Who is Really the Host?

My impressions of this film were threefold: I was highly enthralled, I was astonished at the overt social satire, and I walked away from it not knowing who was supposed to be the real monster. I want to look specifically at the scene in the hospital (was it one? The camp, the outpost, in which Gang-du underwent 'brain surgery'). For me, this scene was essentially the thesis of the whole film, but its argument wasn't quite what I expected it to be. As Lee argues, "one of the essential conditions for inculcation of nationalist values among the Korean public is the domestic film industry's projection of Hollywood as a monster trying to devour Korean national cinema" (52).  

The monster in this film was disgusting, and was clearly supposed to be a product of American carelessness and disregard for the safety and well-being of the Korean people. However, the idea that the infection, the disease carried by the monster, was supposed to be in the brain of those affected struck me as confusing symbolism. The doctor tells Gang-du that there is no disease. This immediately follows what seems like fairly compassionate but strangely meta-fictional critique of his search for his daughter. Why didn't he call a human rights organization, or the police? Why didn't he take action and tell someone what was going on? This is ironizing for the genre, as no horror film would be complete if the police/armed forces/people in charge could control the situation or exert influence. Yet, there is a strangely intense degradation of Gang-du, as well, who has been ignored not only by Americans and Korean officials but by his own family. This American faux-sympathy seemed confusing out of place in a Korean film about Korean people trying to overcome an American monster. It would have been different, I think, if the doctor's speech had been more absurd, but his insinuation that it was the minds of the people that were the problem seemed subversive in the wrong direction. 

In a film that so poignantly captures the monster-victim dynamic as part of a nationalist-imperialist dialogue, this scene stuck out to me as a criticism of the Korean people that was not satirical enough to be fully anti-American. I think that I ended up buried under too many layers of thinking and could no longer distinguish who was helping and who was hurting the search for the lost children. It's not until AFTER the brain surgery, in point of fact, that Gang-du gains enough stability and agency to find his daughter. The infection, perhaps, was lack of Korean national confidence, and only when faced with the condescension of the American doctor and his essentially superfluous surgery that a conclusion could be reached. 

Lee allows that the film "invites multiple readings" and this scene seemed like the main door to most of them.