(For comparison, most of the videos are like this:)

I love this show so much.

Anyway, I got some productive writing and editing on the WIP (Work in Progress) done, though I’m not going to go into it except to say I’m glad decided to check out my long-neglected copy of Snow Crash recently for the first time, after hearing some discussion of it on a podcast along with a discussion of how William Gibson sounded on the audiobook he narrated of Neuromancer.

The phallocarp is to the Papuan man what jargon is to the modern nerd, geek, cyuberpunk, and pickup artist. Click to see the full-sized image.

I’m working at making my own story convey the sudden realization that hit me today about how nerd subcultures wear jargon the way some Papua New Guinean men wear phallocarps. (Neat discussion of phallocraps near the end of this post, by the way, including the Jared Diamond passage here I first heard of such things.)

My WIP is basically an experiment in how effective it is to mash up different geek subcultures and mix their lingos. I think I’m mashing three together: pickup artists, cyberpunks, and techno-greens. With the bonus that the battle of the sexes gets addressed too, in a cartoony sort of way. (My wink and nod to Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, though she’d probably revile it.)

Ah well, for now, more drafting soundtrack:

It’s a recording of a talk given way back in February 2008 by Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, a prof at Notre Dame. The talk is titled “Our Toys, Our Selves: Robot Taekwon V and South Korean Identity.” (That’s a direct link to the MP3, so if you want, you can right-click and save it, instead of listening to it stream online.)

The talk discusses the role of taekwondo in the building of national identity, the military, and nationalist propaganda, speculates the role of anti-communist government directives in the rhetoric of the film, and discusses the relationship between industrialization initiatives contemporaneous to the film and some of the science-fictional technologies depicted.

(I happen to have a copy of two versions of the film, which were “subtitled in English for children to develop their English abilities.” I haven’t watched either version all the way through, but I’ll have to do so eventually.)

• Brown-skinned people are either poor children with hearts of gold or scary witch-doctor/fortune-teller types, which is natural since brown-skinned people are all poor and have inborn magical abilities.
• No other brown-skinned local people besides poor children and scary witch-doctor/fortune-teller types should be included in shots. If they absolutely must do so, have them appear for no more than one second at a time, and in the background.
• Have your Korean characters talk to the few local brown-skinned people who appear onscreen in English only when they apparently cannot speak English; have the same characters speak primrily in long, fast Korean phrases when they meet a browqn-skinned local who can speak English. Don’t worry, since brown-skinned people are magical they can (somehow) understand much of what is being said in Korean.
• Make sure to include some white chicks, and dress them in bikinis whenever possible, even if everyone else is fully dressed in long pants/skirts and long-sleeved flowery shirts.
• Include some Korean boys, and dress them in outfits that look like a cross between Korean girls’ clothing, disco and early 80s singers’ outfits, and the clothing of Joey Jeremiah circa 1990 (pic here, but your eyes will bleed). Make sure they look bored on holiday in [unspecified warm country full of brown-skinned people], just as Joey did in school.
• Include some Korean girls, and dress the most sympathetic character as a cross between Strawberry Shortcake and your average agashi (ie. single girl). (Contrary to popular expat belief, there are some differences between the two. Strawberry Shortcake never wore high heels, for example.)
• Include plenty of stock footage of random islands and stuff because tourism is what the young people like these days.

Yes, I’m being harsh, but no, I’m not saying that similar criticisms couldn’t be made of most of what’s on North American TV. Many such criticisms could, I am sure, be made… and have been.

Television really bucks Sturgeon’s Law: something more like 98% of all TV everywhere is crap — not just crap, but slanted, weird, sexist, racist, insulting-your-intelligence crap. Or this is how I experience TV. The less I watch it, the more I feel like it’s a few drops of perfume dripped into a tank of sewage. You can isolate the perfume as it drips in, but there’s so little you can’t help but wander off.

Even if we’ve come a long way, the whole Magical Hot Asian Chick subplot in Jack’s past — the thing in Pattaya, in Thailand — jumps out at me as an example, even if Jin and Sun’s lives and characters are passable counter-examples to this generalization. (Jin isn’t simply an Asian gangster, and Sun isn’t simply a pretty Korean rich-girl.) Hell, even the good stuff on TV has a slant to it, and I wonder whether the nature of the medium is such that even the best shows can only play with it, the way Mad Men is relatively conscious of nonwhite characters and of giving us a glimpse of what they think and (justifiedly) feel even if they don’t really get to take center stage. Even TV shows that seek to deal with this kind of depend on a reverse slant, overstatement, or simplification.

As for Kkotboda Namja, the TV series from which the clip above is taken, I’m not sure whether, as a non-local, the stuff jumps out at me more, or whether this show made your average Korean guffaw in horror. Weirdly, I’d bet that the people with the reaction most similar to mine would be really old guys. But then, I dunno: have older men in Korea been bemoaning, of late, the girly clothing that young men are wearing? The lengthening hair, and the feminization of male fashion and iconography in the media? I’d be very curious to hear what grandpas and grandmas are saying, but having no Korean grandparents myself, I haven’t the foggiest idea. And I imagine maybe they aren’t, as a generation, as big consumers of recent media as it would take for them to care enough to complain.

Then again, I don’t have a TV in my house. So who knows?

Not that I’ve written much before this. I’ve never felt even the slightest bit moved to write fanfic, ever, but this scene, this weird neo-Saturday cinema serials thing, just popped into my head, very loosely based on this TV show I’ve been watching. Don’t click on the link: if you don’t know the show, the weirdness won’t hit you (though you should check out this program, it’s worth watching). And if you do know the show, the characters should be instantly recognizable.

“Mr. Draper,” he heard her cry out as the Pinto jounced over the still-writhing bodies. Thud, thus, crack, thud. Madison Avenue was… charred. A series of charred buildings, row on row of blackened nothingnesses, with the shadows of the ships above still flickering across the ruined streets and molten glass and steel. Invaders from outer space, and he was fleeing in a Pinto, of all things. With this one, he thought to himself.

“Don’t call me that,” he said, one eyebrow raised. As if it were obvious she shouldn’t.

“Then what should I call you?” she asked. Her voice was clear and blunt, but soft, as if she knew she ought to be careful, but couldn’t figure out just why or how.

He didn’t answer her right away. Eyes on the thickening pillars of smoke out in the suburbs, he slammed the accelerator down. Didn’t know why it felt right. The ships, the… invaders, they could just as easily be attracted by the faster motion, but his instincts told him that speed was the key to surviving this.

Eyes on the road, he spoke just loud enough for her to hear him over what passed for the roar of the engine in a Pinto. And what he said was, “Because I’m not going to be him anymore, and you’re not going to be Peggy. Not if you want to live through this. What you were, what I was, those people are dead. They could never live through this. They were cocoons, and we’ve left the cocoon. Time to fly away. It’s time to move forward.” He sighed, and then added, “Got a cigarette? Mine were in my jacket.”

She fished around in her oversized blue purse for a moment, and fetched out a pack of Luckys. “They’re not mine,” she said, as if worried, fending off judgment. “I only carried them because…”

“What makes you think I care?” he asked, turning his head for a moment to cast at her that deliberate, simple glance that had unarmed so many women before her. And she didn’t care how he looked at her. She didn’t give a damn, she thought to herself, as a flaming blue ray streaked out of the sky and through the roof of a church. Which church? She couldn’t remember.

“I just… I don’t know.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and a priest on fire flashed through her mind. “I just… well, you saved me.”

“No I didn’t,” he said. “You made yourself worth bringing along, that’s all. I’m not saving you. I’m saving myself.”

“I see,” she said. “And your wife?”

He furrowed his brow. “Why do you want to know?” And when she was silent too long, his face softened, and he said, softly and a little sadly, “The radio. They said… my neighborhood was incinerated first.”

A wave of panic washed over Peg… her. Nameless, worldless, unfamilied her. Her son was still in Brooklyn. She could save him, she realized. This son who didn’t know her name, her face. Who would never call her Mommy.

“Can we stop in Brooklyn?”

“No,” he said. “We have to leave the city.” And then, “Why?”

And out the window, a streaming ray of blue fire slammed across the landscape, melting concrete and splitting in half both a newspaper stand the the man inside. She was scared, now, that if she got out of the car, he would be gone when she came back. That she would burn with the rest of the city. Maternal instinct? What was that? She wanted to live. She searched inside herself for some stronger impulse, but she couldn’t find it. Anyway, she didn’t know where he lived now, with his new mommy and daddy.

“Never mind. Just get us out of New York,” she said, firmly, and for the first time in her life  she knew that she would never see her son again.

“Gladly,” he said, as nameless as she was, and shocked, but alive. He could make it like it had never happened. Like this life of his had never, ever been.  Of course he could. He’d done it before.

“There’s a bottle in the glove compartment,” he said. “Get it out.”
#

Real post coming tomorrow!

(I mean CRAP.)

My SF-reading friends warned me. Reviews and discussions online warned me. I mean, even non-SF people had told me that Twilight was a bad movie, but when it hit theaters in Korea this December, I decided I would go and see it. It took me until a day or two ago to follow through with that.

And of course, it was crap.

(I mean CRAP.)

As Ben observed to me in chat a few minutes ago, the vampires in this film (and I assume the books) are not vampires.

me: I did go to Twilight last night, though. What a piece of sh*t. I knew it would be, but I had to see it anyway. (It’s only out in cinemas here now, so…)
ben: Yeah. It certainly looked like one.
me: like a piece of sh*t?
ben: My MFA friend Matthew put it nicely…”if it lives forever, has no particular need to drink blood, walks around in the sunlight and glitters, it’s not a vampire, it’s a f*cking elf”
me: LOL yeah. Something like that. The weird thing was, I found some element of my mom in me when I watched it. But you know how moms always say, “Wow! Look at that furniture?” during a murder mystery film? That was me with the Pacific Northwest.
ben: yeah
me: “Wow! Look at the English-language bookstore.” and “Wow! Look at the snowy forest. I wish vampire boy would f*ck off so I could look at the pretty trees…”

That’s not surprising, since the author of the series, Stephenie Meyer, has claimed, in various interviews, never to have watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or to have read Dracula, or…

Well, really, what all that translates to is, Stephenie Meyer doesn’t really know anything about the vampire mythology, and isn’t interested in them.

(I mean, come on. I’m not very interested in vampires, but I’ve read at least a baker’s dozen of novels, and seen, easily, dozens of vampire films (good and awful alike), including chunks of several seasons of Buffy even when it was just running on TV. Sorry, but if you don’t read vampire novels or watch vampire films or TV shows, if you’ve never played a Vampire RPG, then you’re not interested in vampires. It’s not a sin, it’s just a descriptor. But you’re bound to write bad vampire books, if that’s the case, just like people who’ve never heard jazz before are bad jazz musicians, just like people who’ve never watched a ballet are bound to be bad ballerinas, and, well, okay, I’m going to take the point as evident.)

The funny thing was, though, that as I watched the film, I kept thinking about how things could, at just any old minute, become much more interesting simply if it were  taken over by even a mediocre GM with experience in White Wolf’s World of Darkness games series.

For example, the fact that the Indian kid who Bella used to make mud pies with — he was totally a werewolf, probably an Uktena pack, and totally was on the edge of a Rage fit when he saw Glitterboy. That kid probably could have slashed the living crap out of the whole emo-rock vampire family: if indeed they were vampires, they were obviously a bunch of 12th generation Toreador poseurs, and Dr. Paleface was a hell of a wimpy local Primogen.

Then I was thinking about those geeky kids Bella hung out with at school. Like the Asian dude who met her on the first day — and who was, in every appearance except one –”Look, Bella! A worm!”, I mean, I ask you, what put that line in the script? He’s Asian, he’s not mongoloid! — cooler than vampire-boy. I mean, the kid’s a reporter, a DJ, he’s funny… and he actually knew Bella’s name the instant he met her. He was obviously some kind of Mage, though it’s been so long I can’t remember any of the Mage Orders from Mage: The Ascension (yeah, I’m old-school, I know). Seriously, though: it was so obvious that the almost-car-accident was someone pulling some bad ass techmagic curse crap on the car. (And of course it was a black guy driving. Couldn’t have a blue-eye making that kind of mistake and losing his license!)

Seriously, “Look, a worm, Bella!” That’s the trigger where Bella was supposed to awaken, to realize she was infatuated with a worm — a pale, creepy thing that could regrow itself if cut in half — and those geeks at school are some kind of technomage kids bent on helping the First Nations Werewolf Kids on kicking the crap out of the oh-so-quee fakeassed vampires.

Not bloodlust: he just wants to rifle through Bella's purse for hair products and makeup. And hairspray.

Because, dude, they weren’t vampires at all. Not even Toreadors. They’re some kind of Changeling posers, with a Fae Inferiority complex. “Like, no, dude. I’m not a Fairy. Well, if I were, I’d be a redcap. Or a Sidhe, except that sounds like “she” and I don’t wanna seem girly in all this eye makeup, so, wait, no, um, like, no, see, I’m badass. I drink, er, well, deer blood. And I shimmer in the sunlight. Like that Barbie doll you covered with glitter nail polish when you were seven. What do you mean, vampires hate the sun? Burst into flames? Huh? No, hey, wait, I wanna drink your blood, but, oh, see, my sexy angst? See, I’m so hot for your…. er, blood, Bella!”

Honey, did you borrow my eye-liner again?

I could make more fun of the eye-liner, — I had a great line about comparing how much more he wears even than Bella’s white trash mom –  but the bottom line is, if you think of Bella not as some skinny white high school chick in a cheeseball romance movie, but instead as a Player Character in an RPG — a role-playing game — her missteps become obvious. She’s human. She’s alright looking. She has no reason to go out and become a vampire, so until such point as Emo-Vamp-Fairy-Glitter-Boy actually turns her, the real key to adventure in this town is to hang with the more interesting Supernaturals in town.

The Geek Magelings at the school; the Werewolves out on the reservation. Or, hell, I bet Bella could even meet some really interesting Wraiths back home in Phoenix. Dating a vampire? What, did she pick character traits skills like Making Out and Smooching and Applying Makeup and Slow Dancing?

The problem is there’s no adventure for Bella. Bella is not a Player Character in this game. If you’ve never played an RPG, that simply means that she’s not a real character: she’s one of those cardboard cutouts used by the guy running the world, to get the interesting characters to do something. Bella has no skills, no powers, no adventures: she’s a thing to be loved, protected, sexed up, and hunted. The only thing she does is succumb to the  romantic lure of her “vampire” boyfriend.

There’s plenty of adventure for her Glitter Emo Fairy boyfriend and his folks, but what’s incongruous is that, seriously, if this were an RPG, the player running the main character, Bella, would do just as well to leave her d10 (her weird RPG-gamer dice) at home, to stay home, in fact, and just get status updates on the character by text message on her cell phone. Bella no weapons at her disposal, no dilemmas beyond the one predetermined for her — how to fall in love with a vampire who somehow already loves you but is trying to avoid you? — and no real choices to make.

This, I imagine, is precisely why so many women who are just a bit older (and wiser) are pointing at Buffy and saying to younger Twilight fans, “Nah, honey, check this out.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer works well as an RPG setup because Buffy’s a character. Willow’s a character. Giles is a character. Angel’s a character. The character with the fewest useful skills (in what is an unmistakable reversal of the Gothic Triangle with the helpless female in danger) is Xander Harris, and even he comes into his own after a while.

Whereas Bella just gets protected, and loved, and pledges herself to a Glitter Fairy after, what, how many weeks of awkward silences and avoidance, and a couple of weird dates? Can you see Bella with a chain gun or a magic spellbook or, hell, even a set of fangs of her own by the time installment two of this series rolls around? No, you can’t. If this were an RPG, the player running Bella would probably drive the red truck off a cliff just so she could go ahead and roll herself up a new character with something interesting going for her besides what’s supposed to be taken as romance.

I know, I know, it’s a chick flick, it’s a romance, right? But if it actually were romantic — if there were something kind of attractive about that love-story plot — I could sort of overlook the trashed-out supernatural stuff. But the romance was amateurish, awkward, badly thought out, and actually downright off-putting, in a bloody drunken car-crash sort of way: I couldn’t stop watching to see whether it could get any worse. It’d be one thing if the vampires were messed-up but the romance plot worked. But the romance plot was all, “Oooh, he’s a total prick and that makes him mysterious! And because he’s mysterious, this must be love! Love! WUVZ!!!”

That said, something in it seems to speak to a lot of young women. The film was certainly popular, and when I was walking out of the theater, some young ladies — that is, college-aged women, I mean — ran to catch the elevator. My holding the door for them spurred them to make conversation, so they asked me what I thought, and I told them the honest truth: “It was TERRIBLE! HORRIBLE! AWFUL!” They laughed, and told me they thought it was prety good, that the vampire was cute, and the romance was interesting. Their English and my Korean precluded any deeper discussion in terms of, like, how the vampire boy acting like a total prick through most of the film made him attractive, or how Bella’s over-the-top melodramatic professions of love to him could be received with anything but a squirm, or the fact that the handling of the vampire stuff was just, er, dumb.

But what did come across was that the film spoke to them, and it spoke to them because of the romance plot more than anything. And that gave me pause, because in Twilight, the romance was all so cardboard and clunky and, well, in the film anyway, so unexamined. (There was none of the anxious, er, “step back and think about this, kiddo” that we saw when this plot was explored by Buffy and Angel.) But those two young women, and many more besides them, seemed to have responded to exactly that in such a positive way.

And I can’t help but think it should give us all pause.

Puzzled, or nervous, or awkward pause.

(EDIT: Actually, it also seems the norm in movies, but in a different way: long brooding shots, action scenes five minutes too long, and hyperemotional crying is something we see both on TV melodrama and in films, but I’m particularly thinking of comedy at the moment.)

Or, rather, not “why” but “how it became the case that…” One example is the various gag TV shows like Uchassa and Gag Concert. These are, roughly speaking, the Korean equivalent of Saturday Night Live, except that they’re, well… more cartoon-like? For one thing, everyone, but especially the men, has a bizarre haircut. (Men with what can only be described as a short blunt-cut are often the stars of the comedic scene.) While I’m assured that the wordplay and such is actually quite brilliant, the whole performance strikes one who cannot follow the language quite well enough as, well… as the kind of thing aimed at children. And, indeed, the fact that these are precisely the kinds of shows that elementary schoolkids select as their favorites does little to dissuade me from the sense that the heights of Korean comedy are pretty, er, unsophisticated.

I’m not saying, “Why ain’t there a Korean Lenny Bruce?!?!?” (or Bill Hicks, or George Carlin). I think it’s pretty obvious that such a comedic tradition, if indeed one did exist before the dictatorships, would not have emerged unscathed. (I think any such critical, anti-authoritarian comedic tradition that might have existed in the Joseon era (say, of the sort we glimpsed in the meh-worthy film The King and the Clown) could well have survived Japanese rule, but not Park and Chun’s. I’m sure some nitbrain would call me a communist for saying so, but I don’t care. Fending off communism doesn’t necessitate — or excuse — completely destroying all freedom of thought and crushing diversity within your nation.)

Anyway, I’m posting this not to say that Korean comedy shows are all dumb. There have been films I’ve seen which had a hint of black humour of relatively noteworthy sophistication. (The President’s Last Bang was one, though even I was often perplexed at the idea it was comedy.)

I’m just wondering whether someone who is fluent in both Korean and English, and who is familiar with both these sorts of Korean comedy shows, and with good examples of Western comedy, can tell me whether I’m right in suspecting these shows are just silly, or missing something, or whether they’re essentially dumb, not no more dumb than, say SNL is these days. (Which is pretty dumb, but remember, SNL 20-30 years ago wasn’t so dumb at all. Or am I glorifying Eddie Murphy, Victoria Jackson, and the rest of that lot?)

Anyone? Insights?

• Some much-needed documents are on their way here.
• I received my copy of Interzone 219, with some very fine art illustrating it., and a cheque for my story, too.
• My students in one class — the graphic novel class — volunteered to work during the first week or so of post-semester break, in order to do a good job finishing up their project, rather than rush through and do a so-so job before exams. I was quite stunned. They jokingly asked for extra credit, but the best I can do is give them a pizza party or take them out somewhere. Something like that.
• I’ve finished tidying the student-made subtitles for Such a Long Journey, the film we’re watching tomorrow evening in the make-up class. And a damned fine film it is — the “Real Mommy-Daddy kiss” scene is precious, yes, but I like it anyway, and the Tower of Silence scene is just… wow. If only the DVD had subtitles on it. Or even captions. Since there weren’t, and since I ordered it for the class, I had the students do up subtitles. I knew it’d be a lot of work

  We’re discussing the first couple of chapters of the book in class next week, basically looking at what happens to “historical novels” in a multicultural society — I’m going to argue that Such a Long Journey unfolds chunks of what is now, for a considerable enough segment of Canada, “Canadian history” in that it’s the history of a segment of Canada’s population, and that one of the real features of multiculturalism in its literary incarnation is that it blurs all the boundary lines like what it means to be Canadian, or how far the roots of “Canada” can be imagined to reach. After all, it’s relevant to the larger whole of Canada because Canada is impacted by its Indian presence; and for that matter, that it also is relevant to Korean history to the degree that there is an Indian presence here, however marginal and disrespected in general it may be at the moment.

  Note to self: I really must get around to reading A Fine Balance at some point. (Let alone more recent novels… I’m okay with being a decade and a half behind.)

• I’m mostly on top of my work-related tasks. Some tabulation to go, yes, and some writing assignments to check-mark and comment on, but otherwise I’m mostly in the home stretch.

I’m still going to be too busy to do much creative work until January, but I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I see the Island, and its banks are fair… wave of school-work, take me there.

(Extra points to the first commenter — on my site, or on LJ — who can name which poem by which poet I horridly bastardized above.)

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “You can have it. But what does it mean?”

What it means is that I am trying to have fun while working on an academic paper. Always a dangerous route. What it signifies is the phenomenon wherein someone who knows absolutely jack squat about SF, or seems to know jack squat, treats it as a kind of grab-bag of random, decontextualized tropes (often undifferentiated from fantasy, horror, myths, video games, sex-comedy, and so forth), and when things seem as if they may get boring, the dolt reaches into the grab bag and pulls out a random trope, and tosses it into his or her creative mix.

Not uncommon in big-budget SF films, it is also a predictably occurring (though, it must be admitted, non-universal) feature in SFnal novels by people who have never actually bothered to read any real SF novels.

Here’s the ugly tangly passage stretch where I unpack this monstrosity of a neologism:

One common problem–often noted by SF fans and scholars worldwide, and even among even a significant number of non-SF-consuming anglophones–is the notion that SF is a form or extension of children’s literature; that is, something not to be “taken seriously.” There are different reasons for this: SF’s investment in fictional estrangement, which outsiders do not always perceive as cognitive–that is, related to serious issues worthy of intellectual exploration; its link to pedagogical use, as in Chinese (Huss) and Western curricula; or even the ineradicable sense of playfulness often evident in even the most accomplished and intelligent works of SF. It is understandable why an outsider–a non-SF person, as we sometimes call them–might perceive SF not as a sophisticated literature of the imagination, but rather as a random assortment of interchangeably “silly” or fantastical tropes contiguous to fantasy, horror, myth, and so forth, with as many special effects as the budget can bear.

There are several basic responses to this dilemma. The first is to go with the outsider’s impression, and treat SF (and other genres, like fantasy, horror, etc.) not as a genre of ideas, but as a grab-bag of random ingredients to be thrown at the audience. Occasionally, as in films like Donggam (Ditto, 2001) and Siworae (Il Mare, also 2001), such tropes are seemingly thrown in for variety, a slight new twist on an old genre like romantic melodrama. If these are SF movies, they are only technically so, for the SFnal trope is generally just a vehicle for a good cry. But in other cases, as in the work of Nam Gi-woong, such as Daehakno-yeseo maechoon-hadaka tomaksalhae danghan yeogosaeng ajik Daehakno-ye Issda (Killing Machine, 2000) and Samgeori Museutang Sonyeoeui Choehu (Never Belongs to Me, 2005) the result is more like a trope-salad: a jumbled assortment of random genre conventions that don’t connect together, match, or resolve into any discernibly intelligible pattern. Cyborgs with penis-guns stalk the streets alongside half-human beastmean, while witches and mad scientists convene hide behind closed doors.

Yes, my friends, penis guns. PENIS GUNS. I am not making this up! (The penis gun actually appears in both films, though more prominently — and on a man, not a reanimated teenaged schoolgirl hooker–in the latter film mentioned, Never Belongs to Me, which is nothing like the title in Korean–my vague guess is something like, The Final End of the Three-Way Intersection Mustang Chick, or maybe The Awful Fate of… or something like that. Yeah, doesn’t make sense to me, either. And it is probably the worst movie I’ve ever Alt+Right-Arrowed my way through. That’s a useful shortcut key in my media-player of choice, VLC.)  But wait, there’s more! The proverbial money shot comes next:

But probably the most expensive trope salad Korea has ever produced is Jang Sun-Woo’s  Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002)…

Yes, I am not a fan of the movie. It’s bizarre fun the first time, somewhat eyebrow raising the second time, and boring after that.

On the other hand, I of the Korean SF films I haven’t mentioned, which are worth watching, at the top of the list comes a film I never saw because… well, because the poster for a totally different movie with the same name (which came out only a couple of years later) looks outright horrible:

Nabi

This is not a movie I would want to see. Well, actually... no. No.

The Nabi I’m talking about is not that film. It’s a low-budget, indie film with SFnal themes. For a review of it, look here. It’s pretty on the money.

In terms of the film as an SF piece, it’s interesting: I always go into indie SF movies with a little hesitation. I like Hal Hartley — a lot, as in, Henry Fool (which screen in Seoul recently, but I missed it) has given me the most amazing, bizarre moments of joy whenever I watched it. (It really is the ultimate English-major’s movie.) But the more SFnal Hartley’s movies become, the more they slide towards parody. I got a kick out of The Girl from Monday, but it being the third very spec-fic film I’d seen by Hal Hartley film — after The Book of Life and No Such Thing — I started to find the whole indie-film aesthetic a bit… well, it struck me as SF beng made by people who liked the notion of using SF to say certain things, but who probably hadn’t read any SF, and were relying on the old cinematic tropes– often the cheesiest and oldest — to say the same sorts of things that they wanted to say.

Sort of like, well, if someone started singing songs about ganja and decided that this was reggae, if you get my drift. A reggae song is about much more than ganja, a song about ganja that isn’t reggae isn’t bloody well reggae, and SF is about more than the few tropes that it sometimes seems every indie SF filmmaker seems attracted to. (That said, Hal Hartley’s films still gives me a good time whenever I watch one, and I don’t expect that to change.)

All of that is to say that Nabi is a very interesting film, for an indie-SF movie. I really don’t mean that as a pejorative. It’s just… well, you need to be in the right mood for it. The loss of memories is essentially a Korean SF trope — it features in so many SF flicks here, really, for obvious historical/sociopolitical reasons, just like how so much of Korean SF is focused on past traumas and history, not the future — but it’s handled interestingly, here, in a way that somewhat presages the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The future Korea is, to me, a little more than barely recognizable (as Darcy Paquet puts it in the interview linked above) but the acid rain and lead poisoning are interesting cinematically; though vaguely unbelievable, they do open up interesting doors as far as the characters interacting, and Paquet is right that there is something elemental, something about the deepest core of humanness, that comes across in certain moments in this film.

All the performances are very good, and Kim Ho Jung will break your heart, not when she’s looking sad, but when she smiles briefly and seems okay for a moment.

By the way, Fay Grim? A sequel to Henry Fool? This exists? Whaaaaaaaaaat? Nobody told me about this! Damn, I could have seen that, too, but I missed it. Ah well… when there’s a will…

Though I have trawled through the books I’ve recently read for over a half an hour now, I cannot now find the passage that sticks out in my mind where an SF critic points out that American readings of Gojira, while they tend to correctly grasp the political subtext of the film — anxieties about nuclear weaponry, loss of colonial territory after the war, the threat of American power — miss out other, subtler aspects, such as the fact that the dynamic of “survivor’s guilt” could easily account for the fascination with a tremendously destructive monster attacking one’s homeland. (Another example of something Western viewers don’t always pick up is one Thomas Schnellbächer (cited above) notes about the tense push-and-pull of retrogressive and progressive notions of nation and identity and power in the film (34-35) — evident in the way the monster Gojira arises as a result of American nuclear testing, but also arises on an island from within the former Japanese empire, only one example of many in the film).

While The Host is accessible enough for non-Korean audiences to follow — and for Korean audiences to read only in a superficial way, if they like — there is a great deal more resonance to be explored in the film. A tiny example is the fact that Nam-Joo’s archery skills — intendedly or not — actually hearken back to the fact that — yes, just like elves in D&D — Koreans were — in Chinese sources — apparently renowned for their archery skills, at least according to one book of mine — a text with tons of historic photos, titled 사진으로 보는 朝鮮時代  [조선시대] 생활과 풍속 (Yi Dynasty through Pictures) Vol. I (Seomoondang: Seoul, 1988) which presented this picture along with the discussion of Korean archery (on page 119):

부인의 활쏘기: Women's [or <em>Ladies'</em>] Archery Practice

… and made the claim that Korean women were renowned for being outstanding archers:

활은무기이기도 했지만 여성과도 가까운 존재였당. 그러나 적어도 이만큼 활쏘기를 즐기려면 서만충아낙으로선 어림없는 일이었다.

I (with a little help) render this as:

Although archery involves deadly weapons, it was closely associated with ladies. However, it was usually difficult for women who were not of a certain degree of means to have the opportunity to enjoy such training.

That’s an interesting resonance which adds some depth of character to Nam-Joo’s character, and which is not available to Western viewers of the film. (Or, I should add, a number of Korean viewers. When I mentioned that I’d come across this claim, some of my [Korean] students were surprised to hear about any association between women and archery in Korea, or that the Chinese had claimed Koreans to have been good archers at all, though everyone was aware that archery is a big deal in the Korean sporting world.) It would probably be going too far to claim she emblematic of Korea, but it does help bolster the sense that her family — with her included — are more than just characters, that they stand for something greater than just any old family who happened to experience the bad luck of having their kid stolen away from them by a river monster.

But I’d like to turn to the river monster first, and try to tease out what that thing is all about, before looking too closely at the Park family.

The one singular characteristic of the monster is its relationship with the concept of transformation. After all, it is istelf a mutant: the dumping of chemicals into the river — on American orders, yes, but carried out by a Korean — is the origin of its transformation. This is driven home when, after the monster’s assault, Gang-Du is eating something from a can. On the side of the can, it says, “BAI-DING” or something like that, and this is a food product that I’ve seen plenty of times, but never bought myself — though we do have a tin of it in our cupboard! (Lime says she has plans for it, though not the usual kind: although a variety of uses are possible, these snails are commonly used for anju, meaning side dishes consumed whilst drinking alcohol.) When you see him eating it, it becomes apparent that this thing –  — is the normal form that mutated to become the monster we saw earlier –

I noted above that the director himself agreed about a degree of similarity between Gang-du and the monster, and this is one of them: Gang-du eats small snails, and in a strange reversal, a giant snail eats people (including his daughter). The similarties are otherwise rather numerous: he and the monster are both awkward, clumsy, and somehow not quite “right.”Gang-du seems mentally deficient, and not really responsible enough to run a confectionery stand –

– let alone father a child:

… a suspicion which is finally confirmed when Gang-du takes the wrong girl’s hand while fleeing from the monster:

and his daughter is captured by the horror:

Gang-du, of course, turns from a clown to a tragic figure when his daughter is presumed dead, and then becomes a heroic v(if still goofy) underdog when it turns out she is alive, and awaiting rescue. Still, if Gang-du were just an idiot, that would be relatively uninteresting. He isn’t, however: the identity between him and the monster actually go much deeper. We learn this when, frustrated by his siblings’ treatment of his eldest son, Gang-du’s father tells his other children a story.

Just just a story, a confession, and the story of how Gang-du became the way he is. It is a pathetic tale of neglect, both lightened and made more tragic by the fact that Gang-du’s siblings are soon sleeping instead of listening to the story of how their now-stupid elder brother was once a very clever little boy, left to fend for himself and “do seori” (let’s say, “borrow” in that sense that means never giving back) food from nearby farms. Just like the monster, Gang-du was transformed in his early life by a “toxic environment” — the broken family of hiw own childhood. And as his father said, “something broke” inside his head. The chaos we saw at the funeral:

… pays off as it becomes obvious that this family is already, irreparably, broken, even as they struggle to maintain the shreds of integrity they have and save their family’s most vulnerable member.

Now, far be it from me to push this too hard, as it’s really just a tangent, but I’ve seen a lot of broken families in the Korean short fiction I’ve read. One of the patterns I’ve seen — enough to feel like it’s some kind of literary convention — is the us of broken families to represent the division between North and South in Korea. I don’t think that’s what is going on in this story, mind you — any more than I think Yonggary — a giant dragon-like beast that rises out of the ocean — has anything to do with Japanese guilt about imperialism and conduct during the war. Rather, I’m just noting that broken families are one of those tropes that we see a lot in modern Korean literature — and film, for that matter — and that they seem to have accreted a kind of aura of significance and meaning, especially a political one.

The characters are very interestingly selected, by the way. Nam-Joo, played by Bae Doo-na, is quite decidedly not the sort of character who is usually tasked with being the heroine in a Korean film. That is to say, Nam-Joo is not a pretty woman. Not that we would say the same of Bae:

Nothing to sniff at, as I’m sure you’ll agree! Yet Bae’s character — who, albeit, goes from believing her neice is dead, to hunting the giant monsterthat had kidnapped the child — is most definitely made up to look unpretty — there’s a conscious, conspicuous effort put into it:

… and at times, one cannot help but wonder if what is being done here is some kind of hearkening back to a time before the media and fashion industries — so prominent today — had become as entrenched as they now are, and before female Korean stars were getting massive amounts of plastic surgery, dressing they way they do, and wearing enough makeup to make even a group of teenagers push the buttons of a surprisingly large number of adult men. Nam-Joo may well be not just be a refiguration of the female archers of old Korea, but also iconic of those women who somehow struggled to hold their lives together without falling back on their looks, or selling themselves as so many — enough to make the sex trade very nearly competitive with agriculture in this country — have ended up doing.

And by the way, Nam-joo is downright bad-ass, when she finally gets over her hesitation issues. She’s the family member I credit most with the death of the monster, simply because she is a stone [monster-]killer. Look at that expressionless face:

Nam-Joo’s brother, on the other hand, is camouflaged — he wears a suit at the beginning, and looks like he could pull off fitting in the corporate world of Korea much better — but he’s no real action hero, and indeed, he’s not very much of a man at the beginning of the story. Indeed, the first thing we see of him is not his face, but his hand, and in it, bottle of soju — the hard liquor that is, again, the emblematic Korean liquor:

The next thing we see is him guzzling the stuff as he approaches the photo of his supposedly dead neice:

While I have no doubt some guys do go and get hammered on soju when there’s a death in the family — just as some guys go get hammered on Wild Turkey or cheap vodka, depending on where they live — I think there’s more going on in this scene than just that, too.

As I’ve promised to explore in my (still ongoing, but backburnered) series on Gin Lane and Soju-Ro, soju is fascinating as an emblem of Korea — in this context especially so because it is also a beverage that has been completely redefined by the industrialization and modernization of the country. As Wikipedia notes (citing this article by Ines Cho):

From 1965 until 1991, in order to alleviate rice shortages, the Korean government prohibited the traditional direct distillation of soju from fermented grain. Instead, highly distilled ethanol from any source was mixed with water and flavorings to create diluted soju. Although the prohibition has now been lifted, cheap soju continues to be made this way.

Ethanol, of course, was an industrial byproduct. This is significant because the concern over rice shortages was nothing new: Cho notes periodic bans on soju-making during the Joseon Dynasty for similar reasons, but they were probably ineffective (just as the ban on using rice to make liquor was apparently ignored in the countryside in Korea from 1965-1991) and didn’t last. Notable also is the fact that soju was (effectively, through heavy taxation) banned by the Japanese colonial government — a ban that, again, did not last. Thepeople wanted their soju, and they would have it. The only change in 1965 was that soju could be had without using rice to make it: industrialization made that possible, because industrialization meant industrial byproducts, and that’s essentially what soju was (and I’m under the impression that, in many cases, despite the additives, the cheap stuff still is).

But I’ll save the finer discussions of history and booze for later posts in the series on soju and gin. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s simply important to note that soju is, and long has been, the drink favored especially by the working class (as opposed to CEOs who, as much as they may partake in soju-fests, tend to go drinking in expensive places and pay millions of won for bottles of foreign liquors like whiskey, as a function of status). Soju is, significantly, a drink that was transformed by industrialization and modernization, and to add one more startling transformation to our list in the film, the iconographic green soju bottle itself makes another startling transformation — to a weapon against the monster:

The fact that he is aided by an (obviously alcoholic) homeless man is only more reason to consider that soju, in the logic of this film, is iconographically a class marker, but what’s far more important about this tranformation of the soju bottle is that it also invokes poilitical history explicitly, visually. Nam-il was a member of the democracy movement, a protester back in the 1980s, and he speaks of his past as a sacrifice, as having given up his youth to bring Korean into the democratic era, a sacrifice he feels has not been rewarded. And in the end, his weapon fails, just as some would argue the democracy movement failed to truly transform the government.

Not that all demonstrators have lost out. Nam-il’s “friend,” a fellow ex-demonstrator who had gone corporate, gotten a job with a major telecom company, and tries to sell out Nam-il (and his sister) to the authorities for money, is a pretty strong satiric jab at the idea that the whole democracy movement was unimpeachable and well-intended, but at the same time, one cannot help but feel that Nam-il represents simultaneously the elements in the democracy movement who both (a) truly cared about democratization in Korea and (b) were used by all kinds of crooked types (like Nam-il’s friend) to catapult a few into positions of power and wealth quite comparable to their previous oppressors, the corporate and political elites who, under the dictators who came after the Korean War, ran the country with impunity.

Nam-il’s friend’s betrayal is, of course a cynically predictable, and relatively comic, moment, but it also signifies a great deal in a political sense, and it is also worth noting that this is a case of another transformation: a protester against the sysrem has become a (very eager) cog in the system.

Likewise, Nam-il’s failure to kill the monster with his last Molotov cocktail, which he drops to the ground, seems significant to me as an extension of the same political critique. The monster, then, really does resemble the establishment that, in his much younger days, he fought against, and which nobody quite managed to kill. For, after all, when democracy was ushered in, the old regime became a party, and the competition, over time, began to resemblethe party in ways that resonate powerfully with Nam-il’s friend and his decisions.

And that’s what I think needs saying about the monster: it is a transformed creature, but one surrounded in a sea (or, at least, a river) of transformations, and in a sense indeed springing from those transformations. Along with all the smaller but ubiquitous transformations mentioned above, we have a tyrannical dictatorship that has transformed into a less-tyrannical but no-less-corrupt (perhaps even more corrupt) and no-less-callous democratic government (with all of its trappings, the police and medical systems and under-the-thumb media, in tow). Our setting is in the posh area of a city that has been transformed from a third-world capital to a major metropolis, complete with a multiethnic population (featured much more prominently in those first scenes in Yeouido than I’ve ever seen in any Korean film before):

But at the same time that all this political critique is undeniably present in the film, the focus is, as so many have pointed out, on the story of a family. A broken family, with all the political resonance that seems to carry in Korean literary and cinematic culture… but a family nonetheless. Since nearly every character seems to be transformed in this film — including a few I haven’t yet discussed, but I’ll get to, I promise — we could ask ourselves: what transformation has the family itself gone through?

Well, its brokenness is nothing so spectacularly dramatic as in those (mostly less-recent) Korean stories I’m thinking of, where, during the Korean war, a husband and wife or brother and sister are separated by some strange turn of events that symbolizes the political division between North and South Korea — complete with the moving reunion of the pair at the end of the story as a poetical utopian evocation of Korean reunification. I’m fully aware that this might be a trope that ends up in works more commonly chosen for translation into English. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if this explicit political content were in fact part of the reason such works seem to win the awards that sometimes serve as the basis for selection for translation and publication. But the number of times I’ve seen the trope crop up suggests to me that the analogy between a broken family and a broken nation has become as natural to Korean readers (and film-goers) in the same way that the hackneyed metaphorical meaning of rain as “new beginnings” is obvious to literate anglophones.

Still, the broken family is not, in this case, one that can be repaired: Hyun-Seo’s mother seems to have just run off after having the baby, and never sees her daughter (or, we assume, Gang-du) again. The saying,”북녀남남” (Buk Nyeo Nam Nam — “Northern women, Southern men”) comes to mind — if Hyun-Seo’s mother is emblematic of North Korea, it is in the sense that she is pointedly absent, and utterly unwilling to reunite with Gang-du. She has abandoned the future, something we could easily argue North Korea also has done.

But there’s another way to look at this. If we also see Gang-du’s extended family, instead, as being already-transformed, as the product of a transformation that preceded the beginning of the film, we can see our way a little more clearly. And the transformation I’m talking about is the transformation of South Korea itself in the time since it was split apart from the North, a transformation that took place in the very lifetime of the characters depicted (though it was close to complete by the time Hyun-Seo would have been born).

The transformation I’m talking about is one that — significantly — is termed “The Miracle on the Han [River].” Which, as you probably know, is the river that runs through Seoul, and the river from which the monster in The Host emerges. It’s the economic and industrial modernization of Korea that happened from 1961 — the coup of Park Chung Hee — to the 1997 Asian financial crisis. In Korea, it’s called something quite similar: 한강의 기적 — “Hangangeui Kijeok” — and it essentially turned South Korea from an agrarian society into a modern, increasingly post-industrial society. That we should see a monster emerge from a river so rhetorically associated with transformation, in a film where transformations of all kinds flow thick and fast, suggests we should look at this bigger, more generation transformation for clues about how to read the movie.

(And, tangentially, while I play mental word associations with various words and names in the film, I find it interesting that the first syllable of Gang-du’s name is a homophone with the Korean word for “river”; likewise, Nam-joo and Nam-il’s names both contain the syllable Nam, which is a homophone with the Korean word for “south” — and both have been shown above to be emblematic of the South. Whether this is intentional is something I daren’t say, but it is tantalizing, and I’m sure more such things can be found. But then, one must also be skeptical of such fine-tuned readings. All I can say is that it is interesting to find such resonances even down to the characters’ names.)

The thing to notice is that the people in Gang-du’s family, had they been living a generation or (two or three) before, would likely have been peasant farmers living in a village in some random corner of the country, under the boot of Japan, or under the boot of the Joseon Dynasty’s local representative, depending on how far back you go. And I daresay that a lot of the things we see the Korean government doing in The Host — lying to its citizens and the international community, fabricating news, denying the basic human rights of citizens, ignoring their pleas for aid or even the freedom to take care of their own families, empowering thoroughly corrupt private business a staggering degree of power over the lives of citizens –like when Gang-du’s family must bribe a local businessman to get access to the riverside so they can search for Hyun-Seo:

– and enjoying themselves while their handiwork was being done by others — one thinks of the barbecue outside the trailer where Gang-du’s brain is being biopsied –

– then we can see that, whatever transformations have happened, the family is pretty much trying to stay in as close to one piece as possible.

Which brings us to the question of who the “bad guys” are. Certain commentators have repeatedly argued that, because of the opening of the film and its use of the (popularly exaggerated, and minor compared to relatively poorly-publicized incidents perpetrated by Koreans) dumping of formalyn into the sewage system by Koreans at the command of a civilian American mortuary worker. (You can read the whole rant here, if you like; it’s the one at ROKDRop that I linked it in part 1 of this post as well). Others have wholly dismissed the idea that the film (or these images) should be read as anti-American, noting that a great deal of harshness is handed out to all kinds of people — ex-democracy protesters, the Korean police, the Korean government, and so on. (Again, Michael’s previously-cited response can be read here.)

In my opinion, both of these readings are too simplistic. It’s futile to deny that many of the Americans are presented in a negative light. However, it’s also foolish to ignore than many of the Koreans in the film who occupy positions of power — that is, like the American military officers and medical experts who are, almost all, implicitly in positions of relative power in a Korean context — are presented in an even more negative light. Even more embarrassingly, a number of other Koreans are shown to stoop and fawn before both. Not just the Korean who obeys orders that the audience is encouraged to see as bad orders, at the beginning of the film, but also the doctors who make a show of being professional — they suddenly stop gossiping, switch on their equipment, and stand awkwardly at attention, reminiscent more than anything of little boys pretending to be real grown-up doctors — when a representative of the American CDC shows up in the trailer where Gang-du is being held:

And no, the token nice white dude who sacrifices his life to help save the lives of some Koreans doesn’t erase that many Americans look like bad guys in this film. Then again, Private Donald is dressed pretty much like any other [Korean] Yeouido visitor, and his relationship with his girlfriend seems, from the few moments we see of it, heartfelt. She pleads for him to not run into the monster’s vicinity, which is a hell of a step up from every [romantic] foreigner-Korean relationship I’ve ever seen in a Korean movie. (Usually, the girl is either a prostitute or a so-called “slut,” and seems sad or mentally mixed-up. Donald’s girlfriend seems pretty much like any average Korean girl of the same age, except that she seemingly (from her accent) speaks English fluently. Kudos to Director Bong for giving us what may be the first non-psycho Western/Korean couple in Korean film. May be, note. There might be an earlier case I’ve missed!)

And while I am discussing misinterpretations: it’s breathtaking how far off the mark ROKDrop is when he implies that the anti-Agent Yellow protesters are lionized for their actions. Yes, Agent Yellow is an obvious send-up of Agent Orange:

– and frankly a well-deserved one, considering the horrors that the US use of Agent Orange abroad led to. (And did you know the stuff as used in Korea in the late 60s, too? Yes, that nasty little secret’s been out for a few years now, I guess.) The histrionics about verbal attacks on America — so common among a small number of Americans here — are a distraction. Bickering about whether or not the film is anti-American is much less interesting than asking what the use of images of Americans means in this film.

While I’m at it, I’d also like to note that, in this film, it would be ridiculous to claim (as ROKDrop implies) that protesters are being praised. Not only has protest culture been scathingly criticized already in the form of the betrayal of Nam-il by a fellow ex-protestor, but most of the younger generation of anti-Agent Yellow protesters flee as soon as it comes to putting their own butts on the line: a massive crowd of protesters suddenly dwindles to a handful of souls just as Agent Yellow is released.

You would have to be outright searching for something to criticize, and would have to have left your sense of humor back at home on the base, not to find this both hilarious and scathing as a send-up of Korea’s so-called “tin pot culture” (heats up quickly, but cools off just as quickly). Bong isn’t praising protestors, he’s mocking them as viciously as he mocks almost everyone else, including Americans.

So if it’s less than useful to rant about — or to excuse — the depiction of this or that America in the film, how are we to make sense of the obvious cinematic rhetoric about American presence in Korea. Well, to me, the image I cited above is particularly relevant:

What we see here is the absolute nexus of real power in Korea as many Koreans of Gang-du’s class and background would perceive it: Americans in military uniform, and Koreans in suits. These two groups are, in their purest sense — as in this image — distilled into types, into vague, unparticularized forms, because they are not characters, in the sense that Donald is. They are emblems of a status quo that, indeed, existed in the past and still haunts Korea today, no matter how many Donalds there are, no matter how much time has passed.

You go on and get you brains drilled out, Gang-du. We’ll be out here barbecuing burgers and weiners and networking! Okay? Good.

The American characters in this film, aside from Donald, are not strictly speaking “American.” They’re rather an inextricable part of a complex web of figures — the foreign CDC man, the Korean cop, the foreign mortuary boss, the Korean mortuary worker, the crowd of suits and soldiers having a nice Sunday barbecue while Hyun-Seo starves in a monster’s lair in the sewers by the Han River — that emblematize the hermetically sealed relationships of power that comprised life for the Korean masses, powerful business owners, the Korean military, and the American military and government during the dictatorships under which the Miracle of the Han River occurred. Almost all American presence in the film is explicitly linked to Korean power — oppressive Korean power, specifically an oppressive, deceitful Korean government that fabricates a story about a virus, that doesn’t blanch at having citizens lobotomized for the sake of its lies, that in fact does everything it can to ruin the lives of Gang-du’s family for no good reason at all. These and all of the government’s other insanities all represent the two-faced nature of the governments which ruled Korea in those years: one face smiling out at the world, and the other staring impassively, blocking many people from even criticizing its very real, very important injustices, abuses, and inadequacies.

The barbecue scene, in other words, is a brief glimpse of the Old Boy’s Club of Power in South Korea, one that, however it may discomfit us, and no matter what justifications we may wish to offer, included or was linked to powerful Americans. Gang-du is not welcome there, and he does not linger, but he knows that even the transgression of fighting for his own life, and his daughter’s, is inexcusable in their eyes. (This is why he needs a hostage.)

Little wonder then, really, that the chase scene where the cop tries to stop the family from escaping the hospital went over so well with audiences:

… since there is, and has been, long-seething discontent with the arrogance, ineffectiveness, lack of compassion and respect given to citizens by the police in many parts of Korea — resentment less pronounced in the countryside and among older people, according to this survey, but resentment that, in public and online discussions has flared in certain instances to the point of a public relations disaster in which high level officials or, recently, the President, had to show up at the police station to remind people to do their goddamned jobs.

Resentment and — unsurprisingly — a strong sense of the police as linked to or part of the bureaucratic institutions of the government, rather than as upholders of the law and the peace in their local communities. This is yet another facet of the power structure that Bong is constantly attacking in the film, such that by the end, you’re left wondering whether it’s the Korean government and all of its tentacles — business, the medical system, the police — who comprise the real monster of the movie. And if you think Bong Joon-Ho has hammered it over your head already, perhaps it’s overkill for me to note that Yeouido, which the all-important Wonhyo Bridge near which the monster lives is located, is… well, I’ll let Wikipedia describe it for you:

Yeouido is a large island next to the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. It is Seoul’s main business and investment banking district. Its 8.4 square kilometers are home to some 30,988 people. The island is located in the Yeongdeungpo-gu district of Seoul, and largely corresponds to the precinct of Yeouido-dong. The island contains the National Assembly Building, where the National Assembly of South Korea meets, the huge Yoido Full Gospel Church, the 63 Building, and the headquarters of LG, KBS, and MBC, and the Korea Exchange Center.

Yeouido is, in other words, a site where power in Korea (governmental, religious, media, and corporate power alike) are concentrated. If you’re anything like me, there’s only one possible reading for the notion that a giant monster lives there, and it’s not flattering to any of the above.

And to say nothing about America, the government that after all supported the same dictatorships that ruled through the majority of the Miracle on the Han, would simply be remiss. Of course, those who see the movie as anti-American are likely to see America’s involvement in Korean history through rose-colored glasses, just as some Koreans are likely to see it through nightmare-tinted sunglasses. The truth is somewhere in between, with great dollops of both, but for society’s losers, the whole mess of it — American power, rich Koreans, military officials, cops, doctors — melds into one nasty, seething, toxic lump of oppressiveness. Toxic as the HanRiver is at the beginning of the film.

And society did have its losers. The so-called “Miracle on the Han,” of course, is primarily understood as an economic miracle. In any economic transformation, however, there are all kinds of other changes that must occur. For example, “From 1970 to 1990 the city’s population more than doubled to a panic-inducing 10 million“  — a transformation that, of course, should bring to mind the gargantuan size-change in the monster, as well as its propensity to consume people, mentioned above.

In every such environment-in-transformation, there are always winners and losers. The novels (or, rather, collections of linked short stories, which they both are) that I mentioned in part 1, which I am currently reading, A Distant and Beautiful Place (원미동 사람들) by Yang Kwi-Ja and The Dwarf (난장이가 쏘아올린 작은 공) by Cho Se-hui, very vivdly sketch the world of the losers and underdogs who fared less than well in the rapid transformations that made up the Miracle on the Han. A Distant and Beautiful Place depicts one of the suburbs they were driven into (the place where I live, which as I’ve mentioned before, some of my students have called “a slum”) as real estate and development in Seoul took its course, and The Dwarf depicts (among other things) the indignities they faced while being edged out, along with some of the horrid lengths to which some had to go to keep their lives from collapsing completely. I don’t know quite how badly-off they are, but all kinds of little hints show that Gang-du’s siblings aren’t doing much better than him: how his brother marvels at his (traitorous) protester buddy’s salary, and the way Nam-joo dresses. (She works for a government office, which means stability, but not much income: this all but screams lower-class woman clawing her way up to middle class. I know people who are basically in the same position as her.)

The family must struggle to maintain its unity, though. Obviously, they don’t live together: Gang-du’s father, Hie-bong, says as much to the photo of Hyun-Seo when her uncle comes to the funeral: “Because of you, we’re all together now!” he tells her. Nam-joo presumably lives in Suwon, where she works — which is a suburb of Seoul. Nam-il, one imagines, works in Seoul. Gang-du and his father and daughter perhaps don’t live in Yeouido, as it’s too ritzy for the likes of them, but may live in one of the lower-cost housing areas nearby, or perhaps in some cheap corner of the island.

This is the postmodern family, and none of them really quite fit into the Korea in which most of the audience lives: they’re far too much the underdogs, ground down by the very same Miracle on the Han that has bouyed up so many others. And for all the glittering lights on can see on the Han river in popular photos, what I the monster seems to represent –or literally to be — is the dark side of the Miracle on the Han, that which has been denied and suppressed. It is primarily a submarine creature, concealed beneath the surface; its lair is part of the modern infrastructure of the city’s sewage system, dark, underground. In this way — being relegated to the status of beneath contempt, beneath notice until they strike out, Gang-du’s family has a great deal in common with the monster they hunt.

When Hyun-Seo’s family hunts for her, what we see is a motage of images of tunnels underground that would almost not be out of place in a fantasy dungeon crawl, and the only characters we encounter there most of the time are others of society’s losers — like the homeless kids, one of whom Hyun-Seo ends up defending against the monster:

– and government agents seemingly more bent on maintaining control of the riverfront than on catching and killing the monster itself.

(The epitome of coldness follows this scene, where Gang-du simply cannot abandon his dead father, and for his trouble, the soldiers black-bag him and haul him off. It is a heartbreaking moment, but it’s not as if citizens weren’t hauled off — bags over their heads or not — during the historical period I discussed above. They were, and then they were tortured, and sometimes imprisoned. Which makes the scene even more horrifying and heartbreaking, another dark echo of the horrifying past.)

The character that shows the greatest chance of fitting into the world — of escaping from the powerlessness and poverty that traps her family — indeed, is young Hyun-Seo, who looks like any other kid in Seoul, who is smarter than her father, more together than her uncle, more confident than her aunt, but who also just wants a new cell phone. Hyun-Seo is not merely a vulnerable child, in this film: she’s the closest thing to a character that the audience can identify with as being like themselves. She’s the only really “normal” character in the film.

And thus, since this is a movie, Hyun-Seo is bound therefore to suffer… and suffer she does.

Hyun-Seo, like so many other children in older Korean monster movies, has a strong connection with — and direct experience of — the monster before almost anyone else, certainly before any of the other major characters. What’s different is that this experience is wholly and violently negative from the very start. She is neither fascinated by the monster, nor amused by it. It arises from the waters, seizes her, and hauls her away. After a brief experience of her as a normal teenaged kid, the audience sees her almost immediately hauled off to the beast’s lair, logically to become the monster’s food, but in terms of the narrative structure, to become a hostage whom the rest of her family must rescue.

Hyun-Seo’s superficial transformation seems quite horrific: she is immediately filthy, her clothes ruined, and yet an essential sweetness and decency shines in her eyes, making her transformation all the more horrifying — indeed, as she is familiar (a regular kid her age) and also the walking dead, a meal deferred (the unfamiliar, the awful), she pretty becomes a textbook definition of unhiemliche as Freud defined it.

But I’m not interested in talking Freud: I think lit people often take him to seriously anyway. What interests me is the deeper significance of Hyun-Seo going underground, going into the monster’s lair to be consumed. When I discussed this topic with my students, I used a powerpoint to present these ideas, and the picture above (or one like it, showing Hyun-Seo in the state she is in there) was contrasted with this one, an image by the famous Korean photographer Kim Ki-chan:

(This child was particularly striking to my students because she was photographed not far from the university where I teach, not many years before they were born. The area is big buildings — including some monstrous high-rises and department stores — and it’s hard to believe it ever looked like this, let alone having looked like this just a few decades ago.

The other picture I used on the slideshow was one rather like this one, which I believe is by Michael Hurt:

Which I think ruffled some feathers — as intended. I could as easily have used the movie poster for the film adaptation of The Dwarf, which I’ll include here again (it was also included in part 1 of this post):

The text on the side reads something like this: Mom, I am a grown-up and I can choose what to do with my body. I will withstand it, I will withstand it. Which makes me pretty sure the film is a much more salacious presentation of the plot in the novel where a young woman makes the best she can of a terrible dilemma.

I want to make it clear that my point is not to say that there is some sexual subtext to the monster’s capture of Hyun-Seo, even if the kidnapping does render her a kind of surrogate mother to the little boy she rescues. (Or, maybe, surrogate elder sister, which is just as weird as it means the monster “births” her a brother out of its mouth at the same time that it births out “death” in the form of the bones of its other victims — meaning the monster is some kind of surrogate mother, which is too weird even for me to consider getting into, even with Mari Kotani’s bizarre essay on the transformation of female forms in Japanese womens’ SF — mentioned here, and yes, it’s in Robot Ghosts… too — floating around in my brain.)

Rather, I’m interested in the prospects of a girl like Hyun-Seo a few years down the road after experiencing the “dark side” of the Miracle on the Han — that is, the stuff the monster represents, the instability of housing, the grinding poverty, the severely limited access to education and decent opportunities to work. Which, as far as I can figure out, are pretty much the kinds of long-term opportunities that the little village girl a couple of photos up had available to her: marrying and becoming dependent on her husband and/or in-laws, or making money whatever way she could.

Note: the size of the sex trade in Korea, and the reasons for women going into it here, are a pretty weird topic to discuss with anglophone Koreans, especially younger people. There’s either a great deal of embarrassment, or else a great deal of naivete about the subject. But even so, it’s difficult to deny that the sex trade has, in Korean society, been an important option for women who had no other way to support themselves, especially in a society so rapidly commercializing that it sometimes seems everything is being commodified — and even sex can be used to announce the grand opening of… a corner shop:

Which, as people like James keep pointing out, is bizarre for a society that just legalized miniskirts and hot pants a couple of years ago. (Or is it? Maybe it’s precisely what you would expect from such a society. You tell me.) My discussion with James focused on the cultural ambiguity of sexualizing teenagers in Korean pop culture today. Suffice it say that the fact that Hyun-Seo is a teenager doesn’t exclude her from this icky economic underworld: indeed, among all the characters in Korean SF I’ve encountered, she most resembles in age and attire the main character in the independent film Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakroh, about a teenaged prostitute who is killed in a university district, resurrected as a cyborg, and goes on a killing rampage. Trust SF to dive straight into anxieties that newspapers would prefer to euphemize as things like “compensated dating.” (For an excellent discussion of wonjo gyojae/”compensated dating” see this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling, about another Korean film and its social context.)

What I’m suggesting here is not that Hyun-Seo would someday have become a prostitute, or even one of these dancing girls in front of a corner shop, but rather that countless girls in her position — essentially swallowed up whole by the dark side of the Miracle on the Han River — have in real life been confronted with the choice either to sell themselves in some form or another, or to go hungry. Either fate is a horror, and either fate has been faced by millions of women during the so-called Miracle on the Han River. Where was their miracle, pray tell? That’s the question I feel like the film is asking. Sometimes, the miracle is a monster.

What I’m talking about is the sexism and essential classism of the Miracle on the Han — its essential unfairness, in a society profoundly concerned with “fairness,” as Korean society has time and time again shown itself to be in matters pertaining to education and class. (See Michael J. Seth’s book Education Fever if you’d like a pile of examples of Korean society’s concern for fairness, and its concentration of the need for fairness on children and their futures.) Yet the fact that a great deal of the fallout is not up for public discussion. These young women, like Hyun-Seo in the monster’s lair, remain hidden, concealed, subterranean.

One might well even imagine a whole network of such lairs, in which the monster has stowed away other children and the bones of other victims. If the monster did not have such a thing, in time it would necessarily have developed it.

But Hyun-Seo is also, and we must not lose sight of this, a child. She dies in part because of the neglect of her father to save her from the beast by catching her hand at the crucial moment… a failure which is a result of his own father’s neglect, and which opens up a sort of sense of a whole legacy of neglect being passed down from ages past, and generations long forgotten. Yet there must be more to it than that, right?

Well, another element is that, very often in not just SF but even mainstream films and all kinds of literature, children represent the future. Hyun-Seo is such an interesting character because, more than anyone, she seems like a contemporary Korean. She seems like someone who could fit in, who could function well in society, who could perhaps climb up out of her bottom-class tier into comfort security, and a measure of happiness. But such potential is precarious, and the Han River is very broad, and the deep dark side is very powerful, and can tear away opportunity in a heartbeat.

And then we find that, at the end, Hyun-Seo dies. Now, it would be a mistake necessarily to read this specific ending wholly allegorically. I am not saying that Bong Joon-Ho has declared the lower class hopeless, or anything like that. Indeed, it would be a profound mistake to miss the fact mentioned by Charles in this comment that Korean audiences — or, at any rate, Korean filmmakers — seem to really go for tragic, melodramatic deaths. They’re just into that. Melodrama is a big thing here, and one should never underestimate the importance of culture on the media a society produces. Plenty of Korean movies end very, very sadly.

Although the tragedy is softened by the fact that Hyun-Seo died a hero, protecting a child who becomes the surrogate child for her father, it’s an immensely disappointing, painful moment when one realizes that, after all the struggle, despite all her brightness and promise and goodness — her essential normality — Hyun-Seo is actually, really, finally dead. Her screwed-up family weeps over her dead body as the monster struggles, and then, of course — because this is a monster movie and who else is going to do the monster in? — the survivng members of Hyun-Seo’s family each do their part to slaughter the beast before it can escape.

They failed to save Hyun-Seo, but in killing the beast, they succeed… just barely. They manage to kill the monster — this particular monster, though the ending shows continued vigilance, and the fear of more such monsters. Obviously, this is at least in part a case of leaving the door open for a sequel (in addition to the prequel due out in summer 2009), which not only from a fiscal standpoint is a very smart move by Bong.

But it also suggests that the victory against the monster is not only incomplete in that Hyun-Seo has died, but also in that the threat, the looming, hidden danger, still remains, has not dissipated, and affects many still. Gang-du, staring out over the Han River with his rifle in hand, his surrogate child asleep on the floor of his convenience stand in the depths of a winter storm, can easily be read as a potent symbol of the fact that many families today face the same instability — or even worse, in some cases — faced by those whse lives were disrupted by the dark side of the Miracle on the Han.

Actually, as the film ends, there is one more glimpse of a reversal we see. Gang-du and the homeless boy that Hyun-Seo saved sit down together to share a meal. I mentioned earlier (in part 1, I think) that almost every Korean movie I’ve seen includes one scene involving a meal. There are several in The Host: the one where Hyun-Seo’s family eats, and, thinking of her, we see her among them as they long for her and worry about how long she’s gone hungry. And there is this meal at the end, which Gang-du shares with his adopted son. But Bong Joon-Ho rightly points out that there are other “meal” scenes as well:

The first concept was born in June 2000, and in it the monster kept growing simply by eating fish. Then one day it finally tastes human flesh, and where would that come? From a poor fella committing suicide from one of the Han River bridges, obviously! So our Monster tastes the flesh, and starts thinking: “How could I ignore this delicious taste for so long! All that fish infesting the shitty waters of the Han River can’t even compare!”

But the last image in the film is a claustrophobic, ominous one. Rightly so: in Korea today, government policies — of the kind likely to hurt people like Gang-du’s family more than anyone — are being proposed at a dizzying rate. Though the recent protests (see here) have derailed many of them, the risk is far from over: like the fish that dropped from the side of the monster, there’s the constant potential for the Han River to produce more horrors as it continues to flow along its way. The threat of the dark side of the Miracle on the Han — the looming shadow beneath the waves that indeed begins the whole movie — still haunts many, even today.

UPDATE (10 Sept 2008): More on The Host here!

Disclaimer — all images not cited to an photographer at copyright their respective owners. They are used in this post for educational/critical purposes, and thus their use falls under fair use. Thank goodness, because this essay would be hard to read without them!

Also: I intended to post this all as one unit, but it turned out to be too “big” for WordPress to handle. I figured that was a sign that maybe I need to post this in two parts, though — horrors — I may need to batch process the images to a smaller size — I don’t know if image sizing is involved. Anyway, Part 2 will come in a day or two. Part 1 is more exploration/analysis of tropes common to Korean monster movies, and Part 2 applies what we learn in Part 1 to the reading of The Host.

In my earlier post on The KOFA 괴수 대백과, I mentioned how monster movie fanclub members (from this cafe community) very generously gave me a copy of the book about the history of Korean Gwoesu films In that book, it is somewhere mentioned that giant monster movies generally can be traced back to King Kong, which was gratifying in a sense since I almost would have imagined them tracing the lineage of Korean monster movies back to Gojira (Godzilla).(Gojira was given more coverage in their booklet, which made sense because the influence of Gojira was almost universally felt in the monster movies I managed to see at the festival, but it was nice that they included the original King Kong as well. No mention was made of later remakes, though, as far as I remember… again, interesting. This seems to suggest a pattern I thought I’d mentioned earlier, and which my the brilliant and well-informed Charles pointed out was a part of early presentations of mainstream literature-in-translation projects in Korea, as well, in which where the history and highlights of a literary genre is recapitulated for newcomers — that is to say, arguably, for many of Korean consumers — in appendices in the back of collections of short fiction. This is a feature of both of the big original Korean anthologies I’d managed to get my hands on, and indeed, even some single-author texts — such as 듀나’s 용의 이 and the Korean edition of Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life — include biographical essays, discussions of the writer’s place in the genre, and more.)

Still, it’s worth noting that the tradition of Giant Monster stories far antedates even the earliest King Kong movie. In some of the oldest texts in any language, you can find references to enormous, terrifying, and powerful beasts. In Old English, we find it in Beowulf; in the Bible, there is the Leviathan; in Odyssey, there are Scylla and Charybdis. Though I am no great student of Eastern literature, one imagines that dragons feature prominently in the earliest of Chinese legendary tales, tales of great snakelike beings — one name for them, possibly among others, is the naga — roaming the rivers of parts of Southeast Asia and India are well known. (Er, I don’t know if the Indian naga are specifically river creatures as they are in, say, Laotian mythology, actually. Anyone?)

A Naga statue outside some kind of temple structure on the local museum grounds in Luang Prabang. Let it never, ever be said that the giant monster movie is a wholly modern, Western innovation...

Let us take for granted the argument that, among others, the late Thomas Disch made in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (and not for the first time — I seem to recall encountering a comparable but slightly more dubious claim somewhere in one of the first critical texts on SF, New Maps of Hell by Kingsley Amis) about how giant monster movies are expressions of social anxieties. If this is indeed the case, then it is utterly unsurprising that many of these creatures are water dwellers — a theme we see recurring in Korean monster movies, almost constantly — since, after all, the human dependence on water for travel and for sustenance would combine very powerfully with the marked human vulnerability to water. Forests might be scary, but you can survive immersion in most forests for at least a few hours.Water, on the other hand, is not only avery dangerous place to be, but also surrounds Korea on all three sides, and played a significant part in a number of Korea’s unfortunate encounters with the outside world, especially the most recent, the Japanese colonial occupation in the first half of the twentieth century.Of course, part of the genealogy of giant (water-) monster movies is the legends told among seafaring societies. It’s far likelier that the Japanese would be afraid of — and titillated by — tales of gigantic oceanic water-monsters than, say, the Mongols would be; likewise, the British or Norse versus, say, southern Germans.However, the giant monster-as-science-fiction probably traces back to H.G. Wells. I haven’t closely studied this, of course, and I could be wrong, but certainly in one sense, his 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth is an important precedent. (Feel free to read the book on your own — it is available in many places, though I recommend nabbing it from manybooks.net, where you have your pick of formats.)This novel strikes not just a conceptual but also an emotional chord which unmistakably resonates through all the great (and not-so-great) monster movies that come after it. The following passage, amply quoted from chapter three, illustrates the particulars of that conceptual and emotional resonance:

It was sheer good luck the horse came down in Hankey, and not either before or after the houses had been passed.

No one knows how the horse came down, whether it stumbled or whether the rat on the off side really got home with one of those slashing down strokes of the teeth (given with the full weight of the body); and the doctor never discovered that he himself was bitten until he was inside the brickmaker’s house, much less did he discover when the bite occurred, though bitten he was and badly—a long slash like the slash of a double tomahawk that had cut two parallel ribbons of flesh from his left shoulder.

He was standing up in his buggy at one moment, and in the next he had leapt to the ground, with his ankle, though he did not know it, badly sprained, and he was cutting furiously at a third rat that was flying directly at him. He scarcely remembers the leap he must have made over the top of the wheel as the buggy came over, so obliteratingly hot and swift did his impressions rush upon him. I think myself the horse reared up with the rat biting again at its throat, and fell sideways, and carried the whole affair over; and that the doctor sprang, as it were, instinctively. As the buggy came down, the receiver of the lamp smashed, and suddenly poured a flare of blazing oil, a thud of white flame, into the struggle.

That was the first thing the brickmaker saw.

He had heard the clatter of the doctor’s approach and—though the doctor’s memory has nothing of this—wild shouting. He had got out of bed hastily, and as he did so came the terrific smash, and up shot the glare outside the rising blind. “It was brighter than day,” he says. He stood, blind cord in hand, and stared out of the window at a nightmare transformation of the familiar road before him. The black figure of the doctor with its whirling whip danced out against the flame. The horse kicked indistinctly, half hidden by the blaze, with a rat at its throat. In the obscurity against the churchyard wall, the eyes of a second monster shone wickedly. Another—a mere dreadful blackness with red-lit eyes and flesh-coloured hands—clutched unsteadily on the wall coping to which it had leapt at the flash of the exploding lamp.

You know the keen face of a rat, those two sharp teeth, those pitiless eyes. Seen magnified to near six times its linear dimensions, and still more magnified by darkness and amazement and the leaping fancies of a fitful blaze, it must have been an ill sight for the brickmaker—still more than half asleep.

Then the doctor had grasped the opportunity, that momentary respite the flare afforded, and was out of the brickmaker’s sight below battering the door with the butt of his whip….

The brickmaker would not let him in until he had got a light.

There are those who have blamed the man for that, but until I know my own courage better, I hesitate to join their number.

The doctor yelled and hammered….

The brickmaker says he was weeping with terror when at last the door was opened.

“Bolt,” said the doctor, “bolt”—he could not say “bolt the door.” He tried to help, and was of no service. The brickmaker fastened the door, and the doctor had to sit on the chair beside the clock for a space before he could go upstairs….

“I don’t know what they are!” he repeated several times. “I don’t know what they are”—with a high note on the “are.”

The brickmaker would have got him whisky, but the doctor would not be left alone with nothing but a flickering light just then.

It was long before the brickmaker could get him to go upstairs….

And when the fire was out the giant rats came back, took the dead horse, dragged it across the churchyard into the brickfield and ate at it until it was dawn, none even then daring to disturb them….

No giant sea critters, these rats, and yet their narrative function is unmistakable. They are gigantic, marauding animals; a horrendous and destructive perversion of nature, and though created by the willful experimentation (and negligence) of human beings, and arguably are simply acting within their nature, nonetheless it remains beyond sane argument that they simply must be destroyed. But they are also enthralling in their size, shocking and spectacular — in the sense of being a spectacle. This, surely, is what attracted B-film directors to adapt the Wells novel — the same thrills and chills that other early SF films and fiction seemed to offer throughthe presentation of the fantastical.

Then, of course, comes King Kong, whose significance — to Korean cinema, at least, if we exclude the American/Korean co-production Ape — seems relatively minimal. (And most profound in the first film, Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi, form what I gather.) Godzilla is, indeed, seems to be the grandfather of (South) Korean monster movies. Yes, sometimes the beast comes from space rather than the ocean, but the two seem to both function in a similar way. And anyway, a lot of water-beasts do turn up. (The many horrors in 비천괴수 (Flying Dragon Attack) and the beasts in both Yonggary films emerge from the ocean, and, interestingly, the monster in 괴물 (which from now on in this post, I will refer to as The Host) emerges from water… though from the Han River, not from the sea.

There are other commonalities, which I mentioned in the earlier-mentioned post, that seem to be shared among Korean monster movies. To recapitulate them:

• A special “contact” or connection between overtly vulnerable children and the monster.
• Presentations of both the American military and the Korean government and military as ineffectual or callous, later resolved by an over-the-top military response that takes down (or helps take down) the beast.
• “Foreigners” circumstantially or directly connected with the appearance of the monster in Korea.
• The monster’s having arisen from the watery depths and finally wreaking havoc in Seoul. (Though thebeast in The Host doesn’t smash any buildings at all!)
• The monster is revealed very quickly, and gets a good amount of screen time. Which sucks when your special effects are bad, as in older Korean monster movies, but which is excellent when you have CGI on your side.

The occurrence of these tropes or elements is presented in the figure below. Darkened/checkmarked means the element is present, greyed/question-mark means I don’t know, and blank means the trope or element is absent from the film. Click on the figure to see a larger version of the chart.

We can thus make two sorts of categories for tropes in such films:

1. “Generic” or Fundamental Tropes appear very frequently, and invite two sorts of questions: why they’re so common, and — in cases of their absence — why they are absent in a particular film. Some examples from the chart above include:
   1. Early Reveal and Lots of Screen Time for Monster
   2. Prominence of “Family Narrative”
   3. Monster Arises from Watery Depths
   4. Monster Destroys Buildings
   5. Government/Military is Ineffectual or Callous
   6. Special Contact Between Vulnerable Children and Monster
   7. Resolution or Partial Resolution via Over-The-Top Military Response
   8. Resolution or Partial Resolution via Actions of Civilians
2. “Occasional” or Variational Tropes appear only occasionally, or only in certain periods, and their inclusion or use perhaps invites investigation as to whether they herald generic change, idiosyncratic choice on the part of the creators of the media, or other circumstances that have affected the film’s content. Examples above include:
   1. “Foreigners” Circumstantially or Causally Related to Monster’s Appearance
   2. Monster Consumes People
   3. Monster Wreaks Havoc in Seoul
   4. References to Real-World Political Figures

A couple of caveats apply. First, this is far from an exhaustive analysis. I’ll probably go whole hog on this eventually, when I’m working on an independent paper on The Host, but for now, I’m only including films I’ve seen recently, plus Wangmagwi about which I had a chance to read. Were I to go whole hog, there would be a bunch more Korean films to see, plus all the Japanese (and American) Godzilla movies, plus the early versions of King Kong and maybe (if there were evidence of it having been released in Korea) the aforementioned adaptations of H.G. Wells. But this is just a preliminary jaunt, in the interests of a kind of quick-and-dirty analysis.

Secondly, I’m looking only at the films. At this point, I haven’t listened to the Director’s commentary — which will be a rough couple of hours for me — or the English-language director’s commentary released on the American version of the DVD. All I’m looking at is the films themselves. Whatever ideological claims we may favour in terms of the “the death of the author,” it’s silly to think that not listening to what people have to say about their own works is worthless… even if they don’t (and can’t) offer all the answers.

And thirdly, we could — arguably — exclude two of the films on the list above: Pulgasari is a North Korean film, and quite vividly tied up with different concerns than the other films in the list. Likewise, Apeseems primarily to be an American film, to the point where the most prominent Korean character may well be a Korean-American. (His accent, at least, is almost certainly that of a native speaker from the USA.) Ape also seems to reflect decidedly American concerns, though at least in that film, South Korea is not interchangeable with just any other setting. (The American and Korean government interaction is a major part of the film, and it is the only monster movie I know of, aside from the upcoming sequel to The Host, that refrerences real-life political figures. (A imaginary conversation between an American military official and South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee occurs in the film.)

Finally, yes, we could probably wrangle a little more over the trope categories I’ve decided to use, and so on. But all of that is really just a useful framework for finding the right questions to ask.

I don’t really want to analyze each of the tropes in-depth. After all, regardless of what the Host’s director, Bong Joon-Ho, says about how soon the monster appears in his film — he suggests it is unusually early, if I followed the director’s commentary right — this seems to me to be actually a rather common feature in monster movies, and especially common in (South) Korean monster movies as well. (Probably for reasons inherent the genre: part of the point of giant monster movies is SPECTACLE!, after all. But the most interesting among those tropes listed above — those that seem peculiar to Korean (or perhaps to Korean/Japanese) monster movies, and those that seem peculiar to The Host — deserve some attention.

“Foreigners” Circumstantially or Causally Related to Monster’s Appearance

This is an important question for the reading of The Host, especially for someone such as myself, a non-Korean. I am resistant to both of the opinions I’ve seen thus far — that is, that as ROKDrop put it in his post titled, “The Host is Crap.” [Because, of course, he argues, it is these scenes are "anti-American" anti-US -- his reading of the film, though, seems as if he energetically strained to find anti-Americanism everywhere he could.]

Nor can I dismiss as insignificant the very obvious anxiety about American power in Korea — and its connections with the upper echelons of Korean power — the way Michael seems to do in his responding post, “The Host, Anti-American? Nawwww…”

The answer is that a sensible reading of the film would balance the elephant in the room with the fact that the elephant is dwarfed by the GIANT MONSTER ATTACKING THE CITY!!!! That is to say, whatever is happening in The Host, there are very interesting anxieties about American power, but the movie is by no means simply or straight-forwardly anti-American.

What is worth noting is that, in fact, this is almost completely new to Korean monster movies. The only other film I know of in which foreigners have any presence at all is the American co-production, Ape, and that was a foregone conclusion since, well, they’re American actors in Korea. Even they do not, however, seem to be the cause of the monster’s appearance in the country, though they do struggle against it to some degree, and the American military’s response is almost (but not quite) as callous and damagingas that of the Korean government’s response.

Further discussion of this theme will follow in the final section of this post.

Prominence of “Family Narrative”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember much in the way of a family narrative in King Kong. There is a family narrative in Jaws, but the family narrative actually seems more deeply subsumed within a community narrative — an atmosphere of panic. But in what is probably the film most prominently influential on Korean monster movies — the Japanese 1954 production of Gojira (Godzilla), a family narrative of a kind does feature prominently: the expedition to Odo Island includes a paleontologist, his daughter, and her lover — her secret lover, because she’s engaged to another.

Many have commented that The Host is as much (or more) a family drama than a giant monster movie. After all, the point-of-view characters are all members of the same family, and they are the ones who struggle against both the government and the monster, and finally defeat it.

This is not, strictly speaking, unusual in relation to the other Korean monster movies I’ve seen or read about. Indeed, every Korean-made monster movie I’ve seen (and from what I’ve read, Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi also) features a family narrative — and even the broken family of The Host is anticipated, not just in Gojira — why does the mother not play a role in the expedition? — but also in several other films. Pulgasari told the story of a local elder and two kids who seem related to him (maybe in this case, ajeoshi really does mean “uncle”?) but they live without apparent parents. In 비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks) the focal characters are, in fact, a father who is some kind of peleontologist specialized in crytozoology — as well as a single father whose home in invaded by a female reporter posing as a nanny (and who, of course, becomes a potential love interest by the end). The original version of Yonggary: The Creature from the Depths improbably places the whole family up in the helicopter that is dropping sedatives upon the head of the dragon (after the little boy of the family discovers the beast’s weakness, or so it seemed from the horribly edited version I saw!), and indeed, even the husband’s boss at the Korean space center is also his wife’s father!

According to Tom Giammarco’s review of Giant Space Monster Wangmawi, the alien invasion interrupts a scheduled wedding, and indeed, the monster kidnaps the bride, carrying her about King Kong-like while smashing Seoul to bits. Even Ape — American co-production though it is — focuses more than one might expect on the plot of a growing romance between an American film actress and an American expat reporter, and his repeated marriage proposals to her, and presents Seoul figuratively — before the monster attack — through the idyllic and cheesy joy of happy family life on the part of a Korean military man who becomes a major character.

The fact that The Host focuses so explicitly on the narrative of a family — and indeed a family who is personally struggling against the monster — is therefore nothing new, and though it is a more recent innovation dating, seemingly, to the 1980s, neither is the brokenness of the family upon which it focuses.

Monster Arises from Watery Depths

A while back, I mentioned the book Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams as a great (academic) source for all kinds of informaiton on Japanese SF. In that anthology of essays, there is an excellent piece by Thomas Schnellbächer titled “Has the Empire Sunk Yet? The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction.” The essay essentially argues that in early Japanese SF — as in other Japanese literature — the Pacific Ocean was somehow crucial to Japanese national identity, that earlier tropes of ocean and (glorified, colonialist) identity ended up being problematized and at the same time retooled for a less self-aggrandizing, more anxious postwar zeitgeist.

I must leave aside many of the wonderful points he makes about films like Kaitei gunkan (The seabed warship), and books like Kobo Abe’s Inter-Ice Age 4 and Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (not long ago remade into another film) — though the essay is wonderful, convinced me that I ought to read the two novels mentioned, and I recommend it for a fascinating look at the retooling of SF tropes along political and social lines.

But I will point out that it is tantalizing, this notion that the Pacific Ocean was somehow a powerful symbol of Japanese national identity, and that, in 1954 — less than a deacde after the end of World War II, and while war having had just recently concluded among involving Japanese former subjects aided by two superpower — one of whom Japan had defeated in a past war, the other of whom Japan had just been defeated by. And in 1954, Gojira rose from the waters and attacked Japan.

Excluding Pulgasari — which is North Korean (much less oceanfront property up there!) and based on a traditional Korean mythic beast — and Ape — which, again, is American and explicitly a riff on King Kong (though the Ape does reach Korean from a freighter off the coast) — nearly every Korean monster movie features a creature that arose from the ocean. Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi is an exception, though it’s worth noting that, as Schnellbächer points out, outer space is really in many ways a substitution for the ocean. (Thus all the naval terminology in spacefaring SF, right?)

Perhaps it is ironic that the sea spawned monsters for Korea — the ex-colony — just as it did for Japan — the ex-colonizer — but this makes a kind of sense. I don’t imagine there is much of a grand tradition of seafarer-narrative literature in Korea, mind you, but in any case, when the trope arrived in Korea, apparently via Japanese film, it makes sense that it would resonate. After all, Korea is a peninsula — one side short of an island — and its relatively recent experience of colonial rule at the time was facilitated by oceanic connections between Korea and Japan.

The special genius of The Host is that its enormous water monster emerges not from the ocean, but from the Han River. This is not only a departure from tradition, but also a powerful return to the inner logic of that same tradition, as I’ll explain later. A hint: it has to do with the links between bodies of water and national(ist) identity.

Monster Attacks Seoul/Destroys Buildings

Most of the monsters that we encounter in Korean film attack Seoul — for the same reason alien ships hover over Washington, and not Idaho — and most monsters in Korean films destroy buildings, too. Scale models. Tons of them. Constantly. This happened in the first Korean monster movie, and it just kept on happening. Heck, Yonggary couldn’t even wait for the movie to start — he started destroying Seoul on the poster.

Pulgasari is an exception for obvious reasons — it’s historical fantasy — so the monster destroys some older palatial-looking buildings. The more interesting exception here is 비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks), in which everything happens at a seaside town, and though I had a vague impression it was on the southern coast of the peninsula, it wasn’t clear to me exactly where except that it’s not around Seoul, and the “dragons” attack not just the daughter in the family, but also what looks like the local power plant and factory.

Smashing buildings can be explained easily — again, the necessity of Spectacle! — and Seoul makes sense because the psychogeography of Korea is focused completely on Seoul, and has been for a very long time. It also probably makes sense for a number of other reasons: the vulnerability of Seoul to Northern attack (demonstrated manifestly during the Korean War), the relative stresses and anxieties inherent in the city, its emblematic status as the epicenter of industrialized modernity and social, economic, and political power.

Yet, interestingly, the monster in The Host is not a massive, powerful giant who smashes buildings. It does manage to take out a truck and a trailer — and arguably the trailer is the lower-class equivalent of a “big building” — but it is, compared to other Korean Gwoesu, quite modest in size, and its destructiveness is focused on people, not buildings. However, there is a way in which the monster in The Host and the psychogeographic focus on Seoul connect very neatly.

That’s because there one more reason Seoul would attract monsters, according to the logic of monster movies, which is that like attracts like. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Seoul was very much like one of the giant monsters in these films: it grew up from something more modest into an enormous, relatively brutal, very powerful living thing that survived and grew from a constant “consumption” — chewing up and, sometimes, spitting out — of human beings. The previous sentence could very easily be a description of the monster in The Host, too, couldn’t it?

It's baaaaaaaaaack.

(Korean literature apparently is full of stories of people being chewed up and spit out by Seoul: two of the books I’ve been most impressed by — in their English translations — were A Distant and Beautiful Place (원미동 사람들) by Yang Kwi-Ja and The Dwarf (난장이가 쏘아올린 작은 공) by Cho Se-hui. I cannot vouch for the film version of the latter, though: not only is it horribly titled in English — Flew One Little Dad ?!?!?! — but it looks, er, like the focus is , well… shall we hazard a guess that it ended up as a seamy exploration of a single subplot involving..well, you get the picture, right?

However, from what I’ve read of each, both books are well worth reading!)

Indeed, considering the profound amount of anxiety with which the prospect not only of moving to Seoul, but of “making it” there, presented people, there is probably some level on which the giant monster in a Korean giant monster movie is, indeed, the dark shadow-twin of the city of Seoul — its hidden, repressed inversion, we could call it, or in the language of the soap opera and Sunday serial of old, the city’s evil twin holding forth all about the capital that we know, but do not wish to talk about.

Government/Military is Ineffectual or Callous

This was one of the factors that stuck out most for Western viewers of The Host. I think Bong Joon-Ho is exaggerating slightly when he says what he says in this interview, quoted below:

Cineaste: Does that mean that the Korean public is so used to this dysfunction that The Host reflects the audience’s own pervasively cynical view of society?

Bong: The funny thing is that Korean audiences don’t receive it cynically or seriously but as comedy. Bribery and corruption are both very familiar but also very funny. Audiences don’t feel anger or grief. They accept this as a realistic picture of life. Koreans don’t react defensively, witnessing corruption for them is as natural as breathing.

Koreans I know did tend to take the corruption in the film in stride — they were not surprised that it was presented, and did see it, to some degree as comedy, or just as realistic. But Koreans are growing increasingly less tolerant of corruption and institutional dysfunction, or so it seems from events like these and those discussed in this series. No, not all the way to actually demanding corruption is punished, but I don’t think laughs were all that people got out of the film. People I’ve discussed it with found it quite critical of the Korean political establishment and Korean society in general.

In any case, the presentation of the government as ineffectual or callous is, again, not new to The Host.

It is also not universal — in films like Yonggary and 비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks), indeed, there seems to be a strenuous effort to highlight the ability of the military to take down the bad monster. Unsurprisingly, these are Park-era films, and perhaps directors hoped to assuage fear of Northern invasion whilst delivering thrills and chills and Spectacle!

But in other films, the government and military seemed, essentially, powerless to stop the beast. In what seemed like the most realistic of all plotlines, Ape, the American military dimisses claims of a giant ape rampaging in the countryside as a publicity stunt for an American film being shot in Korea, and when the Americans catch on that it’s not a sham but a real monster attack, the Park government demands they take it alive, even if it means the monster will crush village after village in the countryside. Only when the beast approaches Seoul does the American military convince Park that the giant ape needs killin’, and by then, they begin to realize that’s easier said than done.

Which, by the way, is an interesting point to raise: most of the monster movies presented the government in a very faceless way, through functionaries and the like. Ape does something quite unusual in referencing Park. Then again, he had been the dictator of Korea for almost a decade and a half. But it’s interesting that rumor has it the current President of South Korea, Lee Myung Bak, will be referenced in the prequel to The Host, due out next summer, and set in the area of the Cheonggyechon stream revivification project that occurred during Lee’s tenure as mayor. Cheonggyecheon, of course, is the site where many of the protests of this summer occurred, and the project itself was, at the time, a major controversy in Seoul, and one that for some looked like a case of “the little people” being run out by rich fatcat “redevelopment” — a view that subsided, but is likely to be revisited now that Lee’s a stupendously unpopular President of the country, and still perceived by many as a rich fatcat. (For those not in Korea, Antti Leppanen discussed the situation at the time here and here back in 2004.)

That said, there’s also a simple problem involved in the genre itself: if the monster is huge, and massively destructive, then there is little incentive on the part of the establishment to let it rampage for too long. There are various workarounds for this problem. 비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks) has an effective military response, but also a ridiculous number of monsters thrown at it, so that dealing with the mess still takes a good long time, affording the audience plenty of goofy giant-monster action. Meanwhile, in Yonggary, the beast it dealt with using knock-out powder, but unfortunately, the stuff wears off. These workarounds are the sort that allow one to present a competent military, but they’re not the only sort. In Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi, the air force is rendered helpless due to compassion: they can’t very well carpet-bomb the area where the monster is, since it’s Seoul. In Ape, the strategy is a mix of incredulity, callousness (especially towards anyone living outside of Seoul), and finally incompetence that keeps out monster running about.In Pulgasari, of course, the story must unfold along ideological lines, but nonetheless, its solution — that the corrupt landowners are incapable of stopping the beast because the beast grows constantly more powerful and consumptive with each consumption, and because commoners are simply unwilling to accept this status quo — presents another solution to the problem of how to keep your giant monster rampaging.

The Host, though, seems unique in terms of the monster it deploys: no skyscraper-dwarfing, no lasers from its eyes, and no long rampages smashing the towers of Seoul to bits. This monster actually spends a certain amount of time hiding out in its lair, and when it emerges, it’s as goofy and klutzy as it is terrifying. It’s a much more modest and even naturalistic monster than ever has been seen in Korean monster films. And to echo Bong Joon-Ho’s comments in the same interview linked above, it is also a sort of mirror-figure of Gang-du, the goofy and klutzy male protagonist. In other words, this might just be Korea’s first working-class monster movie, with a working-class scaled monster to boot — and it’s beaten mostly by a working-class family, aided crucially by a drunken homeless bum.  (Which, if it doesn’t set off alarm bells for you, should!)

The filmmaker for The Host, therefore, had to resolve the problem of what challenges the family in their task. Realistically, the monster’s not anywhere near as hard to kill as the monsters in a lot of these other movies. It can’t shoot lasers, it cannot swat helicopters out of the sky, it can’t smash buildings down onto its assailants. It can flee, but it can also be hunted, and sooner or later, a nice sloshing dump of napalm into its lair would have taken it out. Therefore, Bong Joon-ho did what nobody else seems to have done in a Korean monster movie, but which, in the end, seems brilliantly obvious: he made the government (and by extension the military, including but not exclusively, the American military) the bad guys, in a sense another “monster” that the family must fight to survive and save their missing child.

Special Contact Between Vulnerable Children and Monster

This is one of the most puzzling aspects of the Korean monster movie genre: the fact that children seem to have some special relationship with the monste, and that their vulnerability –  often dramatized by a descent into a death-like state, or the child’s disappearance — is highlighted during the course of the film.

The only film I have seen so far from the genre that did not feature this was Ape, which, again, breaks a lot of the rules, but is an American co-production, supposedly scripted by Americans (though there are moments that make me wonder), definitely helmed by Americans, and so on. Meanwhile, children do not seem to feature anywhere near so prominently in films like King Kong and Jaws.

But in every Korean monster movie aside from Ape, children have a special connection of some sort with the monster. In Pulgasari, the main characters are children who bring the monster to life. In Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi, 비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks), and Yonggary, children seem almost fearless at points, and have (or, in the case of Yonggary, almost have) direct contact with the monster. 비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks) includes perhaps the most bizarre narrative turn, as the young girl who is injured by the monster (and goes into a kind of a coma) dreams of a very silly-looking monster — toy-like, indeed, would better desribed it’s appearance — fending off fighter jets; the girl giggles and cheers for the monster as if it were the hero of the film, and then begins crying when it is shot down.

비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks) is only the most extreme example of a trend that seems to have through nearly all of the earlier Korean monster movies: the fact that when the monster showed up, the kids in the central family of the film were outright excited, tendedto run off to look at the monster on their own, and sometimes even had — damaging — contact with the monster, a twist of events that soberingly drove home their vulnerability.

I have to confess: I’m not exactly sure why this element exists in Korean monster movies. I could theorize a few things. Such as:

• Perhaps children symbolize the future. If the monster is a reflection of the kinds of social changes mentioned above — if the monster is Seoul, and the future is Seoul — perhaps the child represents the future and its continuity with the present and past. Not for nothing, monsters in older films are often seen smashing older structures apart, especially distinctively Korean structures.
• Perhaps the focus on children-at-risk is a product of a shift in the internal logic of the monster. In Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi, there is an overt and undeniable sexual undertone, as the monster not only interrupts a wedding day but also steals away the bride and, again according to the review mentioned above, leers at the bride’s bosom!This would suggest that, at least in this film, Koreans did not suffer from what Sharalyn Orbaugh, in her essay “Sex and the Single Cyborg” (collected in the aforementioned Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams), calls “The Frankenstein Syndrome” — that is, the supposed “tendency of developing countries, those defined [in narratives like King Kong] as  ‘monstrous’ and ‘raw’ by the already developed nations, to see themselves in those same terms” (pg. 174).However, in subsequent Korean monster movies, this sexual subtext would make much less sense: a gorilla or a spaceman could fall in love with a human woman, but a carnivorous dragon? A chicken-headed flying horror? Since the original subtext of King Kong — the sexual vulnerability of a white woman to a big, wild black [ape] set loose in New York City — didn’t translate well in a Korean context, at least not until the 70s when films could actually depict (or imply) white men paying for sex with Korean women (as in Woman Detective Mary, which I reviewed here), it makes sense that directors would choose the next most “vulnerable”characters available: children. (And, in more recent films, especially female children, or very young male children.)
• Perhaps there is some underlying identification between the monsters and North Korean Communist ideology; a much older Korean man I knew described how, when he was a young child, a North Korean passed near by his village and, encountering children, gave them candy and taught them ideological North Korean songs. Though nobody would have used the notion of memetic susceptibility, Communist thought in South Korea seems to have been regarded (and responded to militarily, in some cases) as if it were a contagion to be burnt out. Maybe children were seen as more vulnerable to this kind of influence, and there’s a whole different political psychodrama underlying Korean monster movies?
• Perhaps it is a function of the idea that SF is kid-stuff; that, indeed, the audience would include any number of kids, and would need to provide them with characters with whom they could identify. Kids getting excited about the monster, running out to confront it, finding things out about it, would be perfect stuff to keep children in the audience entertained.

Whatever the reason, kids seem almost always to have been especially vulnerable to, especially attracted to, and especially connected to the giant monsters in Korean movies  this genre of Korean films, a tradition which is partially carried on by The Host: while none of the children are particularly attracted to the monster, two children wander fearlessly (foolishly, it turns out) in the monster’s hunting grounds by night, and it is — improbably — only two children who survive the trip to the monster’s lair, with their harrowing time in that underground place being probably the creepiest element in the film.

Continue on to Part 2…

Unfortunately, I didn’t catch on to what was being played — or, rather, how very rarely some of it is seen — until the evening of the 3rd of August, when it was too late to see the legendary, much-sought-after first Korean monster movie, 우주괴인 왕마귀 (Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi), so I’ll have to just keep looking around and try to catch it next time around. Or, rather, get stomped by it.

However, I did manage to see a few other Korean giant monster movies. I’m going to reserve comments on The Host beyond the few things that hit me watching the film in the cinema that time, but what I have to say about the rest will follow.

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THE TURNOUT

The screenings enjoyed a relatively decent turnout, overall. Only a few films had less than ten people show up, and several have more than twenty, which is not bad on weekday afternoons and evenings, after all. Of course, the numbers were boosted by the fact that some local care home or activity group for people who were very obviously mentally handicapped had decided that monster flicks was a good form of afternoon entertainment — and indeed it was: they got into the films more than anyone! The remainder of the audience was predominantly men in thir 30s, along with a few assorted spouses and kids of both sexes.

A local club of Giant Monster Movie fanatics (who have a Naver Cafe here) had a big display of giant monster toys and action figures set up, and were hawking books about the history of Korean monster movies for W4000 (ie. about four bucks) apiece, though they gave me a copy for free, perhaps just because how often does one meet a Westerner who’s interested in Korean monster movies?

(By the way, I have a short video of all the toys they put on display, if anyone’s interested. I suspect nobody is, but comment if you like and I’ll put it on Youtube.)

Oh, one more thing to add was that it was devilishly cheap. For less than the cost of a single movie ticket at any other place, I saw all of these films over the course of two days. It was bizarre!

THE FILMS

킹콩의 대역습 (Ape): This movie is collossally bad. Essentially, a giant ape goes on a rampage through the countryside near Seoul (Suwon, to be precise, but this was 1976. Between American military personnel who laugh off the threat, and the Korean government (that is, the dictator Park Chung Hee, who is directly referenced and calls the American officer we see most) who is hell-bent on capturing the gargantuan ape alive, the common folk don’t stand a chance. In fact, this is one of the most realistic elements in the film: the way Park Chung Hee is implied to basically write off the deaths of hundreds of peasants as the cost of catching the beast alive, for the sake of Korean science.

The ape is laughably bad, a guy in a monkey suit who mostly stands around for trick shots and even flips the bird at his assailants at one point. And in a shocking subplot (for anything actually involving uhman characters is a subplot in a monster movie, sub- in multiple senses of the word), Joanna Kerns (better known as the mom from Growing Pains) runs about in a red silk kimono, showing off her thighs and white panties for all to see as her newsman boyfriend and his Korean military buddy fight to save her from the beast. Because giant apes always fall for blondes, didn’t ya know? The special effects are probably clever for 1920, but for 1976 they’re, um, laughable. And the film is indeed good fun, if you are the sort who finds laughing at a film enjoyable.

One tiny twinge of curiosity I feel is about a few moments in the script that don’t seem so much like they were written by the credited screenwriters, Paul and Reuben Leder. Or, rather, they feel like they were sketched out by a Korean pulp movie writer, and maybe improvised or filled in by the actors or the screenwriters. One such moment is in the taxi ride the two American civilians (Kerns and the reporter) take into Seoul. She comments, at one point, “What’s that building?” — evading yet another marriage proposal from her sorta-boyfriend, and he says, “That’s the Blue House. It’s where the President lives.” (Or thus I remember the line.) She replies, “It’s very impressive, especially with that mountain behind it,” which sounds to me very much like the kind of thing a Korean would throw into the script.

(Another thing that makes me wonder is just how oversexed our white couple is in the film — they’re making out all the time, while the Korean couple we see only eat breakfast together with their kids, with obvious fondness but not a hunt of attraction between them. The making-out of the white couple seems almost exaggerated, but it could well be that’s what American pulp film directors were doing too.)

비천 괴수 (Flying Dragon Attacks (?!?!?)): Apparently, some dragons’ heads look like chicken heads!

In this 1984 film, a female reporter is sent to a little seaside town (or so it seemed to me) to figure out what some guy is up to. She ends up sneakily posing as a housemaid and caretaker for the man’s young daughter whom he parents alone — a little girl who is squeezed of every drop of cuteness possible — and discovers that what the man is up to is studying the bones of weird sea monsters. The man discovers her snooping, fires her from the maid position, and then all hell breaks loose. A large number of bizarre creatures attack the town, to be killed off one by one. The little girl — who, strangely, finds the monsters quite enchanting and cute, a strange pattern that cropped up again and again — is hurt by one, melodrama ensues, more monsters attack, and yay, Korean military force saves the day time and time again. The airplanes in flight — so fake, so inspiring, so reassuring that the threat of Communism is well fended-off.

It was one of the most interesting of the films, partly for itsuse, as in The Host, of a broken family structure, of hospitalization, and of dramatic military action all together. But as you can see from the pictures I harvested from this Korean review of the film, the monsters themselves are, well… pretty goofy:

One insult in Korean is to call someone a 닭 대가리 (chicken head). I could not help but laugh when I saw the giant chicken-headed monster.

대괴수 용가리 (Yonggary, the Creature from the Depths): This movie was unfortunately the “edited” (ie. horribly chopped up, I don’t know why) version of the 1967 film as it was, apparently, first screened for Korean audiences. At least, I think that’s what the guy who took my ticket explained to me when I asked what the difference between this and the 78 minute version was. Practically unwatchable, it mostly focuses on the military side of the story, featuring a brave Korean astronaut and his family as they work with the Korean military to obliterate the threat of Yonggary, which is basically a Korean rip-off of Godzilla. It had no subtitles. It needed no subtitles, though: the dialogue was so radically chopped up that the point of the thing was seeing (small, plastic) Korean fighter jets zipping around and shooting at the monster, which occasionally got knocked out with some special knockout powder dropped (by the astronaut, in a helicopter, with his whole family along for the ride). One wonders why they didn’t just keep applying knockout powder to prevent the monster from demolishing half of Seoul.

And of course, the knockout effect seemed — from my hazy grasp of what was going on between characters — to have been discovered by a little boy who was quite, er, interested in the monster. No, no, not “interested” in that way, I mean, fascinated by, excited about, and eager to see. There’s something in these Korean monster movies about the fascination kids have for the monstrous, their simultaneous vulnerability to monsters, and interest in them, and ignorance of the danger. It makes one wonder to what degree Korean monster movies of the past are on some level about ideological anxieties about the North, which are, of course, like the monster, eventually fended off by neato whizbang fighter jets.

(At least, I think there were also fighter jets in this film. After a few bad monster movies, they all sort of meld into one soppy mess. There were definitely tanks, though!)

Another explanation is that Korean filmmakers may have tended to see SF as “kid stuff” (as do some Western filmmakers, but as do many more in cultures where SF is less well-established or lacks a native form). Perhaps the kids’ are also supposed to arouse the interest of kids in the audience? I’m not sure, but it’s something I don’t think we have as much of in Western monster movies. Or maybe it’s just falling back on making the film more about families than about armies and powers. In that, Yonggary shares something with 비천괴수.

불가사리 (Pulgasari): Yes, this is the famous North Korean giant monster film from1985, directed by a South Korean director who was abducted to the North (as was his wife) for the purposes of making movies in North Korea. If you can’t beat ‘em, kidnap their resources, I guess? And yes, it’s a painfully obvious allegory for capitalism — it temporarily frees workers, but eventually consumes everything of value in their lives. Actually, it’s hard to say that’s wrong, but Mr. Kim’s solution to the problem is like cutting off a broken leg. Anyway, again, there were no subtitles, but for the most part, none were needed, and I was almos glad to be spared the finer points of the ideology spouting from peasants’ mouths. Though if you want to see it with subtitle, you can watch the whole thing via Google Video:

I don’t have a hell of a lot to add to critical discussions of the film like the review at Socialist Films or the discussion at io9, but I will note that a Western (American?) remake of the film apparently, and the (terrible-looking) thing is titled Galgameth (here’s the film’s IMBD page) in which the original director, Shin Sang-ok, was involved! Oh, and that the Bulgasari is actually a traditional supernatural (or imaginary, anyway) beast from Korean mythology. I ran across a reference in a translation of a poem years ago to “the legendary bulgasari of Andong,” though I might be remembering the place-name wrong. Funny, since I get the impression those who know the creature at all now know it from the North Korean film — how many more mythic beasts have simply been forgotten by all but a few?

Anyway, for better or worse, I class this as a non-SFnal giant-monster movie — specifically, as an allegorical fantasy — but a kaiju is a kaiju is a 괴수 — they’re all alike on a fundamental level, and there are considerable commonalities shared with the other 괴수 movies I’ve seen: again, there are kids who are crazy about the critter (which is, after all, a cute little fella at the beginning), useless and corrupt power-holders who are essentially powerless against it and put off doing anything for too long, and there’s some smashing and bashing of scale-model buildings. But the monster actually leads the peasants in its battle scenes, which is kind of cool, and it feeds not only on metal but on the blood of saddened a maiden — ah, the taste of 한 (suffering) — and unlike the other beasts in the series, the Bulgasari doesn’t come from space or from the depths of a body of water, but instead, is a man-made golem-like creature fashioned for revenge.

And you too can have your own Bulgasari for only… oh, well, you could in 1998. No more, unless you go hunting for it second hand. Yes, made by a Japanese toy maker, but then… Bulgasari was a North Korean/Japanese co-production! (So sayeth Wikipedia, at least.)

손오공 홍해아 대전 (Son Oh-kong vs Hong Hae-a): Aside from a brief scene where some spirit or deity of unusual size assault the intreprid party of adventurers in the story, this wasn’t really a 괴수 movie at all, though I can see why it was included — it is in a related genre, and uses many of the special effects seemingly pioneered in monster movies. The characters are probably familiar to many from the various other retellings of the “Journey to the West” stories — yeah, that trio of a Pig-man, a Monkey King, and a bald, ugly fella who accompany an important Buddhist cleric (in the AD&D sense of the word) on his journey to India.

These are not pictures from the movie I saw, but they do feature some of the same characters in the same costumes.

It was goofily fun, though by the end I was eager to leave, partly because it was so episodic, partly because it was mostly for kids, and partly because there’s just so much of the “special effects” one can take when special effects mean stopping the camera so characters can move, and then starting it again, this having characters teleport around the screen at high speed. That got old pretty fast!

Here’s a clip that I think includes bits from the whole series.

See a clip from the film I saw here (an underwater fight, obviously shot through an aquarium), and more bits from the series here.

괴물 (The Host): There’s a lot I have to say about this 2006 film, but I’m saving most of it for a post very soon.

However, a few elements that jumped out at me as having been directly linked to one or more earlier Korean monster movies, though given a twist in this film:

• A special “contact” or connection between overtly vulnerable children and the monster.
• Presentations of both the American military and the Korean government and military as ineffectual or callous, later resolved by an over-the-top military response that takes down (or helps take down) the beast.
• Foreigners circumstantially or directly connected with the appearance of the monster in Korea.
• The monster’s having arisen from the watery depths and finally wreaking havoc in Seoul. (Though thebeast in The Host doesn’t smash any buildings at all!)
• The monster is revealed very quickly, and gets a good amount of screen time. Which sucks when your special effects are bad, as in older Korean monster movies, but which is excellent when you have CGI on your side.

And as a treat for those of who’ve survived this far, here is a very odd but characteristic observation of Korean monster movies: the critters always, always can be made into cute icons. Well, wait, maybe not The Host. But all the rest? Check it out:

My funny Wangmagwi,

Sweet comic Bulgasari,

You make me smile with my Yonggari... Your looks are laughable... Unphotographable... Yet you're a monstrous work of art....

Cute neotenous monster icons ganked from here.

(I’ll post tomorrow, at greater length, about the  Korean Film Archive (KOFA) 괴수 대백과 (Giant Monster Movie Omnibus) retrospective I caught part of earlier this week.)

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I’m not going to stand a hope in hell of reviewing every one of them in depth, so I’m going to do a hit-and-run review: Ten words or less for each title, with some musings at the end.

What I watched at PIFAN 2008:

Recycle: Cheesy Filipino SF. Alien invasion, giant mecha, melodrama. But fun.

Opapatika: Thai horror. Very confusing. Suicide gives you magic powers? Meh.

Om Shanti Om: Bollywood — yay! Loved it. Still singing the songs. Watch it!

(Really. It was, for me, the highlight of the festival, and Lime loved it too. Highly recommended.)

The Housemaid: 1960s Korean melodrama. Sexual morality play. Fascinating. Need the DVD.

Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation:  Yawn. No critical discussion. Just clips and clips of lezsploitation.

Bhoothnath: Hee! Kiddie Bollywood. Canterville Ghost rehabilitated by a kid. Fun.

Woman Detective Mary: 70s pulp. Sexually perverse narcotics ring hunted. Occasionally shocking.

The Ecstasy of Black Rose: Japanese wackos. Not really porn. Sexual insanity? Red-light liberationism? Odd.

The Summer of the Flying Saucer: Irish “SF.” Smalltown UFO crash. Aliens fit in. Cute, alright.

A Chain of Islands: Japanese murder mystery; American occupation, drug ring, gangsters. Fascinatingly opaque.

Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge: Silly/fun: Japanese schoolgirl & boyfriend fight chainsaw monster. Awwww.

The Auteur: Fauxdoc: poor famous porno director’s career in decline. Hilarious stuff.

Alone Across the Pacific: Japanese, true story. First transpacific Japanese sailor. Pretty damned good.

Mirageman: Utterly brilliant comedic superhero: penniless Chilean dude. Touching subplot, too.

Let the Right One In: Swedish vampire drama. Little kids. Spooky, touching. Cool.

American Zombie: Hilarious fauxdoc: Zombie Civil Rights. Zombie speed? Don’t Ask. Grrrrrrrr!

Sarkar Raj: Serious, somewhat confusing Indian political drama. Comic-book like.

When the Full Moon Rises: Funny Malaysian horror/comedy/mystery. Ghosts, lycanthropes, jazz, pretty girls.

Jodhaa Akbar: Beautiful but long Indian historical drama. Needed intermission… but wow.

Death Bell: Fun Korean remix: SAW + Battle Royale, spooky highschool.

The Rage: Schlocky monster vultures. Korean audience girls screaming. Anglophones howling laughter.

Cyborg, She: My Sassy Droid. Define “cyborg”? Better than expected. All Japanese!

(Seriously. You could tell there was Korean influence, but it was heavily Japanese, and in my opinion benefitted from being much more deeply influenced by Japanese manga than any other Korean SF film to date. More on that in a post in a week or two…)

Transsiberian: Russkie murder mystery. Predictably surprising. Twisty. Dark. Brr.

I’d have to say the most entertaining film of the bunch was Om Shanti Om, which I saw twice — the second time, I insisted Lime come along, and she loved it too. It’s very cheesy in some ways — the twists and turns of the plot didn’t really surprise — but there’s a lot of metafictional commentary on (and celebration of) Indian cinema, the songs are mostly very catchy, and everyone looks like a million dollars.

Here’s a campy (on purpose) trailer:

The best Korean film, for me, was The Housemaid (하녀) which I suspect may well be the most interesting Korean film I’ve ever seen. It was somewhat like a Korean episode of The Twilight Zone but, instead of anything supernatural happening, a single moment of moral weakness in which a man cheats on his wife with the housemaid leads to, well, baaaad things. Watching this film, I realized that Korean “melodrama” is not one genre, but several, one of which is the sexual morality play, a seemingly major genre in Korean cinema. (Including films like The Good Lawyer’s Wife, Crazy Marriage, The Green Chair, Plum Blossoms, Summertime, La Belle, Too Young To Die, maybe Oasis, and much more.)

Men and women... a dangerous mix. Careful if you value your life and those of your wife and kids, gentlemen. That is the take-home message of 하녀.

Between The Housemaid and Woman Detective Mary, a Korean pulp flick about a female narcotics officer hunting for her supposedly undercover cop boyfriend who’s involved with a narcotics ring (with generous dollops of sexploitation thrown in), I was stunned by how different older Korean films were than what I imagined. I imagined, when watching Crazy Marriage in the cinema, that this was a new sort of thing, this kind of explicitness — but it seems to me now to fit onto a pretty smooth curve of development.

The other fascinating thing — a subject I want to post more about, though it’ll have to wait till September at the soonest, is the very overtly and necessarily gendered character archetypes in these movies, all of which is fascinating. It’ll be part of an upcoming discussion of Gender Archetype Taxonomy in Korean pop culture that I’ll be getting to, well, just as soon as I can.

As for the festival itself, it’s well-known that the mayor blackballed the people who actually got the PIFan going in the first place for forgetting his name in the ceremony. That’s pathetic of him, it’s very third-world-politics and officious and childish too, in my personal opinion. But that is no reason to dismiss the festival, or, well, not a good enough one. Dozens of volunteers put in a lot of work, and while there were many  serious problems with the way the festival was executed — the fact that ticket reservations were screwed up from the beginning, the fact that ticket reservations were only available on the Korean site (I’m not sure whether it required a Korean ID number as Lime went ahead and reserved them for me), the website worked only in Windows (as usual), and the fact that the opening and closing film tickets could only be bought online.

All of that added up to a big, big pain in the butt, but Lime posted a pretty strongly-worded complaint, and the festival high-ups let loose a flurry of “Oh, gee, sorry! That’s true, we could have organized things a lot better.” To the volunteers’ credit, they tried hard to smooth things over, they went out of their way to ensure I could get the tickets I wanted, and they were very helpful. I was impressed by the volunteers, and I do hope that the higher-ups really intend to address their various infrastructural problems and set things up a little more professionally next time.

All in all, PIFan was a good experience for me. Incidentally, I also made a couple of friends there — Korean guys, one of them just a student who happened to chat with me. Not a word of English, and he didn’t make a big deal out of it, which was cool. We had dinner. I also hung out with Matt and Mark (and, briefly, some of the festival people) one night, and met a friendly young Korean writer at the Genre Books Sale that was held at city hall. (He’s a mystery writer working on getting his first book published.)

Good times.

I’m sure I’m the only person interested, but the Korean Film Archive is showing some old SF movies this month. That is, this weekend and Monday. My Friday is already spoken for, and I have a DVD of Yonggary here, but I’ve never seen Ape (1976) and I’ve heard it’s deliciously awful, and since I’m researching Korean SF at the moment, — and it is apparently some kind of a Korean-American co-production — I am definitely going to see it.

It’s playing at 2pm this Monday at the KOFA theater. I’m sure I’m the only one deranged enough to be willing to inflict Ape upon himself, but if any reader in or around Seoul dares to brave the madness, please find me after — I’ll be the only other person there, I’m sure, but just in case I’ll be probably looking like this by the end of the flick — and we can go for a coffee or an early beer after. (3:30pm is early, but if the film’s as bad as I’ve heard…)

Here’s the movie’s sparse info page (at KOFA, and at IMDB) and here’s the KOFA’s schedule info page, and the map (with instructions) to the theater. I’ve never been, so I will be trying to turn up early so as to find my way. I’ll probably also be taking a taxi from the subway station if it’s as bloody hot as it has been lately.

To start with, a disclaimer:

In discussions of Lost, I’ve seen the several trends, and I’m going to comment on each one before I give my thoughts and opinions. You’re free to disagree. But I want you to know from the outset, I’m not really interested in extended dialog about Lost. To me, Lost is just a TV show. Seriously. And I’m not going to waste time on arguments about it.

I’m not so dispassionate about all TV shows, mind you: I push Dead Like Me onto people very passionately; I will hold you down on the ground if that’s what it takes to get you to watch the genius of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, or Life on Mars. But Lost has enough fans, and if you’re not one, that’s fine. If you get all in my face and start claiming that Heroes saved you, because Lost was jumping the shark, I might laugh at you, or mumble something, but I won’t bother with a full argument.It’s just not worth it to me.

So for this particular post, I’m instituting a new comment rule: you may ask questions. No declarative sentences, just questions. I reserve the right to delete any comment that doesn’t follow that rule. Keep ‘em simple, keep ‘em interesting. If you have opinions you want to express, aside from questions, go do it on your blog. (I know you have one if you’re reading this!)

Okay, so, trends I’ve seen in discussing Lost:

1. I hate Kate/Jack/Locke/etc. 

   I take this as a sign of good writing, because it’s not always the same character. If everyone hated Locke, that’d be that, and it’s be boring. Locke would be The Bad Guy, or at least, The Good Guy in Disguise Who Awaits Plot Twists to Reveal the Truth. But in fact, different people hate different characters. Our dislike for whichever character bugs us in Lost is often much more organic. It’s kind of like how, in every group of people, there’s going to be one person you like the least, and have issues with eventually. In a sense, we’re trapped on a desert island with the characters, and our own reactions are probably as much a testament to the successful immersiveness of the concept.

   A lot of Korean Lost fans who discuss the show online dislike Kate. They apparently (Lime tells me) feel negatively towards her because of her behaviour: that is, how she switches from guy to guy, playing them off against one another, so you can never tell where she stands. Which is, of course, a valid response as a reader — humans care about characters as if they’re people because well-drawn characters push the same kinds of mental or emotional buttons in our heads that real people do.

   But it reminds me of how one of my profs in grad school said to a rather irate student who was angry at Holden Caulfield for insulting doctors (since her dad was a doctor). The prof said, “Okay, but could we please go beyond talking about characters like they’re real people?” Why I dislike Kate’s character has more to do with the fact that a lot of the time, it feels like there is no there there. She’s mostly a love-interest, a third point in a triangle, the thing for two of the leading men to fight over. Likewise, while a lot of people dislike Ben for being so cold-blooded, I find that this is precisely what makes him interesting. Ben is a bastard. He will mess you up, he will double cross you. Yet he does have feelings, he has things he is desperate to achieve. He’s very human, even despite still being, largely, a mystery. Ben has contradictions in him, which makes him a great character. Kate’s self-contradictions have all been a bit too, er, predictable, and a bit too focused on Jack and Sawyer. Juliette is a much more interesting character, because it’s still not clear which side — if any — she’s on, and why.

   Still, even going back to the level of basic human reaction, different viewers get invested in different characters. The cast has grown even wider, with the people who’ve dropped in on Season 4: a geeky scientist, a wise-cracking psychic who’s also Asian-American (nice niche to exploit); Michael’s back, with guilt to spare; and we’ve seen much deeper into the world of Charles Widmore, including a really tantalizing future plot where Sayid is working with Ben against Widmore.

2. What’s with the flashforwards? They’re screwing up the present-setting plotting, and robbing us of all mystery.

   Well, I understand the concern, and I think writing flashforwards is risky since it really can rob the past struggles of suspense… if it’s poorly done. And yes, the writers of Lost indeed have fumbled at times in the past.

   But one should always remember that what one sees in those futures is almost certainly being built up to deceive viewers. For example, when we see Sun at Jin’s grave, declaring tearfully, “I miss you,” what are we to make of it? This suggests that Jin is dead, but that doesn’t mean it’s so. Jin’s fate could be any number of things: maybe he died when the tanker blew. Maybe he survived somehow. Maybe he was caught up in the same timewarp that caused the island to shift in time in the finale, and he was able to swim to shore. Maybe he was actually rescued, but is in hiding somewhere that Sun’s father can’t screw up his life. There are many possible explanations for why Jin is absent. (I think he is indeed dead, but there’s no way to know without watching the whole series, if even then.)

   The objections to the flashforwards, to me, may or may not become more valid depending on what happens in Season 5. I think, however, they may well be linked to the time-travel plot device that is affecting Desmond, that is used to move the island, and so on. Also, it’s quite possible that future action and past action will be eerily contemporaneous since, after all, time travel does exist in the world of Lost. (We haven’t seen travel to the future — yet — but that doesn’t make it impossible. Likewise, all this discussion of “going back” that we’re hearing in the flashforwards may not refer solely to spatial movement.)

3. The relationships issues are getting boring!

   Yeah, well, that’s relationships. Sometimes they’re like that in real life, too. In fact, the best relationships on the show are the most screwed-up ones… Ben’s with Juliette; Juliette’s with Jack; Sayid’s with Shannon — because how the hell was that going to work out anyway? — and so on. I have to admit that the whole Jack & Kate shackup toward the end of Season 4 has me feeling quite annoyed with Jack, but again, that’s good writing, if you ask me. How far he’s fallen: he’s an abject nut dependent on Kate, of all people. (He really should know better, and I’m guessing his guilt must just be overwhelming him to the point of nonfunctionality.) In fact, the person most deprived of relationships — Hurley — is the most in touch with reality. Maybe.
   
   

4. What’s with the time travel? The Ghost-Whispering? All that other kooky stuff?

   It’s just a science fiction trope, man. Get over it! I wasn’t expecting so much of it. I’m not sure how well it’ll end up being handled. Already, we’ve got some paradox issues, and I don’t care what the writers say, there is always an element of paradox when you have time travel. Unless you do away with causality or something wacky like that. For example, Farady-in-the-past knows for sure that time travel is possible. This will almost certainly affect his research plans, and has already sent his life on a different trajectory… yet how could it have, if it hadn’t already happened? Of course, the past can be edited then fine, but it still affects the future… unless you do away with causality, or something.

   As for the other time-travel — like Locke’s childhood visitor still being the same age in the present — that’s all just neat stuff. I’m curious to see where the island ends up. I’m thinking it could be the recent past, but probably some time in which the island didn’t exist, so as to avoid any kind of weird interference or destructive process. It’ll be interesting.

   The ghost-whispering, all those visions of the dead, and Jacob? I have no idea. I’m not so crazy about this stuff, because it vaguely reminds me of how Shadowrun mixed Tolkien’s (or, rather, AD&D’s) magic and demihuman races with a cyberpunk setting. Why the hell do we need orcs hacking the Pentagon’s clockwork mainframe? I just don’t see the attraction. But some people get off on mixing genres, I guess. Some of them know what they’re doing, and others don’t.

5. Screw this! Heroes totally kicks Lost’s ass!

   Fine, you go on and watch Heroes. Why the hell are you reading this? By the way, Heroes actually was, well, it was okay, at least in Season 1 (I watched most of it during boring bus rides in Laos) but really, it was kind of like Superheroes for Dummies. Dummies being people who have never read a comic book or watched a superhero movie, or pretend they haven’t. It was okay, but, I mean, old hat. The concept was an RPG way back in the early nulls. (Remember White Wolf’s  Aberrant, anyone?)  I mean, is that the way it works now? Rarefied concept -> popular niche concept -> Wacky RPG-> NBC TV show? Because, hey, I got this Wraith campaign I ran back in the late 90s that would make a great TV show…

   The thing I like about Lost, flaws aside, is that it is really a retelling of several different stories, but most centrally the Castaway story… yet it’s about modern, and essentially American(ized), castaways no so much lost on a desert island, but adrift in our modern world. The characters were all completely “lost” long before they got to the island. Last semester, I hammered away at the idea that we could understand a lot about a culture’s hidden anxieties by examining its pop culture. My student wrote about Lost at one point, and argued rather brilliantly that Lost is the post-9/11 TV program. While Heroes has the explicit threat to New York in its storyline, its Lost that embodies a sense of adriftness, a sense of desperation and distrust, of fear of unknown, dark powers, of factions, of lies from above and from all around, conspiracies from within and without. It was a fascinating little essay.

I think that’s about all I have to say for now. I’ve put off things so long that it’s all vague, and I apologize if this is a disappointment, but I know I won’t get around to watching Season 4 episodes until long after the series is all finished — so much else to do — but when it’s running, I still find the show compulsively watchable. I’ll probably have more to say when the next season starts, but for now, I need to do other things. And no, I haven’t read this or that special Lost website. The franchise is probably full of hints, but I’m full of other projects…

Still, if you have any questions, feel free to pop them into the comments. Actual questions only, this time, folks! Post ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.

Scott thinks they’re “retards” who are guilty of “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation,” and that “they think that going to a massive anti-government demonstration is cosplay and means nothing serious in the end…” and that I’m being patronizing in excusing this.

I disagree. Wanna know why?

The whole comment thread is here, and I invite you to read it all because I’m boiling down Scott’s argument a lot, but here’s my main comment:

First off, I find it hilarious that one might call the use of costumes in a protest movement “retarded,” consider its long history. For example, “retarded cosplay” figured in none other than protests of the Vietnam war, and after all, the hippies you think so highly of also followed a rather ornate set of costume codes during the Summer of Love; on one level, it could easily be seen as having involved a rather large exhibit of “cosplay.” Does that make the Summer of Love “nothing serious” and “retarded” too?

But there’s a more interesting example in the Luddites. They made extensive use of cross-dressing, somehow not mentioned in Wikipedia at all, though you can see on the image on the main Wikipedia page that the image of Nedd Ludd is of a man in a dress. They did it for a simple reason, which was that violence would be much less likely used on women than on men, as well as to effect a kind of disguise. This kind of thing isn’t even limited to the twentieth century, either: the Luddites and Saboteurs were famous cross-dressers, for the same reasons. And — realistic or not — the fears that were expressed online in discussions of how authorities might respond to the protests, such as for example agents provocateurs starting fights among protesters, were oddly reminiscent of the same fears nineteenth-century Luddites.

And also note: I’m not saying the protesters are the same as the Luddites. The Luddites had a pretty clear goal in mind and seemed to be fighting for a clear agenda… sort of. (Though there’s scholarship that suggests it was a different agenda than we commonly think, thanks to anti-Luddite propaganda, so even there there’s some confusion.) The lack of clarity here is something I’ve criticized myself, in my comment responding to you, and people I talked about it with on Saturday mostly agreed. But masks and disguises and costumes have long been a part of protest movements — including some that you hold in high esteem — so mocking it here as “retarded” and mere “cosplay” seems unfair.

As for intellectual laziness and not reading movie reviews, I understand your exasperation, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that the movie was not the comic book, and that plenty of people — not just lazy ones — don’t read movie reviews or blogs about the films they see — especially the ones they liked or that resonated for them. We can go around denouncing them as ignorant and ethnocentric, or instead, and this is likely to be more useful in figuring out what they did and why, we can ask ourselves why they chose to take up that symbol despite their not being anarchists themselves.

One useful starting point is the fact that anarchism was almost completely excised from the movie: most of the English-language critics who mentioned it were mentioning its absence from the film, and any Korean critic who did otherwise, even in Cine21, was undoubtedly just trying to show off that he or she had read the Wikipedia entry on the book, because dude, seriously; that movie is not about anarchism. In any way, shape, or form. It all but screams for an American-liberal reading.

And by the way, before you dismiss that observation, and before you get too comfortable with the idea I’m patronizing Koreans here, I’d like to point out that the English-speaking internet has largely much missed out on the connection too. If you Google (English-language webpages only, to ensure we catch all the references to anarchy in English) for “V for Vendetta” you’ll find close to 4 million hits. Then add “anarch*” (a wildcard that will include anarchy, anarchist, anarchic, anarchism, etc.) to the search and it drops down to just a bit over a hundred thousand mentions.

When you calculate it all out, it appears that approximately 2.5% of English-language discussions of V for Vendetta make any mention of anarchism or anarchist thought… in other words, the majority of Anglophones discussing the film online — Anglophones who have the leisure of reading book reviews and even of going out and reading the original comic book in their own language — are also guilty of “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation,” or, er… no, that would sound silly, wouldn’t it?

Yes, it would, because after all, as I imagine you know, this is precisely how popular cultures work. Figures morph and transform over time, and their treatments by later derivative artists — especially in film! — change their popularly understood meanings. These days when we think of Superman, we think of him fighting “crime” or taking on an insane military-industrial-science complex (as often personified by Lex Luthor); that is, as an extension of the justice system or the state. Most of us don’t think of old Superman as a raging fighter for the rights of the working poor, though in the early days of the comic, he often fought villains like slumlords, corrupt state orphanage administrators, and crooked bosses. Most people don’t remember that in Korea and America alike.

And perhaps you have missed the discussions of V online in English, but there was actually a lot of disappointment expressed (by those who knew and loved the book) at how little of the original intellectual/anarchist basis remained. This is one of the reasons Alan Moore himself hated the film and distanced himself from it: he noted that is actually recast the original political conflict in the book — fascism versus anarchism — as something else — American neoconservativism versus American liberalism. So, really, even Moore thinks the movie is in itself an American-liberal tirade against American neo-conservativism. How can we fault Koreans for correctly seeing that in the film?

Then we factor in the subtitling — where detail and nuance is always lost — and lack of access to the comic book, and what we get is a liberal fantasy narrative about citizens rising up against a neocon government. In other words, the protesters used the symbols you saw with pretty much direct continuity to their use in the film. Yes, there is a level of utopian fantasy here. That, too, should be familiar from earlier protests movements, including ones you esteem highly.

But basically, it seems to me they were using liberal icons as a protest against conservativism that they perceive as aligned with American neoconservativism.

Which is, I imagine, what they would have told you, had you asked them why they’d taken those symbols up. Perhaps in not so many words, because it would be obvious to them, and puzzling that you would ask about something that seems unrelated to the film. But it seems important to me to know — and I don’t mean to be nasty here, but I think this is a valid question:

Once you discovered that they hadn’t been aware of the anarchist trope in V for Vendetta, and once you established that they didn’t know the V-sign was an inverted anarchy sign…

Did you ask them why on earth they decided to use the symbol and mask? Or did you just decide they’d misunderstood everything and were idiots, and walk away?

I don’t know, what you’ve written seems like a really, really cheap shot, and I think there are much better places to aim those strong uppercuts and jabs of yours.

And I do. Scott’s punches are strong, and I respect you, Scott, but I think you’re flat-out wrong on their use of V, and I’ve been thinking about this angle on things for a while. After all, this isn’t the only thing from SF/fantasy we’ve seen manifest as part of the protest… not by a long shot, and much of it much more open to criticism than this.

As for uses of the V-sign in protests of days past, I have no idea the vector of adoption, so I can’t say much about it. But the V they were using on Saturday is clearly right from the film. Is it too much to imagine it’s a different vector of exposure?

What a crappy month it’s been for films in the cinema. I hadn’t gone in some time, but of the three films I saw, only Kung-Fu Panda amused me. Actually, it was good fun, once you got beyond the feelgoodishness of it all. I mean, it was very nicely animated and had some funny bits, some cool imagery — man, that scene with Master Oogway the turtle and the peach blossoms, man — and all that badass Tai Lung business, that was some fun, even if I was snickering (inwardly, always, at animations) most often at parts that the Korean audience around me seemed not to find so funny.

(And yes, I still like it even though in her exam one of my students compared me to the Panda, writing, “He is you 100% Professor Gord! You exactly! So big~ and cute~ bear!”)

But the other three films I saw in the Cinema?

The Happening, indeed. As in, what the hell is happening to M. Night Shyamalan? Or maybe, better, what the hell is happening in Hollywood, if a piece of crap like that got released? Actually, I’d prefer to call this movie The Crappening, but I’m sure I’m far from the first to make that crack about this film. Whatever you say, I’ll defend Sixth Sense, and Unbreakable was a great movie. However, something bad happened when Mr. Shyamalan worked with Mel Gibson, I imagine — Signs was a stinker — and while he held it back during The Village, which was, you know, not brilliant, but, you know, alright enough, the condition came back with a vengeanes. We got the mess Lady in the [Swimming Pool] and, now, yes, The Happening is the worst of all. (Er, need I say “so far”? Please, tell me Mr. Shyamalan won’t be given any more money to waste. I can stomach spending millions on a good film, it doesn’t even need to be great, but on crap? Seriously? I’d rather the money goes somewhere useful, like, you know, researching differences in toilet style between Europe and North America.)

What I mean to say is that The Happening is horribly written, terribly acted (the heroically bad example being, “Look! A car!” said, while pointing at a car that is one foot away, though, “Yeah, but… why did it start in the parks?” being a close second), inexcusably poor in production quality…

Wait, I have it. It was exactly the episode of Twilight Zone that one would write if one were commissioned to restart the series for a special audience comprised only of the mentally challenged and for those with advanced cases of Alzheimer’s Syndrome. And I am not insulting those people, either. That is how poor in quality everything about this movie is: it’s as if it was designed for people too disconnected from the experience of viewing for any attention to need to be paid to making the film, you know, interesting, amusing, surprising, funny, or, er, good.

And then there’s Doomsday. I had not seen any trailers. In fact, the only thing I knew about it was that it said, in big bold letters on the back of the Korean promo paper, “SF,” and since I take an interest in what is promoted as SF here, I checked it out. Well, this film is best described as a montage of different genres mushed together. First, there’s something like 28 Days Later, a disease outbreak in Scotland. So Scotland gets fenced off, which reminds one of Children of Men. Then there’s some evil dystopian government stuff that overtly references another British politician (Hatcher? Come on!) and then, very quickly, we’re into the female protagonist going into the “Hot Zone” to prevent the same 28 Day Later-ish thing from happening in London. Then we have some military SF-ish stuff — basically hi-tech infantry battling what is a cross between punk rockers and Picts from Braveheart. This gives way to a kind of knights/castle/tyrant narrative, which features a long combat pit duel that may well have been choreographed by watching Gladiator. And then there’s a twenty-minute long car chase — yes, car chase — with the Pictish-punk rockers, and a cruddy trailing-off-into-pointlessness. I almost walked about at several moments, but I just didn’t believe it could actually get worse. It did. Continually.  I was in pain. Okay, but then again, that was the day after I discovered my (mild) case of high blood pressure, and I squirmed a lot when the flashing, smashing, bashing action onscreen elevated my pulse. Meaning, yes, my pulse elevated, but I assure, mostly just as a fight-or-flight reaction to the full-blast noise in the cinema.

And call me a killjoy if you like, but when I watched the latest Indiana Jones film, I kept asking myself, “Were the earlier Indie films this bad?” My friends gleefully have replied, “Yes, they were.”

So it’s been a rather disappointing month in the cinema, that is, aside from Kung Fu Panda and Iron Man. Which, oh, yes, I haven’t blogged about yet. I really liked Iron Man.I don’t know the original comic, though, and I think the beginning was a bit long. As in, it took too long to get going. But I liked the film anyway, at least for a single viewing, though it’s been too long since I saw it to have much more to say about that, except, of course, that I wish Hollywood would, for once, think of a new bad guy. The Muslims-in-Desert trope is growing a little tired, already.

But three out of the five films I watched in the cinema stank. That’s not good.

On the other hand, some of the films I’ve watched at home — like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Graduate. Both of those films were very distinctive of their time, very interesting and stylized. The way in which sharp dialog is inescapably stylized is something that’s come to interest me. Both films are funny, alternately dark and light, and very surprising. But I do wish that Robert Downey Jr. hadn’t put out that CD.

(The last track is one of his songs, and I was all, “Huh?” and only twenty minutes later, I felt so badly for the man. But hey, he’s the one who gets to play Iron Man, and get paid doing it, so I’m sure he doesn’t need my pity.)

No links, because I can’t be bothered. All these films will come up if you google them or copy the name to IMDB for a search.

So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay in my own field, and in one I may be perhaps best equipped of anyone to write. It’d be neat to present a paper in Fukuoka to a bunch of specialists, so why the hell not? If they take me, it’s an experience. If they don’t, I lose nothing. So I’m glad that James inspired me to give it a shot.

And as I say, I don’t believe there are many people who could fill in this area as I could. Well, there was this Korean guy I met least year who had done a Ph.D. in the US years ago in the field of SF literature, but the last I heard he was too busy trying to extort money out of childrens’ textbook publishers to actually do anything like real academic research.

In any case, I did up a couple of abstracts, and tried to upload them. The one I’d like for them to have taken is not the one they took, but ah well, publishing a paper on SF in Korea’s not so bad, is it?

The question, dear readers, is why Korea lacks a really vibrant SF-genre literature for adults, either in translation or in some native form. When you ask Koreans about this, they often answer with the same sophistication as your average bookseller in North America: that is, they conflate SF and fantasy and even, to some degree, horror. There is at least one major fantasy author worth noting, whom I’m told popularized the concept of the “zombie” here. (Lime’s a fan: she recently almost ordered second-hand copies of his whole series,퇴마록 (Toemarok), and bemoaned the fact that the film version was so horrible, since she thinks I would enjoy it if only I could.

No, Korea has a vibrant and rather entertaining — if somewhat derivative — literary and cinematic fantasy life. Fantasy tropes (including cutesy swords-and-idealized-history stuff) are common in video games, in daydream sequences in otherwise mainstream films (My Sassy Girl is a famous example among others), and in fantastical films ranging from Arahan (where chop-socky kung-fu mysticism meets modern-day Seoul) to the stupid but funny Sisily 2km (where gangsters and rural-types mix it up with ghosts). Fantasy and horror work adapt quite well to the Korean aesthetic, and to Korean narrative-styles, and to the politics and culture here. Horror, especially, seems to be a good fit: films like the Yeogo Gwedam (”High School Girl’s Ghost Story”) series evoke the horrors of the school system and of teenaged girls’ lives; the oldie-but-goodie 301/302 that explores the alienation inherent in apartment-block life, especially by women; Gidam (”Epitaph”) exploits the remaining (or renewed) Korean anxities about Japan and its colonial past in Korea to horrific effect; R-Point combines military drama/action with horror; Eolgul Eobneun Minyeo (”Faceless [Beauty]“) pushes the kind of “subjectless body” notion that James at Grand Narrative has been exploring to its extremes by exploring the eros/thanatos horror of a beautiful woman with Borderline Personality Disorder. The list could go on and on, but it’s unnecessary. Everyone who’s interested knows that Korean horror, even when it’s not brilliant — cinematic horror so rarely is — works like horror, functions, does what it needs to in order to get the job done. Likewise, fantasy works well enough to be recognizably functioning as fantasy does in other incarnations of fantasy abroad, whether it’s a film that is all-in-all fantasy, like Arahan or The Ginkgo Tree Bed, or just brief asides like the swordfight daydream scene in My Sassy Girl. Likewise, there is a native tradition of ghost-stories and fantastical mythology in Korea that, like fantasy anywhere, can be plugged into the plot-coupon structure so popular in fantasy, or the inevitable-doom plotline so universal in horror films, that even when they aren’t great, these kinds of genres can be viably handled in a Korean context. Even in historical or mainstream dramatic films, fantasy can be woven seamlessly into the action as it was in downright magical-realist scenes in Oasis and The Barber of Hyoja-dong.

I’ve come to the opinion that the same is not quite true of cinematic SF in Korea. All of the “SF” films I’m thinking of have come out since the turn of the century, and all of them are flawed in ways that go beyond the quality of the plot or storyline. Watching films like 2009: Lost Memories and Yesterday and Natural City, you get a sense that the kinds of things the filmmakers are trying to say are not actually SFnal, or indeed, that the stories themselves are on some level anti-SFnal in ways that cannot simply be attributed to the derivative nature of a lot of Korean cinematic SF.

(Hollywood SF, too, is often profoundly anti-SFnal, at least, for someone literate in the genre. SF in the media is often doing things that nobody could get away with doing in books anymore, because the territory Hollywood likes to hang around in was, in literary circles, all strip-mined barren fifty years ago.)

Yet SF itself — the SF pervasive in the Anglophone world, and in Western Europe — has permeated into Korean society. Some of the things in the news — from Dr. Hwang’s crazed promises to cure all illnesses, to the government’s unfortunately unrealistic, but openly-declared plan to put robots out on the DMZ as automated/autonomous guardians, and in homes as nannies and English tutors — are so unrealistic, so unreflective of real science, that one would expect them to be explicitly cribbed from Hollywood SF or Golden Age paperbacks.

But it likely isn’t from Golden Age paperbacks, at least. SF novels and short stories have been translated in Korea, but never in as great numbers as one might hope, and never so successfully that the genre has actually taken root here. For all the films made over the last ten years since Korean films “became good,” there hasn’t been one film that has embraced the underlying tenets of SF so completely as to succeed on the terms upon which SF internationally is judged. (Likewise, most SF films, with the exception of Bong Joon-ho’s recent blockbuster The Host, have performed weakly or even dismally at the box office, so it’s not as if these failings are necessarily lost on filmgoers here.)

Of course, Korea is not unique in lacking a deep-rooted SF tradition, as well as a functional literary SF scene. Literary critics interested in SF have long noted that outside of Britain and Britain’s onetime colonies, outside of Western Europe and Japan, SF just isn’t that popular, and not many people are writing SF. It is, perhaps, not surprising that SF is undergoing a boom in China these days, with literally millions of regular magazine subscribers and readers into the genre. China’s SF scene is vibrant in terms of consumption, at least — whether Chinese authors are making a living writing the stuff, I don’t know, but the history of SF in China has been one of booms and busts, not just neglect. Ironically, from what I’ve read, the place with the most analogous situation to Korea is Hong Kong — amateurism, lack of interest, a sense that it’s kid-stuff and not worth the effort.

SF has been enjoying booms in other places, too, from what I’ve read — India, some claim — yet in Korea, it’s still kind of stuck. I think the older explanation, based on the observation that industralization and modernization arrived too recently to have provided fertile ground for the genre, is outmoded. I think there are specific cultural, historical, and other reasons for this phenomenon, and that’s what I plan to explore this week in a few posts that will become the basis of my paper, should it be accepted for presentation.

(But even if it’s not, this is worth thinking about.)

Well, not “say,” in many cases, but I always have students write up a Prep Sheet and a Reaction paper, before and after a panel discussion, respectively, and I’m working through the Prep Sheets for the West Wing panel right now. There’s lots of good stuff, such as discussing the logic of a fantastical Democrat Administration on TV during a Republican Administration’s rule, or the relative lack of women in high positions in the West Wing even in this supposedly utopian, egalitarian, “dream” administration. Lots of good stuff. But there’s lots that took me by surprise, too.

While I’m on a marking break, I thought I’d note a few things among my students’ reaction papers that were really odd, unexpected, or surprising, for anyone interested.

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The “n” sound is a liason between the m in “Seum” and the “l” in “-liette,” so the latter half of the name, “-liette” obviously taken from the character’s name, but “seum” requires a little explanation if you don’t speak Korean. It’s the second half of the word “gaseum” (which could also be spelled “kaseum”) which has the same double-meaning as “breast” in English: that place where pain or joy can reside, or against which one rests one’s dreaming head, as well as in a woman’s breasts, the bosom, the “boobs.”

Apparently, Korean lost fans think that the most striking feature of the actress, Elizabeth Mitchell, is the size of her breasts relative to her overall slimness. So they’re calling her the equivalent of “Boobliette.”

As for me, I’m still puzzled as to why the people using this name are so impressed with her chest in particular… she doesn’t seem any more graciously-endowed than other actors on the show. Maybe it’s just that, as a Westerner, I’m just used to more prodigious equipage? I’m not sure, but anyway, I thought this warranted sharing.