RulerOfYourOwnWorld

Somehow, though, my other (very brief) experiences with Korean TV dramas kept me skeptical. I don’t care for the kind of hyper-twisty, surprise-focused, romance-focused drama in any case, but in Korea this is worsened by the fact that the most jarring archetypal patterns (rich guy treats poor pretty girl badly; poor pretty girl falls for rich guy; poor pretty girl leaves decent-hearted not-rich guy for rich asshole) meld with other stuff I would rather not watch on TV (mom throws temper tantrum at family dinner; then she does it again… and again… and again…).

When it was recommended to me years ago, the show was really hard to get, and impossible for someone who couldn’t speak Korean; the program had been released on DVD, but without subtitles. I was given copies, along with fansubs (apparently by whoever this Totuta person is, who runs this website), and filed them away under “Watch when I have time.” Well, I ran across them again this winter, and decided to give the show a whirl, and what do you know: it’s pretty good!

The things I was told about it were generally true: it’s well-written, which means that all the characters — even the smaller supporting characters — each have their own story, their own unique struggle. In a sense, the show brings to mind that aphorism, widely misattributed (so they say) to Philo of Alexandria or to Plato, that one should be kind to everyone one meets, as they are all fighting a hard battle. In Ruler of Your Own World, this turns out, to some degree, to be true: everyone seems to be struggling — and sometimes giving up on the struggle — to deal with her or his own problems, and those problems become part of the story too, without overwhelming the main thread of the story.

Another thing this show does which is worth note is that it inverts the expected pattern. There is a rich guy who treats the female protagonist (Kyung) badly (and, to be frank, acts a lot like a child); but rather than falling for him, she relatively quickly spurns him and goes for the screwed-up but honest and much more grown-up ex-con in her life (whose name is Boksu). The ex-con has a very slim and stylish (but also relatively poor and potty-mouthed) long-term girlfriend (Mirae), a cheerleader who in most dramas like this would end up being some kind of oppressively horrible witch, except she isn’t… she’s very sympathetic, and I can’t help but kind of cheer for her, and empathize with her, even as I know that Boksu belongs with Kyung.

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Which is interesting, because even I can see that Boksu is not a very handsome guy. Which is not a crime: we can’t all be the handsomest guy in the show, but it does sort of violate the rules of Korean TV, as far as I’ve seen. He dresses like a regular lower-middle-class Korean guy in 2002, and his face is average. And while I like her as an actress, I don’t find Lee Na Young (Kyung) particularly attractive in this show — people constantly comment about her cheesy, country-style wardrobe and her looks. I can’t help but imagine that in most Korean TV shows, the casting would be inverted — that the lovers at the center of this narrative would likely end up on the outskirts of the story, while the man and woman rejected by them look more like the lovers paired at the center of most Korean TV dramas. That would be sad, as I’d say everyone brings their A-game to this show, and because I think that seeing people who aren’t stereotypically beautiful lends the show a kind of realism bolstered by the way each character is so different, so uniquely themselves.

Mirae, the foul-mouthed cheerleader who is, deep down, desperate not to lose the man she truly loves, is an excellent example of this, and probably my favorite character in part because even she, the prettiest girl in the show, looks like a normal person, not some Gangnam plastic-surgery bot… and in part, because she’s the inevitable underdog and yet she’s such a sympathetic character all the same. All she really wants to do is go to college and become a nurse. But she’s also a bit domineering, and has mothered Boksu — in ways he seemingly has outgrown. When he fails to break up with her, it’s understandable in some ways — he knows it will break her heart — but frustrating in others, since he knows that he really wants to be with someone else… and yet, I wondered whether he didn’t also crave the mothering he got from her, and whether it didn’t, deep down, remind him of his own domineering mother.

Once, last year, a student and I sat and discussed Korean dramas in comparison with American ones for the purposes of a presentation she had to do. I told her that one of the biggest differences I’d found was that, in Western dramas, it was possible to structure a narrative around something other than a love story. Love and sex do play a part in most TV shows — or, at least, relationships often do —  but, as the student agreed, a TV show like E.R. is kind of impossible in Korean terms: it’s focused on how an E.R. works, on the experience of being a doctor and on how doctors perform their jobs, on the health care system. Yes, there are relationships and even romances in the show, but the focus is the work being done in a busy emergency room in Chicago. This happens with police shows, with shows about criminals (I’m thinking more about Dexter and Breaking Bad than Weeds, mind you), and it can happen with people in jail (Oz, Prison Break).

Ruler of Your Own World is somewhere in-between, in this aspect: the romance is a big part of the narrative, but at the same time, what characters do for money is also important: after all, the male lead starts out the show as a pickpocket just getting released from jail. The question of what he will do next preoccupies him, and his eventual choice to train as a stuntman is less shallow than it would have been in a lot of shows. When being a stunt man could have been presented as all leather-jackets and sunglasses and coolness, it’s actually presented as hard bloody work, as dirty and dangerous, as involving know-how that needs to be acquired, and under-respected by people who know nothing about it. We see Boksu screw up, and struggle, and learn.

Kyung’s job — playing keyboards in an indie rock band — is similarly empty of glamor: they get excited about small gigs, they scrimp and save the money they have, sometimes they consider pawning their instruments for cash, and so on. Their new lead singer isn’t an instant success — in fact, she suffers from terrible stage fright, something the band struggles with. Kyung’s family is less than supportive of her musical aspirations, and her rich-almost-boyfriend sees it as a hobby.

Other characters all have jobs of some kind: the rich guy is a journalist, Mirae is a cheerleader (and, later, part-time model) whose job kind of sucks; Boksu’s father drives a bus — and we see him doing it sometimes — while his mom runs a fried chicken shop. Kyung’s mother is a depressed housewife, but her father runs hotels (and is well-networked with local gangsters and thugs). Practically everyone in the story not only has a job, but is shown actually doing it, usually in less-than-glamourous tasks, rather than in the showy, cool, and overstylized fashion we’d see in most Korean TV shows.

(This brings to mind what I’ve read about how one of the first English-language novelists to focus on work as a major theme of his narratives, as something that kept the world and the Empire going, was Kipling. I’m not sure about that being quite true, but Kipling — and a lot of writers after him in the Anglophone world — have been making work an important part of characters’ lives, in a way that it doesn’t seem so often to be in Korean TV shows or in many of the Korean stories I’ve read in translation. I rather wonder if this is related to the way many of my students say they want to work in a big company, but only shrug when I ask what specifically they want to do. “Work in an office,” is the most precise response I usually get.)

Ruler of Your Own World

The show also — all the way back in 2002 — made some pretty clear comments on issues in Korean society. For one thing, Kyung — the sympathetic female lead — openly admits to having had premarital sex to her kinda-sorta-boyfriend, and isn’t willing to take shit for it. She also smokes, and drinks him under the table. Her meekness at home is part of the very reason she has so much trouble with her father (it is not so much a virtue as an annoyance to him). Boksu’s mother, meanwhile, is a broken woman, and there is no magic fix for this problem, only the struggle to relate to her sons (especially Boksu, who was the offspring of a now-terminated marriage to a violent alcoholic), and to men in general. The family relationships in this show seem a lot more real in their dysfunctionality than what I’ve glimpsed in other Korean TV shows. Parents less often throw fits than they just act like jerks sometimes, almost always in ways that relate to their own personal problems.

In any case, I’m only halfway through the program, but so far I get the impression the narrative is centered on the importance of doing the things one truly wants to do — of being honest with oneself, of walking around open to the world and to happy possibilities, of not being locked into an unhappy situation. In that, I’d say, it’s somewhat radical as far as Korean cultural messages go: I can’t count the number of times when Korean students or friends have come to me asking for advice on some decision or other, and reacted with shock when I asked them what they wanted to do, and told them they should do what feels or seems right to them. “You’re the only person who said that to me! I knew I should have asked you first!” is something I’ve heard time and time again, to my sorrow. When I ask what advice they got from friends, it almost always boils down to these two notions:

1. Don’t — DON’T! — consider what you want to do. In fact, if you feel an impulse to do A, you most definitely should do B, or C, or something else… but not A.
2. If you find the prospect of doing X unpleasant, then that is what is necessary and you really need to do it. (Justification for this is focused on the idea of career building, one’s future, economic stability, or whatever, but the main thesis seems to be that self-torture isn’t just occasionally inescapable — it’s a requisite part of becoming adult and “living well.”)

Anyway, I have thoughts about why these ideas seem to persist and to plague my students and friends whenever they seek advice — or, in many cases, even when they don’t ask for it, but get it anyway — and I think there are specific reasons why in Korea, adult responsibility seems to be so often paired with personal unhappiness and with not doing what one wants to do… but that’s for another post.

In the meantime, I’ll simply note that find it heartening to see a TV show that comes out hard-hitting against all that. The very title of the show does this: 네 멋대로 해라 basically translates as “Do What You Want To Do.” While it’s sad to me that this message might come across as unique or radical in entertainment, I’m glad it got some airtime almost a decade ago. I hope more like it gets out there too…

I’ll sum up my thoughts once I’ve seen the remaining episodes, I guess, so stay tuned for that! For those interested, you can see the show online, at least if you’re in North or South America (or have a proxy that will convince the site that you are… or, there’s always this). Like I said, by all accounts, it’s probably the best Korean TV drama ever made, so… well, there you go. If you can get past the stuff that a North American viewer (like me) is likeliest to trip on — the occasional overlong crying scenes, the weird pacing in certain “dramatic” moments, things like that — you might really enjoy it.

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More next time.

Well, here are some links for you to gobble down, and think about later:

• I’m a little dubious about the idea we’ll have enough energy to fuel anything as expansive as what is discussed in this video featuring a talk by Jesse Schell (a Carnegie Mellon University Professor), but I do imagine we will be going about receiving points for all kinds of daily activities, and in fact I’ve been thinking about shifting a couple of my courses to an XP-based grading system next semester. I think this notion is likely to work its way into my next major piece of writing, as well. (Via Kotaku)
• Also at Kotaku, for the expat in Korea who wonders what it might have been like if s/he had departed for Japan after a year, or two years, or had been there from the beginning, allow Tim Rogers to fill you in on the things you’d likely be complaining about if you’d done that. Plenty to rant about in Japan, though I still get the impression that, after a few years in Korea, this stuff would be easy to deal with — maybe because the stuff I do actually rant about here is stuff we never encounter during trips to Japan.
• An interesting paper by Jin-Kyu Park, a researcher and professor at Korea University and Kyunghee University, appropriately titled, “‘English fever’ in South Korea: its history and symptoms.” I think Park is missing a few points, like the ways in which English fever is an excuse for lazy parenting (which is all one can say it is when a kid gets home from hakwon at 8 or 9 pm and is told, “Go to your room and study,” as unfortunately too many kids are; or how the “goose family” setup often is just a cover for a socially-acceptable separation. (And a percentage of both moms and dads in such situations are notorious for enjoying a lively sex life during the separation from their spouses.) Yet I’ve found precious little discussion of those realities, but then, one isn’t supposed to talk about the elephant in the room. But people do seem to be willing to see the exodus of kids for educational purposes problematic, or as a crisis. Some interesting thoughts also in this thesis, though it is a bit earnest and lacks sensible cynicism in places.
• Need a pop filter for your microphone? Two (very similar) ways to make one for yourself, cheap, here and here. I need one of these for the next time I do recording for film, especially anything with narration. (The second link is from the first article, btw.)
• I also have been installing different bits of software/firmware lately. LibreOffice, which I couldn’t install on my Ubuntu setup until I read this guide, and I also installed the amazing Tomato router alt firmware onto the used Linksys WRT54GV.4 I picked up on Craigslist. (I had a V7, and it took some research but I discovered this was why I could not port forward, nor could I get it set up so both Miss Jiwaku and I could connect stably. All that is a bad memory now, and the Tomato firmware is operating amazingly well!)
• I’m reading two excellent books right now: Paul Park’s The Gospel of Corax, and Hal Clement’s Noise. Each is fascinating in its way, though for vastly different reasons, and I can easily imagine people who love one might hate the other. But the attention to the picky details of an alien culture and society (and, in the Clement, ecology) is what makes them both stand out. I’m trying to learn lessons here to apply to my own ongoing writing project, about which I’ll say more later, but I’ll just say that, though I’m less than a hundred pages into either book, I recommend both — though to different people, I imagine.
• If you’re looking for movies to enjoy, I finally saw The Perfect Host and it was a knockout. I was amused by Mean Girls, though maybe because I didn’t have very high expectations of it. And then there’s the Korean movie we saw the other week, My Way, which is about a Korean guy who ends up in the Japanese Imperial Army, and then the USSR’s army, and then the Germany army, during World War II. It was an interesting story, though it kind of undersold its own message by pulling punches on how horrific the War was… and by focusing on specific racisms of other cultures, while ignoring the evident ones among the Koreans. (I would be shocked if a group of soldiers, encountering a lone woman who had been spraying their group with sniper fire, didn’t rape and/or kill her on the spot, once they caught her on the battlefield.) Still, it was far from the colossal blunder I imagined, when I saw the poster for the film:
  

  This is the poster that got the most display in Seoul, with prominent Nazi flags in the background. Oh, how I feared this would be some kind of anti-Inglourious Basterds. But it wasn't. Still, the international (ie. English-language) posters for the film look pretty different...

  By the way, it was showing in Yongsan with English subtitles… as long as you didn’t mind seeing it either at noon, or midnight.

• Speaking of double-gobbles, these crabs could do that to your head. And yeah, they’re frigging REAL.
• Also, this video, whixch you must have seen by now if you use Facebook, is nonetheless worth posting here, if only to have on hand for any media-related course I might teach someday:

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

This is awkward because I usually rather hate their favorite book, TV show, or movie.

Not all SF fans, or SF authors, like all SF. It’s a simple thing to say.

But it’s another thing to explain it, and they usually seem to find the fact so unbelievable that an explanation seems wanted.

My explanation almost never satisfies them, but maybe that’s because I haven’t rehearsed my sound bite. After all, everything has to be expressible in a sound bite in this era. Perhaps I should prepare one for the next time.

I can’t start out of the gate quoting Adam Roberts’ observation that sometime in the mid-twentieth century, the dominant mode of popular SF shifted from text to “visual” forms (like cinema, TV, and comics). I can’t very well explain that there was an accompanying aesthetic shift that occurred, and that SF in the visual mode does all kinds of things I don’t find satisfying, while lacking a lot of the things I crave from the genre.

It’s sort of like telling a Korean, “Well, look, I like kimchi, but I like the traditional stuff. You know, the stuff from before the days when hot peppers arrived from the Americas? The stuff your ancestors loved? The white, pickled stuff that bears no resemblance to that spicy fermented cabbage you eat with every meal.” You get blank looks. You get bafflement, and an insistence that, no, dude, what about kimchi?

The SF I love best blows my mind by being unpredictable; by taking scientific concepts and using them to stretch my imagination. You know those bowel movements that feel like you’re giving birth — the ones you have only occasionally, but which actually scare you until they’re over, and then you’re just kind of relieved and in happy shock not to have had your insides pop out and explode all over the place? That’s what a great SF story or novel can do to your mind.

It’s an acquired taste, thinking. And it’s an acquired expectation. I don’t insist that everyone should want the things I want.

But I do feel insulted by a lot of what is offered in place of that.

Take, for example, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, which to me feels much more like a bowel movement that simply took forever to end.

I get it why people enjoyed the show. I really do: despite some pretty bad writing in places, and despite the fact that it pushed a lot of my annoyance buttons — any TV show that refers to “God” and “the gods” constantly is going to annoy me, guaranteed — I can see what excited people about it. It’s like Dan Brown’s (dreadful, awful, horrible) writing: the man cannot write a character to save his life, but he can get you curious enough to wonder what’s going to happen next.

When I advised my students there are much better things to read in English than Dan Brown, one said, in shock, “But they made a movie out of The Da Vinci Code!” When I told her that they had, and they’ve made movies out of many badly-written books, the laughed and said, “Like Twilight?”

Yes, like Twilight. Like The Da Vinci Code.

I don’t know about other hard SF fans, but I find it ironic and kind of discouraging that one of the first things people think of when they hear the phrase “sci-fi” or “SF” or “science fiction” is the Star Wars series. Not because I hate Star Wars, but because the franchise is, quite clearly, an epic fantasy that decided to cross-dress, slapping on a bit of metal breastplate and some blinking Xmas lights under a helmet.

Indeed, Star Wars explicitly, excitedly, insistently lacks all the things I love about SF proper:

• an intent, honest questioning of the nature of the human species (and its mutability), especially in terms of its own self-understanding and its own dilemmas, as shaped in relationship to its tools (ie. technology)
• an exploration of science as an interface between nature and man’s conception of (and power to manipulate) the universe in which we live
• an essentially realist, empirical aesthetic, or as some bright folks out there put it, a “naturalistic worldview… free of supernatural and mystical elements.”
• a fascination with alternity — future times, or deep pasts that are alienatingly alien, or alternate worlds, or even the estranging reality of a world as seen through the eyes of another intelligent species, or of humans meeting another intelligent species
• an investment in questions that could only be posed in a  post-Darwinian, post-Enlightenment, post-industrial revolution world

If you look at that list, it’s pretty easy to see why I’d revile Battlestar Galactica — though, to be fair, I watched it right to its miserable, insulting deus ex machina finale.

(Which isn’t just insulting in its anti-science, anti-tech stupidity. I mean, the big reveal is that God did it? That’s it? Come on. George R.R. Martin’s right: too many people don’t know how to write endings anymore.)

Need I rehearse the points?

An intent, honest questioning of the nature of the human species (and its mutability), especially in terms of its own self-understanding and its own dilemmas, as shaped in relationship to its tools (ie. technology).

Er, yeah. There’s humans, and then there’s robots called cylons, and then there’s these other robots (also called cylons) who are basically human except they can resurrect. Oh, and then there are some other humanlike robots who can resurrect, who made the other humanlike robots, but they forgot who they are. But basically, they are all kinda sorta human.

And then they all agree to give up technology and cities and stuff because we’re not ready and need a clean start. Or something.

An exploration of science as an interface between nature and man’s conception of (and power to manipulate) the universe in which we live.

Science in this series is surprisingly thin. There’s some medical science — all of which looks to be basically in line with our medical science ten years ago. You’d think a spacefaring colonial society with the technological advancement to run FTL (faster-than-light) starships might have actually figured out and implemented better treatments for cancer than we have now; or even just figured out and implemented the stuff we’ve figured out, but not yet implemented.

As for the rest of the science, well, again, it’s amusing that in a spacefaring colonial civilization, only one apparent scientist survives annihilation. (Maybe there are more, but somehow Baltar has control of the fleet’s scientific research resources and labs and so on… really?) You’d think they would have more scientists, since science is the bedrock of their interstellar society. You’d think that maybe five or ten scientists would have survived, and not just one dude named Gaius Baltar. And they would be checking that cylon-detector code, uncovering whatever software tricks he used to hide his results, and landing his ass in the brig right from the start. Though, then again, Baltar’s forcible conversion and constant god-bothering is about the least scientist-like behavior I can imagine. Well, unless he was a physicist (some of them do go theo-obsessive, I don’t know why), in which case, why’s he coding a clyon-detector app?

Science? Well, there’s spaceships that go boom and stuff. But even the science in the finale is just meh. There’s a great explanation of that here, along with a critique of the disastrous finale.

An essentially realist, empirical aesthetic, or as some bright folks out there put it, a “naturalistic worldview… free of supernatural and mystical elements.”

and

An investment in questions that could only be posed in a  post-Darwinian, post-Enlightenment, post-industrial revolution world.

Ha ha. Ha!

I won’t even bother. And no, it’s not that the series deals with religion: I’m fine with religion being presented as part of an SFnal society. I have a problem when it’s as central to a very advanced civilization as it is in our primitive one, though. I was momentarily ranting about this a few weekends ago and said to someone, “Yeah, like a spacefaring civilization with the ability to run faster-than-light ships is going to be run by religious nuts.” Then I paused, and said, “Of course, look at us today…” It’s not unimaginable… it’s just so pessimistic and depressing to think it, and I think it’s a bit unlikely.

The thing is: religion has been at science’s throat all along, and so if you’re making an SF narrative, and you privilege religion and supernatural religious concepts as fact in terms of your worldbuilding and metaphysics —  if there really is a god pulling strings behind the scenes — then you’re automatically deprioritizing the science part of it… and, as I see it, dooming the science part of your science fiction.

(You’ll also be avoiding a lot of the more interesting questions possible in SF, which makes me wonder: why are you making an SF narrative in the first place? Is it because you like spaceship battles and funny costumes? If so, well, please frack off. )

But you may be surprised to find that it’s the absence of this one that really bugged me:

A fascination with alternity — future times, or deep pasts that are alienatingly alien, or alternate worlds, or even the estranging reality of a world as seen through the eyes of another intelligent species, or of humans meeting another intelligent species.

Where to begin?

The robots are robots, but they’re kinda human. Like, kinda very human. Like almost undetectable in their non-humanness. Which in practical terms means, they’re human. No estrangement or alternity there, really, especially once their resurrection capacity ends.

But I’ll confess: it was the Western, late-20th/early-21st-century-ness of it that bothered me most. Star Trek and Star Trek:TNG (the only series I know at all), as much as they often just metaphorized 20th century dilemmas, issues, and conflicts, at least had the decency to suggest a civilization unlike ours — a post-scarcity, unified world society emblematized by the Starfleet uniforms.

In Battlestar Galactica, the characters dress, talk, eat, think, and act like modern Americans, full stop. Sure, there are tiny deviations, like how, when they cuss, they pluralize the word “god.” But their military garb is essentially our military garb; their drinking culture is essentially our drinking culture; their politics are so familiar I think of them as barely a funhouse mirror reflection of our politics. We’re supposed to believe that the business suit worn by millions of men in the postmodern world today was also worn by the majority of men in another civilization 150,000 years ago that developed in some other corner of the galaxy, by a difference species that, somehow, evolved to be basically like us.

When I complained about this, my friend Chris said, “Well, what are they supposed to wear?” I imagine that’s precisely what everyone involved in the envisioning of Battlestar Galactica would say to, and while I can’t fault Chris for it — his literary loves are not the same as mine, and he finds other things to hang attention onto in a TV series — I certainly do fault people who make SF TV shows lazily.

Because that’s how I read the question: it’s laziness. Not the laziness of budget restrictions leading to the use of forehead-aliens (those aliens that are made alien by makeup tricks on their foreheads, as in the Star Trek franchise), because trust me, having done some short film work, I get it about budget and logistics and special effects. I really do.

But the laziness that precludes bothering to imagine a culture that differs from modern American culture even as much as some present-day cultures on Earth do, that’s a laziness I can’t excuse. The laziness of not even bothering to assemble something that mixes up real-world Earth cultures — a pseudo-Confucian strict hierarchic social system here, a penchant for wanton violence by the powerful (a la the ancient Romans) there; the cultures of BSG’s colonial society could have been compelling and authentically foreign. Instead, they ended up being the forehead-alien equivalent of American culture, plus a little forehead alien Greek mythology thrown in.

This is why, though I did (especially in the first couple of seasons) find the characters relatively compelling enough to ignore the prattling on about God, the science-ignorant writing, the lack of interest in a philosophical inquiry into consciousness, human nature, and technology (beyond Robots are bad! Robots are scary!), I felt a kind of bad taste in my mouth even early on. Everything we’re shown in Caprica, prior to its fall, suggests that the people there might have kicked back and watched How I Met Your Mother on a weeknight. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, fine, tell it: but don’t expect me to believe the society doing it lived in the deep past, on the other side of the galaxy, and had just fought an interstellar war with its robotic slaves, but somehow looks so much like ours that they even sit around eating sushi rolls and talking on the phone while being set up for blind dates.

It was dumb, lazy and dumb dumb dumb. If you want to know why, you’ll need to be prepared to read some novels, to find out BSG hasn’t really caught up with the cutting edge of SF proper as it was thirty or forty years ago. Because, my friends, that is the sad truth: TV and cinema SF tends to just lag behind written SF by a generation or more. Is it because the people making visual SF tend to get stuck on other visual SF? Are they just not reading enough? I don’t know, but it sounds likely to me.

(Then again, I’m sad to admit, I’m just not reading enough these days to stay current, or even start to catch up.)

And that’s why I tend not to like SF TV shows. In fact, though I very rarely read fantasy in print form (unless it’s horrific and dark, as in, Lovecraftian, for example), I tend toward liking fantastical or supernatural TV programs more. Dead Like Me and Being Human and Life on Mars are prime examples. (The latter clearly is fantasy, not SF, if you ask me.) The SF I like on TV is usually billed as something else — a comedy series like Red Dwarf or Better Off Ted, for example. In fact, the TV show that has most consistently given me the closest feeling to a hard SF story was a Canadian science faction series called Regenesis. I loved the series, and someday I’ll probably watch it again from start to finish. (My review of the series, written just before I finished it off, is here.)

I know, I know. Someone out there is thinking, “What about Dr. Who?”

What about it? I liked it when I was little, but haven’t seen the new ones. Does it sound like I’d like it? All my writer friends here do, but they also, I suspect, think my objections to the BSG series (not the finale, I hope, just the series) are nuts.

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The thing is, the film really didn’t have to suck. The opening section was actually really interesting: I felt like I was seeing Seoul represented in a film in a way I’d never seen before: a different feel to the skyline, a kind of easy comfort with the grunginess of the place, an honesty about the trash on the sidewalk and coldness and loneliness of the city.

There was some fairly effective, if somewhat cheesy comedy, as a fellow wearing a fake mustache wandered about “doing good” — picking up trash and throwing it into bins, for example, which highlighted what a pathetic do-gooder he was. He stumbles on a woman being chased by a group of men, and intercedes… and somehow, he kicks their asses with his bizarre, almost satirical martial arts moves. Whatever the hell he is, he is able to take a beating and keep fighting.

Finally, having rescued the young lady, he brings her to his crappy apartment, and becomes extremely uptight. This part is, once again, full of cheeseball comedy — he’s insanely uptight, to the point of not even wanting to look at the woman, and avoiding her gaze. But a bizarre game of jenga leads to a kind of semi-forced make-out session, and it becomes apparent the woman wants to sleep with him. Immediately. Oh, and her name is Harmonica. Which, you know, is surely a hooker’s name (or, okay, a party-girl’s pseudonym) if ever I heard one. Oh, and she’s insanely strong. Like, insanely strong.

But the uptightness returns, and the man resists. That’s when the woman goes nuts: she has a large tear i the skin of her back, and her spine emerges, just as you saw if you watched the preview, which I’ll paste again here:

Okay, so, the spine-attack thing knocks the man out, and when he wakes again, he discovers he has been tied up. The woman desperately tries to get him aroused, though on some level she also seems to exult in torturing him. Fellatio doesn’t turn him on, because, well, it’s not so fun when it causes bleeding; and she uses a feather duster to tickle him, but then brutalizes his backside with it. He finally gets turned on, but then staunchly refuses to sleep with her, because of a chastity vow he has taken.

When he continues to refuse her, she finally resorts to a more severe form of torture: flooding his sinuses with a tonic of pure evil: raw garlic, wasabi, hot peppers, and hot sauce, if I remember right, fed in through a hose in one nostril, through which the man is supposed to breathe.

I’ll cut ahead to the gist of what happens, because the torture goes on for some time: finally, she decides to choke him to death because, yeah, she’s an alien inhabiting a dead body, and she needs some sperm tonight to give birth to a child — tonight is the perfect night for it, and she can’t wait till tomorrow to be married to the man and get his sperm.

But at this moment, a flashback arises in the dying man’s mind, of… well, a case of extreme abuse he apparently suffered from his own father, as a child. (I’m talking tied up outside in the rain in your underwear, with rope around your neck, beaten on the head with a shoe till you bleed, drive you so mad you kill your own father in self-defense kind of abuse.) So the guy finally fights back.

Which is — yes, this is it — the moment this film seems to have been written to feature:

The climax of the film arrives when the man finally, finally fights back against this alien attacking him. He beats her in the face, repeatedly and for a long time, until his own face is covered with blood. Then, believing he has killed her as he did his own father, he feels a rush of guilt, and begins to weep for his crime. And then she stirs, and he realizes she isn’t dead… almost, but not quite. So then he rapes her. During none of this does she manifest any alien powers, any time-altering abilities, anything at all that would make her different than a human being.

So, yes, effectively, the film is a vehicle for a deeply misogynist beating-and-rape fantasy, inflicted by a geeky man upon a buxom, pretty young woman. That’s it, folks.

Well, I wish that was it. The denouement of the film involves the guys who were hunting the alien woman, who infodump her species’ history (plus some crap about their “speeeding up time” and “using up energy faster,” none of which made any sense at all). There are disgracefully overt references to the famous — and absolutely wonderful — Korean SF film Save the Green Planet (which it pained me to hear, since this crap film doesn’t deserve to even exist on the same Green Planet as that one), but those only made explicit what I’d already noticed: how much this film ripped off Save the Green Planet. And then the protagonist dies of old age while attacking another alien, who seems to have maybe killed Harmonica, except of course that it was the protagonist who beat her till she was crippled.

And then he dies. And that’s basically the end.

So, what to say, other than this was a complete and total waste of money and time?

Well, for one thing: this was like a slush-pile film. SF magazines that mention things not to do, explicitly mention NOT to write stories where protagonists enact rapes, or brutal beatings of women, just for the sake of the wanton misogynistic indulgence. Hell, look at Strange Horizons’ list of stories they’ve seen too often:

30. Brutal violence against women is depicted in loving detail, often in a story that’s ostensibly about violence against women being bad.

1. Man is forced by circumstances or magic to rape a woman even though he really doesn’t want to, honest.
2. The main reason for the main female character to be in the story, and to be female, is so that she can be raped.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is exactly my sense: the film suggests it will be a kind of amusing sex comedy, but at its core is a disturbingly misogynistic fantasy, portrayed in disgustingly loving detail.

Had Harmonica taken on an alien form — something nonhuman, that made clear her nature was not essentially that of a human woman — I would have been quite comfortable with him beating or killing his alien assailant. (Not guiltily raping it afterwards, in alien form, mind you, but the  beating and killing would have been understandable, and non-misogynistic.)

Had Harmonica used her enormous and brutal strength to fend him off during this climactic scene, I might have believed it, and felt badly for the man as he resorted to violence, and discovered how puny and useless his emasculated male violence is in the face of a transcendent being from another corner of the galaxy.

A little blood would not have disturbed me so much if Harmonica had turned out to be truly alien, I guess, is what I’m saying. But in the crucial moment, Harmonica turns out to be nothing but a pretty chick — “bitch,” really, is the word I imagine the filmmaker using, however — set up to be beaten bloody and raped before an audience. But then, that’s not surprising given the track record for the treatment of women in Korean SF films, I suppose — they are almost all either depicted as grotesque, doomed to die pathetic deaths, or inhuman machines. (The woman with the bow in The Host being the one exception that comes to mind.)

As it was, I felt icky during and after the film, in the way you might feel icky watching a comedy show that suddenly turns racist and hateful and doesn’t look back, or watching a history film and then discovering it’s a pro-KKK paean.

But there’s more disappointment than that to consider: there’s the failure of yet another Korean SF film, when so much was possible. At first, I misheard the name Harmonica (with the familiar tag “sshi” appended to it) as Munakashi, which sounds a lot like the name of an alien in a famous Korean novella, Djuna’s Daerijeon (Proxy War). (Apparently quick and slightly rough translation here.) I was excited, hoping that perhaps this film was an adaptation of that novella or novel, which after all featured the notion that alien sex tourists were visiting the earth (and occasionally running amok in hijacked host bodies). If only the filmmaker had thought to adapt — or, hell, even to to rip off — Djuna.

For the love of all that’s holy, I wish would-be SF filmmakers in Korea would read some Korean SF, would talk to Korean SF authors, would maybe watch some SF movies. And I don’t just mean stupid SF-skin flicks like Species. I mean the broad range of SF films that exist from a whole bunch of cultures.

Finally, and I am really struggling with this pattern this year: why is it that in order to be sympathetic, a “good” character protagonist must put up with incredible amounts of crap (usually violence and abuse) passively before acting? Why can’t characters just lash out quickly, the first time someone hits them unprovoked, in self-defense? Why do they have to beg, and plead, and bow their head down as someone beats the crap out of them ten times, before standing up for themselves? Is this cultural, or does it annoy Korean viewers too? Is it some kind of melodramatic sympathy-overkill — as in, we won’t feel sorry enough to forgive character violence unless they take a lot of crap? Is it tied to problems in the depiction of agency, as Charles Montgomery argues is a major issue in Korean fiction?

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I am pretty sure most Westerners will react as I do, finding the passivity of these characters off-putting even when, as in a film like Musan Ilgi (which I wrote about here) we really do want to sympathize with the poor protagonist.

The problem for Alien Bikini is that, essentially, the moment when the male protagonist becomes “real” for us, becomes truly sympathetic because he is fighting for his life, he is also beating the living crap out of what was supposed to be an alien all along, but suddenly seems much more like a plain, defenseless, half-naked human woman. He is humanized, and dehumanized, at precisely the same moment.

What I couldn’t help wondering was — why did the actress take the part? Also: well, should I really be surprised at misogyny in this film? It’s a sex-comedy in which not one character is a woman (there is an alien inhabiting a female human’s dead body, but that’s it). Bechdel Test, anyone?

I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can really say about this film. I am shocked that it got a theatrical release here, let alone having won a prize at any festival on Earth. (Though, frankly, if it was going to win anywhere, it would be in Japan; that’s the only place I’ve ever seen anything comparably disturbing made.) For an (unsurprisingly inane) interview with the cast and director, go here. But why would you? Other than a little comedy at the beginning, and cleavage, what above interests you?

Okay, okay, cleavage, and tight clothes, and  so on:

Invasion of Alien Bikini_4

… but that does not make up for the film, really, it doesn’t. You can have cleavage and a non-stupid plot. You can have tight-clothes without misogyny culminating in brutality and rape. (And while someone might argue that the word “rape” is the wrong word, I think it is; the alien is dying, and while the protagonist believes he’s doing her an act of desperate kindness, it’s a ridiculous idea… especially, as I noted, given how very human she seems at that moment.)

And while I can say seeing this film made me even more eager to try write something feature-length in the Lovecraftian-SF/horror genre for Miss Jiwaku and me to shoot in Korea, I must add that I did not come to this film seeing it as competition to be bashed. I wanted to love this film — I tried, because I think the more SF is made in Korea, the better chance we have of getting good Korean SF films made, and too few of the ones that have been made actually were any good. (I can count the worthwhile ones on the fingers of one hand.) But when it saw I cared, Alien Bikini kicked me in the groin, and pointed and laughed, and then spat in my face for good measure.

But yeah, as Justin Howe commented not too long ago — the thing to do is not to complain, but to “Make something new. Make something better.” Still, this post was useful to me for working out exactly why the film disturbed me so much… as well as why I want to tell everyone I know not to go see it. That figured out, I shall move on to better, newer things to be made.

I haven’t managed to read the other volumes, but I am curious. I have Volume 2, and figure I can check out Volume 3 next time I’m in Canada. But the way the film was put together — using Satrapi’s characteristic style, but with a wonderful audio track and really graceful animation — really impressed us both.

Lately, I’ve been coming back to the question of stories about young people trapped in fucked-up systems, stories about finding within oneself the fighting spirit to resist those systems, and stories about what Satrapi is quoted as having said in this interview:

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

She’s absolutely right, and this war between intelligent people and stupid people pervades the lives of everyone in the world, constantly. One of the things I liked in the movie, though, was how the Marjane character herself must first figure out what is stupid and what isn’t.

At one point, she is the ringleader in a group of kids who decide to torture a fellow kid because his father killed plenty of fellow imprisoned Iranians. Her mother sends her home before they catch him, and then Marjane realizes the error of her ways. But when she approaches the boy, telling him she is sorry and knows he is not responsible for his father’s crimes, he defends his father, howling that the man “only killed communists.”

This is a more nuanced question than the problem of evil, of which, by now, we know all people are all capable. This is the question of how an intelligent person can do combat with stupidity, without also doing combat with stupid people. For it would be impossible to walk away from Satrapi’s film imagining she advocates any kind of violence: the horror and stupidity of the Iran-Iraq war is just as boldly underlined as the horror and stupidity of the religious fundamentalism that took over the society in which she was growing up.

The film doesn’t, not quite, offer a concrete suggestion in this regard, but I think instead it performs it: it is a consummate work of storytelling, a act of memory, and an act of intelligence. As you see it on the screen, if you are intelligent at least, you grasp what Satrapi is arguing: that the way to fight the war between the intelligent and the stupid is simply to help awaken the intelligent in as many people as you can.

Childhood is important for this: it is important because the stories we are told during childhood affect what kinds of adults we can become. The stupidity and the intelligence that Satrapi mentions, after all, are not inborn in most cases: they are more a kind of a willfully defiant intelligence, versus a willfully controlling stupidity. And it may be that our stories aren’t just the main modes of recruitment, but also the weapons and defense on both sides.

Not to say that Satrapi’s film and books are kid stuff, but they are accessible to young people, and I think that’s not by accident: she is discussing important issues, problems, questions, but she’s doing so in a way that neither panders to young people, nor excludes them. Perhaps that’s part of the implicit point of the project: that we need to start making clear to kids that this conflict concerns them, involves them, and will shape their lives in ways more profound than they can exactly grasp.

A call to arms, perhaps.

Apparently, a guy steps in and saves a woman from some thugs, only to discover that she is in fact a lovely little sex-hungry alien. She wants to rob him of his virginity, and for some strange reason, he refuses… so she tortures him.

No matter how cheaply done, no matter how confusing, this is definitely bound to be better than 7광구 (link is to my review)… but once I see it, I’ll expand this post.

For now, I can say I am looking forward to it, silly as it will probably be. (After all, I’m all for silly if it’s actually entertaining. And if they throw in smart, hey, I’m all for it — silly, smart, and funny would be great. But you know, I’ll take two out of three over the over-seriousness, boredom, and stupidity of 7광구, for sure!)

A lot of this is not just applicable to depicting people with physical disabilities, but also to depicting people of any group about which one does not know intimately, or which experiences the world in a way different from oneself (through the lens of another gender or sexual orientation, a different race or religion or culture or philosophy, and so on):

• Expect to be blindsided by the holes in your own knowledge and understanding. Even when you do a lot of research, you’re going to get some things wrong, because your preconceptions will fool you: there are the things you know, the things you don’t know, the things you think you know but have wrong, and the things you don’t realize that you don’t know… and telling these apart is simply really, really hard. you can wait to be blindsided by an editor who knows more than you, or a reader who points out how badly you botched it, should the work see print; or you could go ahead and pre-empt that by getting your narrative vetted. Show it to someone who will know and be honest with you about it. And when they tell you, listen; be open-minded. Be flexible. Realize that some things you think you know are in fact wrong. And even when you’re depicting someone who is different in some imaginary way, it might be useful to ask people whose experiences might trip up questions you might not think to ask.
• Remember, people of every group are human. They’re complex, and imperfect, and especially in the aggregate, some of them are bound to be jerks. Simplifying them, forcing them to abide by a ridiculous standard of behaviour, in order to secure sympathy is wrongheaded and amounts to another form of dehumanization; it will take away from the story’s believability, and/or dilute sympathy felt for the character. Don’t slot people into the role of mere victims or exaggerated saints, or especially pure victim-saints.
• Think carefully about how your character’s condition will shape the way the story works. A film is a very hard medium for telling the story of a blind person. (Not impossible, but difficult. I suspect Derek Jarman’s Blue is a more successful project in some ways than Blind, because it forces the viewer to be blind; but it is also less successful, because it alienates the viewer in ways that Blind doesn’t.) A feral child would make a terrible narrator. A character who cannot hear will present specific challenges for a storyteller. These limitations can be great, but you have to take them seriously.
• Consider the fact that, however strange, difficult, painful, or unimaginable the state of your character might appear to you, it is his or her normal reality. He or she does not live life implicitly comparing his or her limitations to your much less painful, difficult, or limited experience: while having no hands is hard for you to imagine, for your character, it is — to whatever degree he or she is used to it — just normal, everyday reality. Sensitivity exercises (like being blindfolded for a day) can be misleading: a real blind person is far less ungainly in his or her home than you are when blindfolded, because he or she is used to it… mind, this is true as long as the furniture doesn’t get moved around in his or her absence. Remember, you also have shortcomings that others might find stunning or shocking — an inability to swim, relative innumeracy, partial visual impairment in one eye, a fear of heights, and so on. (Three of these four are examples from my own personal experience, but I wouldn’t say I “suffer” from any of them.) For you, that’s just normal. For your character, his or her condition is normal too. Grok it…

  Oh, and remember that this condition is probably also part of the lives of millions of people out there. Or dozens. Or hundreds. Or at least some. Don’t do them the disservice of propagating myths about their condition; grok it.

• Ask yourself what the victory condition for the narrative is, and ask yourself whether you’re including the character’s condition for a good reason. Why are you telling this particular story? How would you know if the story is successful? People who are marginalized aren’t exploited only by bad employers or unsympathetic fellow citizens: they can also be exploited by storytellers who choose to include them in stories simply as a gimmick. (I’m not saying this was necessarily what happened in Blind, though I do think the guide dog part of the story involved a lot of manipulative gimmickry and reinforced popular ignorance/misconceptions about guide dogs.) Remember that there are real people out there with the handicap or other marginalized status you’re writing about, or something analogous to the imaginary condition or state you’re discussing, and for them the condition or state is more than just a flashy gimmick: it’s their daily reality. You don’t need to become a crusader for them, or make your fiction didactic — indeed, doing so might well make your work less effective or even detrimental to their cause — but this reality deserves some respect, awareness, and consideration.

While I’d bet nothing here is a shocking revelation, I think all of these points are worth reminding yourself about when you’re setting out to write a story about someone with a disability.

There’s the little fact that the villain is a doctor… which in itself is interesting, in that it does seem a trend more in Korean film than in other national cinemas I’ve looked at (like, say, Indonesian cinema or French or Canadian or Bollywood… or of course Hollywood). One finds a rather surprising number of films in which the bad guy, the monster, the psychopath, is a some kind of professional, especially a doctor, lawyer, or very successful buusinessperson.

Having heard stories from behind the scenes at a couple of hospitals and medical schools, I know that some doctors really are, very likely, psychopaths, or jerks at the very least. (Every doctor I’ve known well has mentioned an intern nicknamed “Malig” (for “malignancy”), for example.)

But that is true of any society, and seems unlikely as a reason for the pattern. Rather, I think, the cinematic representation reflects generalized resentment of people in the professional class. (The wine-swilling scumbag businessman villain in the unfortunate 2010 thriller remake of Kim Ki-Young’s The Housemaid comes to mind. Then there’s the rather off-putting lawyer husband in The Good Lawyer’s Wife who, if he is not a villain, is probably that film’s closest thing to it. Were I to sit around thinking about it, I’m sure many more examples would come to mind.)

Well, expressions of resentment for the elite is nothing new, but there was something that turned me off the particular choice of villain in Blind — and that is, he is a gynecologist — and the one scene in which we actually see him working, he seems to be performing an abortion. Now, psychologically it may be that one could see one’s way to imagining a certain kind of man, doing that job, might develop an unhealthy attitude towards women. (Assuming he’s screwed up to begin with, of course.)

But what struck me is — his being a gynecologist doesn’t seem to play directly into the narrative. He could, just as easily, have been an opthamologist, though it might have been less chilling. (It would have been more high-stakes, though, assuming he knew more about optics, vision, and blindness.) The thing that struck me, though, is that I’ve never seen a doctor villain in a Korean film who specialized in the most hateful-of-women branch of medicine popullarly practiced here today. No need to hint, I’ll show you what I mean:

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Posters like this are all over the place in Seoul: it’s difficult to go out without seeing one. And at least some of the women who go out and see a barrage of it aren’t exactly oblivious to the fact it represents a kind of constant onslaught on their self-respect, their image of themselves. It’s not just like the doctored pictures of women on the covers of magazines — rather, the message is that you are, in your natural appearance, necessarily insufficient and that plastic surgery is the solution to the apparent problem.

A large proportion of my students are women, and a considerable number of them — far more than their male counterparts — consider this situation seriously, think about it, and try to write about or talk about it in classroom discussions, essays, speeches for contests, and so on. One story I’ve heard a couple of times is of a female student going to a plastic surgery clinic and inquiring about something common and routine like eyelid surgery. What the reported about the experience was this: the doctors said things like, “Yes, we can do that, but you know, for your face, we  need to do some work on your nose. Also, to let your beauty shine through, we would need to do something about your jawline.” That is, suggesting other forms of plastic surgery that these women didn’t seem to feel they needed.

Well, yes, that’s what happens when you make plastic surgery into a high-paying business, of course.

But it still kills me that, while I’ve seen doctors of other specialties depicted as corrupt, bad, twisted, or mad — gynecologist, a psychiatrist, and others — I’ve never seen a plastic surgeon presented as a predatory monster harming women. And yeah, that annoys me. If there’s any medical specialty that is more profoundly anti-female than that, I don’t know of it. And while I’m not about to buy the line that gynecologists perform (illegal, in Korea) abortions out of the goodness of their hearts, or as secret allies of women’s liberation — I know too much from accounts  by other female students, including one who was a nurse/receptionist in a gynecological clinic where a lot of abortions apparently got performed a decade or so ago — I do think there’s a hatred of women implicit in the the practices of a lot of plastic surgeons here. While that has come  forth in certain films, I think, I’ve never seen a plastic surgeon presented as a woman-hating psychopath; this strikes me as profoundly ironic.

By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Korean villains are always upper-class. I think many are, as part of that whole underdog aesthetic that is popular here — the long-suffering good guy finally gets a break, saves the world, or whatever. There are plenty enough thugs and uneducated bad-guys in Korean movies, I’d think. But when they aren’t illiterate thugs, Korean villains have a surprising tendency to be people of an elite class, whether military, economic, or professional. And that is worth commenting on, I think.

Am I missing something? Is this pattern common in Western thrillers to? I tripped on it, so I assumed it wasn’t but maybe I’m not seeing something that is bluntly obvious in Western films. 

For those curious about what I mean about knowing about blind people being a detriment to the film, I suppose a little background is necessary.

I worked with blind people, and visually impaired people, back in Montreal. We were working for a company that designed tutorials for blind people on how to use Windows software. I even dated a visually-impaired woman for a while, after she left the company. One of my co-workers — the only one who was completely blind — had a seeing eye dog; he was also somewhat of a pervert, and came on to at least one co-worker. (“It’s even sexier if we screw on the boss’s desk!” he apparently said, during one unwelcome advance on a co-worker. Oh, and if I remember right, he was married, too… to a sighted woman who at least seemed very supportive.)

I mention this not to out this former co-worker of mine as an adulterous, sexually-harassing jerk: I doubt anyone reading this blog knows him, and if they do, well, it’s not such a surprise, is it? No, I mention this to point out that blind people are like anyone else: they’re not all saintly and sad and long-suffering. They’re not “poor souls” in the sense that many sighted people imagine. Yes, doing certain things is harder for them, like, say, jaywalking on a busy street, or playing baseball — though, have I told you the story of the blind guy who beat me in a game of pool? (Yes, he had help, but how else is a blind person supposed to play pool?) Some blind people are nice and decent, and some are really assholes — just like anyone else. Some blind people become bitter, or even outright assholes, because of the difficulties they face, especially when they get no support from their family, or their society, of course; but most of the visually impaired people I’ve encountered — either through my former work, or through the woman I dated, or through another ex who worked with several Special Needs organizations in Saskatoon — have been about as likely to be average as anyone else.

In the film, though, the blind protagonist is made to suffer onscreen. Although she  has been blind for three years, she seems not to have learned how to cook for herself, and much is made of her having what we might call a “bad blindness day.” I’m adapting that from the expression “bad Korea day,” an experience many expats report — some days, thing after thing specific to Korea just disturbs, aggravates, and frustrates you, all in a series. Well, the metaphor is probably apt: most  of the people I knew who were outright blind had been so for a long, long time, and were well-adjusted. For them it was normal, while for the protagonist, she’s more of a recent emigrant to the country of the blind. She’s only been blind for three years… but you’d think she would have learned not to turn up the gas on the stove to the maximum temperature when frying up her dinner.

While it’s believable that she would have “bad blindness days,” what I’m objecting to her is the extreme sentimentalization of her condition. We’re supposed to feel sorry for her. This is exactly the kind of story a sighted person would tell about a blind character, and it’s based on the misperception that people who are blinded become irrevocably miserable — a myth debunked in scientific studies, such as those mentioned in the wonderful book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Sure, people who were blinded as adults may take longer to adjust, and are perhaps more likely very frustrated at how poorly supported people with their condition are here, just as white people arriving in Korea (and suddenly subject to all the dumbass, racist garbage their non-white friends back home were already dealing with regularly, but which they likely barely noticed most of the time) often experience difficulties in dealing with how things creep into certain aspects of daily life. Being suddenly blind in a society as non-supportive of blind people as Korea is, that would be a revelation, and suddenly they would “see” (metaphorically) that lack of support much more clearly. (As we in the audience “see” the traffic light in one scene, lacking an audio signal, as radically non-supportive of the blind and visually impaired.)

But it’s important to recall that blind people — even those blinded as adults — don’t exist in a perpetually pitiful, sad, sobby state. They pick up their lives and move on. They date, and some marry, and some even cheat on their spouses. They have kids, or hobbies, or both. They have jobs, quit jobs, get new jobs. They get drunk, they go to concerts, they listen to music at home. Some of them “watch” TV, and hold birthday parties with dozens of people present, and some of them write books or play musical instruments. They are people, and their blindness often isn’t their defining characteristic. (When I think of the visually-impaired woman I dated, I don’t think of her visual impairment first — I think of her sassy attitude, and of her seriousness about education — she had learned to read using a magnifying glass as a teenager, if I remember right, and as soon as she could she began to read voraciously, if slowly, for years on end. Oh, and her unapologetically bad taste in music — ugh, Paula Abdul! Also, her tirelessness and patience in explaining to people that most blind people aren’t “blind” but visually impaired, and so on — more about that below.)

My point is this: most of the visually impaired people I’ve known would have been annoyed or insulted if I’d felt sorry for them, or at the very least would not have seen a point in feeling sorry for them: blindness, or visual impairment, was the normal state for them, and while the few I asked said they would definitely take any treatment that would give them sight, a few (mostly those who’d always been blind) said they were happy the way they were, and most generally seemed to be quite well-adjusted to their condition.

Which brings me to the second issue that bothered me. The way Blind is shot, I kept having to remind myself that the protagonist — a blind former police office — wasn’t just visually impaired. There are a few shots that are supposed to simulate what she perceives — including details she is filling in perceptively. We see people moving toward her, whom she is perceiving either through hearing, or using a rudimentary perception enhancement tool. More details are given than she would herself perceive, since it’s a film and we need to know who’s doing what in those scenes, but it’s confusing if you know about visual impairment.

The reason it’s confusing is that one gets the impression that those shots, being both over-details and  POV shots from the protagonist’s point of view, represent the vision of someone with severely impaired vision, rather than someone who is fully blind. According to Wikipedia:

The WHO estimates that in 2002 there were 161 million visually impaired people in the world (about 2.6% of the total population). Of this number 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind.

In other words, most people who have some kind of visual impairment aren’t 100% blind: that’s only, approximately, 20% of all people. If you know this, those trick shots where we “see through her [blind] eyes” end up being somewhat confusing. And while someone might argue that there’s a little the filmmaker could do, I think there are a couple of responses: one could be to ask yourself why the protagonist needs to be completely blind, as opposed to visually impaired. (Of course, unrealistic numbers of Koreans in films and TV also lack epicanthic folds; we are used to everyone on the screen being a contrived long shot. Still…)

Another question is to ask yourself whether those shots needed to be quite so detailed as they were. (I like to imagine that, given the quality of audio systems in theaters, we could have been immersed in the protagonist’s consciousness, the screen dark and the audio system getting a powerful workout, for short spans of time — it would have been both more disorienting for us, and more powerful —  but of course you would probably have to see the film in a  THX-equipped theater… and besides, this factlet won’t distract most people, who assume anyone with a visual impairment is blind, period. (And thus won’t be jolted out of the story when they suddenly see what looks like it could be POV shots from a visually impaired person.)

Then there’s the seeing eye dog. When I was new on staff at that tutorial place I mentioned, I saw my co-worker with a seeing eye dog, and I quickly, squatted down to talk to the dog and pet it. I was told, “Don’t! Not when he’s working… it’s something you aren’t supposed to do with seeing eye dogs.” There are a few scenes where the protagonist’s seeing eye dog engages in cutesy play when he is working, and it jarred me. Not because people wouldn’t do it, but because when they do, they’re not asked not to do so, and told why. Of course, there’s a reason that the dog’s cuteness is played up — and more than just the abiding desire for cuteness in all things so common in Korean media — but nonetheless, it’s a jarring distraction… if you know anything about guide dogs.

Finally, the protagonist’s self-control in a certain scene towards the end is difficult to stomach. If someone put you through hell, and tortured you, and was a known murderer and psychopath, would you conk him on the head and hope he’d stay down, or, with a heavy object in hand, would you bash out his brains so as to be sure he would stay down? I’m not advocating murder, but killing (or seriously injuring) someone who has been stalking and trying to kill you for days on end is just bloody common sense, and not the sort of thing a sensible audience gets bothered about — especially if not doing so leaves you in further danger. However, I think this silliness is tied to a need to see the blind protagonist in a kind of hagiographic mode.

This is something we see a lot in the Korean media: when you’re supposed to feel sympathetic for a character who is unusual in some way — a way that is not conventionally accepted or supported or included by Korean society — the character is usually cast into a dual role of victim and saint.

First, the character must suffer before one’s eyes, in a victim-role that is pathetic beyond the point of understanding, so that the audience feels sorry for them. Characters put up with awful treatment without a word of protest; they accept beatings, beratings, mockery, or injustice without complaint, and usually retreat to their homes to weep in silent sorrow. This is a pattern not just common in fictive depictions of the physically handicapped, but also of other marginal groups in Korea, for example in TV documentaries: one cannot watch a program involving a marginalized person without seeing them either in extremely poor circumstances, with sad music in the background, or even weeping and crying. (This is why the short film collection If You Were Me, Vol. 1 was so radical: the guy in the wheelchair does deal with some difficult circumstances, but he also, to the degree possible, seizes control of his life and fights for his rights… or so I remember it.)

(The standard, by the way, is not solely Korean: I’ve seen similar patterns in fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust or of the African American experience of slavery, where the Jews or African-Americans were all pure-hearted, sweet and kind victims; as if rudeness, bigotry, exploitation, sexism, theft, and violence were impossible among groups who were oppressed, unseen in the ghettos and camps, unknown in the slave quarters. As if, when experiencing the worst horrors of history, those horrors victims all splintered in exactly the same way, towards the gentle, the kind, the forgiving, and the pathetic — and none became full of hate, rage, cruelty, and vengefulness? When bad things happen to good people, sometimes good people stop being good… but bad things also happen to bad, or so-so people. People aren’t automatically good just because they’re victims. Obviously, since oppressors have justified their brutality towards these very groups on the basis of ridiculous claims about their morality, their behaviour, or subhumanity, one wants to tread carefully — but to rip out the essential complexity of people in a bid for sympathy is misguided: what you elicit is fake sympathy, as well as a distorted morality: surely, genocides and enslavements are wrong because genocides and enslavements are wrong, not because of the cloyiong goodness and purity of the murdered or enslaved!)

Second — and this is a stage we usually don’t see in TV documentaries, but do see in films — when these neglected minorities are pushed beyond the limits, they refrain from fighting back effectively. Oh, they will lash out. They may fight to defend themselves from grievous bodily harm, or explode at someone whose maltreatment of them is so extreme that no audience would believe or sympathize with passivity from the chsaracter at that point. But the never, ever kill someone; they never, ever lose their self-control, they never act the way most people would — bashing out the brains of the person who is trying to kill them with a brick or a rock or a baseball bat, for example. At the very least active, they lash out briefly, until their attacker retreats; at the most, they will knock out the attacker and save themselves temporarily.

The pattern, for minorities, is both offensive and disempowering. It brings to mind the dichotomy of “good foreigner” and “bad foreigner”, which is what Koreans really mean when they talk about “qualified” and  ”unqualified” English teachers. If you look at the image of a good foreigner, what you tend to see is that he (for it is the male ones that attract all the concern) is either asexual, or sexual only within his own race; he never responds to maltreatment by Koreans in kind — he does not curse when cursed at, he does not defend himself when attacked, he does not threaten when threatened. He is emasculated, passive, and obedient to Korean male, whether authority figures or just random men telling him what to do. And he does it all smiling his goofy Robert Halley smile. Or, if he fails to attain this standard, he is a dangerous, bad, rude, gangsterish, nasty type who doesn’t deserve to be in Korea — an unqualified foreigner. Dating a Korean woman is enough to make him unqualified. Having worked retail back home can make him unqualified. Not politely regurgitating how wonderful Korea is, or joining in on histrionics about the evil of Japan and their encroachments on Dokdo, can get him labeled a bad guy. even taking offense at treatment that no Korean would accept can get him labeled “bad.” In short, being a non-Korean man, as opposed to a non-Korean muppet, is enough to get him labeled bad.

It’s a standard I’ve seen applied to migrant workers (as in the important but problematic film Bangga! Bangga!), North Korean refugees (for example, in the important but problematic film Musan Ilgi), and the handicapped (most dramatically, in the — nevertheless wonderful and groundbreaking tragedy — Oasis, though the film gets a pass in my books because it explores the complexity of the characters’ inner world, and also was made a long time ago. It’s a striking pattern: in Korean films, one nearly never sees a non-Korean (in face, a non-Korean male) who is allowed by narrative logic to get violently angry, or use violence in self-defense. While romantic male leads in Korean narratives can do all kinds of problematic things and still be aesthetically coherent as a romantic male lead, the ethical expectations for everyone else — women of any race or class, poor Korean men, non-Koreans, handicapped people, North Koreans, and children — are far more strict.

I think this is a pattern also present to some degree in Blind — hence the cop-out in the climactic scene and the cloying and, to me, unrealistic epilogue tacked onto the film…  although I must explain my position about this carefully.

I don’t mean to castigate the people involved in Blind. Problems or not, it’s good to see the physically challenged out in the open for once; Miss Jiwaku was telling me about an article she read recently, in which a British mouth painter (both without hands, and with tiny feet) visited Korea and commented along the lines of, “It’s a very nice country, I like Korea very much, but where are all the handicapped people?” The response Miss Jiwaku described her getting was an awkward silence. Meanwhile — and I think this was the same article (I’ll add a link or links when I can) — the author reported, during a trip to some European country, seeing a bunch of physically handicapped people around town — relaxing in the park, going along the streets in their wheelchairs, and so on, a Korean rushed into a shop and inquired whether a violent demonstration by the handicapped was afoot, to which the shop owner made a face and said, “What do you do on nice, sunny days? You go outside. That’s what they’re doing!”

The latter anecdote is relevant for two reasons: one, the physically challenged in Korea are often hidden away, and it is unusual to see them in public as a general rule. (I’d say that in the past year, I’ve seen maybe three or four groups of deaf people conversing in sign language, one visually impaired person with a white cane, and a couple of people in wheelchairs, and I live on the outskirts of the biggest city in the country.) But the anecdote is also telling because, when there are large numbers of physically challenged people in public here, it is often in order to attend a demonstration. One thing people tell me, often, is that the handicapped in Korea fight vigorously, fight very hard, for their rights, for better support, for respect. That this has not been achieved cannot be blamed on them, everyone agrees.

I can’t help but wonder if their families fight; I wonder whether fighting is understood to mean taking your handicapped relative to the park, to a restaurant, for a walk in the evening, or whatever. I wonder how many people push their political representatives to provide better support and help for these people to be integrated into society? (Then again, roughly half the population of Korea is women, and you’d think getting female-specific health care costs by national insurance in to the degree male-specific health care is would be easy… yet it hasn’t happened, as anyone who’s visited the gynecologist for an HPV vaccine or pap smear can tell you.) I don’t know. But I do know that depicting such people as perpetual victims might give people something to feel vicariously sad and guilty for a while… and doesn’t force people to confront their own complicity in the marginalization and tangible oppression of these people.

But you know, inertia is inertia, and that’s part of why I’m reticent to criticize this film too much. Korea has quite a distance to go in its acceptance of the physically challenged and in the integration of them into public life, the recognition of them as human beings with the full rights to dignity, experience, and happiness. (And Canada, the USA, and the rest of the Western world, while having made some inroads, is far from perfect too.) In that light, Blind isn’t just a fairly taut and thoughtful thriller — through the protagonist’s unseeing eyes, we are made to “see” how unfair it is how blind people are either dismissed or go unsupported in Korean society; we see how very capable they can be (for the blind protagonist is a key witness to a murder, and provides a number of crucial clues from her “ear-witness” and tactile/olfactory account).

The film does a lot of things well, and is certainly a step in the right direction. It’s just, if you know more than the average person about visually impaired people, the things it got slightly wrong will stick out to you like a sore thumb.

I think there are a few very simple things that production companies in Korea need to realize, if they want to start putting out films as successful as The Host on a more regular basis. I figured I’d put them all in one place, and if someone wants to translate them and post them around, all I ask is that a link

• SF is of the Fans, By Fans, For Fans: Don’t fund genre film projects with people who neither understand nor love those genres at the helm of the project. Seriously: ask the person pitching the project about his or her love of genre films, ask what he or she thinks of major SF authors (Korean, American, Japanese, etc.). If the person doesn’t seem to know SF, doesn’t seem to love it, then just say no. People who don’t love jazz will never make good jazz albums. People who don’t eat kimchi will never, ever make great kimchi. It’s the same with genre: someone who doesn’t love or respect SF, or horror, or fantasy, or rom-coms, will not make a good one. Someone who does the genre will have standards, and passion, and a sense of what SF people like and love, and how to achieve all of that, and will go that extra mile to make sure it turns out as wonderfully as it can… by the standards of people who love those genres… and they are the core of your #@*!$ audience. They would evangelize Korean SF to their friends, except you’ve given them barely anything to share…
• Stop Dithering About Marketing: You need to quit turning movies into failures by mis-marketing them. Market SF as SF. If it’s not actually comedy, don’t market it as comedy. (Black comedy plays well to SF lovers, SF plays less well to straight comedy fans.) You need to make posters that actually sort of give a sense of what the film is about, the mood and style of the film, and so on. This is elementary. If you make an erotic film and put a kids’-movie poster up in cinemas, and the film is rated 19+, you are going to lose shit-tons of money. This is elementary. It’s true of SF, too. So market SF as SF, not as kiddie fare, or comedy, or horror, or whatever else you think will sell. Sell the movies to your audience. Make a good SF film, and the whole Korean internet will hear about it on opening night, and the SF fans especially will book tickets. Several of the Korean SF fans I know saw Avatar at least once, if not two or three times, in the audience… even those who knew the plot was stupid. That’s what I call hunger… and an audience waiting to be served.
• Expand Your Audience Intelligently: Yes, it is possible to write romantic SF films. (Go watch Blade Runner again. Or even the recent Star Trek reboot film.) If you want to do SF comedy, think about how time travel can be funny. Back to the Future compares very favorably to, oh, Heaven’s Soldiers — mainly because of the humanity of the characters in Back to the Future, the awkwardness of the situations they’re propelled into by the SFnal idea of time travel, and the relatability of the characters’ responses to those situations shines where the nationalist claptrap of Heaven’s Soldiers falls flat. If you want to make horror SF, it’s possible; detective/crime/thriller SF? Sure! Military SF, erotic SF, comedic SF… these are all possible, and can help win more fans for the genre, or at least works within the genre. While it’s not exactly my kind of film, Cyborg She (by Kwak Jae-yong) does exactly that: it’s an SF chick-flick, and if it’d been shot in Korean, I think it would have done quite well here.
• Stop Remaking American SF Films: Yes, really. Stop trying to “adapt” foreign works of SF to film. Natural City is a terrible adaptation or “reinterpretation” ofBlade Runner (via Japanese anime like Ghost in the Shell)– so bad it actually misses the point of the original works in both genres. 7광구 feels more like an offense against The Host and the Alien series than homage. The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl riffs on The Matrix, but shows no sense of actually having grasped how the film manages to mobilize interesting and important intellectual questions through pulpy SF tropes. Homage is okay, when done well — there’s tons of it in some Korean works, like The Host and especially Save the Green Planet, that works very well. Both of those films are very Korean, and it’s no surprise that they’re the only remotely successful commercial SF films made in Korea since 2000. And if you’re not sure how to Koreanize those SF tropes, well, this next point is for you:
• Go Hire Real Korean SF Authors, or at Least Buy Their Stories : There actually is a community of SF authors in Korea, writing Korean-styled SF. Some of it is actually quite good, and might make a great adaptation to the screen. No, really! Yes, you would have to pay them money. But what you would get in exchange would be SFnal narratives tailored to your own culture. Believe it or not, different cultures do SF with a different “accent” and these authors are not only well-versed in SF, but also have done the really difficult work of figuring out how to make workable SF narratives that are also culturally coherent to Korean audiences. The track record of Korean SF films suggests that filmmakers have a lot to learn from them. All you need to do is ask. They love SF and would be exactly the people you should pay — as consultants, as screenwriters, or as authors whose works could be optioned — to help you make blockbusters that rake in the cash and the fans, that launch series, that popularize SF and create a new and powerful revenue stream for Korean cinema.Oh, and… buy the stories. Don’t rip off SF writers. If you do, you’ll get a bad reputation, people will pan your films, but more importantly, you will be flying blind from then on. Korean SF authors are your biggest resource, and by the way, they can also advise on adaptations… They want any adaptations done to be done well, so they will be happy to discuss changes and ideas and so on, to a point. If you need evidence of why not doing so is a bad idea: the “differences” between the film 2009: Lost Memories and the book In Search of an Epitaph by Bok Geo-il may have saved the filmmakers in the plagiarism case that followed the film’s release… but they’re exactly the reasons why the film is so damned bad, and lost so much money… in other words, the departures from the novel made in the film are exactly the kind of, ahem, “workaround” that wasn’t worth it in the end.

That about wraps up my thoughts. Who knows whether the people who need to see it ever will, but at least I’ve said my piece. Now, back to other stuff.

Sector 7 is shot amateurishly, it is badly acted by almost the whole cast — and since at least some of the cast can act, I suspect it’s badly edited and badly directed; the budget was mostly used creating CG for a rather unimaginative monster; it was derivative of The Host (괴물), the Alien series (especially Aliens; it was badly written; it had the aesthetics of a Korean TV show on the big screen; and it was plain insulting to the intelligence of its intended audiences, not only Koreans but also those audiences abroad for whom a poster has already been designed. (I’ve got it in the extended post, below.)

A more thorough critique is below, as well as a discussion of the film in the context of what I’ve said about Korean SF films in general. But the short capsule review is: it repeats many of the mistakes of the 

In 2002, the year I arrived in Korea, SF cinema in Korea was undergoing a crippling attack… from within. Three movies were made around that time: The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2001), 2009: Lost Memories (2002), and some other 2002 film I’ve forgotten that was less SF and more dark-fantasy/adventure.

These three films bombed, none more spectacularly than The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, a record-setter for budget and for failure. The net effect was to set back the interest in making SF films, and even blockbuster-type films in general, for a few years, as Jinhee Choi discusses in her book.

7광구 is bad enough to remind me of those days. It has me worried that the Korean film industry will shy away from SF films, rather than shying away from the movie’s awful director and, (probably, to whatever degree this film is their fault too, the people who wrote the script).

The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl also set several other specific trends which apparently plague Korean SF cinema even today, as Sector 7 (7광구) clearly demonstrates. In my recently published paper on the subject (which is in the current Acta Koreana, for those interested), I argued that some there are three specific problems that affect most Korean SF films.

1. Lack of Generic Fluency & the Trope Salad Sydrome: Directors, screenwriters, producers, etc.  either don’t know the genre well enough to do an SF narrative justice, regard it as dumb kid stuff, or, more alarmingly, imitate canonical (ie. foreign) SF without actually getting the point. In the worst case, SF is a random grab bag of crappy tropes to be mixed and matched.
2. Anxieties of History, Postcoloniality, and Identity: Mainstream ethnonationalist revisionist historiography is so powerful in Korean popular culture that in many SF films, SFnal conceits and speculation itself play second fiddle to the demands of this — inherently conservative, anti-radical, anti-other, anti-critical, and even downright anti-speculative in some subjects — that it makes the kjinds of questions, speculations, and inversions common in SF impossible.
3. Anxiety of Influence: Media SF in Korea is usually experienced as foreign culture; there are specific anxieties about the source cultures — Japanese and American — which are exacerbated by the place those nations have in popular Korean conceptions of history, but there also seems to be a deeper distrust towards (and repudiation of) the speculative in SF which runs through many SFnal movies.

All three of these problems apply strongly to Sector 7, to differing degrees. The speculative elements are plain stupid: the background story behind the monster, especially, leaves one boggling — to the tune of explaining that one has developed an antigravity technology powered by goodwill and salt. The reworking of source material — this film clearly attempts to riff on The Host and on the original Sigourney Weaver-featured Alien series, though I’d swear other set-pieces riffed on other films as well — is generally poor, predominantly because Sector 7‘s monster fails to effectively serve as a metaphor for anything at all, let alone the oil business, the way The Host metaphorized the socioeconomics of poverty and disempowerment within the context of Korean development and the Aliens in the Alien series represented the horrors of maternity, nature out of control, and so on.

Likewise, the makers of Sector 7 seem to have failed to grasp what was evident even in the weakest of the Alien movies, and bluntly obvious in The Host — and which the inestimably wise Chris Kammerud recently put it to me as a central message of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well: that when we fight monsters, we also discover how monstrous we ourselves are. In the Alien films, Ripley grows less and less human; the commonalities between Gang-du and the monster in The Host are widely-commented on; and brash though the horrors are in Buffy’s high school life, she is at times brutal, dehumanized, and horrified at what she sees in herself. In Sector 7, there is none of that: the film lacks metaphorical depth, and the primary reason is the characters.

Oh, and of course, there’s an intellectually incoherent milksop to ethnonationalists — those are de rigeur in bad SF films out of South Korea, of course — at the end, where there’s something about how Japan and Korea were both drilling in that spot, Japan stopped, and then Korea had to continue… or those evil, wily Japanese would move in again. Or something. I hardly cared enough to pay attention to the milksop at the end, as the film didn’t even present to relate to energy issues, global warming, fossil fuels and their non-renewability, global dimming… no, it was just about a monster on an oil rig. Period.

(It could easily have been a metaphor for nuclear power, mind you: in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima plant, in the light of Korea’s continued installation of many, many nuclear power plants, the film could have been about human-designed energy sources going out of control — about nuclear disaster and its horrors, or about the horrors, likewise, of continuing to rely on oil in a world where oil is choking our skies and helping push climates out of equilibrium, raising the seas, and so on. Who knows — some of that may even have been in the first draft of the script… I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t a part of what ended up on the screen. All we ended up with, in the end, was some vaguely ominous anti-Japanese jingoism.)

Meanwhile, anxieties of influence are profound for this movie, as well they should be. The film is so derivative that, in fact, specific moments from the final battle in The Host are recapitulated in it. (I was wondering why the character facing down the monster had a pole in hand, and went, “Oh, no, don’t…” — because, yes, the scene is quite reminiscent of the final battle in The Host, except of course there’s no family drama, no community, just an old man with a pole and a lighter being stupid, heroic, or both.) But the film also refers, quite unmistakably, to the Alien series of films, and Ha Jiwon’s character is clearly supposed to be a sort of Korean equivalent of Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley.

The problem isn’t that Ha’s character, whose name I forgot — yeah, that’s telling — has a girlier side that Ripley doesn’t. The problem is that there’s nothing in between that girly side, the side that cries and gets cutesy and turns all soft and pink and gooey or screams in pain while getting stitches when it suits the lazy storyteller, and the side that is supposed to be tough as nails — saving the oil rig operation, taking a potentially serious injury to save others’ lives, racing her potential love interest around the deck of the oil rig on a motorbike.

(The scene is notable and memorable not for its coolness, but for the awful green-screen work: it’s obvious the motorbike stuff was shot in studio, and then SFXed onto the rig — about as obvious as the claymation in the original Clash of the Titans, I mean. It looks like a cheap local-TV affiliate homemade advertisement for Uncle Chulsu’s Scooter Barn. Seriously — it was embarrassing. I have a feeling that this scene was what Ha Jiwon was thinking of when she reportedly cried after seeing the premiere screening of the film.)

I’ve complained that Ha’s character had basically no substance, but this only is especially notable because she is supposed to be the interesting character of the film: the same is true for all of the other characters. The characterization mainly consists of a series of inversions: the dude who is composed and cool at the beginning (played by Park Chulmin) loses his shit pretty quickly when things get messy; the nasty-mouthed, annoying shithead guy whose pronouncements for the first hour of the movie are mostly the same bloody line — “E saekiya!” (approx. “You fucker!”), which he says, in various variations, about twenty times in the first third of the film — becomes the weepy, terrified loser.

Not one of these characters was remotely relatable. Not one. No, not even that one.

Oh, and there’s a “scientist”  (some girly in a white lab coat) who dies pretty quickly. I don’t remember when the scientist guy dies, but it must be early on too. I didn’t care about him either. It’s necessary they died early, because if they’d have survived, they would have spent the rest of the movie pointing out how everything that follows her death is scientifically impossible: the little fishies from the depths of the ocean that are a new source of (ahem) energy, as in, they’re highly flammable and, like a pyromaniac’s dream of the Energizer Bunny, just keep burning and burning. Such as the monster these little fish become, somehow engineered by one scientist chick and her male scientist boss (of course he’s her boss) and some petroleum engineers into a creature with legs and a (relatively, compared to your average Seoul subway passenger) highly evolved sense of how to walk around? How did they manage to evolve the creature that way? Uh, ask the sci… oh, right, they’re dead. Well, maybe the oil rig workers had minors in Renewable Energy-Providing Monster Design and Genetic Engineering?

Most annoying among the characters is the standard, obnoxious and hyper-exaggerated “loser” character… the character type which strikes me as the laziest in Korean media, and a very common one — the 왕따 or “outcast.” In this film, the outcast character is a clownishly weird roughneck who has a hopeless crush and who simpers, snivels and clowns until you are ready to sign up for Roughneck University yourself just for the chance to kill him. He’s also stupid enough to get himself bitten in the face by a phosphorescent deep-sea fish that was safely stowed in a tank. Thank goodness that character took very little time to die — he’s next after the scientist chick.

The least hateable character is the boss who shows up about twenty minutes into the film, and whom everyone seems to love way more than people ever really like their bosses. (When he turns up on the rig, things devolve into a cutesy greeting (puke!) followed by a drawn-out pseudo-characterization scene, where people eat and get drunk and then compare their scars… in other words, they hold an MT, and he is talked into extending the operation of the rig for a few more months because Ha Jiwon’s character really wants to strike oil there, and it would have meant so much to her dad. Geological engineers? Renewed survey drilling? Eh? We don’t need no stinkin’ science! Sentimentality is what makes the film go round… Of course, in the end, he turns into the most-hateable character in the film because the whole stupid conflagration is his fault: greedy businessman that he is, he engineered the monster on purpose. Oh, I am so surprised.

(Don’t worry, he dies too.)

On the characterization, I think the closest experience I’ve had in Korean cinema to this film was Haeundae (2009) in that I was, to be honest, happy every time a character died, and my primary annoyance was when one or another character evaded death, however temporarily. (Aside from a very few: I found the characters in that film almost universally unlikeable, aside from Ha Jiwon’s.) I didn’t care about any of the stick-figurey characters in this film, and worse, I actively disliked them: I hate the clownish loser; I hate the skinny smartmouth guy who cusses all the time; I hate the “cool”-headed guy who’s been on the rigs for years; I hate the woman who jumps from toughie to cutie in two seconds flat. Perhaps it’s that these Korean-styled archetypes grate for me; but it’s also that these characters are nothing more than archetypes, like cardboard cutouts flapping in the wind. I cared for not a single character, and not one was really sympathetic. Not one.

It’s difficult for me to express my disappointment with this film. When The Host was released, it sent a message: SF could be timely, political, and meaningful; it could embrace issues in the recent past, and address issues — like the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the empowered elites and the rest of Korean society — that mean something to Korean audiences. Indeed, The Host proved not only that such a film could be a hit, but that SF could be a powerful tool in expressing criticism within a social context where those who control the arena of discourse — the government — has limited power to control or suppress.

What Sector 7 represents is not just an absolute lack of understanding of, or respect for, that lesson. It represents an attempt to set Korean SF back not just to 2001, but all the way back to 1967… yeah, to the days of Yonggary, when a film didn’t need any deeper meaning, or figurative significance; where characters could be thin as newsprint paper, and plots could be mainly built on the idea that spectacle is all you need.

Well, that might have worked in 1967, but it’s not going to work now — not even in Korea, where audiences are used to TV content completely lacking in political critique, where these kinds of thin character archetypes and hackneyed stories are far from uncommon. The buzz on the net is bad… really, really bad.

Those hastily drawn-up movie posters made in English, for marketing to America? Um… I wouldn’t pay to have them printed up in mass quantities just yet.

Films like these make me really, really want to tell film producers a few simple rules that will help avoid the waste of money that films like this represent. Hell, in fact, I think I will post such a list. Tomorrow…

For now: save your money. See something else. Don’t support this travesty of SF… even the bug sucks in this bughunt.

Note: a big image of the poster does not equal endorsement of the film...

As you may recall, Heaven’s Soldiers is a South Korean SF film about North and South Korean soldiers cooperating on the construction of nuclear weapons with which to apparently meet the threat of foreign hegemonic domination or invasion or something. (The plot was kind of muddled, but I remember that suddenly the passage of a comet sends the soldiers hurtling back though time into Korean history.)  I was asking some SF-fandom friends about it, and a few people (I think my friends Eunho and Insu) told me that the stuff about a North-South Korean alliance to build a nuclear weapon was a riff on a popular Korean novel from the 1980s, by an author whose name I promptly forgot.

After a little hunting around, though, I’m pretty sure it was Kim Chin-myong. This page on the US CIA website — yes, the CIA, that tells you something — has this to say, among other things:

The refashioned tale of nuclear proliferation, Mugunghwakkot i p’iotssumnida [The Rose of Sharon Has Blossomed], made him South Korea’s most successful novelist. The story of North and South Korea joining forces to defeat a Japanese invasion with a jointly-constructed atomic bomb became an immediate best seller and since its appearance has sold five million copies, a record for the Korean publishing industry. Since 1993, his books have invariably broken into national best-seller lists for fiction. Hanul iyo, Ttang iyo [Heaven and Earth], a novel published in 1998 that wove together the Korean financial hardship of the time with the author’s perception that his nation was in a spiritual crisis, sold more than a million copies.

Kim Chin-myong may also be the most popular South Korean novelist north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Sales figures there are nonexistent, but a Seoul journalist found Kim fans in North Korea. A guide accompanying the journalist around North Korea in July 2005 asked him if he had read Mugunghwakkot i p’iotssumnida. After the journalist said he had, his guide claimed to have read the book as well and asserted that a “considerable number” of people in the North had read it too. Saying how impressive he found the story of the Korean people on both sides of the DMZ uniting without foreign interference to defend their land against invasion, the guide opined that the “South” would do well to produce more novels like it.

Kim’s popularity in the North ought to be enough to give one pause, but of course, if any kind of fiction from the South were to make sense in a North Korean context, it would be xenophobic speculative fiction. (That is the genre in which most of the news media works up there too, after all.)

Great, great book. Get it. Read it.

Well, anyway, I was reviewing the page proofs for my paper on Korean SF film, and something bubbled up from my memories of the bios in the back of a book of Japanese SF I’d just finished reading the night before, called Speculative Japan (the wonderful collection of translations published by Kurodahan a few years ago, the second volume of which I’m now reading in order to review it).

I went and had a look, and found what I was looking for in the name of Hanmura Ryō. Here’s the relevant text from the bio at the end of Speculative Japan:

His ever-popular 1971 novel Sengoku Jieitai (Warring States SDF) dropped a small unit of Japan’s Self-Defense Force through a time hole into the middle of Japan’s Wartring States period, where they find that Oda Nobunaga, the great unifier of Japan, doesn’t yet exist, and take it upon themselves to unify the nation in his stead. The novel has twice been made into popular movies.

In the little bit of searching I’ve managed to do so far, I’ve seen rather less complimentary comments about the movies, especially by those who prefer the more recent manga adaptation titled Samurai Commando: Mission 1549 by Harutoshi Fukui and Ark Performance, I have to say, the resemblance to the plot of Heaven’s Soldiers is remarkable.

In that latter (Korean) film, it’s a secret group of North and South Korean soldiers who travel back in time to discover that Yi Sunshin, the naval commander famed today for repelling a Japanese invasions, is a drunkard and a dropout from the military examination system: that is to say, the time travelers in Heaven’s Soldiers go to the same century, and essentially the same period of time — only 50 years earlier, and at the moment when Japan was being unified — as the time traveling SDF soldiers in Hanmura Ryō’s Sengoku Jieitai, and they similarly have to fill in for and finally create a historical figure who is considered a national hero but doesn’t, for whatever reason, perform his heroic function (or, in a sense, doesn’t exist).

I have no idea what Hanmura Ryō’s text is like–it seems not to have been translated to English, from what I can tell–but I suspect I would hate the films made of it, at least one of which looks pretty ridiculous:

WarringStatesSDF

For a summary of this film, go look here. You know what they say about judging a book by its cover...

… but, well, I’m picky about SF films and Iit may be personal that I’ve found Japanese live-action SF films are often too cartoony and goofy for me, even more than Korean ones. (I’m open to suggestions, though. But don’t be surprised if I’m not impressed.) The above poster is for the remake, but check out this, er, “trailer” clip fest from the original, which I only know about because it was mentioned in the discussion of the film adaptations over at Mutant Frog Travelogue:

Seriously, some of those scenes really do remind me of Heaven’s Soldiers. Now, here’s where your average foreign commentator in Korea would rant about plagiarism and theft and unoriginality. That’s a load of toss, in this case at least: SF is all about borrowing, theft, reworking of ideas. In a way, I find the Korean film enriched by this possible hypertextuality: it may not be very self-consciously critiquing its own nationalism (which I still think ruins the film) but it is interesting how Korea’s own (modern) preoccupation with reunification is played out thematically in an apparent adaptation of a Japanese film literally about Japan’s unification by modern time-travelers. That’s at least as deep an engagement with the localization of SF as I’ve seen in any Korean SF film. Well, to whatever degree it’s conscious, mind. It’s hard to see, since the film itself is so hard to take seriously.

In any case, those interested in the handling of time travel in Korean SF films should also check out this paper on time-travel in Korean films, which discusses the familiar movies 2009: Lost Memories (2000) and Ditto (2000) but also a 1999 film I didn’t know existed, titled Calla (Kara).

In other news…

While steampunk (the literary genre) is something Korean SF fans know about, at least something about, I can report that references to steampunk are now appearing outside of that circle, too, at least in the fashion/consumer sense. Wonder what your average non-SF person makes of that sort of thing.

Oh, and for those following along, I was just informed by Jeong Soyeon (among other things, such as suggestions for stories for translation) that there was a new and “important” book of very political and social Korean SF published under the title 독재자 (Dictator) in December 2010. The contributors include a lot of the familiar names in Korean SF, and according to Jeong the book does indeed deal with themes of power and authoritarianism. Exciting stuff!

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By the way, in other news, let’s see: there are currently a series of Philip K. Dick books being translated by Kim Sang-hoon (like this one) and published by 폴라북스. Kim’s translation of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep is only half-finished at present, or at least, have published. (Volume 2 forthcoming at the moment.) I found a copy of Peter Watts’ Blindsight translated and published in Korea by Puzzlebooks with the most perplexing cover ever — as one friend commented, it looks like some kind of mainstream Japanese novel. One wonders how many non-SF readers will pick it up and find their minds ripped apart by the strangeness therein… well, if the translation preserves any of that.

I have word I’m not sure is public, so I won’t say anything beyond noting that Korea should be getting some novel-length Charles Stross work (in plural) in translation sometime soon, finally. And it’s the novels I figured would make the best transition to Korea, too! (I’ve heard there is a fan-translation of something of Stross’s around, but I can’t remember what.)

So I’ll admit it now: I’ve been watching True Blood. Yes, yes, it’s trashy. But as someone who is not very plot-minded, I have to say, it does a particular trick with a knife that I, too, am learning to do.

I’m close to the end of Season 3,  the season during which a ton of revelation has gone on regarding the world’s vampire culture. Kings, the utter fealty of a vampire to its “maker” (the person who vampirized it), the (clear, and overwhelming) social dominance of males, their clannishness (not in the World of Darkness RPG-game sense of vampire clans, but in that vampire laws relate to vampires, and do not extend to non-vampires), their clearly über-hierarchic age-based social organization (wherein the only exception to age-based relationships is raw power, whether violent or in terms of connections), and the absolute irrelevance of (American) human laws, culture, values, and life to vampire society.

Yes, yes, it's trashy. I said that already.

The show, I think, plays this social dimension of vampirism up as horrific — which it kind of has to do, since after all they’ve gone to such great lengths to sexy up vampirism itself (to make the main romance plot workable); to me it works that way — the only real horror in the show for me is the relentless brutality and backwardsness of vampire society: a maenad in Season 2 is no scarier in itself that a psychopath in Season 1. But vampire society? Creepy, unsettling, and yet (of course) somehow all too familiar.

Kings. Kings, I tell you.

But as I was thinking it over, I found that the more I looked at it, the more vampire society in True Blood looks like a (just slightly) exaggerated version of a Confucian society. Every aspect of vamp culture in the show that I mentioned above is also something that tends to anger, annoy, mystify, or enrage Westerners living in (supposedly-) Confucian societies (like South Korea) at some point.

Which is interesting because, of course, True Blood is obviously not consciously drawing on Confucian social order as a source for its vampire culture. Confucianism is about the farthest thing referenced, and I’m quite sure The Analects of Confucius is not the taproot text of True Blood.

Unlikely, but it would have made the 2009 film about his life SO much more interesting.

So what’s going on?

Well, this puts me in mind of an interesting (and somewhat surprising) panel discussion conducted in one of the courses I’m teaching recently. Students were talking about feminism and their attitudes towards it, their understanding of feminism in Korea and why it has or has not (mostly, they said, has not) been translated well from Western cultural sources to the Korean context.

I spent some time, at the end of the discussion, in reminding them that a number of the cultural mores they ascribed to Confucianism (like the strictures on women smoking, for example, or on female sexual freedoms, or general patriarchality of society) were also major features of various Anglophone cultures until, relatively speaking, not so long ago at all. Beyond what was said in class, in the opening episode of Season 1 of Mad Men, which we watched together,  there were some pretty specific (and important) parallels with workplace and social life for women in Korea today — such as a glass ceiling so low you can barely crawl under it, for example.

On some level, if people are going to continue to see Confucius as the source of all this, then I am willing to see Confucius as a vampire to be staked. (And there are Koreans who have made the same argument, such as (in one famous case) Kim Kyong-il, who, about ten years ago published a book titled something we could translate as “Confucius Must Die for Korea to Live.” At the time, Kim was a professor of Chinese Literature somewhere in Seoul, but as for now, I have no idea.)

Still, my point was to take this claim at something other than face value, since, if we give in and ascribe it all to Confucianism, we’re left with two dilemmas: first, how to argue that it ought to change, since in a postcolonial context, certain sorts of people tend to get defensive (and conservative, in the sense of conserving “cultural heritage” even in its relatively unsavory aspects; and second, whether it’s sensible or just intellectually lazy to just go ahead and blame everything on Confucianism when it can — given the parallels in other modernized societies, at different points in their histories — be blamed just as well, if not better, on plain old patriarchy (albeit carried out under the justification of Confucianism).

After all, we would be hard-pressed to argue Confucianism as the cause of all those phenomena that horrify us so much in American culture in the late 1950sand early 60s which were so vividly played out (perhaps exaggerated, though I suspect not so much) in Mad Men (especially, I find, in the first season)… or, indeed, the fact that, as many have argued, things probably haven’t changed quite so much as we like to tell ourselves.

In a sense, there are a lot of parallels between Sookie and Joan, or Sookie and Peggy, and the corporate society of Mad Men and the vampire society of True Blood: not the details, but in how familiar nastinesses are served up in slightly-estranged form.

My point is this: while to me the vampire society in True Blood looks horrific in ways that parallel very specific aspects of (supposedly) Neo-Confucian Korean culture, the basis is probably much closer to home for Americans: the very things we perceive, however dimly, in our own cultural past, against which we have revolted and which we like to think we have bludgeoned into obscurity — monarchy, very thoroughgoing sexism, strict and relatively inflexible apparent age-based hierarchy, overt and unapologetic “racism,” absolutist parental control of “offspring,” and so on. I suspect the social organization of the vampires would be far more readily intelligible and comprehensible to most of the people who lived in our Western cultural history than the “modern” culture in which Sookie and the other humans normally act.

This interaction would probably have baffled even most readers' grandmothers, if it were shown to them back in the days when they were Sookie's age.

Which leads me to wonder whether the angle of sociohorror, which I see as part of the horror of True Blood, would actually translate well to Korean audiences. Of course the romance element would, the sexy vampirism, the overt and explicit use of sex in the show, the magic, and other stuff would translate pretty directly — but would the sociohorror of the vampire culture translate?

Even for a lot of Westerners, I suspect,  there’s a degree of quaint familiarity to the vampire culture… after all, it’s not too far from the language used in contemporary Christian Churches in America, something I’ve always found baffling: a democratic society, fiercely proud of its democratic ideology, is full of religious people who continue to insist on calling their god terms of address from a monarchic vocabulary, even after they revolted against their monarchy, cast of its shackles, and set themselves up — as Hollywood loves to tell us over and over — as the “land of the free.” You’d think words like “king” and “lord” would have attained the insult status that anti-monarchists ascribe them, but somehow churchgoers are latent monarchists after all, on a metaphysical level.

Then again, some Churchgoers simply appear to be vampires. Not even very latent ones, either. Or maybe I'm being unfair to vampires everywhere.

All of those musings led me to wonder how, indeed, would be the most effective way to set up a narrative of sociohorror for a Korean audience. Would it be best to gesture towards those elements of social history which have taken on an aura of troublesome antiquity, would it be more effective (if, sigh, predictable and a bit tiresome) to construct it in terms of postcolonial trauma (and if so, how?), or would it use the “otherness” perceived in Western culture as the basis for a kind of chaotic, contra-Confucian type of social disorder? Or does the vampire, as a western cultural trope, come loaded with the same baggage and “just work” — whether because Koreans perceive their society as having come so far from what I see resemblances in, just as we like to think we’ve left the misogyny of Mad Men in a long-ago age, or for some other generic reason?

I think there are examples of sociohorror in Korean films — the Vengeance Trilogy by Park Chan-wook is one example, and I (indirectly) note in several forthcoming papers that, sfnally, both The Host and Save the Green Planet partake in what we could call of retroactive sociohorror (I don’t use the term in the papers, but I could easily have). Indeed, even several of the Korean SF films I’ve found less than successful have indulged in a kind of sociohorror — 2009: Lost Memories, for example, with it’s vision of an alternate Korea still under Japanese rule in 2009.  And hell, as Jinhee Choi argued in her book, there’s plenty of horrific stuff in films about high school in Korea — the ones that are generically horror films, and the ones that aren’t too.

But what about specifically vampiric sociohorror? If one set out to design a vampire society that would be as alienating to Koreans as the vampire society in True Blood is for Americans, how would one do it, exactly? In the one Korean vampire film I’ve seen (Thirst) the thrust is horrific, but it’s dubious whether the horror has a social dimension, except in that the vampires break every human rule possible. (Maybe this is vampiric sociohorror for Korea? Having not seen Vampire Cop Ricky — yes, that’s a real movie title – I have nothing with which to compare it in Korean cinema.) Maybe something more North-Korean-seeming might work, I don’t know.

How do you think would one construct it, were one attempting to translate the vampire trope into terms effective for South Korean audiences?

But the other day, Miss Jiwaku dragged me to a couple of great films that were showing in Guro.

The first was the omnibus film If You Were Me 5 (시선이 너머). I never managed to see the third and fourth in the series, but I saw the first two at film festivals and found them very effective. Each film in the series, as far as I know, has been a selection of short films, funded (at least in part) by the Korean Human Rights Commission, and the films generally focus on the lives of people who are “marginal” or the subject of discrimination, maltreatment, or general silencing in Korean society. Embedding is screwy, but you can see a trailer here.

(In the first edition, I remember abused children in two stories, a pedophile in an apartment complex threatening one of them; a teen girl turning to prostitution to pay for eyelid surgery; a man in a wheelchair discussing how much it sucks to be handicapped in Seoul; and a documentary about a Nepali woman imprisoned in the Korean psychiatric system for six years and four months, because some idiots thought that (a) she looked Korean and (b) all Nepalis speak the same language… I’m afraid to even look up what happened in terms of consequences for the people who imprisoned her, but I recall that the reparations paid her by the Korean government were a pittance so embarrassing that private citizens raised more money to donate to her out of shame and remorse).

This edition was just as strongly socially-conscious, but focused on individuals somewhat different, people “out of sight” of the Korean populace generally — a Filipino migrant worker  and his Korean coworkers at a moving company, and accusations of theft of moved goods; a woman whose rape experience goes unprosecuted thanks to sexist a police officer (of which there is no shortage in Korea); North Korean refugees in South Korea; a couple screwed over by a poorly run hospital, resulting in the death of their baby just prior to its birth (no shortage of such hospitals here either); and a love hotel in which a Mongolian migrant worker (working cleanup duty), an apparently lower-class Korean woman, an abused Korean woman, and a pregnant teenager’s lives end up intersecting.

For my money, the strongest narratives were the first three I mentioned here: the hospital story was a bit overcooked for me, and the hotel story felt way overcooked. Meanwhile, I found the reversal in the story featuring the Filipino was powerful since it played on the all-too-common pattern in Korean media where migrant workers or other marginalized people are made out to be so utterly pathetic (and pure and innocent) that one cannot help but feel pity for them. Pity is cheap: respect is a harder thing to demand, since it requires recognizing someone’s human dignity and his or her difference simultaneously.

The story about the North Koreans and the rape story are both well-performed, as well, and harrowing in their believability. (If I had a broken asshole’s skull for every time a Korean told me about an attempted rape she suffered, or he fought to prevent, I’d be able to stage Hamlet in several cities at once, believe you me.)

And then, in the evening, we saw 무산 일기, The Journals of Musan. This is a movie also focused on a marginal individual, or rather, marginal individuals. The main character is a North Korean refugee in South Korea named Seungchul, who is — as anyone would be –utterly messed up by his experience. Like many escaped North Koreans, he turns to Christianity to fill the void left by the absence of the religion of state of North Korea, with the Kim dynasty at its center.

There are other characters all around Seungchul, nearly all of whom seem skin-crawling in one way or another. The main supporting character is a shifty fellow North Korean refugee who, among other things, helps to counterbalance the same tendency I mentioned above (to portray marginal people as pathetic and thus pitiable): he is involved in all kinds of illegal activities, and is more often than not seen with a prostitute beside him in bed. He is also involved with a group of North Koreans trying to send money back to North Korea, and a South Korean policeman who “helps” them. There are the people at the karaoke salon where Seungchul briefly works — prostitutes and their often-belligerent clients — and there are the rival postering thugs (a pair of outright psychoapths) who threaten Seungchul’s life for invading the postering territory they consider theirs.

Not everyone in the film is quite evil, however. There’s a young woman, with whom Seungchul has fallen in love, who goes to the same church as him and has secrets of her own. And there’s a stray dog who, much like Seungchul, has no real home and no real place in South Korean society, and like Seungchul is left to scrouge about in order to live.

The film is depressing, obviously, but I found it interesting for a few reasons, the main one being that what it has to say about North Koreans living in the South, could just as easily be said about a lot of South Koreans… if the South, in the wake of the financial crisis that happened a decade-and-a-half ago, were ready to start being honest about things. The gap between rich and poor in South Korea is widening and going increasingly solid, and I suspect more than a few South Koreans have experienced a kind of desperation very similar to Seungchul’s. The realism of the film was especially increased by the way the film was shot, often feeling somewhere between a documentary and a drama, though never making any explicit gesture toward documentary status.

Another thing I found interesting was the way sympathy is evoked in Korean films. I’ve already talked above about pity and pathos, but I think passivity is another important cinematic/cultural difference. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m a Westerner, but when I see too much forbearance in a character, it turns me off: someone who actually turns the other cheek constantly is annoying. A character, being beaten, should fight back in his own defense.

This is notable because I find very often that when violence breaks out in a film, a sympathetic underdog character is more than likely to just sit there, or lie there, or stand there, and take it. Long after a Western character would respond with inspiring rage and a desire to protect himself, or those he loves, the Korean character will persist in covering his face, lying still, and hoping his oppressors will stop beating him up.

I have no idea whether this represents actual behavior of social underdogs when being beaten by their hierarchical superiors in Korean society, or is purely a cinematic trope. All I can say is that, unless and until the moment a character like Seungchul fights back, he never feels quite real for me.  And when he’s living in a society like South Korea’s, where anyone different gets treated like crap on a pretty constant basis, it’s tiring to see someone put up with so much garbage for so long without lashing out at anyone. Too much humility and gentleness can be a fault too.

The ending of the film is odd, and cryptically hints at the outcome of the story which, supposedly, is based on a true story. I once again found it just slightly unsatisfying, though only slightly, and maybe that’s because the nuances of the line of text on a black screen that ends up the film were lost on me.

But I think, nonetheless, the film is worth watching, and I find it sad that it was being screened so very little — we had to go to Guro to see this film, and I doubt it played there for very long.

I haven’t read the books by Jeff Lindsay (upon which the series is based) but I have seen about two seasons of the show, and while I have a couple of caveats, I think the show is brilliant. Figuring out why necessitates a few spoilers, but they’re minor (in my opinion). Still, if you hate spoilers, I wouldn’t read on. Go check out the show yourself, instead. If you’re game, though, well, I have some ideas to share about the show.

My caveats are the sort that don’t bug me much when I am watching the show, but do bug me when I’m thinking about why I like it so much. Dexter doesn’t really seem to be a garden-variety psychopath, for one thing. Now, that’s fine–interesting characters often aren’t garden-variety type persons, after all–but it does raise some questions. For example, Dexter’s psychopathy seems to be the result of a serious, early-childhood trauma (the unfolding of which is a major plotline in the series, hence the spoiler warning). The reality, as I understand it, though, is that most often psychopaths are products of genetics, and the fact that some of their parents are cold and abusive is, well, more of a testament to the genetic nature of the offspring’s psychological disturbance. There isn’t, as far as I know, incontrovertible evidence suggesting this, but it seems pretty likely from what I’ve read. So I have trouble buying that Dexter really, truly is a psychopath; I see him as a deeply screwed-up human being, but not a true psychopath.

This brings me to the second point, which is that Dexter does indeed seem to have feelings. He insists, time and again, that he doesn’t, and yet his moral framework has lasted all these years; and yet he feels fear, and sorrow, and longing; he seems, indeed, to harbor authentic affection for certain other characters, such as his sister and girlfriend (and the girlfriend’s kids). Of course, if Dexter were completely devoid of emotions, it’d be hard for the audience to get into him so much. The fact is, he does seem to have some basic emotions, not just “impulses” as he claims motivate him.

Which brings me to why I think the show is so engaging for its viewers. Why would people be so interested in watching a psychopath go around killing people in horrific ways, even if the killings are (somewhat) ethically justified? The thing to remember is that TV audiences are constantly aware of the theatrics of TV. Nearly every competent human being is able, on some level, to separate fantasy from reality, and even for the most sensitive of audience members, it is quite natural to react to the horrific acts on the screen with a great deal more detachment and distance than one might if witnessing those same acts in real life.

What I am saying, then, is that not only in Dexter, but throughout our television experiences, we are quite used to seeing murder, suffering, horror, and downright horrific acts on a daily basis. The difference is that among all the other grisly TV shows–the increasingly over-the-top CSI series, plural, come to mind–only one is honest about the kind of reaction expected from the viewers. When we see Dexter turn on his bone saw, and the blood spatter his glass facemask, we see him smiling with a detached, distant expression. Like us, he witnesses the horror but is untouched; for him, every brutal act is characterized by the kind of irrelevance that it is–though we can admit it only awkwardly, until we think about it–to the audience.

Dexter’s relationships with the people around him are–for most people–quite unlike the relationships we in the audience have with the people around us. That said, the people around him are other TV characters, and his relationship with them emulates rather well our relationship with those fictional characters. As the one psychopath in the show–but a psychopath possessed of a moral compass, of a sense of justice being necessary, though sometimes brutally served–Dexter is not so much a figure of the modern urban person, as he is a kind of caricature of the TV viewer of today. When we gaze through the blood-spattered glass, what we see is a reflection of ourselves, and the entire audience of contemporary TV, watching as newer and more sensational horrors are enacted right before them, yet unmoved, detached… smiling a little at the ridiculousness of it all.

Some might think that this is a scathing indictment of the TV show, but I’m of the opinion that entertainment doesn’t drive people to do out and do evil things; most people who see such things don’t go out and imitate them in real life, in fact. Such copycats are usually not so bright, and far from stable.

No, I’m not criticizing Dexter: I think instead that the whole thing is a very clever, thoughtful commentary on the kind of relationship we have with our entertainment, as well as how we have come to engage with (even as we disengage from) our entertainment. Little surprise that Dexter’s condition has been likened to an addiction, for TV is the great undiagnosed addiction of the developed world, and it has, indeed, numbed us considerably (prompting the increasing extremes of TV shows in general). Dexter is just the first show I’ve seen that, seemingly consciously, has anything to say about this.

This, of course, can be turned into a lesson about writing, but I wonder what the lesson is. When I think back to a story like “The Little Magic Shop” by Bruce Sterling (collected in both Crystal Express and the more recent Ascendancies), I see it as a kind of metafictional game about the genre of SF, and I’ve seen stories like that before. Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds likewise engages in a metafictional discussion of the relationship between an artist and his or her art–as I remember it from over a decade ago, a writer in the novel falls in love with a character whom he has written into his own novel (and gets her pregnant if I remember it right). However, I’m trying to think of a story or book that effectively puts into play a metafictional figuration of the reader’s relationship with the genre or text. The closest thing I can come up with is Stone, by Adam Roberts, but that book didn’t work for me that way–I remember Roberts suggesting somewhere that it was supposed to, but it wasn’t how I felt about the book.

Which, of course, has me thinking about what the metafictional figure of the SF audience member ought to be, and whether or how I could work it into my own next big writing project, in a way that is quite as engaging as what we find in Dexter, without being so distracting as to take away from the story itself. Hmmm.

The first is that you can tell a lot about a movie by how badly Koreans took it. The American, a European film featuring George Clooney, has been getting some pretty negative reactions online in Korea. People are reporting things like a quarter of the audience getting up and walking out at some point in the film. Lots of people are complaining about how it’s so “boring” and “pointless.” (Of course, they said that about brilliant films like 지구를 지켜라! (Save the Green Planet!) and 고양이를 부탁해 (Take Care of My Cat), too. Somewhere in his book on Korean pop culture, Mark Russell lists off all the best features of the former movie, and then observes: “It didn’t stand a chance.”)

Suffice it to say, if Korean audiences are, on average, hating a movie, the chances are that it’s either an abominable stinker, or quite wonderful and interesting and just a little different.

Well, for the record, Miss Jiwaku and I saw it the other day — for me, it was a test of how much I’d recovered from my food poisoning — and we thought it it was the latter — wonderful and interesting and just a little different. It’s a rather dark little movie, and while there were a few bits I wasn’t clear on, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s nice to see bits of Europe instead of bits of Vancouver-as-California or Toronto/Montreal-as-NYC. It’s nice to see a film at a European pace. And Clooney is a good actor, as this film aply demonstrates, even if it is a familiar sort of character for him.

The film has a very paranoid feel, but also something of the sense one gets from reading Graham Greene: an American abroad being part of that, but also an American stuck in a world that is within his reach, but beyond his grasp. Indeed, I think this is part of what I liked about the fact that there are things I wasn’t clear on, even as I watched the film: there are things that aren’t supposed to be clear about it, though the general story seems comprehensible enough.

It ends up being a story about whether love is possible in a world where one must survive by one’s wits, by one’s ability to kill those who might kill you without remorse, but it also becomes a story about whether life is possible under those circumstances. And I think the answer the film suggests is that it all depends on how you define “life,” as well as how willing you are to stick to an unsatisfactory definition of it.

As for the new TRON: Legacy we saw this in 4D with a big crowd of friends, and if those friends hadn’t suggested it, I would have given it a miss. I strongly suggest you learn from my mistake, because you have much better things to do.

First off: if you haven’t experienced 4D, well, the idea is that you get a 3D film, and then add in another “dimension” of experience. I think a lot of the technology is a few decades old, and taken from amusement park rides: your chair shakes and changes shape at dramatically opportune moments, little plastic doohickeys slap the backs of your legs, and the air currents are manipulated in the theater, both on a macro scale (which is okay — these are the best-ventilated structures I’ve been in for years) and on the micro-level, by means of little fans in the neck area of the seat back.

I had very low expectations going in. I guess they weren’t low enough, though, because I was groaning at a number of points. Miss Jiwaku whispered into my ear, at the start, “Oh, it’s a Disney movie,” and there was a 4D experience: our hearts sank. The sad thing is that the real-world plot didn’t just suck, it was… well, here’s the thing. I know, as my friend Charles commented when I explained why I hated the film, that Hollywood [almost] always handles anything to do with computers at the level of a high-functioning retard, but trust me: the handling of the computer stuff in the opening of this film insults the intelligence of that hypothetical, imaginary retard. I mean, if you don’t know what an OS is or does, go on Wikipedia. OSes aren’t live TV broadcasts. When people talk about some piece of software being “the most secure version ever” that doesn’t mean what you think it means. And I still don’t know how the protagonist hacked into the software, altered it, and escaped in a couple of minutes without touching a keyboard…

But it gets worse. I’ll just say, we all expected the “conceit” to be a bit dumb. What we didn’t expect was that the virtual world that was to be revisited in the sequel would be boring, too. It was. Had I had the same level of expectations as one of my friends (with whom we saw it) maybe I’d have enjoyed myself a little more. “I expected a black background and blue glowing lights in the foreground.” Which is, to translate as she did, “No expectations.”

Okay, sure, but the thing is, I’m getting tired of going to SF films with no expectations. I’m tired of SF — the kind of literature I find the most challenging and intelligent of almost anything I read — to be so poorly translated into media. It is not so bloody hard to make an intelligent movie.

Then again, it probably is hard to make an intelligent remake of TRON. But… then, why bother?

Oh yeah. Money.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1), though, is a pretty good counterexample, though.

I don’t know whether the folks behind this film love the book series, or were attracted by the money, or both. I’ve had mixed feelings about the past films, even though I’ve never read the novels. (Yeah, yeah, I know, but it’s not because I’m an elitist or hate them. I just haven’t gotten around to them, okay?) But this film felt like a project where people were trying to really tell a story, to make it look good, and to give it some depth.

Sure. huge sums of money are changing hands, but that’s not the whole of the point, and you can tell when you see the film.

My favorite scene was the part where you learn about the Deathly Hallows; it’s an animation narrated by Hermione, and it is absolutely gorgeous, as well as at least partly inspired by the shadow-puppet tradition we see in Southeast Asian puppetry (called wayang kulit in Indonesia, for example):

The film is, as several friends have commented, pretty unrelentingly dark, and pretty unrelentingly merciless on the characters. My impression was that in some earlier Harry Potter films, some of the story problems were easier to solve, and were often the problems of other characters–this or that classmate or teacher being the baddie-of-theyear, swapped in to start trouble–but in this narrative, though there is no shortage of villains and villainous plots –

– the core story problems are all very nicely anchored inside the hearts and minds of the protagonists themselves: their own weaknesses, their own failings, their own problems.

The villains are, of course, just a little cardboard, still, and to be frank it’s hard to imagine how they could be otherwise without hearing the story from their point of view. That said, I’m assuming the films are faithful to the books and, yeah, I’m impressed that Rowling took all this Muggle-blood/half-blood/Wizard-blood ideology to its logical extension, ie. eugenics-embracing totalitarian rule by magic-users. (Or that seems to be what is going on, anyway.)

I appreciated that each of the primary characters is struggling with his or her own problems: Harry with the responsibility he must bear (as usual) but also the need he has to keep his little group together if the world is to be saved from his enemy; Hermione and Ralph Ron struggle to keep their relationship — and their sanity, really — as they’re pulled along on this mad quest.

But the “quest” involves a lot of “go hide and wait” and one thing I was impressed with, regarding that, is how the waiting didn’t bore me. The other thing that struck me was how utterly in reverse the dynamic was with other characters from outside the core group. When I left Canada for Korea, I figured I needed a big book to read on the plane, so I began reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, in a big fat single-volume edition of the kind that were plentiful when the films were coming out. I remember observing that I felt a lot like Frodo at the time, when a flight attendant gave me and a few other people a second meal just because the plane was so empty and the people in first class were all sleeping (and it was, yes, first class food that she’d been snacking on); I remember being given a place to crash when I was passing through Vancouver, and being so grateful; I remember arriving, perplexed, and some random middle-aged Korean guy helping me find which bus I needed without even being asked to help.

All of this, for me, echoed the way Frodo and his friends, on leaving the Shire, got help from stranger after stranger, as if they were simply being sent help from the universe itself, as a kind of cosmic endorsement, a sign of approval that they were headed in the right direction. Plot coupons do indeed lie ahead, fellas.

Well, this pattern cannot, and did not, hold, of course. Normal life settles in, and you find that some people are eager to help you, while others are eager to screw you over… and the majority just don’t know you from Adam (or Eve, or Lilith, take your pick). You end up not so alone, but certainly left with time to gaze into yourself and see what’s in there.

The interesting dynamic in the Potter books is that, one or two villains aside, Potter has spent a number of his adventures getting help from those around him. But it’s a perilous world, and Potter’s radioactive now. He himself isn’t toxic, but his presence certainly is, and the world has finally eaten away at that protective buffer he has enjoyed for so long. The interesting thing is that, now, each way he turns in search of help, he finds a potential (or actual) betrayal or heartbreak.

And the very interesting thing, the thing I am curious as all get-out to learn, is how Rowling resolves this in terms of his eventual triumph… because, yes, we all know Harry’s going to have to win in the end. But… will he have to go it alone, or will he have to find a way to bring Hermione and Ralph Ron along? I’ve noted in the past that Korean narratives seem often to tend to emphasize how joining a group or being a part of a group is the way to success (a popular example is The Host, where a group forms, suffers a setback that causes it to split up, and then must re-form, in altered composition, to succeed in their big bughunt), while Western ones tend to drive the protagonist to finally “go it alone” to do what others cannot (the Alien franchise and Sigourney Weaver’s heroics come to mind).

I’m guessing it’ll involve a little bit of both. If you’ve read the books, don’t tell me.

We saw Harry Potter at the IMAX in Yongsan station, having missed the chance to see it on the biggest IMAX in Korea (and supposedly the biggest in the world in constant commercial operation); honestly, I highly recommend seeing it on a very big screen if you can. I would be surprised if it isn’t re-released into theaters again this summer, when Part 2 comes out, so bear that in mind, if you haven’t seen it this time around. Or, hell… you can still see it now in a bunch of theaters, in Korea anyway.

That said, cinematic handling of love is usually unsatisfyingly shallow. Still, once in a while a film will do the subject justice… not that I expected that of this movie. I agreed to see it with Miss Jiwaku, just as an excuse to go out. Besides, I figured this might be one of those sex-comedies that have been showing up in Korean cinema. Sometimes those manage to be slightly funny.

Well… we both regretted seeing the film, and afterward, agreed that we should have walked out after twenty minutes. I have to say that I didn’t expect that I would find every damned character unsympathetic. Actually, unsympathetic isn’t the word. Stomach-turningly annoying is the word.

Every bloody one of them. If I were able to step into the movie and interact with the characters, I’d be stealing a submachine gun, fully loaded, and leaving a trail of woe and mess in my wake.

The male protagonist is a Hamlet, without the interesting stuff to say, and all of his male friends are annoying bastards too — annoying, and apparently heavily plastic surgeried bastards. The female lead is an annoyingly shallow bitch. Her “best friend” is a complete asshole, as is her elder brother (who is also verging on physically abusive). The romance plot is worse than obvious: it’s hard to be excited when they come together, after hoping against hope that one or both of the characters would be run over by a Mack truck.

My advice? There are better things to do with your time. Like, say, cleaning the grouting in your shower. Or torturing yourself with paperclips. Or, I don’t know… seeing good movies.

Tonight I saw 초능력자 (Choneungryeokja, which you could translate as “Psychic” or “Person with Supernatural Powers”¹) with Miss Jiwaku, and I have to say that it actually pretty much was what one of my students described:

…pretty good for the first hour or so, and then ramps up an exponential curve of silliness until it hits infinite silliness at the end. That said, the film seems to have been received rather well by the Korean public, and some people are praising it. My experience is that films that are very highly praised in Korea are sometimes good, but often don’t seem so great to me, and this is no exception, as my feelings are very mixed about it.

So I’m going to explain why. I’ll start with the good stuff, and proceed to the stuff I thought didn’t work so well, but be warned, spoilage ahead. If you’re thinking of seeing it, I’d say people who like manga, who don’t mind the sort of overblown drama that Korean cinema and TV tend toward, would probably get a kick out of it… especially if they don’t go in expecting too much.

Hell, Korean SF films are rare enough as it is; it’s worth seeing just on account of that. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about the silliness.

First off, the film at least attempts to handle its conceits relatively interestingly. The baddie is a sociopathic telepath with the power to control others like puppets, as long as he can see them. Apparently, the power is located in his eyes, not his brain–don’t ask me how, ask the screenwriters or director.  That said, at least the baddie seems to make pretty constant, casual use of his powers in ways that make sense. In any physical confrontation, you can bet that every person in view (who isn’t immune to his mind-control, as the hero is) will be used as a meat puppet against the hero. And the hero, who also has superpowers, has very toned-down, human powers. He’s a “superman,” in a sense, but for most of the film his superness is quite subdued and he has to pay a hell of a price to pull of his feats.

Secondly, the film makes a connection I’ve been waiting for since Bong Joon-Ho flirted with it at the beginning of The Host: it connects the minjung aesthetics inherent in the film with the situation faced by migrant workers in Korea. The protagonist’s best friends are two migrant workers from Turkey and Ghana, with whom he works at a junkyard at the beginning of the story. Now, if you know my theory about Korean SF films, you know that I figure they’re categorizable into two essential aesthetic groups: minjok films, that tend towards essentially nationalist narratives (preoccupied with history or memory) and featuring cops or soldiers, and minjung narratives, which while they also feature themes of memory, focus on protagonists in the lower socioeconomic classes, and their struggle against authoritarian power systems and oppression. This film is not only clearly in the latter category, but it also suggests implicitly that the migrant laborer fits into the minjung category in Korea today. The film 방가방가, which I reviewed earlier this year, surely attempts to humanize migrant workers and to show their plight, but  초능력자 makes their status as part of Korea’s essential underdog class today much more explicit.

Thirdly, the film has a narrative drive. Unlike a lot of SF films, this is not about memory. I didn’t find anything in the film overtly referred to nationalist themes, to themes of memory or history, or any of that stuff that I find so often weighs down Korean SF films. It’s about a guy with a power, and what he does with it, and another guy who seems to have another power, and how he fights back against the first guy. The bad guy has reasons for why he’s a monster, at least somewhat; the hero seems like a nice guy before he turns heroic. There’s a love interest, but she’s not really central for most of the film.

Fourthly, I think thematically the idea of people being turned into zombie-like mesmerized figures who are walked mindlessly to their own doom by a powerful, evil, charismatic guy in a suit is very reflective of the present conundrum humanity (and Korea specifically, too) faces. I rather wished the villain had been older, rather than young and smooth-cheeked, as it might have added some strength to the possible political readings of the film.

cnrj

But then there are the weaknesses:

First, the soundtrack all but announces the action. The plot feels more predictable than it actually is, because the music never lets up. If you want to know what will happen, listen to the music.

Second, there’s that silliness factor I mentioned: the story gets more and more far-fetched toward the end, and the “twist” ending is one you will see a mile away. Well, it’s far-fetched in the context of the expectations the film sets up. The thing is, once you’ve seen it, you realize this is much more like a superhero “origins story” than the film it seems to think it is at the beginning. It’s a bit like a Korean reimagining of that M. Night Shyamalan film Unbreakable (which I thought was one of the few decent films the man made). The thing is, usually in origins stories, we care more because we know where the hero will go later, what he or she will go on to do, and so on. This, I get the feeling, is an origins story for a superhero narrative that will never be followed through on.

Interestingly, the director apparently felt it was important to go with people using their superpowers not to destroy the world, but rather to survive, to get money to live off and so on. I think my third complaint is that the film didn’t think big enough. There’s no reason why a Korean superhero film can’t push the envelope. Not that I didn’t like the scope of the powers and plot, but in the end, it seemed like the world and universe were no different for the presence of superpeople here and there.

Fourth, I had a lot of trouble with the villain. From basically the first time we see him (as an adult) he is making boogly-eyed faces every time he uses his powers. I get it that he shouldn’t be so super as to pay no price for using his powers, but the faces he made were just silly. Likewise, and this may be a pet peeve, but I wish Korean villains didn’t throw so many shouting tantrums, and then switch immediately into soft, hushed, cool-guy tones of voice. It’s just… well, it’s so familiar now.

Fifth, well, as I said, things get exponentially sillier as the story goes on. Wanna see a crappy old van souped up to have turbojets on the back of it? Or, rather, a van that shoots fire out its exhaust pipe, which somehow makes it go much, much faster than anything else on the road? The flare gun built from a revolver and a cooking gas cannister was just odd, and I could not buy the last scene, not really, not even though I wanted to.

And sixth, the film’s manga stylistics didn’t do much for me. This last one is pretty much idiosyncratic. I tried to read some of the Death Note comics, and the weird-haired freaky-looking guy just annoyed me. So did the villain in this film, who was very much stylized along manga lines.

That said, the film was entertaining enough. I think it’s worth a watch… just go not expecting much. I may update this post as more thoughts ofccur to me, but I wanted to get my thoughts set down before they all dissipate.

^{1. Of course, if I were suggesting English titles, I’d probably suggest something more like Preternatural, or Telepath, or Psion.}

I was asked what I thought of it, and I said it was ironic. I told a story about the life of Alan Turing. (And not just part 8, on his death; much of the rest of it I told, and the whole is relevant.) I mentioned that in the light of this, if one considers how people seem to have the impression that there’s a blockage of the Internet in one of the most wired campuses I’ve ever been on, in one of the most wired countries on Earth, the ironies stack extremely deep.

Internet blockage? Ah, metus est plenus tyrannis? The only thing I really can say is that open discussion would help a lot in clearing up rumors… if they are rumors.

Anyway, I’m a little worn out on that issue, so I’m going to turn to the other thing that has been floating around in my brain the last few weeks, and that is. Regenesis. As in, the Canadian SF TV show that was, well, wait… a second, was it SF?
I guess it depends on how you define SF. If you think SF is about costumes, aliens, and spaceships, you will not see this as SF. But if you think SF is about science, ideas, and mind-blowing weird speculations, then yeah, this is definitely SF.

To the website’s credit, a reviewer at io9 did call it a “biotech drama” (link below) but for me it’s basically SF, just… set in the present.

There’s crazy science-fictional premises, there’s world-spanning threats, and there’s interesting characters who act a lot more like scientists than one finds in a lot of media. As Jeff Lester wrote in his intro/review of the show at io9, “One of my favorite things about ReGenesis is whenever anyone comes out to a seemingly-impossible result with their testing, they’re told they’ve made a mistake and to re-do their work again and again—which is the reaction you’d expect from real scientists when faced with such a scenario.”

Still, as I’ve been watching, I wonder what real scientists–especially geneticists and biotech researchers–thought of the show. I imagine that a few developed a kind of drinking game of some sort, though I’m not sure what they’d use as a trigger for their shots.

For my part, I love the show, I’m crazy about it. I love Bob, the brilliant scientist with aspergers–and, by Season 4, a much weirder condition than that–and I love Mayko, whose struggles throughout Season 3 are as fascinating as her insights are early on. Carlos, a Mexican physician and researcher, is also a brilliant character, very moral and conflicted, a religious gay man with a deeply logical sensibility. And then there’s David Sandström, a grouchy genius-type character with a penchant for slipping into and out of relationships.

There are ways in which I feel like the show is almost more honest about human embodiment–the fact we all walk around in bodies–than perhaps any TV show I’ve seen: for a while, it seemed like Sangström would jolt out of bed nude at least once per season, never in a deeply sexual way but simply in a way that suggested that, yeah, some people sleep naked, and wake up, and their bodies are there, not immediately and magically covered with clothing.

I will say, the Disease du Jour approach has begun to wear on me, a few episodes into Season 4. I mean, how many diseases can the members of the NORBAC facility contract before they’re all going to die off? (Someone has to die sooner or later.) Still, the show captivates, as everyone commenting on it has noted. I saw the first season back when it was new, but believed it had been a mini-series and didn’t know there was more till someone commented about it somewhere on this blog, I think. I remember being very much drawn in by Season 1, and I probably should have re-watched it to get up to speed on how things ended off… but I was so eager to see what was going to happen with each of the characters.

If you like the show, you probably know about the NorBAC site, where some of the show’s affiliated ARG was presented, and the affiliated podcast. But if you don’t know the show, I suggest you start with episode one. And if, like me, you get nothing much from Sandström’s conflict with his daughter, well… keep going. It’s worth it, and you’ll be free of her annoying presence by Season 2.

It’s nice to be able to write a paper about some topic, or make effective presentation, but if nobody’s shown you how to make an argument, or how to ask the kind of questions that tend to be worth asking (about your own preoccupations, even if nothing else)  then how useful are those “practical” skills?

Anyway, about the saddening thing she said: well, she asked how one comes up with an interesting thesis, and I walked her through an example. “Give me your bag,” I said, and on the bag was written, over and over, “NEW YORK NEW YORK NEW YORK.” I asked her if she liked New York, and she said she did.

“Have you ever been there?”

“No!”

“So why do you like New York? How do you know? What does it mean to like New York? What ideas do you have about the city, and why do you have them?”

We talked about things like how sofas became popular in Korea, why pimatgol has been torn down, and more. The thing that made me sad, though, was when she said, “Your words are like magic. Suddenly you find something interesting in anything. Suddenly you can find some interesting question everywhere.”

I’m not bragging about this. Frankly, any student who doesn’t realize that his or her own words are like magic, is a person who has been failed by his or her education. Because, in the end, education is about teaching people how to think. This student, encountering very basic processes of thinking about the world around oneself, confused it with magic, the way Arthur C. Clarke imagined we would be unable to distinguish any sufficiently advanced technology from magic.

Except that thinking about the world is a very, very basic technology. It’s a very basic process, and every student should have a fairly good handle on it by the third year of her or his studies… especially when someone is studying language and culture as a specialty, as all of my students do (albeit, in some cases, as a secondary specialty following business, science, or some other subject¹).

I’ll be honest: while I am skeptical of the idea that Korea’s the only society that uses education to pummel the creativity and wisdom from its masses, I do think Korea’s elevated it to an artform (of sorts, if a horror show can be an art). Miss Jiwaku has a friend who is a teacher, and she was talking to her lately about teaching. The friend was saying things like how high school kids appearing on TV in a quiz show ought to dress in school uniforms, because after all they are students and should look like students, not like adults. Miss Jiwaku balked at this, not only remembering how much she hated having to wear a school uniform, but also remembering how this friend herself had absolutely reviled it, how she had seen friends stuck wearing hand-me-down uniforms that didn’t fit because they were too expensive to buy new, in the correct size. This friend herself had complained at having to wear a skirt, and now she was saying kids should wear them.

The problem, you see, isn’t just teachers. A lot of good teachers somehow become cogs in a big bad system. John Taylor Gatto and others make similar arguments about education in the West. But if we’re not teaching students how to think critically, how to ask questions and seek out answers to them, if we are training people to leave school only to be easily brainwashed by spurious explanations of the world… what are we teaching people in schools?

I’ll confide another depressing comment here. I was recently told by a Korean colleague that I was asking too much of students. I was saying how

When you’ve proposed the same obvious, simple curriculum changes years in a row, when students are even pointing out they there should be prerequisite courses, though, it becomes hard to see what one ought to do. Here’s the obvious, you say. Let’s do this.

Oh, but we can’t, comes the reply. And here’s a spurious reason why.

The most recent form of this, though, I encountered yesterday, when I was told that, “We can’t expect creativity from students. They’re only undergrads.”

Which is a puzzling sort of assertion, especially when it’s made in the context of my comment that something on presentation proposal was essentially a regurgitation of popular claims on the internet.

(Specifically, that American depictions of Koreans and Asians in general betray a deep-seated, unmistakable, pervasive white supremacism supposedly universal in American entertainment and American society as well. Premised on the notion that Lost was anti-Korean. That the reason human trafficking is presented as being perpetrated by Koreans in films like Crash is because of racism, and not because it’s such a serious problem in Korea and in Korean expatriate communities in places like Los Angeles. Because William Hung didn’t win American Idol — despite being a “handsome Asian man” — because he’s not white:

I’m sympathetic to the idea that Asians, especially Asian men, get short shrift in American entertainment media. But Lost was only racist if you’re a thoroughgoing sexist. (I’m far from the only one to have noted that Jin becomes a very sympathetic character over time, while Sun is pretty much sympathetic all the way along, and is indeed one of the few characters–major or minor–who is really, genuinely nice and sympathetic from the start, along with Bernard and Rose.) As my American co-worker pointed out, there’s real-life reasons why human trafficking is framed as a problem with Korean-Americans (and Koreans, period) and the problem is real and serious in Korea, here and now.

And William Hung? I mean, really? It is not apparent from the video above that he’s as untalented as plenty of other Idol Search TV show contestants? Does he compare so favorably to this guy?

Maybe all that karaoke one must experience living in Korea has simply callused this poor student’s mind to the horror of that awful singing.²

Whatever the case, what my (undoubtedly well-meaning) colleague said to me is plain wrong: when we challenge students to do something they think they are unable to do, what often happens is that they surprise themselves by rising to the challenge. Hell, the premise of my approach to teaching is that one must push students to constantly take on bigger and bigger challenges, until it becomes a habit for them, because that is how one learns to do increasingly difficult things. And in my experience, most students who are actually interested in learning adjust to the higher standards: they learn what they need to, they push themselves a little harder,, and suddenly they’re doing things you assumed might be too hard for them.

(Like having their own ideas about the world, instead of just regurgitating. This is something I am working on learning too, in another way: in classroom discussions, I’ll hear things that would make most Westerners turn horrified, disgusted. I feel that way too, sometimes. I often stop and feed in a little information, some statistics that devastate the popular (regurgitated) opinion. But today, I stood back and watched as students themselves did this, looking up statistics and facts online. It’s not optimal–they’re not totally sure how to separate wheat from chaff when it comes to statistics, for example–but they’re  looking beyond what parents, media, peers, and professors tell them to think.)

But I have another objection to assuming undergrads are incapable of thinking creatively, and it’s not even to do with the evidence that, in a lot of cognitive areas, young adults perform better than their elders. I believe that treating students this way is to treat them like little kids, and in doing so we do both the students, the future, and the society a great disservice. It is, indeed, a form of infantilization, and infantilization, as Robert Epstein argues in his latest book, is the surest way to disempower, silence, and subdue young people.

Korean society needs its young people to think hard, to talk loud, to push for changes that need to happen if Korea’s to contend with the future that it is tumbling towards at high speed. Without those changes, a host of problems that already exist now will bloom into full-on dysfunctions and social crises. What Korea needs right now is not more of the same, but rather creative attempts to deal with its problems. However, in institutions that are dominated by people who aren’t just older, but who also think younger people ought to know their place, and cannot come up with anything worth considering, a vital wellspring of human creativity is being stifled and indeed utterly blocked.

Perhaps it would behoove Korean society to consider the concept of “flow” to crucial to its local version of feng shui and of oriental medicine alike: if you block a flow, you do serious damage and cause problems for the whole system. Right now, the flow of respect from old to young, and the flow of ideas from young to everyone, are both severely blocked. There is room, in other words, for a reenvisioning of the social dynamics we see in Korea even from within the same cultural sources that underpin this status quo. A society normally need necessarily to not look beyond its own tradition to find sources for a radical reevaluation of its status quo.

And I think the situation is serious. A long-term expat I know, and was talking with the other night, said to me that she felt as if the country was falling apart at the moment. Koreans I’m close to who live here have generally expressed a sentiment of worry about the immediate future of this country, and very many of them seem to simply wish to leave, because the machinery that has brought the society to this peril is too big, too complex, too much like a juggernaut that they feel no hope for stopping its movement, changing its course, or even surviving as it slams through their own lives.

And by the way, I’m not saying Korea is unique in this. The results of the very recent mid-term elections in the USA terrify me, not because Obama’s my personal political Jesus (he isn’t) but because the other guys are so much worse. I sometimes feel as if the whole of the modern, “developed” world is sinking down into the sea, and we’re arguing about whether taxes are fair, whether women should be able to have abortions or birth control pills, whether there should be sex-education. Canada’s not doing significantly better, from what some friends tell me… we’re become a blue state-red-state American-styled football game too, in the years since I left (and it was already starting in the years before I left Canada.)

And the same kind of fiddling-while-Rome-burns is what  see when I look at Korea. And it doesn’t have to be that way, at all. But unless we start asking people to think, holding them responsible for their opinions and challenging them to have reasons for thinking the way they do, we might as well just give up on education altogether. We might as well just lie down on the track while that juggernaut train rolls in, with its rich older men at the helm, and most of humanity shoveling coal and slopping buckets of oil into the furnace.

It’s now or never: are you a teacher, or just a cog in a machine that’s chewing up the whole world?

And what would you rather be?

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^{1. Korea seems like one of those AD&D campaigns where everyone is playing a multi-classed character, not characters with a single class. It also seems like the kind of campaign where people would be minmaxing their characters. Yes, I am suggesting that all those comeliness points (for those who remember AD&D first edition) come at a cost: if you spend all day worrying about your makeup or hair, you’re not thinking about the world, and it will cost you intelligence and wisdom points.}

^{2. Seriously, on the karaoke: I am starting to wonder if anyone has carried out serious tests for sensitivity to tuning problems. I don’t mean sensitivity in terms of ability to detect such problems, but rather, in terms of ability to tolerate off-key music. I am unusually sensitive to it, such that I find karaoke outings pretty much unbearable even with people I’d like to have fun with–primarily because, let’s be honest, most normal people cannot sing very well. I wonder whether people in societies where karaoke is popular are more tolerant of off-key singing because of the popularity of karaoke, or whether the karaoke is more popular because the off-key singing doesn’t bother them as much as in societies where karaoke is less popular, or what. One might imagine noise-sensitivity in general might play a part: I find Koreans very much more noise-insensitive on average than North Americans (and hence most coffeeshops are riotously loud here) but at the same time, in my experience, Japan is much, much quieter and they’re all over the kaaraoke. So, of course, it may be there are mostly other factors at play — acculturation, genetics, experience, development — that could explain all this. But I still think a study inquiring whether average Koreans are more or less tolerant of noise, and especially of off-key music, would be very interesting.}