The Cinema of Bong Joon-ho / Gary Indiana
The three feature films Bong Joon-ho has directed to date--Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), and The Host (2006)--suggest what Gogol might have done with a movie camera. Bong pictures the absurdity of our time as the mess generated by unlimited idiocy, "the human condition" as an unstable mixture of bad conditioning and decent instincts. His films heap shrewd, witty ridicule on all forms of authority, particularly the military and police; his work is witheringly hostile to the United States's presumed guardianship of South Korea, and pointedly critical of the country's family-owned conglomerates and their fascistically intimate relations with government.
In the course of his narratives Bong progressively raises the ante of ludicrousness, as the problems encountered by his characters reveal the world's essence as an irresolvable state of contradiction: if things are like this, efficient garbage collection is impossible, much less social justice; but if they are like this, the individual faces unevenly unattractive options. One can pretend to love the system and move up its fecal ladder, or reject it and starve.
In the society he portrays, Bong finds little place for authentic human feeling; the middle-class is comprised of humanoids, people who've merged with their technology and reserve their emotions for consumer objects. He detects the possibility for happiness only among the lower classes, which haven't been hypnotized by gurgling electronic objects, condominiums and Mercedez that they can't afford. Like Gogol, or Bunuel, Bong treats happiness itself as a momentary condition between calamities rather than a credible note on which to conclude a film. Even the happy end of The Host feels transient, fraught with potential menace and weighted with prior loss. Bong's optimism is the Gramscian version.
Shifting atmospheres and startling cuts in Bong's films recall the anarchy of the earliest cinema, before films became codified into specific types corresponding to genres of theater and prose narrative. Unfolding in contemporary space and time, among recognizably modern people, these pictures have an otherworldliness akin to mythology, fairy tales, and fables. Bong liberally adopts visual tropes from manga, or graphic novels. This pictographic form of storytelling relies less on dialogue than gestures, facial expressions, and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow; its filmic transposition in spatial design, sequential patterning, and acting resembles the esperanto of the silents, as certain western sound movies do--Dreyer's Vampyr, for example, or William Wyler's The Heiress. Bong's films are intensely talkative, their dialogue hilariously profane, scatological, ridiculous, and scathing, but we could easily follow them without a sound track.
In interviews, Bong cites Clouzot's The Wages of Fear as leaving an early, deep impression on him. He pays casual homage to the Hollywood movies he saw before college, by directors like Frankenheimer, Friedkin, and Spielberg--Steve McQueen in Papillon usually gets mentioned as well. (He likens his second feature, Memories of Murder, to the Cohen Brothers's Fargo; the comparison is provocative, indicating how differently directors think about movies than audiences do.) After acquiring a less than encyclopedic familiarity with Hollywood film, Bong absorbed Chinese and Japanese movies by directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Shokei Imamura, and Kiyoshi Kurowsawa "with an attitude of studying films, thinking it would be nice to have such films in Korea too."
Instead of the occultism prominent in many contemporary Korean films, Bong highlights the surreal condition of everyday life and the weirdly configured spaces people inhabit and work in, the enclosures and physical obstacles we contrive for ourselves.
"I am interested in jobs where you have to work in a small space for a long time," the director told an interviewer, "like ladies selling lottery tickets, cashiers at stationary stores or restaurant waitresses, etc. Films never paid attention to characters with such boring jobs. They are never remembered by anyone. I figured there would be a dynamic effect when these people get entangled in strange situations."
From this perspective, Bong Joon-ho has an certain affinity with Fassbinder. Bong's characters are emphatically working class. His films illustrate the harsh mechanisms of capitalism. In most films where characters do "work in a small space for a long time," that space is never lingered on, and the unrelenting tedium of subsistence work is quickly sidelined. Something more important and compelling has to happen, in more expansive locations, to the working stiff, or, in the parlance of Hollywood, we haven't got anyone to "root for."
Bong, on the other hand, explores the settings of menial employment with almost fetishistically close attention. Small lives become rich with curious and bizarre details. He often features characters who aren't expecting anything, or can't get anywhere, or have already been flattened by the economic system; those with a modicum of ambition have some inhibitory flaw or inherent weakness that keeps them treading water to keep their heads above it.
In Barking Dogs Never Bite, the ruinous equation of "democracy" with "capitalism"--in the simplest terms, "your money or your life"--is the film's virtual raison d'etre, a subtext impossible to overlook. Barking Dogs encloses the class system in a panopticon-like apartment complex, where some residents are making it, others making do, and the detritus of society squats in shadows in the basement; the massive building and its uniform, jutting walkways suggest some indifferent housing plan thrown up during a building boom. Its social microcosm has, in fact, been installed in a bunker of defective materials. The sham construction haunts the structure as the ghost of "Boiler Kim," a repairman killed by accident in a confrontation with the developers, who sealed up his body between two walls near the boiler.
Yoon-ju, an underpaid college lecturer, lives in the building with his pregnant wife. He elicits immediate sympathy, faced with the corrupt facts of life: to get appointed to a professorship, he must give the dean a $10,000 bribe--money he doesn't have.
Bong casts Yoon-ju in an ambivalent light. Played by the remarkable Lee Sung-jae (Art Museum by the Zoo, Attack the Gas Station, and Public Enemy), the lank, delicate-featured Yoon-ju incarnates the stressed-out Everyman at the mercy of the money system. His abjection encourages us to overlook his self-absorption and impacted rage.
Yoon-ju's financial dilemma is a symptom of the same corruption that built the apartment complex, an intrinsic part of a post-Confucian society that rewards dishonest dealings. At the same time, it provides insights into Yoon-ju's character. His ethical sense is ruffled by the bribe, but his main concern is how to raise the money. He also worries about getting caught.
A third, cautionary implication of the bribe is presented when a friend who urges Yoon-ju to seize the opportunity relates what happened to the person who grabbed it the last time it arose. The scene takes place in a men's lavatory during a typical night of boozing; as his friend describes the dean plying his new protégé with heavy liquor, Yoon-ju visualizes the scene. The young man isn't a drinker, and staggers into the subway heading home; while vomiting onto the tracks from the edge of the platform, a train knocks his head off. Later, crawling home himself, Yoon-ju fantasizes glugging with the dean, followed by his own decapitation.
Such imaginary events appear in Bong's films without any stylistic brackets to distinguish them from "reality"; in The Host, while her family takes a hurried break from their search for her, the missing Hyon-seo appears at the table, where everyone feeds her the choicest bits of their meal; here, Yoon-ju summons a karmically retributive consequence of the bribe. A more tangible effect is stress, compounded by his strained relations with his wife, who initially seems overdemanding and abrasive. Gradually, the film's sympathies tilt in favor of a pregnant working woman married to a petulant, grown-up child.
Yoon-ju is essentially passive: he lacks the will to either accept the career failure that will come if he doesn't bribe the dean, or the Nietzschean perversity to embrace the uber-values that would make the bribe "nothing." Instead he rationalizes his inevitable capitulation by telling himself, "When I'm a professor, I won't take bribes." A weak man, we might say, yet because his weakness stems from a certain revulsion at the demeaning compromises of adult life, he retains a degree of likeability. He sleeps in a fetal position, as if envying the uterine security of his wife's unborn child. His haplessness is that of a child losing its innocence.
The dark side of curdling innocence is already apparent: Yoon-ju has taken on the responsibility of a family, no doubt because of his conformist nature, and resents what this involves. Annoyed by constant barking, he "retaliates" against fate by snatching a neighbor's dog and locking it in a wardrobe stored in the basement, after botched attempts to throw it off the roof or hang it from a ceiling pipe.
The dog, too, has multiple meanings. It serves to interlace Yoon-ju's story with that of Hyeon-nam (Du-na Bae, who plays the deafmute's anarchist girlfriend in Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), employed in the building's management office, whose job includes stamping notices posted by tenants, so that maintenace staff won't remove them from the building walls.
The office bores her; she cleans it, refills the water cooler, does the accounts, stamps papers. She takes on putting up a little girl's lost dog poster to get outside, visiting an overweight friend who runs a variety store on the building's ground level. (Go See-he, who plays the friend, is the lesbian prison bully in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and a formidable comedienne.) The cramped refuge behind her store counter is a "small space" that becomes its own little world--as do the police station basement in Memories of Murder and the interior of the snack stand in The Host.
The friends view a TV report about a female bank clerk who fought off a knife-wielding robber, thus becoming, in Hyeon-nam's estimation, "a celebrity." Hyeon-nam escapes her dull job in daydreams of doing something similarly heroic. Meanwhile, Yoon-ju has realized that he locked up the wrong dog, and surreptitiously witnessed, from the now-empty wardrobe, an old janitor turning the dead pooch into stew; unfazed by his mistake, Yoon-ju contrives to snatch the "right" dog from an elderly tenant. Dressed in a red pullover and matching cap, he pitches the second dog off the roof, which Hyeon-nam witnesses through binoculars from the opposite wing of the complex. She pursues him, but collides with a suddenly opened apartment door.
The dramaturgy of the chase (particularly the stiff, exaggerated scything motions of Yoon-ju's arms), the morphology of terror-stricken expressions that passes across Yoon-ju's face as he hides in the basement wardrobe, and, later, a dribble of blood from his nose when he learns the old woman whose dog he killed has died of grief, are all manifestations of manga iconography, in the service of a tangled but unmanga-like plot. Bong turns the story on its head when Yoon-ju's wife, craving an affection he doesn't give her, brings home a dog of her own, which Bong quite innocently loses while walking it outside a nearby park, when a cloud of pesticide is blithely dispersed through the vegetation.
The film's protagonists meet an hour and half into the story, when Yoon-ju, sopping wet, turns up in the rain to make copies of his own lost dog poster at the convenience store. His wife, oblivious to his previous two dog killings, accuses him of the one he isn't guilty of. This has a reverse echo of Gombrowicz's novel Cosmos, in which the narrator, after noticing numerous objects, including a sparrow, that have been deliberately hung by string in an unfamiliar landscape, "completes the series" by hanging a cat, but promptly dissociates himself from his action: quite deliriously, he wonders which member of the family he's boarding with "could have hung the cat." "Supposing she had done it? Supposing she had done it? Of course I was very well aware that I had done it myself, but by saying 'Leo' like that she attracted everyone's attention…I had the feeling that in spite of everything she could have done it, that if she was capable of battering a tree stump with a hammer in a nervous crisis…she would have been perfectly capable of throttling the cat and then hanging it. It would have been just like her." (Cosmos, p. 79)
Yoon-ju, contrariwise, must confront the fact that it "would have been just like" him to dispose of his wife's dog. Its disappearance, the old woman's death, and Hyeon-nam's innocent helpfulness shame him into plastering the entire neighborhood with posters offering "a substantial reward" for the dog's return. (Hyeon-nam later manages to rescue the missing dog from a derelict.)
The encounter between Yoon-ju and Hyeon-nam occurs too late for Barking Dogs to degenerate into that loathesome genre, "romantic comedy." Hyeon-nam is an innocent, high-spirited soul, a plausible antidote for Yoon-ju's fretful, bottled-up neuroticism. But "what might have been" is an ambiguous speculation at best. What we see are two people heading in different directions who pause briefly in the same place. Hyeon-nam loses her job because of her empathy for others; Yoon-ju will be rewarded for his selfishness.
A very drunken Yoon-ju, returning from delivery of the bribe, encounters Hyeon-nam and calls her his "savior." He even makes a sodden, gingerly flirtatious overture, but suddenly begins running, his bent arms slicing the air, to prompt her recognition of the man she chased through the housing complex.
"You lost your shoe," she tells him when he slumps exhausted at the curb, holding it out for him. This is, perhaps, the most complicated moment in Barking Dogs Never Bite. Hyeon-nam's friendly return of the shoe, like her return of the missing dog, is a disinterested act of kindness, something that will never occur in the world Yoon-ju has just secured a place in.
Bong's fictions record moments of a civilization in flux. The Confucian values woven into Korean life for a thousand years persist in the primacy of family relations and the sense of all Koreans as part of a single kinship system, but war, politics, and the artificial grafting of technological modernity onto an insular, agrarian culture have jumbled ancient customs with hyperreality.
Memories of Murder reprises a slightly earlier period of "modernization," when serial murder first began to occur in South Korea. Serial murder is often depicted as an urban phenomenon, but even in America, it's mainly an activity occurring in the heartland, where concealing bodies and crossing legal jurisdictions only requires a motor vehicle. The first such killings in Korea began in 1986, in rural Gyeonggi Province, on the outskirts of a small city, Hwaseong. The city itself is never really pictured, though the film spends a lot of time in its police station, and a large factory complex figures importantly in the action. Bodies turn up in drainage ditches, culverts, and fields along dirt roads, out in farm country.
Bong intended his second film to act as a reminder of a repressed recent past and the actual murders, still unsolved, on which it's based. Its humor is much more brutal than Barking Dogs, emphasizing the doltishness of investigators and the bleak atmosphere of the late dictatorship period--there are, for example, nationwide blackouts for civil defense drills, and diversions of police units to quell demonstrations, that help the killer pick off victims with ease.
The central figure, the provincial detective Park Doo-man, is played by one of the finest actors anywhere, Song Kang-ho (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Joint Security Area, Shiri, Bad Movie); Park is a strutting lump of hubris, a mixture of hard-boiled cliches and obstinate ignorance, who finds he's suddenly teamed with a Seoul detective whose methods are the opposite of his own. They can't stand each other. Seo Tae-Yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) works from documents and empirical evidence, while Park Doo-man relies on "instincts" he doesn't really possess, and hauls in suspects on the strength of idle gossip. Park's junior officer is a vicious punk who tortures confessions from a mentally disabled boy and a factory worker caught wanking in the woods; Park himself subtly coaches these battered innocents in details of the crimes which "only the killer could know," to have his trumped-up cases deflated by Seo's irrefutable deductions.
The detectives waste eons of time battering suspects and attacking each other. The murders all occur on rainy nights, and the film capitalizes on vistas of gorgeous, deep green darkness, watery mist and glistening vegetation, morning skies quilted with clouds, and landscapes in which near things appear set at vast distances from each other.
Park resorts to consulting a shaman and visiting bath houses in search of "hairless men" (as the victims were raped and no trace of the killer's pubic hair was found); Seo's more scientific approach proves equally useless. Neither detective seems excessively well-trained or even suited for his job. The only truly promising lead is discovered by a female officer, whose clue is fatuously dismissed by Park but seems, in fact, the most likely key to the crime.
The case has strikingly different effects on the lead detectives. The murders continue, driving the investigators into sleep-deprived exhaustion and disorientation. As Park confronts the continual failure of his crude methods he becomes less certain about rash conclusions, averse to unnecessary violence, aware of his limitations; Seo, who has placed all his trust in forensic proof, starts to break down when the film's last victim turns out to be a schoolgirl he questioned earlier in the movie. His anger transforms him into what Park was at the outset. He attacks the prime suspect and nearly beats him to death; when Park shows up with DNA evidence disproving the suspect's guilt, Seo refuses to believe the documents and tosses them on the wet ground.
Bong's camera fixes space at disorienting angles--diagonal overhead views, dizzying pans of curved ramps, long shots of indistinct objects, etc. Evocative of manga panels, his sequences emphasize the claustral and/or agoraphobic qualities of homes and offices, stores and institutions, the scale of people in relation to the architecture that surrounds them. Open space is dilated at times, at other times foreshortened, as when Gang-du, the son of the food stand proprietor, runs to meet his daughter Hyun-seo: in the first shot she appears to be about four feet away at most, and blurry; this is followed by a crisply focused shot of Gang-du running across a long grassy expanse where he trips on his face before Hyun-seo enters the frame.
The Host introduces an intermediary element of scale that transforms constructed space into an indeterminate labyrinth. The cityscape appears in The Host, and the film's frenetic action seems to encompass large quadrants of Seoul, but the urban matrix is actually compressed into synecdotal fragments: a glittering skyline behind the river, a small block containing a dry cleaning establishment opposite an office tower, the Han River banks and traffic underpasses, a short patch of freeway, the interstices of a bridge, and miles of cavelike sewer system.
The eponymous figure of this film is a mutated fish produced when the U.S. military dumps a vast quantity of formaldehyde into the Han River. The deformed, acrobatic monster attacks a large crowd of people picnicking on the riverbank where Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), his father Park Hie-bong (Byeon Hie-bong), and Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung) live in the back of their food stand. Gang-du's sister, Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na), is the Korean Bronze Medal holder in archery; his brother, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is an unemployed, heavy-drinking engineering graduate.
During its first spectaclar rampage, the creature devours several people and mutilates several others. Gang-du gets separated from Hyun-seo, whom the creature snares with its tail before making a long leap into the river, where it splashes down amid duck- and swan-shaped paddleboats, emerging on the opposite shore, where it ingests Hyun-seo whole.
The official response to the crisis of a large, hostile amphibious animal gobbling up parts of the local population is predictably hostile to its victims; mourners who've collected at an auditorium around photographic shrines to the dead are tear-gassed and herded into quarantine; fumigation companies seize an opportunity to compete for government contracts, while the US military promotes the myth of a "virus" spread by the creature to conduct medical experiments on the survivors, and to test its latest biological weapon, "Agent Yellow."
The hospitalized Gangu-du receives a barely audible cell phone call from Hyun-seo, who has been regurgitated by the monster into an inescapable culvert in the sewer, where the beast is storing its "catch." As the authorities refuse to believe him, Gang-du and his family escape medical custody and turn to the Mafia to arm themselves, disguised as fumigators, and find the missing child in the sprawling maze of the sewers.
The Host has a magical look, taking place mainly at night within sight of the bruise-blue river and in dark metallic spillways of ankle-high water, the color schemes of deep blue and gray juxtaposed with the overlit, morgue lighting of hospitals and laboratories; actors are shown through scrims of beaded water, curtains of opaque plastic, and in spaces carved in momentary flashes by the strobelike wobbling of flashlight beams. Bong makes abundant use of fog and slow-spreading trails of dense vapor, culminating with the release of an Agent Yellow bomb, from what looks like a floating amusement park fixture, into the middle of a mass protest near the river's edge.
The Host shows a family of ostensible losers transcending its internecine squabbles and undertaking a noble challenge, while the agencies of power miserably fail to protect the vulnerable and welcome disaster as a tool for enriching themselves and asserting control over people's minds and usurping the individual's autonomy. This film should resonate with audiences anywhere within the reach of mass media during America's "war on terror." Thusfar, The Host is Bong's most complete statement about the world we inhabit, and the most beautiful one as well.
The three feature films Bong Joon-ho has directed to date--Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), and The Host (2006)--suggest what Gogol might have done with a movie camera. Bong pictures the absurdity of our time as the mess generated by unlimited idiocy, "the human condition" as an unstable mixture of bad conditioning and decent instincts. His films heap shrewd, witty ridicule on all forms of authority, particularly the military and police; his work is witheringly hostile to the United States's presumed guardianship of South Korea, and pointedly critical of the country's family-owned conglomerates and their fascistically intimate relations with government.
In the course of his narratives Bong progressively raises the ante of ludicrousness, as the problems encountered by his characters reveal the world's essence as an irresolvable state of contradiction: if things are like this, efficient garbage collection is impossible, much less social justice; but if they are like this, the individual faces unevenly unattractive options. One can pretend to love the system and move up its fecal ladder, or reject it and starve.
In the society he portrays, Bong finds little place for authentic human feeling; the middle-class is comprised of humanoids, people who've merged with their technology and reserve their emotions for consumer objects. He detects the possibility for happiness only among the lower classes, which haven't been hypnotized by gurgling electronic objects, condominiums and Mercedez that they can't afford. Like Gogol, or Bunuel, Bong treats happiness itself as a momentary condition between calamities rather than a credible note on which to conclude a film. Even the happy end of The Host feels transient, fraught with potential menace and weighted with prior loss. Bong's optimism is the Gramscian version.
Shifting atmospheres and startling cuts in Bong's films recall the anarchy of the earliest cinema, before films became codified into specific types corresponding to genres of theater and prose narrative. Unfolding in contemporary space and time, among recognizably modern people, these pictures have an otherworldliness akin to mythology, fairy tales, and fables. Bong liberally adopts visual tropes from manga, or graphic novels. This pictographic form of storytelling relies less on dialogue than gestures, facial expressions, and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow; its filmic transposition in spatial design, sequential patterning, and acting resembles the esperanto of the silents, as certain western sound movies do--Dreyer's Vampyr, for example, or William Wyler's The Heiress. Bong's films are intensely talkative, their dialogue hilariously profane, scatological, ridiculous, and scathing, but we could easily follow them without a sound track.
In interviews, Bong cites Clouzot's The Wages of Fear as leaving an early, deep impression on him. He pays casual homage to the Hollywood movies he saw before college, by directors like Frankenheimer, Friedkin, and Spielberg--Steve McQueen in Papillon usually gets mentioned as well. (He likens his second feature, Memories of Murder, to the Cohen Brothers's Fargo; the comparison is provocative, indicating how differently directors think about movies than audiences do.) After acquiring a less than encyclopedic familiarity with Hollywood film, Bong absorbed Chinese and Japanese movies by directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Shokei Imamura, and Kiyoshi Kurowsawa "with an attitude of studying films, thinking it would be nice to have such films in Korea too."
Instead of the occultism prominent in many contemporary Korean films, Bong highlights the surreal condition of everyday life and the weirdly configured spaces people inhabit and work in, the enclosures and physical obstacles we contrive for ourselves.
"I am interested in jobs where you have to work in a small space for a long time," the director told an interviewer, "like ladies selling lottery tickets, cashiers at stationary stores or restaurant waitresses, etc. Films never paid attention to characters with such boring jobs. They are never remembered by anyone. I figured there would be a dynamic effect when these people get entangled in strange situations."
From this perspective, Bong Joon-ho has an certain affinity with Fassbinder. Bong's characters are emphatically working class. His films illustrate the harsh mechanisms of capitalism. In most films where characters do "work in a small space for a long time," that space is never lingered on, and the unrelenting tedium of subsistence work is quickly sidelined. Something more important and compelling has to happen, in more expansive locations, to the working stiff, or, in the parlance of Hollywood, we haven't got anyone to "root for."
Bong, on the other hand, explores the settings of menial employment with almost fetishistically close attention. Small lives become rich with curious and bizarre details. He often features characters who aren't expecting anything, or can't get anywhere, or have already been flattened by the economic system; those with a modicum of ambition have some inhibitory flaw or inherent weakness that keeps them treading water to keep their heads above it.
In Barking Dogs Never Bite, the ruinous equation of "democracy" with "capitalism"--in the simplest terms, "your money or your life"--is the film's virtual raison d'etre, a subtext impossible to overlook. Barking Dogs encloses the class system in a panopticon-like apartment complex, where some residents are making it, others making do, and the detritus of society squats in shadows in the basement; the massive building and its uniform, jutting walkways suggest some indifferent housing plan thrown up during a building boom. Its social microcosm has, in fact, been installed in a bunker of defective materials. The sham construction haunts the structure as the ghost of "Boiler Kim," a repairman killed by accident in a confrontation with the developers, who sealed up his body between two walls near the boiler.
Yoon-ju, an underpaid college lecturer, lives in the building with his pregnant wife. He elicits immediate sympathy, faced with the corrupt facts of life: to get appointed to a professorship, he must give the dean a $10,000 bribe--money he doesn't have.
Bong casts Yoon-ju in an ambivalent light. Played by the remarkable Lee Sung-jae (Art Museum by the Zoo, Attack the Gas Station, and Public Enemy), the lank, delicate-featured Yoon-ju incarnates the stressed-out Everyman at the mercy of the money system. His abjection encourages us to overlook his self-absorption and impacted rage.
Yoon-ju's financial dilemma is a symptom of the same corruption that built the apartment complex, an intrinsic part of a post-Confucian society that rewards dishonest dealings. At the same time, it provides insights into Yoon-ju's character. His ethical sense is ruffled by the bribe, but his main concern is how to raise the money. He also worries about getting caught.
A third, cautionary implication of the bribe is presented when a friend who urges Yoon-ju to seize the opportunity relates what happened to the person who grabbed it the last time it arose. The scene takes place in a men's lavatory during a typical night of boozing; as his friend describes the dean plying his new protégé with heavy liquor, Yoon-ju visualizes the scene. The young man isn't a drinker, and staggers into the subway heading home; while vomiting onto the tracks from the edge of the platform, a train knocks his head off. Later, crawling home himself, Yoon-ju fantasizes glugging with the dean, followed by his own decapitation.
Such imaginary events appear in Bong's films without any stylistic brackets to distinguish them from "reality"; in The Host, while her family takes a hurried break from their search for her, the missing Hyon-seo appears at the table, where everyone feeds her the choicest bits of their meal; here, Yoon-ju summons a karmically retributive consequence of the bribe. A more tangible effect is stress, compounded by his strained relations with his wife, who initially seems overdemanding and abrasive. Gradually, the film's sympathies tilt in favor of a pregnant working woman married to a petulant, grown-up child.
Yoon-ju is essentially passive: he lacks the will to either accept the career failure that will come if he doesn't bribe the dean, or the Nietzschean perversity to embrace the uber-values that would make the bribe "nothing." Instead he rationalizes his inevitable capitulation by telling himself, "When I'm a professor, I won't take bribes." A weak man, we might say, yet because his weakness stems from a certain revulsion at the demeaning compromises of adult life, he retains a degree of likeability. He sleeps in a fetal position, as if envying the uterine security of his wife's unborn child. His haplessness is that of a child losing its innocence.
The dark side of curdling innocence is already apparent: Yoon-ju has taken on the responsibility of a family, no doubt because of his conformist nature, and resents what this involves. Annoyed by constant barking, he "retaliates" against fate by snatching a neighbor's dog and locking it in a wardrobe stored in the basement, after botched attempts to throw it off the roof or hang it from a ceiling pipe.
The dog, too, has multiple meanings. It serves to interlace Yoon-ju's story with that of Hyeon-nam (Du-na Bae, who plays the deafmute's anarchist girlfriend in Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), employed in the building's management office, whose job includes stamping notices posted by tenants, so that maintenace staff won't remove them from the building walls.
The office bores her; she cleans it, refills the water cooler, does the accounts, stamps papers. She takes on putting up a little girl's lost dog poster to get outside, visiting an overweight friend who runs a variety store on the building's ground level. (Go See-he, who plays the friend, is the lesbian prison bully in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and a formidable comedienne.) The cramped refuge behind her store counter is a "small space" that becomes its own little world--as do the police station basement in Memories of Murder and the interior of the snack stand in The Host.
The friends view a TV report about a female bank clerk who fought off a knife-wielding robber, thus becoming, in Hyeon-nam's estimation, "a celebrity." Hyeon-nam escapes her dull job in daydreams of doing something similarly heroic. Meanwhile, Yoon-ju has realized that he locked up the wrong dog, and surreptitiously witnessed, from the now-empty wardrobe, an old janitor turning the dead pooch into stew; unfazed by his mistake, Yoon-ju contrives to snatch the "right" dog from an elderly tenant. Dressed in a red pullover and matching cap, he pitches the second dog off the roof, which Hyeon-nam witnesses through binoculars from the opposite wing of the complex. She pursues him, but collides with a suddenly opened apartment door.
The dramaturgy of the chase (particularly the stiff, exaggerated scything motions of Yoon-ju's arms), the morphology of terror-stricken expressions that passes across Yoon-ju's face as he hides in the basement wardrobe, and, later, a dribble of blood from his nose when he learns the old woman whose dog he killed has died of grief, are all manifestations of manga iconography, in the service of a tangled but unmanga-like plot. Bong turns the story on its head when Yoon-ju's wife, craving an affection he doesn't give her, brings home a dog of her own, which Bong quite innocently loses while walking it outside a nearby park, when a cloud of pesticide is blithely dispersed through the vegetation.
The film's protagonists meet an hour and half into the story, when Yoon-ju, sopping wet, turns up in the rain to make copies of his own lost dog poster at the convenience store. His wife, oblivious to his previous two dog killings, accuses him of the one he isn't guilty of. This has a reverse echo of Gombrowicz's novel Cosmos, in which the narrator, after noticing numerous objects, including a sparrow, that have been deliberately hung by string in an unfamiliar landscape, "completes the series" by hanging a cat, but promptly dissociates himself from his action: quite deliriously, he wonders which member of the family he's boarding with "could have hung the cat." "Supposing she had done it? Supposing she had done it? Of course I was very well aware that I had done it myself, but by saying 'Leo' like that she attracted everyone's attention…I had the feeling that in spite of everything she could have done it, that if she was capable of battering a tree stump with a hammer in a nervous crisis…she would have been perfectly capable of throttling the cat and then hanging it. It would have been just like her." (Cosmos, p. 79)
Yoon-ju, contrariwise, must confront the fact that it "would have been just like" him to dispose of his wife's dog. Its disappearance, the old woman's death, and Hyeon-nam's innocent helpfulness shame him into plastering the entire neighborhood with posters offering "a substantial reward" for the dog's return. (Hyeon-nam later manages to rescue the missing dog from a derelict.)
The encounter between Yoon-ju and Hyeon-nam occurs too late for Barking Dogs to degenerate into that loathesome genre, "romantic comedy." Hyeon-nam is an innocent, high-spirited soul, a plausible antidote for Yoon-ju's fretful, bottled-up neuroticism. But "what might have been" is an ambiguous speculation at best. What we see are two people heading in different directions who pause briefly in the same place. Hyeon-nam loses her job because of her empathy for others; Yoon-ju will be rewarded for his selfishness.
A very drunken Yoon-ju, returning from delivery of the bribe, encounters Hyeon-nam and calls her his "savior." He even makes a sodden, gingerly flirtatious overture, but suddenly begins running, his bent arms slicing the air, to prompt her recognition of the man she chased through the housing complex.
"You lost your shoe," she tells him when he slumps exhausted at the curb, holding it out for him. This is, perhaps, the most complicated moment in Barking Dogs Never Bite. Hyeon-nam's friendly return of the shoe, like her return of the missing dog, is a disinterested act of kindness, something that will never occur in the world Yoon-ju has just secured a place in.
Bong's fictions record moments of a civilization in flux. The Confucian values woven into Korean life for a thousand years persist in the primacy of family relations and the sense of all Koreans as part of a single kinship system, but war, politics, and the artificial grafting of technological modernity onto an insular, agrarian culture have jumbled ancient customs with hyperreality.
Memories of Murder reprises a slightly earlier period of "modernization," when serial murder first began to occur in South Korea. Serial murder is often depicted as an urban phenomenon, but even in America, it's mainly an activity occurring in the heartland, where concealing bodies and crossing legal jurisdictions only requires a motor vehicle. The first such killings in Korea began in 1986, in rural Gyeonggi Province, on the outskirts of a small city, Hwaseong. The city itself is never really pictured, though the film spends a lot of time in its police station, and a large factory complex figures importantly in the action. Bodies turn up in drainage ditches, culverts, and fields along dirt roads, out in farm country.
Bong intended his second film to act as a reminder of a repressed recent past and the actual murders, still unsolved, on which it's based. Its humor is much more brutal than Barking Dogs, emphasizing the doltishness of investigators and the bleak atmosphere of the late dictatorship period--there are, for example, nationwide blackouts for civil defense drills, and diversions of police units to quell demonstrations, that help the killer pick off victims with ease.
The central figure, the provincial detective Park Doo-man, is played by one of the finest actors anywhere, Song Kang-ho (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Joint Security Area, Shiri, Bad Movie); Park is a strutting lump of hubris, a mixture of hard-boiled cliches and obstinate ignorance, who finds he's suddenly teamed with a Seoul detective whose methods are the opposite of his own. They can't stand each other. Seo Tae-Yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) works from documents and empirical evidence, while Park Doo-man relies on "instincts" he doesn't really possess, and hauls in suspects on the strength of idle gossip. Park's junior officer is a vicious punk who tortures confessions from a mentally disabled boy and a factory worker caught wanking in the woods; Park himself subtly coaches these battered innocents in details of the crimes which "only the killer could know," to have his trumped-up cases deflated by Seo's irrefutable deductions.
The detectives waste eons of time battering suspects and attacking each other. The murders all occur on rainy nights, and the film capitalizes on vistas of gorgeous, deep green darkness, watery mist and glistening vegetation, morning skies quilted with clouds, and landscapes in which near things appear set at vast distances from each other.
Park resorts to consulting a shaman and visiting bath houses in search of "hairless men" (as the victims were raped and no trace of the killer's pubic hair was found); Seo's more scientific approach proves equally useless. Neither detective seems excessively well-trained or even suited for his job. The only truly promising lead is discovered by a female officer, whose clue is fatuously dismissed by Park but seems, in fact, the most likely key to the crime.
The case has strikingly different effects on the lead detectives. The murders continue, driving the investigators into sleep-deprived exhaustion and disorientation. As Park confronts the continual failure of his crude methods he becomes less certain about rash conclusions, averse to unnecessary violence, aware of his limitations; Seo, who has placed all his trust in forensic proof, starts to break down when the film's last victim turns out to be a schoolgirl he questioned earlier in the movie. His anger transforms him into what Park was at the outset. He attacks the prime suspect and nearly beats him to death; when Park shows up with DNA evidence disproving the suspect's guilt, Seo refuses to believe the documents and tosses them on the wet ground.
Bong's camera fixes space at disorienting angles--diagonal overhead views, dizzying pans of curved ramps, long shots of indistinct objects, etc. Evocative of manga panels, his sequences emphasize the claustral and/or agoraphobic qualities of homes and offices, stores and institutions, the scale of people in relation to the architecture that surrounds them. Open space is dilated at times, at other times foreshortened, as when Gang-du, the son of the food stand proprietor, runs to meet his daughter Hyun-seo: in the first shot she appears to be about four feet away at most, and blurry; this is followed by a crisply focused shot of Gang-du running across a long grassy expanse where he trips on his face before Hyun-seo enters the frame.
The Host introduces an intermediary element of scale that transforms constructed space into an indeterminate labyrinth. The cityscape appears in The Host, and the film's frenetic action seems to encompass large quadrants of Seoul, but the urban matrix is actually compressed into synecdotal fragments: a glittering skyline behind the river, a small block containing a dry cleaning establishment opposite an office tower, the Han River banks and traffic underpasses, a short patch of freeway, the interstices of a bridge, and miles of cavelike sewer system.
The eponymous figure of this film is a mutated fish produced when the U.S. military dumps a vast quantity of formaldehyde into the Han River. The deformed, acrobatic monster attacks a large crowd of people picnicking on the riverbank where Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), his father Park Hie-bong (Byeon Hie-bong), and Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung) live in the back of their food stand. Gang-du's sister, Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na), is the Korean Bronze Medal holder in archery; his brother, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is an unemployed, heavy-drinking engineering graduate.
During its first spectaclar rampage, the creature devours several people and mutilates several others. Gang-du gets separated from Hyun-seo, whom the creature snares with its tail before making a long leap into the river, where it splashes down amid duck- and swan-shaped paddleboats, emerging on the opposite shore, where it ingests Hyun-seo whole.
The official response to the crisis of a large, hostile amphibious animal gobbling up parts of the local population is predictably hostile to its victims; mourners who've collected at an auditorium around photographic shrines to the dead are tear-gassed and herded into quarantine; fumigation companies seize an opportunity to compete for government contracts, while the US military promotes the myth of a "virus" spread by the creature to conduct medical experiments on the survivors, and to test its latest biological weapon, "Agent Yellow."
The hospitalized Gangu-du receives a barely audible cell phone call from Hyun-seo, who has been regurgitated by the monster into an inescapable culvert in the sewer, where the beast is storing its "catch." As the authorities refuse to believe him, Gang-du and his family escape medical custody and turn to the Mafia to arm themselves, disguised as fumigators, and find the missing child in the sprawling maze of the sewers.
The Host has a magical look, taking place mainly at night within sight of the bruise-blue river and in dark metallic spillways of ankle-high water, the color schemes of deep blue and gray juxtaposed with the overlit, morgue lighting of hospitals and laboratories; actors are shown through scrims of beaded water, curtains of opaque plastic, and in spaces carved in momentary flashes by the strobelike wobbling of flashlight beams. Bong makes abundant use of fog and slow-spreading trails of dense vapor, culminating with the release of an Agent Yellow bomb, from what looks like a floating amusement park fixture, into the middle of a mass protest near the river's edge.
The Host shows a family of ostensible losers transcending its internecine squabbles and undertaking a noble challenge, while the agencies of power miserably fail to protect the vulnerable and welcome disaster as a tool for enriching themselves and asserting control over people's minds and usurping the individual's autonomy. This film should resonate with audiences anywhere within the reach of mass media during America's "war on terror." Thusfar, The Host is Bong's most complete statement about the world we inhabit, and the most beautiful one as well.
