The Host: Source of Trauma

The film "The Host" stars Song Kang-ho, the loveable "every man" actor we have seen come up time and again in this class as well as last semester's. His character--easy to sympathize with due to his total normalness--allows us to imagine that we are in the space of the film almost every time, and it succeeds again in "The Host."

One theme in particular stands out: repeated traumas. This has directly to do with the Anisfield reading, which proposes the monster movie Godzilla as a working through of the nuclear disasters for Japanese people, while the same film acts as a source of guilt for American viewers. What sort of trauma does "The Host" represent--is it a single event from an outside source, or rather a deep and historical, internal societal issue?

Attempting to understand allegory in "The Host," we have to consider what the monster is and what he does. In "The Host" the monster itself is a product of a white man's clumsy laboratory management (to the dismay of his Korean lab partner)--here is perhaps a very obvious moment of blame in the film. Secondly, the monster evolves from a small mutated creature into its full horror. In this aspect, the monster is different than the story of Godzilla, in which the monster (supposedly) represents a single disaster. Thirdly, the monster in "The Host" lurks in the darkness of the water, but his "home" is in a man-made sewer in the depths of the man-made city. The incorporation of the monster into the human world--its reliance on humans both as a source of food and home--is striking (hence the title "host" can have more than one meaning--the fictitious disease as well as the monster hosting on the city). What does it mean for the monster--or, more metaphorically, the problem--to "need" humans to survive? Does this point to a societal issue rather than a single, isolated disaster/event?