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Spectacular Masochism in the Products of the South Korean Film Industry(2007) |
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The analysis of film as a type of language is a highly dubious yet commonplace practice predicated upon the more familiar theoretical mechanics of the textual referential systems that all films inevitably create and utilize, and is an essential aspect of understanding the socio-political meanings of films as cultural products. What is unfortunate is that even the most advanced discussions of this kind often avoid completely the latter degree of interpretation, reveling in the linguistic reformulations of films that utterly conform as cultural products to the interests of global capital — and they therefore fail to illuminate the institutional practices that are reflected therein. While filmic language is certainly a real enough cultural construct, the relationship between films and written language breaks down when we attempt to analyze commercial films as textual entities, and with even greater theoretical divergences than with static visual media, such as photography, print making, and painting. Although under-explored due the expedience and acceptability of the standardization and interdisciplinary transposition of critical theories, the primary reason for these divergences is that industrial filmmaking (as opposed to personal filmmaking) is done in massive social configurations in comparison to any other cultural product that might be read textually. It becomes difficult to speak of authorship when within a single frame of celluloid we see the recording of dozens or even hundreds of aesthetic and technical decisions, often made departmentally and without the input of the director, or any other supposed creator. What we call authorship in commercial or industrial film is essentially the editorial approval that sanctifies a massive set of decisions made in an institutionalized hierarchy of social positions. The techniques of such large socio-economic configurations as film productions are certainly dependent upon the many levels of cultural, social and economic power structures they serve and reinforce. Partially due to an industrial complicity, the aforementioned exigencies of interdisciplinary theoretical transposition (film = text), and of course good old-fashioned conformity, the internal or external socio-political implications of a film’s production are rarely examined in film criticism. It can be seen how film theory that can diminish the importance of social relationships and socio-economic conditions in methods of production would be a simple addition to institutionalized theories of aesthetics and hermeneutics, and how easily one would be able to psychologically equate literary and filmic characterizations and narratives. Such theories can even create stylistic analogies without batting an eye at neurological and sociological research and fact that betrays an extreme difference in a person’s mode of perception and psychological identification between moving images and text, such as mirror neurons or the politics of illiteracy. Language, as a manifestation of culture, is materially arbitrary, and references only the “social body” of the viewer. Visual representation (and types of auditory information), however, relates automatically with the physical body and involves a physiological interaction that textual signification does. This is not to say that films can never be read as texts, or that the narrative levels of films are never important. A film can easily function as allegory, as diagram, or in any other simple relationship with linguistic signification. But that is never all that a film is doing — especially when film is consumed not as illustrative, but as entertainment, spectacle, or art. Strictly physiological and linguistic modes of filmic interpretation both assume an unproblematic relationship with filmic representation in terms of the social aspect of film production. Either can logically create direct analogies with theoretical figures of socially repressive interpretive systems — whether they be the problematic identity constructs of Freudian psychology or Darwinian evolution; when no account is given to the power negotiation between producer, product, and consumer as manifested in the subject’s imaginative total body, a theory or critique will lose any ability it may have to facilitate increased social agency. What is missing in traditional film theories then is the imaginative body — the synthesis of physical (defined by subconscious faculties), social or linguistic (defined by conscious faculties), and socially self-reflexive (facilitated by practical consciousness) spheres of influence the body. Therefore, films — centralized (produced by a semi-discrete social entity) moving image referential systems — will need to be critiqued in relation to (at least) three interpretive modes: the linguistic functions of narrative and visual symbols; the physiological functions of the photographic, digital and display processes; the power structures implemented in both the methods of production and distribution, as well as in the use of textual devices, such as narrative, character and symbolism.
The Leviathan and the HostIt is being suggested by many reviewers of Bong Joon-ho's The Host that the film functions—at least partially—as a self-aware political commentary. While these assertions are most often left unsubstantiated by reviewers, Bong Joon-ho has been far more precise when discussing the historical dramatization that serves as the opening scene of the film:
While discussing the “factual” references for the film’s plot, Bong clearly states that he utilizes “political satire” as a set of “genre-conventions”—and he does so within a film that mixes the conventions and expectations of multiple popular cinematic genres in an original way. Despite this formal originality, it will be my assertion in this essay that the “political satire” that is consciously woven into The Host is employed ironically in the service of the politically repressive culture industry, with its dual mandates of mystification and entertainment—and, therefore, that the true political agenda of the film is a subconscious acquiescence to the power structures engrained in official economic and political models. Pre-rendered model for the monster in The Host
Two aspects of the production are receiving the majority of the critical attention being paid to the film—the “realism” and “high-quality” of the depiction of the monster-character on the one hand, and the comedic dysfunctionality of the depiction of the family-characters on the other. We must ask ourselves: are these truly the most noteworthy aspects of the film? If so, how are we to examine these aspects in terms of their political agenda(s)? Obviously, the technological spectacle of the ”monster” and the anti-conventional portrayal of the family are receiving the most mainstream media attention (that is to say, the reviews, promotional video, awards and interviews that play an integral role in the success of the economic venture of the film) because there is an established pseudo-linguistic relationship between mainstream filmmakers/production companies and media outlets—a code that serves to pre-categorize a film in marketing terms (that have been adopted as critical terms). A perfect example of this codification in a general sense is the American phenomenon of “best-picture” films that are produced explicitly to validate the positioning of marketing institutions (such as the Academy Awards, or major news outlet reviews) within the myth of cultural “expertise”. In the specific sense, the universalizing of film score types or the standardization of acting methods through cultural monopolization represent two of the handful of characteristics that are superficially and falsely debated in mainstream film criticism in order to artificially validate the existence of institutionalized critical “expertise”, and to ensure its symbiotic function in economic support of the cultural hegemony of major motion picture production and distribution. It is a slightly less visible extension of the standardization of occupational roles in major film production. The “bottom-line” reduction of all aspects of cinema culture is perhaps more overt right now in South Korea than in any other film market in the world:
The “monster” that is brought to life in The Host is at once the central narrative fabrication of the film as well as the most explicit representation of the artificiality of the filmmaking process. The manner in which this device is representative of a political agenda is highly complicated because of the complexity of the conscious and subconscious political tensions this device references, and ultimately because of the contradictory representational strategies employed in the film. The technique of creating terrifying or supernatural characters that symbolize political and psychological anxieties is by no means a novel one—its use in fairy tales, allegory, painting, cartooning, and innumerable other forms is common knowledge. What locates the monster of The Host within a much more specialized tradition is its explicit artificiality—an artificiality which attempts to be an equal to the “natural” processes of traditional photography in its ability to represent life. This method of symbol making reflects an ill-advised resuscitation of enlightenment hubris—a belief in the possibility of a fundamental mechanization of life in the name of universal coherence and environmental mastery. The monster of The Host, which, in the narrative “genre-convention”, is a byproduct of Western arrogance and violence, is in the totality of the cinematic experience the direct semiotic descendent of Hobbes’ Leviathan, in that it denotes an artificial biology as the structural model for the life of a singular social subject:
Like Hobbes’ Leviathan, the failure of The Host, and the monster that is the main spectacle in the film, as political illustration stems from three, cyclical causes: a technological hubris resulting in the reduction of the natural and human to mere mechanics; a technical production apparatus that is incapable of and uninterested in a multiplicity of subjects; a logocentric reduction of multiplicity in social subjectivity in favor of a generalized and mystified symbolism. If we seek to understand the monster as a true Hobbesian “automaton” that monolithically represents the political and psychological state of Korean audiences then we can effectively identify the political agenda of The Host with that of the masochistic mass culture described and predicted by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer:
No matter how intensely a viewer is enraptured in the narrative drama, there is no adult, politically responsible audience member who is unaware of the artificiality of the monster, or of the expense of bringing this fabrication to the screen—it is literally animated in the computer rendered “contours of its skeleton”, and I can think of no more accurate a description of the form the monster takes than “the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly”. This illusion of technological control over the appearance or image of the organic (multiple) subject is also descriptive of the relationship of the spectacle-film to the psychologically repressive fascist mass spectacles first analyzed by theorists such as Wilhelm Reich, Georg Lukåcs, Siegfried Kracauer, and later by Paul Virilio and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (to name only a few). It is obvious—yet contrary to the codification of institutionalized film commentary—that the monster exists at every moment within and beyond the frame as an explicit manifestation of the technological power of the filmmaker, production companies, and by synecdoche, the terrifying ability of the culture industry to manipulate the meaning of cinematic (quasi-mythical) images via economic monopoly. It is my belief that this type of analysis is appropriate for understanding the explicit intent behind many technical aspects of The Host, and possibly for the analysis of its fundamental political agenda as well. We can now begin to understand how, as the above Adorno and Horkheimer quote describes, The Host blends many of the common conventions of various cinematic genres for ultimately political reasons, although these reasons—according to the contradictory logic of repression—are simultaneously subconscious and explicit. The repressive techniques relating to the realization of the monster require the construction of a framework of “genre-conventions”, or filmic structural and grammatical devices in order to achieve the culture industry’s dual mandate of entertainment and mystification. The microcosmic unit of the family is conflated symbolically with the psychological state of the South Korean audience—and by virtue of their powerlessness and comic ineptitude, they become representative of self-doubt and self-limitations in the image of all audiences that the screen projects. Again, Bong Joon-ho is more direct than any critic in stating his intentions:
We will ostensibly “enjoy” our identification of ourselves as “weak” and “lower-class” masochistically as we laugh at the anti-heroic slapstick of the family in The Host. Despite the superficial reversal of narrative conventions, we can still feel ourselves being guided by the codes of score and fetishized facial reactions into a sympathy with the phallic unity of microcosm and macrocosm. We take refuge from the vaginal horror of the monster in the narrative reversal of character expectations, as a scene of mass mourning becomes a three-stooges routine, as the American military hero dies, as the son’s incompetence leads to his own father’s sacrifice, as the drunk brother finally proves his dexterity only to slip in the end, as the hesitant sister satisfyingly releases her flaming arrow, as the invalid father shakes off a lobotomy to stab a metal rod deep into the monster’s all devouring orifice, as the little girl is replaced in the familial structure by a little boy—a confused and ecstatic shuffling of surface elements gives way to an overwhelming sense of the inevitability of violence—and specifically—the inescapability of a centralized, masculinized violence perpetrated against the feminized chaos of the organic, the democratic, and the resistant. This stimulating and meaningless shifting of mythological readings in the characters and symbols in the overlapping climaxes of the film represents the final failure of the conscious political agenda of the film, in much the same way that Carl Schmitt characterized the meaning of the Leviathan as a political symbol:
When true horror becomes reduced to “thrill” or sadistic comedy, the potentially radical expressions of discontent and criticism of power structures is exchanged for the masochistic pleasure of the cinematic audience enjoying and accepting its own powerlessness. What is most disappointing is that while The Host superficially addresses the psychological ramifications of genuinely interesting and problematic subjects—namely environmental devastation, the social aftermath of Korean democratization, and American military imperialism—the film ultimately exploits the social tension surrounding these issues to reinforce a repressive positions of social spectatorship and incomprehensibility. The Host—with its structural, technical and symbolic methods generating a nihilistic, stereotypical, misogynist, and repressive model of social subjectivity—is the ironic spectacle of pretending to corporealize the terror of political powerlessness and social fragmentation. Even if it were genuine, this is a fundamentally backwards approach in terms of conveying an actual political agenda, for as Michel Foucault has stated:
Despite the excitement manufactured in the institutionalized circuits of film marketing and reviews around “genre-bending” and “self-reflexive” genre films, it is an unavoidable fact that repressive political agendas in film cannot be avoided or countered in narrative reformulations alone—reassessments in technical, symbolic and structural methodologies are essential. When stripped of its masochistic pleasures, The Host reveals yet another Artificial Man projected onto the cinema audience as the terrific, chaotic body. I am reminded of Susan Buck-Morss’ juxtaposition of two images from 1933 in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West which she qualifies as "symbols of the masses displayed as spectacles for the masses", representing “two complementary economies of desire": Boris Iofan's design for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (a classicized skyscraper topped by a giant statue of Lenin) and a poster for the movie King Kong showing the giant ape perched on top of the Empire State Building. [ix]
Regressive Filmmaking in Peppermint CandyOften in commercial films, the cynical repurposing and reformulating of the techniques of political satire for the sake of self-referential genre-parodying is more subtly disguised by sober and reverently recreated historical settings, or perhaps even the genuine intentions of the creators. Watching Lee Chang-dong's film Peppermint Candy begins to feel like playing a game, which you should eventually realize is rigged — and not in your favor. The film’s skeleton is a series of chronologically regressing chapters centered on dates with immense historical significance in recent Korean history — yet each chapter focuses on a the narrative of Kim Yeong-ho — his various jobs, decisions, family, and his psychological state. While moving backwards through a linear narrative focused on one character, the film highlights certain critical moral and emotional moments in the Kim Yeong-ho’s life which are shocking or difficult to understand, then supplies psychologically satisfying explanations for his behavior in a series of restrained and calculated moves. This creates a reverse parallel “narrative” that is external to the “historical/fictional” reality of the narrative which, when imaginatively reconstructed in the memory of the viewer as chronologically progressive, is logically entropic. The external “narrative”, however, operates on a logic of crisis followed by understanding — loneliness followed by reunion — separation followed by rejoining. The external narrative, which is constructed before our eyes with manipulated footage (the reversed shots from the back of the train), explanatory title cards, deliberately exaggerated repetitions of key objects and characters, and a sweeping, saccharine score, is never presented as anything other than fantasy. The ability to understand and heal, according to the logic of this film, is a function of artificial reconstruction, and does not occur in the “real” world.
The entrapment of the historical subject in Peppermint Candy
Like many recent South Korean films, Peppermint Candy retells a well-known historical situation in the context of a fictional narrative structure, the artificiality of which is exaggerated or demonstrated explicitly through popular cinematic conventions. Peppermint Candy doesn’t play out the fantastical aspect of its temporal remapping in the reactions of the central character — as does, say, Memento (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2000), a film with which it is often compared — but instead watches and records the behaviors of its central character with the objective pretense of a psychological case study. The effect for the viewer — who must always be tracking the two parallel narratives simultaneously — is one of entrapment: this is a case study that has been constructed to yield predetermined results. In this respect, the film shares a philosophical bad faith with Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (France, 2002). In relation to an “average” Korean audience — that is, an audience that enters with a preexistent knowledge of official historical representations, their own personal experiences, and oral histories of the events referenced in the film — Peppermint Candy becomes a problematic film. We must ask why the filmmaker — while exaggerating the fantastical nature of psychological resolutions through heavy-handed structural and stylistic interventions into the “realism” of the linear narrative, and while stressing a singular, traumatic reading of objective history through the rigid and precise symbolic linking of historical events to the destruction of a fictional character’s psyche—chooses to use a character-based narrative at all, when his concern seems to lie so transparently in commenting on the effects of social trauma on Korean society as a whole. Furthermore, why is the construction of fictional tortured male characters and dysfunctional families to symbolize social trauma a recurrent tactic in popular contemporary Korean cinema? In Peppermint Candy, the character of Kim Yeong-ho, like many other male anti-heroes of contemporary Korean films, is presented as both tortured and torturer—ethically impossible conflations of victim and aggressor. Perhaps the experience of watching these filmmakers and actors—representatives of a new, different Korea—is not one of coming to socio-historical conclusions or even one of social catharsis, but rather a cinematic self-flagellation—a masochistic reflex of a cultural production/consumer system that has not moved past the resonant effects of massive, traumatic social change. The Korean film industry, as dependent upon the production and economic methods it adopted out of practical necessity as it is, is to some extent attempting to make films from new ideas in the forms of films it has already seen. The more virtuosic the formal reproduction, the more painful would be the recognition that these forms—imports and impositions of the same nature as any other economic or social structure—are as unsatisfying and ineffective as the ones they’ve left behind. In this light, the regressive point at the end of Peppermint Candy—which Kim Soyoung, in her essay about Peppermint Candy, calls a “totalitarian state ideology” [x] — is a subliminal reminder that unless conceptual and political ideas are accompanied by formal and technical innovation, the investigation of Korean history in film is doomed to repeat itself.
The Masochism of the Imaginative Body in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
I do not consider Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), directed by Park Chan-wook to be either deserving or in need of further discussion as extraordinary or momentous cinematic achievement. Rather, I consider it as an exemplary product of contemporary South Korean mass culture because of its use of hyperactive pastiche and self-aware representation of the neuroses of the culture industry. This film is also representative of the type of South Korean film that has become a sub-industry within contemporary Asian cinema: the Asian “extreme,” or “shock” film. The most notable common techniques of the films that are produced and marketed under this pretext are a fragmentation of narrative and genre structures, an emphasis on computer-generated (“slick”) post-production and editing devices, graphic depictions of physical, sexual and emotional violence, and above all, a fascination with sadomasochistic psychological character motivations. In this discussion of Mr. Vengeance, it is crucial to stratify the different formal relationships between the cultural producers, the framing conditions of South Korean mass culture, and the imaginative body of the subject in the production trajectory of filmic mass-cultural products (from development, through production and reception) in order to determine what psychological interpretations apply to technically distinct cinematic decisions, symbols and methods. The sadomasochistic tendencies of the characters within the narratives of this film provides one such point of interpretation, while the decisions of the director, writers, and producers provide another. Still deeper in the strata, where the psychological becomes socio-political, Mr. Vengeance promotes a power structure that conforms to repressive social norms of the imaginative body. However, although this highly planned, crafted, and valued cultural object fulfills inflexible economic demands, there are interesting contradictions and variances in the techniques utilized, and they deserve a closer analysis. I would like to examine the way in which Mr. Vengeance presents masochistic models of agency for social, physical and imaginative bodies by virtue of the power dynamics they exhibit on each of these levels. It is, however, a very complicated dynamic, as the way masochism is interpreted in the textual modes of narrative and symbolism, the physical modes of production and body imagery, and the imaginative mode of implying systemic models of social agency is at once extremely differentiated and interrelated. The term “Masochism” contains a plurality of problematic historical figures. Although the subject exists before Freud first addresses it in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), nearly every subsequent formulation of its pathology, symptomology and theoretic value uses Freud’s model as a primary reference. In this work, Freud posits a dual structure of sadism and masochism which formulates perversion, just as the dualism of masculinity and femininity formulates libidinal mechanisms, and activity and passivity formulates psychology in general:
At this point in Freud’s formulation of sadomasochism, the roots of sadistic instincts "are easy to detect in the normal." He continues:
Marie Bonaparte, in her essay Some Biophysical Aspects of Sadomasochism, summarizes Freud’s subsequent schematization of this model in The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924):
Marie Bonaparte, one of Freud’s favorite later students, is writing in 1951, at the height of the institutionalized psychotherapeutic reduction of Freudian theories of sexuality to biological determinism. In her essay, she elaborates on the ramifications of Freud’s location of sadistic impulses (which in the 1924 essay has assumed a primary role over masochism) in the death impulse of single-celled organisms, as opposed to the natural aggressiveness of the male’s reproductive impulses. What is of course immediately, and famously, troubling in Freud’s formulations of masochism is that the female subject is always only the “sexual object”, and never the subject of either active or passive impulses. And what is equally troubling is that the trajectory Freud’s formulation of sadomasochism takes from sexual perversion to biological fact remains intact, becoming institutionalized in psychoanalytic theory, and eventually in linguistic theories of film interpretation — via Lacan’s hermeneutical primacy of the category of the real over the symbolic and imaginary, and then in Deleuze’s utopian re-working in Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. The figures of masochism and sadomasochism have been dealt with extensively in film criticism, especially by feminist critics such as Linda Williams, Kaja Silverman, and Gaylyn Studlar. These figures also become increasingly important in the criticism of South Korean cinema since the emergence of the “Korean Wave”—a group of filmmakers and films that often depicts scenes of extreme suffering and sexual violence. In The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Kim Kyung Hyun devotes a chapter to the filmmaker Jang Sun-woo, and his uses of sadistic and masochistic devices. For example:
Kim’s essay portrays the early films of Jang as subversive of the dominant gender and political representational codes of South Korean cinema, and Jang himself a self-reflexive auteur working within the mass culture system. In this example from To You, From Me, we can see how even the height relation of characters engaged in sexual activity in South Korean cinema conveys gender and power messages — the behaviors exhibited by the male character in this example, and in the rest of the film, are utilizing a preexisting referential system of gender roles to propose what Kim considers “subversive” power structures that can, ideally, facilitate a critical apprehension of the viewers social position and agency. In the referential system of South Korean cinema, even the engagement in sexual acts that do not involve the phallus as a site of pleasure become a feminizing behavior for the male character. Kim’s theoretical basis for the favorable reading of Jang’s depiction of masochism is based in Deleuze’s reading of Venus in Furs. Kim explains:
Kim’s application on Deleuze’s reformulation of masochism fails when applied to a referential system that involves both male and female sadomasochistic subjects. Linda Williams, who Kim even quotes despite an antithetical reading of Deleuze, states:
In addition to not taking into account the psychological interpretations of female sadomasochistic subjects, Kim gives aligns her linguistic misreading of the symbolism of the characters behaviors with the ultimate level of political interpretation. When discussing the many instances of rape in Jang’s films, Kim can only devote one line to explain away the most notably repressive aspect of the Jang’s treatment of sadism:
Kim’s apology for Jang’s one-sided depiction of rape is absurd. What she later calls “frank sex” is here called “allegorical” — and one must ask, of all the symbolic and metaphorical techniques for visualizing allegories of sexual violence, must Jang (re)stage the all too realistic violation of a female body? Central to Kim’s readings of these films is the notion that these stagings of physicalized “subversions” of “taboos” links such techniques to a critique of fascism, which she traces to Jang’s biographical relationship to the struggle for democratic reform in the 1970s and 80s in South Korea. Where this link fails to materialize is in Kim’s reduction of physical representations and production methods to the linguistic level of the narrative developments in Jang’s films. In Park Chan-wook’s Mr. Vengeance, sexuality and pain are conflated at every level of interpretation, and the use of physical “aberrations” for symbolic purposes defines a particularly disturbing formulation of the imaginative body. In one scene, for instance, four men are huddled in an awkward position on a mattress leaning their head against the wall of their apartment. They are all exaggeratedly masturbating, and are precariously balancing pornographic images and their own weight on each other’s attractive, mostly nude bodies. Their appearance and noises are immediately humorous, yet present a somewhat “taboo” spectacle — that of heterosexual homoerotic bonding. They are listening the sounds of a woman screaming in the next apartment over. At this point, an elaborate cinematographic gesture allows us to track through the walls of this apartment building into the room where Ryu, the protagonist, and his sister live. Ryu’s sister is the woman screaming, only instead of cries of pleasure, she is rolling on the floor in pain caused by a diseased kidney. The self-reflexivity of the reveal of the painful reality of the formerly erotic situation is meant to symbolically indict the viewer in an unintentionally sadistic derivation of pleasure, but because the “reality” is presented by the physicalized performance of a woman, we are instead presented with the sadism of the proposed model of filmic interpretation — where real, living bodies are orchestrated in gestures of pain, abnormality, and aberration. As Kim stated about Jang’s depictions of sexual violence, such images “allegorize”, but what they are allegorizing is not a symbol, but a human body. In Mr. Vengeance, the narrative begins as a story of lower class, young adults attempting to overcome the difficulties of their economic, social, and physical situations. All stereotypes of varying degrees, the main characters are Ryu, who is deaf and mute and works in a factory, his sister who has a kidney disease that’s getting worse all the time, and Ryu’s girlfriend, a nonsense caricature of an unserious, naïve political activist. Ryu quits his thankless job, and he and his girlfriend conspire to kidnap her boss’s friend’s daughter for ransom to pay for a black market kidney transplant, but complications arise when the black market kidney traders rip Ryu off, Ryu’s sister kills herself, the boss’s friend’s daughter dies accidentally, and then the boss’s friend decides to get revenge for his daughter’s death. The plot’s potential for serious symbolic and textual readings is continuously undermined by the ironic production methods of the film. For instance, the film begins with a voice-over written in the voice of Ryu speaking to his sister. But we soon find out that the female voice we hear reading is not the actual character who it is written as, but a paid performer in a sound booth reading Ryu’s sister to his letter. The narrative conceit is that Ryu, being deaf and mute, must have — or chooses to have — his letters read to his sister on tape. This is transparent self-reflexivity, as the sound booth depicted is a film voiceover studio, and the necessity for having a letter read aloud makes no sense when Ryu can write and communicate in sign language with his sister. And so immediately we encounter a chain of disturbing subjugations of political and social meanings: the deaf character’s deafness is presented as defining his personality, since we are introduced to his devotion to his sister through a sentimentalized display of affection that depends on his deafness, but not on a reality of day-to-day-life for deaf people; we also see how the sentimentalization of Ryu’s deafness is in turn sublimated by the film’s self-reflexive production techniques which are broadcasting the filmmakers’ implicit directive: that the psychological motivations of the characters and emotional potency of the narrative is not to be taken seriously. We know almost nothing of the characters’ past, and the narrative presents Ryu as never coming into contact with another deaf person; his physical difference is reduced to a metaphor for our (the “normal” members of the audience) proposed isolation in as far as we identify with him. And the surface elements of these characters— their attractiveness, their fashionability—are meant to seduce an idealized identification. This physical identification is exploited in the stagings of violated and damaged bodies, turning an already sexualized identification into a sadomasochistic one — such as in the black-and-blue marks on the face of writer in To you, From Me. A ubiquitous presence of images of wounds, scars and bruises constitute one type of manipulation of the idealized body identification — and it is not the magical sadism of de Sade, whose victimized bodies could sustain the worst tortures without a mark. As Susan Sontag states in Regarding the Pain of Others[xvii], “All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic,” meaning, they exploit the sexuality of living bodies through their exposure to the scopophilic gaze. At the same time, the narrative characterizations of aimlessness, naiveté, isolation, and moral ambiguity function as classic bourgeois fantasies of the working class, and force a false identification with the symbolic characterizations. This double bind is indicative of one level of the socially repressive model of masochistic pleasure that this film implies for the imaginative body of the viewer. The double-bind: Ryu From Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, his kidney removed
And as we attempt, despite the filmmaker’s clear warnings, on the conscious level to formulate a psychological logic for the character’s actions, we can even identify with Ryu and his girlfriend after they kidnap the little girl because they temporarily form an ironically sentimental, completely dysfunctional family unit — and because the narrative justification for their actions is seemingly benevolent. But all the while we are going on the symbolic roller coaster of the narrative, we are also forming physical identifications with Ryu and the other bodies on screen.
Deafness, then, has historically been metaphorically equated with physical suffering or damage, and in masochistic representations, of violation. As the narrative explicates, Ryu’s deafness is a perfect match for his grueling, dehumanizing job at the unbearably loud factory, where all the hearing employees must wear ear protection. The negative social aspect of industrialization is expressed symbolically through Ryu’s physical difference, and this technique is introduced again with the character of the stranger at the river who twice disrupts the flow of the narrative. This destructive character, who has no narrative and functions almost entirely symbolically, is presented by the filmmakers as a disturbing force symbolized by his behavioral and physical difference. Instead of being incidental to a characterization, physical difference is again exploited to serve the symbolic narrative. The character of the stranger at the river provides the perfect symbolic scapegoat in the “accidental” death of the boss’ daughter. Ryu and his girlfriend are guilty of negligence, and again, Ryu’s deafness prevents him from functioning as an active social agent.
The physical bodies are also often fetishized with technologies of control, sensory deprivation, and domination, or become powerless through the self-reflexive imposition of narrative and symbolic devices. Characters are bound, tied to the poles of streetlights, hooded with plastic bags, restrained or given physical differences that result in a lack of bodily and speech control. The hearing audience is also put in a position of sensory deprivation by the technique of dropping the sound track out when we are supposedly experiencing the action from Ryu’s point of view. The sudden absence of a sensation that was there a moment before is completely different than the lifelong condition of actual deafness and hardness of hearing, and instead of increasing a humanizing identification with the character of Ryu, it exploits a stereotype of deafness for the sake of self-reflexively demonstrating the ability of mass culture medium to control the symbolism of physical bodies. These positions of submission, victimization, and fetishizing of wounds all reinforce a patriarchal society’s formulation of the Freudian concept of feminine masochism. The male bodies which are inhabited by narrative psychological impulses when treated as stereotypical subjects, are later reduced to the objects of the sadistic manipulations of a dominant mass cultural referential system. In perhaps the most graphically violent, and narratively extraneous, scene of the film, a desperate man undertakes an act self-mutilation in front of Ryu’s sister’s boss, her boss’s friend, and the little girl that will eventually be drowned. The man, pleading with the boss for his job, becomes so distraught that he brandishes a box-cutter, and slices repeatedly into his stomach. We are granted a unobstructed close-up of this horrible, criss-crossing wound as it starts to seep blood. The performance of the actor is extremely exaggerated, and he becomes the familiar image of the middle-aged man desperate to provide for his family that provides a rationalization for male violence in so many films. In this film, however, the man’s violence is the creation of an image, on his own body, for others to see. Again we, supplanted by Ryu and his girlfriend who watch unnoticed from their car, are put into the artificial position of demanding sadistic pleasure, by virtue of our engaging in the referential system that provides the entertainment we have paid for. And if we buy into it, we are free to revel in the pleasure of this staged physical disfigurement as long as we accept this compromised formulation of our imaginary bodies. What is most striking is the resemblance of this scene to a practice known as the "Death by a Thousand Cuts", or "Death by a Hundred Cuts", that was a practice of the Chinese military in the 18th and 19th century for punishing deserters and criminals. These displays were public, and documented photographically by a French colonial officer. Susan Sontag discusses the importance of the photographs of this method of torture, which were eventually proliferated as justification for French colonial rule in China, on the theorist and author of many works on sadomasochism, Georges Bataille:
“The Death by a Hundred Cuts”, reprinted in George Bataille’s Tears of Eros
The staging of violence as a sadistic gesture in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
The masochistic submission of the viewer’s imaginative body — the synthesis of their perceived physical and social spheres of influence — is a form of the isolation effect that repressive social systems exact upon minorities, and upon social activists of minority interests. The isolation of the Ryu’s deafness —a particular reading of physical difference —is symbolic, but it is reflected in the real and imaginary level of interpretation of this film. What characterizes Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in relation to the next two films in Park’s “Revenge Trilogy”, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, is its technique of constructing the narrative identification primarily through symbolism and physical displays of self-reflexivity, and this perhaps explains one reason why the film was not as successful as the following two. Perhaps the symbolic level of identification is less successful in promoting them while inspiring a masochistic pleasure than the literalization of isolation from an unseen force that provides the narrative setting of Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. What is a predictable constant in all of the films, however, is the absence of a female sadomasochistic subject, and the self-reflexive statement of the powerlessness of the individual in affecting the referential systems of mass culture.
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[i] Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York. 2003. p. 102 [ii] Weinberg, Scott. "TIFF Interview: The Host Director Bong Joon-ho.” Cinematical. Sep 13th, 2006. <http://www.cinematical.com/2006/09/13/tiff-interview-the-host-director-bong-joon-ho> [iii] Shim, Doobo. “Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia.” Media Culture Society. 2006. National University of Singapore. <http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/1/25>. [iv] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a COMMON-WEALTH ecclesiasticall and civill. London: University Press, 1651. P. xviii. [v] Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. P. 94-95. [vi] Weinberg, Scott. "TIFF Interview: The Host Director Bong Joon-ho.” [vii] Schmitt, Carl. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. (Carl Schmitt, George Schwab, Erna Hilfstein p. 5. [viii] Foucault, Michel. “14 January 1976.” Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. 2003. P. 28. [ix] Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. P. 176. [x] Kim Soyoung. “Do Not Include Me in Your ‘Us’: Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference.” P. 82. [xi] Freud, Sigmund. Theory of Sexuality. Reprinted in The First Freudians, ed. By Hendrick M. Ruitenbeek, Jason Aronson, Inc., New York. 1973. p. 166 [xii] Freud, p.164 [xiii] Freud, 169 [xiv] Kyung Hyun. Jang Sun-woo’s Three “F” Words: Familism, Fetishism, and Fascism. Reprinted in The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham. 2004. p.162 [xv] Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, University of California Press, 1989. p. 210 [xvi] Kim, p. 165 [xvii] Sontag, p. 95 [xviii] Norden, Martin F, The Cinema of Isolation: a History of Physical Disabilities in the Movies, Rutgers University Press, 1994. p. 5 [xix] Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Verso, 1996. p. 3 [xx] Sontag, p. 98
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