A Necessary Alliance

This week, since we are going to be discussing From Wonso Pond (FWP) and The Good, the Bad and the Weird (GBW), I wanted to look at the idea of partnership and alliance, codependence, unwilling or willing. I really enjoyed GBW, I loved its genre-bending aspects and thought each of the three central figures met the expectations of their respective adjectives in funny but meaningful ways. In FWP, though, the alliances and partnerships are a little bit harder to pin down. Ch'otchae and Sinch'ol, along with Kannan and Sonbi, seemed to embrace the idea of alliance, but in the novel we don't get the sort of easy categorization provided by the title of the film. These two pairs of characters also don't really fall into alliance until quite far along in the book, although they all know each other from the first dozen chapters or so. In GBW, Yoon Tae-goo and Park Do-won take on a tentative alliance mostly because they see it as a means to an end, and they share few moments of real connection save their heart-to-heart by the campfire. The affirmations that "every Korean has a sad story", and "for guys like us, it's no different under nobility or Japan", tie them together in identity even when they are separated by values and goals. This film is unabashed in vilifying the Japanese, or at least in identifying them as a force of antagonism, and in my reading, that gave all three of the main characters a distinctive Korean identity.

The force of antagonism in FWP is slightly harder to identify, and the novel's pacing is quite tempered for the first three-quarters or so, which means almost all the 'political' events and developments happen very quickly and have little (or no) time to resolve themselves. The main shift is from rural to urban, and once this occurs, characters who previously had no alliances are forced to make them wherever they can find them. Sonbi, who has previously been suspicious and sad about Kannan and her choices, understands the latter finally, and they help each other to make the best out of their tragic situations. I was left a little unsure of what/who Kannan was loyal to, and where she escaped to when she left the factory. The references to class consciousness struck me as vague in some ways, though maybe I wasn't reading closely enough.  Similarly, Sinch'ol's tale of imprisonment and conversion was left fairly open-ended, and Ch'otchae's last-second realization of the realities of capitalism and those same class dynamics were a little overwhelming considering how subtle they had been in the novel up to that point. At any rate, by the end it seemed as though Sonbi, Ch'otchae and Kannan were all at the cusp of some kind of rebellion, though we never find out exactly what it is and not everyone survives. So, alliance serves a similar purpose in the novel and the film, for mutual benefit rather than a strong sense of shared ideals, but apart from that I have more questions than conclusions.

Do we see anything in the fact that the Bad was the only one who died in the shootout? What will happen between the Weird and the Good? Is Manchuria a sort of purgatory? Who is Kannan working with and will Ch'otchae ever have enough money or find a girlfriend? Can we see anti-capitalism as the same as a promotion of communism? What kind of politics are insinuated by the exposure of working-class struggle/the oppression and abuse of women? Is Okchom a modern woman?? I am excited to hear everyone's ideas because I feel there is a lot to say about both works.