and purpose to vengeful actions performed in the present. As the film unfolds, the spectator becomes caught up in the investigation as in a crime or noir thriller.5 Both the viewer and Sophie, the film’s detective, are privy to a similar repertoire of accounts and clues, and JSA implicitly compels the spectator to identify with the neutral Swiss protagonist. Guided

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by her evaluation of the gathered clues, expressed through her words, body language, and facial expressions, the viewer partakes in the melodrama that is manifest through the film’s plotting in the manner of a crime story. The analytical stance of the detective overlaps with that of the spectator. Both are tasked with deciding between significant and insignificant evidence and to look beyond the veil of falsity to discover the truth. Park calls forth both Sophie and the viewer as collaborators to observe, judge, and discern – activities enabled by the camera and consolidated through its own non-aligned, technological vision that observes the world from a neutral vantage point. By the end of the film, Sophie is able to reconstruct the important details of the incident by reading and synthesizing the depositions of the survivors. Sophie learns that two South Korean soldiers, Lee Soo-hyuk and Nam Sungshik (Lee Byung-hun and Kim Tae-woo, respectively), regularly sneaked off at night to visit two North Korean soldiers, Oh Kyeong-pil and Jeong Woo-jin (Song Kang-ho and Shin Ha-kyun), in their outpost across the DMZ. This relationship began on February 17, at exactly 17:35, when Kyeong-pil and Woo-jin saved Soo-hyuk’s life by defusing a mine in which he was trapped in a border zone area. Their friendship later developed through a mixture of mutual curiosity and genuine camaraderie. Yet, for obvious reasons, their bond, which became increasingly close over the subsequent months, had to remain hidden from the gaze of their respective superiors. JSA presents these two ostensible enemies coming together through mutual openness and respect, and for a fleeting moment they lay down their weapons, share anecdotes, play children’s games, and exchange gifts. The film entertains the possibility of North and South joining together, not through the politics of diplomacy and public arbitration, but through mutual trust and the politics of friendship. JSA was released only three months after Kim Daejung’s summit meeting with Kim Jong Il, the first such meeting since the Korean War, and seems to reflect the possibility that a shared future could be had involving the two sides. However, Sophie finds out that their secret meetings were tragically brought to an abrupt end when, on October 28 at 02:31, a North Korean patrolman entered the outpost and discovered his comrades consorting with the South. According to the deposition, he entered the outpost with his gun pointed at Soo-Hyuk. Kyeong-pil attempted to diffuse the quickly escalating situation, remarking, “Comrade Choi, please calm down. I’ll explain everything.” The patrolman saw cigarettes, alcohol, and Choco Pies on a wooden box functioning as a table, evidence of their fraternizing, and chastised Kyeong-pil: “You bastard! I put you on guard and you screw

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around with these puppets?” Soo-Hyuk had his gun raised as well, tensely playing out the political deadlock that has characterized official relations between the two countries. According to his testimony, Kyeong-pil tried to convince his superior that the soldiers from the South had come to defect to the North. Not believing him, Comrade Choi commanded Woo-jin to arrest their political enemies. The communist officer slowly raised his gun against his friends. Kyeong-pil grabbed the pistols that were pointed at each other as all five men prepared for mutual annihilation. Speaking calmly, he lowered the guns slowly. But as soon as they holstered their weapons, the auto-reverse function on the tape player switched and began playing South Korean pop music. Confused and disarmed, they reached for their guns again and began firing. In the end, Sophie ascertains that it was Sung-shik who committed the murders and shot the two North Korean soldiers in cold blood, “execution style.” With regard to this key scene in the North Korean outpost, the director comments: “The North Korean soldiers should be killed extremely violently. Their heads are blown into pieces, and their fingers are cut off, because this is the moment when our subconscious communist-phobia violently explodes. Ironically, violence always emerges out of fear for the other.”6 The spectacular violence in this scene is aesthetically depicted, construed through virtuosic cinematic montage. A brief shot shows a hand getting blown off in slow motion. A hanging lamp is sprayed with blood. In the next moment a North Korean soldier is shot in the leg. As the soldier recoils in pain, Park intercuts a shot of a smoking gun, from which a half dozen more shots are fired. It is at this moment that Sung-shik’s newly befriended “younger brother,” Woo-jin, becomes an inanimate corpse. Blood pools around his body and as the camera pans back, it reveals more blood splattered throughout the small, dimly-lit outpost. These bodies were supposed to be those of new friends, old enemies reconciled and long-lost brothers reunited. The tragedy of this explosive scene may be particularly marked for the South Korean viewer, whereby the friendship between North and South seemed momentarily to overcome, as Park puts it, “fear of the other.” In this sense, bodies “blown into pieces” and fingers “cut off” are presented as a series of spectacles, not in order to be celebrated, but to foreground the spectator’s own “communist-phobia.” Suk-Young Kim, in an article on Park’s and other contemporary films dealing with the division of the Korean peninsula called “Crossing the Border to the ‘Other’ Side,” argues that popular films such as JSA, Shiri (1999), and Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) “exposed the anomalous nature of the divided Korea, especially arguing to the viewers

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that the hostile way in which the North and South Korean political regimes have regarded each other for decades should not be applied symmetrically to the ways North and South Korean people relate to each other.”7 Indeed, the violence against the North Koreans in JSA is made problematic in that these ostensible enemies are depicted as humans, whose private conduct and beliefs do not correspond with the ideologies of their respective regimes. Kyeong-pil and Woo-jin have individual hopes and desires, families, and feel pain, “just like us.” They become, in other words, beset victims of the melodramatic mode, a crucial typage that, as revealed by JSA and other popular films dealing with the humanity of North Koreans, constitutes the representation of the divided nation in the new millennium. Moon Jae-cheol notes of Korean New Wave films of the 1990s, which informs the politics of representation in JSA, that its “view of history is melodramatic. The movement criticized the contradictions of reality while seeking the humanism and morals of historical reality.”8 The violence depicted by Park in the film’s penultimate scene is felt as tragic, because the Northerners seemed so sympathetic, no longer Cold War enemies, and because the possibility of friendship was squandered. One entertains the thought that these four human beings could have been great comrades, if only they lived in a world where they were not subject to mutually opposing, dehumanizing, political regimes. As Williams notes, “melodrama is structured on the ‘dual recognition’ of how things are and how they should be.”9 In this connection, we may be reminded of the reunion of families riven apart by the divided nation starting in the year 2000, the year JSA was released in Korean theaters. Made possible in conjunction with Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine Policy, parents and children, siblings and extended family members who had not seen each other for fifty years were allowed to meet. The television footage of these reunions remain heartbreakingly melodramatic. Families should be allowed to be together, one thinks while watching these images, but the geopolitical reality makes it impossible. Jinhee Choi argues that blockbuster films such as JSA adopt Hollywoodstyle narration but tell national stories centering on familiar historical realities in order to appeal to local audiences.10 A recent essay by Nikki J.Y. Lee largely concurs with this, arguing that big-budget Korean films have been successful, not because of their contradictory stance toward Hollywood, but because of their appropriation of Hollywood genres, techniques, and modes of distribution.11 The box-office success of films like Shiri (1999), Silmido (2003), The Host (2006), and JSA may be attributed to their successful adoption of the melodramatic mode, integral to the rubric of the blockbuster, and

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its way of mobilizing moral feeling. The violent scene in the North Korean outpost cannot be seen and felt outside of this mode, particularly in the way it structures historical suffering as grief and even outrage. While JSA clearly shows how national politics stands in the way of individuals relating to each other as sympathetic human beings, the sympathy felt by (capitalist) viewers for their communist North Korean neighbors can only be realized through the particular, but always already universal, assumptions that constitute the human being within popular cinema. Despite having ostensibly “solved” the crime, questions remain: Was this indeed a case of revenge, as claimed by Sophie? Should Woo-jin’s death be understood as remuneration for a past transgression? How did this secret friendship between North and South Korean soldiers go wrong and why did it call for vengeance and murder? In moving back in time and reconstructing past events, JSA traces a linear history structured through the search for cause-effect narrativity. Correspondingly, in the realm of the moral occult, each moment is linked to the next through the dialectic of punishment and payback. The logic of revenge, like that which underlies narrative cinema, assumes the linearity of time and space, as well as the coherence of characters who embody legible desires, moralities, and memories. Parallel to structure of narrative drama, and constituted through what Tom Gunning calls the “narrator system,” revenge promises recompense and necessitates eventual closure.12 Thus, in JSA, the DMZ becomes a highly politicized space where cinematic narrative takes place. An ostensible holdover from the Cold War, where history has putatively stopped, the DMZ in Park’s film is where an engrossing crime story, whose events are carefully organized and time-stamped, is reconstructed through flashback. Despite their constant temporal leaps between past and present, the narrative moments depicted in JSA coalesce in what Gilles Deleuze calls the “movement-image,” in that their relationship to temporality remains coherent and sequential. Corresponding to the dictates of the modern, post-IMF world, where individuals are expected to act and react rationally, the events, emotions, and actions narrated in JSA are connected to each other according an ascending logic that places images on a continuous line of cause and effect. Deleuze writes, in this regard: Qualities and powers are no longer displayed in any-space-whatevers, no longer inhabit originary worlds, but are actualized directly in determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times. Affects and impulses now only appear as embodied in behaviour, in the form of emotions or passions which order and disorder it.13

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As the past is reconstructed through flashback in JSA, their ordering is determined through the Aristotelian principle of quantified time, corresponding to a temporality measured by number and its spatialization on the face of a clock. As General Bruno Botta reminds us in the film: “what’s important is not the outcome, but the procedure.” Narrative events are placed in numerical, and therefore necessary, relation to what happened before and what will happen. Sophie’s job is to figure out how one event led to the next, their ordering “in determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times.” This linearity is reinforced by the presumption that the five soldiers involved in the incident acted in a manner that may be rationally ascertained and reconstructed through a predictable logic. As we shall see, however, the movement-image that ultimately governs Park’s JSA will unravel to reveal the collapse of past, present, and future characteristic of the time-image in his later work. As the testimonies of Soo-hyuk and Sung-shik are narrated and pieced together, another key narrative element emerges, one that has ramifications for Sophie’s position in the film. During his continuing research, Botta learns that her father was a North Korean general, a fact that sullies her Swiss neutrality and which compels her discharge from the case. Describing this plot development, Youngmin Choe writes that Sophie’s reputation as an impartial arbitrator between North and South gives way to “history’s dirty hands.”14 Her tarnished reputation reminds us that, far from the timelessness often associated with the DMZ, narratives do take place and time does pass in this contested zone. There are, in fact, two times, two histories, which unfold in JSA. The story of Park’s film oscillates between both of them, both intertwined yet incommensurable, and this undecidability expresses the ambivalence that remains central to the elucidation of sovereign violence. There is the time of politics, of raised weapons, rehearsed rhetoric and ideology, of moral outrage, retaliation, the give and take of public discourse, and the indirect image of time through the cinematic depiction of movement. This time makes possible the show of force and the imperatives of the political animal. Opposed to this is the time of friendship, of reconciliation, of generosity, the homosocial comradery of male soldiers, “individuals” relating to each other as “humans,” thus giving rise to the possibility of a new ethics. This is a more elusive, private time, critical of the metaphysics of first and crucial to the elucidation of divine violence. Throughout the entirety of the film, the four soldiers cannot detach themselves from the national ideologies that endlessly reinstate ontological divisions between North and South. A stark division between public, national politics and private friendships subtends the relationship between

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the five North and South Korean soldiers. In JSA, public politics is the realm where individual identity is constituted through the discourse of one’s national government. It is also the realm where revenge is articulated through the form of public discourse, of its linear relationship to past transgressions as well as to the promise of retribution in the future. On the other hand, this public articulation is undermined by the private exception of the secret, where illicit friendships are possible, as well as the possibility of forgiving the other. The private realm is constituted as a space that exists both inside and outside the political order and which provides a key privilege to the film spectator, for it carves out an alternative, utopian space where a non-melodramatic, non-political hope may be offered to the viewer. As we continue to look closely at Park’s films, we shall see that these two temporalities organize the ethics that I am trying to draw out from them. In JSA, they do not converge, except in the tragic scene on October 28 that left two soldiers dead. This intense moment puts into relief the impossibility of overcoming politics through friendship and the incapacity of the time of friendship to undermine the strict, cause-effect linearity of political deadlock. As Sophie’s neutrality unravels, the spectator’s complicity with her position as a non-committed observer erodes as well. Sophie ceases to stand in for the distanced spectator, as she moves from politically neutral observer to herself becoming an object of critical observation. And as the judgmental gazes of Sophie and the film spectator separate, JSA seems to encourage another self-scrutinizing, one associated not only with the timelessness that is often attributed to the DMZ, but also of the generic tropes that revalue the hated other, the North Korean, as worthy of sympathy. With this critique, Park’s film constructs narrative genres of otherness while exposing the very conditions of their possibility: notions of modern time and history, and linkages of cause and effect that constitute narrative continuity in the cinema. In the irreducible opposition between public politics and private friendship, Park pushes the logic of revenge to its breaking point in the politics of the divided nation, radically problematizing its vulgar ethics of retribution. The viewer is compelled to question his or her own expectations about what moves them in the cinema, whose ethics were thought to be politically neutral. The aporia between the public and private culminates in silence for one character and in an act of suicide for another in the film’s final moments. At the end of JSA, Sophie approaches the North Korean sergeant Kyeong-pil and asks, “Do you think you can forgive Private Nam and Sergeant Lee?” Seated with his injured arm in a sling, he does not respond, as if unable to confirm or

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deny this question. It is unclear whether he already has or will soon forgive his former South Korean friends. Cutting back to Sophie, she asks Kyeong-pil for a cigarette. Sophie receives it and turns to walk away. He then stands up and, suddenly looking wistful, remarks that, “If this had happened at Southern post, I would’ve shot first.” Sophie continues to walk away from him, while a medium shot tracks back with her. She turns around and asks how it feels to be discharged from his post at Panmunjom. He smiles and looks away, again unable to respond to her question. “Sergeant Lee is being sent to Yongsan Hospital today,” Sophie continues, “do you have a message for him?” This time, the North Korean sergeant offers a more concrete answer. Kyeong-pil approaches her and lights his own cigarette with an American Zippo lighter, one that was given to him by Soo-hyuk during one of their last meetings. He exhales smoke while whistling, in the same manner he is introduced in the film, the night he saved Soo-hyuk’s life and defused the mine in Panmunjom. Standing in front of Sophie, he lights her cigarette with the Zippo as well. The film cuts to a dark holding room. Sophie lights Soo-hyuk’s cigarette with his lighter and returns it to him. He quietly peers at Kyeong-pil’s “message,” the returned gift, while Sophie casually explains that there “was one consistency in Sergeant Oh’s testimony. He said that Private Nam didn’t kill Private Jung.” Park then cuts to a close-up of Soo-hyuk holding his cigarette while Sophie remarks, “It was you.” The accusation seems odd, even out of place, yet the statement nevertheless causes the South Korean soldier to shudder. In the next moment, Sophie quickly disregards the allegation, attributing the discrepancy to his misremembering or a mistake. She asks, as if to herself, “But what does it matter who shot a second quicker or later?” The exchange of the Zippo lighter reinscribes the public terms of revenge in this context. It is returned to Soo-hyuk as if to return the friendship and camaraderie they once shared. This symbolic gesture has the character of a quid pro quo: an eye for an eye, one action that demands an equal reaction. The exchange of the Zippo extends into the realm of ethics, whereby one transgression demands that it be met with retributive justice. This is the public performance that must be played out in accordance with the normal historical course of events in the economy of competing national ideologies, circumscribed by the context of the divided Korean peninsula and its longstanding political and military deadlock. When he is asked whether he can forgive his former friends from the South, the non-response of the North Korean sergeant, Kyeong-pil, is most telling. He knows what really happened at the outpost in Panmunjom, he knows who is culpable, and yet he remains silent. For what reason? Perhaps friendship? We must remember it is the friendship between North and South, one quite extraordinary, which was

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betrayed by historically determined, already politicized conditions. The extent to which Kyeong-pil does or does not forgive will have to remain a secret, private and never to be politicized, a forgiveness that cannot be captured by the visual and auditory capacities of the cinema. And for a moment, his silence excuses him from the terms of everyday politics and its implicit language of equal, moral exchange. For the South Korean Sergeant Lee Soo-hyuk, whose secret has been articulated (“It was you,” says Sophie, even if she does not think it significant), things end quite differently. As two soldiers escort him to the van that will take him to Yongsan Hospital, Soo-hyuk takes one of their guns and commands the accompanying soldiers to back away. He falls to the ground, puts the barrel of the gun to his mouth, and pulls the trigger. The film flashes back to the outpost across the DMZ, revisiting for the last time this watershed moment of the film, and shows Jeong Woo-jin getting shot. Park matches visually the gun that killed the young man with a gun held by Soo-hyuk. This flashback corroborates his committing the two murders and his secret is finally divulged to the spectator. For a devoted South Korean soldier, who has disciplined all his efforts toward realizing victory over the enemy, the conflict between friendship and politics proves too much to bear. Public revenge and private camaraderie remain irreconcilable, a conflict embodied by Soo-hyuk in this last moment, and the only solution is self-annihilation. The futility of overcoming official history is rehearsed one last time, and once its cruel aporia is realized, so must the film’s narrative finally find its conclusion. The very last shot of JSA tracks over a photograph of the four friends on the DMZ. Soo-hyuk is in the foreground, holding up a hand to block the camera’s view. Kyeong-pil and Sung-shik stand at attention in the middle ground. And Woo-jin marches with his North Korean comrades in the background. The image recalls an earlier moment from the film while evoking the poignancy of the deaths of three of the friends. It also recalls the future anterior of the still image that I discussed in the introduction to this book, the will have been of the human lives depicted in it. Park’s film, in many ways culminating with this shot, reveals the melodrama, the consciousness of a split between how things are and how they should be, that is inseparable from the temporality signified by the still image.

The Moral Economy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) Revenge stands at the center of Park’s feature-length films that follow JSA, the so-called “Vengeance Trilogy,” which is made up of three films:

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy (2003), and Lady Ven­geance (2004). Although Oldboy is perhaps the most well-known of the three, it should be seen as a film that develops his previous works in their critique of revenge. This critique already revealed itself in JSA, Park’s first great film that works with the dichotomy between the public and the private. It is adapted to the narrative of class struggle within post-IMF Korea in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (hereafter Mr. Vengeance), and in the last film of the trilogy, Park opens up a different ethical logic altogether. I will leave a fuller discussion of this possibility, as well as a close analysis of Lady Vengeance, for a later chapter, as it may be put into further relief only if we turn our attention to the films that lead up to it. Mr. Vengeance begins with the plight of a deaf factory worker named Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun, who played Woo-jin in JSA). He is young, somewhat naïve, and sports dyed green hair. He labors in a hot and dark industrial environment to support his ailing sister, who is in dire need of a kidney transplant. Ryu offers to give up one of his, but their blood types do not match. After being laid off by his factory, called Ilshin Electronics, he turns to the world of illegal organ trafficking in order to save his sister. In exchange for ten million won and his own kidney, the traffickers promise to find and deliver the type-A kidney that will save his sister’s life. He agrees and the screen fades to black. When he awakens, Ryu lies naked in the cement parking lot where he sealed the illicit organ deal. The traff ickers disappeared without a trace and took both his money and his kidney. Ironically, it is at this moment, after Ryu has been conned, that a donor for his sister is miraculously found. Unfortunately, he does not have the money for the operation. In order to get it, his anarchist girlfriend Young-mi (Bae Doona) convinces him to kidnap the daughter of the wealthy president of Ilshin Electronics, Park Dong-jin (Song Kang-ho, who was the North Korean Kyeong-pil in JSA), and demand ransom money for her return. Although Ryu seems initially to have some qualms about committing this crime, he does it, not only to acquire the money that will save his sister’s life, but also as an act of revenge for his having been fired. While staking out the situation, they lure the young Yu-sun (Han Bo-bae) into a game of jump rope. Ryu and Young-mi take the girl and, together with Ryu’s sister, they keep her until a ransom demand is ready to be made. However, when the sister realizes that Yu-sun has been kidnapped, she becomes ridden with guilt, slits her wrists, and bleeds herself to death in the bathtub. The water becomes crimson with her blood as she lies limp and motionless in it. Ryu finds her and cries in anguish.

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He drives his sister’s body and Yu-sun to a riverbank. Ryu mourns her death as he buries her near the water, underneath a layer of stones. Meanwhile, a mentally disabled boy wanders into the scene and tries to steal Yu-sun’s plastic gem necklace. She gets out of the car and yells for help but her cries fall silent on Ryu’s deaf ears. Yu-sun then walks onto a fragile pier while trying to get his attention, continuing to call for him while waving her arms. Somehow she falls into the water. Unable to swim, Yu-sun drowns and dies. The second half of Mr. Vengeance follows the wealthy Dong-jin and his pursuit of revenge for his daughter’s death. A post-mortem of Yu-sun takes place, echoing in many ways the autopsy sequence that appeared in JSA. It shows only Dong-jin’s face as his daughter’s body is ripped open and examined by the pathologist. While the sounds of bones cracking, whirring tools, and squeezed organs fill the soundtrack, his face registers the horror that he sees as well as the anguish he feels. The image of his suffering solicits the pity of the viewer and encourages compassion and sympathy for his profound grief. Taking the law into his own hands, Dong-jin sets out to pursue his daughter’s kidnapper, retracing the places where Yu-sun was kept before she died. He matches a photo of Yu-sun, found in Ryu’s vacated apartment, with a plastic gem necklace she lost on the riverbank. Digging around, he discovers the body of Ryu’s sister buried beneath the rocks. Her body is taken to be autopsied and Park repeats the medium shot of Dong-jin’s face utilized in the autopsy of his daughter. In stark contrast to the misery expressed when Yu-sun’s small body was being examined, Dong-jin’s taciturn face watches the gruesome dismantling of the sister of his enemy without sympathy or emotion. At one point he even yawns out of boredom. He continues to gather clues that lead him back to Young-mi’s small apartment. Meanwhile, Ryu pursues his own vengeance against the organ traffickers who stole his kidney and money. He goes to their grimy apartment and kills all three of them – the two short-haired, overweight young men as well as their drug-addicted mother. This murder scene is perhaps the most spectacularly violent of the whole film, featuring spurting blood and a head being repeatedly bashed with a baseball bat. As Ryu brutally punishes the organ dealer for having stolen his money and his kidney, with each swing and crunch of bone, the head becomes a bloody mass, mutilated and defaced. Concurrently, Dong-jin reaches Young-mi in her apartment. He restrains her in a chair, attaches wires to her ears, and throws the switch to the attached battery. During her electrocution, she apologizes and weakly remarks that they never intended to kill his daughter, only to procure the

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ransom money. Young-mi adds that if the terrorist organization she is associated with finds out that she was murdered, members of her organization will seek vengeance. Done with discoursing, Dong-jin covers her with a heavy blanket and electrocutes her to death. The cynical hwesawon then goes to the green-haired worker’s dingy apartment. Ryu is not there, but Dong-jin finds a bloody Baskin-Robbins ice cream container that, we find out in this scene, contained the kidneys of the organ dealers. It is now empty, presumably because Ryu had consumed them. When he returns home, he touches the handle to his door and is electrocuted by a trap set by the electronics CEO. Ryu is brought to the riverbank for the final time with his hands and feet bound by rope. There, Dong-jin exacts his revenge, allowing Ryu to die in a similar manner as his sister – by bleeding him to death in the water. As he digs a hole to bury Ryu’s dead body, a jeep drives up and four men, previously unseen in the film, approach and stab him repeatedly. These unknown men are presumably members of the terrorist organization to which Young-mi referred earlier. Dong-jin’s murder here recalls a similar scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), where Professor Quadri is stabbed, with a kind of hesitant fascination, in a forest. A note is attached to Dong-jin’s chest with a knife. It is dated October 23, 2001 and states that he has been sentenced to death “in the name of the revolution.” From JSA, where revenge is historically couched in the public politics of the divided nation, we come to Mr. Vengeance where the logic of revenge itself seems to be at issue. In his 2000 film, a crime is reconstructed in its totality as plot fragments, told through flashback, are linked to each other through cause and subsequent effect. The linear narrativity that constitutes JSA, concomitant with principles of continuity editing and the logic of the movement-image, are carried over into Mr. Vengeance. In the latter film, however, all direct references to the Cold War drop away. As Paik Nak-chung has compellingly argued, the development of modern Korean history cannot be separated from the legacy of national division after 1953 and its incorporation into the capitalist world-system. This legacy, what he calls the “division system,” haunts contemporary South Korean life.15 All of Park’s films after JSA, specifically in the particular attention they pay to questions of ethics, are informed by the division system as well. Yet, instead of individuals explicitly playing out the mechanics of revenge within the politics of the Cold War and opposing national ideologies, in Mr. Vengeance individuals play out its machinations within the context of opposing class ideologies in neoliberal, post-IMF South Korea. Park’s films concern the ethical logic that underpins their narratives – a logic

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that, moreover, is informed by the discursive-historical contexts to which they refer. The logic of neoliberal capital underpins the policy changes in the realm of labor mobility negotiated through the reforms imposed by the IMF. A brief summary of these changes will help us to see the politics of representation at work in Mr. Vengeance. In exchange for the relief funds that prevented the South Korean banking sector from collapsing, the IMF demanded reforms that would make the national economy more transparent, more open to foreign investment, and thus less fettered by national state constraints. Indeed, the economy had already been liberalizing since Kim Young-sam introduced his policy of segyehwa during his presidency, but this process accelerated when Korea joined the OECD in 1996, and when the government facilitated the financing of corporate business through tax exemptions and loans procured through state controlled banks. Another key requirement set by the IMF was increased flexibility in the labor market, which would, in theory, enhance the profitability of local companies. What resulted, however, was the laying off of permanent employees and their substitution by temporary workers, as job security withered away through the dissipation of Korea’s chaebols. While the proportion of temporary, non-regular workers in Korea was already higher than in other OECD countries, the percentage of contingent workers increased from 43.8 percent in March 1997 to 53 percent in December 1999.16 Less-skilled and low-income workers were particularly affected by the IMF reforms as their status became increasingly tenuous. Before the financial crisis, concepts such as annual salary negotiations and contracted temporary workers were relatively unknown, but after the year 2000, Koreans no longer felt secure in their employment status, despite having dedicated many years to their company. This tenuousness is depicted in Park’s film when Ryu is laid off, reflecting the historical situation of many Koreans who lost their jobs after 1997. Ryu is even offered a compensation package, like many who found themselves in the same unfortunate situation. In Mr. Vengeance this money could have been utilized to save his sister’s life. However, when Ryu’s leftist girlfriend criticizes the “bastard” who fired him, and when she mentions that the boss’s car alone is worth ten years of his employee’s salary, his desire for revenge is ignited. As she plans the kidnap and ransom of Dong-jin’s daughter, Young-mi grumbles that people without money cannot get the healthcare they need and complains that workers are exchanged for luxury items. For her, the reality of class inequality justifies their kidnapping of Yu-sun and subsequent demand for ransom money. “That money is nothing to them,” she remarks, “but for us it’s a matter of life and death.”

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The scene that follows reiterates the desperation felt by laid-off workers. Dong-jin and his company subordinate drive in his expensive car with their daughters in the back seat. Yu-sun has a cell phone and her friend asks her father if she could have one too. The father of Yu-sun’s friend, the man who carried out Ryu’s firing, scolds the company president and asks why he buys his daughter such fancy things. He reproaches him to “have consideration for your neighbors,” and to be mindful of those who may be envious of Dong-jin’s wealth. Suddenly, the car lurches, as if having driven over speed bump. They exit the vehicle and peer underneath it. Peng, a middle-age man who worked as an engineer at their company, lies underneath the car on his back. Obsequiously grabbing Dong-jin’s foot, Peng tells him that his wife ran off and his children are hungry. “In six years I’ve never missed a day of work,” he desperately remarks, “You know the percentage of faulty goods was 0.008%.” Peng, who had been laid off like Ryu, pleads for his job back. When he sees Dong-jin’s unsympathetic face, Peng stands up and positions himself before his former employers. Removing his jacket and exposing his midriff, he produces a box cutter knife from his pocket and declares, “I devoted myself to welding. I gave away my youth to Ilshin Electronics, you know?” Then he slashes his stomach with four quick gestures. While looking down, Peng lowers his white undershirt as blood soaks through it. Later in the film, Dong-jin visits his former employee’s dilapidated home to ascertain whether Peng kidnapped his daughter out of revenge. He tragically finds the entire family dead. An unidentified white substance has dried around their mouths. It remains unclear as to how they died, but it is very likely that Peng himself did this, poisoning his family, out of an overwhelming sense of male inadequacy. We find out later that the children were not in good health and that the electronics engineer did not have money to pay for their treatment. From 1997 to 1999, almost 1.1 million regular full-time workers lost their jobs. When the economy started to recover in 1999 and 2000, many of these employees did not return to their positions but found that part-time workers replaced them. While Korea was still adjusting to the deregulation of labor relations, in accordance with the demands set out by the IMF, about half of all labor throughout the decade was composed of those who worked on an irregular basis. Many did not receive welfare benefits and were not supported by their employers (typically by making regular contributions of about 4.5 percent of their salary). Explaining the lack of welfare benefit preparedness by both employers and employees, sociologist Shin Kwang-Yeong writes that, “They had a shared interest in avoiding welfare contributions. While employers could reduce the total cost of employment of workers by

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withholding welfare contributions for irregular workers, irregular workers avoided the welfare benefit because their wage was too low to shoulder the welfare burden.”17 In 2006, 76.5 percent of regular workers received health insurance while only 17.6 percent of irregular workers were covered. Of those regular workers who were left unemployed, many of them male heads of households, some were too humiliated to notify their families, while others took their own lives. At the same time, as part of Korea’s economic reforms, new government initiatives incentivized the development of the IT industry and the knowledge economy. High paying jobs were contrived in conjunction with the emergence of new technologies that automated the banking and service industries. As a consequence, lower-level factory, managerial, and clerical jobs disappeared. The number and type of jobs created a “U-shaped” labor market in the overall economy, whereby both lucrative, highly-skilled jobs and low-paying, low-skilled jobs increased, while those in the middle dropped. As a result, the income gap between the rich and the poor increased throughout the post-IMF decade. In fact, the real income of the top fifth of households rose even as the financial crisis continued until 1998, while the bottom four-fifths lost income during this period.18 “In South Korea,” sociologist Jang Jin-Ho reports, “the gap in hourly income between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of the population was the largest (5.6 times) among OECD countries in 2003.”19 The number of labor disputes issued throughout the first decade of the millennium noticeably increased. Many of these were disputes and appeals issued by former employees that typically revolved around illegal layoff and labor practices. With income inequity rising, new alignments of power intensified social and moral inequalities by privileging individuals who possessed skills in technology that would presumably bring prosperity to the nation state, while excluding those who had been deemed unprofitable or less worthy. In order to help jump-start the economy after the crisis, lending to consumers drastically increased, particularly in the credit card sector. Encouraged by looser governmental regulation of the industry, credit card companies raised limits on cash advances and even introduced tax deductions on card purchases. By 2002, Korean private consumption spending was largely based on debt as consumer spending skyrocketed from $53 billion in 1998 to $519 billion in 2002.20 In this period, household debt as a percentage of GDP rose from 18% in 1999 to 62% in 2002.21 In 2003, about 16 percent of working adults, about 3.6 million people, defaulted on their debts, a marked change from 2.5 million in the previous year.22 Some committed suicide because of crushing credit card obligations.23 Consumer debt compounded

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the immense sovereign debt following the implementation of IMF regulations, creating a sense that South Korea remained beholden to the rest of the world. Individuals who racked up unsecured credit card debt, dishonored through their inability to honor their debts, stand in stark contrast to the exemplary citizen who possessed “marketable” skills, was autonomous, and who was perceived to owe nothing to others. As I shall show in a moment, Mr. Vengeance reveals how the logic of debt corresponds with the accumulation of moral responsibility in neoliberal modernity. The first half of Park’s film not only depicts the shock of unemployment as a consequence of IMF reforms, it also critically reflects the increasing tensions between the poor and the rich after 1997. Dong-jin, Peng, and Young-mi each represent the political actors typically invoked in the analysis of class warfare in late capitalism: the capitalist, the exploited worker, and the militant activist. Park’s film plays up the melodrama of class conflict through depictions of desperation and violence. Rob Wilson writes that the world depicted in Mr. Vengeance “is a world of social antagonism that might better be called Killer Capitalism in all its lurid spectral effects and body-eating intensity of intimate mutilation.”24 These characters also play out positions revolving issues contemporaneous with the film: the clash between the rich and the poor, and the politics of post-IMF welfare policies. However, I believe Park’s film can take us further than this, beyond merely depicting the narrative of social tension inherent to the analysis of capitalist political economy. Mr. Vengeance does not simply reflect the reality of class struggle, but introduces elements that interrupt the viewer’s involvement in its melodrama. For one thing, when the film’s protagonists act politically, they do so quite poorly. The aim of kidnapping Yu-sun, despite planning and forethought, is rendered pointless when Ryu’s sister commits suicide and the young girl accidently drowns. At moments, Park’s characters even display some black humor. While Peng intends to make a show of his dishonor by committing seppuku before his former boss, he struggles to find the knife he will use to slash himself. And Young-mi is a caricature of the leftist activist, unreasonable at times, disconnected at others, all the while passionlessly parroting slogans such as “Dismantle the conglomerates” and “Destroy the new liberalism that ruins the lives of the people!” Ryu and Peng do not carry out their retaliation against Dong-jin proficiently but are ineffective and bungling. If exacting revenge is their goal, they seem to go about it by amateurish approximation. More importantly, through their clumsy attempts to enact social justice, the spectator’s sympathy does not remain with one character throughout the film. At first, Park’s film utilizes mechanisms of spectatorial pity and

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identification that encourage sympathy with the vengeful worker seeking payback from the capitalist. One may find oneself sympathizing with Ryu, who struggles to maintain health and dignity despite the overwhelming circumstances of his poverty. His sister tragically lacks access to healthcare and becomes an object of the viewer’s sympathy by co-extension. Yet, in the second half of Mr. Vengeance, one may find oneself sympathizing with well-off Dong-jin, who has lost his daughter to the carelessness of a bungling kidnapper. We find out that his wife left him when the economy crashed, reflecting the situation of South Korean men who were emasculated and whose families were broken up by the IMF crisis, perhaps eliciting the sympathy of the viewer who has experienced the same. Film scholar Moon Jae-cheol observes that Park’s films evidence an “ironic imagination,” writing that, “Employed on the level of style, irony shocks the viewer and stirs his emotions by strongly contrasting mutually contradictory things.”25 If the logic of revenge in narrative cinema typically involves sympathy with beset victim-heroes who are revealed to be inherently virtuous, Park’s film problematizes this mechanism through irony, showing how it may be possible to sympathize with those subjects who have been deemed unsympathetic and not grievable. The “evil,” rich, company CEO becomes, in the second half of the film, a humanized, possibly “good,” victim-hero himself. A close look at the last scene of the film reveals why this sympathetic oscillation between the two main protagonists of Mr. Vengeance is crucial for the film’s ethical critique. In it, Dong-jin finally confronts the man who kidnapped and ostensibly murdered his daughter. They stand, face-to-face, chest deep in water, near where Dong-jin’s daughter was found earlier in the film. The spectator has already witnessed a number of extremely violent and harrowing moments and expects more to come in this penultimate moment. Yet, Dong-jin hesitates, as if to consider what next to do. For a moment, we think he will forgive Ryu for his transgression and that he will give up his compulsion toward revenge. The mute boy, however, is unable to apologize or ask for forgiveness. “I know you are a good person,” Dong-jin calmly remarks, “therefore you understand why I’m going to kill you?” His logic is unambiguous, cruel, and without mercy, for it is clear that it matters little whether Ryu is a good person or not. He will be murdered nonetheless. An extreme long shot drowns out the graphic details of Ryu’s death – better perhaps not to explicitly show how he dies. A subsequent shot indicates that it involved a knife and the Achilles tendons of the deaf worker. Blood demands that it be repaid with blood. Kyung-hyun Kim explains that this scene provides “the paradox of Park Chan-wook’s revenge trilogy – revenge comes not from hatred, but from

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Fig. 6: Ryu awaits his punishment. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

love and pity.”26 For Kim, Park’s depiction of revenge is directly related to the ressentiment of the slave, as Nietzsche explains in his Genealogy of Morality, and to the reversal of traditional notions of good and evil by slave morality: “you are evil; I am the opposite of what you are; therefore I am good.”27 This logic constitutes the pivot point for the Christian worldview, inextricably linked to the positing of a heavenly life beyond death and the belief that the meek shall inherit the earth. The slave revalues his or her own perceived weakness in relation to their master by defiantly turning it into a strength in the realm of moral justice. In this politico-theological realm, the slave claims to be “good,” while his or her powerful adversary is labeled “evil,” “sinful,” and is deemed to be morally flawed. As in the moral melodrama, the slave legitimizes victimization as virtuous and validates their suffering as noble. In the film, Dong-jin is not the only one who justifies his revenge through ressentiment. Young-mi, Ryu, and Peng all act violently out of their perception of having been marginalized, traumatized, and slighted by others who are perceived to have gained the upper hand. Nietzsche’s critique of morality, in other words, coincides with Williams’s observations on the recognition of virtue in the melodramatic mode. She explicitly notes that melodrama “deploys the paradoxical location of strength in weakness – the process by which suffering subjects take what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, a moralizing revenge upon the powerful achieved through the triumph of the weak in their very weakness.”28 Both of the main protagonists of Mr. Vengeance find strength in having been victimized by the other, a state that, in turn, mobilizes the viewer’s sympathy for their weakness. Thus, the viewer’s oscillating sympathy throughout Park’s film disallows him or her from consistently placing blame on any one character in the narrative in order to think vengeance, not as an instrument toward a specific

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political end, but critically, in and of itself. Mr. Vengeance encourages the viewer to meditate on revenge as a logic that coordinates the ethics of the other and as intimately connected to ressentiment. Through Nietzsche, we can see that Park’s films attempt to confront the problem of ethics by questioning the melodrama of a character who is considered guiltless, vulnerable, and without moral debt. This line of ethical questioning underpins other films we have seen so far. Hye Seung Chung, notably, calls Kim Ki-duk’s cinema a “cinema of ressentiment,” and points to his repeated depictions of marginalized men who seethe with vengeful envy against the rich and well-connected.29 This description clearly characterizes Dog-eye’s hatred toward US soldiers in Address Unknown and Han-gi’s bitterness toward the entitled in Bad Guy. Kim Ki-duk’s “inferiority complex” described at the start of this chapter is relevant here. Nietzschean ressentiment could even be read in Young-ho’s anguish in Peppermint Candy. For Young-ho perpetrates violence but is convinced of his victimization because of the violence of others and because of history. Anguished, anxious, and ready to explode in ferocious anger in response to a world perceived to be hostile and unforgiving, the male characters created by Park, Kim, Lee, and others carry with them an internal pain that remains unredeemed. In this, the unresolved suffering that underpins Korean han is that which also constitutes Nietzsche’s ressentiment.30 Throughout this book, we will see that these connections allow for deeper philosophical elaboration, particularly in the realm of ethics. Dong-jin’s words in this scene from Mr. Vengeance thus do not disclose the truth of Ryu’s morality – that is, he is not inherently good or bad – but critique the utilization of “good” and “evil” as words to justify one’s implacable compulsion toward vengeance. Dong-jin must kill and avenge the death of his daughter, just as Ryu must kill the organ dealers who stole his kidney. In order to bring about the sought-after closure, the sinful other must be annihilated, and the daughter’s death must be exchanged for the death of her kidnapper. Typically, in order to justify this series of “musts,” both self and other are to be revalued, if we are to believe in a meaningful and coherent world, until a narrative about “good” and “evil” is concocted that justifies revenge. Yet, Park’s film reveals the arbitrariness of this all. Ryu is “good,” but he will be killed by Dong-jin nevertheless. Of highest importance, apparently, is the violent releasing of one’s ressentiment at the expense of one’s mortal enemy. At the conclusion of Park’s film, it seems nothing can interrupt the company CEO’s unyielding trajectory toward vengeance. However, this unyielding mercilessness applies to Ryu as well, as the revaluation of values functions merely to justify his fury. “That’s what

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they have in common,” Park explains on the DVD commentary track for the film, “they are attacking the other, but not because they are strong. They are persistent. They don’t have solid plans. They don’t confront each other. They are waiting back to back.” This is spoken over a long shot of Dong-jin resting in Ryu’s apartment, earlier in the film, as he waits for the one who wronged him. Park then explains, “Ryu’s revenge was really stubbornly determined. He was retrieving what was taken away from him.” His interlocutor on the commentary, director Ryoo Seung-wan, responds, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It is a primitive and savage revenge. Dong-jin is the same. His daughter was drowned in shallow water. He is trying to do the same to Ryu.” The desire for revenge places them in a deadlocked situation of give-and-take, like two chess-players strategizing their next move. Dong-jin must kill Ryu because he can think neither critically, nor selfreflexively about the implacable, unforgiving logic they presently carry out. In this, both are acting on what Park simply calls “animal instinct.” Such an instinct operates according to a strict, closed intelligence: an eye for an eye, a kidney for a kidney, a life for another life. In the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche characterizes the relationship between the transgressor and the vengeful other by the double meaning of the German word Schuld, which may be translated as either “guilt” or “debt,” depending on the context. He identifies a primeval, contractual relationship that these two words simultaneously express, “between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the conception of a ‘legal subject’ and itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic.”31 Based on this primitive ethics, the violent punishment dealt to the transgressor becomes justified via the mythic law of compensation, an equivalence whereby juridically the moral obligations between debtor and creditor are neutralized, “paid up” as it were. Revenge participates in this attempt to “get even” by exchanging and transferring debt from one person to the next. Dong-jin and Ryu remain unthinking and unable to self-reflexively judge this moral quid pro quo they carry out. Through its depiction of a banality of evil, Mr. Vengeance prevents the viewer from stubbornly empathizing with one character or another. In practice, vengeance – the desire to get even – merely instigates and perpetuates a continuous circle of anger and resentment. For the egoist who cannot abide any outstanding debts, their mounting rage compels them toward acts of revenge, to demand reimbursement from the other. Park corroborates this in a 2006 interview, stating: “Yes, revenge is an endless circle of evil, going around and around until the chain breaks. We tend to justify vengeance, but it’s not my idea to justify it or explain it.”32 For Nietzsche, the logic of moral payment gives rise to the sadistic pleasure

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of momentarily becoming master over the one who has committed the transgression: at last, he, too, shares the elevated feeling of despising and maltreating someone as ‘inferior’ – or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting punishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty.33

By focusing on Ryu’s character in the first half of the film, then on Dong-jin in the second half, the melodrama of Mr. Vengeance identifies a “perpetrator” and a “victim” and then reverses these labels, drawing a circle of ressentiment, of accusation and violence exchanged between individuals. Each attempts to gain power over the other, so that their moral worldview may be legitimated and their cruelty justified. Through this however, the position of judgment, who judges the other and on what grounds, is placed under critical scrutiny. Park’s film poses the question of how one gains the right to punish another using violent means and of who possesses the authority to erase another’s crime and to treat it with leniency. The ethics of moral exchange – of guilt, kidneys, a daughter, a doll, money, or a cell phone – pass into the ethics of commodity exchange. What Marcel Mauss calls the “gift economy,” whereby gift-giving forges social bonds in archaic societies, merges into the postmodern economy of neoliberal capitalism.34 The aims of homo economicus become, under capitalist neoliberalism, increasingly ubiquitous, infiltrating notions of the human self in post-IMF life. Park’s film shows how political capital is exchanged as late capitalist violence, critiques the presumptuousness of the sovereign individual when regarding the morality of the other, and makes a spectacle of unleashed cruelty as guilt and debt circulate between social actors within this economy. Reification of the world within a neoliberal economy is a precondition of the total exchangeability of any one thing, animate and inanimate, for another. Reification of the other is a precondition for the exchange of moral guilt among capitalist actors. It consolidates their personal history as memory and makes them predictable, obligated to other individuals to whom debt and guilt are owed. In his philosophical analysis of debt in contemporary life, Maurizio Lazzarato calls this guilty person the “indebted man,” who remains accountable before neoliberal capital. He writes: “The ‘morality’ of debt results in the moralization of the unemployed, the ‘assisted,’ the users of public services, as well as of entire populations.”35 An individual who cannot make good on his or her debts

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does not perform dominant subjectivity successfully, does not “make good” on his or her promise for exchange, and is thus considered to be at (de) fault. Taking account and moral accountability become governed by the metaphysics of counting. Making explicit the intersection of capitalism and ethics, while exploiting the moralization of debt, Young-mi remarks that “movement of capital maximizes the value of money” in order to justify and nullify her guilt about kidnapping Yu-sun. Ressentiment arises when differences of human valuation, perceived through the criteria provided by neoliberal capitalism, come into conflict with democracy’s egalitarian ideals, registered as moral inequality. The logic of exchange and the fetishization of the commodity merge into the logic of violent payback, the quantification of the other, and the notion of human individuals possessing moral private property. In the next section of this chapter, I will discuss the relationship of debt and power in greater detail. This exchangeability between capital and morality is expressed through the formal style of Mr. Vengeance as well. At moments, human bodies become inanimate things, posed for the camera as if to be photographed. Still images refer to other images throughout the film, connecting them in ways that upend conventional narrative continuity. A shot of a boy in a hospital bed is followed by one of Young-mi and Ryu as they stare at each other next to an elevator. A statue of a policeman with a fly on his face shakes when they have sex. Dong-jin looks at this statue later when he electrocutes Young-mi. Shots of water colored red signals how both Ryu and his sister died – by being bled out. Through these repetitions, Park does not aim for symbolic meaning, but seeks to correspond past, present, and future through the logic of images and in this he discovers the direct image of time. Some of these connections seem like non sequiturs, as if the film were testing the ability of the viewer to synthesize repeated signs and fragmentary meanings. For instance, when Choi, the investigator researching the death of Yu-sun, calls Dong-jin to ask him what he will do when he finds his daughter’s murderer, the filmmaker interpolates a phone conversation between Young-mi and the organ dealers. Their dialogues intersect and overlap, confusing the viewer. The editing here seems to be wholly uninterested in depicting a reality circumscribed by Cartesian notions of space and time (the only reality permitted by neoliberalism). Rather, Park’s film expresses a continuity that pulls the narrative progression of the film toward the principles of cinema, toward graphic matches, the rhythm of affect, and toward the logic of the time-image. Nevertheless, moments of miscommunication, like these criss-crossing phone calls, abound in Mr. Vengeance. Each stymies the stubborn linear

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trajectory toward revenge. When Ryu’s sister writhes and screams because of her bad kidney, four young men in the next apartment mishear a woman screaming in sexual ecstasy and proceed to masturbate furiously. Throughout the film, Ryu’s deafness severely inhibits clear communication. At the end of the film, one wonders whether he can even understand Dong-jin’s words. The impossibility of their communicating only heightens the tragedy of the situation, confounding the ostensible precision of the ethical economy associated with retaliatory payback. The film seems not to confirm the narrative logic of revenge, but to trouble the Manichean conflict between good and evil its melodrama implicitly inscribes. By presenting this circle of violence in a critical manner, Park does not espouse the individual ethics of Ryu, Dong-jin, or Young-mi. He works through the logic of vengeance in order to critique it from within. “The audience thought the film was violent because it showed something they wanted to avoid,” remarks the filmmaker on the DVD commentary for Mr. Vengeance, “but this exists in reality. Most people don’t kill other people, but people do cruel things because they think only of themselves or they are busy and tired.” The violent ethics depicted in Mr. Ven­geance, brutal and gratuitous, does not simply express a “cool,” but empty, postmodernism; Park’s film suggests a different function for the cinema, less about suture and identification and more about presenting, face-to-face with the spectator, the logic of cruelty in general – how it is imagined and the audacity it takes to carry it out. The melodrama that plays out in Mr. Vengeance is fundamentally ambivalent, achieved through a particularly intense experience of violence and pathos. Park’s film bears out Hannah Arendt’s warning that instrumentalized violence, as a means, can be overcome by its ends. “Phenomenologically,” she writes, “it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last state of their development, they can substitute for it.”36 The representation of violent revenge is what audiences “wanted to avoid”; yet, Mr. Vengeance allows its tragic melodrama to overcome the use of violence as a legitimate means, so that audiences are asked to question how violence has been typically justified in the cinema. Park himself seems to corroborate this idea in response to a query regarding the use of violence in his films: Basically, I’m throwing out the question ‘When is such violence justified?’ To get that question to touch the audience physically and directly – that’s what my goal is. In the experience of watching my films, I don’t want the

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viewer to stop at the mental or the intellectual. I want them to feel my work physically, viscerally. And because that is one of my goals, the title ‘exploitative’ will probably follow me around for a while.37

His goal is not a Brechtian one, whereby the viewer is alienated in order to be given an opportunity to think. Park aims to affect the embodied viewer “physically, viscerally.” Only by depicting violence in this way does its legitimate use, particularly within the popular melodramatic mode, undergo critique. In the final section of this chapter, I would like to expand on this analysis of Park’s 2002 film and discuss how cinematic narrativity relates to violence in greater philosophical and aesthetic detail. In Oldboy from 2003, as in Mr. Vengeance, Park constructs characters that compel ambivalence, rather than full identification in the spectator. In the following, I will show how the logic of revenge demands characters that are imbued with a humanist, moral soul, one that is also calculable, coherent, and embodies a rational will – all crucial features of the human subject implicated within the logic of neoliberal capital. In order to show this, I will bring an analysis of Oldboy into the critical purview of political theology.

Oldboy (2003) and Sovereign Judgment “My original intention wasn’t to deal with incest but to take the idea of revenge to the extreme.”38 ‒ Park Chan-wook

The opening shot of Park’s Oldboy thematically recalls the autopsy scene I discussed in JSA. Both concern the sovereign right of power over the life and death of another. While fast-paced music plays in the background, Oldboy begins as Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) extends his arm, not to aim a gun, but to prevent a man from committing suicide off the top of a high-rise building. “I said I just wanted to speak,” Dae-su remarks, as he grasps the necktie of a desperate man hanging over the precipice. These settings also recall the opening to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the viewing of which apparently compelled Park to become a filmmaker years ago.39 Were Dae-su to let go, the man and small dog he is holding would fall to their deaths. “What’s with the way you talk,” the suicidal man asks, “Who are you?” Dae-su’s extended arm also reminds us of the autopsy sequence in JSA. Sophie Jean

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Fig. 7: Dae-su saves a suicidal man and his small dog. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

extends her arm to explain how a man was shot and killed out of revenge. In Oldboy, Dae-su extends his to save a man from killing himself and so that he can tell his story. The logic of debt structures the revenge narrative of Mr. Vengeance, but this logic is even more insistent in Oldboy. Park’s script is based on the Japanese manga of the same name, written by Garon Tsuchiya and published in serial form between 1996 and 1998. As I shall argue, this second film of the Vengeance Trilogy puts the discursive conditions that regulate this logic into greater critical relief. Its narrative is perhaps already familiar to readers. Baby-faced Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae) has held a grudge against Dae-su since high school for spreading a rumor of incest between himself and his sister Soo-ah (Yoon Jin-seo). Eighteen years after graduation, Woo-jin seeks vengeance against his Catholic high school classmate. Dae-su, now a middle-class hwesawon, is imprisoned on his daughter’s birthday. He does not know why or by whom. Dae-su’s confinement lasts fifteen years, during which South Korea witnessed a number of historic national and international events: the 2000 summit between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong-il, the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11, and the 2002 World Cup held jointly by Japan and Korea. Meanwhile, Dae-su trains his body, punching a drawn representation of his imagined enemy on the wall, and strategizes his escape. When he is finally released, again without knowing why, he begins his pursuit of vengeance, to find the person who imprisoned him. Dae-su meets an attractive woman named Mido (Kang Hye-jeong) in a sushi restaurant. She decides to help him look for his tormentor, accompanying him to numerous Chinese restaurants to find the one that fed him all those years as well as to Dae-su’s old high school. As they work and get

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to know each other, they eventually sleep together. Dae-su is, however, completely unaware that Mido is actually his daughter, fifteen years older since he last saw her. He thus unwittingly breaks the same universal taboo rumored to have been broken years ago by Woo-jin. When Dae-su revisits Sangnok High School, we enter into an unusual flashback sequence that helps us think through the relationship of debt, memory, and revenge. In it, the camera takes the point of view of the young Dae-su in student uniform, observing, through a dusty window, Woo-jin and his sister engaging in sexual contact. The flashback here remembers and reenacts the past, realizing the capacity of the cinema to index and re-present a foregone event. What remains extraordinary here is Park’s insertion of the older, more contemporary Dae-su, wearing a modern sports jacket and unkempt hair, as a detached observer into the flashback scene. Park switches between the perspectives of the young and old Dae-sus, replacing one with the other at key moments in the scene. Such a depiction, allowing for the simultaneity of past and present actions taking place, seems less about redeeming a lost past and more about highlighting the inability of the rememberer to embody fully his previous self. The spectator sees Dae-su see a younger version of himself. All three see the primal scene take place between Woo-jin and Soo-ah. Park multiplies the framing devices and compounds the act of looking across temporal distances, highlighting the indebtedness of the image on the past. Through this act of memory, unfolding like a film for Dae-su and the viewer, we are reminded that the act of remembering, performed in the present, cannot bridge the gap between the moment of this act and the already elapsed past event. The two “old boys” come face-to-face in the penultimate scene at the end of the film, which corresponds in many ways to the conclusive scene I analyzed from Mr. Vengeance. In this dramatic sequence, which takes place in Woo-jin’s penthouse apartment, the young-looking man describes his elaborate stratagem for revenge. He explains that Dae-su was entrapped and made to feel the same suffering, the same ressentiment, that Woo-jin has felt for the last fifteen years. This has been a lifelong obsession, requiring exceptional precision in his planning of seemingly serendipitous events as well as cunning in his hypnotizing and planting of key individuals in Dae-su’s life. Woo-jin points to a box containing a photo album and dares Dae-su to open it. The first page features an image of his small family, wife and child. As he flips through the book, the images depict the female child growing older, culminating with recent surveillance photos of Dae-su and his grown daughter together. The progression of these images attests to the irreversible unfolding of lived time, as in the rapid page-turning of a flipbook

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or a kineograph. Stunned and devastated, Dae-su pleads for forgiveness from Woo-jin and begs that he not reveal this terrible secret to his daughter. It should be noted that the Japanese manga does not utilize the theme of incest in its narrative. Park brings this universal taboo into his cinematic adaptation to heighten the tragic drama of its plot. The sequence that follows features a spectacularly grotesque performance by Dae-su. In an extreme show of repentance, he cuts out his tongue with a pair of scissors. The blood shed as a result of this act of self-silencing colors the water running through Woo-jin’s penthouse condo red, reiterating the imagery of blood and water featured in Mr. Vengeance. Woo-jin now has the sadistic “title to cruelty,” borrowing once more from Nietzsche, and the other who is “beneath him” has accepted his humiliation. Dae-su goes down on his knees to weep before his master’s shoes. In his comprehensive reading of Oldboy, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon notes that Dae-su refers to Woo-jin as hyejangnim (“company boss”) in this moment of dramatic obsequiousness. Reading the relationship between the two men against the backdrop of South Korea after 1997, Jeon writes: At this crucial point in the film, Dae-su addresses Wu-jin in the very manner that a salary man would address the chairman of the chaebol, revealing in stark terms his understanding of their relationship and of the specific type of authority that Wu-jin wields, despite the crucial fact that Wu-jin was never his actual employer. 40

The character of Dae-su plays out anxieties surrounding the continuing survival of the mighty conglomerate and the autonomy of its laborers during the years under the IMF. Jeon persuasively argues that Oldboy can be read as an allegory of the breakdown of “corporate paternalism, demonstrating in stark terms just how different a chaebol was from a family.”41 This final scene also reveals the incommensurability between public politics and private reconciliation, first identified in my analyses of JSA. As Dae-su licks his master’s shoes, Woo-jin’s face is held in a handkerchief as he watches this stirring performance of melodrama and remorse. He covers his mouth as if to sob into the handkerchief; yet, when the camera approaches and pans around to his face, we see that Woo-jin covers it not to hold back tears, but laughter, giving in to the intoxication of cruelty. There is no release from the compulsive grip of revenge, no closure, no effort is made to forgive and forget. As in Mr. Vengeance, Dae-su’s request for absolution will not be granted. Nor will Woo-jin give up the memory of his past transgression. While his compulsion toward necessary revenge is

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merciless to the very end, absolute retribution finally fails to provide the catharsis that will allow the vengeful to continue living. This moment marks the culmination of Woo-jin’s melodrama; yet, this moment also ends the narrative of his life as well as the narrative trajectory of Park’s film. Woo-jin will kill himself at the end of Oldboy, as if there were no other reason to live following the completion of his vengeance. From the start, Oldboy signals that the film will deal with the intertwined themes of time and memory. Its opening credits appear superimposed over images of analog and digital clock faces. They fade in while the letters of the cast and crew rotate and tick like the second hand of a great watch. The film then settles into a rainy, urban noir setting. On the DVD commentary track, Park tells us that the street arrow captured by the camera corresponds to the irreversible arrow of time. Throughout Oldboy, revenge in the present is profoundly shaped by an unforgettable, unchangeable past; indeed, a highly charged, traumatic past that cannot be “worked through” and overcome. It is not clear whether the reason for this is because of an inability or a refusal to perform this work. It is also not clear whether a psychoanalytic working through the past can even be articulated as such within this context. “Revenge is an act requiring enormous energy and passion,” Park states in a 2004 interview for The Straits Times, a tormentor has to give up every pleasure and comfort in his everyday life. However, vengeance also brings another kind of pleasure, which is very dark and leads to nothing in the end. Even if the tormentor fulfills his revenge and kills his victim, he’d not be able to, say, bring back his lost years nor can his dead wife return. This paradox in vengeance, which channels all your energy and passion into such meaningless things, ­attracts me the most. 42

Park here echoes Nietzsche once more, while also providing insight into the temporality of vengeance. For the vengeful, who live for nothing else, the past remains unchanged and unredeemed in a manner concomitant with the reified other. Moreover, the future is predetermined by the demand for just compensation. Temporality for the vengeful one is rigidly structured by the vulgar time of the clock. Past, present, and future remain ontologically distinct, and these temporalities are linked to each other via the logic of cause and effect. Vengeance demands a severely constrained vision of what must come, one overdetermined by the logic of recompense and organized in advance according to the ordinary course of historical temporality.

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The cinema is apposite in this regard. Its mechanistic unfolding is inextricably linked to the arrow of time and is coterminous with time’s irreversibility. And yet, the image that appears in the cinema owes its exis­ tence to a profilmic scene that has already passed. Indeed, the cinematic (and by co-extension photographic) image may be said to be indebted to the past ontologically, for its present owes something to the past moment through its capacity in the here and now to re-present the singularity of an event that was. This indebtedness is precisely that featured in Dae-su’s flashback sequence. D.N. Rodowick, writing on the potentiality of modern visual mediums in The Virtual Life of Film, notes that, “photography’s mode of presence is to evoke an unbridgeable gulf of time surging before us in the form of an absent cause. Every photograph is indebted to a past world; in viewing photographs we redeem this debt in the form of a detached looking.”43 Rodowick extends this indebtedness and act of redemption by looking to the reenacting ontology of the filmic image. This temporality, which constitutes the depiction of Dae-su’s flashbacks, underpins the temporal structure of vengeance itself, of the relationship between present and past, between debtor and creditor, between the vengeful and the original wrongdoer, and the moral debt that mediates all of them. If the exchange of kidneys, money, and guilt determines the ethics in Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy reveals to us how guilt and payback are measured through the exchange of rumors, teeth, hands, and tongues in the course of historical time. Still, reviewers have balked at the images of excessive brutality that constitute these connections in the Vengeance Trilogy, commenting that the representation of violence in Oldboy remains excessive, gratuitous, and unnecessary. Manohla Dargis, film critic for the New York Times, sniffs that “Mr. Park’s largest fan base may be those cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome. (At this point, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that the head of the jury at Cannes last year was none other than Quentin Tarantino.)”44 Her disapproval of such audiences, those that blur the boundaries between high and low culture, is echoed in her summary critique of Park’s Oldboy: “The fact that ‘Oldboy’ is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys.”45 Evidently, the shock and awe of Park’s imagery offended her liberal humanist sensibilities. However, these ad hominum criticisms go further than mere disapproval. Indeed, it is as if Dargis and other reviewers

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themselves needed to reap revenge on Park for having been subjected, apparently forcibly, to his gratuitous violence. Expropriating these critics’ comments, Kyung Hyun Kim notes the way Dargis singles out Park in her review, reminding that extreme violence was characteristic of a number of other films screened at Cannes that year. “Cannes winners Lars von Trier, Wong Kar-wei, and Quentin Tarantino,” Kim writes, “have similarly created distance from philosophical or political issues, seeking instead to leave their viewers with an indelibly ‘cool’ impression of violence.”46 He remarks that filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah have, in the past, generated similar controversy, and that both “Peckinpah and Park Chan-wook are, for better or for worse, similar as filmmakers, not categorically different.”47 Indeed, films such as The Wild Bunch (1969) or Straw Dogs (1971) have been celebrated as examples of what Stephen Prince calls a necessarily “savage cinema.” 48 In this light, Kim rightly identifies an odd inconsistency in the critical reception of Park’s films, particularly in the English-speaking context. Why is the violence in Park’s films still so problematic for these spectators? In an interview conducted in 2004 with Mark Russell, Korea correspondent of the Hollywood Reporter and culture editor for the Korea JoongAng Daily, Park gives us a clue about the necessary role violence plays in his films. He claims to seek a cinema whereby representations of violence presented in the name of revenge renders its underlying ethics untenable: While modern society is burdening the individual with a growing sense of rage, the outlets through which people can release their rage are becoming narrower. This is an unhealthy situation, and it’s probably why art exists. In reality, however, the vengeances in my movies are not actual vengeances. They are merely the transferring of a guilty conscience. My films are stories of people who place the blame for the actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves. Therefore, rather than movies purporting to be of revenge, it would be more accurate to see my films as ones stressing morality, with guilty consciences as the core subject matter. The constantly recurring theme is the guilty conscience. Because they are always conscious of and obsessed with their wrongdoings, which are committed because they are inherently unavoidable in life, my characters are fundamentally good people. The fact that people have to resort to another type of violence in order to subjugate their initial guilty consciences is the most basic quality of tragedy characteristic in my movies thus far. 49

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Park’s comment that the vengeful in his films are “fundamentally good people” may be corroborated with Dong-jin’s statement to Ryu at the end of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. The filmmaker remarks that the struggle with morality stands at the center of his films and that their tragedy revolves around the inability of their characters to confront and work through guilt. Vengeance is thus not rendered morally unproblematic, but its logic is made into a violent, self-destructive spectacle in Oldboy. Precisely by figuring violence as a means for carrying out retribution, it becomes a profound philosophical problem to be thought through, not identified with. Park’s films thus force characters to confront the ethics of their violence while also forcing viewers to confront the nature of violence itself and the moral consciousness that underpins it. This confrontation inspires a critique of violence separate from its typical narrative justification and instrumentalization. By pursuing such a critique, I am interested not in legitimizing the spectacular gratuitousness depicted on screen (and I am correspondingly not interested in proving how immature “fan boys” exist in a “hermetically sealed world”), but in demonstrating how a critique of revenge brings to light the nature of violence itself, beyond its utilization toward a predetermined end and beyond its ostensibly empty cinematic shock value. In his essay, “Critique of Violence” (“violence” is Gewalt in the original German, which, depending on context, can also be translated as “force”), Walter Benjamin attempts to ascertain whether violence, in and of itself, can be thought of as an ethical means, regardless of whether its ends are justified or not. Such violence would be exercised as a “pure means,” compelling the violent one a moment to think critically about the aims he or she has imagined to justify it. A violence of pure means is not grounded in a linear telos and, as such, may be mistaken for its “gratuitousness.” Throughout the first half of his difficult essay, Benjamin works through a number of instances of violence where its justification may be grounded through either natural or positive law. On the one hand, we understand that violence exists in nature, between animals, plants, and their environments, such that living beings will utilize whatever means of action to sustain their own life. On the other, we also think of violence in terms of its legal justification; its validity is judged according to notions of entitlement and justice regulated and codified in written law. Both implicate violence within the linear, rational kingdom of means and ends, and, as such, bring violence back into the realm of representational thinking. Every analysis of political economy necessitates a sustained consideration of the role of violence, but the analysis itself remains problematic in that it describes the nature of violence in terms of preconceived, teleological categories. At a key turning point in his essay, Benjamin summarizes:

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Among all the forms of violence permitted by both natural law and positive law, not one is free of the gravely problematic nature, already indicated, of all legal violence. Since, however, every conceivable solution to human problems, not to speak of deliverance from the confines of all the world-historical conditions of existence obtaining hitherto, remains impossible if violence is total excluded in principle, the question necessarily arises as to what kinds of violence exist other than all those envisaged by legal theory. It is at the same time a question of the truth of the basic dogma common to both theories: just ends can be attained by justified means, justified means used for just ends.50

In other words, both natural and positive law always already instrumentalize violence as a possible means toward a possible end. As soon as violence is forced to comply with the ostensibly inevitable course of fate, violence is done to its phenomenological description. Violence is no longer pure, but is turned into a metaphysics. It is justified and mobilized, and manifests itself as objective. In turn, this heterogeneous and politicized violence reinforces preconceived notions of animal nature and human law. As Oldboy shows, the metaphysics of violence remains crucial, for it avails itself to critique through its rendering as an object of spectacle. In the final pages of the essay, Benjamin brings a theological language to bear on the phenomenology of violence within modernity. In order to arrive at an adequate description, he frames violence in terms of myth in order to foreground how its underlying logic seems to be understood as normative and universal. Mythic violence, he writes, is “lawmaking,” “sets boundaries,” brings “at once guilt and retribution,” and is the assertion of “bloody power over mere life for its own sake.”51 Key to his formulation of mythic violence is its grounding of sovereign power through the act of lawmaking. This includes not only the power to deem human action legal or illegal, social acts that are, in fact, always already bound to law, but also the right to perform the juridical determination itself. For Benjamin this aspect of lawmaking violence seems to be particularly cryptic, and, as such, is perceived as “mythical,” for it seems to originate from outside human law and because its discursive effect is immediate. Mythic violence “specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power.”52 Continuing, Benjamin writes that, “lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence.”53 At stake in the exercise of mythic violence is thus the establishing of power, conventionally belonging to the sovereign, that legitimates the use of violence toward ostensibly

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legitimate ends. This God-like, limitless power is such that it can even validate its own shirking of the obligation to the other by deeming its own violent undertaking as juridically legitimate. Moral judgment of the other, related to the debtor-creditor relationship and the “measure of a man,” is inseparable from this settling of scores. The nature of violence committed by the sovereign subject, understood as a secularized theological concept, can thus be seen more clearly: mythic violence seeks to initiate law and to contain it in the body of sovereign so that violence may be exercised at will. Mythic violence perpetuates the ideological belief in the free individual of bourgeois culture, concomitant with a vulgar definition of freedom of choice, as well as the related notion that the self-determining individual should be allowed to commit acts of violence with impunity. Sovereignty persists as phantasmatic in modernity, which substantiates judgment and political action. In order to carry out revenge, regardless of whether it is justified or not, mythic violence makes a legislative claim to a new law, one that will ground its gory, cruel undertaking through its suspension of the old law. Mythic violence, in other words, coincides with what Giorgio Agamben, interpreting political theorist Carl Schmitt, calls a “state of exception.” Through the founding of law and the discursive force that legitimates it, sovereign power emerges precisely at the threshold between the lawmaking and law-preserving capacities of violence. In turn, the indistinction between the two legitimates the very existence of sovereign power and the expression of the divine embodied by mortal man. Schmitt seems much less interested in Benjamin’s pursuit of delineating a “pure” violence, and for him the ontological instability that underpins the sovereign may be recuperated through the violence of the sovereign decision. “The sovereign violence in Political Theology,” Agamben writes of Schmitt’s book published in 1921, “responds to the pure violence of Benjamin’s essay with the figure of a power that neither makes nor preserves law, but suspends it.”54 The sovereign declares himself an exception to law by appealing to a primitive, mythical law beyond juridical law, which is then folded back into the strict means-ends logic of mythic violence. In the midst of this ontological circularity, within this rhetorical redundancy, lies the ostensibly mystical source that grounds the moral truth of the sovereign self. This understanding of sovereign violence, as it conforms to the course of historical temporality, also coincides with melodrama and the right of entitlement to a normative means-ends narrativity. Through the harrowing spectacle of a persecuted, beset victim-hero, melodrama locates the right of sovereign power in the suffering body of the film protagonist. Their victimization justifies their ressentiment and belief in their own exceptionalism.

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The beset hero is allowed to pursue violent revenge against their tormentor, unhampered by law’s binding force. Key to this pursuit is the melodramatic mobilization of the spectator’s sympathy. And key to this sympathy is the doubling of sovereignty through the scorned character to the judgmental look of the spectator, who demands that victimization be followed by ven­ geance. This trajectory must be achieved without disruptive “plot holes,” narrative contradictions, or irrational character behavior. In melodrama the spectator entitles him or herself the moral high ground. By identifying with a character that suffers logically through their ressentiment, the viewer sympathizes with their right of retaliation and sanctimoniously deems that the violence doled out against the perpetrator is justified, morally righteous, and may be even celebrated as “poetic” justice. The quid pro quo of revenge becomes particularly relevant here, for the melodramatic empowerment of the beset victim not only becomes legible as revolving around vengeance, but is also a vengeance that is considered virtuous in the heart of the film spectator. Both Dae-su and Woo-jin pursue the right of sovereign power over the other through their pursuit of revenge. Both operate on the presumption that they have been traumatically victimized by the other and thus deserve their just payback. Retaliation has become their raison d’être, resentment their general outlook, and the humiliation of the other their mutual goal. The sympathetic victim, when he transforms into the vengeful retaliator, may be admired for taking the law into his own hands, for righting an implicitly unfair situation. For the film viewer feeling in the melodramatic mode, such a transformation, which in Park’s films leads to the violent death of the other, is perceived as natural and appeals to a “mythic” law beyond juridical law. At the same time, Oldboy reveals that such retaliation, far from adhering to a primordial law of nature, merely conforms to the political theology of modernity. In his essay on Oldboy, Jeon argues that the relationship between Dae-su and Woo-jin can be allegorically read in terms of the relationship between labor and capital after the IMF crisis in South Korea. I am trying to show that Park’s film may be more profoundly read for the way it presents a cultural logic, a mythic violence, which may be abstracted from this context. The bond between labor and capital is symmetrically determined by their mutual pursuit of moral debt and is inseparable from a profound ressentiment that ascribes the other as “evil” and the self as “good.” The struggle between two vengeful men is, as a consequence, felt as a transhistorical moral conflict between two individual human beings. Mythic violence covers over historical notions of the human that persist in capitalist modernity,

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where the notion that the “customer is sovereign king” must be maintained at the expense of all, less-than-human others. Woo-jin’s precise program for revenge conforms to the regularity of capitalist clock-time and to the causeeffect linearity that binds memory and retaliation, past trauma, and the promise of vengeance in the future. Their violent drama, inseparable from the melodramatic mode and the mythic violence that sustains it, justifies their mutual suspension of law and empowers their claim to sovereignty over the other. However, their mutual claims to power are ultimately negated, bringing the right to one’s vengeance to a violent end in the harrowing conclusion to Oldboy. In it, the viewer’s demand for narrative satisfaction is stymied, as in JSA and Mr. Vengeance, resulting in the experience of heartrending futility. After he cuts out his tongue, Dae-su spits blood and breathes heavily following his tormented display of remorse before Woo-jin. The baby-faced man turns around and walks toward the elevator. As he does so, Dae-su grabs the pen light that controls Woo-jin’s artificial heart. The tongue-less man makes a last-ditch effort to have his sovereign vengeance and do away with his hated enemy. But as he furiously presses the small button on the pen it triggers, not Woo-jin’s death, but an audio recording of Dae-su and Mido having sex. Woo-jin, with a satisfied smirk, walks away as Dae-su screams in anguish, his quest for vengeful, mythic violence having failed once more. Woo-jin takes the elevator down to the ground floor. His revenge is now complete. As he stands in the elevator alone he begins to reminisce about the moment, years ago, when his sister committed suicide. The camera pans from his anguished face down his body to his outstretched arm holding an off-screen hand. His pose recalls the opening scene of the film when Dae-su’s outstretched arm clutches a suicidal man, as well as in Sophie’s extended arm enacting the violence of revenge in JSA. Oldboy flashes back once more to a teenage Woo-jin desperately holding his sister over the railing of Hapcheon Dam. “I know you’re scared Woo-jin,” she remarks, “so let go of me, ok?” He refuses to let go. She then reaches for the camera around Woo-jin’s neck and, looking into it, says, “Remember me, ok? I have no regrets.” She takes her own photograph, evoking once more the future anterior that belongs to the photographic image. Woo-jin continues to struggle but he finally acquiesces to his sister’s desire for death. He lets go and she falls into the water far below. The young Woo-jin is replaced by the older one as the camera pans down his arm again. It stops at his hand, making a gesture as if to pull the trigger of a gun. Suddenly, the film returns to the present day and just as the

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Fig. 8: Woo-jin holds an imaginary pistol. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

elevator door opens, Woo-jin shoots himself in the head. This action recalls Soo-Hyuk’s suicide at the end of JSA, for both characters are profoundly conflicted between their compulsion toward revenge and the impossibility of forgiving and forgetting. Both are morally “bankrupt” and are unable to work through past trauma in order to reconcile the past with the present. With mythic violence derailed, what Park’s films emphasize is not only the futility of revenge, but also the pursuit of sovereign power over the other that functions as its key grounding presupposition. In an interview carried out in 2006, the director explains that “[A]ll revenge films deal with the idea that you can get even – especially when it’s the most foolish thing in the world to do. A lot of films try to hide that last fact. You just get the sense that it’s fun and that it’s cool. But I try to put that fact right in front of audiences.”55 In another interview, conducted in London in the same year, Park remarks that, “Revenge is something that makes you happy and invigorates you only when it is in your imagination, but when it comes to actually realizing this it is never happy and never gives you pleasure. Because it is an act of total stupidity.”56 His films interrupt everyday depictions of revenge in the cinema, where revenge is all too easily justified and even celebrated as such. In this regard, it is perhaps not surprising that Spike Lee was chosen to remake Oldboy in 2013, the director of the violent Do the Right Thing (1989), which has been called “A Theater of Interruptions.”57 Park’s aim is to present the “cool” and “happy” experience of revenge in the cinema as profoundly ambivalent, compelling the viewer to question his or her sympathies and the capacity for sovereign judgment. Dae-su and Woo-jin are both hopelessly dug in and pursue their respective vengeances, but in the end, each cancels the other out. Woo-jin commits suicide, and Dae-su willingly forgets his past. In the final scenes of Oldboy,

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Dae-su, now unable to speak, sits across from a female hypnotist, “Mrs. Yoo” (Lee Seung-shin), in a snowy forest. She has just finished reading his story and notes the final lines of the written narrative: “Even though I’m no worse than a beast, don’t I have the right to live?” She then tells him to stare at a tree and imagine it transforming into a concrete column. Park utilizes the concrete to pivot back to Woo-jin’s penthouse apartment, where the two men had confronted each other for the last time. Dae-su approaches one of the windows that faces the city at night. “When I ring my bell,” Mrs. Yoo commands in voice-over, “you’ll be split into two people.” With the sound of a bell, the window is darkened, becoming a mirror for Dae-su. “The one who doesn’t know the secret is Oh Dae-su. The one who keeps the secret is the monster. When I ring the bell again, the monster will turn around and begin walking.” It is not the reflection that turns and walks away, but the “original” Dae-su, the monster who remembers his sins. “With each step, you age one year. When the monster reaches seventy, he will die. It will be a very peaceful death. Now, good luck to you.” The camera turns back to Dae-su’s reflection, the one who has forgotten, and then cuts to a shot of a reel-to-reel tape recorder as the end of the tape is fed through the machine. Signaling the end of the recording material, it signals the end of the celluloid film and the end of Oldboy. Both men are unable to forgive the other, particularly as they are unable to work through their traumas. There is no winner, and what remains is only a violent story of revenge, one that nevertheless has the potential of changing the course of history.

3.

Serial Sexualities and Accidental Desires

In the previous chapter, I showed how three well-known films by Park Chan-wook, JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Oldboy, operate through an ethics of moral credit and debt. Born from ressentiment and given narrative form through melodrama, this ethics determines the logic of vengeance and retribution in all three films. I also demonstrated how this logic works allegorically to reflect desires produced by and reinforced through profound socio-political shifts that occurred in post-IMF South Korean life: new strategies of reconciliation between the two Koreas, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the changing relationship between capital and labor wrought by the demands imposed by the IMF. Park’s films may be read as limit cases that trace the trajectory of sovereign violence until it is stymied and rendered inoperable. Characters with which the spectator are supposed to sympathize become, by the films’ conclusions, intoxicated with cruelty. In this transformation, Park’s films overturn the ethics and melodrama of vengeance in JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Oldboy from within. In the following sections, I would like to take into consideration three films by two Korean directors, also familiar to the international f ilm festival circuit. Hong Sang-soo’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), his Woman is the Future of Man (2004), and Park Ki-yong’s Camel(s) (2002) play out the sexual politics that mediate relations between men and women in post-IMF Korea. All three f ilms feature seemingly alienated characters, long takes, and a minimalistic, severe cinematic style. In this chapter, we shall see how the cycles of male desire represented in these films may be read in conjunction with notions of capitalist temporality that remain closed to the possibility of chance and contingency. Narcissistic and inflexible, the egos represented in these anti-melodramatic films are subsequently unable to affirm the heterogeneity of the other in the manner called for in chapter one by Levinas. However, despite their repetitious pattern of reducing difference to the finite logic of the same, we shall see how a critique of desire may be produced precisely through repetition and through the reproducibility of the film medium itself.

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Repetition and Critique in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) Of his early works, Hong’s third feature film is perhaps the most rigorous in its approach to narrative form. Its story revolves around a couple’s romantic history. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (hereafter Virgin Stripped Bare) features a young woman, Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), who works as an assistant scriptwriter to Young-soo (Mun Seung-kun), an independent film director. They go to an art gallery, where Soo-jung meets Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok), the gallery owner. Hong does not depict them walking around the gallery space and looking at art, but cuts quickly to their leaving the building at the same time, as in Ozu Yasujiro’s Late Spring (1949). The three decide to have lunch together. The conversation between Soo-jung and Jae-hoon is awkward and stilted, indicating a nervousness that often accompanies mutual attraction. Soon, they become involved, at first meeting serendipitously in public, then in a bar, then at a café, during a dinner party held at a mutual friend’s place, and later at each other’s apartments. Fulfilling the narrative expectation introduced by the film’s title (which is derived from Duchamp’s artwork, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [1923]), Soo-jung loses her virginity to Jae-hoon in a hotel situated on top of scenic Namsan at the end of the film. Hong’s film presents this chronicle in two variations. Each is narrated, or perhaps remembered, in ways that correspond to the perspectives of the two characters of the couple. They differ in both minor and major details. Jae-hoon’s version of the story (which I will designate as “A”) is presented first, in seven clearly marked chapters that last slightly more than fifty minutes in duration. Soo-jung’s version then follows (“B”), consisting of seven chapters that occupy the same length of time and whose events loosely correspond to those depicted in Jae-hoon’s. The variations are separated by a brief sequence, marked with the intertitle, “Suspended Cable Car,” which depicts Soo-jung being transported to the top of Namsan. Both variations, put together, are flanked by a phone call between Jae-hoon and Soo-jung speaking about their meeting in Jejudo, and then changing their mind to stay in Seoul. Although these episodes, occurring at the beginning, middle, and end of the film, do not explicitly depict the characters narrating their past memories – Hong does not utilize conventional cues for signaling the film’s entrance into flashback – they are gradually understood as taking place in the present. In the final scene of the film, Jae-hoon and Soo-jung sit, look out of their hotel window and, dressed in hotel robes, discuss their future together.

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Fig. 9: Soo-jun, Young-soo, and Jae-hoon at lunch.

Jae-hoon off-handedly asks Soo-jung if she is a good cook. “I don’t know,” she responds, “I’m not good at anything, so you take care of it.” Smiling, he optimistically remarks that he does not mind that she is incapable of doing “anything.” “I’ve found my other half, so I really have no problem,” he assures her. In the final moments of the film, which have a tone reminiscent of the ambivalent ending to Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), they gaze once more out of the window and not at each other, leaving the viewer wondering if their relationship will survive. The differences between the two narrated versions are subtle, but significant. On first consideration, they seem to highlight, as in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), the ways in which multiple individuals perceive and remember a series of events differently. In the A version, Jae-hoon and Soo-jung meet by chance on the grounds of Kyongbok Palace, where she is assisting a film shoot. Meeting for the first time without Young-soo, they recognize each other immediately as they approach from opposite sides of the film frame. She is holding a pair of gloves. Jae-hoon seems to recognize them and asks if he might try them. As he slips the gloves on, Jae-hoon remarks incredulously that, “These gloves are really mine. I came back but… I didn’t think I would find them… I must have left them on the bench during lunch.” Even more emphatically, he says that, “I can’t believe that you, Soo-jung, brought them to me.” They then recollect each other’s names and happily remark that they both have good memories. In the corresponding B version of the scene, Soo-jung is more playful and perhaps more forthcoming in her advances toward Jae-hoon. Earlier, while riding in the van to

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the shoot location, she convinced the film crew to go to Kyongbok Palace, knowing perhaps that Jae-hoon regularly takes his lunch on the palace grounds. Approaching from opposite sides of the frame, she approaches him and asks if the gloves she found are his. “They are? This is incredible,” she excitedly exclaims, “I found them on that bench and wondered whether they were yours.” Soo-jung is impressed that Jae-hoon remembers her name and throughout their short conversation, she continues to laugh and smile. In this version of events, Soo-jung is the more incredulous one, mirroring Jae-hoon’s excitement in the A version. Differences are also notable in the characterization of Young-soo, the film director. Throughout Virgin Stripped Bare, his demeanor remains somewhat haughty and at times aggressive. But his actions do not follow up on his threatening words. In the A version, we see that Young-soo quickly becomes apologetic when confronted with a belligerent colleague. After arguing angrily with one of his crewmembers, who complains about having to work the next day, they meet in Young-soo’s office to confront each other face-to-face. When the livid worker arrives, the director stands up and calmly remarks, “I’m really sorry. You know how it is, we’re always behind schedule. So I was a bit tense, and I said some things I shouldn’t have.” He extends his hand and obsequiously requests that they make peace. In the B version, Young-soo is seated in his office and his glasses are removed. He is receiving verbal abuse and slaps across his face. “You bastard,” the angry crewmember remarks, “Do you think that you’d be enjoying all this if you weren’t the nephew of the owner? You think people call you director because they respect you?” Meanwhile, the camera pans left to Soo-jung, hidden out of sight of the two men. Her presence makes explicit that this version of events corresponds to her perspective. The crewman brusquely asks Young-soo if he slept with Soo-jung and warns him that, “If I ever catch you two fooling around in the editing room, I swear I’m gonna kill both of you right then and there.” With this admonition, she quietly slips out of the frame. Other differences between the two accounts of the story are minor. In version A, Young-soo becomes drunk and excuses himself to go to the restroom in a codfish restaurant, and later, while Soo-jung and Jae-hoon kiss in café, a fork drops from their table. In version B, Soo-jung gets drunk on makgeolli, a Korean rice wine, in the codfish restaurant and stumbles to the restroom. Later, in the café, a spoon falls from the table. These discrepancies play out for the viewer, as David Bordwell puts it, as “a stringent memory test.”1 If Soo-jung and Jae-hoon both command an excellent capacity to remember, their differing versions of the depicted events seem to suggest

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otherwise. They remember in ways that accord with their differing needs, their divergent agendas, what appeals to them individually, and what they wish to disavow. The viewer is made to remember similarities and differences between the two versions in order to confirm whether Soo-jung and Jae-hoon can, in fact, remember. Aside from the differences depicted in the narration of events shared by both, the two versions also shed differing light on the more private lives of their characters, particularly their desires and experiences in matters of sex. In the A version, Jae-hoon clearly becomes allured when Soo-jung confesses to him that she is a virgin. His attempts to have intercourse with the naïve woman are repeatedly rebuffed and the narration of these events seems to reflect the story of his repeated sexual frustration. If the images in version A represent what he remembers, the sex scenes remain extremely unsettling as the viewer is asked to comply with his increasingly exasperated perspective. Soo-jung firmly tells him “no,” but her refusal seems only to infuriate him. As Adam Hartzell writes, these scenes remain decidedly “unsexy,” depicting behavior that borders on sexual assault.2 Instead of allowing the viewer to take visual pleasure in the spectacle of the actors’ naked bodies during the sex scenes, Hong challenges this form of voyeuristic spectatorship as Jae-hoon pushes the limits of Soo-jung’s trust in him. On the other hand, the B version reveals that Soo-jung may not be as virginal and sexually inexperienced as Jae-hoon and the spectator initially believed. In a scene that is initially confusing, Soo-jung manually stimulates her older brother in bed. Her sibling presses her to satisfy him sexually and she eventually gives in, recalling the manner in which Jae-hoon presses her to have intercourse. Later in the B version, Young-soo takes Soo-jung to a cheap motel where he proceeds to undress, grope, and finally demand sex from her. She struggles to resist him and finally pushes the inebriated and desperate film director off her. “I had a big crush on you,” she remarks, “You know you were about to rape me.” The camera then continues, without moving, to film them lying next to each other in silence, extending the mounting discomfort in the viewer. Hong maintains a minimalistic style that presents these disturbing and unsexy scenes with an unflinching gaze. Virgin Stripped Bare is filmed in stark black and white, utilizing long takes that encompass the entirety of the interactions between characters. Hong does not cut away when conversations become awkward or when sex borders on assault. The viewer is forced to endure these extremely uncomfortable scenes. The attitude toward the filmed events seems to recall the condition of “automatism” that for Stanley Cavell is characteristic of the cinema’s basic relation to reality.

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The cinema, for the philosopher, offers a view onto the world, allowing the viewer to observe it from without, while placing him or her in a voyeuristic position of seeing and not being seen. “Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic,” Cavell writes, “takes the responsibility for [the world] out of our hands.”3 In this sense, Hong’s camera seems unable or unwilling to intervene on what takes place before it; it only observes and records. The viewer is subjected to stark images of violence, sexual and psychological, that are exchanged between Jae-hoon, Young-soo, and Soo-jung while an ontological distance between camera and profilmic event is constituted through Hong’s relentlessly long, perhaps irresponsible, takes. For some viewers, the style and story of Virgin Stripped Bare may try the limits of their patience and test their tolerance for experiencing unpleasure in the cinema. The viewer may wonder why the director is subjecting him or her to these images of sexual violence, why one should care about these characters while the film fails to unfold with the motivation typically associated with the melodramatic mode. Peter Parshall disparagingly writes that Hong’s film provides “desultory forward movement at best, filled with aimless conversation and lack of decision.”4 Centering on largely unsympathetic characters, Virgin Stripped Bare may induce boredom in the viewer and the sense that “nothing” is happening in the film. The long takes allow the spectator, however, time to scan the whole image and to observe details within the shot – Soo-jung’s small and sparsely furnished bedroom, for example, or the graffiti-covered walls of the codfish restaurant, or the countless bottles of soju and half-eaten dishes of food that cover the tables in the Christmas house party. Many interactions between characters may seem mundane and at times meandering, but they are punctuated by occasional outbursts of pent-up anger or awkward desire. Although the plot of Hong’s film unfolds through dialogue, there are no shot-reverse shot sequences in the film to facilitate the spectator’s attention and sympathy. Most of the time, Virgin Stripped Bare is content with framing the characters in a medium shot and every now and then in long shot. Objects may occasionally be seen in close up, but a face never is. Conversations are shot from ninety or forty-five degree angles in relation to the line of action, and the camera almost never moves from this position throughout the duration of the conversation. As in Ozu’s cinema, Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare never uses dissolves or fades, utilizing only decisive cuts that clearly distinguish one shot from the next. There is very little ambient music throughout the film, except for a clumsy piano melody in ¾ time that signals transitional moments between the sections. Eschewing the rules of camera technique and editing that involve the spectator in

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the melodrama of character development, Hong’s film takes a decidedly distanced approach to its human figures and story. Avoiding discursive structures of spectatorial identification, Virgin Stripped Bare does not encourage the viewer to align him or herself with any single protagonist. In all these ways, Hong’s film remains anti-melodramatic. Yet, despite, or perhaps because of, the distance of Hong’s camera, it would be too hasty to claim that the A and B versions of the film’s narrative merely reflect the perspective of one or the other of its two main characters. This is where I diverge from most critical accounts of Virgin Stripped Bare. A closer look reveals that some details are depicted in the two versions that cannot be attributed to either perspective. For instance, at one moment during the A version of Jae-hoon’s memory, he and Soo-jung are at his apartment. While Jae-hoon takes a shower, Soo-jung removes her bra in the living room, an action that he could never have seen, let alone remembered. And in the B version, ostensibly depicting Soo-jung’s memory, it is unclear whether she sees Jae-hoon kiss another woman at the dinner party after he puts a CD in the player. She never brings it up or chastises him later in her narration. In an interview with film critic Huh Moonyung, Hong addresses such discrepancies and explains that he did not want to be too “stubborn” about linking both characters’ perspectives with each version of the film’s story: I remember I decided not to be stubborn about showing only the things from the man’s perspective, although each chapter seems to lean on the main character’s memory. I think it was better to give rich content by not being strict on formalizing the content based on each subject’s vision. However, I think I agree with your statement that I tend not to distinguish memory, imagination and dreams. Such an attitude of mine probably allowed me to easily make such a decision. To me, film is a frame where I can put the things I want. The fragments of memory, dream, imagination and fragments of reality are just different in name only, but they all share homogeneity.5

These comments invite us to consider the stark, black-and-white images that make up Virgin Stripped Bare, not as simply depicting subjective memory, but as constituting a form that allows remembering, imagining, and thinking to co-exist. Such a form, indeed, belongs uniquely to the cinematic image. Determining historical truth, the veracity of one version, of one detail or another, becomes less important if Hong’s images are considered less in terms of documenting a pre-existing reality and more

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in terms of creating reality – that is, a filmic reality that unfolds before the viewer, as opposed to an empirical reality that pre-exists the cinema. In this, memory, dream, imagination, and reality “all share homogeneity” as they find common ground in the logic of images, expressed through cinematic means. It is thus crucial to approach Hong’s cinema, despite his use of long takes and synchronized sound, as one that does not simply represent reality, one that is narratively coherent and even separable from the means of depicting it, but as one that is inseparable from the cinema’s specific means of expression – a cinema of duration that is also a form of thinking. Gilles Deleuze describes a cinema that may be construed through the logic of images, as a form of thinking. In Cinema 1, he describes how the linkage of one shot to the next in narrative cinema conforms to the habituated, sensory-motor linkages that constitute Cartesian space and time. In my discussion of JSA from the previous chapter, I showed how the ordering of events in Park’s film, despite its constant switching between past and present through flashback, confirms this ascending logic that places images on a line of cause and effect. Time is thus represented in this cinema, linear and progressive, in terms of space in what Deleuze calls the “movementimage.” In Cinema 2, on the other hand, it is space that revolves around the turnstile of time, breaking the clichés that link cause to effect and giving rise to new images, new ways of perceiving and remembering. He writes of this new, more modern cinema: What has happened is that the sensory-motor schema is no longer in operation, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It is shattered from the inside. That is, perceptions and actions ceased to be linked together, and spaces are now neither co-ordinated nor filled. Some characters, caught in certain pure optical and sound situations, find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip.6

Through this, the images betray their complicity with Bergsonian duration and thus their alliance with the movement of thought. The image of thought culminates in what Deleuze calls the “time-image,” where past, present, and future, and by implication the actual and virtual, are collapsed and signified in the image itself. Within this regime, characters and plots behave in ways that upend habituated lines of action. The film’s plot begins to wander and provides “desultory forward movement at best.”7 The images become less about documenting reality authentically (as Cavell described it above) and more about delineating a line of thinking through montage and movement.

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This formulation of a cinema of thought helps explain a line Hong has often been quoted as saying: “People tell me that I make films about reality. They’re wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up.”8 Virgin Stripped Bare does not unfold in a linear fashion such that the terms and characters set out at the beginning of the film develop progressively for its two-hour duration. Rather, Hong’s film reiterates the basic principles of montage and repetition that structure its plot, two versions of one story. The differing versions cannot be wholly explained by everyday notions of reality, including familiar notions of time, space, and the individual self, but seem to trace discursive lines of thinking that are “aimless,” and thus do not conform to a single, progressive telos demanded by capitalist modernity. The repetition of the story in version B does not confirm the reality depicted in A, but instead seems to confirm only its fundamental ambiguity. As lines of thinking, then, the two versions culminate to raise questions of the image specific to Hong’s cinema: repetition and contingency, and the possibility of chance in a world overdetermined by the repetitions of the culture industry. Marshall Deutelbaum’s careful reconstruction of Virgin Stripped Bare seems to miss the point of Hong’s film in this regard. In an article published in 2005, Deutelbaum acknowledges that Hong’s film has generally been misinterpreted as depicting two versions of a couple’s romantic history that correspond to their points of view. Yet, instead of demonstrating that cinematic narrativity remains fractured in Hong’s film, he proceeds to show that the two versions “form a single, coherent chronology with a few minor exceptions.”9 When Young-soo becomes drunk in the codfish restaurant in version A and Soo-jung becomes inebriated in version B, this discrepancy cannot be solely explained by the fallacies of subjective memory. According to Deutelbaum, both depictions belong to a unified past, such that Youngsoo first became drunk and later, in the same historical reality, Soo-jung became drunk. This manner of narrative reconstruction is applied to most of the differences I have described above, including the physical abuse of Young-soo by one of his crew members and the dropping of a fork or spoon in a café. While he is able to systematize the two versions of Jae-hoon and Soo-jung’s chronicle fairly efficiently, Deutelbaum confesses difficulty in accounting for two specific situations: the events following the trio’s leaving the art gallery at the beginning of the film and the returning of Jae-hoon’s gloves on the Kyongbok Palace grounds. He concedes that these differing depictions may be explained by Jae-hoon and Soo-jung’s differing memories. Overlooking these exceptional cases, Deutelbaum concludes that, “From the evidence thus far, one might best conclude that what we see in the presentations of the couple’s past consists primarily of objectively

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rendered events. A character’s subjective interest affects what we see only in a handful of truly repeated events.”10 Yet, by reassembling a chronology of events in this rigorous manner, rendered “objectively” and automatically in Virgin Stripped Bare, Deutelbaum closely hews to a narrow definition of reality and ultimately to a strict principle of cause-effect that subtends linear narrativity. Hong provided some contrary insight here, insofar as he disavows the notion that his films are about reality – he remarks that they are instead based on mental structures. In other words, the images of his films do not delineate a closed system that conforms to a world that we already know. While Virgin Stripped Bare presents images that could be read as subjective perception or remembering, Deutelbaum maintains that they are rigorously mimetic to such a world. Yet, such a claim immediately forecloses ontological possibilities for the image and limits what it can do to mere documentation. Viewed more affirmatively, in a manner that allows for Deutelbaum’s approach as well as others, the black-and-white images that make up Virgin Stripped Bare could be better read as constituting an open system, one that allows, to quote the filmmaker once more, the possible co-existence of “fragments of memory, dream, imagination and fragments of reality.” Hong’s film operates at the nexus between fantasy and empirical reality, at the threshold between the actual and virtual, and where the image of thought finds expression. Thus, we may set out on a different path into Hong’s film, one that is not delimited by notions of fact or fiction, but proceeds through the movement of thought that both constitutes and is constituted by a rigorous structure. If, for Deleuze, a cinema of thought is one that breaks away from the habituated paths and lines of desire concomitant with the movement-image, it is this wandering, seemingly aimless image that departs from the principle of sufficient reason and is released toward unpredictable futures. It breaks from the necessary, cause-effect linkages between past and present in order to restore and make visible the fluidity of the image between past, present, and future. While Deutelbaum’s reading may be useful for unraveling the order and placing of narrative events in relation to each other, it depends wholly on an understanding of the cinema image that obscures its basic temporality and limits it as a marker of spatialized time, while foreclosing the possibility of images to signify lived duration. Beyond this foreclosing, Hong’s film, I am arguing, attempts to signify time directly. It is from this perspective that the repetitions and meanderings of Virgin Stripped Bare may be read more productively. Hong’s film indulges the philosophical constraints of melodrama and its way of structuring temporality in order to describe its limits and thus make way for a more open

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future temporality. The possibility for contingency is indicated directly in the titles attributed to the two versions of the story: “Perhaps Accident” for version A and “Perhaps Intention” for version B. Presumably, these titles refer to the accidental or intentional quality of the relationship that develops between Jae-hoon and Soo-jung. They set into motion questions that the viewer is encouraged to ponder: To what extent was their meeting at Kyongbok Palace serendipitous? What are Soo-jung’s true intentions toward Jae-hoon and Young-soo? To what extent were the encounters between the three main characters orchestrated before they occurred? If the film offers “desultory forward movement at best,” is this lack of forward movement merely a result of awkward personalities interacting with each other or the result of strategic dissembling that seeks to manipulate the other?11 Finally, do these characters act out of free will or are they victim to forces beyond their control? These are questions that I believe issue from the logic of the time-image while directly addressing the film’s narrativity, the veracity of its diegetic reality, and the melodramatic content of the characters. Hong apparently intended that a degree of undecidability should be constitutive of the relationship between Soo-jung and Jae-hoon. In an interview, he explains that he wanted to show Soo-jung’s indecision about whether she will sleep with Jae-hoon until the last scene of the film. “Until the last moment,” he remarks, before carrying out her final act, Su-jeong was calling Yeong-su because of the anxiety and self-doubt she had felt. She was rolling the dice whether to lose her virginity or not. She was passively hoping that Yeong-su could discourage her from moving forward. There is no such thing as an absolute determination.12

It remains unclear, in the discomforting sex scene at the film’s conclusion, whether Soo-jung’s cries are those of complicitous pleasure or unwanted pain. Did she intend for this culminating moment to happen in this way, or is it the result of a series of accidents? Yet, it seems Hong himself was undecided as well. Although he scripted the film in its entirety beforehand, the dialogue and even the story constantly underwent revision during filming. The tension between accident and intention threads its way through Virgin Stripped Bare, not only in Soo-jung’s decision to sleep with Jae-hoon, but also in the accidental/ intentional character of their meeting in Kyongbok Palace as well as at other key narrative moments. This tension seems to allegorize a temporality that underpins Hong’s writing and filmmaking process itself. While on set,

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a balance needed to be struck between calculation and intuition, as he explains: “I do calculate, but a decision is made by the intuition. It is easy to calculate once the structure is set. It’s the intuition that decides where to draw the line.”13 It is intuition that guides which accidents or unexpected ideas that appear during filming are to be incorporated into what was intended in the script. The intertitles that begin the two versions of the story, “Perhaps Accident” and “Perhaps Intention,” should thus be read as signaling, not only the mystery of how Jae-hoon and Soo-jung came together, but also Hong’s filmmaking process itself. As with materialist/structuralist cinema (which the director was exposed to as a film student at the Art Institute of Chicago), Virgin Stripped Bare self-reflexively foregrounds the film’s process as a process of filmmaking in order to privilege the film experience itself, beyond that provided by the trajectory of melodrama and narrative. Coincidently, as Hong explains in an interview about his production of this film, these two intertitles were not intended from the start of the film’s writing, but they came to him only after the filming was finished, during the editing process.14 The most charming scene of Virgin Stripped Bare, which takes place in chapter six, came about through the tension between accident and intention. Jae-hoon and Soo-jung venture out onto a frozen lake in Kojan, a coastal city close to Inchon. The ice cracks beneath them as they step onto it. Jae-hoon reassures Soo-jung that the cracking sound indicates that the ice is acclimatizing to their weight. The lingering danger of fragile ice seems to heighten the unpredictability and thus the accidental quality of the scene. In a long shot that depicts the couple wearing dark clothes against a pale landscape, the romance growing between them is underscored through their visual isolation. Jae-hoon sees something stuck in the ice and crouches down to take a closer look. “It’s gum wrapping paper,” he observes, “It says ‘kiss’ gum.” The film cuts to a close-up on the wrapper and then cuts back to a two-shot of both of them, squatting face-to-face with each other. They smile and somewhat innocently kiss. Soo-jung warmly thanks Jae-hoon for coming to Kojan to visit her. Standing up, he asks if she would like to slide. Still squatting, she offers Jae-hoon her hands and is dragged across the ice while shrieking in delight. Responding to his interviewer, who notes the beauty of this scene, Hong explains that it was not originally intended in the script but came about unexpectedly while scouting for filmic locations: I was hunting a shooting location the day before and found a gum wrapper that read ‘Ppoppo’ (meaning kiss in Korean) frozen in the lake by accident. So we planted dozens of gum wrappers in the lake. The next day, we did

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a close up of one of those wrappers. If it wasn’t for that gum wrapper, the actors would not even have gone onto the frozen lake.15

An accident initiated the creation of this scene. It occurs only in version B of the film’s story, and is not depicted or alluded to in any way in version A. Thus, its appearance late in the film is particularly surprising, as it inspires the thought that the feelings shared by Jae-hoon and Soo-jung may not merely be the result of a repetition. Perhaps more than any other in the film, this scene exemplifies the tension between accident and intention that is integral to Hong’s filmmaking as a whole. It brings a fleeting image of lived life, of that which cannot be planned, into the course of the filmmaking process. Freeing himself from the primacy of the written script, Hong remains open to unforeseen encounters in the present, here the serendipity of the gum wrapper while searching for a location to shoot, in order to reconfigure the conventional linkage of the past with the future. In doing so, the transient feelings of romance between Jae-hoon and Soo-jung are expressed as well. Each informs the other, from filmmaking to relations between men and women, and back again, as the unanticipated is allowed to alter what was initially intended in the course of time. In order to further describe how the tension between accident and intention relates to time, I would like to turn to some key passages from Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889). In this book, Bergson attempts to provide an extended description of duration, the continuous flow of time that constantly eludes metaphysical, or representational, thinking. In pursuing this description, Bergson seeks a definition of free will that is unconstrained by mechanical, habituated patterns of living aligned with capitalist modernity. For the French philosopher, freedom essentially means freedom from repetition and thus from a dehumanizing form of life that forecloses the possibility of a yet to be determined future. Through this brief philosophical detour, we will see how the two narratives depicted in Virgin Stripped Bare are not simply two versions of one story, but taken together are attempts to cinematically think through the problem of contingency and, related to it, the temporality of possibility. This problem, I insist, underpins the critical ethics of Hong’s thinking and his filmmaking practice in general. It is during his critique of the debate between determination and free will that Bergson describes the nature of the self as it encounters two possible, but differing, actions, which he calls two “tendencies” that are available at any one moment. Bergson even provides a diagram to represent these tendencies to the reader, drawing a line between the letters “M” and “O”

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to designate the lived self in the course of time. At point “O” the line splits into two lines, labeled “X” and “Y,” and which indicate two divergent possibilities of being. “Indeed, these opposite inclinations alone have a real existence, and X and Y are two symbols by which I represent at their arrival- or termination-points, so to speak, two different tendencies of my personality at successive moments of duration.”16 Bergson is quick to note that this diagram is already an objectification of a lived duration, a representation of time already passed and no longer present – not the flow of time, but time flown. Thus, the lines, OX and OY, each of which represent a possible trajectory of being, the one measurably divergent from the other, can only provide abstracted conceptions Fig. 10: Bergson’s diagram of free will. of these two possibilities. They are presented to consciousness as two reified, already lived choices, as Bergson elaborates: “In short, the continuous and living activity of the self, in which we have distinguished, by abstraction only, two opposite directions, is replaced by these directions themselves, transformed into indifferent inert things awaiting our choice.”17 When life and its possibilities are represented in such a schematic manner, as a series of lines drawn on a page, they not only depict the divergence and mutual exclusivity of these possibilities, they also diverge metaphysically from their organic, existential unfolding in the course of time. Bergson is interested in whether this choice, constituted as an inert representation, is necessary for isolating and defining an act of freedom. It is often assumed that a person who has free will chooses among a clearly delineated range of options, options that are already given before a rational choice is made. Bergson remains suspicious of this however, for a schematic description of possibility already implies a relationship to time, despite the claims of metaphysical language to transcend transience and its belief that the observing self stands outside time’s perpetual flow. That life-choices are already mapped out in relation to time is made clear in the diagram laid out between the points MOX and MOY. This schema lays out the course of time, from past to future, as if all were given to the observer. Despite believing

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time to have been mastered and accurately reproduced as in a diagram, the representation grossly misrepresents time’s fundamental becoming. “If you trace it beforehand,” Bergson explains of the position of the observer, “you assume that you have reached the end and are present in imagination at the final act. In short this figure does not show me the deed in the doing but the deed already done.”18 The timeline renders time as if it were an object that may be controlled and traversed at will. And through its diagramming, temporality is prefigured and, in fact, intimately linked to the accumulation of ressentiment and the moral prefiguration of the other, which I discussed in the previous chapter. For Bergson, then, the choice made at point “O” of his drawing is not really a free choice, since it is conditioned by a priori determinations and a posteriori anticipations. In other words, the choice is not pure, is not free of “mechanical explanations” that bring recollected, coalesced habits and the expectation of a purposeful telos to bear on decision-making.19 To foresee is to see in time’s spatialized visualization, to visualize qualitative possibility as a quantitative diagramming. Bergson aims to isolate a concept of freedom in its most rigorous sense, unfettered by discursive determinations that implicate duration as representable and analyzable. This critique applies, moreover, to those that read Virgin Stripped Bare as simply a character-driven drama of desires in conflict with each other. To imbue Jae-hoon and Soo-jung with melodramatic interiorities, already spatialized with respect to the dichotomy between inside and outside, is to gather a set of abstracted facts about their memories, worldview, emotions, and intentions. And to do so is to place the viewer in the position of armchair psychologist or philosopher, observing human behavior and physiognomy as if they express legible moral psyches. Bergson helps us to describe more clearly the problem of interpreting character psychology: For the sake of greater definiteness, let us imagine a person called upon to make a seemingly free decision under serious circumstances; we shall call him Peter. The question is whether a philosopher Paul, living at the same period as Peter, or, if you prefer, a few centuries before, would have been able, knowing all the conditions under which Peter acts, to foretell with certainty the choice which Peter made.20

Bergson writes that there are two ways in which such a foretelling may be possible. Either Paul becomes Peter in order to live the psychic state under which he makes a choice, or Paul acquires as much data as possible about the conditions under which Peter could make a choice. The first, of course,

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is impossible, and the second remains, once again, a mere representation of Peter’s lived duration, asymptotic with respect to the knowability of Peter’s choice. Bergson critiques this approximate knowability as, once again, schematic: Like a novelist who knows whither he is conducting his characters, Paul must already know Peter’s final act, and must thus be able to supplement his mental image of the successive states through which Peter is going to pass by some indication of their value in relation to the whole of Peter’s history.21

Some form of this process describes what we as spectators in the cinema undergo as we are led through character-driven, melodramatic narrative. Point of view shots, eyeline matches, and shot-reverse shot structures suture the viewer into the fantasy of identification and character sympathy, but the valuation of characters performed by viewers are dependent upon the “mental image of the successive states through which” characters such as Jae-hoon and Soo-jung have passed. Bergson seeks time and free will through critique, by criticizing metaphysical ways of thinking that impede the pure apprehension of life’s creative unfolding. He works through arguments, such as the debate between freedom and determination, in order to discover inconsistencies among them, but primarily to identify their underlying metaphysics. What guides his critique, moreover, is the hope that duration may be somehow thought, either with the help of analytical language or without it. As a mode of critique, Hong’s cinema actively refuses the metaphysics of the melodramatic mode in dominant narrative cinema. Like Bergson’s critique of static, representational thought that pervades in the endless debate between determination and free will, Hong also critiques the assumptions that underpin the tension between intention and accident that pervade popular cinema. His long takes, lack of shot-reverse shots, and refusal to accede to the visual pleasures of dominant narrative eschew the melodramatic, “feel-good” experiences of the cinema that promote escapist, spectatorial captivation and the ethics concomitant with it. Through critique, Hong and Bergson are able to isolate a provisional definition of freedom against the backdrop of generic repetition. The French philosopher concludes that freedom is “the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs.”22 Indeed, this formulation may seem a bit unsatisfying, but Bergson’s critique nevertheless allows us to see that the divergence between lived duration and its philosophical

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representation cannot be overcome. All attempts to theorize freedom, and the contingency of the future, are predetermined by an abstracted, repetitious conception of time. Within our modern metaphysics, it seems a positive definition of freedom remains impossible without taking recourse to the reiteration of the past and the anticipations of the future, as both belong to the analytic of determinism. “All the difficulties of the problem,” Bergson writes, “and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensivity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable.”23 The gap between experiential duration and the representation of time must remain. Like Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, which incorporates elements of chance with planned construction, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors incorporates accident in relation with intentional narrative elements. The co-presence of the two foregrounds their implicit tension in order to clarify that which is truly accidental, truly free within the course of modern time. Thus, to read Virgin Stripped Bare without criticizing the temporality that underpins the binary between free will and determination, and by co-extension the binary between accident and intention, is to deprive the film of its self-reflexive searching for a cinema that unfolds serendipitously. Hong’s film seeks a manner of living and desiring whereby past and future are rigorously left open-ended. The international title of Hong’s film perhaps spoils its ending, yet Hong’s virtuosity is made evident in placing the viewer in a constant position of wandering uncertainty, throughout its two-hour unfolding, as to whether this goal will indeed be realized. Accidents, unforeseen consequences, and unintended awkwardness seem to impede the film’s drive toward the narrative conclusion, but in the end they are precisely those elements that enable its eventual realization. The cable car that stops and remains suspended due to a technical difficulty, for instance, seems to function as a metaphor for the halting progression of Virgin Stripped Bare. It is, as Akira Mizuta Lippit puts it, an example of a line of “inquiry” that self-reflexively questions the plotlines threading their way through Hong’s films, as he writes: The accidental encounters, implausible reunions, journeys, telephone calls, repeated phrases, and revised scenes that form many of the elements of Hong’s work always tremble on the line between an immutable narrative metaphysics in which every conclusion is fantastically predetermined and a purely random, although equally fantastic, series of accidents.24

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Yet, this halting progression, unfolding in fits and starts, is precisely what enables the realization that things did not have to occur only in one, strictly causal manner – things could have been otherwise. If not a fork, then a spoon, or a knife. If not soju, then makgeolli. If not intentional, then Jaehoon’s gloves may be accidentally returned. The differences that appear in the repetition make evident that more than one narrative course is possible at any one moment. Repeated viewings of Virgin Stripped Bare become increasingly thrilling if approached with this sense of openness. Details from the two versions of the film’s story, A and B, are not to be selected and ordered according to the criteria of truth or even plausibility. It is crucial that Hong’s film be approached not simply as a memory test that demands that the spectator compare and contrast two versions of reality. And we should remain vigilant in schematizing the two versions of the story, like the forking paths of Bergson’s diagram, to reinscribe false mastery over past, present, and future. Virgin Stripped Bare attempts to reveal lacunas of potentiality immanent to every moment of lived duration by critiquing these approaches, precisely through difference and repetition. Hong carefully balances accidents, unanticipated discoveries, and unforeseen consequences with intentions in his filmmaking in order to keep possibility, or the possibility of possibility, open for the past and the future. This type of filmmaking stands in contrast to that type determined by the cost-effective, mean-ends logic of capital and the centrality of the preconceived script. Instead, Virgin Stripped Bare attempts to find that which is productive through reproduction, diversity discovered in repetition, in order to seek a path toward that which cannot be prefigured, toward the unforeseeable future temporality. The key is to affirm the durational experience of the moving image while remaining vigilant to a mode of representational thinking that inadvertently reifies it as immobile form.

The Temporality of Modern Romance: Woman is the Future of Man (2004) The final episode of Virgin Stripped Bare depicts the narrative aim of the film: Jae-hoon sleeps with Soo-jung. It begins with an intertitle: “Naught Shall Go Ill When You Find Your Mare.” The phrase is a reference to a line articulated by the trickster Puck from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Act 3, Scene 2. After Puck mistakenly squeezes a love elixir in Lysander’s eyes, he remarks, “Jack shall have Jill;/Nought shall go ill;/The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.” Later, the elixir will

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cause him to fall in love with Helena, his “mare.” At this point in the drama, Puck’s words ironically attest to the illusion of love, yet they also confirm that presumptuous men maintain this illusion through the possession of women. This sexist illusion and the ethics of possessing and being possessed is evident throughout Virgin Stripped Bare as well as in Hong’s fifth film, Woman is the Future of Man. As I aim to show next, the temporality of male desire depicted in the latter will be key for thinking about desire within the sexual politics of post-IMF Korean culture. Only a few years after Virgin Stripped Bare premiered, Hong was already enjoying wider international recognition for his work. Woman is the Future of Man was nominated for the coveted Palme D’or at the Cannes Film festival the year of its release, and was touted by critics such as Manohla Dargis (who we may remember harshly criticized Park Chanwook’s films) and Anthony Lane who writes for The New Yorker, as well as by critics in France, Germany, and Asia. On the other hand, naysayers criticized the work for being inexpressive, unappealing, misogynistic, and even derivative. Among Korean feminists, Woman is the Future of Man was problematic for its depiction of gender dynamics. In the following analysis, I will pick up on the critique of time developed through my reading of Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare and bring it to bear on the ethics of men and women in contemporary Korea. In the previous section, I tried to show, following Bergson, how lived duration in the cinema is translated into abstracted time when the two versions of the film’s story are subjected to retrospective analysis. Moving from the experience of Hong’s cinema to the dynamic of desire depicted in it, I want to show how the women in Woman is the Future of Man are also subjected to a form of reification by the men who previously dated them. We shall see that this form of desiring remains nostalgic, idealized, and fetishistic in nature, issuing from an ego that forecloses the possibility of desiring in accordance with lived, durational time. Hand-written opening credits to Woman is the Future of Man appear over a beige burlap background as the film begins, reminding the viewer of Ozu’s manner of presenting film credits in his family melodramas. A lilting piano melody is played on the soundtrack as the film cuts from the credits to an opening shot of Hyeon-gon (Kim Tae-woo) walking through a residential neighborhood in the snow. He smiles and extends his arm to shake the hand of Mun-ho (Yu Ji-tae), who appears from off-screen left and waits in front of the gate to his house. “Quite a climb…,” Mun-ho remarks. “Luckily, the bus stop isn’t far,” Hyeon-gon responds, a little out of breath. The two friends have not seen each other in a while and they have never

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met at Mun-ho’s residence. As they converse, an address plate hanging on the gate of the house indicates that it is situated in Jongno-gu, a district in the center of Seoul and one of the most expensive in the city. Mun-ho apologizes and tells Hyeon-gon that his wife wants them to go out somewhere because the house is currently a mess. But because his friend has come all this way, Mun-ho invites Hyeon-gon to stand in the outdoor area in front of it. He also tells him that he has a gift. As they stand on the path leading to the front door, Mun-ho brags that he took out a 200-millionwon mortgage to purchase the property and that it will take a long time to pay it off. Mun-ho’s gift to Hyeon-gon is to let him walk on the first snow of the season. “It’s beautiful. I kept the dog off it,” he remarks. They laugh, and Hyeon-gon takes several backward steps into the fresh snow, creating footprints intended to confuse observers about whether someone came or went. The confounding footprints seem to function as a metaphor for the temporal movements between past, present, and future that will be the principal concerns of Hong’s film. Mun-ho proposes that they leave. As they walk down the road together, he suddenly notices that he is without his wallet. Walking back to the closed gate, he buzzes his wife on the intercom and asks her to unlock the door. She responds in a bright and familiar voice, “Mun-ho, is that you? Just a second.” This is the only time we will hear Mun-ho’s wife and she will not be seen for the entirety of the film. As Woman is the Future of Man continues, Mun-ho will make repeated passes at waitresses, female students, and old friends, and behave as if he were a single bachelor. Following the film’s opening scene, the viewer may forget that Mun-ho is married at all. He seems intent to appease his unfulfilled feelings of nostalgia or boredom. Youngmin Choe points to this in her essay about boredom and “transitional emotions” in Hong Sang-soo’s films, and notes that such affects are linked to specific places and associated with notions of the “good life” produced by neoliberal ideology.25 Indeed, for many viewers, Mun-ho, as well as Hyeon-gon and most of the men in Hong’s films (including Jae-hoon and Young-soo in Virgin Stripped Bare), remain largely unsympathetic – selfish, self-absorbed, shallow, sexist, brooding at times, hostile at others, and frustratingly narcissistic. Film critic Michael Atkinson, a great admirer of Hong’s work, calls the men depicted in his films “treacherous louts” and comments that they walk an “untethered life path of power-boozing, disconnection, and romantic failure.”26 Anti-melodramatic in nature, Hong’s films depict men who remain entirely unsympathetic, men who seem to be oblivious of their effect on others and whose sexual politics remain outdated and infantile.

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Fig. 11: Hyeon-gon and Mun-ho, the morning after.

For viewers who are familiar with the previous work of the two male actors, this sense of moral disapproval may be exacerbated by their sense of surprise in seeing them play such repellant personalities. Kim Tae-woo was perhaps best known for playing the meek and traumatized Sung-shik in Park’s JSA. In Woman is the Future of Man, his character is the older of the two leading male protagonists, certainly more worldly and confident compared to the sensitive soldier of his previous role. Only six months before Hong’s film premiered, Yu Ji-tae, the actor who portrays Mun-ho, was featured as another relatively unsympathetic character: the vengeful Woo-jin in Park’s Oldboy. These characterizations of Mun-ho and Woojin should also be seen in contrast to Yu’s romantic roles in Ditto (2000) by Kim Jeong-gwon and One Fine Spring Day (2001), directed by Hur Jin-ho. In the latter film, Yu plays Sang-woo, a sound engineer who falls passionately in love with Eun-soo (Lee Young-ae, the lead character in Park’s Lady Vengeance [2005]). Unlike Yu’s previous roles, Mun-ho in Woman is the Future of Man seems to feel no love, looks constantly bloated, and is dressed shabbily. The two men go to a Chinese restaurant and sit across from each other in front of a large window that allows a full view of the street outside. They update each other on their lives. Hyeon-gon speaks about his time studying film in the US and mentions that, if offered, he would take a teaching position in Korea. Mun-ho speaks of his family and humorously recalls a moment when he caught his wife smoking in the bathroom. “I see her less as a woman or a wife,” he comments, lowering his voice, “and more

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as a human being.” Mun-ho reminisces about the times when he saw her sleeping next to their child: “She looks so beautiful. I believe that proves that she’s a good wife.” His words seem disingenuous, as if he were simply repeating hackneyed phrases that fathers and husbands are supposed to say. Suddenly, out of the blue, Mun-ho remembers when they met in the US and angrily castigates his friend, telling him never again to hug his wife “American-style.” Hyeon-gon protests. Mun-ho stands up and leaves, apparently to cool his temper. After he leaves the shot, the young waitress that had been serving them brings a plate of noodles to their table. Hyeon-gon gets her attention and remarks that he is a film director who is looking for “real people” to act in his movie. “I really like your face,” he remarks, “that’s why I’m insisting.” Seeing her shy reluctance, he offers to give his phone number, but she politely declines. He is clearly exploiting his status as an “artist” in order to make a pass at the attractive waitress. Meanwhile, through the window of the restaurant, another eye-catching, long-haired woman waits for her ride. Hyeon-gon lights a cigarette and gazes at her from his table. The entirety of this scene is filmed in one long-take, in a two shot set around one of Hong’s most typical filming locations: a dining table. The sociality of the table enables gathered individuals, sharing food and alcohol, to express feelings and thoughts that are often not expressed in other, particularly public, situations. Here, the spectator is privy to the performance of male ideas about women, as either human beings possessed as wives or as individuals in public to be possessed. These ideas about gender are made more explicit when we meet the female protagonist of Woman is the Future of Man, Sun-hwa (Sung Hyun-ah). The film cuts to a shot of a hospital somewhere in Seoul. People are wearing summer clothes, indicating that a change in time has taken place since the scene in the Chinese restaurant. A taxi drives up, Hyeongon gets out, and he leaves the frame on the right. Cut to a new shot as a young woman in a red shirt, Sun-hwa, walks left and meets a young man unknown to the viewer. They have not seen each other in a while, and as they engage in conversation he remarks that he just finished serving his two-year mandatory military service. The man asks that they go somewhere “to talk.” He hails a taxi, opens the door, and tells her to get in. Sun-hwa protests that she is supposed to meet a friend. The young man becomes increasingly irritated at her reluctance and angrily demands that they ride the taxi together. She finally enters the taxi. In a new scene, Sun-hwa enters a cafe wearing much more subdued colors. She sits across from Hyeon-gon drinking tea in another two shot.

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Sun-hwa apologizes for making him wait and looks despondently down into her lap. He leans in and asks if there is anything wrong. “Yesterday I was kidnapped and taken by force to Puchon,” she begins. Looking into her boyfriend’s eyes she continues, “A guy I know – he turned up out of the blue. He found me after he got out of the army. He knew we’d see each other. He knew what time I go to the hospital. He was waiting for me.” Looking away, she reveals that, “In Puchon he took me to a hotel, and there he raped me.” Hyeon-gon is visibly shaken by this news. He takes a sip of tea. They then go to a cheap motel together, where Hong seems intent on repeating Sun-hwa’s victimization by making the viewer complicit with her sexualization. She and Hyeon-gon are showering together. In a medium long shot, Sun-hwa is voyeuristically framed by the shower door on one side, while a mirror on her right gives the viewer visual access to the front of her nude body. Hyeon-gon lathers up soap and kneels down to clean the area between her legs. He does this at length, even after Sun-hwa tells him, “That’s enough.” This uncomfortable sequence is depicted in one long take. Augmenting the spectator’s unease even further, in the following shot they are shown having sex. While on top of her, Hyeon-gon says, “I’m making love to you to cleanse you, you understand?” “I’ll really be clean again?” she asks, and then replies, “I want to be clean. Make me clean.” The couple is then shown in a scene at the airport. Sun-hwa says goodbye to Hyeon-gon as he is about to board a plane to the US. They hug and he asks her to wait for him. “I’ll wait for your call,” she says, crying. The film then cuts back to the two shot in the Chinese restaurant, where Hyeon-gon and Mun-ho are eating and drinking. They both gaze at the long-haired women wearing on the street outside. When Hyeon-gon asks his friend if he remembers Sun-hwa, he implies that she is not in his life anymore and that their relationship existed in the past tense. The highly disturbing events just depicted – her admission of being raped, their having sex so that she may be “cleansed” – are part of his past. In the present of the Chinese restaurant, Hyeon-gon has just returned after having studied for an unspecified amount of time in the US and apparently after he and Sun-hwa had broken up. As in Virgin Stripped Bare, the film shifts between past and present, delineating a structure inspired by subjective memory. Hyeon-gon asks what Sun-hwa is doing now. “I heard she runs a bar in Puchon,” Mun-ho responds, “She was working in that kind of place when she was a student. She dropped out of university. I don’t think she’s a waitress anymore. She runs a bar in a hotel.” Mun-ho suggests that Sun-hwa worked in a “club room,” explaining that jobs are difficult to find and do not pay well. This realization of her whereabouts inspires him to cynically comment

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on the sexuality of Korean men: “The myth of virginity means girls have a high price on them. Koreans are too fond of sex. They have nothing better to do. There’s no real culture.” Hyeon-gon grabs his jacket and tells Mun-ho that he has to go pick up some photos at the shop. When he leaves, the waitress comes over to the table again, this time to fill up their teacups. What happens next is a repetition of a scene we have already witnessed. Mun-ho makes a pass at her, remarking that he teaches Western art, while asking her if she would be interested in posing for him as a nude model. As in the previous scene with Hyeon-gon, she declines and walks shyly away from the table. In both, an ostensibly cultured male with expertise in a form of visual art exploits his position to gain intimacy with a woman. Mun-ho turns and looks at the woman still standing outside. They make eye contact briefly, but it is broken when a car pulls up and she gets in. The film then cuts to Mun-ho’s past with Sun-hwa, his courting her and their having sex while their mutual friend Hyeon-gon was studying film in the US. When Mun-ho makes a pass at the waitress, repeating the manner in which Hyeon-gon had tried to woo the same woman, this repetition anticipates the story that will unfold in the second half of the film revolving around Sun-hwa. Inadvertently, the unsympathetic friends Mun-ho and Hyeon-gon will repeat the pasts of the other as well as of their own. In the previous section of this chapter, I tried to show how repetition may be understood as a means of producing that which is new. Through repetition, cinema allows the viewer an opportunity to critique the present and its relationship to the past in order to open up a future that is unanticipated and accidental. I elaborated on the dichotomy between intention and accident in Virgin Stripped Bare and tried to show how it illuminates something essential to Hong’s filmmaking practice and to the reproducible ontology of the film medium itself. I would like to attempt something similar in the following discussion of Woman is the Future of Man. At this moment in his career, Hong’s working method had changed so that he was able to dispense with a pre-written script altogether and write dialogue on the day of the scene being shot with only a broad treatment of the film’s narrative in mind. In an interview he describes how he came to realize this writing style: Before I did Turning Gate, there used to be long scripts and I would make changes continuously at the location. I began to think that it would be alright to have a treatment rather than a long script […]. So I began production with only a treatment and wrote the day’s script every morning at the location. It takes about an hour to write a script for the scenes that needs to be shot. I can’t procrastinate any longer, and I can

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concentrate at my maximum, burdened by the fact that nothing can be done if I don’t write something productive. I think my nature forced me to choose this method. I’d like to believe that this method produces better results.27

Hong seems to strive for a kind of freedom within structure, within the constraints of the f ilmmaking situation, which includes dealing with producers, sound designers, camera operators, actors, as well as lighting setups, costumes, camera lenses, etc. He is aware that the course of the production revolves around him and that he plays a crucial role by enabling its forward movement. For Hong’s production process, as well as for the stories he writes, this movement progresses through accident, by incorporating unanticipated happenings on set into the filmmaking process. The performers and crew receive the script the morning of the shoot, giving them limited time to rehearse. The dialogue may be informed by Hong’s own interaction with the actors during the time of the film’s production: New materials arise when I interview the actors beforehand or when we drink together. There is exhilaration on my part when the actor encounters the script for the first time and reads it during morning rehearsal. This is the moment when the texture of communication and connections between the actors and me reveal themselves.28

This risky style of film production eschews the highly planned nature of script writing typical of commercial cinema production. It could be said that Hong transfers the idea of risk, typically associated with capitalism, to the realm of film aesthetics. As he notes in the quote above, from On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002) onward, this will be Hong’s working style of all his films, including Woman is the Future of Man. If Hong’s characters are compelled toward aimlessness, such that they “find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip” and, concomitant with Deleuze’s time-image, are diverted from habituated, teleological paths that undergird the teleology of the movement-image, and if Hong’s cinema may be characterized as the discovery of accident within repetition that enables an encounter with an open-ended future, then it is in this sense of non-linearity and open-endedness that Hong’s treatment of sexuality, relationships, and marriage should be understood.29 Again, this attitude toward the future temporality is reflected in both the film’s narrative and its production. For Hong, the ending has not been intended in advance, it is to be discovered accidentally. He explains:

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Even a treatment needs to be completed. So, there is an ending. However, I think that can be changed any time. Because there is no predetermined ending, I feel pressured throughout production that something has to be discovered everyday. In that process, parts change and, subsequently, the whole changes little by little. And as the evolving whole gets its shape gradually, the ending is naturally determined.30

The ending to Woman is the Future of Man, Hong confesses later, “wasn’t in the original treatment, but was conceived halfway throughout the shoot.”31 A parallel could be made to Mun-ho’s wandering through the film. Mun-ho’s marital status has little consequence after the opening scene, as he seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge any abstract aim to the romantic relationships he pursues with other women. Nor is a melodramatic “space of innocence” restored at the end of the film.32 While the men and women depicted in Hong’s films may be, as film critic Lee Myoung-in writes, “moderately corrupted, temperately vulgar, and properly secular,” such an evaluation still depends on criteria set by this melodrama’s popular mode of creating spectator sympathy.33 For Mun-ho and Hyeon-gon, however, this innocence seems to have been lost and is perhaps unrecoverable. True to its anti-melodramatic nature, Woman is the Future of Man does not seek a generic, redemptive ending. Their inability to settle on a predetermined path toward love and commitment reflects not so much the immorality of the characters, as the tension between accident and intention. As I showed in my analysis of Virgin Stripped Bare, Hong’s cinema may be construed as avant-garde, insofar as it eschews spectator identification and sympathy, seems not to provide definitive victim-heroes, and does not offer the viewer easy access into the motives and desires of its characters (through close-ups on the expressive body or shot-reverse shot structures). Instead, Hong’s characters and narratives function as means of structuring the experience of cinematic time that do not conform to predetermined conventions and cues. His f ilms clearly contain moments of humor and attempted romance, but they nevertheless do not conform to the genre expectations and repetitive structures of feeling concomitant with the Korean “rom-com,” expectations dominant in popular film and television dramas and instrumental to the global success of hallyu. On the other hand, this effort to discover an experience of time as openended is informed by neoliberal notions of choice and freedom, inextricably intertwined with the disciplining of productive men and woman in the new millennium. This historical context is perhaps what Hye Seung Chung and

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David Scott Diffrient mean when they observe that Hong’s films “subtly evoke the repercussions of Korea’s emphatic modernization project.”34 The aimless desires expressed in Hong’s films evoke the profoundly ambivalent opportunities that have appeared in the post-IMF period, opportunities inseparable from the ideology of capitalism and patterns of lifestyle revolving around commodity consumption. While emphasizing self-realization and the pursuit of individual desires, the quest for career satisfaction, love, personal fulfillment, economic success, or a combination of these, neoliberal opportunity is subtly intertwined with predetermined gender roles set out by the political economy of contemporary South Korean culture. Anthropologist Cho Han Hae-joang pejoratively calls the exemplary subjects of this economy “kukmin” (“citizen”), discursive formations circumscribed by nationalist aims and made manifest through neoliberal state policy. Yet, as she points out, the reinscription of “timeless” gender roles break down when men lose their jobs following the IMF crisis, challenging the integrity of the Korean family: Many fathers have no role other than to earn their family’s living expenses, and many fathers have failed to perform their roles as a member of the family, particularly in making intimate relationships. During the period of compressed economic growth, many men did receive respect as financial providers, but at the same time the father has become the most instrumentalized and isolated member of the family.35

On the other hand, while men were to become productive kukmin, instrumentalized for the biopolitical demands of the family and nation, women are the first to be laid off. Their validation by dominant ideology is based on their capacity to maintain the traditional domestic sphere. In other words, for both men and women, life lived under neoliberalism is increasingly managed and limited, subject to closed notions of time and temporality while offering equally limited def initions of opportunity and accident. In such a regime, dissent is discouraged, while sacrifice is (melodramatically) commended by hegemony. All are expected to live and work according to their assigned, individual capacities as Korean men and women. According to Cho, some have begun to critique and find ways of living that do not acquiesce to the repetitive predeterminations of capitalism, to seek out new masculinities and new femininities. Increasingly aware that options for life are becoming dominated by totalizing notions of rational, productive time, individuals are beginning to realize that conventional

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life goals have become unfeasible within neoliberal modernity. For Cho, the turning point was the IMF crisis: A reflection on the nature of temporality is necessary in order to achieve the necessary ‘epistemological’ break. I see more and more people who want to restore the quotidian world that has been destroyed in the process of modernization. The restoration of the quotidian will be possible through the management of time. Nothing can be achieved without regulating and managing time. Beginning from the ontological recognition that all humans will someday die, there needs to be a philosophy and methodology that can slow down the pace of change until a system for regulating desire and for managing daily time can be discovered.36

Cho seems to call for a conception of daily time management that does not conform to schematic, predetermined ideologies – capitalistic, political, religious, and otherwise – and which remains open to the contingencies of the future.37 Not a closed system of time, but one that moves forward by affirming unforeseen accidents. Indeed, this search for a form of life that lives according to a time whose goals are as yet undetermined, one based on lived duration and not on the prefigured schemas of Korean capitalist modernity, helps explain some of the drastic social changes that have taken place in the realm of gender and which were enabled by the IMF crisis. For a younger generation who did not live through war or under military dictatorship, and whose encounters with these watershed historical periods took place in front of a textbook, the political memories generated through these events may seem remote, forgettable even. The cultural ideals and ideologies that disciplined productive citizens and organized social relations between men and women in the 1980s and 90s seem to have given way to gender ideals circumscribed by the logic of quantification and commodity exchange. According to Dongjin Seo, the explosion of self-help books in the new millennium aim toward promoting the pursuit of “well-being” and describe strategies for self-improvement that “render the self manageable in specific ways with technologies that make the self and its events, emotions, and bodily actions knowable, calculable, evaluable, and correctable.”38 Women in the new millennium have acquired higher levels of education and enjoy increasing presence in the professional workforce. At the same time, these opportunities have been circumscribed by old, hegemonic notions of gender, concomitant with the ideology of IMF capital, and that have maintained sexist attitudes toward labor and the semi-proletarian status of working women. Still, the desire for economic

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independence through career pursuits and, associated with it, freedom from traditional familial expectations have driven women away from a life trajectory inextricably linked to conventional marriage. Sociologist Chang Kyung-sup describes these changes in his important book on the role of familism and Korea’s compressed modernity: A new term, bihonyeoseong (non-marrying women), has been coined to describe single women for whom marriage is just a matter of personal choice. To them, the existing term mihonyeoseong (women who are not yet married) is a personally insulting and social inaccurate label. Most of them do not detest getting married or raising children, but believe that marriage, if it is to take place at all, must be first and foremost personally gratifying.39

Chang places this increasingly widespread sentiment within a broader context of “defamiliation” and the predicament of Korea’s “accidental pluralism” that characterizes the highly syncretic ideology of the family in post-IMF culture. He argues that contemporary life and ethics are deeply informed by a series of conflicting discourses that have arisen due to Korea’s compressed modernization: the tension between public and private, between traditional and modern, Korean and Western, and between men and women. These contradictory discourses co-exist non-synchronously and are refracted through competing notions of family. “For instance,” Chang explains, “when young people are exposed to Western-style family relations and domestic life through mass media and pursue their life accordingly, their ensuing family ideology lacks a systematic relationship with its traditional counterpart and thereby leads them in a situation of irresolvable inter-generational conflict.”40 Such conflict is ripe for melodramatic narrativization, of course. It is manifest not only inter-generationally, but also may be experienced within the same generation by individuals who have lived through Korea’s rapid modernization. The changing gender roles in Korea have dramatically affected the institution of marriage. The number of married individuals who have sought separation from their spouses in the year leading up to and following the financial crisis drastically rose. From 1980 to 2004, the divorce rate nearly quintupled and South Korea emerged with the highest increase in the number of divorces in the region. 41 This trend increased throughout the decade such that the crude divorce rate (among 1,000 people) was a striking 2.3, one of the highest in the world. 42 In the meantime, the rate of new marriages declined and the average age of men and women at their first

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marriage steadily rose (32.2 years old in 2013 for men and 29.6 for women). 43 The declining numbers seem to indicate a desire for relations between men and women that do not conform to the ethics of traditional marriage and for undetermined futures that elude its ideological demands. Perhaps some are realizing that marital bonds, and the familial goals typically associated with it, implicitly schematize lived life and restrict freedom within the constraints of the neoliberal economy. Popular films such as Marriage is a Crazy Thing (2002), written and directed by Ha Yoo, A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003) by Im Sang-soo, and Green Chair (2005) by Park Chul-soo depict the desire for individual gratification in the realm of love and marriage. Meanwhile, the television drama, Marriage Clinic: Love and War, which for ten years depicted dramatizations of real-life couples undergoing divorce, placed the taboo subject of divorce in the public sphere. Apparently, the Confucian stigma traditionally attributed to divorcees and to the perpetually single has lost its sting in contemporary Korean life. It is against this backdrop that Hong’s films tell stories of increasingly individualistic, increasingly cosmopolitan Korean men and women. Clearly, the incredible pace of modernity that has taken place in the last fifty years has provided many individuals with new freedoms and exciting possibilities. However, Korea’s compressed development has also brought unanticipated ethical consequences for men and women, and the relations between them, living under neoliberal capitalism. Hong’s films, I argue, make a spectacle of these new sexual politics by critiquing the temporality that mediates these ethics. When his characters go on vacation, sit around a table and become recklessly inebriated, obsessively seek sexual partners, and even hope for death, they seem to seek an experience of lived time that interrupts capitalist temporality and its predeterminations. Such depictions betray the extent to which the body and notions of love have been reterritorialized in conjunction with the upheavals of Korea’s compressed modernity. Yet, in the midst of modern life’s eternal recurrences, Hong’s films seek the unprecedented and the unforeseen. For if, in Woman is the Future of Man, relationships between men and women move forward as a series of accidents, like Hong’s filmmaking process, they do so in order to seek new ways of living and loving that do not conform to the repetitions of capitalist time. This critique of temporality can be made clearer by returning to Woman in the Future of Man. Mun-ho and Hyeon-gon meet up with Sun-hwa in her two-bedroom apartment. A female neighbor, a yoga instructor, joins them with her dog. Sun-hwa lives alone, but she is apparently able to support

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herself and adorn her living space with middle-class furnishings. As the night wears on, and the consumption of soju continues unabated, Hyeon-gon kneels before Sun-hwa and expresses intense guilt for having “treated her badly” in the past. Bringing photos of the café where she told him that she had been raped, he drunkenly remarks that, “I wanted to go back, confront the past and see that place again.” Sun-hwa looks at him with sympathy. Mun-ho meanwhile rolls over and begins sleeping on the sofa. The yoga friend leaves. Holding Hyeon-gon’s hand, Sun-hwa takes him back to her bedroom. Later in the night, she leaves the bedroom and sees Mun-ho sitting up in the dark. Sun-hwa comes over to sit next to him with a glass of water. Mun-ho boorishly asks if she would “suck him off.” After doing so, he thanks her. Holding hands, they enter into the other bedroom together and close the door behind them. For viewers who find the sexual politics of Hong’s films patriarchal and amoral, this scene represents perhaps another cringeworthy instance when a female character disappointingly gives in to the desires of a sad, sleazy man. Once again, the filmmaker manages to depict character behavior whose sexual politics many will find objectionable and unsympathetic. But above all, it is the sense of aimless sex, of men and women getting together, not out of romantic desire, but out of boredom that once more illustrates the time-image of post-IMF sexual politics. Mun-ho and Hyeon-gon seem only able to repeat patterns of desire, not originate new ones, and thus they appear to be trapped within an endless cycle of lust and disappointment. They perceive women as idealized, fetishized, and in relation to a predetermined “type” – in short, not as an absolute other whose alterity humbles the self, but as always already circumscribed by the fantasies of the narcissistic ego. Kyung Hyun Kim, in his groundbreaking book, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, was the first to note the importance of repetition in Hong’s cinema. His analysis provides a number of formulations that will help us precisely articulate the dynamic of male desire in Woman is the Future of Man. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema argues that modern Korea cinema (the so-called “New Korean Cinema” of the 1990s) utilized tropes of masculine insufficiency to reflect how men have responded to the drastic cultural, political, and economic shifts that have taken place in South Korea since the early 1980s. Images of male crisis presented in films such as Park Kwangsu’s Chilsu and Mansu (1988) and Jung Ji-woo’s Happy End (1999) reflect anxieties around the status of men in Korean society, registered in these and many other films through the experience of trauma. Yet, seemingly as a response to a greater awareness of a pathological sense of national/male

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deficiency, particularly as images of Korea become increasingly globalized after 1988, films by Jang Sun-woo, Park Chan-wook, and Kim Ki-duk may be read as “remasculinizing” the men in Korean cinema by ideologically and nostalgically shoring up visions of the idealized self. Representations of male lack are countered by a proliferation of images of male violence, misogyny, and brutality in the late 1990s and after. In his chapter on Hong’s films, Kim places particular emphasis on the interlinked themes of waiting and repetition. Waiting occurs for any number of mundane reasons, as Kim notes: “mismanagement of time, indecision, bureaucratic holdup, traffic congestion, unexpected phone calls and meetings, plain irresponsibility, and forgetfulness.”44 Mun-ho waits for Hyeon-gon as he climbs the hill to his house, Sun-hwa waits for Hyeon-gon while he studies in the US, and the two men wait for Sun-hwa in a fried chicken restaurant. Interruptions in the management of abstracted time in modern Korea correspond to, according to Kim, moments of suspension that defer the film’s arrival at narrative closure in Hong’s films. These interruptions represent lacunas of time created through temporal delay, moments when nothing happens in the midst of intensifying capitalist activity. Repetition functions in a similar manner by derailing the telos of melodramatic narrative and exposing its empty pleasures. “By repeating the everyday occurrences as his primary drama,” Kim writes, “Hong’s narrative trajectory often loses its momentum forward and reiterates the circular motion in the spirit of realism, constituting what Brian Henderson called the ‘iteratives.’ The use of iteratives frees Hong from the limitation imposed by the temporality of plot.”45 The progressive, linear time of capitalist modernity is interrupted by repetition, signified through the non-productive activity of waiting. While Kim relies on psychoanalysis to substantiate his claims, drawing from key writings by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Kaja Silverman, he curiously does not utilize this discourse or any other to elaborate a theory of repetition in his book. (Nor does he address the issue of repetition in his analysis of Woman is the Future of Man in Virtual Hallyu.) This lacuna in Kim’s analysis deserves more detailed elaboration, and, to this end, I would like to return to psychoanalysis to secure a stronger relationship between repetition, sexuality, and the pleasures of the cinema. Sigmund Freud, we may remember, was careful to distinguish remembering from repetition in his work on patients who exhibited symptoms of psychic illness. Both are instances that bring the present into relation with the past but differ greatly in the manner in which present and past relate. The act of remembering recognizes a strict separation between what is and what has been. It recalls

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the past as part of a coherent narrative that can be represented and retold. Remembering is the aim of psychoanalytic work, insofar as a “healthy” subject should be able to recall past experience without psychic resistance, even when the memory is of a traumatic nature. He or she, in effect, takes up a metaphysical position of sovereign mastery over their past. Repetition, on the other hand, also brings the past into the theater of the present, but appears, in contrast to remembering, precisely as a result of repression. Freud explains: If we confine ourselves to this second type in order to bring out the difference, we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it. 46

A repetition appears to have no precedent to the person who repeats. As Jacques Lacan puts it in his seminar on Freud’s theory of repetition, “What is repeated, in fact, is always something that occurs – the expression tells us quite a lot about its relation to the tuché – as if by chance.”47 In other words, repetition is understood to be mere coincidence. What is repeated is perceived to be “perhaps accident,” as Hong put it in Virgin Stripped Bare. This tension between repetition and chance is played out in the relations between men and women in his films. In Woman is the Future of Man, most of the men, including Mun-ho, Hyeon-gon, and the young man recently returned from military service, repeat patterns of male violence in their demand for sex with Sun-hwa. Correspondingly, the same could be said for the men in Virgin Stripped Bare, including Jae-hoon, Young-soo, and an insistent, incestuous brother, in their relations with Soo-jung. All perform patterns of male sexual obsession, reiterate its patriarchal politics and stereotypical fetishizations, and replicate its sexist power dynamics. Many of them are supposedly enlightened professors, artists, and intellectuals. Yet, despite their urbane intelligence, Hong’s men remain oblivious to their manner of desiring and the ethics of their heterosexual desire. They repeat patterns of desire, but do so, in their minds, as if by chance. On the one hand, this longing seems to be a product of accident, outside ideological predetermination; on the other, it quickly becomes obvious to the spectator of Hong’s cinema that these men are locked into repeating infantile desires in relation to women. According to psychoanalysis, this manner of desiring, repetitive but thought to be unique, is essentially narcissistic. In his essay on narcissism,

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Freud works through some of the ways in which the narcissistic ego engages with the object of his love. The male ego’s choice of love-object is a kind of repetition that inadvertently and unconsciously recalls all of his earlier choices. “We say that a human being,” the psychoanalyst writes, “has originally two sexual objects – himself and the woman who nurses him – and in doing so we are postulating a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in some cases manifest itself in a dominating fashion in his object-choice.”48 The two objects are later reflected in life through two types of narcissistic loving. On the one hand, one loves commensurate with his primary narcissism, fantasmatically overvaluing the love-object such that one’s love for oneself is transferred to the putative object of his affection. The effect of this is to produce the narcissistic feeling of “being in love,” which for Freud is “a state suggestive of a neurotic compulsion, which is thus traceable to an impoverishment of the ego as regards libido in favour of the love-object.”49 On the other hand, one may love in a more purely narcissistic sense, such that one demands love from the other in the manner that one loves oneself. Freud associates this type of loving with women, particularly “beautiful” women who develop a certain kind of self-contentment in regards to love. “Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man’s love for them.”50 Such individuals do not place so much importance on loving, but on being loved, particularly in a manner that accords with past patterns of being loved by another. Freud concedes that both types of narcissistic loving may be observed in any particular individual, whether male or female. The choice of love-object may be summarized in a formulation included in Freud’s essay and through it we can see more clearly how love relates to the problem of temporality: A person may love:– 1. According to the narcissistic type: a. what he himself is (i.e. himself), b. what he himself was, c. what he himself would like to be, d. someone who was once part of himself.51

According to the “narcissistic type,” one loves oneself in the past, present, and future. One loves another as well, but only if that person was somehow “part” of oneself in the past. For in loving, the narcissist believes that he loves in a wholly singular and unique manner, free of repetition and predetermination. He is “in love” – yet in doing so he merely repeats a past love, while remaining oblivious to the fact that he is repeating. In other words, he

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claims to experience his love as new, but the narcissist simply loves himself, as he was in the past and as he envisions himself in the future. The essence of narcissistic loving congeals around a transcendental, yet fantasmatic, position of mastery with respect to time. He feels he is moving forward, but he cannot give up the fantasy of timelessness, of standing outside the course of time and the belief that time can be schematized as in Bergson’s critique in Time and Free Will. This helps us explain the repetitions that are made manifest through all the narcissistic men in Hong’s films. In the previous chapter, we saw how the ethics of revenge forecloses the other through the self-righteousness of ressentiment. In a parallel fashion, the ethics of narcissism forecloses the other through the love for what he himself is, was, and would like to be. Both perpetuate a cyclical ethics that fails to account for the heterogeneity of time, of the accident, and what can never be foreseen. I have been trying to argue that the most powerful examples of Korean cinema work through and critique this cyclical ethics. In the coda to Hong’s Woman is the Future of Man, this critique is performed one final time. In it, Mun-ho repeats his pattern of bored sexual relations with one of his female students. The incident once more involves drinking late into the night. “I want to go in there,” Mun-ho announces, pointing to a cheap motel, “What about you?” Calmly, the attractive student named Kyung-hee responds, “That suits me, sir.” They enter the motel room together. Turning to Mun-ho, she asks, “Sir, do you want me to suck you off?” The moment repeats an earlier scene from Sun-hwa’s apartment. The very last shot of the film features Mun-ho hailing a taxi. Kyung-hee tells him about another student who took one of his classes. “I don’t remember. My memory’s not very good,” he remarks. A taxi pulls up and Kyung-hee climbs in. Mun-ho is left on the side of the street, looking at the ground and waiting for another taxi to come. The piano music fades in as the screen goes black, ending Woman is the Future of Man. The disappointed professor is alone, having just repeated his pattern of sex and desire. As if standing on a precipice, he is neither coming nor going, only suspended in time. Hong explains this final shot precisely in these terms: In the last scene, Mun-ho is standing alone on an empty road to catch a taxi. I like the scene because I felt that I wouldn’t know whether Mun-ho is in the past, present, or future. It feels like a linear sense of time has vanished. Men thought of the past and went there to try to conf irm that in present, and he is standing on a big road on a dark winter night

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imagining that repetition of past lies in front of him, not the future. It’s like if Mun-ho were to meet her again in the future, it would be just like yesterday when they were still together.52

Mun-ho’s presence in the film is outdated. His expectations of women remain stuck in the past, as he sees women as figures that are to appease maternally his desire to be pampered and sexually satisfied. In short, his and Hyeon-gon’s ethics in relation to their female others remain limited, static, and narcissistic. Their repetitions reflect an inability to imagine sexual difference in ways beyond those already manifest as a form of repetitious acting out. While Sun-hwa seems to have adapted to the changed conditions of life as a woman after the IMF crisis, Mun-ho and Hyeong-gon remain stuck within the repetitions of infantile masculinity. If they are somehow aware of their nostalgic mode of being, these men, like many depicted in Hong’s films, seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

Coda: Camel(s) (2002) and the Cinema of a Generation Park Ki-yong’s black-and-white, feature-length, digital video work tells the story of two middle-aged, married people meeting to have an affair. The opening shot depicts Man-sup (Lee Dae-yeon, who played Detective Choi in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) picking Myeong-heui (Park Myung-shin) up at Kimpo airport. They drive to a restaurant and chat about their ordinary lives. We find out that she works as a pharmacist and, through a phone call that interrupts their meal, we surmise that he works in a mortuary. They speak about their stress-related body pain, quitting smoking, and of the freedoms enjoyed by their divorced friends – one who lives off the land by travelling and camping and another who takes frequent trips to Nepal. Man-sup convinces himself that, “egoism isn’t always a bad thing,” and that the lives of their single friends are “enviable” in some ways. They sing karaoke together and check into a hotel, where they have sex and then order room service. In between the slurping of noodles and the crunching of sliced cucumbers, they speak of old relationships and their arranged marriages. Their conversation reminds the viewer of how the institution of marriage in Korea disciplines the life of individuals, and of conventions of marital arrangement persisting into the more individualistic post-IMF context. The next morning, they eat once more and converse with less passion than the day earlier, almost as if they have become strangers. After finishing his meal, Man-sup asks Myeong-heui if he can call her again.

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She does not respond but offers to pay for some damage done earlier to his borrowed car. “It’s okay,” she insists, “I earn money too.” Although he does not accept the money, she offers to pay for the meal. Man-sup puts out his cigarette and they both leave to drive to the airport. Park’s film, as in Hong’s work, consists of long takes with the camera set at some distance from the characters. The sex scene is filmed in one prolonged take from a stationary camera. All the silences during conversations, both awkward and otherwise, are captured in their entirety. When Man-sup smokes a cigarette, its whole duration is filmed, from the lighting of the cigarette to its putting out. As with Hong, faces are never shown in close-up, eschewing spectator sympathy. Camel(s) is, however, even more daring in its minimalist aesthetics. The visibility of the shots is usually not ideal, particularly in night-time or dark indoor scenes, and Park does not utilize standard three-point lighting. Other than during establishing shots, no non-diegetic music is used, emphasizing the drab everydayness of the film’s mood. In a review of the film, Mun Hak-san attempts to interpret the title of the film in this spirit of prosaicness: Camels represent the man and woman, and the desert translates into an insipid life. Their meeting, eating, singing, and sex can be seen as an oasis that can be found in a desert-like life. In other words, impassionate desire of the middle-aged who cannot alleviate hunger by eating sushi and noodles and cannot satisfy sexual desire by having sex and emotional sharing, makes their aesthetics of life as dry as a desert.53

The dialogue is perhaps more natural in Camel(s) compared to Virgin Stripped Bare and Woman is the Future of Man, less emphatic and performative as is the case with Hong’s characters. And Park’s depiction of the “insipidness” of everyday life and the mundanity of sexual desire, even that which is morally taboo and adulterous, is arguably more unwavering and rigorous. In an e-mail exchange I had with Park about his work, he writes of the comparison made between himself and Hong: “Being compared to Hong Sang-soo is an unavoidable thing for my generation of filmmakers. I guess it’s because his films were so new, real and powerful, and represented the creative desire of my generation.”54 Indeed, when Park made Camel(s), he was aware that the actors were of the same generation as himself. The director was born in 1961, and the two actors in Camel(s), whose characters are around forty years old in the 2002 film, were both born in 1964. They belong to a generation often referred to as the “386 Generation” (“sampallyuk

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sedae”), a term coined in the 1990s when the Intel 386 microprocessor chip was the CPU installed in most home PCs. Each digit signifies common characteristics of this generation. They were in their 30s when the term was devised, attended college in the 1980s, and were born in the 1960s. This generation was instrumental in mobilizing the pro-democracy movements of the 1980s and would eventually win important positions of power in politics, broadcast companies, and in the teacher’s union in the 2000s. Many of this left-leaning generation, more sympathetic to the North and less sympathetic to the US than the generation that preceded it, were key players in overhauling the chaebols after 1997. It is perhaps not a coincidence that most of the filmmakers I discuss throughout this book belong to this generation. Kim Ki-duk was born in 1960, Park Chan-wook in 1963, and Hong Sang-soo in 1960. While acknowledging the insufficiency of the generational formation, in and of itself, as a means to explain the variety of films produced in the new millennium, Jinhee Choi maintains that that cinema produced by the 386 Generation was successful because its auteurs were able to express nationally-specific themes through the global language of Hollywood (as well as other globally recognizable film styles). Thinking of films such JSA and Taegukgi, she writes that, “the 386 Generation directors’ exploration and appropriation of the North-South issue should be considered as product differentiation from Hollywood blockbusters and other national cinemas. In their films, the 386 Generation directors utilize the unique aspects of Korean culture and history for commercial gain.”55 For Choi, these films should be understood primarily in terms of “the interplay between the global and the local: how locality – regardless of whether it is indigenous to a particular culture or hybrid – is transformed and utilized for global and national needs.”56 Inextricably linked to this interplay is the changing representation of politics in the new millennium cinema. In contrast to the contentiousness of the 1980s, class struggle is represented as pastiche in the postmodern 2000s, as an image on a television, as comedic relief, or as an outdated trope. In Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006), for example, a character named Nam-il is a 386er but he throws Molotov cocktails, not at armed police officers for political reasons, but at a CGI monster for action-entertainment ones. Camel(s) belongs to this generation of Korean cinema, not because it appropriates the popular narrative structures and grammar of Hollywood, but in the way it expresses the spirit of risk-taking and the search for the unprecedented. For Park, this spirit revolves in particular around the

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problem of the moving image medium and his search for what he calls “digitalness,” as he explains: If overcoming self-restricted storyline and story-space were my challenge for Motel Cactus, finding digitalness was for Camel(s). In order to achieve this goal, I made it a rule from the beginning that the actors improvise a lot, use almost no light, use the auto-focus function of my small Sony PD 100 camcorder, keep the production team as small as possible, and many other crazy things.57

For Park, “digitalness” is linked to the unique possibilities offered by digital filmmaking, from filming to the editing process (this sentiment is also articulated in the interview provided on the Korean DVD of the film). He utilizes and experiments with the new tools of manipulating images in order to seek new attitudes toward storytelling. Instead of repeating the melodramatic narratives of love and desire well represented in both Korean and Hollywood commercial cinemas, and associated with the older celluloidal moving image, Park seeks a spirit of creativity that more properly belongs to his generation living in the new millennium. This is a generation that sought democratic reform and social justice in the 1980s and saw these efforts succumb to the discursive schemas of neoliberalism beginning in the 1990s into the 2000s. Through his experimentation with his cheap DV camera, Camel(s) seeks the very definition of the “new” in the new media,

Fig. 12: Aimlessness and the search for a new cinema.

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that which cannot be anticipated from the regime of the old – indeed, a new approach toward storytelling appropriate for a new age. Nevertheless, the very definition of that which cannot be anticipated comes with it a profound sense of confusion, for the metaphysics for describing the new was not yet available to Park at the time. He shared the sense of aimlessness expressed by the characters in Camel(s): “I could say that it was my story. Not that the same thing had happened to me, but I shared their feelings: the loneliness, emptiness, and rootlessness. I was their age at the time.”58 At a moment when others of his generation were successfully packaging local, national concerns within a global, commercial cinematic language, Park seems to desire a language that does not yet exist and thus does not repeat its ethics. Exposing the repetitions of desire in new millennium Korea, of meeting, eating, singing, sex, then eating again, Camel(s) makes the taboo excitement of adultery seem positively mundane. Yet, in doing so, Park indulges the repetitions of desire within melodrama and at the same time presents them as insipid through the digital image. Park’s film boldly yearns for a new language, a new future for the cinema, but expresses this yearning still entrenched within the language of the old. The criteria for recognizing the melancholy hope expressed in Camel(s) remains elusive within the constraints of neoliberalism and within a cinematic grammar associated with its discursive regime. Park’s attempt here remains admirable, for to seek such a cinema, one that is of the future, to seek an ethics that is yet undetermined, is to turn oneself toward the ineffable face of the other. This ethics of the face will be my chief concern in the next chapter.

4. The Face and Hospitality In a short article called, “A Face Which Registers His Career: A Comment on Actor Choi Min Sik,” film critic Moon Hak-san celebrates the face of the actor who played Oh Dae-su, the man of ressentiment in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy. Moon begins by referencing gwansang, or the art of face reading, a Korean Buddhist practice that divines the fate of a person through physiognomy: “According to a physiognomist, Joo Seon-hee, the nose is the vault which collects property and symbolizes energy and wealth. A nose in the middle of a face shows his masculinity as well as his current standing as an actor.”1 Forms and remnants of gwansang belief persist in modern Korean culture, having ramifications, in some cases, for job applicants and marriage prospects. In a survey conducted in 2001, a slight majority of Koreans expressed that “physiognomy is believable to a certain extent.”2 According to the face reader Joo, Choi’s expressive eyes are capable of bringing out the inner drama of a wide range of character types, from a North Korean officer in Shiri (1999) to a painter born into a family of low standing in Chihwaseon (2001). Moon continues by touting Choi’s greatness as an actor and the capacity of his face to encompass a character “in the dynamic process of becoming, rather than that in the static state of being.”3 More specifically, the critic emphasizes the actor’s large face, which conveys a unique, powerful presence through the confluence of the individual features that constitute its expressivity. His comments echo those made by Béla Balázs in The Visible Man that compare the combination of eyes, nose, and mouth as expressing “chords of the emotions.”4 Moon writes: His face in close-up f ills [the] frame without marginal space in any direction. An actor’s face filling the screen exhibits the meaning and emotion appropriate for the scene and prepares [the] audience for the next one. Deep eyes hide the light and shadows of emotions and his facial expression show a wide and deeper spectrum of emotion than simple pleasure, anger, sadness, and joy. His large face implies emotion in proportion to size, but the breadth of emotion, the look in his eyes and the subtly moving muscles make it intense.5

Choi’s physiognomy is particularly well suited for the cinema. When it fills the entire frame of the screen in a close-up, the surface of his face becomes the expressive surface of the image projected before a spectating audience.

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Reading Choi’s face becomes, in effect, co-extensive with reading the film image itself and turns the act of spectatorship into an interaction with the cinema technology. The centuries-old practice of gwansang meets the modern melodramatic mode in the cinema, culminating in the readability and judgment of the face by both local and global traditions. In a moment, I will more explicitly emphasize the importance of the expressive face to the melodramatic mode. In Oldboy, a painting based on The Man of Sorrows (1891) by James Ensor hangs in Dae-su’s confinement room. It features the head of a man simultaneously weeping and smiling, rendered expressionistically in red, white, and black oil paint. Underneath the image, the following words (derived from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox) are inscribed: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” Several times throughout Oldboy, Dae-su is compelled to laugh and weep at the same time, oscillating between the two as a dynamic becoming between joy and suffering. (This ambivalent face was also produced by Soo-hyeok when he met the North Korean Oh Kyeong-pil for the first time, stuck on tripwire in a border zone between North and South Koreas.) Both emotions revolve around Dae-su’s intractable demand for revenge. Film scholar David Scott Diffrient describes Choi’s physiognomy during one of these moments in a similar manner: Trembling as he struggles to flash his yellowed teeth, Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik) turns his weathered face into a mask, a grotesquely grinning visage that appears to disguise his true feelings. However, this shift from one extreme to the other – this metonymic stand-in for the entire film’s schizophrenic slide from sadness to euphoria, misery to contentment – is a rhetorical gesture on both the director and performer’s part, revealing as much as it conceals.6

I have shown how these ambivalences, constituted in the traversal “from sadness to euphoria, misery to contentment,” are intrinsic to the critique of ethics that is central to Park’s vengeance films. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy take melodrama to its limit, turning the good, suffering victim hero who seeks justified revenge into cold-blooded, cruel perpetrators of violence. In the latter film, Choi’s facial expression embodies an uncertainty between sadism and suffering, correspondingly placing the viewer in a position of moral undecidability oscillating between sympathy and alienation. We should connect these thoughts on the cinematic face and the spectator to my discussion of this relationship in chapter one. There I demonstrated

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how Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown and Bad Guy stage the experience of otherness that is intrinsic to the encounter between self and other. I argued that the historical encounters between colonizer and colonized, Korean and American, men and women, tradition and modernity, and other social binaries are allegorized through the face-to-face encounter between spectator and screen. In doing so, Kim’s cinema stages a violent rupture in dominant modes of film viewing, compelling spectatorial self-scrutiny and the questioning of the viewer’s implicitly colonizing and objectifying gaze. This scrutinization was realized through a close analysis of Kim’s shot-reverse shots of faces and elaborated through the relation of exteriority that the face implies. In this chapter, I aim to describe this ethics in greater detail by turning to a set of films that specifically address the possibility of a politics beyond that prescribed by the normative relation of creditor and debtor. In my analyses of films by Park, Kim, and Hong thus far, I revealed how the aims of the melodramatic mode are stymied and rendered spectatorially unpleasurable, uncomfortable, and unjust in their depiction of physical and psychological violence. In the following discussion, I hope to show how critique can enable an open, more capacious spectator and, by co-extension, a more open, more hospitable relation to the other. I would therefore like to continue in the spirit of Moon’s description above in order to reveal the phenomenology of the filmed face as intimately related to the phenomenology of the moving image. Indeed, the face has recently become of increasing interest for some scholars of Korean cinema. Diffrient’s essay goes on to argue that so-called “extreme” contemporary Korean horror films have a predilection toward the expressivity of the face. Michelle Cho, in an essay entitled, “Face Value: The Star as Genre in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother,” shows how Bong’s casting of Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin in his 2009 film mobilizes the reputations of these well-known actors to empty out the putative interiority of the beloved star that fans invest in their famous faces, thus acknowledging “the failure of the promises of images to help constitute a positively articulated national subjectivity, a seamless integration of national, public selves, and private experience.”7 And in his reading of Kim Ki-duk’s Time (2006), Seung-hoon Jeong introduces key ideas about face on screen as an “‘image-screen,’ that is, an interface [that] vibrates between one’s different identities, between self and simulacra, between subject and object, between past and present, between human and inhuman, between reality and immanence.”8 I would like to draw from many of their insights to describe the imbrication of ethics and the cinema – a phenomenon of the moving image that I believe is key to understanding how their claims are possible in the first place. To draw out my argument, I

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turn to three important works produced during the post-millennial period of Korean cinema: N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love (2003) by Park Chan-wook, Memories of Murder (2003) by Bong Joon-ho, and 3-Iron (2004) by Kim Ki-duk.

N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love (2003) and the Name of the Other Face In 1992, a forty-year-old Nepali woman called Chandra Kumari Gurung entered South Korea as a migrant laborer, one of about 2,000 workers who were part of a trainee exchange program set up by the two national governments. One evening, when she could not pay for a meal at a casual restaurant, the owner called the police. As she was not fluent in the Korean language, Chandra struggled to explain that she had lost her wallet. She could not convey her home address in Seoul and was unable to communicate her phone number. Chandra kept repeating, “I don’t know,” in response to the questions she was asked. Although she insisted that she was Nepali, the restaurant owner and police later reported that they thought she looked Korean (her “dark face” led them to believe that she came from the countryside). This mismatch between the perception of her racial features and her inability to perform Koreanness apparently caused great confusion. Following this breakdown of communication, she was taken away and placed in an institution as her attempts at speaking were deemed to be the utterances of a mentally ill person. Over many months Chandra was transferred from one psychiatric ward to another and kept isolated in her room. It was only after six long years of being wrongfully institutionalized that a Korean doctor familiar with Nepal introduced her to a Pakistani man who confirmed that Chandra is indeed from this South Asian country. In 2000, her story was publicized, eliciting outrage among Koreans about her profound mistreatment. In 2003, the National Human Rights Commission in Korea requested six filmmakers to produce an omnibus film called If You Were Me. Park Chan-wook was offered the opportunity to contribute and decided to tell Chandra’s story in a twenty-eight-minute work called N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love. In this short film, Park wanted to depict the institutional actions and ordinary discourses that judged her nonsensical. In an interview in which he was asked about his depiction of the police, hospital workers, and airport immigration officers involved in her six-year ordeal, Park responds:

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They are ordinary people. And incidents like that happen all the time due to the incompetence and indifference of ordinary people. In the end, it’s an issue of social structures. It’s not a problem caused by a single person with bad intentions. That was the point of the film. The people around Chandra are the faces of Koreans we see around us everyday. That’s why the film’s original title was Faces.9

The filmmaker, strikingly for our discussion, calls the anonymous individuals who participated in Chandra’s unjust treatment ordinary “faces.” The use of the word “face” here does not designate its expressivity, but signifies the ontological status of the anonymous, yet quickly recognizable, other; that is, the other who is culturally and linguistically recognizable, the familiar stranger. Perhaps in order to avoid confusion with Park Kwang-su’s contribution to the omnibus project, which is called Face Value, or with Yoo Sang-gon’s contemporaneous horror film, Face (2004), Park settled on the acronymed title.10 (The Korean title of N.E.P.A.L. may be translated as “Believe It or Not, the Case of Chandra.”) N.E.P.A.L. begins in Nepal with a series of nine medium shots of nine different women directly addressing the camera. An off-screen voice asks, in Korean, whether the woman being filmed is Chandra. Eight times they respond no in Nepalese, eight times in repetition – some shake their head, some smile slightly while declining. With the ninth medium shot, featuring a middle-aged woman with her hair pulled back, Chandra finally answers yes in Korean. When the camera finds the victim-hero of the film, the image fades to black and two intertitles explain that she came to Korea to work in a factory. One day she had a fight with her co-workers and left the factory upset, getting lost on the way. N.E.P.A.L. then cuts to her firstperson perspective, filmed in muted black and white, wandering through an alleyway. We see a restaurant and as the camera approaches it, money drops out of her pocket. As the film narrates Chandra’s story, the camera adopts her perspective until her narrative is concluded. The audience will not be shown her face again until the film’s coda, which is filmed in color and repeats the nine shots that began the film. Following the opening sequence, the credits appear and the film cuts to a shot of an empty bowl of ramen noodles. The restaurant proprietor and a policeman ask if she paid for the meal. Chandra responds with a weak moan, which almost sounds like “yes” in Korean, but in the informal familiar. This is a level of response that one would never use with strangers in public. The camera pivots up and down the woman and policeman, as if to look at them weakly. N.E.P.A.L. then cuts to the inside of a police car,

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Fig. 13: Chandra’s point of view, face-to-face with a psychiatrist.

signaling that Chandra has been taken into custody. The policeman sitting in the front passenger seat of the car turns around, wrinkles his nose, and rudely asks, “What’s that smell?” In these and other situations depicted in Park’s film, Chandra is mistreated and disparaged for speaking in a rough manner and for not being able to speak Korean fluently. The confusion of cultural difference is elided in favor of predetermined categories of identity and difference. In the eyes of the anonymous Korean faces she encounters, Chandra is narcissistically perceived as Korean as well, but somehow defective, verbally inept and mentally ill. Though they seem not to harbor malice toward her, their imagination of her psychiatric disorder cannot be separated from their misrecognition of her ethnic foreignness. Chandra falls victim, in other words, to a profound failure of hospitality. N.E.P.A.L. begins by putting a name to a face. In contrast to the anonymous Korean faces that we will see throughout Park’s short work, “Chandra” will be linked to a specific physiognomy, singular and unique. When the film shifts to her first-person perspective, this physiognomy will disappear behind the camera, as it were. To help narrate the story, Park occasionally breaks away from Chandra’s subjective view in the form of establishing shots or third-person narration. At several moments characters will turn to the camera and speak directly to the viewer. While Park’s films are known for their surrealist, expressionistic sensibility, the images in N.E.P.A.L. seem documentary by comparison, as the filmmaker utilizes no special effects or post-production techniques to manipulate the content of the images.

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By not appearing again for the duration of her ordeal, the film refuses to show Chandra’s face in the third-person as an object for the cinema’s look. Instead, the camera seems to attempt to embody what her face sees and hears, thus manifesting the title of the omnibus film, If You Were Me – as if to say, “if you were Chandra.” Moreover, this embodiment switches the perspectives of the native and foreigner and gives the spectator the opportunity to identify with Chandra’s perspective. After the officer turns around and remarks on Chandra’s odor in the police car, the film cuts to a seated Nepali man, who remarks directly to the camera, “You think Koreans don’t smell of kimchi or soybean paste?” The question, and the reversibility of Chandra and the Koreans, of “you” and “me,” reminds us that the judgment of unappealing smells is based not on universal aesthetic criteria, but on relative cultural differences. This police officer, the restaurant owner, and the series of psychiatrists address the subjective camera and, in doing so, stage face-to-face encounters between themselves and the viewer, positioning the film spectator as a foreigner among Koreans. With the camera standing in for Chandra’s embodied presence in the world, Park’s film seems to compel the viewer to perceive urban Seoul as alien. Moreover, Park seems to attempt to become foreign through the production of a free indirect image and by attempting to see his own culture through Chandra’s eyes, seeing and hearing on her behalf. The subjective point-of-view shot is, of course, a common technique of narrative cinema since the beginning of film history and is utilized in short takes as part of a shot-reverse shot sequence, following an eye-line match, as well in as other situations, in order to involve the spectator in the film’s diegesis. The viewer is repeatedly invited to momentarily identify with the perspective of a sympathetic character in a film’s narrative. What he or she sees, the camera sees. What he or she hears, the microphone hears. Subjective camera is constituted through both primary and secondary identifications, identification with the camera and with a character within the diegesis, two key modes of cinematic suture described by Christian Metz.11 On the other hand, the utilization of the point-of-view shot for an extended length is somewhat rare in film history. A number of recent examples that utilize subjective camera for the duration of a feature include Alexsandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009). The most critically discussed of these such films, however, is Robert Montgomery’s noir, Lady in the Lake (1947). In it, the main protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, narrates the story through subjective camera and off-screen voice for the

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film’s 105-minute duration. Marlowe is a detective fiction writer who is drawn into a murder case by his editor. He reluctantly agrees to work with her at first, but finds that the further he delves into the editor’s world of jealousy and revenge, the less he is able to extricate himself from it. The viewer sees Marlowe’s face only when the camera/he looks into a mirror. Otherwise, as in Park’s N.E.P.A.L., characters interact with him by directly facing and speaking to the camera. Because of these similarities in the way the shot addresses the spectator, a detailed consideration of subjective camera in Lady in the Lake can shed light on how this technique implicates the embodied viewer in Park’s film. Reviewers and critics of Lady in the Lake have reported not visual pleasure in the ideological coincidence of the character, the camera, and the viewer’s gaze, but discomfort, claustrophobia, and fatigue in the film’s constant demand for spectatorial identification. David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, and Jean Mitry all call Montgomery’s film more or less a failure and all attribute this failure to the material non-coincidence of the viewer’s gaze with that of Marlowe’s. For despite the film’s efforts to disavow the physical gap that persists between the spectator and cinematic apparatus, the viewer is unable to fully identify with this cynical, fast-talking character (the script is based on a Raymond Chandler novel). Film scholar Vivian Sobchack provides the most sophisticated explanation for this non-coincidence by first recasting the theory of spectatorship on phenomenological grounds and then by showing how the extended subjective camera induces the experience of ontological separation from the film apparatus. Lady in the Lake fails to establish the identicality of the viewer’s body with that of the film technology, or what Sobchack calls “film’s body.” If the “successful” film experience involves the alignment of the spectator’s and cinema’s perceptive intentions toward the world, then its failure in Montgomery’s film arises because the image allows objects unintended by the subjective camera to enter into the frame. The example Sobchack cites to demonstrate this non-coincidence is an early scene in Lady in the Lake when Marlowe smokes a cigarette. In it, a hand appears from the edge of the frame to accept a cigarette from Adrienne Fromsett, his would-be editor. She flips the head of a skull-lighter and offers the flame to Marlowe. He begins smoking while the camera pans to look around the room, reflecting his point of view, as he is being introduced to characters that will be key for the story. Marlowe interacts with them while smoke rises from the bottom of the screen. His comportment toward the world is directed not to the act of smoking, an act that has become second nature to him, but to the task of interacting with other human beings in the room.

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Yet, as characters speak to the camera, the viewer’s own comportment is left free to survey the scene, to focus on the furnishings in Fromsett’s office, on her clothes, and other objects that do not concern Marlowe’s attention or are irrelevant to the narrative situation. Indeed, while he smokes his cigarette, the viewer may be particularly fascinated by the rising smoke itself, which, for the characters within the diegesis, remains unimportant and mundane. Sobchack describes the separation of the spectator’s interest from that of Marlowe’s and, by co-extension, of the camera’s in the following: By virtue of their respective material differences, even if the film and the humanly embodied character are intentionally isomorphic (sharing the same interest and attending to the same intentional objects with the same emphasis), their manner or means of being interested and attentive will differentiate them. That is, although the film’s body and the human body it pretends to appropriate may be identical in function as they both realize the same intentional object, their material differences will constitute visible differences in their visual activity and the production of that object as visible.12

Far from inducing the experience of identification with Marlowe’s perspective, the subjective camera in Lady in the Lake produces the experience of alienation. The film’s intentionality, aligned with Marlowe’s, extends beyond the lighting of the cigarette toward the characters in the diegesis. Yet, because the image treats the cigarette, the human figures, and all the room furnishings as ontologically equivalent, as mere surfaces to be read, there is no reason for the viewer to necessarily concern him or herself with the cigarette or even with what Fromsett is telling him at the expense of everything else. Though the spectator’s eye is guided toward Marlowe’s intended phenomenological object, the conversations between himself and the other diegetic characters, the viewer is free to look elsewhere, even to look away. An oscillation between convergence and divergence, between the body of the spectator and the body of the film, is put into play through the film’s prolonged subjective camera. And the viewer’s growing awareness of this oscillation is the phenomenological source of his or her growing irritation with Lady in the Lake. To the extent that Park’s N.E.P.A.L. may also be considered to be a film narrated through subjective camera, these difficulties hold true when the viewer, Chandra’s point of view, and the camera are made to converge. Despite the ontologically misplaced presumption that the viewer can become Chandra, the existential discrepancies, for the same phenomenological

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reasons explained in relation to Lady in the Lake, remain insurmountable. And while N.E.P.A.L. may attempt to bring the perspectives of the spectator and Chandra together, certain moments, particularly when her body enters into the image, remind the viewer of the impossibility of actually becoming Chandra in body and soul. In a shot where she is speaking to a psychiatrist, for example, the camera wanders away seemingly to look at a diagram of the human brain as the doctor asks her questions about her mental state. Suddenly, the camera/Chandra attacks the doctor, as hands enter into the frame to grab his white jacket. In another scene that exposes the existential gaps between the spectator, camera, and film’s protagonist, Chandra is being transported to an institution in a vehicle with barred windows. Her hands can be seen in the frame while a landscape passes before the camera, while non-intentional details, the car interior for example, enter the frame. At another moment, she meets a Nepali man who greets her in Korean. Chandra becomes fearful of him, seeking comfort in the nurse who accompanied her. In these and other scenes, the subjective camera and the intentionality it inspires invite, not sympathy with the protagonist’s look, but the free, distracted attention of the spectator. Though the image gives the viewer a world that is to be seen and objects that are to be materialized through his or her look, it is the fundamental openness of this visible world that allows for other means, other styles of looking. Instead of a relation of identity between the viewer and Chandra, N.E.P.A.L. constantly reminds us of the impossibility of this relation and of the epistemological limits of the spectator’s sympathy. Indeed, the more the subjective camera attempts to align Chandra’s intentions with those of the putative viewer, the more the spectator becomes aware of its impossibility. The ambivalent oscillation between identity and difference reminds us of the subjunctive mood of the film’s international title, “if you were me.” And yet, this impossibility, this moment when the concept of the other reaches its limit, is precisely where an ethics of the cinema begins. Thus, in producing the experience of difference, Park’s f ilm moves beyond the solicitation of the viewer to become Chandra, ideologically or phenomenologically, in order to produce an absolute other that challenges the narcissism of the spectating self. The exteriority of the face, elaborated in chapter one in my working through of Kim Ki-duk’s films, remains particularly apt, for Park’s film shows that this face, profoundly other, is repeatedly foreclosed when the restaurant owner, the policeman, and the psychiatrist encounter Chandra. These “faces of Koreans we see around us everyday,” to quote the director once more, are unable to grant Chandra her ontological foreignness and refuse to undertake the patient work of

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affirming her broken Korean. A nurse remarks that the Nepali language sounds like the “mumbling of a Korean mental patient,” demonstrating that even when Chandra’s ethnic difference is recognized, judgment still proceeds along predetermined, everyday lines of understanding. When N.E.P.A.L. places the viewer in a relation of exteriority before the face of the cinema screen, it puts the ethical failures that were committed by those around Chandra into relief. The viewer oscillates between identification and alienation from the cinema apparatus, allowing him or her distance from their cruelty, incompetence, erroneous diagnoses, and serious misunderstandings. Park’s film shows us how Chandra’s foreignness constitutes and is constituted by the failure to accommodate difference. This failure is perhaps most pronounced when the everyday faces that enter into relation with Chandra seem unable to accommodate her name properly. One repeated theme in N.E.P.A.L. is the seeming inability of people around her to pronounce her non-Korean name. When Chandra is first brought into the police station, she states her full name, “Chandra Kumari Gurung,” but the interrogating officer is unable to repeat it. In the psychiatric ward, she is given the name, “Sun Mi-ya,” which is decidedly more Korean and less foreign-sounding. An immigration officer notes that her name was entered incorrectly on her immigration form, misspelled “Gorom,” and that her immigration number was wrong as well. In a Korean language class, the teacher asks Chandra to repeat, “My name is Sun Mi-ya,” in the effort to drill Koreanness into her. She responds however, “My name is Chandra Kumari Gurung,” to the puzzled look of the teacher. Only when Chandra finally encounters someone who can speak Nepalese and who can recognize her non-Korean difference does she find redemption. At the end of her narrative, rendered through subjective camera, a man asks her if she is “Chandra” and, with a nod from her, they join hands. Park’s depiction of Chandra’s six-year, four-month ordeal revolves around her repeatedly being misunderstood and her symptoms being misidentified. Her elusive condition is given its perhaps most ethically poignant representation in her apparent unnameability. She exists both inside and outside the community of everyday Koreans, a foreign face in the midst of Korean faces. N.E.P.A.L. depicts their profound confusion, and a fundamental inability to determine whether Chandra is Korean or Nepali, whether she is mentally ill or healthy, and whether her name is Sun Mi-ya or Chandra. Moreover, these ambivalences are allegorized through the oscillation between identification and alienation intrinsic to the subjective camera. As I have shown, the ideological identification of the film viewer with the subjective look of a character in the diegesis, and by co-extension the camera, is stymied by

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the embodied non-coincidence of the viewer’s intentional body with the body of the film. Yet, if the viewer experiences an alienating discomfort and unpleasure when watching Chandra’s narration, this experience cannot be separated from the discomfort and unpleasure experienced by Chandra herself living in Korea. I will develop this provocation to the viewer in a later chapter, but I would like to delve deeper into the ethics of faceicity by describing the preconditions for its moral judgment. In order to do so, I now turn to Bong Joon-ho’s crime drama, Memories of Murder.

Memories of Murder (2003) and the Unreadable Face Like N.E.P.A.L., Memories of Murder is based on a historical incident. In the rural city of Hwaseong, situated about 30 miles south of Seoul, ten women were found having been brutally raped, gagged with articles of their own clothing, and murdered over a period of five years between 1986 and 1991. The Hwaseong serial murder case is considered the first of its kind in Korea. Though countless officers, investigators, and expert specialists were assigned to the case, the killer has never been found. Over 21,000 witnesses and suspects were interrogated, yet the clues gathered about the perpetrator remain scanty. He was apparently in his 20s when he committed the violent crimes, about 165 to 170cm tall, and of slender build. In the ninth and tenth murder cases, DNA evidence was sent to Japan for analysis, as the technology was not yet available in Korea, but the results were unable to corroborate any new suspects. Memories of Murder dramatizes the story of the Hwaseong serial killer and the surrounding historical period from the perspective of the police who were assigned to the case. It opens in the year 1986, toward the end of Chun Doo-hwan’s authoritarian presidency, when democracy movements struggled for legitimacy, and ideological activists on the political extremes thrived. Throughout the decade, the violent and excessive interrogation techniques of the police were well known among young demonstrators. Radical students, many dropping out of school to work in factories, stood in solidarity with the labor movement and against Chun’s anti-democratic regime. In response, Chun vastly expanded the paramilitary riot police by mid-decade to around 150,000. As part of the agenda of his militarized regime, regular civil defense drills were performed to prepare the citizenry in the event of a North Korean attack. During these drills, people were ordered to stay inside, move flammables to a safe area, unplug all AC cords, and shut off all their lights. While Bong, a member of the 386 Generation,

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was performing the research in preparation for his film, he discovered a disturbing connection between these drills and one of the Hwaseong murders: When I was doing research, I learned from the papers that the day the middle school girl was murdered was November 15. With our generation, the 15th of the month was always the day of civil defense drills, you know? The civil defense drills of the 1980s included blackouts. When drills were held on the evening of the 15th of the month, every home and public place turned off all the lights for a certain period of time, and people avoided going outside. I thought, ‘Oh, this girl must have been dying in the darkness while the civil defense drill was taking place,’ and I really started to get angry.13

Later, Bong will state that this anger and rage was a key inspiration for the script. Yet, he reports that the emotional toll during the production so was great, primarily because the killer still remained at large, that he vowed never to do another film based on a historical incident. “I think it was too difficult for me,” he remarks, reflecting on his experience filming Memories of Murder, “from the ethical issues to the psychological burden and the primal fear.”14 The f ilm opens with a close-up on the face of a boy, looking at a grasshopper in a golden rice field on a late summer day. A tractor brings detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho, from JSA and Sympathy for Mr. Ven­geance) to a water duct that borders the field’s edge. He peers inside and sees the corpse of a young girl, tied up and gagged. Numerous ants crawl across her lifeless face. The morbidity of this image is juxtaposed with a shot of a group of children cheerily playing in the rice field. Cutting back to a close-up of the boy’s face, he mischievously imitates Doo-man’s words and gestures. The boy squats and looks at the detective curiously in shot-reverse shot. In the director commentary for the Korean DVD, Bong guides the viewer’s attention to the interactions between the characters in these opening shots and remarks that he conceived the entire film with the idea of the face in mind. Following the title screen, a montage of Doo-man interrogating a series of suspects is shown: an ex-boyfriend of one of the dead women, a meeklooking man who seems to have a particular admiration for the Kathleen Turner thriller, Body Heat (1981), a middle-aged man wearing a suit and glasses who is asked about the rape of a rural woman, and a sweaty-faced fellow who has trouble opening his eyes for a photograph. Headshots of all

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the men are taken and catalogued in a notebook. Like N.E.P.A.L., which begins with a search for Chandra through a series of faces of Nepali women, Memories of Murder begins with a search for a criminal through a series of faces of suspected Korean men. Later, as Doo-man eats lunch while attaching photos to his notebook using cooked rice, the chief of police asks him, “How can you look at those photos while eating?” The detective’s response clarif ies his method of detection: “If I keep staring at them, one moment it’ll hit me. Instinctively.” In the original Korean, he uses the word “faces” to refer to the men represented in the photos. “Chief,” he continues, “I may know nothing else, but my eyes can read people. It’s how I survive as a detective. There’s a reason people say I have shaman’s eyes.” The chief then tests Doo-man’s ability to read faces and to “instinctively” separate the innocent from the guilty. He points to two men sitting and writing at a desk on the other side of the room and says, “One of them is a rapist, and the other is the victim’s brother. He caught the guy doing this [he mimics a sexual gesture] to his sister, and dragged him in. So tell me, which one’s the rapist?” Doo-man turns and looks intently at the men, in a shot-reverse shot sequence. But before he opens his mouth to offer his assessment, the film abruptly cuts – to the detective having sex with his wife in their small apartment. His choice is never divulged to the viewer. Like this cut, which conclusively signals the inconclusiveness of determining guilt, Doo-man’s shaman-like capacity to read faces will become increasingly frustrated as the f ilm proceeds. There are two intertwined arguments I want to pursue in this section. One, if the face functions as a melodramatic, expressive sign that signifies the presence of a moral interiority, this face also implies the existence of a face reader who is capable of detecting this invisible interiority. I aim to describe the preconditions under which the act of detection and the moral judgment of the expressive face are made possible at all. And two, the inconclusive ending to Memories of Murder will allow us to see how this act of reading the face undergoes auto-critique, in that the face resists the preconditions of sovereign judgment precisely by the one who claims to be able to detect and scrutinize it. Far from simply providing us with a generic auteurist flourish, the inconclusive, unreadable face sheds light on an ontological possibility of the cinema image itself – that is, the last scene of Bong’s film reveals the cinema image as a surface that implicitly inspires ethical questioning. I thus wish to articulate two moments of violence in this section: the violence enacted upon the face through its moral judgment, and the violence returned to the one who judges it.

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Doo-man’s judgmental powers are showcased with two suspects featured in Memories of Murder. Both of them will turn out to be wrongly accused. The first is Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), a mentally challenged young man with a serious burn injury to the left side of his face, who the detective has impulsively pegged as the killer. Yong-koo (Kim Roe-ha), Doo-man’s colleague and hatchet man, enters and kicks the boy down with his foot while exclaiming that, “Just looking at this face makes me angry.” Doo-man picks him back up, holds Kwang-ho’s neck with his hand, and remarks, “Are you really innocent? Look in my eyes.” For a moment he searches the young man’s face for any sign of guilt. In N.E.P.A.L. Chandra’s face was mistakenly understood as signifying a mentally challenged soul. Here, Kwang-ho’s deformed face is not only read as indicating mental incapacity, but also, mistakenly, as pointing to criminal culpability. Later in the film, Doo-man surreptitiously observes his second suspect, a middle-aged fetishist named Byung-soon who wears women’s underwear, masturbating at a crime scene where a woman was brutally murdered. Discovered in the midst of this act, he runs away and is chased down to a construction yard. The suspect wears dark clothes like the many men who are working at the site, but Doo-man spots the pink women’s underwear he is wearing from afar. He commands all the men in the area to form a line. As the camera pans across their faces, Doo-man grasps the neck of one of them and tells him to look in his eyes. The middle-aged suspect, whose face is half-covered with a surgical mask, looks at Doo-man. The detective immediately identifies the man. “My eyes can’t be fooled,” he later remarks, “one look and I know.” With limited information, the detective grants himself the capacity to make spontaneous judgments about the moral character of a human individual. If, as I discussed in chapter one in my analysis of Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown, the command, “Look at me like Dog-eye,” can be read in an ethical register, Doo-man’s injunction to “look in my eyes” may be read in a similar spirit, as having something to do with the ethics of the other. The detective’s ostensible capacity to “read people,” to determine whether a suspect is a criminal simply by looking at their face, coincides with a similar capacity exercised by the spectator, steeped in the popular melodramatic mode, to read the faces of the characters in the film’s diegesis and to make judgments about their ostensibly intrinsic morality. In her analysis of the O. J. Simpson trials that took place in the US in February 1997, Linda Williams describes the intense scrutiny the camera placed on Simpson’s demeanor, his body and facial language, as he listens to testifying witnesses and other courtroom events. A blink, a smirk, twitching muscles, and eye

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movements ostensibly betray Simpson’s thoughts and provide clues for the rapt television viewer. “Demeanor evidence,” Williams writes, is one of the most important justifications for a jury trial and an important reason for the jury trials’ existence as popular entertainment. And it is in the jury trials’ faith in the ability of jurors to read the external, visual signs of demeanor that we may locate the trial’s connection with melodrama’s quest for moral legibility in a post-sacred universe.15

The film viewer’s quest for moral legibility is shared by the detective Dooman, who is tasked precisely with the pursuit of determining culpability and with deciding who the serial killer is. Alongside the detective, the viewer also searches the faces Doo-man brings into custody, to decide for him or herself who is guilty and who is innocent, based on the visual data provided by the camera. David Bordwell has noted that suspense is controlled in the detective film by making the viewer share the limits of knowledge possessed by the detective. He writes: The detective film will utilize a restricted narration to justify gaps in our knowledge of the crime fabula, and when the detective is in the dark, we will be too; but the narration will make sure that we do not become privy to the investigator’s solution until he or she states it at the proper time.16

The investigator not only performs the acts of seeing and hearing for the spectator, like Sophie in JSA, but also performs the thinking and acts of deduction that implicate the viewer as detective. Indeed, that Doo-man’s moments of face reading in Memories of Murder remain performative seems to constitute part of his characterization, as it becomes evident that these performances are meant to reinforce, for himself and for others, the myth of the all-knowing detective. As the film progresses, Doo-man’s investigative techniques become less convincing, as one quickly realizes that he is no Auguste Dupin or Sherlock Holmes. He performs to save face before the eyes of the public. Instead of capturing the real killer, he is more interested in being portrayed as a hero of the people in the newspaper, and in making sure that the police, and the authoritarian ideology it represents, does not lose face in the mass media. Doo-man’s carefree, entertaining demeanor, functioning at times to provide comedic relief, reinforces the growing sense that his instinctual methods are not to be taken seriously. When he notes that the killer left no body hair at one of the murder scenes, Doo-man amusingly spends an entire day at the

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Fig. 14: Doo-man and Tae-yoon interrogating a suspect. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

public bathhouse, covertly looking for men without pubic hair. He plants clues, such as a shoeprint in mud, to fabricate evidence one might find in a television crime drama. And when his ostensible talent for reading faces fails to result in the capturing of the killer, he desperately turns to “folk wisdom,” to a Korean shaman, as a means of criminal detection. The shaman gives him a scroll-like charm, upon which he is to pour wet soil from the crime scene. After it dries, the stain is supposed to reveal, as if by magic, the face of the murderer. As the film unfolds, the modern viewer begins to see practices such as these as humorous and superstitious. In contrast to Doo-man stands Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), a collegeeducated, cosmopolitan detective recently arrived from big-city Seoul to assist in the case. Doo-man grumbles that the urbane, smug young man is not familiar with Hwaseong and their small town ways. (Indeed, a good deal of the fascination in Bong’s film is the depiction of a world, a post-colonial South Korea struggling toward modernity, that had all but disappeared by 2003.) Not only is Tae-yoon not familiar with the local context, he shuns Doo-man’s provincial, shamanistic powers of detection in favor of modern, scientific methods. In Tae-hoon’s eyes, there is nothing to admire about his partner’s mystical techniques. Close attention to detail and rational deduction, which has stood at the center of the detective genre since its inception in the nineteenth century, will yield the truth for him and, moreover, fulfill the expectations of the film noir and crime melodrama for the early twentyfirst century cinema viewer. “Documents never lie,” Tae-yoon remarks twice in the film, indicating that he trusts the written signifier and the facts they

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are supposed to signify, in contrast to the untrustworthy face which is prone to dissembling and misunderstanding. Through his evidentiary means of detection, they eventually discover their third suspect, Hyun-gyu (Park Hae-il), a young man who works at the local Remicon factory. All the gathered clues point to him as the killer: his soft hands, a postcard request to the local radio station to play the song, Sad Letter by the singer/songwriter Yoo Jae-ha, which is always played the night a woman is murdered, and his lack of a credible alibi for the night of the latest incident. During his interrogation, Hyun-gyu denies any wrongdoing. Because there are no witnesses to his crimes, Doo-man and Tae-hoon cannot conclusively indict him and are forced to let him go free. His face is seemingly ageless, without wrinkles, and appears both youthful and sad. If the viewer’s powers of reading the world are made possible through the acts of detection performed not only by Doo-man but also by Tae-hoon, this capacity to interpret the image oscillates in a similar fashion between the capacity to read the face and the truth of written records. Throughout Memories of Murder, the viewer constantly shifts his or her sympathies between the two detectives, and, by co-extension, between traditional means of determining guilt and modern means of scientific detection. The film’s narrative unfolds precisely along the lines of this tension, as linkages between cause and effect, or one event and the next, become increasingly arbitrary or not deducible. The tension between folk knowledge and rational logic works to propel the plot forward. DNA recovered from the semen found on one of the women’s bodies seems to connect her brutal killing to Hyun-gyu, but the evidence must be sent to the US for the connection to be confirmed. As they wait, the relationship between Doo-man and Tae-hoon becomes increasingly confrontational. In his wide-ranging essay on Bong’s film, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon argues that the failure of the two detectives to capture the serial murderer may be read as an allegory for the breakdown of historical memory and the inability of the historian to ascertain incontrovertible facts in an “uninhabited present.”17 By pushing the expectations of the crime film to its limit, Memories of Murder discards the crime/noir genre midway into the film in order to expose the consequences of Korean modernity on questions of historicity. Jeon thus writes: In short, the film links generic tradition to cultural tradition and imperils both. In this entire calculus, the underlying problem is like a kind of amnesia, forcing us to ask foggily, where are we and how did we get here? Ultimately, the real missing person in the film is neither the absent

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murderer nor an unfound victim, but the rather the body politic of the national imaginary.18

Jeon’s analysis illuminates how Bong’s film approaches the problems of historicity at the end of history. Yet, if Memories of Murder can be read as thinking the limits of historical evidence, it is also at this threshold where the search for a new relation, a new ethics, toward the undetectable can begin. At the end of his discussion, Jeon notably does not wallow in the nihilism of ahistoricality. The archive of history, however fragmentary, does offer a kind of hope, though “it is a more modest historical hope, not for facts or historical narratives, but for the attitudes required to interpret them.”19 What the archive calls for, then, is not the endless, teleological drive toward the certainty of truth, but the proper comportment toward that which implicitly fails detection. I have been attempting to delineate this comportment toward otherness throughout this book. The most concrete manifestation of the failure to ascertain culpability takes place in the dramatic final scene of Memories of Murder. When a local high school girl is killed, adding to the death count, Tae-hoon unilaterally breaks into Hyun-gyu’s apartment, hits him in the face, and drags him to a train tunnel. With rain falling, the vengeful detective is determined to execute the suspect, acting out of hate and exasperation. “Nobody will care if I kill you,” Tae-hoon remarks, while raising his gun. Impatient and frustrated, he demands that Hyun-gyu confess, despite his lack of credible evidence. The young man struggles and kicks Tae-hoon’s gun from his hand. He receives a beating from the detective. As if on cue, Doo-man comes running into the scene holding the results of the DNA tests, arriving “in the nick of time” and thus fulfilling a key characteristic of the melodramatic mode.20 Tae-hoon quickly opens the envelope and reads the report. The camera slowly moves toward his face as his expression becomes grave, then incredulous. The document states that the DNA fingerprints of the suspect do “not correspond exactly” with the semen found on the victim’s body and therefore, “it cannot be said conclusively that the suspect is the murderer.” Tae-hoon’s eyes well up with tears, which run down his cheeks as raindrops fall from his wet hair. Contradicting his earlier claim that “documents never lie,” he says, “This document is a lie. I don’t need it,” and goes in search of his gun. The ostensibly rational detective has become more like his counterpart: impulsive, rashly judgmental, and driven by fury. In contrast, Doo-man somehow has become more merciful at this late moment in the film. He picks up and holds Hyun-gyu to search the face of the other for the final time. “Look in my eyes,” the detective commands.

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Fig. 15: Hyun-gyu’s unreadable face. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

While pushing Tae-hoon’s gun away, he engages a face-to-face encounter with the suspect. Flipping back between close-up shot-reverse shots of the faces of Doo-man and Hyun-gyu, as the rain continues to fall, the music rises to emphasize the drama of the scene. “Look in my eyes,” he repeats. While Doo-man and the viewer consider the young suspect’s face, searching for any trace of guilt, he finally gives in and says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Do you get up each morning too?” He then tells the young man to “Go! Just go, fucker!” Doo-man’s inability to ascertain the moral truth of Hyun-gyu’s face not only marks the end of the detective genre and, by co-extension, the end of a particular mode of historiography, it also acknowledges the limits of his vaunted capacity for moral judgment, the impossibility of reading the face of the other. Meanwhile, Tae-hoon is determined to kill Hyun-gyu, regardless of the outcome of the DNA tests. If Doo-man, at the beginning of Memories of Murder, arbitrarily pinned crimes onto suspects at will, and Tae-hoon demanded only solid evidence and rigorous investigative deduction, then at this moment in the film, their sentiments have dramatically switched. Tae-hoon cares more about releasing his pent-up rage, his ressentiment, and Doo-man finally acknowledges that his quasi-shamanistic methods, including his reading of the face, are not rigorous enough. In this encounter with the inscrutable “poker face” of the other, he finds himself at a profound loss and is forced to let Hyun-gyu go free. This scene is a key ethical moment in Memories of Murder. As it pushes the limits of both approaches toward crime embodied by Doo-man and Tae-hoon, traditional and modern, superstitious and scientif ic, it also

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illuminates the discursive conditions upon which one is capable of making a moral judgment about the other at all. Both men are in a position to decide who is culpable for the murder, but the viewer nevertheless experiences the methodological tensions between the two as ambivalent. Yet, if both methods ultimately fail, how are they able to concoct a narrative of guilt and how are they to ascribe this guilt onto an individual person? What gives them the authority to make such claims in the first place? In order to provide responses to these questions, I would like to reference another moment from Memories of Murder, about midway through the film, one that points back to the historical period in which the story is set. Doo-man and Tae-hoon, disagreeing about whether to convict the Byung-soon (he does not have the killer’s soft hands but Doo-man wants to condemn him anyway), enter into a shoving match in the police station office. Suddenly, in the midst of their altercation, the song “Sad Letter” plays on the radio. Tae-hoon goes to the window and feels the rain falling outside. Both of these conditions, the song and rain in the night, match those that preceded the previous murders. The chief immediately gets on the phone and calls to mobilize more police. “First, declare a state of emergency,” he commands, “and send me two garrisons of men…. Because our intelligence says so! Tonight. There’ll be a murder tonight.” Scrambling to prepare for the seemingly inevitable, Tae-hoon calls the radio station to ask for the name and address of the person who requested the song. When the police chief gets off the phone, he dejectedly reports that all garrisons are unavailable at the moment because “they went to suppress a demonstration in Suwon city.” The next morning, as was feared, a woman is found tied up, raped, and murdered on the side of a road. The police chief’s declaration of a state of emergency brings us back to the political climate of South Korea in the 1980s. It recalls Chun Doo-hwan’s declaration of martial law in May 1980, which precipitated the Gwangju Uprising in that month. In the introduction, we saw how Lee Chang-dong’s f ilm, Peppermint Candy, retraced the turbulent, public events, going back to May 1980, which were consequential in the private life of its main protagonist, Young-ho. When President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), Kim Jae-kyu, in October 1979, Chun Doo-hwan was appointed to lead the investigation into his murder. The so-called “12.12 Coup,” led by Chun, unilaterally charged Army Chief of Staff and martial law commander Jeong Seung-hwa with colluding with Kim to assassinate President Park. Yet, by being appointed the head detective, Chun was granted the authority to decide which government officials were loyal to the presidency and which were attempting to

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conspire against it. In mid-May of 1980, as Bruce Cumings writes, he “closed the universities, dissolved the legislature, banned all political activity, and arrested thousands of political leaders and dissidents in the midnight hours of May 17-18. He also set up a special committee for national security measures, making himself head of its standing committee.”21 In this state of emergency, constituted through a deposed political leader, Chun stepped in and became the de facto sovereign. Indeed, this performance of sovereignty finds legitimacy in the controversial National Security Act (gukga boanbeop) of 1948. Its purpose, according to Article 1, is to ensure the freedom and life of the people through the suppression of “anti-state” organizations, such as communists or protesting students, that could endanger national security. Within the scope of its legislation, North Korea constitutes one such anti-state organization. The NSA establishes the authority to deem any South Korean who, according to Article 7, “praises, encourages or sides” with North Korea a criminal. Article 10 also criminalizes individuals who fail to inform on other individuals that are sympathetic with an anti-state group. The language of the National Security Act has justified the curtailment of freedom of expression and association, condemning those who may have expressed any hint of sympathy with communist, North Korean sentiments or criticized official investigations (such as during the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in 2010). In effect, the Act grants the power of the state to make distinctions between friends and enemies, thus continuing the Korean War through other means, in the name of protecting the sovereignty of its citizens. In a recent article on the contested history of the war, political scientist Jae-jung Suh writes: The South Korean state has been engaged in a war or crisis since its founding, and if its entire history is that of war, is war not the state of exception but the normal condition of a state that suspends democracy in the name of defending democracy and that denies its citizens their existence as such in the name of protecting their rights?22

This formation of governmentality is particularly pronounced when the exercise of sovereign power is embodied in a single human individual. Indeed, through his declaration of martial law, in the name of a state of emergency, Chun’s drive for political power fits Weimar political theorist Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides upon the exception.”23 Chun’s sovereign power emerges at the very moment he decides between those loyal to the dead president and those who are traitorous,

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between the one who is permitted by law and the other who will be deemed a criminal. This juridical power is legitimated, not on the straightforward application of pre-existing law, but paradoxically on its suspension. It is crucial to note this double movement, for the sovereign places himself outside of the law in the name of law. Various clauses in the NSA function precisely in this manner, legitimizing the use of illegitimate violence. Expanding on Schmitt’s formulation, Giorgio Agamben writes that, “In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.”24 The legitimacy of the sovereign’s claim to his decision-making power rests on this ambivalent ontological ground between the licit and the illicit. Consequently, the decision is an expression of pure force that cannot be isolated as either the application of law or its suspension, a contradiction embodied precisely by the enactment of martial law. In their essay on modern Korean politics and Agamben’s formulations of sovereign power, Lee Seung-Ook, Najeeb Jan, and Joel Wainwright argue that the temporary suspension of law carried out by Chun in May 1980 became a permanent condition of modern Korean politics. Manifesting the nomos of what Agamben calls the “camp,” where the state of exception has become the rule, the violence perpetrated in the state of emergency following the Gwangju Uprising legitimized the dehumanization of leftist protesters who were against Chun. Lee, Jan, and Wainwright thus maintain that: “The underlying rationality of the slaughter was that the people of Gwangju were bbalgengi [a “commie” or literally a “red person”], essentially the enemy, and thus could be legally killed.”25 Existing both inside and outside the law, sovereignty grounds its political power by performing the rhetoric of the decision. Through the sovereign decision, a human being is, in effect, elevated to the status of divine idol and is entitled to (re)create laws at will, (re)establish discursive boundaries, and (re)define the meaning of justice. The declaration of a state of emergency in Memories of Murder situates the film in a moment of modern Korean history when the law was repeatedly suspended so that individuals deemed exceptions to the nationalist agenda, such as communists or those suspected of having North Korean sympathies, could be illegitimated and criminalized, and thus be legitimately subjected to state violence. The scene where the police chief declares the state of emergency also refers allegorically to the power of judgment itself, of deciding between the evil killer and the innocent victim. The discursive structure that grounds moral judgment, Bong’s film seems to show, is also the groundless structure that constitutes the sovereign

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decision. To assess and judge the morality of another, say by reading their face, is to assert sovereign power over the other, to define the other as legitimate or illegitimate in relation to the law. This act is made possible, moreover, by assumptions that underpin the melodrama of the face, its emotions, intentions for the world, its capacity for good or evil, and its grievability. When Doo-man tells criminal suspects to “look in my eyes” so that he can make a claim about their guilt or innocence, he is asserting this sovereign right. And when Tae-hoon angrily concocts a narrative of what the seemingly mild-mannered Hyun-gyu did the night of the murder, in order to explain his culpability, he invokes this right as well. Regardless of whether this judgment is made in the name of instinct or the truth of documents, both appeal to the power of the one who makes this decision. Both commit an act of violence that does not grant the face its basic alterity, as they struggle to maintain the certitude that ostensibly belongs to the detective. Indeed, to place blame on the other is to reiterate the certainty of the sovereign self. If the pursuit of knowledge performed by the detective guides the pursuit of narrative knowledge performed by the spectator, then the conditions that make his judgment possible are also those that make the spectator’s moral judgment possible as well. And if the state of exception has become the rule, a situation that not only describes political life under Chun’s regime but for Agamben is the ontological condition of modern governmentality everywhere, it is this state that entitles the viewer to meaning within all popular cinema, an entitlement corresponding to the ideology of the observing camera. Relevant to this correspondence, Christine ­Gledhill notes that, “The ideology of the camera as observer and the face as window to the soul opened up new significatory possibilities in terms of the inwardness and personality of the performer.”26 Moral legibility is the goal of interrogative gaze, to know why characters are acting this way or that in the world. This goal is continuous with the voyeuristic viewer who occupies a discursive place of sovereignty in relation to the diegetic world represented in the film. Speaking of this relation, Christian Metz writes in The Imaginary Signifier: At the cinema, it is always the other who is on the screen; as for me, I am there to look at him. I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all-perceiving. All-perceiving as one says all-powerful (this is the famous gift of ‘ubiquity’ the film makes it spectator); all-perceiving, too, because I am entirely on the side of the perceiving instance: absent from the screen, but certainly present in the auditorium, a great eye and ear without which

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the perceived would have no one to perceive it, the instance, in other words, which constitutes the cinema signifier (it is I who make the film).27

If sovereignty both constitutes and is constituted by the law, the spectator similarly constitutes and is constituted by the cinema. He or she remains outside, indeed remains an exception, to the diegetic world depicted in the film – a distanced voyeur who claims omniscience and omnipotence over the other who appears on the screen. Yet, the cinematic technology, which animates this diegetic world, requires the inclusion of the viewer to make it come to meaningful life. In this, the victim-hero, or the character that violently suffers over the course of a film and later overcomes their suffering to emerge as virtuous, which is the hallmark of the melodramatic mode, is made possible by this all-perceiving gaze. What remains key to the identification of this victim-hero is the desiring viewer, who seeks to secure the knowability of on-screen characters through his or her psychologizing and moralizing look. Both modes of detection in Memories of Murder, reading the face and reading documents, point to an identical telos. Both lead back to the certainty of spectator and the moral knowability of the criminal. To expose the evildoer is to reassert, through the sovereign decision, the certainty of the melodramatic gaze. The failure of both Doo-man and Tae-hoon to find the killer then carries implications beyond its allegorizing of the postmodern end-of-history. Faceto-face with the other, Doo-man encounters the basic ambivalence of the face, its unreadability. But instead of imposing upon Hyun-gyu’s face the guilt of serial murder, and rather than deeming it the monstrous “face of evil,” Doo-man recognizes the limits of his powers of decision. His sovereign gaze, in this concluding scene from the film, is deposed of its right to judge. The melodramatic mode of looking, and the moral occult it attempts to discover, is rendered inoperable. In order to elaborate this unseating of the sovereign gaze, I want to return to a key theoretical essay I discussed in my reading of Park’s early films in chapter two of this book. There, I aligned what Walter Benjamin calls “mythic violence” with the justification of violence in melodrama. Such violence appeals to a “mythic” law beyond juridical law, one that is grounded in a means-ends logic that is understood as self-evident, “natural,” and somehow primordial. This logic, I explained earlier, remains wholly complicit with capitalist modernity and is a means of exchanging power and guilt from one party to another like a commodity. In contrast to mythic violence, which is inseparable from lawmaking and sovereign

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“powermaking,” Benjamin proposes a critique of violence that exposes itself as a pure means, a means without end, what he calls “divine violence.”28 If mythic violence is concerned with setting boundaries, assigning guilt, and pursuing retribution, divine violence annuls its bloody exercise of supreme power. Divine violence “only expiates,” is “law-destroying,” and is “lethal without shedding blood.”29 It not only confounds mythic violence, it also renders untenable the very justification of violence and the narrative metaphysics that underpins it. In doing so, as political theorist James R. Martel comments, divine violence “leaves behind not truth, but rather only the possibility of non-fetishism. It allows us to begin again, to re-see and re-read the world around us without the certainty of the sin of idolatry.”30 Political ontology bares its legal subterfuge before the sovereign gaze, exhibiting itself as such, while providing an opportunity to ground a new ethics by rendering the normalizing mythic violence of the sovereign unfeasible. In the remaining chapters of this book, I intend to show how this “possibility of non-fetishism” may be demonstrated through cinematic means. Through the exposure of the law, guilt, and retribution as fetishized myth, divine violence renders the melodramatic mode ineffective as well. It expiates the inevitability of revenge generated by the victim-hero and critiques the metaphysics that underpins the politics of blame. Operating on a temporality of untimeliness, divine violence takes the strict cause-effect relations between laws and human action, and between human actors, to their discursive limits. Through this, the exchange of guilt and moral debt that regulates political action, concepts of redemption, and the recognition of virtue are transfigured and make way for new, unprecedented, nonmelodramatic ways of thinking the other. The everyday ethics that underpin ordinary historical time are blasted open by the interruption of the divine. Illustrating this point, Benjamin writes: For the question ‘May I kill?” meets it irreducible answer in the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill.’ This commandment precedes the deed, just as God was ‘preventing’ the deed. But just as it may not be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable, once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. And so neither the divine judgment nor the grounds for this judgment can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or

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communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.31

Benjamin describes the order of moral action typically understood within the metaphysics of mythic violence: the moral law of the commandment, the doer, and then the deed. The critique of violence as a pure means deposes the sovereignty of the moral law as a metaphysical claim. The injunction, “Thou shall not kill,” becomes “inapplicable” when it is judged against a pre-existing law, for its very authority is incapacitated by the wholly other, the unexpected sovereign power of the divine. As Benjamin writes, the moral question, “May I kill?”, if posed fundamentally and critically, renders the pre-existing sovereignty of the moral law “incommensurable.” When confronted with divine violence, even the commandment against murder is made profoundly ambivalent, manifesting a fundamental ethical questioning that discloses the dissimulation of sovereign violence. Such questioning is inspired by Hyun-gyu’s unreadable face in the final shots of Bong’s film. It not only deposes Doo-man’s sovereign judgment, buttressed by the permanent suspension of law, his look that arbitrarily purports to penetrate into the moral occult hidden behind Hyun-gyu’s face, but also calls into question the moral law, the a priori “Thou shall not kill,” which implicitly implicates the existence of a moral interiority. As evidenced by the DNA report, Hyun-gyu’s responsibility for the violent murders remains in doubt at the end of Memories of Murder and this profound uncertainty, which upends the generic conclusion of the detective film, precisely underscores the violence committed by the detective’s moralizing gaze. Crucial to this disclosure is the state of emergency, produced by the sovereign decision, which also, paradoxically, produces the conditions for its dismantling. Both are made possible through the appearance of the face. Divine violence begins as the appearance of the face in itself, emptied of moral content, is recognized and affirmed. It is contingent upon the state of exception. In his essay on the face, Agamben writes quite differently in his explication of the logic of the exception when the non-humanity of the face is bared to the spectator. If sovereign violence must constantly cover over its mystical origins through dissimulation, the face, as such, lays bare its surface as fundamental to its ontology. The confrontation of the filmed face with the viewer’s look exhibits its basic faceicity, as he writes: The fact that the actors look into the camera means that they show that they are simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the extent to which they exhibit this falsification. The same

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procedure is used today in advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly its own artifice. In both cases, the one who looks is confronted with something that concerns unequivocally the essence of the face, the very structure of truth.32

When Hyun-gyu looks directly into the camera, he reveals neither his innocence, nor his guilt, but the very “essence” of the face – its simulatability. The fetishization of the face of the movie star is made visible as such. Its truth is that it remains only a mask, a mere surface that does not conceal a moral interiority. Evacuating this interiority, the means-ends schema produced through the everyday politics of blame is rendered false and inapplicable. Agamben later indicates that this showing of the falsity of the face is precisely the task of politics. Indeed, this task is particularly urgent under modern governmentality, where the violent logic of the exception has become inseparable from the exercise of power within neoliberalism. Within this condition of ubiquity, the ethical task of the face is to “return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear,” so that it can be made hospitable to the other, and in a manner that remains profoundly non-melodramatic.33 I aim to elucidate this “appearance of appearance” in chapter six, where I show how Korean cinema attempts to align the face with the inhumanity of the film image. In the final scene of Memories of Murder, which depicts the present day of 2003, Doo-man lives in a middle-class apartment with his two children and wife. He is on his way to work, apparently as a juice machine salesman, wearing a white-collared shirt and a smart grey suit. Based on his outward appearance, one would be hard-pressed to detect any visual clues of his former life as a police detective. He happens to drive by the rice field that began the film. Perhaps out of nostalgia, or morbid curiosity, Doo-man walks to the water duct where he found a young girl’s corpse seventeen years ago. He looks in and finds it empty. He is startled as a schoolgirl approaches and asks the former detective what he is looking for. “Nothing,” Doo-man responds. “That’s so weird,” she notes, “a while back, a man was here looking into that hole.” She then tells him that the man “remembered doing something here long ago so he came back to take a look.” With a surprised reaction, Doo-man asks, “Did you see his face?” The girl nods. “What did he look like?” Looking down and then at him, she responds, “Well, kind of plain. Just… ordinary.” Doo-man suddenly appears agitated, looking off-screen. He turns to the camera to face it directly, not only breaking the taboo of voyeuristic cinema, but also to bare his own physiognomy to the viewer, to allow his face to become indistinguishable from the surface of the film screen. With this tight shot, the film fades to black.

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Fig. 16: Doo-man looks into the camera. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

This short conversation is narrated through conventional shot-reverse shot. When the girl tells Doo-man that the man looked ordinary, it recalls the routine question the detective posed to Hyun-gyu years ago: “Do you get up each morning too?” In 1986, Doo-man wondered whether the killer was an ordinary man, or as Park remarked earlier, an “ordinary face.” The girl’s description of his face in 2003 as “kind of plain” not only reiterates the inconclusiveness of the case, but also the killer’s everydayness. Still at large, the murderer, who was pursued as a criminal outlaw, now exists somewhere, within Korean society. But his ordinariness also reminds us of another, broader condition: the state of exception that was part and parcel of life in the 1980s continues into the present day – the state of exception that has become the rule and which characterizes the condition of modern governmentality in contemporary South Korea.

Kim Ki-duk’s Untimely Critique: The Face in 3-Iron (2004) “I don’t think Korean films have a tradition in realism.”34 ‒ Lee Chang-dong

In the f inal section of this chapter, I would like to describe the ethics constituted by the face in Kim’s cinema, pursuing the spirit of Hye Seung Chung’s observation that his films are “necessarily brutal,” in order to

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show how it may be read as a sign of hospitality to the other. In particular, his unusual film, 3-Iron, puts this contradiction between brutality and hospitality into critical play. That Kim’s work is considered brutal by many viewers points to the uneasy relationship of his films to his times, as well as, I shall argue, to the timing and historicity of critique itself. I explained in an earlier chapter that assessments of Kim’s violent cinema often rely on self-assured frameworks and are entrenched in aesthetic positions that reproduce self-righteous arguments around his representations of cruelty.35 In the following section, I will argue that his cinema is necessarily a critical cinema, not because it participates in the dialectical exchange of outrage and insult that characterizes the assessment of Kim’s films up to now, but precisely because it refuses to participate in this exchange. Taking recourse to divine violence through the face, Kim’s films may be read as disrupting notions of history that periodize distinct, but causally-linked, ideas of past, present, and future: in short, Kim’s work may be called, in the most Nietzschean sense, an untimely cinema. In the lead essay for her 2005 book, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, political theorist Wendy Brown makes an affirmative case for the untimeliness of critique, particularly during dark times. Untimely critique becomes urgent when the times are locked into a predictable telos, when they advance like clockwork, unreflective and unreflected, toward a singular goal, regardless of their political orientation. When workers at the forefront of their political struggle admonish the critics among them with the retort, “It’s not the time,” Brown writes that these critics invoke time in three senses: (1) the timing relevant to successful political campaigns, (2) the constrained or dark political times we feel ourselves to be in, and (3) ­appropriateness, mannerliness, or civility – timeliness as temperateness about when, how, and where one raises certain issues or mentions certain problems.36

Critique becomes untimely when it is offered during inopportune times. Untimely critique does not aim to repudiate the times, but instead interrogates the sense of temporality that underpins the time of identitarian politics, criticizing the sense of history that presupposes this politics. “If the charge of untimeliness inevitably also fixes time,” Brown writes, “then disrupting this fixity is crucial to keeping the times from closing in on us.”37 Specifically, untimely critique does not pursue a teleological politics, but intervenes on the times itself, posing inappropriate questions in order to

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secure a more thoughtful, more ethical politics. If, according to Benjamin’s sixteenth thesis on the philosophy of history, “historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past,” untimely critique aims to bring the present to an awareness of itself and its grounding metaphysics in order to resurrect critical thinking precisely in this moment of stillness.38 In an age when mental activity is dominated by the logic of means and ends, critique paves the way beyond the horizon of the present, toward the inquisitive, in order to introduce future uncertainty and bring irreducible aporias into view. The untimely involves “both close attunement to the times and aggressive violation of their self-conception,” carrying with it the call, not to repudiate or dismiss, but to engage more intimately with, re-read, and re-evaluate, the current state of things.39 “Critical theory in dark times thus affirms the times, renders them differently, reclaims them for something other than the darkness,” Brown concludes, “in this sense, critical theory in dark times is a singular practice of amor fati.”40 I read Kim’s work as an untimely cinema in a number of ways: firstly, as a cinema of ressentiment that represents those who are misrepresented or not represented at all in an increasingly neoliberal media climate, and who find themselves to be non-synchronous with the time of neoliberal globalization; secondly, as a critique of power, upsetting bourgeois sensibilities and middle-class conformity in South Korea by laying bare the violence that undergirds the logic of winners and losers in the global capitalist economy; and thirdly, as a critique of cinema spectatorship, undermining conformist assumptions about what constitutes global art cinema while problematizing ostensibly settled ways of viewing this cinema. A striking feature of many of the main protagonists of his films encapsulates all three of these aspects of untimely critique – their mute silence. Beginning with Hee-Jin, the fishing resort clerk in The Isle (2000), Kim has progressively explored the use of characters that do not talk in order to discover new ways of “speaking” in the cinema. Their silence attests to their refusal or inability to speak the language of everyday politics. Han-gi, the violent pimp in Bad Guy (2001), Jae-yeong, an amateur teenage prostitute who commits suicide in Samaria (2004), and a young girl and old man, married to each other by the end of The Bow (2005): these characters cannot or do not voice their thoughts. As such, their interiority remains unintelligible, like Hyun-gyu’s face at the end of Memories of Murder, to those who live in the world of everyday politics, where guilt and debt are exchanged as moral currency. Their muteness places extra weight on the significance of reaction shots, for in order to understand what characters might be thinking, physiognomy becomes crucial in guiding the viewer’s

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sympathy and identification. Instead of codifying their intentions for the world in language, whereby an ostensible interiority is exteriorized, Kim’s silent characters communicate through their gestures and bodies, acting and reacting to their immediate surroundings. The silent face emblemizes the untimeliness of Kim’s critique and in no other film is this critique more insistent, in my opinion, than in 3-Iron. 3-Iron serves as a particularly interesting case study for thinking through these issues because it features two characters that remain silent throughout the entire film. It tells the story of a young drifter called Tae-suk (Lee Hyun-kyoon) who breaks and enters into uninhabited homes. During his visitations, he uses the absent owners’ toothbrushes and showers, cooks and eats with their utensils, uses their toilets, and sleeps on their sofas. Nothing is stolen and nothing is altered. Tae-suk repays their unintended hospitality by performing home improvement, fixing broken possessions, and organizing their possessions. Before he departs, he erases all traces of anyone having been there. When the small family inhabiting the first home depicted in the film return, they are modern individuals in conflict, full of resentment, and speak to each other with angry voices. Coming back from vacation, the wife lashes out at her husband, complaining, “You call that a vacation? It was hell.” Many of the homes Tae-suk visits are inhabited by angry individuals living in a world dominated by the politics commensurate with the exchange of moral and private property. In most cases, Tae-suk is not discovered or caught. This changes, however, when he visits a particularly affluent house. A battered woman who occupies it, Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), catches him masturbating in bed while looking at a coffee table book of erotic photographs. Surprised, he switches on the light and sits up. The film cuts to Sun-hwa’s bruised face at the moment her answering machine records an irate message from her abusive husband, Min-gyu (Kwon Hyuk-ho), demanding that she pick up the phone. As his voice harangues off-screen, Tae-suk and Sun-hwa do not say a word. Indeed, their faces are striking in that their expression remains unchanging, as if unaffected. When Tae-suk and Sun-hwa gaze at each other, we, as spectators, read into their expressionless faces a complex progression of emotions: surprise, disgust, weariness, and finally perhaps a request for forgiveness. As if to underscore the status of their faces as interpretive surfaces, Tae-suk’s countenance is juxtaposed with a photograph of Sun-hwa hanging on the wall. In the eyes of the law, his trespassing would be deemed criminal, but it is not clear whether in her eyes she thinks the same. Sun-hwa’s face remains open to the visitation of this stranger, finding him perhaps somehow fascinating. She leaves the house with Tae-suk and accompanies the young man

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to his aimless stopovers (a gesture that fulfills the melodramatic impulse to save a battered woman from her controlling husband). The second time Tae-suk is discovered, he and Sun-hwa temporarily inhabit the home of a boxer, where a portrait of the tough man, wearing boxing gloves and trunks, hangs prominently near the front door. When he and his wife return home and discover Tae-suk and Sun-hwa sleeping in their bed, the husband silently dons his gloves and assaults Tae-suk, giving him a bloody nose and black eye. The boxer accuses them of having stolen property in the house. After he is finished with Tae-suk, his injured face resembles that of Sun-hwa’s. The next time they are caught, Tae-suk is brought into police custody. He breaks into a unit in a dilapidated apartment complex and finds an old man lying motionless on the floor near a pool of his blood. A small dog rests in his arm. The man’s death occurred when alone, while his adult children were vacationing on Jeju Island. Tae-suk and Sun-hwa carefully wrap the body and perform traditional burial rites. After cleaning the room, they silently cook food and begin eating in the old man’s small apartment. As they sit down to eat, his relatives drop by for a visit. Shocked at the presence of strangers and the absence of their father, they immediately call the police. The housebreakers are brought to a dark interrogation room. Detective Lee (Park Dong-jin), despite evidence to the contrary, interpellates Tae-suk as a rapist and kidnapper, charging him with murder. Characters who speak in 3-Iron tend to be the most belligerent and antagonistic, articulating the masculinist voice of the law. The detective, like Doo-man in Bong’s Memories of Murder, looks at Tae-suk’s face and casts judgment, asking questions that presuppose his guilt. Before allowing him his full otherness, and the potential ambiguity of his intentions, the thuggish detective inscribes culpability onto the young man. Unable to penetrate the unknown agenda that hides behind his unreadable physiognomy, the detective attempts to emplot Taesuk within a history of morality and criminality – terms that constitute the normal course of historical temporality, of guilt and debt, cause and effect. He is brutalized by the police officer, and then later by Sun-hwa’s husband, utilizing golf balls and a golf club, in retaliation for a previous act of violence. Judgment of the other and the ethics of the face take center stage, particularly when confronted with the openness of the silent face. In his confrontation with Tae-suk, the detective models, like the peeping sequences from Bad Guy and Address Unknown, a possible spectatorial attitude toward the film’s characters. The silent faces in 3-Iron at once invite interpretation and moral judgment. In an interview conducted in April 2005, Kim tells us that:

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It’s not necessarily that the characters don’t need words to communicate, but really it’s a strategy to force the audience to fill in the blanks themselves. So in some ways they insert sort of their own dialogue throughout the film: imagining what they would say – imagining what might be said when there is silence in the film. 41

These comments highlight at least two important insights into Kim’s cinema. Firstly, they recall film’s silent period, where in lieu of diegetic sound, emotions and affect were primarily conveyed through acting and facial expression. By circumventing language, which immediately marks the particular cultural location of an actor, facial and bodily expression substitute for the voice and bespeak an ostensibly universal language of gesture. “Laughter and crying are I think important elements of dialogue in film,” Kim continues, pointing to means of communication between human beings that circumvent spoken dialogue. 42 Secondly, silences mark the gap where spectators are invited to inscribe affect onto the bodies of the characters. Because of the openness of the silent face, they request of the viewer not to sit back and relinquish engagement with the cinema, but to lean forward and interact with these silent figures in an effort to produce narrative meaning. The silence comes to speak louder than words, taking advantage of cinema’s monstrative capacities to show rather than simply tell. Insofar as the face externalizes internal thoughts and desires, the skin of the screen could be said to be phenomenologically continuous with the skin of these silent characters’ physiognomies, for both are offered up to the spectator as exteriorities to be experienced, read, and felt. Kim’s thoughts on affect and the face may be pushed further by being read through Gilles Deleuze’s proposal of faceicity in Cinema 1. In his passages on the affection-image, Deleuze identifies the cinema image as itself a close-up of the face, offering up the world as an affective surface to be seen and read. “The affect is the entity,” he writes, that is Power or Quality. It is something expressed: the affect does not exist independently of something which expresses it, although it is completely distinct from it. What expresses it is a face, or a facial equivalent (a faceified object) or, as we will see later, even a proposition. 43

We normally think of the face in cinema as the embodiment of a character’s emotional response to a situation, as the manifestation of an internal emotion through physiognomy. The face functions as a mirror and screen for what a character might be thinking. But this is not what Deleuze means. He

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is not asking what the face represents or what it hides. He asks rather about what the face in cinema means as a possibility, about what it can do. The face does not function simply as a carrier of emotion, but as a sign points to the potential creation of affect, not yet actualized, always in excess of its teleological formation. There is thus a stark difference between the image itself and what the image invites: both are embedded within but separate from the world in which they are situated. Deleuze quotes Balázs’s Theory of the Film to illustrate this further: For the expression of a face and the significance of this expression have no relation or connection with space. Faced with an isolated face, we do not perceive space. Our sensation of space is abolished. A dimension of another order is open to us. 44

This otherness does not obey the totalizing law of Cartesian geometry and cannot be cognitively mapped in relation to a unified field. Rather, it belongs to a wholly affective logic, affirming the possibility of the contingent, singular event as an expression of vital life itself. And insofar as singularity is inextricably linked to the face, it is the spaceless, decontextualized face that shows the way toward this other physiognomic dimension. Deleuze comes to call this virtual space, existing outside the actual order of things while embedded within it, “any-space-whatever.” The crucial consequence to this subtle distinction between the image and affect is such that it propels the face further toward this otherness. The face in cinema is “not a sensation, a feeling, an idea, but the quality of a possible sensation, feeling or idea.”45 On the one hand, the silent face is an image that is constituted by its cinematic materiality, for as a sign it refers to an actual state of things in a world we know and inhabit – it “reflects” an historical world. On the other, it invites specific virtual affective entities that pave the way toward an openness, not only to an actual state, but, more significantly, to other possible affects and other possible worlds. As film scholar Richard Rushton writes, the face for Deleuze “establishes the prior level of communicability, the ‘is it possible?’ that precedes the what of thinking, saying, feeling.”46 Thus, the close-up on the face does not simply represent emotion, nor does it solely communicate affect from sender to receiver. Following Kim’s formulations, its function is to render the physiognomy’s unfolding, such that the laughing face bespeaks the potential for happiness, while the image of crying prepares for the expression of sadness: both appear as the prelude to the production of affect.47 The face may thus be thought of as the image of

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potentiality, or the givenness of another order that makes communication possible at all. A silent face, recalling Kim, “forces the audience to fill in the blanks themselves.” Deleuze seems to echo the Korean filmmaker in this regard: The pure affect, the pure expressed of the state of things in fact relates to a face which expresses it (or to several faces, or to equivalents, or to propositions). It is the face which gathers and expresses the affect as a complex entity, and secures the virtual conjunctions between singular points of this entity (the brightness, the blade, the terror, the compassionate look […]). 48

Physiognomy for Deleuze could be said to serve as a kind of blank screen that at the same time amalgamates multiple and contingent relations as a plane of possibility. Silence does not foreclose discourse, but rather serves as the very conditions for its articulation and for constituting an outside to the present state of things. The silent face anticipates the arrival of affective meaning and remains hospitable to the contingency of the future. Its untimely appearance, akin to the divine violence of Hyun-gu’s unreadable face, interrupts the cycle of revenge and does not reiterate the ethics of debt and credit. Deleuze takes up Balázs’s description of the filmed face to show how the plane of the cinematic image does not merely confer affect to things in the world, but that the image is affect: “As for the face itself, we will not say that the close-up deals with [traite] it or subjects it to some kind of treatment: there is no close-up of the face, the face is in itself close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect, affection-image.”49 This enables Deleuze to posit a more general claim such that the affectionimage is “both a type of image and a component of all images.”50 The most important aspect of this, for Deleuze, extends from Balázs’s argument that the presentation of the face is removed from space and time. When the any-space-whatever is pushed toward its limit, it becomes a deterritorialized space where the affection produced by the image turns into pure impulse, acting and reacting in relation to its immediate surroundings. This world of the impulse-image exists prior to the categorical differences that structure the moral differences between good and evil, human and animal. It depicts a world of violence and cruelty that remain after the affective saturation of the cinematic image/face and after the image/ face have fully withdrawn from the coordinates of time and space. Once again, recalling my reading of Address Unknown from chapter one, we

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stumble upon the originary, nihilistic world of “naturalism,” where the impulse-image finds expression. Tae-suk seems to have come straight out of this originary world, naïve and unsophisticated with respect to the ethics and mores associated with contemporary, neoliberal South Korean life. He remains untimely in this sense. Moreover, if Tae-suk may be read as a stand in for Kim Ki-duk, as Hye Seung Chung does in her study of the director, then situations such as those figured in the interrogation scene also may be read as allegorizing the judgments made by film critics about Kim and his work.51 Indeed, many are quick to summon a series of pejoratives that relegate his cinema inappropriate, as lacking the “manners” associated with global cinema. Like Tae-suk in the interrogation scene, Kim is quickly deemed a brute and offered no possibility of overcoming the strict moral binarism enacted through his critics’ interpellating look. However, it is precisely this manner of criticism that is overturned through the film’s untimely critique, for by making interrogation into a melodramatic spectacle, Kim wordlessly challenges the sovereign violence of those who are quick to criticize, deposing their own deification. Tae-suk defies the moralizing gaze of his aggressive investigator, forcing recognition of his elusive otherness, as in the final face-to-face encounter in Memories of Murder. The silent face, in its vulnerability and precariousness, invites sovereign violence, but Tae-suk and Sun-hwa also, as intruders to the course of normal historical temporality, are implicated in the pure means that self-reflexively critiques this violence. The zero ground of the face serves as an allegory for the encounter with radical difference, pointing at the same time to the possibility of new desires, new alliances, and new affects (and, of course, new deceptions). Silent faces do not conform to a predetermined morality and comply neither with a corrupt state, nor with a patriarchal law. Rather, they seem to conform to a law outside the present state of things. Tae-suk and Sun-hwa dwell in the world as drifters, moving from house to house, and like ghosts inhabit these homes as invisible presences. Their transient presence poses a crucial question: at what point does the mysterious other, the visitation of the foreigner into one’s “empty house” (the Korean title of Kim’s film), become threatening, and is it possible to be hospitable to the menace of these foreign faces? The second half of 3-Iron seems to respond to such a question. A key turning point occurs when Tae-suk learns to become invisible to others. He is brought into a white-walled prison cell with three other inmates. They begin to play golf with an invisible ball and club. When they tussle over the possession of the unseen golf ball, jailers rush in and pull Tae-suk

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off the other inmates, placing him in a solitary cell. While in confinement, he gradually cultivates the ability to move quietly, climb walls, and hide in the shadows – becoming visually undetectable to the gaze of others. Unlike Dae-su from Oldboy, Tae-suk does not use his time is prison to accumulate ressentiment and plot his revenge. Rather, he trains himself how to disappear. Each time the guard discovers “Prisoner 2904” evading his scrutiny, smiling as if to mock his authority, he violently beats him with his nightstick. Eventually, Tae-suk is able to completely elude the scrutiny of the jailer’s eye, slipping silently in the negative space behind him. “The human eye sees 180 degrees,” the guard remarks, “so you’re hiding in the other 180 degrees?” Tae-suk lets himself be discovered and is given a brutal beating. After having served his time, Tae-suk returns to some of the homes he visited and, utilizing his newly developed skills for slipping out of sight, silently haunts these spaces. With his disappearing skills, he totally eludes the vision of their occupants, even when they are at home. When he breaks into familiar houses again, they are not empty, but inhabited by petty conflicts and the melodrama of everyday life. He revisits the boxer, who fights with his girlfriend about suspicious phone calls he receives at night. Tae-suk enters the small apartment of the photographer, who manipulates a woman for sex. He also returns to Sun-hwa’s house, where she resides with her abusive husband. Each house he reenters is full of resentment, where the personal politics of revenge are dramatized. But as they argue and fight, a strange feeling that someone is in their homes interrupts them. Tae-suk’s visitations evoke a sense of uncanniness in his unintended hosts and he, in effect, becomes a ghost.52 Tae-suk’s “hauntology” may be corroborated in a suggestive article by Seongho Yoon, “Empty Houses Haunted: Hauntology of Space in Kim ­Ki-duk’s 3-Iron.” Yoon argues that Kim presents unseen characters in 3-Iron to “defamiliarize and refamiliarize our views of others around us who, unbeknownst to us, share our space.”53 This defamiliarization is implicitly destabilizing, critical of those ways of knowing that elude our everyday comportment toward the world. He writes, “While the human eye is able only to take in one hundred eighty degrees of vision, the ghosts recommend using the remaining one hundred eighty degrees not to fail to sense, if not outright tangibly, the ghosts we refuse to acknowledge yet still cannot help but feel resonating around us.”54 Ghosts are untimely in that they confuse distinctions between past and present, and upset ossified notions of temporality by disrupting the linearity of historical time. In her reading of cinematic ghosts, film scholar Bliss Cua Lim writes that specters, in their

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straddling of past and present temporalities, refuse to be domesticated by homogeneous, progressive, and universal notions of time. They exist in the negative spaces that cannot be recognized by dominant ideology. “The spectral,” Lim writes, “estranges our predisposed ways of experiencing space, time, and history and hauntingly insinuates that more worlds than one exist in the world we think we know; times other than the present contend with each other in the disputed Now.”55 The spectral, in other words, insinuates the presence of the elusive, as yet unknown other. Yoon highlights a specific moment from 3-Iron when the presence of ghosts is welcomed with hospitality. While Tae-suk learns to make himself invisible in jail, Sun-hwa also returns to one of the homes they had temporarily inhabited. Through parallel editing, she is shown visiting the hanok (a traditional Korean house) inhabited by a harmonious couple, who wear hanboks and live by gardening and cleaning their Buddhist sculptures. When Sun-hwa steps in, she says not a word, yet the puzzled hosts do not stop her from entering their open-air home. Sun-hwa takes a nap where she had previously spent time with Tae-suk. The husband of the house remarks that he does not know their unexpected guest personally, yet he tells his wife to “let her sleep.” In his essay, Yoon observes that this home “is the only place where the logic of boundaries does not prevail, and distinctions between host and guest do not hold true any more.”56 While the depiction in this scene is somewhat essentialized and idealized, the couple’s welcoming attitude toward the strange guest is clear. It stands in stark contrast to the highly aggressive, inhospitable attitude held by the family returning from vacation, the boxer, the relatives of the old man, and Detective Lee, who, upon their discovery of Tae-suk and Sun-hwa, retaliated in their right to violence and power. How is it possible that the distinction between host and guest does not hold in this particular scene with this mild mannered couple? What does it mean to be a host and how does the host offer hospitality to the other? To be a host means not only to allow the presence of the guest into one’s own midst, but also, as the precondition of this gesture of hospitality, to be master over one’s home. Within the capitalist understanding of social relations between sovereign individuals, to be master over one’s home means to own private property. As such, the definition of hospitality is always circumscribed by the tension between the host and the guest, or the tension between what belongs to the host and what may be rightfully allowed to the guest. How are the rights of the guest determined within the host’s home, and by whom? The indeterminability of these rights underpins the antinomy that is crucial for Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction

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of hospitality. By describing this point of indeterminability, he pushes the ethics of hospitality to its limit: In other words, there would be an antinomy, an insoluble antinomy, a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself, to give him or her one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfillment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, as they are defined by the GrecoRoman tradition and even the Judeo-Christian one, by all of law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in particular, across the family, civil society, and the State.57

Hospitality always runs up against the problem of how rights that belong to the guest may be defined. The granting of hospitality is consistently motivated by its unconditional definition, an idealized notion that allows the guest full access to one’s home such that boundaries do not prevail. This “pure” hospitality is without debt and does not participate in the ordinary course of historical temporality and thus remains fundamentally untimely. It does not struggle to achieve victory over the other, for hospitality circumscribes the rights of the guest and the ontology of his or her cohabitation within the host’s home. The obligation to be hospitable underpins the language of giving and the obligatory right to receive, obligations that are at odds with each other and form the core of the deconstructive aporia. Every possible hospitable gesture, performed in real world situations, takes up a position against the backdrop of its own idealized vision. Paralleling the hauntological condition of the specter, the temporality of the film medium itself inheres in its capacity to re-present events that took place in the past. The past is allowed to haunt the present when a film is projected on screen. In her reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Wendy Brown emphasizes the passages that insist upon our cohabitation with ghosts, learning to live with their untimely, destabilizing presence, and learning how to be hospitable to their visitation. “Learning to live,” Brown writes, means living without systematizing, without conceits of coherence, without a consistent and complete picture, and without a clear delineation between past and present. Living with ghosts, permitting and even exploiting their operation as a deconstructive device, means living with

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the permanent disruption of the usual opposites that render our world coherent – between the material and the ideal, the past and the present, the real and the fictive, the true and the false. Ghosts are what rise from materialism, periodicity, and objectivity after each has been slain by the exposure of their untenable predicates.58

Learning to live with specters, afterlives of those who have been lost, means learning how to be hospitable to death’s futural arrival.59 “I would like to learn to live finally,” Derrida begins his book on Marx, which, he later explains, means learning how to live “from the other and by death.”60 Derrida’s deconstruction of the specter parallels his treatment of hospitality, for he stands, “in any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.”61 Ghosts, who remind us mortals of the untimely event of our own finitude, engage us, not in the struggle for eternal life, but in the lifelong project of cohabitating with the otherness of death and co-extensively with the otherness of the other. And the ghostly film image, upending clear-cut distinctions between distinct temporalities, by its very nature helps us perform the untimely critique that enables this hospitality. Such a vision of cohabitation is explicitly depicted in the very last scene of 3-Iron. Tae-suk, who has now become a furtive apparition, returns to Sun-hwa’s house at night. She and Min-gyu are lying in bed. Min-gyu suddenly wakes up and picks up a golf club, sensing the presence of the young deviant in his home. Suspicious, he remarks to Sun-hwa, “I think someone’s here – could it be him? He’s bad luck, that son of a bitch.” Min-gyu tells her to go back to sleep as he lies back in bed. She, however, exits the bedroom and walks around the house looking for Tae-suk. Sunhwa turns to a mirror and sees the young drifter enter the frame behind him. With both of their images in the mirror, she raises her hand and caresses his smiling face. At this very moment, Min-gyu emerges from the bedroom, again armed with a raised golf club, and turns to Sun-hwa. Tae-suk now gone, she looks at herself in the mirror. “What are you doing awake?” her husband gruffly asks. Sun-hwa, her face in close-up, turns around and approaches him. Now in medium shot, she calmly says, “I love you,” uttering her very first words of the film. Incredulous, Min-gyu looks around to make certain she addresses no one else. “Honey,” he says tenderly, falling into her arms. Meanwhile, Sun-hwa reaches out with her left hand and Tae-suk silently enters the frame, coming up behind Min-gyu. Outside his field of vision, as her face rests on her husband’s shoulder, Tae-suk kisses her.

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Fig. 17: Tae-suk, Sun-hwa, and Min-gyu co-existing.

The next day, Sun-hwa’s husband leaves for work. While the music of the North African singer Natacha Atlas plays from a CD, Sun-hwa and Tae-suk step on a scale together. A close-up shows us that it reads “0 kg,” suggesting that, as ghosts, their physical weight is zero. As the image goes out of focus to signal the end of the film, a final statement is articulated in an intertitle: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream.” In these final scenes the filmmaker does not attempt to delineate reality or illusion as reified categories, but instead affirms both as possibilities of the cinematic image, and of the cinematic face. Blurring the distinctions between guest and host, granting hospitality to the ghost means learning to live with its mute otherness. It requires thinking in an untimely, critical manner that recognizes the persistence of past apparitions in the here and now, and the presence of specters, which exist ostensibly only in dreams, in the realm of reality. “I try very hard not to portray anybody as a bad guy – not even the husband,” Kim comments in an interview, The overarching theme – especially the theme embodied in the resolution is one of coexistence. If you think about it, if they were to escape, that would exclude the husband. They would go someplace where the husband would not be around. But this sort of intervening and coexistence with the husband still there really portrays the possibilities that the three people can arrive at an understanding of each other. So there’s no winner. There’s no loser. And their lives would continue and, at some point, change – but I’m not about the say how.62

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How can we represent the unreadability of others and what will it take to recognize hitherto excluded members of the present-day liberalizing, global economy within our f ield of vision? At the very moment of the impossibility of ethics, Kim’s cinema simultaneously raises these urgent, untimely questions, asking whether, within the current state of things, hospitable coexistence, particularly with those we demonize as the “bad guy,” characters such as Min-gyu, the pimp Han-gi from Bad Guy, or Kim himself, can be realized.

5.

Forgiving the Unforgivable

On July 15, 2004, a thirty-three-year-old man named Yoo Young-chul was arrested in Mapo-gu in Seoul. His criminal record stretched back to 1998, since he was found guilty of a number of misdemeanors including forgery, property theft, and identity theft. In 2000, he was charged with child sex abuse and served three years and six months in prison. Following his release in September 2003, Yoo committed his first violent murder. His victims were an elderly couple whose heads he bludgeoned with a hammer. Yoo would use this instrument for his subsequent victims, primarily wealthy men and sex workers, and his procedure was similar for each of them. Once his victim was rendered unconscious, he mutilated and dismembered their bodies in his apartment. He then disposed of them in shallow graves near a Buddhist temple. According to his own testimony, the killer disturbingly consumed the livers of some of victims. In 2004, Yoo was found guilty of murdering a total of twenty people. During the trial, psychiatrists deemed him mentally sane and explained that he underwent a drastic personality alteration after his wife divorced him during one of his prison sentences. “My actions cannot be justified,” Yoo said of his crimes, “If we live in a society where people like me can live a good life, there will be another Yoo Young Chul.”1 Yoo conceded, in other words, that habitual killers like himself should not be forgiven. As this story was unfolding in the public sphere, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder opened in Korean theaters in May 2003 and competed in major film festivals in Toronto, Tokyo, and Cannes. Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy premiered in March 2002 and November 2003, respectively, both winning accolades from critics and audiences. The similarities between Yoo’s narrative and those told by these films – including the murder of a series of victims by a hammer and the consumption of their organs – remains uncanny, to say the least. Moreover, dozens of serial killer films were produced around this time featuring mild-mannered, naïve young men violently victimizing women and children including H (2002), a crime drama that revolves around the misidentification of a ruthless killer, Diary of June (2005), whose plot deals with the murder of high school students, as well as The Unjust (2010), Missing (2009), and Silenced (2011). They constitute a seriality of crime films that draw from themes and imagery circulating about at-large, violent, serial killers and serial abusers in South Korea. It seems that in a number of films of the new millennium, at issue was the question of crime, the capacity to forgive, and the prospect of pardoning violent criminals.

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In her philosophical magnum opus, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt privileges forgiveness as the epitome of political action. In its power to effect historical change, it does not utilize the terms set out by everyday politics and its perpetual give and take. Forgiveness eludes the means-ends logic of mythic violence and does not reiterate the calculative maneuvers of contracts and conditions. By remaining hospitable to the otherness of the other, forgiveness refuses the closed temporality of sovereign power and arises through the tension between “intention” and “accident.” It upends the normative ethics between creditor and debtor and, as such, “forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance”:2 In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.3

Forgiveness frees political actors from the necessity of pursuing violent retaliation. Indeed, the difficulty of forgiving rises in proportion to the magnitude of the crime committed, such that, as I will show in this chapter, the most egregious, violent crimes raise the question of whether is it possible to forgive at all. If forgiveness has the capacity to disrupt the cyclical temporality of revenge, I believe that it can also overturn the ethics of melodrama and its endless repetitions from within, to disrupt and overturn so that a new political economy may be envisaged. Is it possible to forgive and exonerate the serial killer Yoo? It seems to have been impossible, for on December 13, 2004, Yoo was sentenced to death. At a moment when popular support for state-sanctioned capital punishment was declining, Yoo’s case emboldened many Koreans to insist on the necessity of continuing the practice and demand that the considerable debt of his crimes be paid for with his life. The judge stated that his case has “no parallel in the nation’s history,” and concluded that, “We sentenced him to death, having considered his motive, the method of murder and the shock his killing spree gave to the bereaved families and to the public, even though he felt sorry for the bereaved families.”4 Due to the exceptional nature of the murders, Yoo was not granted impunity from the law. Is it even possible to imagine an act of atonement that could have absolved him? Or is the debt concomitant with the severity of his crimes, its horrific nature and extreme scope, too high? Is it possible to

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forgive the unforgivable? I would like to formulate these ethical questions in the most singular manner possible by looking at Lady Vengeance (2005) by Park Chan-wook and two profound films by Lee Chang-dong, Secret Sunshine (2007) and Poetry (2010). As we shall see, the conditions for forgiving the other remain fundamentally heterogeneous and are related, in unexpected ways, to divine violence. By working through these conditions critically, we shall illuminate the politics of the ethical relation in general.

Forgiveness as Exception in Lady Vengeance (2005) “The film is a story about a woman whose actions are ethically unacceptable, then she seeks atonement in the wrong ways. Her efforts to find redemption end in vain. But I wanted my audience to tell the film’s heroine at the end, ‘It was a nice try.’ I wanted to say her efforts weren’t worthless, that they were valuable after all, even though they ended in failure. That’s my definition of hope.”5 – Park Chan-wook

The following discussion will bring JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Oldboy to their thematic culmination through an analysis of Lady Vengeance. As I showed in chapter two, the Vengeance Trilogy pushes the logic of revenge to its breaking point, radically problematizing its violent ethics of retribution as an impossible aporia. Many have noted, often pejoratively, that the grotesque and spectacular nature of the sadistic acts depicted in Park’s films seem devoid of justifiable narrative motivation. Yet, I want to argue that it is precisely the failure of revenge in the trilogy that makes way for an ethics initiated by the cinema itself; namely, the possibility of pure and unconditional forgiveness. The aporia of revenge responds to a question I believe is implicitly posed by JSA and the films that follow it: what are the conditions for forgiving the other? Lady Vengeance opens with a scene depicting the main protagonist’s release from jail. As Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae, who played Sophie Jean in JSA) leaves the facility, she is greeted by a small group of Christian carolers who sing about overcoming dark obstacles with the guidance provided by the light of God. The preacher leading the chorus offers her a block of tofu on a plate and says, “It’s been hard, hasn’t it? Thirteen and a half years. I’m so proud of you.” The film cuts to a flashback sequence depicting a number of events, starting with her conviction for the murder of a six-year old boy

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named Park Won-mo. We see her being sent to prison. She is then shown joking and laughing with other women inmates. We see her baking cakes in prison. And finally she meets the preacher, who implores Geum-ja to pray and repent for her sins. These flashbacks are deliriously combined through the layering of visual and voice-over montage, joining moments from the past with shots that the viewer will experience later in the film. She narrates her transformation from a sinner to a Christian. Her voice finds its embodiment in a confessional speech delivered to an audience made up of prisoners, correctional officers, and a wildly clapping preacher. When the film returns to the present, the holy man continues, “It’s a tradition to eat tofu upon release so that you will live white as snow and never sin again.” This Buddhist tradition presumably prevents the criminal from committing crime and from being sent back to prison. Instead of consuming the tofu however, Geum-ja knocks it to the ground and, with a close up on her face, defiantly tells the incredulous preacher to “go screw yourself.” As we have now come to expect of Park’s films, Geum-ja has already been transformed into a person who feels very deeply scorned upon her release and as one who seeks revenge. Later, we will come to realize that she actually did not kill Won-mo, but willingly took the blame on behalf of Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik, who played Oh Dae-su in Oldboy), an English teacher of young children who sadistically tortures and murders his students. Mr. Baek kidnapped Geum-ja’s daughter Jenny (Kwon Yea-young) and demanded, as ransom, that Geum-ja take the fall for his killing of Won-mo. Sometime during her time in jail, Jenny was adopted by a couple living in Australia. One of the first things Geum-ja does when she leaves prison is find her daughter and bring her to Seoul. Now a teenager, Jenny does not speak Korean. While she is not antagonistic to her natural mother, Jenny nevertheless harbors some resentment and wonders why she was “thrown away.” Geum-ja’s struggle to be forgiven by her daughter, she soon realizes, will take precedence over all others. Geum-ja seeks to settle scores and to eliminate Mr. Baek, the man who blackmailed her. When she dreams about shooting him with a gun, a satisfied smile forms on her face. Mr. Baek happens to be married to a former inmate, Yi-jeong (Lee Seung-Shin), whom Geum-ja met during her incarceration. Now both out of prison, they scheme together to ensnare Baek in his apartment. The plan almost fails, but he is captured after eating the poisoned meal his wife prepared for him. While Geum-ja is furiously tying him up, she finds a letter written by Jenny in her jacket pocket. The camera cuts to a close-up on a Korean-English dictionary as Geum-ja turns to the words “forgiveness” and “revenge.” Jenny’s reads the letter in voice-over:

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Don’t think that I forgive you. I think mothers who dump their kids should go to jail. When I was younger, I often thought of taking revenge on you. But I couldn’t imagine killing you, because I didn’t know what you looked like. Anyway, since we’re on better terms now, give me your reasons, at least. Apologizing once is not enough. You should say sorry at least three times. Not generously, your daughter, Jenny.

In this sequence, Park juxtaposes images from the past and present, the moment when Jenny wrote the letter and Geum-ja’s translating of it, through split screen and montage. As Geum-ja prepares Baek’s body for her final act of vengeance, Jenny expresses her own desire for revenge against her mother. And like Geum-ja, she seems unable to forgive. Jenny harbors a ressentiment for having been abandoned. As payback, she demands that Geum-ja verbally apologize three times. Geum-ja will perform these apologies in one of the most moving moments from the film. Baek is taken to an abandoned schoolhouse, one where his child victims may have attended if they were still alive. In a dilapidated classroom, the vengeful mother speaks to her daughter through Mr. Baek’s simultaneous interpretation. He remains bound by rope to a chair. Mother and daughter communicate for the first time, but it is the voice of her mortal enemy that articulates her feelings. “I remember when I first had you Jenny,” Geum-ja begins. “As you grew in me, I felt good, like a wallet getting fatter. But even before you could celebrate your first birthday, I had to go to prison, I had to give you up. You’re a sweet child. You smiled your pretty smile to complete strangers.” Geum-ja then explains that she will return Jenny to Australia, after she is “done with this man.” The emotion of this scene hangs on its melodramatic aping toward a return to innocence, a reunion of blood relatives who grew up in different cultures, like those televised at this time between North and South Korean family members. Park heightens the tragic impossibility of this return by rotating the images of their faces so that they face each other, then turning them at moments so they face the viewer. These face-to-face encounters allow the difficult ethical questions posed between mother and child to pivot toward the relationship between spectator and screen. Geum-ja continues, in tears, explaining the conditions under which Jenny had to be given up. She also explains herself in terms of guilt and atonement, recalling concepts I introduced in chapter two: My sins are too great and too deep to take care of such a sweet child like you. You’re innocent, but I made you grow up without a mother. That’s

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Fig. 18: Geum-ja communicates with her daughter for the first time. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

also part of my punishment. Listen carefully. People make mistakes. If you commit a sin, you have to make atonement for that sin. Atonement, do you know what that means? Big atonement for big sins. Small atonement for small sins. Understand?

Lee Young-ae’s acting is pitched perfectly to the construction of the scene. Continuing, Geum-ja confirms that she will kill Baek because he made her a sinner and because “this man killed a little boy and [she] helped him.” With the innocence of a young child, Jenny asks if she should say “sorry to his mother.” Geum-ja sobs, devastated by the impossibility of turning back time. Her lost daughter then asks, “You were happy with me, right?” Holding her close, Geum-ja emphatically responds, “Too happy for a sinner like me.” She then goes on one knee, so that their faces may touch, cheek-to-cheek. Geum-ja then says in English, “Jenny, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Jenny counts the number of apologies with her fingers as she embraces her mother. As in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, revenge in Park’s Lady Vengeance is concomitant with the exchange of guilt, debt, and payback. Big and small transgressions entitle the one who suffers, the one who embraces their ressentiment, to dispense an equal amount of suffering onto the transgressor. Geum-ja demands no less than Baek’s life for the sacrifice of her innocence and for his having kidnapped her daughter. Yet, Jenny demands simply that Geum-ja apologize three times, in exchange for her not growing up with her natural mother. The first thing Geum-ja does upon her release from prison is visit the parents of the murdered boy Won-mo and ask for forgiveness by chopping off her own fingers until she has atoned for his death. However, this is somehow not enough. As Park remarks, “Really, doing that is not going to get you forgiven. That’s something a Yakuza would do.”6

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One life for another, one finger for one life, and three fingers for one mother: each of these reiterate the moral quid pro quo that delineate culpability and victimhood, from one to the other. They merely add up to the mundanity of politics, of gestures and sentiments exchanged between moral actors, and thus do not enact forgiveness in the sense called for by Arendt. In one of the most violent scenes from the f ilm, the parents of the murdered children await with knives and axes so that they may punish the child killer. Geum-ja gathers them together to watch video footage of their girls and boys being tortured by Baek. After they are outraged, the parents are given the opportunity to exact their bitter resentment toward the man who murdered their children, one-by-one and face-to-face. One of the mothers grumbles that “The police have big sticks but they don’t know how to use them. If we leave it to them, there’d be nothing but never-ending trials.” A father speaks up and suggests that they “let each person choose if they want to be in or not. I’m for individual choice.” At the end of their discussions, they all agree to dole out individualized punishment. And with this decision to go through with their retribution, they grant themselves the power of moral righteousness, of sovereignty, over Baek. The parents grant themselves permission to take the law into their own hands in the name of justice, agreeing to act violently and with impunity. Park achieves a bit of black humor in this scene when one of the parents advises another on how best to hold a knife, so that a human body may be safely stabbed without hurting oneself. One by one they enter the makeshift torture room where Mr. Baek remains tied up and defenseless. Blood drips from their axes and kitchen knives as they exit. After everyone has taken their turn and released their ressentiment, they remove the lifeless body, mop up the blood, and gather for a group photo. This authenticates and acknowledges their shared guilt in the murder of Mr. Baek. Burying the memories of the traumatic loss of their children, they collectively dig a hole outside the schoolhouse of torture and bury his mutilated body. Throughout, the sequence is treated with intense irony, so that the spectator may distance him or herself from the otherwise horrifying behavior of the parents. Here, as elsewhere throughout the Vengeance Trilogy, revenge is portrayed as somehow absurd, even when it may be narratively justified. The vengeful are depicted as potentially monstrous as the initial transgressor himself, if not more so. Park, in an interview with Damon Smith, comments on the ambivalences that constitute this scene: And the reason that I showed the video of the children as they were being killed – to the families as well as to the audience – was I wanted

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to heighten everyone’s rage. That way, revenge would be the natural step. To exact revenge would be not only satisfying, it would be pleasurable, if I had edited and gone right to the killing scene. At the height of their rage, you’ll notice the next scene is them all gathered together having a meeting over a trivial matter. And in a way, it’s sort of ridiculous, because by watching this scene, your rage is already dissipating. So when the actual killing scene comes, there’s really no more pleasure in it.7

At this culminating moment in the film, Park permits the viewer, not satisfaction in seeing the monstrous Baek punished for his horrific crimes, but a profound ambivalence with regards to the justification of the parents’ revenge. Revenge is the ostensible “natural step,” from the image of violence to the politics of blame, connected through the logic of cause to effect and manifest in the normal, rational course of historical temporality. Yet, instead of compelling the film viewer to fully identify and sympathize with the parents’ outrage, Park interrupts the pleasure of melodramatic revenge in order to allow the viewer a moment of critical reflection. This ambivalence seems to be the stance Geum-ja herself takes, as Baek’s body is buried. Her sympathy for her own vengeance remains unsatisfied at the conclusion to the film. However, this ambivalence is built into the form of Park’s Lady Vengeance. As in the earlier films of the Trilogy, Park interrupts the ethical logic of vengeance by utilizing flashbacks in increasingly bewildering and virtuosic ways. The past erupts into the present at unexpected moments, as temporalities overlap and coalesce to produce direct images of time. Through these cuts and montages, Lady Vengeance disturbs the line that “naturally” runs from rage to revenge, disrupting its inevitability. And throughout the Trilogy, Park’s films become increasingly disorienting, as his images obey less and less the sensorymotor logic concomitant with mythic violence and the habitual flow of the movement-image. Park presents the unforgiving logic of guilt and exchange once more at the end of Lady Vengeance, and once more emphasizes the displeasure concomitant with the intoxication of violent reprisal. This is the “celebratory” scene that takes place in the bakery, where the families have gathered after having done away with Mr. Baek. The parents of the dead children request that Geum-ja find a way to return the money that they gave to the killer as ransom. The parents pass a piece of paper with their account number so that a bank transfer can be made. Here, the equivalence of sin, moral debt, vindication, cruelty, and money is made disturbingly explicit. The filmmaker describes the feelings they may be having at this moment:

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But at the bakery, if I were to delve into what they were feeling, my guess would be they’re like co-conspirators coming together after committing a horrifying crime. You don’t want to be apart. Once you’re apart you start getting suspicious, wondering if maybe someone’s going to talk and there’s all sorts of emotions that go with that. They didn’t have to go to the bakery. They could have said goodbye then and there, when the deed was done, but instead they all want to stay together. That’s their initial emotion. It’s been snowing the whole scene, but they finally say, ‘Oh, it’s snowing, I’ve got to go home.’ So I think the next emotion they feel is they never want to see these people again.8

The parents were bound together only through the exchange of punishment, money and redemption. Once their business is finished, they will disperse and hopefully never exchange words again. As the eating of the cake and the singing of “Happy Birthday” concludes their collusion, Geum-ja goes to the restroom. There, she hallucinates the dead Won-mo as a young boy, smoking a cigarette and sitting with his back to a wall. She kneels down and begins to speak, perhaps to apologize. But as soon as she opens her mouth, she is immediately gagged and silenced. Cutting back to her point of view, Won-mo suddenly appears before Geum-ja as an adult, played by Yu Ji-tae, who we remember was the vengeful Woo-jin in Oldboy (as well as the pathetic Mun-ho in Woman is the Future of Man). What was she about to say to Won-mo? Is there any apology “big” enough that may be commensurate with her crime? Does Geum-ja somehow forgive Baek, does she forgive the unforgivable, as her vengeance is realized at the end of the film? What is at stake in rendering revenge futile and problematizing its relationship to time? If Lady Vengeance and the other films of Park’s Trilogy interrupt its natural logic, how do they encourage the spectator to think in a different way about vengeance and the ordinary course of historical temporality? By way of response, I want to look closely at the last scene of Lady Ven­ geance and show how Geum-ja exculpates her vengeful anger in order to arrive at some sort of alternative, perhaps non-melodramatic redemption. My premise initially revolves around a set of issues taken over from the previous films, but I wish to develop it through the manner in which Lady Vengeance interrogates and critiques of our ordinary notion of forgiveness. In order to perform this critique, I must first turn to an essay Jacques Derrida published in 2001 called “On Forgiveness,” in which the philosopher tries to isolate an idea of “pure” forgiveness and which I will utilize as a methodological parallel to Park’s film. Derrida’s aim is to separate his highly

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critical, idealized vision of forgiveness from its instrumentalized use in everyday politics. In this latter sense, forgiving the other is easy and as simple as saying, “I forgive.” Yet, to articulate this claim in such a manner presupposes that one draws from a preconceived concept of forgiveness, that one is entitled to forgive, has a binding relation to the law, that forgiveness aims to quickly erase the debt owed to the one who is forgiven, that it returns to a normality that existed in the past, and implies a certain notion of temporality. All these presuppositions, it should be noted, conform to the narrative dynamics of the melodramatic mode. As with Derrida’s delineation of “pure” hospitality, pure forgiveness is that which remains outside the law, is without condition, irreducible, heterogeneous, and operates without prescription. It is absolutely singular, confounding linear, progressive linkages between past, present, and future. Forgiveness is, in other words, untimely, in precisely the manner I discussed in the previous chapter. Derrida articulates as this in the following passage: Each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure—nor is its concept. Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.9

According to Derrida, the language of politics (he cites, for example, the Japanese prime minister’s requesting China and Korea to forgive past military transgressions) is always already implicated in a metaphysical homogenization, manifest through the language of negotiation, and therefore not actually forgiveness in the strict definition of the word. Taking his cue from Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics, it is the contractual language of a political and public forgiveness that is problematic here, for it reintroduces the demand for moral equivalence between political actors, crediting the other with moral debt until the guilt of the guilty is incontrovertibly atoned for. Derrida notes, following Nietzsche in this regard, that the quantity of debt must invariably be overseen by recourse to a sovereign power, a third party that mediates between the debtor and creditor and is ordinarily manifest in the form of a universal law. This is precisely why revenge and forgiveness are rendered impossible throughout Park’s revenge trilogy, for what remains in question is this adjudicating,

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Archimedean third party: at what point is the guilt owed to the other fully paid up and who can make this determination? In the scene I discussed from Oldboy, Dae-su’s request for forgiveness is rendered null because he will do whatever it takes, even cut out his tongue, so that Mido is spared the knowledge of their incestuous relationship. Such a performance, however harrowing, is merely an act of conditional reconciliation, and is therefore simply a form of language games, and not forgiveness in the unconditional sense called for by Derrida. Crucial to understanding its “impurity” is the Judeo-Christian heritage that informs the public discourse of forgiveness. On the one hand, it is this heritage that constitutes the particular forms with which forgiveness is understood – “excuse, regret, amnesty, prescription, etc.” – forms that render forgiveness homogeneous and conditional.10 On the other, Derrida notes that the forgiver and the forgiven engage in this Judeo-Christian discourse, its political theology, in cultural contexts where this discourse of law and authority is not linked to religious traditions “native” to the local context. “They do this in an Abrahamic language which is not (in the case of Japan or Korea, for example) that of the dominant religion of their society, but which has already become the universal idiom of law, of politics, of the economy, or of diplomacy.”11 Derrida uses the moniker “Abrahamic” to invoke the religions of the Book and its Law, “to bring together Judaism, the Christianities, and the Islams.”12 Whether Japan and Korea may be considered originally non-Abrahamic with regard to the logocentrism Derrida identifies here will have to be left for another discussion altogether.13 In any event, this discourse is necessarily intrinsic to the processes of globalization, to the standardization and rule of international law based on the metaphysics of the word derived from the Abrahamic tradition. In this essay, Derrida traces this history through the Nuremburg trials, the internationalization of “crimes against humanity,” and the urgency of memory as constitutive of the modern nation state. “It would be necessary,” he continues, “to interrogate from this point of view what is called globalization, and which I elsewhere call globalatinisation – to take into account the effect of Roman Christianity and which today overdetermines all language of law, of politics, and even the interpretation of what is called the ‘return of the religious.’”14 Globalization, Latinization: both are inherent to the authority of international law, which constitutes a third party that negotiates the terms of the public performance of forgiveness. For Derrida, whether a non-Abrahamic culture realizes it or not, the sovereignty of the law is always already one with its adjudicating authority, its demand to route personal vendettas through the mediation of such third parties, and often with public scrutiny.

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Each performance of revenge participates in the one-upmanship that is part of everyday political discourse, and each act continues, to refer to a formulation I quoted by Park in chapter two, an “endless circle of evil, going around and around until the chain breaks.”15 This radical critique of vengeance shows that its intended goal, purification and atonement, will be impossible, for the act of revenge only leads to its perpetuation. Forgiveness must prove the exception that halts the ordinary course of cause and effect, breaking the unending chain of debt and payback. Park manifests this moment of impossible aporia, this deconstructive breakage, which paves the way toward an alternative ethics. In the very last scene of Lady Vengeance, Geum-ja leaves the bakery where she had shared tea and cake with the parents of the murdered children. White snow falls from the sky and the entire scene is poetically presented in black and white. The voice-over tells us that despite Geum-ja’s failure to find redemption, she is nonetheless “liked,” suggesting that she is to be accepted despite her having made mistakes in the past and taken advantage of others. It is not clear exactly who or what is speaking here, yet it should be noted that this voice, perhaps issuing from the cinematic apparatus itself, sets up the scene to follow. Geum-ja encounters her daughter in a back alleyway and they stand face-to-face. She speaks to her estranged daughter in English, telling her to “live white, like tofu.” Jenny responds and remarks, “you too mom.” Geum-ja offers a block of something white to Jenny, recalling the gift given to her by the preacher at the start of the film. Geum-ja’s block, however, is not tofu, but a white cake she had baked in the cake shop. What might this mysterious gesture mean? In an interview published on fareastfilms.com, Park offers some initial insight: I wanted to convey the notion of salvation in this final installment, but I actually think this is an anti-religious film. There is a contrast between the white tofu that was given to Geum-ja at the beginning of the film as a means of purification and the cake she bakes toward the end of the film. The tofu is salvation from a supreme being, which she rejects, while the cake, after the climax, is judgment and forgiveness for herself by herself. People often ask if the film is Christian or Buddhist to which I reply, it’s Geum-ja religion.16

This disavowal of Christianity and Buddhism is less a gesture toward an atheistic position that may or may not belong to Park and more a rejoinder to the normalizing discourse of an official, already politicized,

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Fig. 19: Geum-ja’s white cake. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

public reconciliation. Rather than appeal to a sovereign third party, Geum-ja produces the terms of her own profane forgiveness, baking her own white cake and offering it as a token of her own redemption. It is this whiteness, unprecedented and not conditional upon an ordinary politics or metaphysics, that constitutes the singular gift of forgiveness, a gift without expectation of return, that at once affirms the burdens of past transgressions and yet is also morally pure as white snow. To emphasize this subtle transformation, the director’s cut to Lady Vengeance is called the “Fade to White” version. Over the course of this version’s two-hour length, the image gradually and imperceptibly is drained of its colors. At the start of the film, Park seems to revel in color: a mural painted on the prison building wall, the dark colors of Geum-ja’s room, the brazen hues of her clothes and makeup. When the film reaches its conclusion, the viewer is presented with a black-and-white image. On the one hand, Lady Vengeance seems to pay tribute to the film noir tradition and the chiaroscuro that is often associated with its style. On the other, the fade to white emphasizes the whiteness of the cake in this final scene while lending the snow and light of the streetlamps that permeate the image a similarly pale glow. A commonality between the cake, snow, and all elements of white throughout the image is emphasized in the final shots of Lady Vengeance. And through this, Park shows that forgiveness is not some transcendent category, separate from the phenomenal appearance of the world. On the contrary, the conditions for forgiving emerge from the existential conditions that constitute the world’s appearance, one shared by and held in common by individual political actors and their surroundings. To emphasize Geum-ja’s immersion in this shot’s all-encompassing white, she plunges her face into the cake, as if to baptize herself and thus become

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renewed by its purity. The medium of the cinema is crucial for opening up the possibility of forgiveness, understood existentially and belonging to a shared world, as the final shot reveals analogies between worldly entities normally obscured in everyday life. Derrida explains that these analogies and ontological connections must remain invisible, must remain secret in a radically deposed state of exception, if forgiveness is to maintain its purity. Thus for him the two poles of forgiving and forgetting cannot be reducible to each other and must be maintained in their separation. He seeks above all a secretive language that remains unarticulated and does not enter into public deeds of moral debt. “In order to inflect politics, or what you just called the ‘pragmatic’ processes, in order to change the law, it is necessary to refer to a ‘hyperbolic’ ethical vision of forgiveness.”17 Derrida acknowledges here that the rigorous deconstruction of forgiveness is finally only an ontological reduction, potentially a mere philosophical exercise. However, its rigor must nevertheless be practiced and constantly referred to as inspiration for an ethics of profane forgiveness manifest in real-world situations. Later in the essay, he imagines a person who, before a juridico-political authority, says “I do not forgive,” and yet “in [her] heart” forgives.18 This forgiveness remains hidden “in her heart,” so that it does not accede to the signifier, is not made visible, to the globalatinizing logic of exchange constituted in everyday political discourse. Additionally, forgiving must remain secretive so that it resists politicizing the devastating effects of trauma and resentment into the desire for an equal and opposite reactive form of justice. The white cake at the end of Lady Vengeance, as Park has explained, is not a gift from a supreme being, one received from a sovereign adjudicating third party, God or some transcendent deity. Rather, it attests to another economy altogether. Its silent whiteness conceals the secret, one that for Geum-ja carries the potential to speak the word of forgiveness. “Whether she says ‘I forgive’ or ‘I do not forgive,’” Derrida continues, “in either case I am not sure of understanding. I am even sure of not understanding, and in any case I have nothing to say. This zone of experience remains inaccessible, and I must respect its secret.”19 I believe that Park is asking his viewers to respect Geum-ja’s secret as well. Throughout the Vengeance Trilogy, manifest in its highly stylized construction, I believe that Park is looking for a cinematic language that is appropriate to this silent, redemptive economy. The logic of the secret threads its way through all the f ilms of the Trilogy as a means of eluding the public scrutiny and exteriorized gaze of the law. “In these films,” writes Kyung Hyun Kim, “vengeance is carefully restricted to the realm of the personal, never crossing over into the

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public domain: it is always aimed at other individuals and almost never against state institutions.”20 He notes that what he calls Park’s “realm of the unknowable” eludes “the mundane realities of a legal system in which figures such as the protagonist Dae-su and the villain Wu-jin freely roam,” and that “in Park-Chan-wook’s realm of the unknowable, the police are useless.”21 I must disagree with Kim’s assertion here that the vengeance of Park’s characters does not venture into the public domain. On the contrary, vengeance is made visible throughout all the films of the Trilogy, constituting its melodrama by betraying the presence of an interiorized moral occult. However, Kim’s observations are accurate to the extent that personal, unknowable, and secretive vendettas compel the violent actions of Park’s characters. He interprets the last scene from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in this manner, foreclosing clear-cut answers in favor of unknowability. The knife thrust in Dong-jin’s chest – why and by whom? “There’s the public [answer] (class hostility), the private one (revenge against Ryu’s girlfriend who was also an anarchist), none-of-the-above, or all-of-the-above.” And the note attached to the knife? It remains illegible, out of view for both Dong-jin and the viewer, and remains an unknowable secret. “Credits soon roll and no one is spared from the frustration.”22 As we saw from Oldboy, the entirety of the f ilm’s narrative is propelled by Dae-su’s speaking the secret of incest, his making public the secret relationship between Woo-jin and his sister, thereby enabling revenge, exchange, and moral debt. In JSA, as I have already noted in chapter two, the fraternizing between North and South must remain hidden from the gaze of their respective public superiors. Ultimately, however, the secretive economy of forgiveness remains invisible to the look of the camera and in this reveals the impossibility of knowing the morality of the other. Its exceptional, enigmatic logic does not partake in the ideology of visibility and documentation that dominates our everyday understanding of what the cinema can do. In this sense, we might think back to the repeated failure of detection showcased in Memories of Murder. Throughout Park’s Vengeance Trilogy, cinema’s particular representative powers are always kept in check, at once refusing the fantasy of total vision while respecting the capacity to present the elusive “unknowablity” of these films. At the most crucial moments of Park’s vengeance films, the sovereign look of the viewer is left deposed, falling victim to its divine violence. Insofar as his images do not straightforwardly document reality “out there,” Park’s respect for cinema’s specific capabilities and its history only adds to its allegorical power. If this rigor can be maintained, which is commensurate with the rigorous critique of revenge and forgiveness that threads its way

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through the Trilogy, the “‘hyperbolic’ ethical vision of forgiveness” may be respected as well. With the exception of Geum-ja, Park’s vengeful characters are all men. Likewise, public discourse, the realm of conflict, competition, pride, and the show of strength are populated predominantly by the men of the Trilogy, where characters such as Dong-jin, Ryu, Dae-su, Woo-jin, and the parents of the missing children “freely roam” as the political animals they have become. All partake in the show of retribution and public negotiation. However, Geum-ja’s gift of a white cake functions in a quite different manner, much more mysterious and elusive. “For me,” Park remarks in interview, “it’s an antidote to the masculinity, impulsive violence and explosions of rage and hate in the first two films. So Lady Vengeance is about femininity, atonement and the search for forgiveness and salvation.”23 Geum-ja’s atonement, as I have attempted to argue, does not partake in the politics of conflict and rage, for it remains impossibly out of reach of the patriarchal gaze of the law and the purview of everyday politics. All three films I will analyze in this chapter may be read as “antidotes” to the explosive, male impulse toward rage and violence. Park has stated his belief that revenge is a fundamental mode of international politics and is thus not limited to the Korean context, for it “is at the core not just of Korean society, but in all societies. I believe that vengeance defines twenty-first century Korea, but that vengeance stories are a central metaphor for life anywhere: from the UN to a gang of people on the street.”24 Revenge implicitly binds Park and Korea to the problem of ethics and politics in the global context. Continuing, Park explains: I’m also opposed to the opinion that sees the themes of sin and redemption or guilt and obsession as Western concepts. Those concepts are already exceedingly well established as routine in our lives as well. I feel that perhaps the time has come for us to show them in our own way. More than that, from the director’s viewpoint I would be happy if audiences reacted by viewing it as questioning in a somewhat peculiar way the ethics of judging what is right and wrong.25

The critical, “hyperbolic vision” of forgiveness that Derrida notes, and which is necessary as a kind of condition that must be constantly referred back to, is performed in each of the films of the Vengeance Trilogy. As I have tried to argue, we see that this hyperbolic vision, a form of hope toward the forgiveness of the other, private and elusive, was already proposed in JSA and finds its most rigorous articulation in Lady Vengeance.

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Secret Sunshine (2007) in the Light of Political Theology The title of Lee Chang-dong’s film is derived from the name of the small city in which its story takes place. “Miryang,” the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters that make up the two words “secret” and “sunshine” (密陽), is situated in Gyeongsangnam-do province, about halfway between Busan and Daegu. In what follows, I will read Secret Sunshine as a film that puts into motion a key connection between melodrama and Christian metaphysics within the contemporary South Korean context. Recall that for Nietzsche, the ressentiment of the weak slave inspires the Christian revaluation of values, of recasting weakness as a moral virtue such that, according to Matthew 5:5, “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.” This act of revaluation is, for Nietzsche, essentially an act of revenge, a promise of future punishment compelled by the rage and powerlessness of the meek. Although Lee’s intense film can be understood to illuminate a wide range of insights about the experience of loss, trauma, and memory, I want to show how these insights can be taken further in Secret Sunshine to shed additional light on the figuration of Christian ethics within modern Korean culture, an ethics that fuses concepts of suffering and redemption to acts of political resistance. In one of many books dealing with the history of this fusion, Christ and Caesar in Modern Korea, theologian Wi Jo Kang explains that, “an important reason behind Christianity’s success in Korea has been its frequent identification with the political movements of Korean nationalism, the independence movements, democracy, and Korean reunification.”26 As we shall see, this political theology helps us qualify the total, deterritorializing reach of globalatinization, and allows us to place Secret Sunshine within its proper historical and political context. Lee’s film begins as a single mother named Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) is driving with her son, Jun (Seon Jung-yeop), from Seoul to Miryang. Her car breaks down on a relatively remote section of the highway and Shin-ae is forced to call a tow truck. She tries to keep her spirits up by reminding Jun of their destination – the hometown city of his late father. An easygoing and amiable mechanic named Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho, who we have seen in several of Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho’s films) arrives. Speaking with a heavy Gyeongsang-do dialect, he engages in conversation with Shin-ae as they travel together in his truck. The nature of the questions she asks about Miryang indicates that she has never been to the small city. Jong-chan responds that its local population is falling, it is fairly right wing, and the people have a tendency to speak quickly. In the course of their conversation, we also discover that she intends to move to Miryang permanently.

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What happens next to Shin-ae in her adopted hometown will constitute the catastrophe around which the film revolves. Jun begins attending the local school, entering the classroom of a mild-mannered male teacher, Park Do-seop (Jo Young-jin). He has a gentle face but is noticeably coarse when disciplining his troubled daughter, Jung-a (Song Mi-rim). Meanwhile, Shin-ae starts a piano academy for children. She is slowly accepted by the otherwise provincially-minded people in her community. After settling in a bit, she considers buying land, which captures the attention and perhaps the envy of others around her. One night, while Shin-ae is out singing and dancing with her female friends, Jun is kidnapped from her home. Distraught and desperate, Shin-ae receives several calls from an unknown man who demands that she pay a ransom for Jun’s return. She withdraws all her savings and pays the stipulated amount, but to no avail. Later, Shin-ae receives another call, this time from the police. They ask that she go and identify her son’s lifeless body, found on a nearby riverbank. Immediately following this scene, Do-seop is brought into the police station in handcuffs. Like Mr. Baek from Lady Vengeance, the perpetrator of child violence is a teacher of children. The viewer is not informed of the investigation proceedings. Meanwhile, Shin-ae falls into a deep, melancholic, wordless depression. At her son’s cremation, she is unable to mourn. When she declares her son’s death at the Miryang city hall, the emotional toll becomes overwhelming and she lashes out at others who offer help. Shin-ae wanders into a small Christian church, where a service is taking place. When the pastor instructs the congregation to pray, Shin-ae wails and cries out, unburdening herself of her profound sadness. It is here, within a congregation of anonymous worshippers, where she is finally allowed to grieve. Following this experience, Shin-ae becomes a devout, “born again” Christian and begins to understand the church as a place where personal comfort may be sought. Shin-ae also begins to incorporate religious concepts into her everyday speech. Her church friends marvel at her perpetual smile and capacity to remain positive, against all odds. At moments, however, especially when she is alone, Shin-ae still struggles to manage the profound misery associated with her son’s loss. Because of her continued effort of having to be a good Christian while working through the loss of her son, Shin-ae decides to visit Jun’s killer in jail in order to forgive him and to bring greater closure to her grief. They encounter each other face-to-face, divided by glass and prison bars. The situation reverses a similar scene that concludes Park Jin-pyo’s film, You Are My Sunshine (2005), also starring Jeon Do-yeon. Jong-chan sits behind

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Fig. 20: Shin-ae attempts to forgive her son’s killer. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

Shin-ae, remaining out of focus within the shot. After offering him a bunch of flowers picked on her way to the prison, she begins to speak, meekly: The reason I’ve come here is to spread God’s grace and love. I never knew such things. I couldn’t believe in God. I couldn’t see Him, so I didn’t believe. But through my Jun, I learnt of God’s love. I found peace and a new life. I’m so thankful, so happy to feel God’s love and grace. That’s why I came. To spread his love.

Just as she is about to absolve him of his seemingly unforgivable transgression, Do-seop announces that he too has recently found God and calmly reports that God has forgiven him already. “I’m so grateful,” he remarks, “God reached out to a sinner like me. He made me kneel to repent my sins. And God has absolved me of them.” This statement positively disarms Shin-ae, though she barely shows it. She has been robbed of the opportunity to pardon him of sin. Do-seop’s transformation from a child murderer to a good, meek, lamb of God was achieved without her. “I pray as soon as I wake,” he continues, I am so thankful every day. My repentance and absolution brought me peace. Now I start and end each day with prayer. I always pray for you, Mrs. Lee. I’ll pray for you until I die. Seeing you here today tells me that God has answered my prayers.

Not only has he helped himself to his own moral redemption, he also grants himself the right to pray for and pity Shin-ae. He becomes, in effect, a “better” Christian than her. Already victimized by his past violence, Shin-ae is once again victimized by his prayer.

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In her effort to reverse the debt owed to her, Shin-ae attempts to annul Do-seop’s incommensurable sin through an act of Christian generosity. However, this gesture of profound humility is revealed simply as another, indeed more devious, iteration of one-upmanship that underpins the impulse toward revenge. When her forgiveness is defeated, her Christian humility is exploded, turning into its opposite: infinite rage and hatred of the other. For the remainder of the film, Shin-ae acts out and releases her pent up ressentiment. She steals a CD from a music store, sabotages an outdoor prayer service, seduces the local pharmacist (whose wife was the first to proselytize to Shin-ae), and slits her wrists with a knife. Each time, she looks up in hatred, acting out in defiance before the eyes of God. Shin-ae’s fate becomes increasingly harrowing as she is institutionalized after breaking down. It seems no one is able to provide adequate help. Jongchan provides friendship (and seems to want more), but Shin-ae brushes off his insistent and, at times, inappropriate attention. Following Shin-ae’s profound disillusionment with the Christian church, no other discourse for understanding the moral self seems available to her. Her desire for forgiveness, even when she realizes that it is complicit with her desire for moral sovereignty, is made into a visible spectacle before her church congregation, through her own urging. Unlike Geum-ja’s act of forgiveness, elaborated in the previous section, Shin-ae’s forgiveness does not remain a secret, but is, in fact, produced and performed for others and within a context where the politics of the other is always already public. Because of her inability to coordinate the private form of forgiveness with its public, Christian articulation, Shin-ae falls into madness, or, as Derrida writes, “a madness of the impossible.”27 She is made an exception to the community of rational humans as her capacity for functioning within the ordinary moral occult associated with the melodramatic mode is rendered inoperable. In contrast to the quick cuts and fast pacing featured in Park’s Lady Vengeance and in his Vengeance Trilogy, Secret Sunshine proceeds much more deliberately. Shots linger after a narrative event has concluded, allowing the viewer time to assess character reactions as well as ruminate on what just took place. Lee’s many long takes communicate a sense of every­ day reality, not unlike that realized in Hong Sang-soo’s cinema, through its capturing of stretches of uninterrupted time. Also in contrast to the numerous close-ups in Lady Vengeance, which constitute a melodrama revolving around the face, in Secret Sunshine the camera frames the actors in medium- or long shot much of the time, depicting bodies that move in an ordinary and familiar world. As a leading member of the so-called New Korean Cinema in the 1990s, Lee Chang-dong was already known for

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his realist style – his penchant for on-location shooting, natural acting, and seemingly mundane dialogue. In Secret Sunshine, he continues to tell stories utilizing a minimum of manipulative effects, such as exaggerated mise-en-scène or swooning accompanying music. Shin-ae’s emotional breakdown seems all the more dramatic when considered against this quiet backdrop of everyday realism. The emotional power of Lee’s film also hinges on Jeon Do-yeon’s extraordinary performance (she won the “Best Actress” award at Cannes in 2007), which is intensely expressive and harrowing. Despite Shin-ae’s appeal to and eventual rejection of an invisible Christian God who exists somewhere up in the skies, Lee’s film remains grounded in everyday reality, showing only what appears before the camera, only what can be seen. The dichotomy between the invisible and what can be seen is a repeated theme in Secret Sunshine, one that concerns not only the reality of things, but also the capacity to believe in their existence. “Mrs. Lee, if you look outside,” the pharmacist’s wife remarks to Shin-ae, “you see people and cars. But there are things you can’t see too! When you believe in God you see everything the naked eye can’t see.” Shin-ae turns around and remarks that she cannot see her son Jun. In the midst of working through the trauma of his loss, she is later told by the pharmacist’s wife that, “God’s will is everywhere, in everything. God’s will is present even in that beam of sunlight.” Skeptical and frustrated, Shin-ae looks at the sunlight on her hand and responds, “What do you think is here? It’s just sunlight! Nothing else, right? Nothing else.” Subsequently, when she seduces the pharmacist in defiance of God, she lies on her back and looks toward the heavens. She repeatedly mouths the question: “Can you see?” Her face is filmed upsidedown and from above, disorienting the viewer. Shin-ae ostensibly addresses God’s judgmental gaze, but the camera explicitly casts the viewer in this sovereign position, as if Shin-ae were addressing and challenging the film spectator. To judge through the act of seeing is to believe in a reality beyond appearance, to constitute morality as metaphysics. In Secret Sunshine, the reality of things is revealed through seeing while the nature of morality is associated with being seen. Only the church provides Shin-ae with an expressive outlet for her grief and the opportunity to externalize, and thus make visible, invisible emotions. Christianity thus plays a key role here, insofar as it gives her suffering a form in which it may be seen and recognized by others. In his illuminating essay on Secret Sunshine, Zachary Sng shows how vision in Lee’s film is implicitly divided between revealing and concealing, between an undecidable dichotomy underpinned by the metaphor of the sun. To

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think the sun as a metaphor for illumination, for knowing, means also to think and see with the mediation of techne (τέχνη), as Sng writes: ‘Secret Sunshine’ might be the hidden meaning of a name, but what it hides is unreadable. It could refer to the intimacy of the love Shin-ae shared with Jun and to the comfort that she finds in Christianity, but also to the deeper secret that reveals these forms of intimacy and comfort to be at best precarious and at worst a blatant lie – namely, the technicity that inverts them into doubles of themselves.28

This very technicity constitutes the ambivalence between the Heimlich and the Unheimlich. Working with Freud’s description of the uncanny, Sng foregrounds the experience of foreignness within the realm of the familiar through the dialectic of invisibility and visibility. The incommensurability that underpins this ontology brings us to a crucial discussion of forgiveness in Secret Sunshine raised by Rey Chow in her essay, “‘I Insist on the Christian Dimension.’” Any rigorous discussion of forgiveness and Lee’s film must begin with the specific issues illuminated in her analysis. Chow’s essay centers upon two key points. On the one hand, when Shin-ae’s efforts to forgive her son’s murderer are stymied in the prison visitation sequence, her ensuing rage and defiance tears this highly intimate act away from its proper, private realm back to that of the mundane course of history. Her forgiveness is made visible to others as Shin-ae is admired for performing this act of Christian humility. As such, her forgiveness enters into the public realm of politics, reputation, and the commerce of guilt and mercy. Chow explains: In making the decision to talk to him face to face in prison, therefore, Shin-ae has already placed herself unwittingly within the logic of this system and defeated her own purpose from the start. Once this system is in play, forgiveness is de facto rendered nonabsolute and reconfigured discursively as part of an unending series of human transactions in which one-upmanship is always possible but never permanent.29

To the extent that Shin-ae’s attempt to forgive the murderer of her son fails because it is transformed into moral currency, Chow’s observation seems to be guided by Derrida’s demand for an absolute, “pure” forgiveness. On the other hand, Chow explains that Shin-ae’s “defeat” must also be thought of in relation to her displacement, in “time, place, and personal situation,” from a putatively universal, and thus ethnocentric, concept of Christian

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humanity.30 Here, Chow departs from Derrida in his assertion of a metaphysics of ethics that is always already determined by a global, Latinized notion of justice, which I discussed in the previous section of this chapter. Working through notions of translation and alterity in Shakespeare’s Shylock from The Merchant of Venice as well as Erich Auerbach’s magisterial study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Chow finally asks herself: “What conceptions of forgiveness, translation, and secularizing (or humanizing) would be necessary for them [Shylock and Shin-ae] to be able to coexist with us, other than through the familiar mechanism of our transcendent benevolence?”31 She pushes Derrida’s deconstruction of forgiveness further to critique notions of the human that seem necessarily implicated in all our attempts to forgive, both exceptional and ordinary. In the next chapter, we will see how this critique of humanism and the human being that embodies it gives way to non-human figures, such as cyborgs, uncanny faces, and vampires. If Geum-ja in Lady Vengeance is able to circumvent the masculine, public realm of vengeance and payback by founding a new, unprecedented tradition of forgiving the other, Shin-ae is limited by the terms set out for her by the public realm where Christian morality and its discourse of the moral human is performed. Her expression of misery risks being characterized as simply emotional, irrational, and hysterical, characterizations associated with a patriarchal understanding of the melodramatic. To be sure, both Chow and Sng are ultimately concerned with their position as bourgeois academics trained in the Western intellectual tradition. In their thinking, both are highly sensitive to the danger of their own analytical gaze as they appropriate Lee’s film to make broader arguments about universality and their capacity to speak on behalf of the universal. Sng asks whether his own appeal to Aristotle and Freud is “an attempt to illuminate an Asian text by means of a secret Western sun and therefore to repeat the project of a Eurocentric enlightenment?”32 His response is to reiterate the undecidability that beats at the heart of Lee’s film, in the untranslatability of a secret sunshine that is “homelike, original, and native” but remains “unspeakable,” “repressed, the sight that must remain unseen.”33 Sng isolates moments of aporia in Asian cinema and Western theory, bringing disparate, culturally specific texts together through their shared problematization of universal humanity. I would like to elaborate on Sng and Chow and their sensitive reading of forgiveness inspired by Lee’s film by providing contexts, both historical and cinematic, in which this reading of Secret Sunshine may be deepened. While Shin-ae’s defeat illustrates a profound aporia at the origin of what

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we call forgiveness, a description of its ideological preconditions may help us to further understand the nature of Shin-ae’s displacement. As Sng and Chow suggest, the forgiveness depicted in Lee’s film cannot be fully circumscribed by the totality of globalatinization. Picking up from their discussions, I wish to pursue a key relationship: the theology of forgiveness and its ideological and aesthetic commonalities with redemption in cinematic melodrama. The history of evangelical Christianity cannot be separated from the experience of colonization in Korea’s modern national history. Catholicism was introduced to Korea in the late eighteenth century, but it was the arrival of Protestant missionaries, namely Horace G. Underwood and Henry G. Appenzeller, in the late nineteenth century that Korean Christianity – fused with nationalism, anti-colonialism, and eventually anti-communism and pro-Americanism – acquired its salvational character and its evangelical form and practice. The notion of redemption has been key for evangelicalism’s success in modern Korea. When Christians were finally allowed by the Chosun government to practice their beliefs openly in 1890, only about one percent of the population identified themselves as having faith. An incredible rise in their numbers took place after the Korean War, to about one in twenty in 1955. Today, about twenty-five percent of the approximately 50 million people who live in South Korea identify themselves as Christian, with about twenty percent of the population self-identifying as Protestant. Seoul is home to the largest church in the world: the Yoido Full Gospel Church, with over 800,000 members in its congregation. The number of Christian missionaries sent by South Korea is second only to the US in numbers. The ideology and rituals of popular Korean evangelicalism, derived from US Presbyterian and Methodist practices, may be considered conservative, even fundamentalist, in nature. Believers are fervent in their attitude toward prayer and zealous in their participation in communal life. In the Korean church, the Bible is considered to be beyond reproach and, as such, is a text that is to be interpreted literally. With respect to social issues, Korean evangelicals overwhelmingly believe in the basic immorality of abortion, premarital sex, adultery, and gambling.34 According to Timothy S. Lee, the sum of these aspects points to a generalized characteristic: the intensely practical, this-worldly orientation of evangelical Christianity in Korea. “Korean evangelicalism, in other words,” Lee writes, is practical both in the sense that it is much more enterprising in devotional practices than in theological ideas, and in the sense that it tends

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to set great store by concrete criteria such as strict observance of the Sabbath, fervent prayer, regular tithing, this-worldly blessings, and the size of church membership.35

Evangelicals have been reluctant to diverge from rituals that were established by its first missionaries, rituals whose histories evolved in conjunction with Korea’s modernization process. Thus, the distinctiveness of Korean evangelicalism may be gleaned through its devotional practices and intense Bible study, which, according to Lee, “lack parallels elsewhere in the Protestant world.”36 Above all, it is the experience of conversion that is at the heart of Korean Protestant evangelicalism. This experience involves the admission of oneself as a sinner who, through prayer, requests that the grace of God liberate one’s soul from sin. Conversion usually takes place through a public performance, by being “born again” through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their “personal savior” that inaugurates one into a community of believers. Shin-ae’s conversion takes place in this way, precisely midway through Secret Sunshine. “I never understood,” Shin-ae remarks before a small group of gathered Christians, the meaning of ‘born again.’ But now I really do. When I met Deaconess Kim, she said there is more in the world than we can see. There are also things we cannot see. When I heard those words I didn’t take them seriously. But now I know in my heart they’re true. I’ve been feeling an agonising pressure on my heart. Now it has gone! I have gained peace. I now truly believe that whatever happens comes to pass by God’s will.

Shin-ae smiles as she says these words. The scene begins with a close-up on her face. As she speaks, the camera slowly dollies back to reveal the others sympathetically listening to her. When Shin-ae finishes, a woman seated next to her in front of an open hymnal responds: Amen. Our sister Shin-ae has found the Lord. How grateful we are for His grace! He has given salvation to a lamb in pain. How thankful we are! Our Lord is here! He is here with us now. Let us praise the Lord who saves us and abides with us. Let’s be thankful for His grace.

With this, they sing a hymn about salvation while clapping in unison to its rhythm. The entire scene is shot in one take to accommodate the dozen or so people who have gathered in Shin-ae’s piano studio. Following her

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conversion, she is able to acknowledge and believe in “things we cannot see,” things that elude the human eye as well as the camera. Through the mythical discourse of God’s sovereignty, her moral soul is asserted and made manifest to Shin-ae. And through this manifestation, the reality of an interior soul, that which eludes appearance, is made external, made visible as melodrama, so that it may be judged by others. During the thirty-five-year-long period of colonization, the notion of Christian salvation was a way for Koreans to understand and cope with their oppression by Japanese imperial power. The idea that one could achieve personal liberation from sin became enmeshed with the hope that political liberation could be realized through a kind of salvational uprising that would throw off alien rule. “The meek will inherit the earth” – this Christian notion proposed moral riches that awaited Koreans in the afterlife and provided a means to cope with misery in the here and now. Speaking directly to this idea, historian Chung-shin Park remarks that: Their otherworldly theology came to play a quite different but necessary role – one that gave them a sense of security and consolation. It became a religious justification for their escapist political stand, an escapist theology for those Christians who wished to avoid painful reality.37

Crucial to note here is the fluidity between theological and political concepts that passed through a shared concept of radical historical change. Both Christian salvation and national liberation from Japanese colonial rule drew from the belief that another, better world awaits the faithful and that one’s earthly suffering is not for naught. To anticipate such a world and to believe in its existence is to turn one’s eyes away from the here and now toward that which is yet to be seen. Echoing Carl Schmitt’s observation that the most significant theories of the state are secularized theological concepts, Korean evangelicalism during the colonial period adopted theological notions of Christian eschatology to inspire the promise of political salvation. Along similar lines, another link may be made between politics and theology in Korea through the belief in human egalitarianism. During the Chosun period, part of the appeal for Christianity among the politically alienated, elite yangban and the middle-class chungin was its espousal of equality in the eyes of God – that is, the idea that each individual, regardless of social standing, possesses an invisible moral substance intrinsic to all human beings. Each has equal capacity, therefore, to become good or evil. Under Japanese rule, some colonized Koreans convinced themselves of the

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righteousness of their suffering and the immorality of their colonizers by leaning on this Christian, universal notion of the moral self. After liberation and through the Korean War, both Catholic and evangelical Christians collaborated with intellectuals and students to turn their anti-Japanese sentiments toward protest against state authoritarianism. According to Joshua Young-gi Hong, the Gwangju Uprising was a turning point that “galvanized many students, intellectuals, and religious groups: the National Council of Churches, YMCA and YWCA, Catholic Farmers Federation, the Catholic Committee for Justice and Peace, and the like.”38 Throughout the 1980s, Christian groups became increasingly politicized in response to Chun’s repressive regimes, culminating with the June Democracy Movement in 1987. Religious meetings at this time quickly became political demonstrations that demanded the overthrow of the military government, accused of violating fundamental, God-given human rights. It is no coincidence that the discursive nexus of nationalism and Chris­ tianity in South Korea overlaps with a number of key concepts associated with the melodramatic mode. Specifically, as Jinsoo An insightfully observes, “the moral logic of melodrama and the promise of salvation in Christianity […] both emerged at a critical juncture of Korea’s modern history. These moral imaginations endowed Koreans with a logical means to cope with tumultuous and traumatic historical experiences.”39 The figure of the sympathetic victim-hero, who becomes the exemplar of virtue through suffering, coincides with the virtuous Christian, who seeks redemption from the suffering of sin. Both are subjected to an increasingly secularizing, post-traditional world that is perceived to be hostile and amoral. Modern Christianity and modern melodrama seek to fill in this perceived moral void by restoring coherence to a radically changed environment and by redefining the terms of what constitutes legitimate sovereign judgment. As Linda Williams has maintained, melodrama is a cultural form that thrives on the discursive contradictions produced through the tensions between the traditional past and the modern present. “Protestantism in particular,” An continues, was instrumental for many Koreans to keep their faith in nationalist resistance and to promote social reform and modern consciousness. It provided a radically alternative worldview, not only to the now-bygone feudal system but also to Japanese colonial discourses, which largely justified Japan’s political and institutional violence over Korea. Protestant ideals provided the conceptual terms for the modernity that nationalists engaged in the discursive struggle against the Japanese model. 40

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The discourse of Protestant Christianity in Korea is melodramatic. It amalgamates old folk ideas and practices with Christian notions of sin and redemption, associated with modernity. As scholars have noted, Korean Protestantism can be distinguished by its syncretic character, and for its particular trajectory of indigenization that constantly negotiates “conflicting temporal orientations.”41 Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of the syncretic character of Korean evangelicalism was the movement of politico-theological thinking associated with minjung theology. According to historian Namhee Lee, the discourse of minjung arose with the awareness of a crisis in historical subjectivity and the concern that Koreans were not agents of their own historiography. Minjung was a way to recast and revise national history that placed “the people” as the true subjects of historical change. 42 Starting with the Gwangju Uprising and continuing throughout Chun’s administration, their thinking radicalized Christian practice in the 1960s and 70s by fusing its doctrine to Korean labor struggles, traditional folk culture, shamanism, and messianic politics. “Theology of minjung,” Suh Kwang-sun David writes, “is a creation of those Christians who were forced to reflect upon their Christian discipleship in basement interrogation rooms, in trials, facing court-martial tribunals, hearing the allegations of prosecutors, and in making their own f inal defense.”43 As one of the more intellectual writers of minjung theology, Suh posits that the dialectical nature of Christ, his divinity and humanity, may be thought of as analogous to shamanistic spirit-possession. The pastor of a church, in effect, becomes a “Christian mudang.”44 The Bible is understood similarly, such that when the story of Moses and the Exodus is told, Korean Christians understand it “not only as a literal event in the history of Israel but also as a literal event in the history of the oppressed people of Korea.”45 For many minjung thinkers, “minjung” names the downtrodden and the dispossessed in other national contexts, not just in Korea. They are linked through their participation in universal suffering, their resentment, or han. Cyris H. S. Moon writes along this line: Han is the anger and resentment of the minjung which has been turned inward and intensified as they become objects of injustice upon injustice. It is the result of being repressed for an extended period of time by external forces: political oppression, economic exploitation, social alienation, and restrictions against becoming educated in cultural and intellectual matters. 46

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In chapter two, I discussed han in terms of Nietzschean ressentiment. We can see now that another link may be made, specifically between han/ ressentiment and the invention of Christian morality. For victims of history who harbor unrequited feelings of suffering, their revenge may be imagined as a final judgment day for those whom they have deemed evil. One of the stated aims of minjung theology is to break this cycle of revenge, of the production and exchange of ressentiment. According to Moon, this cycle must be broken by resisting the desire for retributive payback, by what is called “duan,” which is derived from the Chinese character meaning “cutting off” (斷): The cutting of the cycle of revenge would finally establish harmony in the political and social order. For the oppressors, it means that they should stop being greedy and oppressive. For the oppressed, it means that they should stop wishing to be like their masters and wanting to take revenge. Needless to say, we have discovered that neither of these transformations is easy to accomplish. 47

Despite the seemingly insurmountable task of realizing this transformation, Moon insists on a messianic hope that this ethical, “necessary exorcism” will be performed. 48 A great deal of the diff iculty, as I have tried to show throughout my reading of Korean cinema in the new millennium, arises from the complicity of capitalist exchange with Christian metaphysics. In delving into the theology of Korean evangelicalism, my aim is not simply to provide a cultural context for the diegetic world depicted in Secret Sunshine, but to provide a discursive context for the aporia of forgiveness that stands at the film’s center. For Shin-ae’s difficulty in truly forgiving her son’s murderer is precisely the difficulty of “cutting off” within the ethical terms that find resonance within minjung theology. Despite all her efforts to disavow the evil man who caused so much pain in her life, and despite her conversion to Christianity, she is unable to forgive and unable to forget. Yet, precisely because of her conversion and her entrenchment in the melodrama of moral feeling, Shin-ae seeks vengeance more intensely than before and is doomed to suffer. She remains both enabled and trapped by the nexus of Christian morality and Korean modernity that circumscribes the realm of human grievability. Troubling are the scenes where Shin-ae cries out in emotional pain, expressing the han/ressentiment felt from losing family members closest to her, while the participants of her Christian small group can only watch helplessly.

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A particularly poignant scene that illustrates the aporia of modern forgiveness takes place toward the end of the film. Shin-ae is driving three children home from school. She seems happy, speaking in a melodious voice with the rambunctious kids, and one begins to think that she may have come to terms with her disastrous encounter with Do-seop in jail. As the children leave the car and she begins to drive away, Shin-ae notices Jung-a, the murderer’s teenage daughter, in an alley with two boys. They are bullying her, kicking, slapping, and pushing her head against the brick wall of a convenience store. Shin-ae puts the car in reverse to get a clear look. She observes with some concern as one of the boys threateningly remarks to Jung-a: “Don’t fuck with me.” He grabs her hair just when she happens to see Shin-ae watching her. They make eye contact and at this seemingly decisive moment, Shin-ae acquires a determined look and drives away. She clearly sees a scene of violence taking place before her eyes and is given the opportunity to stop it, but chooses not to intervene. After engaging in a moment of mutual, face-to-face recognition, Shin-ae stubbornly selects indifference, as she is unable to see Jung-a as separate from her father and his past sins. She is unable to cut herself off from the cycle of memory and revenge. Lee films this sequence through shot-reverse shots, implicating the viewer in Shin-ae’s spectatorial judgment. The spectator is invited to wonder whether he or she would have done the same, whether it is possible to feel melodramatic sympathy for Jung-a, or whether it is reasonable to judge her, despite the atrocity of her father’s crimes. When they meet again in the last scene of the film, Jung-a has become a hair stylist. She comes out to cut Shin-ae’s hair. In stark contrast to the intensely melodramatic interview with the barber Abraham Bomba in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), this moment does not give way to emotional outpouring but emphasizes the impossibility of forgiving the unforgivable. Shin-ae closes her eyes and, as Jung-a handles her hair, is forced to confront the bitterness and grief still raw from the loss of her son. Looking at each other’s reflection in the mirror, they confront each other face-to-face once more. Shin-ae has the opportunity to lash out violently at the child of her son’s killer, reiterating the exchange of one for another. Or she could somehow forgive. Both options remain impossible however, and she is left with a profound, unresolvable, ethical aporia. Shin-ae tears the barber cloth off her and angrily asks Jong-chan why she was brought to this specific salon. She indignantly looks up once more toward the sky. Then Shin-ae rushes home, grabs a pair of scissors, and proceeds to cut her own hair outdoors. Jong-chan, persistent to the end, comes in and holds a mirror before her. As Shin-ae snips her scissors, the camera

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slowly moves downward toward the earth, toward an area where garbage and dirt have been collected. The film fades to black and concludes. In the final moments, the camera averts its gaze from the heavenly skies toward the mundanity of the here and now. To forgive is divine, extraordinary, exceptional, but Shin-ae remains unable to perform this gesture, for it is overdetermined and delimited by the ordinary metaphors, discourses, and historical contexts that constitute her earthly reality.

Cinema Beyond Melodrama: Poetry (2010) In an interview provided in the press release materials for Poetry, Lee Chang-dong notes that the idea for the film was inspired by a real incident that took place in 2004. “A few years ago,” he says, “there was a case whereby several teenage boys from a small rural city gang-raped a middle school girl. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking of this act of violence, but wasn’t sure how I would tell this story on film.” Later, the idea and title for the film came to him while watching television in a hotel room in Tokyo: “As I watched the screen playing meditative music to the extremely typical landscape of birds flying over a peaceful river and fishermen throwing their fishnets, it hit me that this film dealing with this insidious crime could have no other title than Poetry.” Most likely, the incident Lee refers to in this interview is a nationally publicized sexual assault that took place in Miryang involving dozens of boys, an event that not only raised the issue of morally corrupted youth, but also drew attention to the corruption of the local police, who tried to cover up the crimes for the sake of the boys’ and their families’ reputations. While Lee was producing Secret Sunshine in Miryang, it could not have escaped him that this town was not only the location for the film, but also where these horrific crimes took place in 2004. Secret Sunshine, however, does not directly depict these incidents that affected the director so deeply. They would be addressed in Poetry. In the following discussion, we will see how this film from 2010 delves more deeply into a number of themes already raised in his earlier film, including the ethics of violence and the possibility of forgiveness. Poetry allows Lee, and by co-extension the viewer, to relate to the 2004 Miryang tragedy, recollecting and narrating it without taking recourse to the clichéd conventions of genre cinema. I would like to show how the conclusion to Poetry raises questions of time and reality that go beyond everyday understandings of historical temporality associated with the popular melodramatic mode. These questions are inseparable from questions of ethics

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and the other that delineate the horizon of the lived present. Thinking at the limit, Poetry attempts to overcome the metaphysics that circumscribes this horizon, transcending the politics of blame while preparing for the arrival of a time that opens up a profoundly new ethical economy. If Secret Sunshine and Poetry can be thought together, we can understand how Lee seems to have twice attempted to find the images that will properly depict all those involved in the 2004 tragedy and who continued to live while the films were being made and shown. The trajectory of Poetry intertwines several narrative strands, all of which are tightly wound around the main character, a sixty-six-year-old woman called Mija. Mija is played by legendary Korean actress Yoon Jeonghee, who has starred in hundreds of tragic tear-jerker films from the 1960s, during the so-called “golden age” of South Korean melodrama. In Poetry, she plays the guardian of her grandson, Jong-wook (David Lee), a disaffected teenager who seems more interested in watching television and sleeping in than interacting with his grandmother. The film opens with a long take of a corpse of a teenage girl floating in a river toward the viewer, recalling perhaps the corpse presented at the opening of Memories of Murder. As the body floats close to the camera, the name of the film appears, explicitly associating poetry with death. From this morbid beginning, the film shifts to Mija sitting in the waiting room of the local hospital for her regular check-up. When she sees the doctor, Mija complains of a prickly feeling in her arm and occasional lapses in memory. The doctor advises her to undergo further testing in Seoul. As she leaves the hospital, Mija encounters the mother (Park Myeong-shin, who played Myeong-heui in Camel(s)) of the drowned girl, agonizingly mourning her overwhelming loss. Mija works as a personal assistant to an old man who is physically disabled and struggles to speak due to complications from a stroke. Later in the film, while being bathed, he asks her to sleep with him, to allow him to “feel like a man” one last time. She rebuffs his request. Mija also begins attending an adult education poetry class at the local community center. The charismatic teacher of the class, played by poet Kim Yong-taek, lectures on the creative muse and the particular comportment toward the world necessary for describing its beauty. He asks that the students complete one task by the end of the month-long course: to write one poem from the heart, one that expresses this attitude of openness. In conjunction with the class, Mija attends a poetry appreciation group and there meets an easy-going police officer who enjoys telling vulgar jokes. She finds his comments distasteful and judges him inappropriate to the lofty aims of poetry.

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Fig. 21: Poetry and death. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

It is in the midst of these events that Mija is notified of two decisive pieces of information. The results of her health test indicate that she has developed Alzheimer’s disease. She will eventually lose command of her memory as well as her physical mobility. Mija’s impending mental deterioration will generate a sense of urgency for the remainder of the film, compelling the plot’s forward drive toward its conclusion. And later, even more shocking, she is informed that her grandson had participated in the repeated sexual assault of a female classmate over a six-month period. Five other boys were involved in this heinous crime. Eventually, the teenager killed herself due to the trauma and humiliation of her victimization. Mija is brought to a local restaurant where the fathers of the boys have already gathered to determine the monetary amount that the mother of the sixteen-year-old girl should be compensated so that she does not speak to the news media. One of the men makes clear that their concern is more for the future lives and reputations of their sons, and less for the well-being of the girl’s family or even the moral weight of their sons’ culpability. The floating corpse introduced at the start of the film, we can now surmise, was the victim of the boys’ sexual violence. Her Korean name was Heejin and her baptized name Agnes. Lee’s film sets these plotlines into motion, and as the film unfolds the prospects of writing poetry and finding beauty in the world become increasingly remote from the prospects of having to deal with Alzheimer’s and with the frustratingly apathetic and seemingly shameless Jong-wook. The group of fathers coerces Mija to convince Heejin’s mother to accept their

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settlement offer. “Just plead with her heart-to-heart, woman-to-woman,” one of the men says to her. When she arrives at the house and then the fields where the Agnes’s mother is harvesting, Mija’s attention is directed toward the natural beauty of her surroundings. She walks by an apricot tree and picks up a fruit that has fallen to the ground. Biting into it, Mija is suddenly struck by poetic inspiration. She quickly removes a small notebook from her purse and writes: “The apricot throws itself to the ground. It is crushed and trampled for its next life.” She continues down the path and sees Heejin’s mother. But instead of speaking to her about the grave matters Mija was sent to negotiate, they make small talk. Mija excitedly recites the poetic line she just wrote and they converse about the weather and the season’s harvest. With this they say their goodbyes. As she walks away, a look of horror forms on her face as Mija remembers the identity of the friendly woman and what she was unable to speak. It is not clear whether Mija was simply caught up in her poetic reverie and the spirit of friendly banter, or her encroaching Alzheimer’s caused her to completely forget her mission. Throughout Lee’s Poetry, an ontological separation persists between her pursuit of poetry and the business of her grandson’s guilt. According to the poetry teacher, writing a poem is about perceiving beauty in the ordinary and mundane, like appreciating the transient life of a fallen apricot. “Writing poetry is all about finding beauty,” the poet tells his students, “It is about discovering true beauty in everything we see in front of us in our everyday life.” He tells them that everyone has poetry in their hearts and that their task is to release this potential. Mija raises her hand and asks where poetic inspiration may be found. “It’s not in some special place,” the poet responds, “but somewhere you must wander around for. It isn’t waiting for you with a nameplate saying ‘poetic inspiration.’ The clear thing is, it is somewhere nearby, not far away. It’s there, right where you stand.” This vocabulary of proximity resembles that of Martin Heidegger’s when he describes Dasein as ontically or metaphysically nearest yet ontologically furthest from us. In his essay on “The Thing,” the German philosopher also speaks of proximity in the age of cinema: “What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on the radio, can remain far from us. What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near to us. Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness.”49 It is the poet’s task to find a language that properly captures the sense of Being that is nearest to human life. The search for poetic beauty, which for Mija seems so far away and remote, seems to have foreclosed the possibility of perceiving the cruelty that is immanent to her present reality.

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In another lesson, the poet emphasizes learning how to see the world with a naïve, unmediated look, reminding one perhaps of a goal shared by the phenomenological project. “To write poetry, you must see well,” he remarks, “the most important thing in life is seeing.” Holding an apple in his hand, he asks the students whether they have really seen an apple: Up till now, you haven’t seen an apple for real. To really know what an apple is, to be interested in it, to understand it, to converse with it is really seeing it. Gazing at it for a while and observing its shadow, feeling its every curve, turning it around, taking a bite out of it, imagining the sunlight absorbed in it – that is really seeing it. If you can really see something, you can feel something naturally, like water gathering in a spring.

In contrast to the moralistic look that is at issue in Secret Sunshine, the poet emphasizes a manner of looking that is without pretension, without prejudice, and that perceives the world as it is. He remarks that this comportment toward the object is preparation for writing poetry: “You should prepare paper and a pencil, and wait for the moment to come. Empty white paper. A world of pure potential, a world before creation: this is the perfect moment for a poet.” The instructor encourages his students to access the phenomenon of worldly objects in a manner that is unimpeded by the distractions associated with modern life, such as technologies that distance Dasein from Being, to see an apple once more as if for the first time. If poetry is to fulfill its promise, it is to allow its readers and listeners to experience the unfettered perception of a thing and its reality. Lee Chang-dong’s previous films, such as A Single Spark (1995), Green Fish (1997), and Peppermint Candy (1999), have character-driven plots and, as such, participate in the melodramatic mode. They involve characters that act and react rationally to their surroundings, as their actions guide the judgmental look of the film spectator through a Manichean dichotomy between good and evil operative in its diegetic world. The significance of meaningful action, expressive of interiorities that may be moralized, is reinforced through the film’s editing, which confirms the necessary and linear linkage of cause to effect that ostensibly conditions our modern reality. Even in scenes where Lee depicts moments of fantasy, such as in the daydream sequence in Oasis, the lighting remains natural and the settings adhere to the rhetoric of realism. All this holds for the majority of Poetry as well. As in Secret Sunshine, long takes, on-location shooting, and seemingly mundane dialogue dominate Poetry, sustaining a mood of everydayness throughout the film.

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But this mood is broken when it reaches its sublime conclusion, manifesting the emergence of the theological from mundane reality through the “miracle” of cinema described by André Bazin: “Although the sacerdotal reality transcends the natural order, it nonetheless springs from a social and historical milieu.”50 After Mija pays her part of the settlement to the mother of the teenage victim, she does not celebrate with the other parents, but takes Jong-wook home, cuts his fingernails, has him bathe, and finally gives him up to the police. As soon as he is taken away, Mija sits down in her small kitchen and begins to write. This is the last time we will see her in the film. The next day, her poem is left on the poetry instructor’s lectern with a bouquet of flowers. He remarks that he will recite Mija’s poem, which is called, “Agnes’s Song.” The film then cuts to a montage of images: a shot of Jong-wook’s mother coming to visit Mija’s empty apartment, the tree that Mija contemplated while waiting for poetic inspiration to arrive, children playing with hula hoops, a bus departing from a bus stop, a girl walking across a school playground, the science classroom where the atrocious crimes took place, Agnes’s house in the country with a close-up on the dog happily jumping up to the camera, a shot taken from inside a moving bus, and the bridge from where Agnes jumped to her death. This montage does not obey an ascending logic of causal narrativity, nor does it attempt to delineate a trajectory of revenge presupposed by a schema of means and ends. These shots seem to seek another logic, one that is unprecedented and guided by a sensibility inherent to the phenomenon of the images themselves. As they unfold, Mija’s voice reads her elegiac poem in voiceover. It is written by Lee himself (the English translation is derived from the subtitles to the United Entertainment Korea DVD): How is it over there? How lonely is it? Is it still glowing red at sunset? Are the birds still singing on the way to the forest? Can you receive the letter I dared not send? Can I convey… the confession I dared not make? Will time pass and roses fade? Now it’s time to say goodbye Like the wind that lingers and then goes, just like shadows To promises that never came, to the love sealed till the end.

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With the next line, the film cuts to the school playground. Mija’s gentle voice is overtaken by that of a young girl’s, presumably Agnes, who continues reading the lyrical poem until the end. To the grass kissing my weary ankles And to the tiny footsteps following me It’s time to say goodbye Now as darkness falls Will a candle be lit again? Here I pray… nobody shall cry… and for you to know… how deeply I loved you The long wait in the middle of a hot summer day An old path resembling my father’s face Even the lonesome wild flower shyly turning away How deeply I loved How my heart fluttered at hearing your faint song

When Agnes speaks the next line, the film cuts to the bridge where she committed suicide. A truck passes by while sounding its horn. I bless you Before crossing the black river With my soul’s last breath I am beginning to dream… a bright sunny morning… again I awake blinded by the light... and meet you… standing by me.

A plaintive song, the poem both laments and commemorates loss, seeks redemption from guilt, and meditates on the passing of time. As the words end, the camera moves toward the side of the bridge and, as it comes closer to the railing, a teenage Agnes enters the frame. She looks down to the water below. The film cuts to a long shot of the rippling river. Cutting back, Agnes slowly turns around to meet the gaze of the camera and smiles slightly, arresting the viewer with her peaceful look. In an interview, Lee states that, “I wanted the audience to face her directly at the end of the film. I wanted people to remember her faintly smiling face and expression directly looking

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Fig. 22: Agnes turns to look at the viewer. Courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

into the camera, and to accept her emotions along with Mija’s poem.”51 With this shot, Lee stages an encounter with the other that is profoundly ethical and, through a development of some key points introduced in chapter one of this book, affirms the infinite alterity of the face of the other. Lee’s film ends with the image that began it, an extreme long shot of a bridge suspended over rippling water. Poetry began with Agnes’s corpse and ends with her reincarnation, brought back to life through the poetry of film. When Mija affirms not only life’s beauty, but its ugliness, tragedy, and injustice, she is able to write her poem. Through this process, Lee’s film enters into another register that transcends the ordinary course of historical temporality, a course aligned with and constituted by continuity editing, the movement-image, and Euclidean notions of time and space. Instead of obeying the spacing of time that governs the metaphysics of this tradition of cinematic realism, the final moments of Poetry rise to the level of modern poiesis. They give us the direct images of time where past and future temporalities, the deaths of Agnes and Mija, are shown as constituted in the present. When the voice of the former overtakes that of the latter, these two women are united through the poetic image. Seeing the way these two women saw while hearing the grain of their voices, the camera allows both seeing and hearing to enter into free indirect discourse, to bring to life a perspective that ultimately belongs to no one in this final sequence. This perception of reality seems not to issue from a singular ego. It is a mode of thinking-being that is constituted instead through the unfolding of the moving image itself. In his essay on poetic language, Heidegger reaches a

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culmination whereby the word itself grants the Being to the reality it ostensibly signifies. “Time times [Die Zeit zeitigt],” he writes, revealing how the noun “time” becomes a kind of creative action or verb through its poetics: Time times simultaneously: the has-been, presence, and the present that is waiting for our encounter and is normally called the future. Time in its timing removes us into its threefold simultaneity, moves us thence while holding out to us the disclosure of what is in the same time, the concordant oneness of the has-been, presence, and the present waiting the encounter.52

This final sequence from Lee’s Poetry realizes a pure optical and sound situation that does not easily conform to the demands of narrativity. It utilizes sound and image to produce their own ontologies – culminating in a cinema without ends, or in other words, a cinema of pure means whereby past and future temporalities are collapsed into the taking place of the moving image in the present. Such a cinema confounds the means-ends logic of mythic violence, passing into the expiatory counter-politics of divine violence. Mija’s poem sings on behalf of Agnes, whom she did not know or meet, bringing the past into relation with the present. The series of shots blur the distinction between the two women. Such relations confound the principle of exchange-value that underpins the exchange of money for the silence of Agnes’s mother and for the life of Agnes herself. Perhaps this explains the incommensurability of poetic language and the logic of settlement through money that blocked Mija’s capacity to compose a poem. When her voice is overtaken by that of Agnes in the final moments of the film, the living enters into relation with the dead, not through a process of psychoanalytic identification, but by showing how the heterogeneity and singularity of one life enters into relation with another. They “wait for the encounter,” as Heidegger writes, one made possible through the cinema. This ethics, grounded in sound and image, arises through Lee’s elevation of the film medium, which is a kind of ennoblement of the medium that sublates the reality and trauma of Agnes’s death. In his essay, “Cinema as a Democratic Emblem,” Alain Badiou comments on this art of ennoblement when he asserts that, “At the cinema, we get to the pure from the impure,” echoing the statement by Bazin that I quoted above.53 In the other longstanding arts, one often does not rise, but falls from aristocratic grandeur down to the mundane and the everyday. Cinema is unique in that it stands at the frontier of art and non-art, of reality and that which transcends it. As Badiou continues:

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It incorporates the new forms of existence, be they art of non-art, and it makes a certain selection, albeit a selection which is never complete. So that in any film, even a pure masterpiece, you can find a great number of banal images, vulgar material, stereotypes, images seen one hundred times elsewhere, things of no interest whatsoever.54

Lee’s Poetry ennobles the mundanity of post-IMF reality, drawing attention to mysteries of human poiesis in the midst of neoliberal dehumanization, while elevating New Korean realism to the level of cinematic art. It shows us that this experience of ennoblement is produced through relation – between precarious beings, between Mija and Agnes, Lee and the victims of the 2004 Miryang case, and between the film and the spectator. These relations are secured through the coordinating of lived time between each of these elements, a gesture of ennoblement that is simultaneously an ethical one. Indeed, this elevating of reality is a particularly urgent aim for Lee and his aspirations for the future of cinema in Korea. In the press release materials for Poetry, he provides the following comments that express a deep melancholy for cinema’s future, by linking the death of poetry to the death of cinema: These are times when poetry is dying away. Some lament such loss and others claim, ‘Poetry deserves to die.’ Regardless, people continue to read and write poetry. What does it mean then to be writing poetry when prospects of an ongoing future seem dismal? This is a question I want to pose to the public. But in fact, it is a question I pose to myself as a filmmaker. What does it mean to be making films at times when films are dying away?

Lee is not referring to the death of commercial cinema, the popular melodramatic films that continue to be successfully produced and consumed in Korea and elsewhere. He is referring, as he states in a 2011 interview, to an art cinema that allows the spectator “to see the world with different eyes, to feel beauty that is not visible, to ask questions of life, to think about the meaning of my life.”55 Lee clearly seeks a cinema that can show viewers how life may be redeemed and how reality may be elevated in ways that do not quickly conform to the narrative and aesthetic forms endlessly reiterated by the cinema associated with the culture industry. Poetry realizes this cinema, one that allows the viewer “to think about the meaning of [one’s] life,” by telling the story of how Mija attends to the precariousness of life itself. Throughout Lee’s film, she is confronted with mortality, not only Agnes’s, but also her own. And as Poetry unfolds,

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through the passing of time and as Alzheimer’s slowly affects Mija’s consciousness, the viewer is presented with an opportunity to think about his or her own lived life while accompanied by the life of the moving image. When Lee claims that a certain kind of cinema is dying, he seems to be referring to a cinema that enables the mortal, human viewer to live his or her life in time, irreversible, from birth to death. This stands in contrast to the repetitious production of sympathy associated with the popular melodramatic mode and the generic eternal recurrence of the commercial cinema. Indeed, Lee seems to ennoble the reality of the medium itself by allowing its cyclical materiality, an endlessly reproducible film reel, to express existential, lived time. This is where this final sequence from Poetry coincides with the time of profane forgiveness, bringing us back to the introduction of this chapter. In her account of political action, Arendt describes two faculties that must be maintained lest the body politic fall into chaos. The first is the power of the promise, which stabilizes the predictability of the future and assures others of the coherence and continuity of the self through time. Such a notion of the self is a necessary construct for Arendt, for it is precisely this political self that is the precondition for inclusion in the modern community. The second is forgiveness, for, as I briefly mentioned, forgiveness interrupts the everyday course of historical reality and enables time to be experienced as duration. Beyond the deadlock of time induced by the cycle of sin and punishment, forgiving “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”56 In other words, through forgiveness, the one who seeks violence and the one who is to be the victim of it are both released from the logic of debt and exchange that constitute modern revenge. In this, the power of the promise and the miracle of forgiveness act in dialectical relation to each other, both subsuming the other in order to constantly start again in the public, political realm. In the final shots of Poetry, Agnes is reborn and given new life through the power of cinema. Her appearance manifests the interruption of everyday temporality by showing that the aim of Mija’s transfiguration, as her voice is overtaken by Agnes, is to renew the possibilities of lived life. Such rebirth is precisely what forgiveness accomplishes, as Arendt writes: The life span of man running toward death would invariably carry every­ thing human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of

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interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.57

If the cinema has the capacity to provide the sympathetic spectator with the opportunity to enable this renewal, then it must be made conditional upon its death. Poetry and cinema could be said to be always dying, each in their specific ways. Yet, they require a sensitive soul, one open to the possibility of profane forgiveness with all its attendant impossibilities, to grant them their second chance.

6. Global Cinema in the Age of Posthumanity In the previous chapter, I discussed Rey Chow’s reading of Secret Sunshine. In her essay, Chow shows how Lee Chang-dong’s film takes the concept of forgiveness, circumscribed by the humanist metaphysics of Christian morality, to its limit, deposing sovereignty of its right to forgive within this metaphysics. She notes that the “Christian dimension,” meaning its ethics and global aspirations, has not yet “exhausted the possibilities of the future of the human.”1 The film does not provide a means of depicting Shin-ae’s forgiveness beyond this politico-theological dimension – another ethics, as we have seen, was offered in Lee’s Poetry. While Secret Sunshine does not delineate a means of forgiving outside the hackneyed modes of representation associated with the ethics of popular melodrama, through its critique the film nevertheless does gesture to the discursive preconditions that make forgiving the other possible. In other words, Shin-ae’s suffering marks the limits of the ethics constrained by the melodramatic mode and yet gestures toward that which is not human; or, as Chow puts it, “whatever the human may become.”2 As we have seen, the humanist impulse is intrinsic to the melodramatic mode. In her discussion of the melodrama of race in Playing the Race Card, Linda Williams reveals that key to the experience of redemption in narratives such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Gone with the Wind (1939) and the television series Roots (1977) is the recognition of African-Americans as humans victimized by the dehumanizing institution of slavery. The emotional power, for the Antebellum viewer of the Christ-like Uncle Tom (in the novel’s theatrical renderings), coalesces around the “historically unprecedented recognition of the humanity of slaves.”3 Significantly, Williams notes that the transmutation of bodily suffering into virtue, which “is a topos of western culture that goes back to Christian iconography,” carries “special weight” in American melodrama, such as in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.4 With this recognition comes a host of ideological assumptions about the inherent virtue of the human being, its capacities and limits, and its grievability. Working in tension with this mode of constituting the humanity of on-screen characters, Lee’s film, we saw in the previous chapter, reveals how melodrama both enables and forecloses notions of forgiveness within the political theology of the Christian dimension. Throughout this book, I have shown how millennial Korean films diverge from this key aspect of melodrama, such that the humanity of the

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characters depicted in them, gleaned through acts of intense violence and rage, is rendered unstable and unclear. If we are to find a way to think the ethics of revenge and forgiveness in our historical epoch, this thinking must pass through these assumptions about the morality and nature of the human being. Our task is to demarcate the impossibilities of the ethical relation through fundamental critique, so that other human beings and other forms of lived life may be hospitably allowed into our midst. In this book’s preceding chapters, I have brought to light the epistemological limits that prevent us from forgiving the other outside the moral predeterminations concomitant with the melodrama of the human being, to prepare a way toward overcoming these limits and thus to visualize forgiveness in a manner that is worthy of its name. In order to think forgiveness, in its heterogeneity and destabilizing alterity, we must begin to imagine an ethics independently of the human. In this chapter, I would like to look at three films that allow us to explore the possibility of a non-human ethics. As we shall see, these works continue to critique the grounds of ethics associated with melodrama and the problem of otherness intimately connected to it, but do so in order to imagine a way relating to non-human others that does not rely on humanist concepts of the self. Park Chan-wook’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006) thinks through the generic conventions of the romance-comedy and puts into radical question the possibility of romantic love as depicted in the cinema. If the face may be read, as I have argued in the previous chapter, as a key signifier of alterity, Kim Ki-duk’s Time (2006) explores the ethical implications of the human face when it is surgically altered and made unrecognizable. Finally, in Park’s Thirst (2009), the ethics between a vampire priest and the humans he must murder in order to survive inspires a fundamental thinking about the metaphysics of Catholicism in Korea. I aim to show how this film continues a mode of critical thought that can be traced back to JSA and the Vengeance Trilogy, a mode that thinks the limits of ontological boundaries between the exception and the rule, local and global, and the human and non-human. In all three films, we shall see that a critical ethics, one that anticipates what the human may yet become, is made allegorically manifest through the relation of the ostensibly human spectator to the technological cinema.

The Restoration of Romance in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006) While Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy has been celebrated by film critics and festival attendees, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (hereafter Cyborg)

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has received a much more lukewarm response from these same audiences. In his review for The Guardian, film critic Peter Bradshaw disapprovingly writes that the film represents the anger and alienation of those seriously suffering from mental illness “very lightly.” Indeed, Cyborg is arguably the most consistently satirical of all his work, uniting both child-like whimsy and violent irreverence. This irreverent tone is also why Bradshaw complains that, “the origins of Young-goon’s depression are not treated with any great dramatic depth. There are bizarre reveries, including a yodeling musical interlude, but this is a frustrating and unsatisfying piece of work.”5 I would like to begin by proposing that Park’s ostensibly “light” treatment of the mentally ill, far from being what Bradshaw calls a “softcore fantasy,” could be read more affirmatively. In this section, we will see that the depiction of mental illness in the psychiatric ward is at once a rejection of the codes normally associated its melodramatic representation as well as a presentation of an extreme instantiation of romantic love – one that, through its flights of fantasy, asks how love between two people may be depicted and how it is possible at all. As an auteur working within the commercial South Korean film industry, Park continues his interrogation into film genres in Cyborg. If the Vengeance Trilogy comments on the conventions of the revenge thriller, his 2006 film could be said to comment on the conventions of the science-fiction film and romantic-comedy, as well as the humanist assumptions that underlie them. The film begins with Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong), an assembly-line factory worker who imagines herself to be a cyborg. Convinced that transistor electricity is her only means of nourishment, Young-goon cuts open her wrist and inserts wires into the bloody gash. Park displays admirable virtuosity in this opening sequence, relishing in the joy of the cinema by utilizing precise camera movements while cutting between credits and flashbacks in time and place. The opening is followed by the sterile settings of a psychiatric ward, where the film settles into the story. Already admitted as a patient, the psychotic Young-goon, with unkempt hair and bleached eyebrows, begins speaking to clocks and fluorescent lights. She believes that she can communicate with these devices when wearing her grandmother’s dentures. Irredeemably convinced of her technological constitution, Younggoon becomes anorexic, refusing human food. As the film continues, we meet a host of delusional and mentally unstable characters in the ward, as if plucked from Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). They exhibit unpredictable, obsessive behavior, at once cruel and then humorous the next moment. A narcissistic, overweight woman eats the white radish that Young-goon refuses to eat. A

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salary man who thinks that he is at fault whenever anything goes wrong walks backward in a display of extreme politeness. And a young boy believes that he is born with an invisible rubber band that constricts his waist. At the institution, Young-goon meets a patient named Il-soon (played by “superstar” talent Rain), who has been institutionalized for his kleptomaniac tendencies and unrelenting obsession with the cleanliness of his teeth. In his first movie role, Rain serves as the film’s leading romantic male protagonist as the two young psychotics fall in love. The psychiatrists and professionals who work in the ward are as self-satisfied as those depicted in Forman’s film, but also, and more significantly, in Park’s N.E.P.A.L, which I discussed in the previous chapter. By the end of Cyborg, Il-soon learns to affirm Young-goon’s delusion of cyborg-being, and despite her continued mental illness, convinces her to eat a mouthful of rice. Park refuses to depict mentally ill characters that are conventionally grievable and redeemable. In contrast to Jeong Yoon-chul’s Marathon (2005), a “tear-jerker” film about a mother who encourages her mentally disabled son to run a marathon, Park refuses to depict the main protagonists sympathetically, negating the generic depiction of disadvantaged characters who overcome their personal struggles. (Marathon was the fourth highest grossing Korean film the year Cyborg appeared.) As the spectator comes to know the young couple, Cyborg ultimately fails to satisfy his or her demand to see them returned to mental health and live happily ever after. In this, Park’s film also operates in stark contrast to a film like Shrek 2, the third highest grossing film in South Korea in 2004, which depicts two protagonists who fall in love and seems to conclude with the reassuring message: “I’m an ogre, but that’s OK.” In this Dreamworks animation, Shrek and Fiona are apparently ok because what matters is the content of their moral character and that one loves and is loved, regardless of their outward, non-human appearance. Another kind of contrast with Park’s film may be made to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001). Like Cyborg, Amélie exteriorizes the whimsical fantasies and dreams of the female protagonist through CG spectacle. But unlike the French award winner, Park’s film does not partake in its brand of generic melodramatic sensibility: Young-goon does not help the helpless and she is not rescued from her shell of psychological delusion at the end of the film. Park introduces the viewer to damaged characters while observing them with a non-judgmental, amoral gaze. The film eschews the conventional narrative trajectory of a traumatized subject who works through the past in order to return to normalcy, as neither Young-goon nor Il-soon seem capable of coming to terms with their own painful memories. It is this “non-serious”

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treatment of the young psychotics that Peter Bradshaw apparently finds objectionable. They seem not to be redeemable human beings, but are depicted unfeelingly and treated much too ironically. Indeed, Young-goon and Il-soon may be characterized as cyborgs described by Donna Haraway in her well-known manifesto: “the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense; a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency.”6 Mentally unstable characters, Younggoon and Il-soon are not supposed to be taken “seriously” as sympathetic human individuals. In a 2008 interview with the filmmaker, Alex Fitch suggests that Cyborg seems to be influenced by sci-fi imagery in American and Japanese cinema. He cites examples such as the man-machine hybrid in Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) as well as stories of mental patients living in a science fiction world in Slaughterhouse Five (1972) or Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995). While Park’s appreciation of American and Japanese genre films is well known, he nevertheless responds that: “I guess you can see those influences but those films are not what I thought of when I was making this film. In fact, I was worried about finding any traces of other films and when I noticed anything like that, I tried to erase the influence.”7 Despite his reputation as a cinephile-filmmaker, Park nevertheless claims that any similarities to other films remain merely coincidental, attesting to his anxiety of influence and vigilant negation of cinematic referentiality. Later in the interview, the filmmaker explains that he nevertheless remains keenly aware of the multiplicity of meanings inspired by the signs and generic codes deployed in his work. Thus, while he knows that viewers will read into the dentures, white radish, and other seemingly meaningful signs that appear through the film, Park affirms the semiotic multiplication brought to bear on them, despite their typical genrification and melodramatization.8 He aims to erase all referential traces in Cyborg, traces that may or may not be intended, and yet this erasure also aims to open up worlds of meaning, beyond those that may be too easily folded back in their typical sentimentalization. Park’s film invites symptomatic interpretation while quickly disavowing and frustrating it. Signs point to logical dead-ends, ambiguities persist and do not coalesce into innuendo, and symptoms cannot be traced to an originating cause. Cyborg seems to dabble in the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis, but at the same time does not acquiesce to its teleological demands. Younggoon and Il-soon remain illegible to the gaze of such a spectator, always already habituated to the expectations of American popular cinema, and

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who expects the experience of redemption through the recognition of their inherent virtue. When Young-goon “comes out” to her mother and declares that she is a cyborg, the mother misunderstands and treats her like a young girl who has become pregnant or acquired a secret deformity. “It won’t interfere with the way you live,” the mother remarks, “just don’t let anybody know.” The etiology of Young-goon’s anorexia ultimately frustrates psychological interpretation. Indeed, one may delve into Young-goon’s personal history and connect the loss of her grandmother to her imaginations of becoming cyborg. A number of flashbacks depict her grandmother believing herself to be a mouse, and one may speculate on how delusion is passed on through the generations. In one scene, she is shown ceaselessly nibbling on white radish and being taken away by the “white ones,” Young-goon’s term for the medical practitioners who wear hospital scrubs. The mother, we find out, was too busy running the family restaurant and had left the child rearing to her mother. A possible connection between Young-goon’s traumatic memory of her grandmother being taken away and her believing herself to be a cyborg is never referenced. Could her mental illness have something to do with Young-goon working endlessly at the radio factory? Or could it have something to do with their constant listening to the radio at home? These questions are not clarified in Park’s film. The same hermeneutic frustration remains when ascertaining the nature of Il-soon’s mental malady. At one point in the film, he explains that he began to steal obsessively and exhibit signs of anti-social behavior after his mother left him and took his electric toothbrushes. A possible cause-effect relationship may be speculated upon, say between loss and male hysteria, but is not confirmed in the film. At best, one may identify his constant tooth brushing as a kind of defensive formation, a compulsion to repeat that is admittedly treated less tragically and more comically. Il-soon’s unfolding narrative does not give us any better understanding of his symptoms and no answers are provided that may explain his ostensibly damaged psyche, how he has dealt with trauma, and why his delusions take the form they do. Throughout her life as a cyborg, Young-goon is concerned above all with her “purpose.” According to her self-conception as a mechanical being, she believes that disavowing her humanity may circumvent the vagaries surrounding the “meaning of life.” In Young-goon’s fantasies, her dead grandmother repeatedly appears to dispense insight into the meaning of existence. But each time, just as her grandmother is about speak, an interruption forecloses this communication. Young-goon cannot hear her grandmother’s voice as she lies in a large glass laboratory cylinder. In

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another fantasy, she is whisked far away by a giant rubber band around her waist, recalling the malady of a fellow patient in the psychiatric ward. A great admirer of Hitchcock, Park seems to have populated his films with McGuffins, objects and signs that seem to express meaning, of narrative signif icance or of life itself, but upon closer inspection remain empty, hermeneutic dead ends. Cyborg’s diegetic world is insular, ahistorical even, as if to deliberately refuse the representation of real individualities or types while remaining within the hermetically sealed walls of the mental institution. Frustrating attempts to be read as a genre film, or interpreted symptomatically, Cyborg calls for another mode of analysis, one that treats human beings in the cinema as phenomenal surfaces to be affirmed and not as fleshand-blood individuals to be interrogated. Park’s film seems to encourage a style of spectatorship that does not deem its characters to be faulty human beings, but to recognize them as emerging into inhuman ­potentialities. If, as David Morley and Kevin Robins argue, techno-Orientalism figures the Asian other as without subjectivity and thus ontologically akin to soulless machines, Cyborg affirms this subjectlessness, not as exclusive to Asianness, but as intrinsic to the mechanisms of melodrama.9 Like Chow in her reading of Secret Sunshine, Park’s film takes the humanist assumptions of the melodrama to the limit, in an attempt to imagine “whatever the human may become.”10 To show how this emergence into an inhuman condition may be possible, I turn to a 2009 interview with the director, in which he is asked to elaborate on the role his university training in philosophy plays in his writing and filmmaking: If I were to comment on the specific trend in philosophy or a specific school of thought, perhaps I can say that I still have a trace of existentialism left from my studies. And also I have learned this attitude towards logic, or attitude towards the process of thinking, where I would have this subject, and I would create a sentence around the subject. And then keep following this chain of thought that derived from this subject until I’m met with a wall where I can’t go anywhere. Or, if I can put it another way, I have learned how to dig deep down and try and look for the root of where this subject originates from.11

This chain of thought may be characterized as essentially critical, one that takes its “subject” and pushes it to its breaking point, where one is met “with a wall” and confronted with an irreducible aporia. What remains important in this trajectory is not the metaphysics that anchors signification, but

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the movement of thought itself, as the fluctuating ground that constitutes the possibility of meaning, expressed through the specific powers of the cinema. I would like to explicate this movement further, taking recourse to philosophy and film in order to isolate an existential discourse surrounding the origin of the sci-fi romance/melodrama and to delineate an ethical thinking that is aligned with the unfolding of Cyborg. An existential thinker that Park studied while a student at Sogang University in Seoul is the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In one of his most well-known works, Fear and Trembling (1843), which may have been familiar to the filmmaker, the problem of unrequited romantic love is framed as a problem of faith, taken to its most irrational limit. In the preamble to the text, we may remember how Kierkegaard discusses a kind of romance that dispenses with the “feelings” commonly understood as necessary to romantic love. While the latter is contingent upon devising strategems for winning the beloved, Kierkegaard shows how the figure of the Knight of Faith, who remains estranged from his beloved, nevertheless loves the princess without condition, without prescription, and without compromise. His uncompromising love, the philosopher writes: would take on for him the expression of an eternal love, would acquire a religious character, be transfigured into a love for the eternal being which, although it denied fulfillment, still reconciled him once more in the eternal consciousness of his love’s validity in an eternal form that no reality can take from him.12

Crucial for Kierkegaard is that the Knight of Faith affirms the impossibility of his love, not only in this world, but also in the world of imagined fantasy. He does not envision a moment when his love will be requited. And yet, the philosopher continues, “by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her on the strength of the absurd.”13 By “absurd,” Kierkegaard refers to the incompossibility of the Knight’s love circumscribed by everyday notions of pastness and futurity, which delimit the present by modern notions of teleological historicity. The absurd does not give us a conclusive purpose of existence, such as one that a cyborg would demand, but only leads us to the next aporia, the next bend in the spiral of history. To conclusively renounce the princess would mean to give up on love in this world as well as in the hereafter; yet, the Knight of Faith finds joy precisely in this renunciation, not in order to imagine an alternative, utopian world where he will win the princess eventually, but one in the here and now. It is precisely the

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affirmative attitude toward this virtual here and now where the absurd may be grounded. This affirmation, a gesture that is profoundly ethical, underpins the whole of Park’s film, the affirmative “ok” of cyborg-being. In order to convince her to eat, Il-soon devises what he calls a “rice megatron,” fashioned from his pocket photograph of his mother, that he claims will convert human sustenance into electrical energy. Of course, this device does not actually perform this action. Functionally, it is only a paperweight imbued with sentimental value. In a scene that seems to express some vague, sexual connotation, again without conclusive psychic significance, Il-soon implants the megatron inside her. He raises a knife to her back, but just as he is about to penetrate her skin, a black marker deftly replaces the blade. Il-soon draws a small door and “opens” her up. Cutting to her face, Young-goon smiles in pleasure as she receives his mechanical gift. Throughout, the scene unfolds as if two children were playacting, as if they were learning about sexuality for the first time. By interacting on her level of belief, while not patronizing and eschewing premeditated deception, Il-soon gains Young-goon’s trust so that she can eat a spoonful of rice. In the cafeteria where this happens, all the patients consume a spoonful of their own rice just as she does, heightening the drama. When Young-goon swallows, her insides glow and become visible as in an x-ray image. And like Maria’s heart-machine in Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, we see the megatron glow inside her as a motor that will sustain her life. Her mechanical interior, composed of gears and other machine parts, appears as if superimposed onto her skin. Il-soon’s gift to Young-goon was essentially a counterfeit apparatus; yet, it nevertheless fulfills the exchange of gift and countergift that constitutes the social relation. (In this regard, one may think back to the gift of “counterfeit” tofu, the white cake, given by Geum-ja to her daughter in Lady Vengeance.) This exchange leaves a kind of spectral excess that affirms Young-goon’s “absurd” belief in her own hybrid, cyborg ontology. While this ethics operates both within the everyday economy of giving and receiving between individuals, it also exists to foreclose hasty condemnation of her cyborg-being, exhibited by the psychiatric “white ones,” and which immediately reinstates the dynamics of power and manipulation between doctors and their patients. It is significant that the kleptomaniac Il-soon, instead of taking from others, here gives the megatron, not in order to demand a return gift, but to give unconditionally, without reserve and without melodrama, precisely on the strength of the Kierkegaardian absurd. Throughout Cyborg, Park seems to return to this absurd as the

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Fig. 23: Young-goon eats a spoonful of rice. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

source of his negative criticality, to bring the generic forms of sci-fi and the rom-com to aporia, not only in order to reveal its contradictions, but also to think its very origins. At a key moment in Cinema 1, Deleuze aligns Kierkegaard’s ethical thinking to the thinking cinema. In the chapter on the affection-image, Deleuze characterizes the image of pure potentiality as an “any-spacewhatever.” In my readings of Kim Ki-duk’s cinema, particularly in this director’s use of the filmed face, I elucidated the “any-space-whatever” as an undetermined, virtual space that underlies the production of affect. Notably, Deleuze later connects this image of potentiality to the possibility of faith, to the wonderment that belief in this world is possible. Deleuze writes that such questions of faith weave “a whole set of relations of great value between philosophy and the cinema.”14 Both play out the deconstruction and subsequent leap of faith from the any-space-whatever into pure potentiality: It is because, in philosophy as in the cinema, in Pascal as in Bresson, in Kierkegaard as in Dreyer, the true choice, that which consists in choosing choice, is supposed to restore everything to us. It will enable us to rediscover everything, in the spirit of sacrifice, at the moment of sacrifice or even before the sacrifice is performed. Kierkegaard said that true choice means that by abandoning the bride, she is restored to us by that very act; and that by sacrificing his son, Abraham rediscovers him through that very act.15

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Referring to the Biblical narratives Kierkegaard analyzes in Fear and Trembling, Deleuze aligns the paradoxical moralism espoused by this existential philosopher with the absurd faith that the cinema can constitute meaning at all. What is miraculous is the sensory-motor link between brain and screen, a linkage of body and technology, which gives rise to belief, in the world and in the loved other. This is precisely the faith that Il-soon continues to have in his psychotic princess, Young-goon, and which affirms her cinematic form of life. When Park says that in his films he chooses a subject then tries to “keep following this chain of thought that derived from this subject until I’m met with a wall where I can’t go anywhere,” he seems to work through this chain of ethical thinking through cinematic means. I have been trying to argue for a rigorous critique of romance through the logic of melodrama and the constitution of human being in Cyborg. This thinking, achieved with the help of the prosthetics of the cinema, remains untimely with regard to the generic melodrama, as Cyborg seems at once to reveal the technics of what is called the human, while resisting the absolute surrender to this Western metaphysics. Park’s film appropriates the melodrama of the human subject and overturns this metaphysics from within. In this, Cyborg does not straightforwardly appropriate the conventions associated with the American melodrama and its discourse of human love. On the other hand, Park’s film also should not be read as simply a localization of global Hollywood conventions. The critical line of thinking at work here operates in a language that is not national, but in a specifically cinematic language that attends to the present state of an always already global American ideology while reworking its generic forms, critically thinking the history of this globality through the chronotope of the cinema. Here, the give and take between Korean and American cinemas, across time and space, gives way to a discursive register that does not acquiesce to an either/ or logic, either global or local, but affirms the exchanges possible between both. The ontology of these exchanges, these gifts without compromise, without reserve, and without premeditation, seems to inform the way Park approaches his own critical practice, his own cinephilia, a love for the thoughtful flux of the moving image and which can never be absolutely possessed. Indeed, Park’s words and Young-goon’s cyborg-being as it unfolds throughout the film trajectory recall philosopher Bernard Stiegler in his theorization of technics and time.16 In his analysis, Stiegler writes that time-consciousness is inescapably circumscribed by our metaphysical mechanisms of calendric and cardinal time, the prosthetic means by which

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time is exteriorized and made legible. He describes this exteriorization, however, as essentially deconstructive. That is, modern time-consciousness is an exteriorizing process of denoting difference, of spacing, continuously delineating past from present, while unraveling metaphysics to the point of its untenability. The model for this delineation, Stiegler notes, is the cinema, unfolding like a melody in time and whose principle, “to connect disparate elements together into a single temporal flux,” precisely expresses the deconstructive action inherent to the experience of duration.17 This critique of technics as evolving toward ruination, like the life of the mortal human being, seems to be at stake in Park’s film as well. In the very last scene of the film the couple wait in the rain for a lightning bolt that will end their lives. They sit near a tent and hold a long metal pole into the air. Rain comes pouring down on Young-goon as well as on the actor Rain. As they sit and wait, he remarks, “More than our socks are wet.” The scene proves once more elusive, even a bit facile in that Il-soon’s vaguely sexual comment yields no psychoanalytic secrets, bringing us once more to ponder Park’s absurd. They wait, not for the utopian, sci-fi vision of the future, but seek the deconstruction of its nostalgic representation, living at the threshold of a metaphysical aporia. They wait, in other words, for a miracle that is impossible and belies their mental condition. “The movie is not interested with the concept of cure,” Park remarks, commenting on Cyborg, “In my view, a cure is impossible. It’s suggesting that even in that situation we should just eat and keep living.”18 Young-goon’s trauma and her delusional fantasies resist generic explanation, rejecting the entertainment of the spectator typically manifest through the melodrama of how the sick returns to normalcy in order to produce new questions, ethical and cinematic, and to affirm new possibilities of being with the loved other. In waiting, she and Il-soon keep open the possibilities of a romance-to-come, and yet, through this waiting, their romance is restored to them.

Plastic Love and Time (2006) Kim Ki-duk’s Time revolves around a man and woman who are involved in an ill-fated relationship. The characters, like the men and women who appear in most of Kim’s films, remain largely unsympathetic. Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) is immature and seems to be motivated largely by selfish desire. Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon) is insecure, needy, and seems to have no hesitation in manipulating Ji-woo so that he will love her. At first sight, the film seems to raise the question of whether this relationship is one based on

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love or co-dependency. Yet, far from providing a definitive response to this question, one that would redeem the spectator’s unpleasure and growing exasperation in witnessing an increasingly dysfunctional relationship, Kim’s film interrogates the conditions that give meaning to notions of “­co-dependency,” “immaturity,” and “insecurity” in the realm of melodramatic love. Time offers a critique of such categories by asking who or what one loves when thinking of the other, specifically when the face of the other is drastically altered beyond recognition through plastic surgery. If the very definition of the human being is inseparable from the existence of a stable psychological interiority, from the presence of an authentic self whose morality and intentions for the world are legible to others, Kim’s critique in Time is characterized by the affirmation of an interiority that drastically shifts and of definitions of the human changing over the course of time. The film opens with a grotesque montage sequence of a body undergoing cosmetic surgery. Kim shows us explicit close-ups of a face, immobilized from the application of general anesthesia, being worked on. An eyelid is marked with a small skin pen, tweezers suture folds of flesh together, facial moles are burned off, a cheek is sliced open with a scalpel, blood from a reconstructed nose is sopped up with gauze, and a mouth is violated with metal tools and a rubber-gloved finger. The images are shot in grainy video, as if acquired from footage of a medical demonstration. If Kim’s earlier films, including Address Unknown and Bad Guy, were disturbing in their depiction of gratuitous violence and cruelty between individuals, in this opening sequence from Time a similar gratuitousness is depicted in the violence performed on the body during cosmetic surgery. The female patient leaves the clinic wearing dark sunglasses and a mask that covers her nose and mouth. She passes through a set of two swinging doors that divide the image of a woman’s face in half. The left door features a large image of the left side of a face prior to cosmetic surgery, and, on the right, the right side of the same face is shown after the medical procedure. This dichotomy underscores the physical transformation that takes place over the course of time, framed in terms of a “before” and “after” – two points in time, two photographs, which juxtapose the old and new selves. As Time continues, Kim will depict the ethical consequences of bodily transformation concomitant with the process of time. When the woman exits the cosmetic surgery clinic, Seh-hee enters into the film frame and crashes into her. The masked woman drops a framed photograph of herself, taken before her face was reconstructed, that breaks when it hits the pavement. Seh-hee apologizes and promises to fix the frame

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at a local photo shop. This scene will become significant when it is repeated in a cyclical manner at the very end of the film. Seh-hee enters a small corner café called “Room & Rumour,” where Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo), a film editor and her boyfriend of two years, is waiting for her. She becomes extremely jealous when Ji-woo looks at and talks to other women in the café. Holding the broken photograph in her hands, she even suspects him of being attracted to the woman depicted in the photo. Later, while lying in bed, Seh-hee acknowledges that she has become less desirable in her boyfriend’s eyes and apologizes. He has been unable to perform sexually. “I’m sorry for having the same boring face every day,” she says. Seh-hee covers her face with the bed sheet in shame. Humiliated and dejected, Seh-hee disappears without a trace. Ji-woo discovers that she has disconnected her phone number and moved out of her apartment. He does not know that she went to consult a plastic surgeon to undergo cosmetic surgery. Seh-hee gives the surgeon a representation of a face composited by eyes, nose, and a mouth cut out from magazines (reiterating a similar gesture in Address Unknown involving an eye cut out from a Western magazine). The doctor manipulates an image of her face on the computer screen as if he were editing an image in Photoshop. Seh-hee agrees to the final design and to the surgical procedure. Afterwards, she is told that the healing process will take six months. Meanwhile, Ji-woo remains oblivious as to her whereabouts and attempts to date other women, but is unable to love again. Melancholy, he returns to the Room & Rumour café and there meets an attractive woman (played by Sung Hyun-ah, who was Sun-hwa in Hong Sang-soo’s Woman is the Future of Man). Later, they meet again on a Jeju Island ferry and go to an erotic-themed sculpture park called “Loveland.” The next time they meet is in the café, where she now works. Ji-woo finally asks her name and she responds, “See-hee” (㌞䧂, or “Saehui”). That her name sounds uncannily similar to “Seh-hee” (㎎䧂, or “Sehui”) does not escape him, of course. He nevertheless remains oblivious to the fact that See-hee is the “new” Seh-hee, his former love transformed through plastic surgery. Time recalls a number of themes revolving around desire and loss that are key to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Both films feature nostalgic men (Ji-woo and Scottie Ferguson) who are tragically unable to forget the woman they loved and lost. And the women in both films (Seh-hee and Madeleine Elster) return with their appearance altered (as See-hee and Judy Barton), raising crucial questions about the nature of male desire and femininity. In Vertigo and Time, a surrogate temporarily ameliorates the melancholy suffered by the main male protagonists by being forced to become identical

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to their previous love objects. The men are unable to love again because they only want to repeat the past and are disappointed that the present cannot repeat it precisely. In the case of Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson stubbornly forces the present, the somewhat coarse Judy Barton, to conform to his original fetishized love. In my analysis of Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors and Woman is the Future of Man in chapter three, I discussed how love and temporality are intertwined in these films. Referencing Freud, I demonstrated how the men in Hong’s film love narcissistically; or, as the psychoanalyst put it, they love: “a. what he himself is (i.e. himself), b. what he himself was, c. what he himself would like to be, d. someone who was once part of himself.”19 Who and the manner in which one loves are rooted in the way the lover remembers the melodrama of past love and how he projects the trajectory of a love to come. While he may believe that he loves freely and spontaneously, when subject to analytic scrutiny, this love is shown to merely perpetuate a cyclical repetition of a love that is idealized and ultimately unattainable. This form of narcissism is operative in Scottie Ferguson and between Ji-woo and Seh-hee, all of whom seem incapable of loving in a way that deviates from their predetermined types. And by demanding that love, they conform to a specific predetermination, an ossified, fetishized image that is pined after nostalgically, whereby one really loves oneself and not the other, according to psychoanalysis. “I was scared of time,” Seh-hee remarks in Kim’s film, expressing a sentiment that corroborates Freud’s insight into the relationship between love and temporality, “Time that makes everything change.” She articulates an anxiety that is relevant for both Ji-woo and Seh-hee – the fear that desire can and will change over the course of time, beyond the control of either individual. Seung-hoon Jeong’s reading of Kim’s Time points us toward other interpretive possibilities about the image of the self that are inextricably linked to the face in cinema. In contrast to the notion that the face reflects a singular identity, a non-exchangeable soul, or a unique “I,” Jeong writes that the face “is also a surface whose effect depends on others’ reaction to it, and furthermore, a gateway to the abyss of otherness and subjectivity that cannot be fully located in the notion of identity.”20 According to Jeong, the confusion between Seh-hee and See-hee untethers the face from a singular personality that it ostensibly makes visible, inducing a dizzying sense of paranoia about the person behind the mask. Jeong reminds us that Kim’s film is not principally concerned with the dichotomy between beauty and ugliness, and of the desire that is elicited in the eye of the beholder, but with the “ontological (sameness versus difference) through the phenomenological

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Fig. 24: Seh-hee/See-hee’s uncanny face. Courtesy of Lifesize Entertainment

(face as surface).”21 Seh-hee/See-hee’s face, oscillating between before and after, becomes both old and new, increasing the number of selves that may be signified by it from one to two. This sense of paranoia evoked by the multiple face and the expanding identity of the other is perhaps most acute in the moment in Time when Sehhee/See-hee tells Ji-woo that she has undergone cosmetic surgery. Having become involved with See-hee, Ji-woo receives a note from Seh-hee telling him to meet at the café. When he arrives, he walks toward the table situated next to a wall, where a woman dressed in black is seated. The camera, taking Ji-woo’s point of view, approaches from her left while she turns her head to meet its gaze. As her face is revealed, it evokes dread, fear, and the distinct feeling of uncanny horror. The woman does not have an organic physiognomy, but wears a crude paper mask that has the image of Seh-hee before having undergone surgery. The slightly smiling face is reproduced in black and white, as if printed from a copy machine, while the eyes and lips are given light pink highlights. Two impossibly small holes somehow allow the wearer to see. The mask is attached to the woman’s head with a thin elastic band. Ji-woo is clearly disturbed by this vision. “What is this?” he asks, shocked. “I believed if I changed my face you’d love me longer,” she responds behind the mask, “But you couldn’t forget your girl of the past. And I couldn’t stand being so jealous.” Suddenly Ji-woo realizes who this woman is, or may be. He covers his mouth while remarking, “That doesn’t make sense. Both of them are you!” Seh-hee/See-hee denies this, telling him that she is a “new” woman. But Ji-woo becomes even more confused, asking

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with a raised voice, “Who are you? Who are you?” His certainty about the separate identities of Seh-hee, someone whose face had been familiar to him for two years, and See-hee, whose face he has only recently come to know, is shattered. This multiplication of identities, as Jeong notes, “debunks our face-centric image empire,” but allows us to think beyond the limits imposed by notions of the singular human self.22 These are the limits that are reiterated in the empire of the popular melodrama as well. Nevertheless, the feeling of uncanniness is unmistakable in this scene, as the disturbed response experienced by Ji-woo mirrors the experience of the viewer’s, proliferating the sense of paranoia about the identity of the other. For Freud, we may remember, this uncanny feeling arises when a repressed wish from the past is revived by an event in the present. Infantile beliefs that have been cast into the realm of superstition and irrationality, such as the belief in ghosts or the resurrection of the dead, return and confuse the adult perceiver about their veracity. Two temporalities are brought together and, for a moment, both seem true. When Seh-hee/See-hee returns in this scene in the café, her (re)appearance inspires uncanniness in precisely this regard. One is confused as to the identity of the woman behind the crude paper mask – Seh-hee or See-hee, past or present – as both are embodied by one inanimate face. Her appearance embodies the figuration of the double, another key example of the uncanny for Freud. Drawing on work by Otto Rank, Freud asserts the double was originally an image that assured the ego of its immortality. Yet, like the belief in ghosts, the notion of the immortality of the self undergoes repression by the truth of reason. No one lives forever, our time is limited on earth – all this we know to be true. “But when this stage has been surmounted,” Freud writes, “the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”23 For Ji-woo and the viewer, in their encounter with Seh-hee/See-hee’s face, confusion is accompanied by the feeling of profound dread. The face of the other “reverses its aspect,” and reminds Ji-woo, as well the living spectator, of his or her own mortality. The uncanny encounter with the other and the confusing oscillation between familiarity and unfamiliarity in Kim’s Time functions to comment on the ethics of cosmetic surgery and the meteoric rise in the number and type of procedures performed the new millennium. South Korea’s $5-billiondollar industry, about a quarter of the total global market, is driven by over 4,000 clinics located chiefly in the urban areas of the country. In the decade following the IMF crisis, an increasing number of Koreans have gone under the knife to aesthetically improve their physical appearance. Although breast enlargement and liposuction are often performed, eyelid

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surgeries (blepharoplasty) and “nose jobs” (rhinoplasty) constitute the most popular surgical procedures. Typically, patients have sought to acquire a so-called “double-lid” appearance, making the eye seem larger by lifting the upper lid. And to achieve a desired “pointy” tip to the nose, a small piece of silicone or cartilage taken from another part of the body is implanted in order to create a higher nose bridge. These are procedures that Seh-hee may have undergone to obtain her new face. Other increasingly common procedures in South Korea include chin and forehead implants, rib removal to achieve an hourglass figure or the so-called “S-line,” and calf reduction surgery. According to a study conducted by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, in 2011 South Korea performed the highest rate of invasive and non-invasive procedures in the world – about 13 or 14 per 1,000 people.24 The percentage among men and women between the ages of 20 and 49 is much higher. With greater numbers seeking cosmetic surgery, public attitudes have become increasingly accepting by young and old of these, at times, major, elective medical procedures. Observers and scholars have typically understood the incredible popularity of cosmetic surgery as a consequence of either Westernization and the dissemination of images of Caucasian bodies in the mass media, or as evidence of Korea’s continued patriarchal subjection of women. Such claims imply that the women who undergo cosmetic surgery are victims to their oppressive cultural contexts and suggest that their empowerment should dissuade them from undertaking these vain, unnecessary, and potentially fatal procedures. For some, plastic surgery implicitly disturbs the binary between the natural and the artificial or the authentic and the copy, and perhaps provokes them to wonder why an individual who undergoes such a procedure would change the body given to them by their parents (or by their heavenly creator). From these concerns, one can thus imagine arguing that Seh-hee, who may be thought to have absorbed Western idealizations of female beauty, feels insecure about her body because she cannot realize these ideals and because Korean patriarchal culture constantly disempowers women from pursuing other forms of life. The comedy 200 Pounds Beauty, a film that was released the same year as Time, seems to illustrate the ideological assumptions that underpin these claims. In it, an overweight woman named Han-na (Kim Ah-jung) is a “ghost singer” for Ammy (Ji Seo-yun), a slim and attractive pop singer. Han-na gets plastic surgery and returns a year later with her face and body drastically altered. She also changes her name to Jenny. Over time, one of her male co-workers, whom she secretly admires, deduces that Han-na and Jenny are the same person, which precipitates the very emotional

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conclusion to the film. Jenny tearfully reveals her true identity before a large audience of concert-goers and her ailing father. Both 200 Pounds Beauty and Time deal with the adjustments that take place when an individual leaves a community of familiar acquaintances and returns, after a time, as an unfamiliar face. However, 200 Pounds Beauty, which garnered the third highest earnings at the box office in 2006, depends much more on the popular forms of redemption associated with the melodramatic mode. In the penultimate scene, Jenny tearfully confesses that she does not remember what she looked like – “I miss you Han-na,” she remarks to an old image of herself, thus fulfilling the temporality of “too late” that characterizes the melodramatic pathos of feeling. A video of her singing, prior to her surgery, is projected behind her on a large screen. The audience gasps but when Jenny affirms, “It’s Han-na. That’s me,” the audience, also in tears, collectively chant, “It’s ok.” When Han-na/Jenny reveals her true identity before a sympathetic public, she reveals her “true self” to the spectator as well. Han-na confirms the viewer’s humanist expectation of a moral occult, of the presence of an invisible morality that may be gleaned through the reading of surfaces, thus enabling the recognition of her victimization by societal judgment. Through her confession, the viewer’s “heart goes out to her” and Han-na becomes all the more sympathetic. In their essay, “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea,” Ruth Holliday and Joanna Elfving-Hwang subtly shift our frame of judgment with respect to the understanding of plastic surgery and its role in post-IMF Korean culture. Although they do not refute previous explanations, such as those revolving around Westernization and Korean patriarchy, they also assert that the meaning of aesthetic surgery must be re-thought: as a process of negotiation between multiple discourses concerning national identity, globalized and regionalized standards of beauty, ­official and non-official religion, traditional beliefs and practices (in some instances historically imported from some other place), as well as the symbolic practices of coming of age, caring for the self, marking social status and seeking success.25

In short, the practice of aesthetic surgery in Korea should be thought in ways that go beyond the assumptions of the human-centered self, for the discursive understandings of bodily transformation in this particular context confound analyses that are motivated by (Western) moralistic judgment. Above all, Holliday and Elfving-Hwang show that both men and women seek

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these medical procedures as means of realizing new forms of agency in a highly competitive, image-driven society. To claim that Koreans have been colonized by Western ideals of beauty constitutes only a partial explanation, as such a claim does not account for “indigenous” ideals surrounding the body. Holliday and Elfving-Hwang refer specifically to traditional Korean physiognomic beliefs, the practice of gwansang, which I discussed briefly in chapter four. Indeed, over half of the Korean population expresses some sympathy with some of these conventions, including the belief that wide eyes signal youthfulness and desire, an upturned nose indicates an inability to hold on to one’s wealth, and that beauty spots signal sadness due to their resemblance to tears. Underscoring the specificity of the Korean face, Holliday and ElfvingHwang note that, “East Asians tend to have more adipose fat in the eyelid than Caucasians, […] men and women who have too much far removed are negatively [perceived] as artificially western.”26 The eyes must be widened such that they maintain their “Koreanness” as well as a certain degree of ethnic and racial specificity. Having the “right” face can often mean the difference between getting a job and being turned down for it. It is easy to deem this mode of evaluation “superficial,” but to do so would itself be superficial in that such a claim overlooks long-standing, local beliefs in the “auspiciousness” or “luck” associated with the face. “With the growing affluence of Korean society, the ‘inauspicious’ face, previously having doomed its bearer to a lifetime of bad luck, can now be fixed.”27 Feminist philosopher Cressida J. Heyes reads the ethics of plastic surgery in precisely this way – not as a transformative process that seeks to reiterate humanist norms of beauty, body, and soul, but as an “aesthetic ethics” that betrays the human subject constituted as a discursive strategy.28 “Fixing” the face, then, should be thought of as a kind of democratizing practice, according to Holliday and Elfving-Hwang, in that it allows individuals to perform a certain social class or status within a culture that still values conformity highly. If their analysis may be read as challenging ahistorical claims about the meaning of plastic surgery and the nature of the human individual who decides to undergo it, I would like to consider Time in a similarly critical register, specifically as undermining melodramatic notions of the human being and the interiority that is implicitly imputed with these notions. Within popular melodrama, a character possesses a single, non-exchangeable face that expresses a unique individuality, a specific moral soul and personality. This interiority constitutes their humanity and confirms, moreover, the humanism of the viewer as well. In stark contrast to the “feel-good” film 200

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Pounds Beauty, the scene in the café from Time is profoundly disturbing in that it questions the viewer’s assumption about the presence of an invisible moral occult. Seh-hee, See-hee: these identities refer to the same person. Yet, Kim’s film does not simply confound the distinction between them by troubling the continuity of the true self through time. The crude paper face she wears in the café scene in Room & Rumour empties out the epistemological assumption that character and psychology exist at all. Her paper face betrays, not the depth of moral character, but the potential nothingness of human ontology. Humanist expectations of the melodramatic mode, such as the intrinsic nature of good and evil, are unsatisfied, inducing frustration, horror, and uncanniness. That which has been banished from the viewer’s consciousness returns through the appearance of this paper mask: death, signaled by the inert, inorganic face. Borrowing from Freud, this inhuman face, far from assuring the encounter of one human with another depicted on-screen, instead “becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”29 Through this, Seh-hee/See-hee’s face reveals its non-melodramatic, non-human, phenomenal appearance – the face-in-itself. Moreover, the phenomenal face in Time coincides allegorically with the faceicity of the film image itself, as an inhuman surface that expresses its basic alterity before the human viewer. Like the faces in Address Unknown and 3-Iron, the face in Time should be read as allegorical of the film image. We saw how Kim takes this allegory to its limit point, toward the dichotomy between physiognomy and interiority, thus collapsing Cartesian distinctions between body and soul. The face becomes a pure means, an appearance that evacuates the being ostensibly hiding behind the mask, and becomes a surface that does not betray secrets but remains singular in its apparent lack of telos. Similarly, Seh-hee/See-hee’s uncanny, paper face in Time signifies only itself, disturbing humanist assumptions about the other through its divine violence of dread and uncanniness, and through its destabilizing of the viewer’s own humanist gaze. The sovereign spectator is deposed of his or her power of judgment through the undermining of the humanist underpinnings that assume the moral legibility of the other. The dehumanized face becomes the focus of the remainder of Kim’s film. Fed up with his girlfriend’s games, Ji-woo finds the plastic surgeon who worked on Seh-hee’s face and accuses him of having committed an act of violence. Somewhat inexplicably, they engage in a physical scuffle and the surgeon angrily threatens to “fix your face up so bad no one can even recognize you.” Ji-woo takes this threat as an offer – of cosmetic surgery. And so, like Seh-hee, he subjects his face to radical physical alteration. Later, with their situations now reversed, Seh-hee/See-hee is told that in five months he

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will return with a completely new face. Time passes and she begins to seek out Ji-woo, meeting several men who she suspects may be her lover. All of them turn out to be the wrong man. One day, Seh-hee/See-hee returns to the café and out of the corner of her eye she sees a shadowy man outside looking at her through the glass window. She rushes out to chase after him, running through the city street and into a subway station. However, her pursuit ends in tragedy. The man runs in front of a moving truck and is run over and killed instantly. Screaming, Seh-hee/See-hee crouches down to look at his lifeless body while the camera pans down with her. His face is completely bloodied and mangled, making it impossible to identify it as human, let alone the human formerly known as Ji-woo. In chapter four, I briefly referenced Giorgio Agamben’s essay on the face. In the penultimate shot of Memories of Murder, the mild-mannered Hyun-gyu, the likely serial killer, looks into the camera and confounds all attempts by the sovereign, judgmental gaze to determine its culpability. I brought this moment into relation with a formulation by the Italian philosopher, specifically concerning the observation that “actors look into the camera means that they show that they are simulating.”30 This face-to-face confrontation with the viewer and the appearance of the face constitutes, as I briefly mentioned, a politics of pure means. I want to continue this critique and develop it further. The face of the inexplicable man in Time takes this radical politics as a means to interrogate the essence of the human being, not as embodying a soul, but as fully aware that the face simulates what is typically called the human in the cinema. Its “truth” is dissimulation and pure appearance. As a mere mask, the face may be more accurately described as a surface that betrays the empty ontological nature of the human being. Explaining this, Agamben writes: Precisely because the face is solely the location of truth, it is also and immediately the location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety. This does not mean, however, that appearance dissimulates what it uncovers by making it look like what in reality it is not: rather, what human beings truly are is nothing other than this dissimulation and this disquietude within the appearance. Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial of all: it is the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear.31

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In order to show this appearance in the film image, to confound all attempts by the spectator to read the face, Kim refuses to show Ji-woo’s physiognomy following its reconstruction and even disfigures the face beyond identification. Taking the uncanniness experienced in the café further, Ji-woo’s defaced face tragically depicts the ontology of the melodramatic face in the course of time, its ruination and disintegration. But to recognize its appearance, as an empty appearance, is to recognize its non-melodramatic truth, to demand a response from the deposed viewer who envisages it.

The Profanation of the Priest: Thirst (2009) While Park Chan-wook has addressed ethical and moral issues in his films, none of them addresses the problem of religion and the ethical responsibility to the other as insistently as Thirst. In the following discussion, I will draw attention to the figure of the undead vampire and its liminal ontology between human life and death, thinking within the film’s context of Roman Catholicism in South Korea. In doing so, I will show how Thirst may be read to prepare the way toward an ethics that exceeds the linear, calculative notion of the law constituted as a set of binding norms. I would like to address these aesthetic and ethical problems through the syncretic nature of the film medium, which grounds the many allegories that the film inspires, including the liminal status between life and death, human life and technology, and the particular and the universal. My aim is to facilitate an affirmation of cinema’s syncretism in order to realize a new non-human politics, one that operates as a means without any teleological ends. Park’s Thirst tells the story of Sang-hyun (played by Song Kang-ho, featured in many films covered in this book), a selfless Catholic priest who serves as a chaplain in a hospital. He prays for the sick and blesses the terminally ill; yet, Sang-hyun remains concerned that he is not doing enough for those who continue to suffer from their physical ailments. In order to relieve his perennial guilt, the good priest volunteers to take part in a dangerous experiment in Africa to find a cure for the Emmanuel Virus, a disease that we are told, curiously, victimizes only “Asians and Caucasians.” When infected with the virus, the sufferer breaks out in gruesome blisters that form first on the surface of the face and then spread to the eyes, nose, and finally to the internal organs. The blood-filled blisters burst open, causing hemorrhages to occur throughout the body. The victim coughs up blood and will eventually die from excessive internal bleeding. Before subjecting himself to the virus, Sang-hyun clarifies that he is volunteering

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for the experiment, not for the sake of martyrdom or to commit suicide, but out of purely selfless motives. The experiment is not successful and the priest contracts the virus. He is not left to die, however, and is resurrected through a blood trans­ fusion. ­Lying on the operating table, with his face covered by a white sheet, Sang-hyun recites a prayer as he is brought back to vital life: “Grant me the following in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: like a leper rotting in flesh, let all avoid me; like a cripple without limbs […].” The priest returns to Korea. His Catholic followers rush to him, believing that the revived man, covered in bandages, has been granted the divine power of healing. They plead for his prayers and desperately request that he heal their loved ones, sick with terminal disease. The chaplain returns to his duties in the hospital and one day Mrs. Ra (Kim Hae-suk), a gregarious, domineering middle-age woman who has known Sang-hyun since childhood, approaches him and requests that the priest visit her son. She claims that he has cancer. Sang-hyun visits the young man, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun, from JSA and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), in the hospital. He is a pathetic hypochondriac and is wedded to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), whom Mrs. Ra took in as an orphaned child and provided for until adulthood. Tae-ju scoffs at his prayers and at her mother-in-law, expressing exasperation for being trapped in a relationship she detests and for being marginalized by the family she has been married into. Mrs. Ra invites Sang-hyun to their house for their weekly mahjong game. It takes place in the apartment above their store, “Happy Hanbok,” which sells the traditional Korean costume of the store’s name. Sitting around their kitchen table, she declares that Kang-woo’s esophagus cancer miraculously vanished through the priest’s blessings. Meanwhile, the priest Sang-hyun finds himself increasingly drawn to the oppressed Tae-ju. Later that night, he begins exhibiting symptoms of the Emmanuel Virus once more as blisters form on his face. The only remedy for this condition, he soon discovers, is to consume the blood of another human being. Sang-hyun’s blood transfusion cured him of the virus and granted him renewed life, but, as he now realizes, at the cost of him turning into a vampire. His body was doubly infected: first with the virus and then with vampire cells. At first, Sang-hyun is fascinated by his undead status, but he becomes despondent when he begins committing sins that transgress his Catholic morality. Not only is the continuation of his life contingent upon taking the lives of others, but the priest is tempted by sinful physical desires that must be satiated. He follows up on his lustful desires for Tae-ju and initiates a

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torrid affair. Together, they conspire to kill the hypochondriac Kang-woo by taking him fishing and drowning him in the water. Shocked by the death of her beloved son, Mrs. Ra suffers a stroke and succumbs to locked-in syndrome. In this state she remains aware of her environment, but is unable to move the muscles in her body except for her eyes. While Mrs. Ra is paralyzed, Tae-ju is inspired to act out on her repressed resentment, which had been building because of her being treated like a slave in her family. At one moment, the adopted daughter slaps her inert mother-in-law for never having celebrated her birthday. Tae-ju is shameless in demonstrating her adulterous affection for Sang-hyun before Mrs. Ra’s unceasing gaze. Meanwhile, the priestly vampire continues to prey on the living in order to survive and to agonize about whether his own existence is morally defensible if it must come at the cost of the lives of others. Sang-hyun increasingly feels the burdens of his sins and over time becomes increasingly anxious and delusional. In an illuminating essay called “Park Chan-wook’s Thirst: Body, Guilt and Exsanguination,” historian Kyu Hyun Kim contextualizes Park’s film within long-standing literary, historical, and cinematic traditions around the f igure of the vampire. Acknowledging various readings of the film – critical, symptomatic, Orientalist, and otherwise – Kim aims, above all, to “illuminate some possible paths that readers/viewers can navigate in order to reach their own interpretations of the f ilm.”32 His essay is helpful for teasing out the misreadings and misunderstandings that have ultimately reduced the film text to a “few profound meanings, psychoanalytic or otherwise.”33 Kim holds out for readings of Park’s film that can aff irm its hybridity in terms of genres and genders, between ostensibly emotional females versus rational males, modernity and antimodernity, and between the spiritual and earthly worlds. However, Kim does not venture further than this and does not offer an elucidation, philosophical or otherwise, of the hybridity that he believes lies at the essence of the film. He writes that Thirst is “a multi-layered work of art that deals seriously with the corporeal and spiritual realities of our lives, which we would rather sweep under the carpet, expertly making use of the seemingly irreconcilable vocabularies and idioms of more than one cinematic genre.”34 In order to further think the film’s multi-layered nature, I would like to turn our attention to the multi-valenced ontology of the film medium itself, which in many ways enables the combining of signs and meanings Kim notes in his essay. If Thirst is indeed a work of art, we can learn much about this form of thinking from the hybrid medium in which it is expressed.

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In 1995, Agamben offered some key comments on the nature of the film medium in a lecture called “Difference and Repetition,” in which he addresses the work of the Situationist thinker, Guy Debord. Agamben makes explicit that the ontological possibilities for the film image are primarily implicated in messianic historiography. On the one hand, the cinema restores the possibility of becoming that is intrinsic to the past through the image of its repetition. The image does not simply repeat the past but projects possibility into that which is by definition impossible – that is, the impossibility of perfectly repeating what has already taken place. Through this projection of the past as possibility, the cinema finds its corollary in human memory, which, according to Agamben, “is the organ of reality’s modalization; it is that which can transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real.”35 On the other hand, the film image, in its juxtaposition with other images through montage, gives rise to a disruptive non-coincidence between what the image shows and its meaning within the flow of the film’s narrative. Agamben calls this “stoppage,” insofar as the power of the image to interrupt upends narrative continuity so that the image is made to exhibit itself as such. Both of these features, which belong to the cinema and not to what Agamben calls the “media” (by which he means commercial television), aim toward a history to come: one that is salvational and at the same time an eschatology. Confounding the dominant use-value of images in commodity capitalism to merely to show and tell a given reality, Agamben strives to realize how the cinema can exhibit the basic ontology of the film image itself, to foreground the everydayness of the medium as it disappears into what it signifies, and to allow the appearance of its own “imagelessness.” In the last line of this lecture, Agamben reiterates his comments on the face I cited in the previous section of this chapter, remarking that, “it is here, in this difference, that the ethics and the politics of the cinema come into play.”36 Thirst seeks this ethics and politics of the cinema, allegorizing these two aspects of the film image, repetition and difference, through the figure of the vampire. Park’s undead creature reiterates familiar conventions associated with the vampire genre in film history: they drink blood, are sensitive to sunlight, they have the capacity for regeneration, are physically immortal, and have superhuman strength. Most significantly, the vampires in Thirst have died and been brought back to life, continuing to exist as supernatural creatures. Having overcome death in the past, the vampire, like the image, restores possibility intrinsic to their past lives as lived, of what is and what may become. The cinema image is not itself life, but is a kind of vampiric afterlife that redeems the body of the human being

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Fig. 25: Kang-woo’s uncanny presence comes between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju.

that once lived. Indeed, the allegorical connection between the undead cinema image and the undead vampire is one that has become increasingly important in our interpretation of cinematic vampires. In his reading of F. W. Murnau’s famous film from 1922, Nosferatu, Anton Kaes makes this connection with a concise formulation: “Nosferatu, a purely cinematic creature (with no life outside the movies), rules the kingdom of shadows, which is none other than the kingdom of film.”37 Like Murnau’s vampire, Park’s undead creatures in Thirst self-reflexively foreground the ontology of the film medium, in that their status as both living and dead corresponds allegorically with cinema’s own uncanny nature as well as its capacity to animate and bring dead things to life. In a scene following his murder by Sang-hyun and Tae-ju, Kang-woo returns as a ghost, disturbing their lovemaking and causing strife in the relationship between the priest and the dead man’s wife. His appearance evokes uncanniness in most viewers, as Kang-woo’s specter lies between the couple sleeping away from each other, drenched in water and holding a large rock, and as if to defiantly mock those who murdered him. At the same time, his reappearance underscores the capacity of the film image to memorialize the dead. In another scene, when Mrs. Ra sees Sang-hyun after her son’s funeral, the mother mistakes him for her dead offspring. This moment of misrecognition so traumatizes her that she becomes paralyzed. Throughout the second half of the film, Mrs. Ra, donned in a hanbok, ­allegorizes another kind of undead life through her shut-in state, lifeless yet living, conscious yet unable to interact with the outside world. Before her paralysis, Mrs. Ra is portrayed as overprotective, overbearing, emotional, and someone whose self-worth is wholly dependent on raising her son – characteristics stereotypical of the middle-aged Korean mother.

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The year Park’s film was released, Bong Joon-ho released Mother (2009), whose story revolves around a mother who loves her mentally challenged son unconditionally, so much so that she brutally murders the man who reveals a profoundly uncomfortable truth about her boy. In her essay on the “monster-mother,” Eunha Oh explains the uncanny dichotomy between the loving and phallic mothers as an allegorical figuration of conflicting ideals of womanhood existing in modern Korean culture – specifically, the continuing marginalization of women that goes back to traditional patriarchal Chosun society over-against their revered status as self-sacrificing mothers of sons. Indeed, this tension informs the relation of the mother-in-law to her son’s wife. As Oh writes, “Thus, when her son marries, the mother-inlaw finally sees herself as privileged, as opposed to feeling solidarity with the oppressed female group of which she was formerly a part.”38 Mrs. Ra’s cold and indifferent relationship to her daughter-in-law, Tae-ju, cannot be separated from this patriarchal context. In becoming undead, Mrs. Ra relinquishes her privilege of the mother-in-law, making way for Tae-ju’s pent-up revenge. Returning to the vampire’s ambivalent ontology, we can see that it is constituted as a being that lives only in the heterotopia of the movies and allegorically constitutes the projected, moving image itself. In contrast to the fundamentally unreal space that is defined by utopia, Michel Foucault defines a heterotopia as “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” – indeed, a kind of state of exception to the discursive law that separates reality and illusion.39 After both Sang-hyun and Tae-ju have turned into vampires, they remain indoors, excluding themselves from the world of the humans. They sleep when the sun shines and are awake throughout the night. The walls of their living room are painted bright white while video footage of what happened outside during that day is played on a flat-screen television. This bright space allegorically imitates the space, “both mythic and real,” that characterizes the film set, and the technique of what is called “day for night,” where daytime scenes in the cinema are filmed at nighttime, and vice versa, using lens filters and carefully placed lighting. The ontologies of Sang-hyun and Tae-ju may remind us of Agamben’s explication of sovereignty and homo sacer, whose precarious existence is situated in the state of exception. As vampires, they exist at the margins of the world of the living. Their exilic condition, internal and external to the juridical order as well as to the order of the diurnal cycle, cannot be separated from the constitution of the sovereign subject. I refer here, not only to the priest-vampire who wields an uncommon power of life and death

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Fig. 26: Vampires during the day.

over the other, but also to the gaze of the sovereign cinema spectator sitting in the heterotopia of the cinema theater, and whose look, as I discussed in the opening chapters of this book, is situated at the position of mastery in relation to the visual field laid out before him or her on the screen. The bearer of this look, as I argued, is encouraged to enjoy the privilege of the decision and of making ontological distinctions through his or her voyeuristic position in relation to the film’s diegesis. Because the viewer remains safe from the judgmental gaze of the characters on screen, he or she enjoys a state of exception with respect to the dichotomies operative in the world of the film. In her essay on film spectatorship in the age of global digital cinema, Hye Jean Chung notes that the experience of perceptive plentitude underpins the heterotopia of the cinema. “In fact,” she points out, “heterotopias self-reflexively reinforce their otherness and expose all other real spaces as illusory, or inversely, reveal that all spaces are based on complex material conditions of lived experience.”40 Typically, in the name of narrative legibility and continuity, these layers of myth and reality are made distinct from each other by the decisive gaze of the sovereign cinema viewer. Allegorically corresponding to this power of decision-making, Sang-hyun decides who will die so that his life may continue and this sovereign power is bestowed upon him at the moment he withdraws himself from the life of human beings. Distanced from the world, the priest enjoys dealing with others in a commanding manner, making judgments about their souls, and their deservedness of punishment and salvation. Film scholar Kim Soyoung reads the young Tae-ju similarly, whose f iguration constitutes a hybrid ontology that troubles stable, generic understandings of the Korean housewife. Reminding us that the figure of the vampire has traditionally allowed Gothic concerns to mingle with

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Enlightenment modernity, Kim suggests that Tae-ju’s transformation into a “feminine monstrous” may be understood as a mingling of premodern and modern concerns revolving around gender in contemporary Korea. Echoing Oh’s argument, she writes that, “The representation of a female vampire opens up a site where the usual pairing of pre-modern/modern with East/West and feminine/masculine (with positive values attached to the second term) is suspended.”41 This suspension is precisely the means by which Tae-ju realizes an exhilarating liberation from the social constraints of her gender. The ressentiment that has built up from years of taking care of her pathetic husband is released when she becomes vampiric, undead, and non-human. Through this transformation, she frees herself from generic representations of women in Korea melodrama as tragic, nationalist tropes of modernity. Her ambivalent ontology as a woman allows her to choose “to become a vampire and turns her boring domestic labour into a carnivorous play, a vampirism game in which the body opens up to the full range of cannibalistic jouissance.”42 For the first time, Tae-ju is allowed to relish in her freedom and experience an elation, previously unknown, associated with sovereign power. Returning to his 1995 lecture, Agamben notes that key to the ethics and politics of the cinema is the task of making visible two potentialities inseparable from cinema’s basic ontology. He associates this use of the medium, this visibility, with a gestural “‘pure means,’ one that shows itself as such.”43 Throughout his career, Agamben has attempted to articulate and capture this non-metaphysical possibility, this divine violence, by making legible a politics that stands at the discursive threshold between the operable and the inoperable. Thinking aesthetics with this politics in mind enables us to think the pure means of the cinema as a potentiality that makes visible, however fleeting, its own ontological essence. When speaking about Debord’s own intervention as a cinema of potentiality, Agamben notes that his use of the film medium to repeat and disrupt the past constitutes, to reiterate one of his favorite formulations, “a zone of undecidability” between the singularity of what was and its repetition in the film image. We might further elaborate Agamben’s politics and aesthetics as essentially gestural and thus as having something to do, not with being, but with becoming. His thinking on the cinema reminds us to think the moving image, not simply as a signifying medium, but as persisting in the course of time, creating a world as the image unfolds, and not merely depicting a given reality. To do so would be to put the image in service of a predetermined telos. Thinking the image as gesture means also to think

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it as a purposeless means without ends. “If producing is a means in view of an end, and praxis is an end without means,” Agamben writes in his essay, “Notes on Gesture,” where he discusses the ontology of the cinema, “the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends.”44 Gesture is a pure means without a given ends. A “gestural cinema,” rigorously conceived, thus evades all metaphysical ends – narrative, aesthetic, or otherwise – and aims only to express its persistence as a medium, its formal specificity. As such, a cinema of gesture expresses its means of expression, it is “the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such.”45 And as a pure means, gesture is the enactment of a politics that does not aim toward a given end, but exhibits itself as a pure means. The writer and director of Thirst has expressed a similar aesthetics of pure means – undecidable, irreducible, and heterogeneous – that I would like to parallel with a point raised by Kim Soyoung above: that is, between Asia and the so-called “West.” In an interview with The New York Times, published in July 2009, Park was asked about his use of what the interviewer calls “Western influences” in Thirst. “When you consider the concept of vampirism,” the filmmaker acknowledges, it is inherently part of Western culture. And also Catholicism is also part of the Western tradition that comes into Korea. So you can say also that my film is about things that are coming from the outside entering in, such as this virus that enters into the priest, changing him. So we’re looking at things from the exterior entering into the interior and whether our inside can accept this thing that has entered from the outside or whether it will reject it. 46

In other interviews conducted around this time, Park reiterates the metaphor of vampiric contamination that constitutes a zone of undecidability between the outside and inside, between native and foreign. Indeed, this point may be underscored in a scene from Thirst involving Sang-hyun and the blind bishop of his diocese. The priest tells his superior that the vampire cells from the blood transfusion have now become necessary in order to suppress the Emmanuel Virus and continue his form of life, and that his continued existence is now dependent on the comingling of the virus and vampirism. “I didn’t choose the blood that was transfused into me,” Sang-hyun remarks, “you know I went there to do good! Now, I thirst after all sinful pleasures. But how can I get human blood without killing!”

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In his interviews Park repeatedly suggests that the priest’s body, as a site of contamination by foreign bodies, functions as an allegory for the problem of hybridity in a much broader philosophical and critical sense. Sang-hyun’s corpus is not only a zone of undecidability between human and not human, life and death, modern and premodern, but, more essentially, it is a means of troubling precisely these binary oppositions and for raising questions both ethical and political. Park’s comments should thus be seen in light of Korean historiography, and the resistance to otherness that has characterized Korea’s modernization process – resistance to Japanese colonization, American neo-colonization, and also the infiltration of foreign capital and regulation, such as that issuing from the IMF, into the national economy. We might thus ask ourselves with respect to the specificity of Thirst: what does it mean when a Korean director appropriates genre conventions of the vampire film, ostensibly sourced from American or European cinematic traditions? And to what extent is Park’s film an Asian film at all, when its narrative is derived from the external “contaminants,” such as the novel Thérèse Raquin by Zola from 1867, as well as set against a hybrid, cosmopolitan mise-en-scène ostensibly depicting contemporary South Korea? Finally, what does it mean when an Asian director makes a film whose narrative is rooted in the moral precepts of Roman Catholicism, an institution whose regime of power and inscription of the law is always already globalized, the condition of what Jacques Derrida has called “globalatinization”?47 Despite Catholicism’s claims of universality and its concomitant discourse of the moral human being, Park’s film shows us how the humanist pretensions that underpin the concepts deployed in these questions are always already ontologically compromised. 48 Thirst manifests this compromise through the co-mingling of the human with the non-human within the realm of melodrama. As in the Vengeance Trilogy, Park utilizes melodramatic violence to compel his audiences to feel the anguish of his characters, not in order to induce a perverse, fetishistic visual pleasure, but in order to lay bare the ontological contradictions that constitute their ostensible humanity. Pushing mythic violence to the limit, Park’s films perform a critique of its formulaic repetition in genre cinema and place the viewer in a position of ambivalent sympathy. Throughout Thirst, Sang-hyun’s faith is taken to the limit, as he searches for a way to live with the comingling of his Catholicism and vampirism within himself. In an interview with the Korea Society from 2009, Park elaborates: He’s a vampire, but he does everything possible to avoid killing. Even if he has to commit a sin, he tries to make it a lesser one, and so forth.

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The greatest tragedy of this character is that he is unable to throw away either his vampire desires or his religion, and he has to struggle to make these very incompatible elements co-exist somehow. That’s the greatest tragedy. If there is any comedic segment in the film, it’s in those scenes where we see Sang-hyun struggling to make this co-existence happen. 49

Indeed, certain moments in the film acquire a sense of black humor when we see the personal anxieties of the vampire-priest play out in “real-world” situations. When Sang-hyun explains to Tae-ju that he pilfers blood from an overweight, comatose patient, the good priest assures that, “He loved helping the hungry.” However, the patient, Hyo-sung, meant that he wanted to provide service to the poor and unemployed, not give his own blood. Nevertheless, Sang-hyun re-appropriates Hyo-sung’s words to justify his irrepressible thirst and adds that, “He’d offer me his blood if he wasn’t in a coma.” Violence against the other, taking the life of another, quickly takes on a means-end rationalization through this re-appropriation. It is not clear whether one should laugh or feel repulsed when Sang-hyun drinks Hyo-sung’s blood through an IV tube, sucking on it as if it were a straw. In a similar scene, this one having a much more serious tone, a woman commits suicide by voluntarily giving her blood to the vampire-priest. Wearing a black dress and lying on a bed, she says, “I don’t feel like I’ll die doing it this way, but more like I’ll live again inside you.” Sang-hyun inserts the needle, lies back, and quietly quenches his thirst. Throughout Thirst, morally ambivalent moments like these attest to Park’s virtuosity in his appropriation of film genres. Such appropriations aim not to superficially reproduce their cues and conventions, but to rethink their limits, to draw out their grounding metaphysics, and to allow one genre to infiltrate another like a virus. For this seems to be the meaning of Park’s adoption of popular American and European cinematic practices into his films: he aims to delineate zones of undecidability between discursive regimes, between comedy and horror, in order to heighten their melodramatics. Moreover, it is precisely in these discursive zones where decisive ethical and moral questions are generated. As a vampire and a priest, how is Sang-hyun responsible to others and to what extent is he justified in taking their lives so that he may continue his? The moral occult typically associated with the melodramatic mode, and integral to all genre filmmaking, seems to be at issue here. To what extent can we, as spectators, sympathize with Sang-hyun, particularly when he is compelled, or forced, to make morally questionable decisions? If one of the most important features of melodrama is the sense in which a victim-hero comes to be recognized for their inner

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virtue, then Sang-hyun problematizes this recognition, delineating a zone whereby the viewer is compelled to both feel with and think critically about the vampire-priest’s morality. For Linda Williams, the excessive emotionality and Manichean moral polarities that have been understood to stand at the center of melodrama aim toward something more essential: “the achievement of a felt good, the merger – perhaps even the compromise – of morality and feeling.”50 If this is the case, the viewer’s attitude toward Sanghyun vacillates throughout Park’s melodramatic Thirst, between feel-good and feel-bad. As such, the film spectator shifts between identification and alienation, and his or her capacity for sympathy becomes problematic and undecidable. As I explained earlier, this undecidability is intrinsic to the ontology, the undead corporeality, of the film image itself. The ethical aporia at the center of Thirst cannot be separated from the ambivalent relationship Sang-hyun ultimately has to his Catholic faith. While his very being embodies the indistinction between vampire and priest, when he realizes that, in the eyes of the church, he is destined to live a life of sin, the holy man renounces his faith. After promising Tae-ju that he will murder her contemptible husband, Sang-hyun speaks to the diocese bishop, apparently to request absolution. Old and blind, the bishop requests some of his vampire blood, so that he may see the sun rise over the sea once more before dying. “Be the miracle worker,” he pleads, “make the blind see.” The request imparts to Sang-hyun the responsibility of a divine power and reinscribes once more the right of the sovereign over life and death. The priest is immediately repelled and he rushes in anguish out of the bishop’s bedroom. He then turns and says: “I’m no longer a priest nor a friar. Forget the rules! Forget the Vatican!” Sang-hyun’s renunciation takes place at the exact midway point of the film. Throughout the second half, he will not be seen wearing his robes and will continue to partake in the pleasures of the flesh, as well as willingly carry out Kang-woo’s murder. At the end of the film, the good priest will commit a final cardinal sin, one that he asserted at the film’s beginning is “worse than first degree murder” and “worth a life sentence in hell”: suicide. Earlier, we saw a woman commit this irreversible act, and though we were not informed as to why, Sang-hyun the vampire-priest nevertheless said nothing to chastise or prevent her from going through with this sinful undertaking. In the final scene he drives himself, Tae-ju, and Mrs. Ra to a cliff overlooking the ocean at dawn and forces all of them to wait and watch the rising sun. Tae-ju initially resists his attempts to subject their bodies to the annihilating force of the sunlight, but she finally gives in. “I wanted to live with you forever and ever. Together again in hell then,” Sang-hyun solemnly remarks, aware that this

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act goes against all his Catholic principles. The non-believer Tae-ju responds by saying, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s been fun, Father.” As the sunlight quickly emerges, their faces disintegrate and melt. Their death is not simply an act of martyrdom, but a reminder that their existences remain earthly and mortal. And through this act of self-annihilation, Sang-hyun transvalues the priestly and vampiric terms of the moral contradiction that he has been destined to live. His and Tae-ju’s bodies are returned to the world, recalling the Catholic sacrament: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” Despite their being vampires, despite their power to quickly heal their own bodies, and despite their potential to live forever, Sang-hyun refuses to accept the conditions of his own life and refuses to murder others in order to perpetuate his. Sang-hyun’s gesture of renunciation is not a denial of the sacredness of the Catholic Church, I want to argue, not a falling toward the secular, but an act of profanation. In a key essay published in 2005 called “In Praise of Profanation,” Agamben makes a crucial distinction that will be useful for my concluding points on Park’s Thirst: In this sense, we must distinguish between secularization and profanation. Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact. Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.51

What Agamben here calls “secularization” is a clear nod to his previous work on Carl Schmitt and this theorist’s insight that all modern political concepts of the state may be understood as secularized theological concepts. In his State of Exception, Agamben showed us how the formation of the modern sovereign finds its metaphysical grounding through the withdrawal of law’s binding force, such that “auctoritas can assert itself only in the validation or suspension of potestas.”52 Clearly, what is at stake here is the danger of auctoritas, seemingly legitimized through law and its metaphysical legacy in the Roman constitution, as it is embodied in a living sovereign or a Führer and exercised through mythic violence. And yet, it is precisely when the

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binding force of law is suspended, constituted through a zone of undecidability between life and law, between zoe and bios, that the profane realizes its apparatus-deactivating, law-deposing power. If secularization coincides with the politics of sovereign power, profanation intersects with a politics of pure means, whose conditions are linked to divine violence. That which has been profaned undermines its appropriation toward a predetermined end and thus shows itself as pure potentiality. Later in the essay, Agamben speaks of this delicate balance between difference and the repetition of the same in conjunction with the forces of modernity. He puts particular emphasis on the mass media and the church that work to extinguish the redemption of the profane. In this our task remains – to keep vigil over the unique powers of the cinema (and of poetic language) to induce the experience of difference in the age of mechanical reproduction. The apparatuses of the media aim precisely at neutralizing this profanatory power of language as pure means, at preventing language from disclosing the possibility of a new use, a new experience of the word. Already the church, after the first two centuries of hoping and waiting, conceived of its function as essentially one of neutralizing the new experience of the word that Paul, placing it at the center of the messianic announcement, had called pistis, faith. The same thing occurs in the system of the spectacular religion, where the pure means, suspended and exhibited in the sphere of the media, shows its own emptiness, speaks only its own nothingness, as if no new use were possible, as if no experience of the word were possible.53

It is thus significant that Sang-hyun refuses to take up the generic role of the miracle doer, who wields sovereign power over life and death, and refuses to infect the blind bishop so that he can see. For this is not a power that he believes rightfully belongs to him as a finite, mortal being. Through his refusal, Sang-hyun stops short of indulging the bishop’s desire to treat his subordinate as a means toward a predetermined end and of secularizing the power of the Catholic institution. Instead, the good priest sets off on a path toward the profane, a “pure means” that makes visible the potentiality of the messianic event described by Paul in his correspondence, while affirmatively foregrounding the capacity of the media to reveal its power of revealing, thereby releasing its use toward a new politics. Again, the body of the vampire underscores this undecidable aporia intrinsic to the power of the cinema. Like overexposed images, the vampires

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at the end of Thirst disintegrate and become “washed-out,” overcome by an overwhelming, bright light. When their undead lives conclude, so does Park’s film. Their deaths deactivate the law of genre cinema and its persistently commercial aims. And yet, in this moment the transient nature of the film medium is revealed, a medium that unfolds and “lives” in time, in synchrony with the ocean, the whales, and the rising and setting of the sun.



Conclusion: Afterlives of Sovereign Violence

In my analysis of South Korean cinema, I have shown how key films from 1997 to 2010 depict violence in order to critique the ideological presuppositions that justify its use. We have seen that these presuppositions stem from spectator expectations concerning the dominant mode of popular cinema: melodrama. Typically, the melodramatic mode is deeply rooted in Manichean schemas of good and evil, and of individual virtue, which implicate the viewer in the judgment of fictional on-screen characters. Their embodiment of a moral occult, accessed through reading their expressive faces, in turn secures the certainty of the spectator’s humanity. Looking at films by Kim Ki-duk, Hong Sang-soo, Park Chan-wook, and others, we have discussed how their films pose fundamental questions about the ethics of the spectator, observing how the ethics of the other are inextricably linked to neoliberal logics of reification, objectification, and biopower in post-IMF South Korea. The logic of conditional exchange regulates how morally good and evil human characters are to interact with each other. The Korean films analyzed in this book fundamentally problematize this ethical logic, integral to the construction of suffering victim-heroes, taking mythic violence and the sovereign hero that it presupposes to their discursive limits. In the first three chapters, my aim was to demonstrate how millennial Korean cinema brings the ethics of the melodramatic mode to crisis in order to perform a fundamental critique of sovereign violence. On the other hand, the state of exception that constitutes sovereign violence also makes possible an alternative, redemptive potentiality. In contrast to the vengeful blood thirst of mythic violence, in the latter three chapters of this book we worked through the critique of sovereign violence to pave the way toward another ethics, a divine violence, one that has the power of deposing the idolatry of mythic violence. I have argued that the ostensibly inhumane characters and images of Korean cinema, such as those featured in 3-Iron, Lady Vengeance, Poetry, and Thirst, provide discursive strategies for overcoming the epistemological constraints of humanism and its concomitant ethical presuppositions. The films treated in these chapters deconstruct the logic of debt and justice to prepare for the possibility of a non-melodramatic forgiveness, to explicate the conditions for hospitality, propose how love may be thought in a capacious manner, and to depict non-human creatures that confront issues of morality, responsibility,

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and death. Divine violence compels perspectives on alterity that transcend the finitude of the human subject. It is a pure means toward an as yet undetermined end and is thus critical in its outlook and profoundly humbling in its consequences. While elucidating how the individual films present allegories of the increasingly cosmopolitan Korean subject, this book has explicated how difference may be produced through cinematic means. Through this critique and through the peculiar aesthetics of the films I analyzed, I have argued that a crucial question is posed to the spectator: how can we look upon others such that we strive for inclusivity yet also respect the basic facticity of their otherness? Violent films, of course, continue to be made in South Korea and they still provoke and shock viewers with their nihilism and images of brutality. Moreover, they continue to reflect and critique the ethics of new millennial capitalism. Beginning on July 1, 2006, the Korean government agreed to decrease the screen quota stipulating the number of days per year that Korean films are to be screened in theaters, which had been in place for forty years, from 146 days to 73 days. This change in the quota was included as part of the negotiations between the US and Korea around the FTA (Free Trade Agreement). US negotiators argued that the cinema, like other commodities such as automobiles and beef, should be subject to liberalization and free competition. Within this ideology, Korean consumers are figured as “sovereign kings and queens” and thus granted the power of decision to choose among ostensibly diverse products on the market. Broader FTA talks were stalled because of negotiations around audio-visual products as well as resistance to the liberalizing of foreign ownership of Korean broadcasting and film industries. Despite a number of public protests, held by many of the filmmakers and actors discussed in this book, the amendment to decrease the screen quota was implemented due to unrelenting US pressure and remains in effect today. The Korean government even promised to never raise it above its current seventy-three days. In the broader context, as the FTA negotiations and the IMF subjected the Korean economy to increased liberalization, the country experienced another financial crisis. The 2008 crisis was largely instigated by the US subprime mortgage debacle and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, rather than from the Southeast Asian currency and banking crises in 1997. The policy reforms and exposure of corporate finance by the IMF at the turn of the century better prepared the Korean economy for its encounter with this later downturn. Yet, it soon became clear that the liberalization measures taken during the millennial decade in the areas of corporate and labor reform imperiled the Korean economy to regional and global disturbances,

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and revealed that the domestic economy was still vulnerable to foreign economic shocks. In 2008, the GDP slowed, investment in infrastructure shrank, wages declined, and the value of the won dropped precipitously. If Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy reflected the spirit of inquiry and ethical critique instigated by economic crisis in 1999, Na Hong-jin’s violent film, The Chaser (2008), seems much more elusive in its social and cinematic criticality, reflecting the acceleration of liberalization measures undertaken in the latter years of the decade culminating in the 2008 crisis. Na’s highly touted first film tells the story of a ruthless serial killer, Youngmin (Ha Jung-woo, who played Ji-woo in Kim Ki-duk’s Time), who brings call girls to his home and sadistically murders them, impaling their heads with a chisel and hammer. He then hangs their bodies up in the bathroom and buries their drained corpses someplace nearby. Young-min is pursued by the unscrupulous Jung-ho (Kim Yun-seok), an ex-cop turned pimp, who is concerned about the whereabouts of his missing girls. He sends Mi-jin (Seo Young-hee), one of his most popular escorts, to a man whose cell number ends with the digits 4885. “4885” turns out to be Young-min. When Jung-ho loses track of Mi-jin, he pursues and assaults Young-min but then struggles to convince the police that he is, in fact, the killer. Young-min even confesses to having murdered a dozen women, but the authorities believe that he is merely playing the crazy man and assume that he is unsure of the difference between reality and delusion. The police refuse to indict him because no bodies have yet been found. Meanwhile, Jung-ho goes to Mi-jin’s apartment and encounters her precocious daughter Eun-ji (Kim Yoo-jung), who is home alone. They leave together and the film gains renewed motivation to find Mi-jin, dead or alive. The Chaser ends with a spectacular, harrowing stand-off between the ex-detective and the killer, leaving both seriously wounded and bloody. More than half the film takes place at night and in the cramped alleyways of Mapo-gu in Seoul. As in Address Unknown and Bad Guy, the settings of The Chaser reflect the life of the underclass and the disenfranchised. Indoor scenes often take place in dilapidated, dimly-lit rooms: filthy apartments, disorganized offices, small convenience stores, cheap hotels, all furnished with tawdry leather sofas and outdated computers. Cell phones and cigarettes are always on hand to secure illicit deals with morally shady characters and to while the time away until the next transaction. The film’s protagonists are weary, cynical, and practical, having adapted to a world that is understood implicitly as unfair and hostile. Like Dae-su in Oldboy, who allegorizes the overworked salaryman, Jung-ho often becomes fatigued from arguing with his colleagues and exhausted with fighting everyone

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who gets in his way. However, despite the unknown whereabouts of his girls, Jung-ho does not dare go to the police. He and his henchman exist at the limits of the law, in the underworld where notions of right and wrong are determined more through the ethics of honor and humiliation passed between friends and enemies. And like Ryu and Dong-jin in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Jung-ho and Young-min are depicted, at moments, as equally guilty, the one for his soliciting of sex and the other for his murdering of sex workers, blurring the typically clear delineation between victim and perpetrator. Violence seems to be integral to the world depicted in The Chaser. Na’s film has no qualms about showing the brutalities committed by individuals full of ressentiment and about depicting images of splattered blood in darkened spaces, typical of the horror or noir genres. These are all images and characterizations featured in many of the films I have analyzed up to now. The film’s story will be familiar to us, as it is based on the case of Yoo Young-chul, the serial murderer who killed twenty people between 2003 and 2004. As I explained in chapter five, Yoo targeted mostly wealthy older men and sex workers, using a hammer to bludgeon them to death before burying their bodies near his residence. A number of similarities may be gleaned from Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, which dramatizes the case of a different serial killer in the 1980s, and The Chaser. As in Bong’s film from 2003, the police in Na’s work are depicted as inept, concerned more with executing procedure and maintaining hierarchy than with catching the killer. They stymie Jung-ho’s pursuit of vengeance against Young-min at least twice in the film. And, as in Memories of Murder, the police have no moral qualms about planting fake evidence, so long as it appears credible to the eyes of the public. Both films portray members of official law enforcement, from the chief all the way down, highly aware of the media and its capacity to make or break reputations. And yet, these images and characterizations, which I discussed in relation to the ethics of sovereign violence, are presented without the ethical contradictions associated with the unreadable face in Memories of Murder. The Chaser is an impressive debut film made by a director who has internalized the principles of narrative continuity and mastered the techniques for invoking the emotional involvement of the spectator. Born in 1974 and thus not a member of the 386 Generation, Na’s work in many ways marks a new era for filmmaking in the millennial decade, reflecting the ethics of the neoliberal economy more fully, an ethics that always already presupposes a concept of the human being inseparable from the melodramatic mode. Indeed, as the story of The Chaser unfolds, Jung-ho

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becomes increasingly sympathetic through his victimization by the inept Korean police and his humanization in relation to Eun-ji. From cop to pimp, he restores a kind of state of innocence at the end of the film by becoming a kind of father figure to her. In the final shot Jung-ho exhaustedly sits by young girl’s hospital bed and holds her hand as she sleeps. The scene’s emotional poignancy stems from the anguish that the viewer imagines she will feel when the morally innocent Eun-ji wakes up and is told of the truth of her mother’s fate. The Chaser constructs a linear story, with a number of cross-cuts that appear in key moments. These cuts between simultaneous actions build narrative tension throughout. At the beginning of the film, Mi-jin is trapped inside Young-min’s dark house while Jung-ho searches for the house in his car in vain. Later, as Young-min is held and questioned by the police, Jung-ho continues to look for the missing women, stopping to question the sister of the killer and other women who have seen him. At the end of The Chaser, the exhausted ex-cop/pimp runs to Mangwon-dong where Mi-jin parked her car, while she, having escaped to a nearby convenience store, is hit in the head with a hammer. Each of these pairs of simultaneous sequences is constructed through parallel editing and the suspense revolves around the same principle for all of them: the give and take of “too late” and “in the nick of time.” Switching back and forth between each action, the narrative tension escalates as Jung-ho struggles to arrive at the right location on time, to save a suffering victim from danger. All of them constitute and are constituted by Euclidean, linear conceptions of time and narrativity. Moreover, all of them correspond to the logic of the movement-image. The parallel editing in The Chaser does not collapse temporalities as in the virtuosic flashback montages featured in Lady Vengeance, a film that at key moments presents the direct image of time. The images in The Chaser serve the purposes of melodrama and specifically of the tragedy typically produced by the negotiation of lost time. Every close-up shot and moment of violence in Na’s film works to create sympathy for victims and to justify revenge against wrongdoers. This teleology is reiterated when, at the mid-point of the film, the etiology of Youngmin’s sadism is made explicit for the spectator. In search of Young-min’s address, Jung-ho questions a sex worker who reveals to him that Young-min is impotent. She remarks that, “No matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t work. He said he wasn’t drunk, either.” She then describes how Young-min became obsessive after she rebuffed his advances and began receiving photos of himself covered in blood accompanied with threatening messages. Later in the film, in an interrogation scene between Young-min and a psychologist,

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the connection between his impotence and his sadism is made even more unambiguous. Speaking directly to the young man, the professional analyst asserts that “assholes like you” harbor aggression toward women because serial murderers have deep issues with their masculinity. He pointedly asserts, “You’re impotent, aren’t you? When you see a woman, you want to have sex but you can’t. So you kill them with a chisel, right? You think the chisel is your penis. The pleasure from hammering the chisel on a woman’s head. You killed young women because of that pleasure.” This assertion clearly agitates Young-min. He stands up as if to challenge the older man. After his anger subsides, the psychologist asserts once again: “I’m right, aren’t I? You want to have sex, but your body can’t.” Suddenly, Young-min assaults his interrogator from across the table, apparently for articulating a truth that hit too close to home. Unlike in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, whose main protagonists are delusional while their interiorities remain secretive to the viewer, The Chaser makes clear that the main antagonist’s inner rage has an originating cause, linked to his compromised manhood. By presenting his motivation in such a clear manner through this exercise of conventional psychoanalysis, the psychologist reveals the presence of an invisible psyche that metaphysically grounds the killer’s actions. And through this explanation, the film spectator thinking and feeling in the melodramatic mode is empowered to quickly deem Young-min to be pathetic and evil. Both Jung-ho and Young-min are unrelenting fighting machines who keep going despite having been stabbed multiple times, hit in the head with a blunt object, and kicked in the face. In contrast to the posthuman figures featured in Time and Thirst, whose uncanny, inhuman bodies function as pure means toward an undetermined end, these male protagonists in The Chaser overcome physical struggles typical of the popular action film. The ex-cop/pimp in particular becomes increasingly sympathetic as the film wears on, as his battered and wearied body becomes a vehicle for melodramatic action and pathos. The Chaser continues and reworks many of the themes of Korea’s violent, millennial cinema, yet its ethical potential, outside that espoused by the popular melodramatic mode, remains elusive, yet to be discovered perhaps. We remember that Lee Chang-dong attempted to induce a spectatorial contradiction between sympathy and lack of sympathy for the characters in his Peppermint Candy. Ten years later, he expressed worries about the end of art cinema in Poetry and the end of a kind of filmmaking that challenges viewers to reflect upon their life. Indeed, the cinema continues to survive through the afterlives of sovereign violence, in spite of

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the increased commercialization of the artistic aims of filmmakers and the rationalization of production budgets. In an interview conducted in 2007, after he finished filming Secret Sunshine, Lee articulates a sentiment that corroborates this spirit: I think film viewing is a learning process. The act of going to the cinema is a learning experience. Creating an optimistic outlook through an increased audience is crucial. On the surface, Korean film has grown tremendously, but on the whole as an industry, it has been declining. Production costs need to be rationalized. Blaming all these problems on the audience is irrational. The audience is not responsible for the problems. I have hope for Korean society. But right now we need to consider more fundamental problems.1

Lee remains pessimistic when reflecting on the reality of filmmaking in 2007 in comparison to the possibilities of 1997. At an earlier moment in the interview, he states unequivocally that, “Korean blockbusters are killing other Korean films.”2 And yet, he remains committed to a cinema that preserves its inherent capacity to pose fundamental ethical questions. Such questioning seems to be at the center of the kind of films that Lee would like to see. Thus he states, at the conclusion to the interview: I don’t believe in easily definable notions like happiness or tender emotion. I used to believe there was a way to communicate with the audience in spite of stereotypes and preconceived ideas. But I’m not sure anymore. If I’m able to make more films, I’ll keep asking myself these questions.3

Indeed, to continue to pose these questions, despite the violence against the other depicted in the form and content of films such as The Chaser, is to continue to critique the ethics of sovereign violence. If the experience of ambivalence that is inherent to South Korean cinema is to continue challenging its viewers, this cinema must adapt to accommodate the quickly evolving logics of neoliberal capitalism. Whether these accommodations will be borne out by the forms and aesthetics of the films to come remains an open question.

Notes Introduction 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

See Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 19-26. Young-Jin Kim, Lee Chang-dong, trans. Park Sang-hee (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007), 65. An excellent essay by Kim Soyoung on Peppermint Candy is much more pessimistic about its critical potential. Kim is concerned about the complicity of the viewer with Young-ho, writing that, “the closed, male, narcissist structure founded in the film makes it impossible for viewers to escape from such complicity.” See Soyoung Kim, “Do Not Include Me in Your ‘Us’: Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference,” Korea Journal 46:1 (Spring 2006). See Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 6:2 (1999). I have adopted this idea from the late American film critic, Roger Ebert. See Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea; Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Kyung-sup Chang, South Korea Under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (New York: Routledge, 2010), 8. See for example, Jiyeon Kang, “Corporeal Memory and the Making of a Post-Ideological Social Movement: Remembering the 2002 South Korean Candlelight Vigils,” Journal of Korean Studies 17:2 (Fall 2012). Jesook Song, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Rob Wilson, “Killer Capitalism on the Pacific Rim: Theorizing Major and Minor Modes of the Korean Global,” boundary 2 34:1 (2007). See Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 19131926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2004), 252. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 249. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 249-250. Ibid., 252. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See Henry H. Em, The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 77. Christine Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), 209. Chris Berry, “‘What’s Big About the Big Film?’ ‘De-Westernizing’ the Blockbuster in Korea and China,” in Movie Blockbusters, Julian Stringer (London: Routledge, 2003). See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 43. Thomas Elsaesser has shown that film melodrama may be read to deliberately disrupt the immersion of the spectator in order to place him or her in a position of criticality. I will take this criticality much further in Sovereign Violence. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987). See Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin, ed., Korean Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo WadaMarciano, ed., Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009). On the branding of violent Asian cinema, see Chi-yun Shin, “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films,” in Horror to the Extreme. Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 5. Ibid. Ibid. http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/film/interview_parkchanwook/. Joo-hyun Cho, “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work: Post-IMF Korean Society and the Construction of Neoliberal Women,” Korea Journal 49:3 (Autumn 2009). Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257-8. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 65. Ibid., 69. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 289. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 96. Ibid. Ibid.

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39. Ibid. 40. See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 41. Jungwoon Choi, “The Kwangju People’s Uprising: Formation of the ‘Absolute Community,’” Korea Journal 39:2 (Summer 1999), 261. 42. Ibid., 267. 43. Ibid., 269. 44. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 246. 45. Ibid., 251. 46. Film scholar Todd McGowan writes that the reverse narration of Lee’s film emphasizes Young-ho’s failure to realize the coherence that belongs to the national subject and thus undermines “the spectator’s attachment to nation as a foundation for identity.” See Todd McGowan, “Affirmation of the Lost Object: Peppermint Candy and the End of Progress,” symploke 15:1-2 (2007), 173.

1.

Unredeemable Images

1.

Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44:4 (Summer 1991): 4. Hank Sartin, “Bad Guy,” Chicago Reader, February 11, 2005. Tony Rayns, “Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk,” Film Comment 40, no. 6 (November/December 2004): 50. Rayns, “Sexual Terrorism,” 51. Jason Anderson, “Best of the Fest,” eye Weekly, September 6, 2001. Kim’s cinema seems to have affinity with the transgressive, millennial films coming out of Europe, including work by François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier. James Quandt has termed the French contingent of these convulsively violent films “The New French Extremity.” Writing that films such as Criminal Lovers (1999) or Trouble Every Day (2001) display “an aggressiveness that is really a grandiose form of passivity,” Quandt may have felt the same about Kim’s violent, reactionary work. James Quandt, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” in The New Extremism in Cinema, ed. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011), 25. For the interview with Jung Seong Il from which this excerpt is derived, see: Kim Ki-duk, “Post New Wave Film Director Series: Kim Ki-Duk,” Screening the Past, November 21, 2002, www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0902/byfr14a.html. Adrien Gombeaud, “Break on Through,” Kim Ki Duk, trans. Paul Buck and Catherine Petit (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 2006), 24. Paolo Bertolin, “The Korea Times: Kim’s ‘3-Iron’ Hailed as Moral Winner of the Venice Film Festival,” The Korea Times, September 15, 2004. Hye Seung Chung, Kim Ki-duk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 7.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

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Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 6-7. Ibid., 102. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 125. Chuck Kleinhans, “Dog Eat Dog: Neo-Imperialism in Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown,” Visual Anthropology 22:2-3 (2009): 191. C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3. Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 1-2. Junghyo Ahn, Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea (New York: Soho Press, 1990). Hye Seung Chung, “A Transnational Détournement of Hollywood Melodrama,” in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, ed. Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 138. Kim Soyoung, “The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantastic Others in South Korean Films,” Cultural Studies 27:2 (March 2013): 263. John Lie, “The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-century Korea,” Gender & Society 9:3 (June 1995): 317. Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 129. Ibid. Ibid. Glauber Rocha, “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie, trans. Burnes Hollyman and Randal Johnson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 219. This scene is interesting to ponder in relation to Tadao Sato’s observations on eye contact in the cinema of Ozu and Naruse. “In Japan,” he writes, “it is considered both uncomfortable to look at length into someone’s eyes during a conversation and cold not to do so at all, so a proper balance has to be maintained.” Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema, trans. Gregory Barrett (New York: Kodansha International, 1982), 194. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 86. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 70-83. See Jacques Lacan’s account of the gaze in seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 67–119. The reference to the “laying down” of the gaze can be found on p. 101.

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30. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 14. The entire sentence reads: “Generally speaking, one does not eat one’s companion animals (nor get eaten by them); and one has a hard time shaking colonialist, ethnocentric, ahistorical attitudes toward those who do (eat or get eaten).” 31. When Bardot was asked to respond to the idea that foreigners sometimes ate dog meat when visiting Korea, she responded, “Foreigners wouldn’t eat dog meat unless they are deceived into believing the meat is beef or pork. I can’t continue talking with you liar Koreans any more.” With this, she immediately hung up the telephone. For more details, see William Saletan, “Wok the Dog – What’s Wrong with Eating Man’s Best Friend?” MSN Slate Magazine, January 16, 2002, http://slate.msn.com/default.aspx?id=2060840. 32. This moment may be likened to the scene in Judou in Zhang Yimou’s Judou when she displays her injured body to the peeping Tianqing. In her analysis, Rey Chow writes that, “The effect of this gesture – of quoting the mostquoted, of displaying the most fetishized – is no longer simply voyeuristic pleasure but a heightened self-consciousness.” Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 167. 33. These terms, of course, bring us back to the heterosexual male spectator, as critiqued by psychoanalytic film theory. The [male] psychoanalytic subject cannot negotiate the image of the other – the predominant example being the female body, always already signifying the terror of lack – with his own fear of castration without recourse to some psychic defense that reinforces his own ego-centered totality. 34. Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 130. 35. Hye Seung Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme’: Rereading Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Ressentiment,” Journal of Film and Video 62, no. 1-2 (2010): 100. 36. Ibid., 100. 37. Ibid. 38. Kleinhans, “Dog Eat Dog,” 184. 39. Ha-joon Chang, The East Asian Development Experience: The Miracle, the Crisis and the Future (New York: Zed Books, 2006). 40. See US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, July 2001, http:// www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2001/3930.htm. 41. Hyun Sook Kim, “Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation: The Representation of Working-Class Women in Popular and Radical Texts,” in Dangerous Women: Gender & Korean Nationalism, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (New York: Routledge, 1998), 196. 42. Sealing Cheng, “The Paradox of Vernacularization: Women’s Human Rights and the Gendering of Nationhood,” Anthropological Quarterly 84:2 (Spring 2011): 489. 43. Grace M. Cho’s book recounts and analyzes the testimonies of Korean women who were involved in sex work during and after the Korean War. Notably,

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57.

however, she attempts to argue that: “The accumulated grief and rage (han in Korean) transmitted by the yanggongju crates spaces of possibility within the ruptures she has made but also in a realm beyond narrative.” See Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 25. Nancy Abelmann, The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 22. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 61. Ibid., 51. Christine Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 209. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975): 15. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 65. Linda Williams, “The Ethics of Intervention: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 187. Kim, “Korean Post New Wave Film Director Series.” Chung, Kim Ki-duk, 131. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 132. Kim Kyung Hyun, “Risky Business: The Rise of Asia’s New Hollywood and the Fall of Independent Korean Filmmaking,” Film Comment 40:6 (Nov/Dec 2004): 41. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 171. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 131.

2.

“Love Your Enemies”

1.

Kim Ki-duk, “Korean Post New Wave Film Director Series: Kim Ki-duk,” trans. Aegyung Shim Yecies, Senses of Cinema (March 2002). Nancy Abelmann, “Minjung Theory and Practice,” in Cultural Nationalism in East Asia: Representation and Identity, ed. Harumi Befu (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993), 163. Hye Seung Chung, “Toward a Strategic Korean Cinephilia: A Transnational Détournement of Hollywood Melodrama,” in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, ed. Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 121-122. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tome to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 308.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

2. 3.

4.

Notes

5.

293

For an insightful account of the relationship between cinema, narrative, and the legal process, see Carol J. Clover, “Law and the Order of Popular Culture,” in Law in the Domains of Culture, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1998). 6. Quoted from Suk-Young Kim, “Crossing the Border to the ‘Other’ Side,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, ed. Frances Gateward (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2007), 219-42. 7. Ibid., 237. 8. Jae-cheol Moon, “The Meaning of Newness in Korean cinema: Korean New Wave and After,” Korea Journal 46:1 (Spring 2006): 49. 9. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 48. 10. Jinhee Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 31-40. 11. Nikki J. Y. Park, “Localized Globalization and a Monster National: The Host and the South Korean Film Industry,” Cinema Journal 50:3 (Spring 2011): 51. 12. See Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith & the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 13. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 141. 14. Youngmin Choe, “Postmemory DMZ in South Korean Cinema, 1999-2003,” Journal of Korean Studies 18:2 (Fall 2013): 322. 15. See Nak-chung Paik, “The Idea of a Korean National Literature Then and Now,” positions 1:3 (1993) and Nak-chung Paik, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14:1 (2013). 16. Kwang-Yeong Shin, “Globalization and Social Inequality in South Korea,” in New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements, ed. Jesook Song (London: Routledge, 2011), 17. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. James Crotty and Kang-kook Lee, “Korea’s Neoliberal Restructuring: Miracle or Disaster?” Dollars and Sense 236 (July/August 2001). 19. Jin-Ho Jang, “Neoliberalism in South Korea: The Dynamics of Financialization,” in New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements, ed. Jesook Song (London: Routledge, 2011), 54. 20. See Florence Lowe-Lee, “A New Financial Crisis: Credit Card Excesses,” Korea Insight 6:2 (2004). 21. Martin Hart-Landsberg, “The South Korean Economy: Problems and Prospects,” in Marxist Perspectives on South Korea in the Global Economy, ed. Martin Hart-Landsberg, Seongjin Jeong, and Richard Westra (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 207. 22. James Brooke, “A Hangover in South Korea After a Binge on Credit,” New York Times, December 1, 2003.

294 

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Sovereign Violence

Jin-yong Cha, “3 Attempt Suicide Over Credit Card Debt,” Korea JoonAng Daily, May 22, 2003. Rob Wilson, “Killer Capitalism on the Pacific Rim: Theorizing Major and Minor Modes of the Korean Global,” boundary 2 34:1 (2007): 123. Jae-cheol Moon, “The Meaning of Newness in Korean cinema: Korean New Wave and After,” Korea Journal 46:1 (Spring 2006): 51. Kyung Hyun Kim, “‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-wook’s ‘Unknowable’ Old Boy,” Korea Journal 46:1 (2006): 96. Kim appropriates this quotation from Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2006), 114. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 43. Hye Seung Chung, Kim Ki-duk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 1-12. John Lie also translates “han” as “ressentiment” in Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 43. http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/film/interview_parkchanwook/. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 45. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967). Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, Joshua David Jordan, trans. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 30. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 46. Dave Kehr, “De-Finger the Piano Player,” New York Times, October 30, 2005. Liese Spencer, “Revenger’s Tragedy,” Sight & Sound 14:10 (October 2004): 19. Youn-hui Lim, ed., Park Chan-wook: Savior of Violence, trans. Park Soo-mee (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2005), 27. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, “Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy,” positions 17:3 (Winter 2009): 726. Ibid., 720. Tay Yek Keak, “Vengeance is His,” The Straits Times, October 14, 2004. D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 56. Manohla Dargis, “The Violence (and the Seafood) Is More Than Raw,” New York Times, March 25, 2005. Dargis, “The Violence.” Kim, “‘Tell the Kitchen…,’” 86. Ibid. See Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Mark Russell, “Dialogue: Park Chan-wook,” Hollywood Reporter, May 25, 2004.

Notes

295

50. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 247. 51. Ibid., 249-250. 52. Ibid., 248. 53. Ibid. 54. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54. 55. http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/film/interview_parkchanwook/. 56. http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=155. 57. See Sharon Willis, “A Theater of Interruptions,” in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (New York: Norton, 2013).

3.

“Serial Sexualities and Accidental Desires”

1.

David Bordwell, “Beyond Asian Minimalism: Hong Sangsoo’s Geometry Lesson,” in Huh Moonyung, Hong Sangsoo (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007), 27. Adam Hartzell, “Hong Sangsoo’s Unsexy Sex,” The Film Journal 4 (January 2004). Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 102. Peter Parshall, Altman and After: Multiple Narratives in Film (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 171. “Interview,” in Huh Moonyung, Hong Sangsoo (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007), 27. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 40-41. Parshall, Altman and After, 171. Quoted in Marshall Deutelbaum, “Approaching Hong Sang-soo,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 12:1 (2014): 1. This statement may be found in the press kit for Woman is the Future of Man. Marshall Deutelbaum, “The Deceptive Design of Hong Sangsoo’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 3:2, 190. Deutelbaum, “The Deceptive Design…,” 196. Parshall, Altman and After, 171. “Interview,” 62. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 64. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 175. Ibid., 176-177.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

296 

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Sovereign Violence

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 184-185. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 221. Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Hong Sangsoo’s Lines of Inquiry, Communication, Defense, and Escape,” Film Quarterly 57:4 (Summer 2004): 25. See Youngmin Choe, “Transitional Emotions: Boredom and Distraction in Hong Sang-su’s Travel Films,” Korean Studies 33 (2009). Michael Atkinson, “Man’s Favorite Sport,” The Village Voice, February 21, 2006. “Interview,” 41. Ibid., 42. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 40-41. “Interview,” 41. Ibid., 43. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 65. Firpresci Korea, Film Critiques Vol. 3 (Seoul: Happy House, 2004), 172. Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient, “Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, ed. Frances Gateward (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 129. Cho Han Hae-joang, “‘You Are Entrapped in an Imaginary Well’: The Formation of Subjectivity Within Compressed Development – A Feminist Critique of Modernity and Korean Culture,” trans. Michael Shin, in The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen and Chua Bend Huat (London: Routledge, 2007), 304. Cho, “‘You are Entrapped in an Imaginary Well,’” 307. See Susie Jie Young Kim, “Korea Beyond and Within the Armistice: Division and the Multiplicities of Time in Postwar Literature and Cinema,” Journal of Korean Studies 18:2 (Fall 2013). In this article Kim persuasively describes a “post-Armistice division consciousness” that persists into contemporary South Korean life. Dongjin Seo, “The Will to Self-Managing, the Will to Freedom: The SelfManaging Ethic and the Spirit of Flexible Capitalism in South Korea,” in New Millennium South Korea, ed. Jesook Song (London: Routledge, 2011), 84. Kyung-sup Chang, South Korea Under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (London: Routledge, 2010), 138-139. Chang, South Korea Under Compressed Modernity, 14. OECD/Korea Policy Centre (2009), “Key Findings: Korea.” Statistics Korea (KOSTAT), “Marriage and Divorce Statistics in 2013.”

Notes

297

43. Ibid. 44. Kyung Hyun Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke University, 2004), 206. 45. Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, 210. 46. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” trans. James Strachey, in Standard Edition Vol. 12, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 150. 47. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 54. 48. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” trans. James Strachey, in Standard Edition Vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 88. 49. Ibid., 88. 50. Ibid., 88-89. 51. Ibid., 90. 52. “Interview,” 73. 53. Hak-san Moon, “Camel(s): Fundamental Questions About Aesthetic of Life and Pleasure of the Humankind,” Film Critiques: Fipresci Korea, Vol. 3 (Seoul: Happy House, 2004), 162. 54. Park Ki-yong, e-mail message to author, June 18, 2014. 55. Jinhee Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 38. 56. Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance, 35. 57. Park Ki-yong, e-mail message to author, June 18, 2014. 58. Ibid.

4.

“The Face and Hospitality”

1.

Hak-san Moon, “A Face Which Registers His Career: A Comment on actor Choi Min Sik,” in Film Critiques: Firpresci Korea, Vol. 4 (Seoul: Happy House, 2005), 70. Andrew Eungi Kim, “Nonofficial Religion in South Korea: Prevalence of Fortunetelling and Other Forms of Divination,” Review of Religious Research 46:3 (March 2005): 291. The 2013 film The Face Reader, directed by Han Jaerim, dramatizes this Chosun-era practice. Moon, “A Face which Registers His Career,” 75. Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 34. Moon, “A Face which Registers His Career,” 71-72. David Scott Diffrient, “The Face(s) of Korean Horror Film: Toward a Cinematic Physiognomy of Affective Extremes,” in Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 114-115.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

298 

7.

Sovereign Violence

Michelle Cho, “Face Value: The Star as Genre in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother,” in The Korean Popular Culture Reader, ed. Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 188. 8. Seung-hoon Jeong, Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (New York: Routledge, 2013), 152. 9. Lim Youn-hui, ed., Park Chan-wook: Savior of Violence, trans. Park Soo-mee (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2005), 33. 10. Michelle Cho performs an insightful reading of Park Kwang-su’s contribution in her essay. See Cho, “Face Value,” 168-172. 11. See Christian Metz, “Identification, Mirror” in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Ben Brewster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 12. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 242. 13. Jung Ji-youn, Bong Joon-ho, trans. Colin A. Mouat (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2008), 102. 14. Ibid., 107. 15. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tome to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 267. 16. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 67. 17. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, “Memories of Memories: Historicity, Nostalgia, and Archive in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder,” Cinema Journal 51:1 (Fall 2011): 77. 18. Ibid., 83. 19. Ibid., 5. 20. Linda Williams writes that, “Melodrama involves a dialectic of pathos and action – a give and take of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time.’” See Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 69. 21. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 377. 22. Jae-Jung Suh, “Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea,” Critical Asian Studies 42:4 (2010): 512. 23. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 5. 24. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 23. 25. Seung-Ook Lee, Najeeb Jan, and Joel Wainwright, “Agamben, Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea,” Antipode 46.3 (2014): 661. 26. Christine Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), 224.

Notes

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

299

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Ben Brewster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 48. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 248. Ibid., 249-250. James R. Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 52. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 250. Giorgio Agamben, “The Face,” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 93. Ibid., 94. Young-jin Kim, Lee Chang-dong, trans. Park Sang-hee (Seoul: Seoul Selection, 2007), 76. Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, in his review published on June 24, 2005, that Kim’s Samaritan Girl (2004) is “worthless,” for example. Wendy Brown, “Untimeliness and Punctuality: Critical Theory in Dark Times,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4. Ibid., 4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 262. This thesis is discussed in detail in Brown’s essay. Brown, “Untimeliness and Punctuality,” 14. Ibid., 16. http://www.grouchoreviews.com/interviews/118. http://www.grouchoreviews.com/interviews/118. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 97. Quoted in Deleuze, Cinema 1, 96. The Edith Bone translation presents this passage differently, however I believe the argument still holds: “Even if we have just seen the owner of the face in a long shot, when we look into the eyes in a close-up, we no longer think of that wide space, because the expression and significance of the face has no relation to space and no connection with it. Facing an isolated face takes us out of space, our consciousness of space is cut out and we find ourselves in another dimension: that of physiognomy.” See Béla Balázs, Theory of Film, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 61. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 98. Richard Rushton, “What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces,” Cultural Critique 51 (Spring 2002): 225.

300 

Sovereign Violence

47. This moment of preparation is related to photogénie described by Jean Epstein: “I love the mouth which is about to speak and holds back, the gesture which hesitates between right and left, the recoil before the leap and the moment before landing, the becoming, the hesitation, the taut spring, the prelude, and even more than all these, the piano being tuned before the overture. The photogenic is conjugated in the future and in the imperative.” See Jean Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (Spring 1977): 9. 48. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 103. 49. Ibid., 88. 50. Ibid., 87. 51. Hye Seung Chung, Kim Ki-duk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 52. One could argue that Tae-suk perished in prison from the brutality of the guards and that only his afterlife haunts the rest of 3-Iron. Each time he is beaten his body is left strangely unbruised. 53. Seongho Yoon, “Empty Houses Haunted: Hauntology of Space in Kim Kiduk’s 3-Iron,” Post Script 27:3 (2008): 65. 54. Ibid., 65. 55. Bliss Cua Lim, “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory,” positions: east asia cultures critique 9:2 (Fall 2001): 294. 56. Yoon, “Empty Houses Haunted,” 66. 57. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77. 58. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 146. 59. This is an argument I pursue in detail in my Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 60. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xvii. 61. Ibid., xviii. 62. http://www.grouchoreviews.com/interviews/118.

5.

“Forgiving the Unforgivable”

1.

Richard Lloyd Parry, “Death for Jilted Cannibal Killer,” The Times, December 14, 2004. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), 240. Ibid., The Human Condition, 241. Richard Lloyd Parry, “Death for Jilted Cannibal Killer,” The Times, December 14, 2004. Youn-hui Lim, ed., Park Chan-wook: Savior of Violence, trans. Park Soo-mee (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2005), 37.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Notes

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

301

Young-jin Kim, Park Chan Wook, trans. Colin A. Mouat (Seoul: Seoul Selection, 2007), 108. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/53/parkiv.php#.U9LKgkDDvP5. Ibid. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 31–32. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid. In this regard, Derrida should be reminded of the logos of Confucianism and its tradition in these two contexts. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 32. http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/film/interview_parkchanwook/. http://www.fareastfilms.com/customPage/27.htm. See Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 51. In section three of this interview, Derrida develops the secret in terms of his autobiography and the larger problem of belongingness. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 54. Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 55. Kyung Hyun Kim, “‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-wook’s ‘Unknowable’ Old Boy,” Korea Journal 46:1 (2006): 88. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 107. Ali Jaafar, “Interview: Park Chan-wook,” Sight & Sound 16:2 (February 2006): 19. http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/film/interview_parkchanwook/. Kim, Park Chan Wook, 114-115. Wi Jo Kang, Christ and Caesar in Modern Korea (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), vii. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 45. Zachary Sng, “Syncretic Sunshine,” diacritics 41:2 (2013): 15. Rey Chow, “‘I Insist on the Christian Dimension’: On Forgiveness… and the Outside of the Human,” in Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 112. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 131. Sng, “Syncretic Sunshine,” 18. Ibid. According to a survey conducted by the Centennial Comprehensive Study of the Korean Church, quoted in Timothy S. Lee, Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 119. Ibid., 115-116. Ibid., 126.

302 

37.

Sovereign Violence

54. 55. 56. 57.

Chung-shin Park, Protestantism and Politics in Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 66. Rev. Dr. Joshua Young-gi Hong, “Evangelicals and the Democratization of South Korea Since 1987,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia, ed. David H. Lumsdaine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 190. Jinsoo An, “Screening the Redemption: Christianity in Korean Melodrama,” in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, ed. Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 66. Ibid., 72-73. Ibid., 73. See Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). Suh Kwang-sun David, “A Biographical Sketch of an Asian Theological Consultation,” in Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983), 16. Suh Kwang-sun David, Theology, Ideology and Culture (Hong Kong: World Student Christian Federation, 1983), 51. Ibid., 22. Cyris H. S. Moon, Korean Minjung Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985), 1-2. Moon, Korean Minjung Theology, 55. Ibid., 55. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper, 1975), 165. André Bazin, “Cinema and Theology,” trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, in Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews From the Forties and Fifties (New York: Routledge, 1997), 68. See http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2011/07/27/poetryinterview-with-lee-chang-dong/. Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” trans. Peter D. Hertz, in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper, 1982), 106. Alain Badiou, “On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem,” trans. Susan Spitzer, in Cinema (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 239. Ibid., 238. See http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/features/articles/lee-chang-dong-15608. Arendt, The Human Condition, 241. Ibid., 246.

6.

“Global Cinema in the Age of Posthumanity”

1.

Rey Chow, “’I Insist on the Christian Dimension’: On Forgiveness… and the Outside of the Human,” in Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 131.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Notes

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

303

Ibid., 131. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 65. Ibid., 29. Peter Bradshaw, “I’m a Cyborg,” The Guardian, April 3, 2008. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9. Interview with Park Chan-wook, http://www.wheelmeout.com/4_5.php. See Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London, BFI, 1999). David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995). Chow, “’I Insist on the Christian Dimension,’” 131. “Park Chan-wook – Thirst, Oldboy – 7/23/09,” http://www.grouchoreviews. com/interviews/292. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 72. Ibid., 78. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 116. Ibid., 116. Stiegler thus far has written three volumes of this Technics and Time. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15. Young-jin Kim, Park Chan-wook, trans. Colin A. Mouat (Seoul: Seoul Selection, 2007), 117. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” trans. James Strachey, in Standard Edition Vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 90. Seung-hoon Jeong, Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (New York: Routledge, 2013), 144-145. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 150. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” trans. Alix Strachey, in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 211. “Plastic Makes Perfect,” The Economist, Jan 30, 2013. Ruth Holliday and Joanna Elfving-Hwang, “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea,” Body & Society 18:2 (2012): 59. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 70. See Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 211.

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30. Giorgio Agamben, “The Face,” trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 93. 31. Ibid., 93-94. 32. Kyu Hyun Kim, “Park Chan-wook’s Thirst: Body, Guilt and Exsanguination,” in Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 200. 33. Ibid., 200. 34. Ibid., 213. 35. Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” trans. Brian Holmes, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 316. 36. Ibid., 319. 37. Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 125. 38. Eunha Oh, “Mother’s Grudge and Woman’s Wail: The Monster-Mother and Korean Horror Film,” in Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 66. 39. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 24. 40. Chung, Hye Jean, “Media Heterotopias and Transnational Filmmaking: Mapping Real and Virtual Worlds,” Cinema Journal 51:4 (Summer 2012): 90. 41. Kim Soyoung, “The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantastic Others in South Korean Films,” Cultural Studies 27:2 (March 2013): 266. 42. Ibid., 267. 43. Agamben, “Difference and Repetition,” 318. 44. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 56, 7. 45. Ibid., 57, 58. 46. Mekado Murphy, “Faith and Fangs: An Interview With Park Chan-wook,” New York Times, July 30, 2009. 47. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ and the Limits of Reason Alone,” Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 67. 48. I am thinking, here, of the relationship between Asian anthropos and Western humanitas discussed in Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13:4 (2010): 441-464. 49. “The Korea Society Interview Park Chan-wook,” http://www.koreasociety. org/interviews/the_korea_society_interviews_park_chan-wook.html.

Notes

305

50. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55. 51. Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” trans. Kevin Attell, in Profanations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 77. 52. Ibid., 86. 53. Ibid., 88.

Conclusion: Afterlives of Sovereign Violence 1. 2. 3.

Young-Jin Kim, Lee Chang-dong, trans. Park Sang-hee (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2007), 78. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 82.

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Quandt, James. “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.” In The New Extremism in Cinema, edited by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, 18-28. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011. Rayns, Tony. “Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk.” Film Comment 40:6 (November/ December 2004): 51. Rocha, Glauber. “The Aesthetics of Hunger.” Translated by Burnes Hollyman and Randal Johnson. In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, edited by Scott MacKenzie, 218-219. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Rushton, Richard. “What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces.” Cultural Critique 51 (Spring 2002): 219-237. Russell, Mark. “Dialogue: Park Chan-wook.” Hollywood Reporter, May 25, 2004. Sakai, Naoki. “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13:4 (2010): 441-464. Saletan, William, “Wok the Dog – What’s Wrong with Eating Man’s Best Friend?” MSN Slate Magazine, January 16, 2002. Sartin, Hank. “Bad Guy.” Chicago Reader, February 11, 2005. Sato, Tadao. Currents in Japanese Cinema. Translated by Gregory Barrett. New York: Kodansha International, 1982. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Seo, Dongjin. “The Will to Self-Managing, the Will to Freedom: The Self-Managing Ethic and the Spirit of Flexible Capitalism in South Korea.” In New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements, edited by Jesook Song, 84-100. London: Routledge, 2011. Shin, Gi-wook. Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Shin, Kwang-Yeong. “Globalization and Social Inequality in South Korea.” In New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements, edited by Jesook Song, 11-28. London: Routledge, 2011. Sng, Zachary. “Syncretic Sunshine: Metaphor in the Cinema of Lee Chang-Dong.” diacritics 41:2 (2013): 6-30. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Soh, C. Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Song, Jesook. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Spencer, Liese. “Revenger’s Tragedy.” Sight & Sound 14:10 (October 2004): 18. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Suh, Jae-Jung. “Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea.” Critical Asian Studies 42:4 (2010): 503-524. Suh, Kwang-sun David. Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983.

Bibliogr aphy

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Williams, Linda. “The Ethics of Intervention: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, 176-189. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44:4 (Summer 1991): 2-13. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” In Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, edited by Nick Browne, 42-88. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Willis, Sharon. “A Theater of Interruptions.” In Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, edited by Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky, 776-793. New York: Norton, 2013. Wilson, Rob. “Killer Capitalism on the Pacific Rim: Theorizing Major and Minor Modes of the Korean Global.” boundary 2 34:1 (2007): 115-133. Yoon, Seongho. “Empty Houses Haunted: Hauntology of Space in Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron.” Post Script 27:3 (2008): 59-68.

Index 200 Pounds Beauty 258-259 386 Generation 24, 151-152, 166, 282 Abelmann, Nancy 60-61, 74 accident 24, 125-132, 138-140, 141-142, 144, 147, 149, 200 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 109, 117, 177, 178, 268 cinema 266, 270-271 face 181-182, 262-263 profanation 275-276 ambivalence 12, 19, 47, 50, 52, 64, 82, 99, 100, 112, 117, 141, 156, 164, 165, 175, 177, 179, 181, 205, 206, 220, 268, 270, 272, 273, 274 An, Jinsoo 225-226 aporia 13, 45, 50, 83, 85, 185, 194, 201, 210, 221, 227, 228, 247, 248, 250, 252, 274, 276 Arendt, Hannah 99, 200, 205, 239-240 Badiou, Alain 237-238 Balázs, Béla 155, 189, 190 Barthes, Roland 28-29 “will have been” 28, 29, 85, Benjamin, Walter 27, 31, 76, 107-109, 185 critique of violence 15, 107, 180, 181, divine violence 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 31, 82, 180-181, 184, 190, 201, 213, 237, 261, 270, 276, 279, 280 mythic violence 15-17, 19, 20, 22, 26, 31, 96, 108-109, 110, 111, 112, 179-181, 200, 206, 224, 237, 272, 275, 279 Bergson, Henri 24, 122, 127-131, 132, 133, 149 blockbuster 19, 21, 76, 80, 152, 285 Bong, Joon-ho 13, 15, 152, 157, 215, 268 Memories of Murder (2003) 21, 24, 158, 166183, 185, 187, 191, 199, 213, 230, 262, 282 capitalism 15, 37, 55, 57, 76, 92, 98, 139, 141, 266, 280 chaebol 11, 57, 89, 103, 152 Chang, Ha-joon 57 Chang, Kyung-sup 14 compressed modernity 14, 143 Cho Han, Hae-joang 141-142 Cho, Michelle 157, 298 Choe, Youngmin 82, 134 Choi, Jinhee 21, 80, 152, Chow, Rey 220-221, 241 Christianity 14, 25, 94, 194, 201, 202, 209, 210, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222-227, 241 Chun, Doo-hwan 10, 166, 175 Chung, Hye Seung 22, 35, 41, 56, 75, 95, 140, 183, 191

debt 11, 25, 55, 56, 64, 91-92, 95, 96-98, 101, 102, 105, 109, 110, 115, 157, 180, 185, 187, 190, 194, 200, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 213, 218, 239, 279 Deleuze, Gilles 69, 250-251 faceicity 188-191 impulse-image 38, 71, 190, 191 movement-image 81, 82, 88, 122, 124, 139, 206, 236, 283 time-image 82, 98, 122, 125, 139, 145, 283 Derrida, Jacques 25, 195, 218, 272, forgiveness 207-209, 212, 214, 220-221 hospitality 193-194, 195 Diffrient, David Scott 156 exception 15, 17, 18, 22, 25, 41, 83, 109, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181-182, 183, 200, 210, 212, 213, 218, 221, 229, 242, 268, 269, 275, 279 exchange 23, 25, 39, 42, 48, 51, 57, 69-71, 72, 84-85, 86, 89, 95, 97-98, 105, 120, 142, 180, 184, 185, 186, 204-205, 206, 207, 212, 213, 227, 228, 237, 239, 249, 251, 255, 260, 279 exteriority 46, 52, 62, 157, 164, 165, 186, 188, 212, 244, 252, 271 face-to-face 44, 46, 50, 52, 53, 66, 93, 99, 102, 118, 126, 157, 160, 161, 174, 179, 191, 203, 205, 210, 216, 228, 262 faith 170, 222, 224, 225, 248-251, 272, 274, 276 forgiveness 199, 201, 202-203, 204-205, 207, 210, 211, 213-214, 216-218, 222, 227, 228, 229, 239-240, 241, 242, 279 Foucault, Michel 20, 268 Freud, Sigmund 146-149, 221, 245, 255 narcissism 147-149, 255 uncanny 220, 257, 261 gift 25, 46, 78, 84, 97, 134, 210, 211, 212, 214, 249, 251 gijichon 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 56 Gledhill, Christine 18, 19, 63, 178 governmentality 14, 17, 176, 178, 182, 183 grievability 63, 75, 178 guilt 16, 52, 63, 64, 86, 95, 96, 97, 98, 105, 106, 107, 108, 145, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 182, 185, 187, 199, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 214, 220, 232, 235, 263, 282 Gwangju Uprising 10, 11, 12, 30, 32, 175, 177, 225, 226 gwansang 155, 156, 260 han 73-75, 95, 226-227, 294 Haraway, Donna 50, 245 Heidegger, Martin 27, 236-237

318  Hong Sang-soo 13, 17, 24, 152, 218, 279 Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) 21, 24, 115, 116-132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 147, 151, 255 Woman is the Future of Man (2004) 24, 115, 132-150, 207, 254, 255 hospitality 24, 160, 184, 186, 193, 196 humanism 14, 17, 19, 43, 62, 80, 100, 105, 221, 241-243, 247, 259, 260, 261, 272, 279 hwesawon 9, 32, 55, 88, 101 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 11, 15, 19, 20, 22, 26, 57, 69, 81, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 103, 110, 115, 133, 141-143, 145, 150, 238, 257, 259, 272, 279, 280 interiority 19, 24, 62, 157, 168, 181, 182, 185, 186, 253, 260, 261 invisible 19, 63, 168, 191, 193, 212, 213, 219, 220, 224, 244, 259, 261, 284 Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun 103, 110, 172-173 Kierkegaard, Søren 26, 248-249, 250, 251 Kim, Gok and Sun Kim Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (2003) 22, 23, 69-72 Kim, Ki-duk 13, 19, 22, 33-37, 71, 73, 95, 146, 152, 164, 250, 279 3-Iron (2004) 24, 35, 65, 158, 183-197, 261, 279 Address Unknown (2001) 21, 22, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37-54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 95, 157, 169, 187, 190, 253, 254, 261, 281, Bad Guy (2001) 19, 22, 23, 34, 36, 51, 54-68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 95, 157, 185, 187, 197, 253, 281 Time (2006) 157, 242, 252-263, 281 Kim, Kyung Hyun 11, 21, 69-70, 93, 106, 145-146, 212-213 Kim, Soyoung 42, 269-270, 271, 287 Kim, Young-sam 30, 57, 89 Lady in the Lake (1947) 161-163, 164 Lee Chang-dong 183, 284-285 Peppermint Candy (1999) 9-13, 25, 26-32, 63, 95, 175, 233, 281, 284 Poetry (2010) 25, 201, 229-240, 284 Secret Sunshine (2007) 18, 25, 215-229, 230, 233, 241, 247, 285 Levinas, Emmanuel 23, 44, 46-47, 52, 115 Lie, John 42, 294 Lippit, Akira Mizuta 131 means-ends 109, 179, 182, 200, 237 Metz, Christian 161, 178-179 millennium 13, 14, 18, 32, 45, 80, 91, 140, 142, 152, 153, 154, 199, 227, 257 minjung 14, 17, 30, 59, 74, 75, 226-227

Sovereign Violence

Moon, Hak-san 151, 155 Moon, Katharine 41 Na Hong-jin 13, 15 The Chaser (2008) 281-284 narcissism 23, 24, 26, 115, 134, 145, 150, 160, 164, 243 National Security Act (NSA) 176-177 neoliberalism 13, 15, 23, 25, 36, 55, 59, 62, 69, 71, 72, 88, 89, 92, 97, 98, 100, 134, 140, 141, 142, 144, 153, 154, 182, 185, 191, 238, 279, 282, 285 Nietzsche, Friedrich 53, 71, 76, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 184, 208, 215 ressentiment 22, 23, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 109, 110, 115, 129, 149, 155, 174, 185, 192, 203, 204, 205, 215, 218, 227, 270, 282, 294 Ozu, Yasujiro 116, 120, 133, 290 Park, Chan-wook 13, 73, 115, 146, 152, 279 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006) 20, 25-26, 242-252, 284 JSA: Joint Security Area (2000) 23, 74, 76-85, 86, 87, 88, 100, 103, 111, 112, 115, 122, 135, 152, 167, 170, 201, 213, 214, 242, 264 Lady Vengeance (2005) 20, 86, 135, 201-215, 216, 218, 221, 249, 279, 283 N.E.P.A.L.: Never Ending Peace and Love (2003) 18, 24, 158-166, 168, 169 Oldboy (2003) 21, 23, 74, 100-113, 115, 135, 155, 156, 192, 199, 201, 202, 204, 207, 209, 213, 281 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) 19, 23, 74, 85-100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 111, 115, 150, 156, 199, 201, 204, 213, 264, 282 Thirst (2009) 26, 242, 263-277 Park, Chung-hee 37, 41, 58, 175 Park, Ki-yong Camel(s) (2002) 19, 24, 115, 150-154, 230, private 80, 82-83, 85, 86, 103, 119, 143, 213, 214, 218, 220 profane 25, 26, 211, 212, 239, 240, 275-276 public 10, 58, 61, 78, 82-85, 86, 88, 103, 136, 143, 157, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 218, 220, 221, 223, 239 pure means 15, 16, 31, 107, 180, 181, 191, 237, 261, 262, 270, 271, 276, 280, 284 realism 146, 183, 219, 233, 236, 238 Rocha, Glauber 43 Schmitt, Carl 17, 109, 176, 177, 224, 275 segyehwa 57, 38, 89 Shakespeare 132, 221 Shin, Gi-wook 14 Shin, Kwang-yeong 90-91 shot-reverse shot 9, 45, 120, 130, 140, 157, 161, 167, 168, 174, 183, 228,

319

Index

Sng, Zachary 219-220, 221 Sobchack, Vivian 162-163 Soh, Sarah 40-41 Song, Jesook 14-15 Stiegler, Bernard 251-252 subjective camera 161-163, 164, 165 Suh, Kwang-sun David 226

Vertigo (1958) 100, 254-255 victim 11, 12, 18, 19, 25, 27, 30, 32, 33, 40, 42, 58, 59-62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 74, 75, 80, 93, 94, 95, 97, 104, 109, 110, 125, 137, 140, 156, 159, 160, 168, 173, 177, 179, 180, 199, 203, 205, 213, 217, 225, 227, 231, 234, 238, 239, 241, 258, 259, 263, 273, 279, 282, 283

“too early”/”too late” 27, 62, 259, 283, 298 trauma 10, 11, 12, 15, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32, 34, 37, 42, 45, 57, 61, 69, 75, 77, 94, 104, 110, 111, 112, 113, 135, 145, 147, 205, 212, 215, 219, 225, 231, 237, 244, 246, 252, 267

Yoo, Young-chul 199-201, 282 Williams, Linda 18, 19, 27, 33, 61-64, 68, 75-76, 80, 96, 169-170, 225, 241, 274 Wilson, Rob 15, 92



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