The Host

                The Host (2006) is different from other monster movies where a creature ravages a city, such as Godzilla and Cloverfield. As Sotang states, quoted by Anisfield, “’In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive’ and such films are ‘one of the purest forms of spectacle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone’s feelings.’” (57) This is not The Host. In it, we see a family with many flawed characters—a grandfather who neglected his son, a father who everyone thinks is stupid, an aunt who can never quite succeed because she’s too slow, and an alcohol uncle without a job. But once they realize that Park Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-seong) is still alive, they ban together to save her. And through that, they all redeem themselves. The grandfather who neglected his son defended and took the blame for Park Gang-doo’s (Song Kang-ho) issues and ended up sacrificing himself for his family. The father who everyone considered a failure succeeded in killing the creature and saving the boy that his daughter was trying to save. The aunt who never managed to shoot in time when it mattered managed to shoot the monster in the eye, critically injuring him. And finally, the alcoholic uncle used alcohol bottles to make bombs which he used to help kill the monster and was the one who managed to find the location of Hyun-seo through a work ethic and cleverness that no one thought he had. I feel like the movie is less about the monster and more about the struggles of a family, which makes it unique from other monster movies. It is a monster movie because there is a strange creature who is trying to kill people, but I feel like the monster was just something to build the actual story on—a story of redemption and the love of family.

Welcome to Dongmakgol

                Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) is a far more humorous and abstract perspective on the Korean War than The Marines who Never Returned or Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War. However, does it make it any less effective in showing the effects and implications of the war? I agree with Jake Bevan in his article, “Welcome to Panmunjeom: encounters with the north in contemporary South Korean cinema,” that Welcome to Dongmakgol is in fact more successful than some other war films, such as Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War. This is because Welcome to Dongmakgol presents an alternative to just North and South. In Taegugki, both sides were shown in a negative light. You ended up not really wanting to be either. However, in Dongmakgol there is the village of Dongmakgol, where everyone strives to be like children—carefree and without prejudice. Not only do we see the happiness of people unaffected by war, which Taegugki showed and The Marines who Never Returned did not, but we see the ability for North and South Korean soldiers who initially wanted to kill each other being able to return to that state of harmony. Not only that, but we can see the difficulties they first encounter—trying to cover up their disgust of each other when they first agree to help the villagers, which only ended in them goading each other until they fought. And then we see them able to move past it. I would have to say though, it is not in the unrealistic scene with them killing the boar that they become friends, but in the ensuing scene of all the soldiers, including the American, sneaking off to eat the boar. I think that’s when they realize how similar they all are because they all had the exact idea to do something that they should not, and it was that recognition of the fact that they are all just people who are sometimes mischievous and other things other than evil, that allows them to overcome their differences. And seeing that capacity of unity between North and South Koreans, if even on film, is a lot more promising than seeing the violent effects that one already lives in.

Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War

                Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War (2004), in giving a “more balanced approach than earlier anticommunist films,” (Kim 303) the ultimate feeling that the film leaves us with is that there are only survivors, no winners or heroes. Despite the uplifting ending where the children are “somehow thriving and sanguine despite the utter devastation all around them, re-inscribes the film with a nationalist ending,” (Kim 306) I am not left with the feeling that the nation will blossom anew, as Kim is suggesting the end scene presents. Part of that optimistic ending is that Jin Seok (Won Bin) is re-united with his mother and says that he too will go to school. However, we see that fifty years later he is still grieving over his brother and obsessed with finding him. When he takes out the shoes that Jin Tae (Jang Dong-gun) had intended to give him, they are shiny and polished. So clearly they have not just been left there until this moment. His granddaughter, as the elderly Jin Seok gets ready to leave for the war site, mentions that last time he got sick trying to look for Jin Tae. The fact that there was a last time, and it certainly does not seem like last time was his first effort to find Jin Tae, shows that he has sacrificed his time and health over and over again in this search—unable to move on despite the optimistic expectation. In that case, Taegugki is more successful at showing the post-armistice division consciousness than Kim concludes with because what I left with at the end of the film was that people should be relieved, they should be happy—and they even act it, but in the end everyone is left with a part of them that cannot move on. Even the granddaughter cannot move on from the war because she has to see her grandfather go through all this and assist him in his search. So what had the possibility to be positive ended up disheartening, just like Jin Tae’s attempt to get his brother out of the war, Jin Seok going to see his family where Kim Young-shin (Lee Eun-joo) gets arrestest, and Jin Seok’s long search for his brother.

The Marines that Never Returned

In David Scott Diffrient’s article, he states that The Marines that Never Returned (1968) “treats the subject of the Korean War with intelligence and sensitivity, daring even to show his doomed heroes questioning its legitimacy.” (28) While I agree with the statement, I think that it is interesting to contrast it to the next movie we watched, Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War (2004). They both show a more balanced portrayal of the Korea War, as opposed to a strictly black-or-white / right-or-wrong depiction of North and South Korea. I think it is interesting to see who or what it seems brings out the courage in both movies ‘heroes.’ In The Marines that Never Returned, the troupe rescues a young girl, Young-hui, who they love and care for throughout the movie. Conversely, in Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War, Jin Tae (Jang Dong-gun) goes to war with the motivation of protecting his brother. Why do these people stay in the war if they are questioning its legitimacy? I think it is clear from both movies that true courage did not come from national pride, it came from humanity because people want to protect the ones they love. Even when the marines wavered in their conviction, ultimately they sacrificed themselves to protect the people they cared about despite knowing that it would be the end for them. And the fact that The Marines that Never Returned, which was for the most part less serious than Taegugki, can reveal the human connections that make wars worth fighting for in some people’s eyes, even to the end, is what makes it as intelligent and sensitive as Diffrient highlights in his article.

Gender in Love and War: Taegukgi, The Marines Who Never Returned and my Experiences in Peru

I spent the first two weeks of March in Cusco, Peru, a city rich with Incan and colonial history. I was working with OCAD University Professor David McIntosh on his project Quipucamayoc, a research-creation interactive media art exhibition project. The goal of the project is to re-imagine Incan and Andean traditions in contemporary contexts, using digital and wearable technology to help performers and audience members embody Andean gods and mythological figures. The Peruvian colonial case, involving the rapid modernization of the country by Spanish colonizers who forcibly destroyed Andean traditions, bears many similarities to subject material and historical context we have studied in this course.

(Myself at the Cusco carnival, March 10, 2014)

One subject of particular note in both the Andean and Korean cases is gender, particularly how it applies to conflict. A particularly strong modernizing influence in Peru was psychoanalysis--traditional societal structures of gender were re-imagined under patriarchal, Freudian ideas. This “colonization” of traditional conceptions of gender continues today in academic discourse on the subject. Meanwhile, rural Andean communities, and indeed some urban centers like Cusco, have attempted to reintegrate these traditions into contemporary life.

The results are provocative ceremonies and coming-of-age rituals that involve a combination of sexuality, androgyny and war-play. In these rituals, adolescents in a community turn sexuality and sexual interaction into a game of conquest, with both men and women as strategists and active players. Victories involve outlasting the sexual partner and accumulating as many sexual partners as possible. Rather than a patriarchal system in which the male dominates the female through sex and through the phallus, this system holds a kind of feminine androgyny at its center.

I see similarities to this re-appropriation in the Korean context, namely in The Marines Who Never Returned and Taegukgi. In Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, Author David Scott Diffrient suggests that The Marines Who Never Returned adopts melodramatic emotional outpourings commonly associated with women’s film in Korea. The character Young-hui also embodies this crossing of genders--Young-hui acts as a mascot and leader figure, giving the soldiers names and ordering them to do things. However, Young-hui also acts emotionally, and in doing so (particularly through her letters to the soldiers), allows them to express themselves as well. Young-hui thus expresses gender fluidly, in a similar way to the feminine androgyny expressed in Andean communities.

Meanwhile, Taegukgi, while also still emotional in its delivery, also emphasizes, through several action scenes involving extended hand-to-hand combat between men, a very traditional and physical notion of masculinity. It is interesting to note as well that The Marines Who Never Returned involves a scene in which the soldiers travel to a brothel and force the prostitutes, who are at first unwilling, to accommodate them. Here, the films attempt to return to modern notions of sexuality and gender, in which female bodies are passive and male bodies are active in sexual interaction. Why is this? Perhaps patriarchal notions of sex are so ingrained in modern culture that they are difficult to remove. However, I posit that this return embodies a repetition of a kind of traumatic masculinity. Perhaps the notion of sexuality as male-active/female-passive is not only damaging to female participants, but also to men. In this framework, guilt and confusion over the damage caused by patriarchal sexual structures results in violent, exaggerated depictions of the masculine. This can be seen in South American culture as Machismo, and also in these war films that depict violent deconstructions, and often destructions, of men who embody modern notions of masculinity.

Academic discourse about commonalities between South America and East Asia are unfortunately rare. I hope to see more of this in the future.

Seong Han-mo as a Victim of Circumstance

The President's Barber (2004) shows the life of a typical barber living in a not-so typical neighbourhood, which ultimately changes his life and that of his family's. The barber, Seong Han-mo, is played by Song Kang-ho, who we have seen in several other movies. In each film, he plays the 'every day man'-- seemingly harmless and a little silly at times. He reprises that sort of character here, making it seem like all the events in his life happened because he was a victim of circumstance.

Seong Han-mo does not seem like an exceptional barber. He just happened to live in the president's neighbourhood, and then his friend just happened to suggest putting up a photo of the president, which the government happened to see. And that chain of events led to him becoming the president's barber. But there is this lack of agency on Han-mo's part. This does take away from his accomplishments, but mostly, it takes away his blame.

Han-mo took his son, Seong Nak-han (Lee Jae-Eung), to the police station because Nak-han had diarrhea, which was supposed to be a symptom of communism. The interrogation that Nak-han had to go through included electro-shock tactics, which led to him losing the use of his legs when he was finally released. While Nak-han was still in custody, Kim Min-Ja (Moon So-Ri) blamed Han-mo for losing their son. As a viewer, I understood where she was coming from, but did not put the same level of blame on him because Han-mo never seemed like the kind of guy who knew what he was getting into. He took Nak-han to the police station assuming they would just babysit him, which is naive considering the tension in the community, but he just seems like that kind of guy who would not know better.

Working Through Problems and Post-Modern Time: The President's Barber and Epitaph

The film The President’s Barber depicts the working through of Han-Mo’s personal issues, and through them, Korea’s issues with its 20^th century history. In the film, Han-Mo’s child Nak-An is rendered paraplegic by torture; it is only when Han-Mo speaks up against the new president and quits his job in his first politicized action that Nak-An can walk again. Here, Nak-An’s embodiment of Han-Mo’s unresolved issues echo Freud’s discussion of repetition; Freud says, “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (150). This film presents the eventual working through of Han-Mo’s issues as positive and definite, as a conclusive and happy end to the film.  This is in line with Freud’s conclusion that at the end of treatment, “the doctor has nothing to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened” (155).

However, in a post-modern world where grand narratives with happy endings often break down, does Freud’s notion of definitively “working through” personal issues still hold? In the film Epitaph, Lee Su-In helps the child Asako work through her personal issues in a method consistent with the way Freud describes. However, at the end of her treatment, Asako dies, and Lee Su-In is made to horrifically re-enact her memories. This film posits that the very modern notion of working through issues through repetition and remembering is not sufficient in a post-modern world where time is no longer linear. Indeed, in many films in the course, including The Host, Welcome to Dongmakgol, Dachimawa Lee and The Good, the Bad, the Weird, time has non-linear (cyclical, circular, disjointed/multiplicitous) qualities, and this reflects in their conclusions and messages.

Ultimately, The President’s Barber’s attempt to impose a grand narrative on its story is not entirely successful. The film’s happy moments and nostalgic orange tint betray a much darker story, in which a desperate, disenfranchised family tries to heal their paraplegic, tortured son, and only their despondent failure and resulting political apathy bring him back to health. Perhaps this film reflects an attempt by Korea to work through its past--but as long as time is viewed in only a modern fashion, this may prove impossible.