CHOSE: Oldboy This Is A Film Analysis Paper

10 “Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling”: Reading Park Chan-wook’s “Unknowable” Oldboy

Kyung Hyun Kim

Oldboy is one of a slew of Korean films recently distributed in the United States (a list that includes Chunhyang, Memories of Murder, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Tae Guk Gi: the Brotherhood of War, Take Care of My Cat, Tell Me Something, Untold Scandal, and Way Home among many others) — but, unlike the others, it has been met with surprisingly negative reviews.1

New York Times critic, Manohla Dargis, acknowledged Oldboy’s director Park Chan-wook as “some kind of virtuoso [of cool],” but she also wrote that the film is “symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it’s all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys”2 Disappointed by the all-too-apparent nihilism Oldboy putatively promotes, Dargis argues that it fails to undertake the kind of tangible philosophical inquiries which Sam Peckinpah and Pier Paolo Pasolini explored in their films during the 1960s and 1970s. Dargis’ criticisms and others like hers undoubtedly dampened Oldboy’s chances to perform well.3 Despite the fact that Oldboy won numerous awards internationally, including the Grand Prix (second prize) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, and despite the cult status it has achieved among young fans of action films, the film managed to generate only mediocre box office receipts in the U.S.

I begin this chapter with Dargis’ critique of Park Chan-wook because it indicates a number of vantage points from which Oldboy must be considered when discussed in an international context. Oldboy, like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksu-neun na-ui geot, 2002) and other Park Chan-wook films, does

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not conjure up the kind of humanist themes that Dargis implies to be properly associated with art-house films such as the ones directed by not only Pasolini and Peckinpah, but also Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Instead of preaching values of tolerance and salvation, Park’s protagonists plot revenge by brandishing sharp metal instruments and impatiently waiting for their turn to spill the blood of others. Moreover, the exaggerated male icons featured in Park Chan-wook’s films seem to be direct quotations of Japanese manga characters or Hong Kong action heroes created by John Woo and Tsui Hark. These contrast with the realism of his predecessors in Korean cinema such as Park Kwang-su or Jang Sun-woo, who, as I have argued elsewhere, have demythologized the masculinity of Korean cinema.4 While many of Dargis’s points are worthy, she fails to point out that Park is not the only filmmaker recognized by Cannes in the recent past who has similarly been uninterested in asking epistemological questions about life. Cannes winners Lars Von Trier, Wong Kar-wei, and Quentin Tarantino have similarly created distance from philosophical or political issues, seeking instead to leave their viewers with an indelibly “cool” impression of violence. Secondly, Dargis’ article sidesteps the controversy surrounding filmmakers like Peckinpah, whose intentions and philosophical depth have been continuously questioned by critics. Jettisoning some of the exaggerated claims made by critics such as Stephen Prince, who celebrated Peckinpah’s “melancholy framing of violence,” Marsha Kinder proposes instead that Peckinpah was the first postwar narrative filmmaker in America who “inflect [ed] the violence with a comic exuberance.”5 Peckinpah choreographed scenes of explicit violence as if they were musical numbers, and was considered a pioneer in American cinema. However, the question of whether or not the violence used in his films truly inspires philosophical questions or simply feeds an orgasmic viewing experience of the kind that has spawned the films of Quentin Tarantino or Park Chan-wook is a serious one. My contention is that Peckinpah and Park Chan-wook are, for better or for worse, similar as filmmakers, not categorically different.

In the three films of Park Chan-wook’s “revenge” trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), one can trace the emergence of “postmodern” attitude that takes up not only the point of view that the grand ideologies (humanism, democracy, socialism, etc.) are faltering, if not entirely dissipated, but also a belief that the image is merely just that: an image. Image here is that which is not an impression of reality, but a perception of matter that approximates the verisimilitudes of both space and time that may not have anything to do with reality. This renders a sense of the “unknowable,” which irked many Western critics who have

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problematized Park’s films for having failed to produce social criticism. But is this all that there is to this debate? Are there no history, no significant meaning, and no profound idea behind Park’s images? How conveniently indescribable is the “unknowable”?

The aim of this chapter is threefold. First, I will try to identify the ways in which the main tropes of Park Chan-wook’s work — including flattened mise-en-scène, the commodified body, the mystification of spatial markers, and the disjointed juxtaposition of images and sound — all aim to explore the potential of cinema in ways that may have vexing epistemological implications. Second, I invoke the Nietzschean ressentiment in examining Park Chan-wook’s assertion that personal vengeance is a plausible kind of energy in a society where its law and ethics have been virtually ratified by the combined interests of liberal democracy and capitalism. Third, in my conclusion, I will entertain the question whether or not the post-politics or anti-history of Park Chan-wook can yield a political reading when placed in a Korean historical context, just as Peckinpah’s work, when contextualized in an American sociopolitical context, was perceived to have cited the violence of Vietnam and the civil rights movement.

Oldboy

Loosely adapted from an eight-volume manga (manhwa in the Korean pronunciation) mystery novel of the same title,6 Oldboy follows in the footsteps of other Korean films such as Alien Baseball Team (Gongpo-ui oein gudan, Lee Chang-ho, 1986) and Terrorist (Kim Young-bin, 1995) that have adopted the narratives and style of manhwa into live-action films. Before Park Chan- wook, the most prominent among the directors who adopted a manhwa approach to filmmaking was Lee Myung-se (Yi Myeong-se), whose films during the late 1980s and the 1990s stubbornly departed from the realist trend of the then-New Korean Cinema. Most of Lee’s films, such as Gagman (1988), My Love, My Bride (1990), First Love (1993), and Nowhere to Hide (1999), have insisted on a cinematic worldview that treats live-action characters as animated ones, thus presenting a distorted vision of the real world. As such, some similarities can be drawn between the works of Lee Myung-se and those of Park Chan-wook. However, it should be noted that Park Chan-wook’s cynicism differs radically from Lee’s heavily thematized romanticism. Park Chan-wook’s films have created an impact so powerful that it has nudged the Korea film industry to look into manhwa as its treasure trove for original creative property. Oldboy was followed by box office blockbuster films 200-

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Pound Beauty (Kim Yong-hwa, 2006), adapted from a graphic novel by Suzuki Yumiko, and Tazza: High Rollers (Choi Dong-hun, 2006), which was originally a manhwa series created by Lee Hyun-se.

Oldboy is the second film in Park Chan-wook’s “vengeance” trilogy, which has been successful both in the domestic marketplace and on the international film festival circuit.7 In these films, vengeance is carefully restricted to the realm of the personal, never crossing over into the public domain: it is always aimed at other individuals and almost never against state institutions. This in itself is hardly original. However, in Oldboy as in the other two films of the trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi, 2005), the police play only a perfunctory role. This erasure of authority accomplishes several things. First, it emphasizes the fact that the heroes and villains operate outside the domain of the law. They mercilessly abduct, kill, blackmail, threat, unleash violence, and engage in series of reprisals without ever even implying the existence of a public judicial system of the kind that typically occupies a central position in dramas dealing with individual liberty and freedom. (Examples of this mode can be seen in realist films such as Chilsu and Mansu [Park Kwang-su, 1988] or Peppermint Candy [Bakha satang, Lee Chang-dong, 1999], which foreground the police as sources of corruption or social malaise who meet all acts of transgressions, personal or public, with a violence.

Second, it enables Oldboy to suggest a mythical, transhistorical world beyond the mundane realities of a legal system in which figures such as the protagonist Dae-su and the villain Woo-jin freely roam. Philip Weinstein writes about something he calls “beyond knowing,” a common symptom of modernist narratives that “tends to insist that no objects out there are disinterestedly knowable, and that any talk of objective mapping and mastery is either mistaken or malicious — an affair of the police” (Weinstein 2005, 253). Although it is difficult to classify Park Chan-wook’s films as modernist, they do exploit such Kafkaesque devices by deliberately rejecting “objective mapping and mastery” and consequently aim to dispel the “knowing” sometimes even when the lights are turned on at the theaters. Park unwaveringly refuses to claim the “knowable,” despite having been labeled as superficial by several prominent critics.

This unknowable attitude can also be seen stylistically in Park’s reconstitution of the visual plane, which deliberately rejects realist depth-of- field and instead opts for a flattened mise-en-scène that relies heavily on wide- angle lenses and reduces the distance between the camera and its subjects. These techniques, which deny any density beyond surfaces, once again underscore the relentlessly superficial domain of the unknowable.

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Complementing the “unknowable” also is the landscape that remains deleted in films such as Oldboy. If the discovery or emergence of landscape, as argued by critic Karatani Kojin,8 is absolutely vital to the structure of our modern perception, is the erasure of landscape essential in shaping a postmodern perception? Instead of nature, what gets accentuated in this flattened space are dilapidated concrete cells, meaningless television images, anonymous Internet chats, and chic restaurants and penthouses that condition Korea’s postmodern environment.

Also in Park Chan-wook’s realm of the unknowable, the police are useless. Park’s visual invocation of pastiche helps readdress and essentially efface modern history of Korea — one that is marked by tyranny of uniformed men. There is one notable exception to this absence of police in Oldboy. At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), appears in a scene that takes place in the police station. Jump cuts centrally figure Dae-su, who is drunk and unruly. He has apparently been brought into the station after having caused some disturbance — in short, he is a public menace. This sequence is shot with a minimum of affect. The realistic lighting and natural acting style differ radically from the saturated colors and highly choreographed action sequences that will later constitute the bulk of the film. Although this police station sequence lasts about two-and-a-half minutes, uniformed policemen rarely appear in the frame. Only their voices are heard, presaging the absence of police throughout the film. Although Dae-su verbally insults the police, going so far as to urinate inside the station, the authorities allow him to leave the station unscathed. The police act as if they were from the 2000s, though this scene is set in 1988. Dae-su’s obstreperous acts may be trivial, but as films like Park Kwang-su’s Chilsu and Mansu (Chilsu-wa Man- su, 1988) and Hong Sang-soo’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Dwaeji-ga umul-e ppajin nal, 1996) have proven to audiences time and again, South Korean authorities rarely overlook even the slightest disagreeable incident stirred up by unruly drunkards.9 Made fifteen and eight years respectively after the release of these other films, Oldboy shows the police as having lost their teeth. In this post-authoritarian era, it is not surprising that abuses of power by figures of authority no longer occupy the central concern of the drama.

Dae-su, an ordinary salaryman with a wife and a toddler daughter, is released from the police station only to find himself locked up minutes later in an anonymous cell. No particular reason for his incarceration is cited, and no indication is given as to the duration of his confinement. Days and nights pass, and Dae-su is forced to repeat the same routine every day. Having no one around to talk to, he watches television and masturbates, inhales hypnotic gas that puts him to sleep, eats the fried dumplings (gunmandu) fed to him,

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undergoes rigorous self-training of his body, and digs an escape route through the wall with the tip of a hidden spoon. In other words, he eats, sleeps, masturbates, and labors as if his life inside a prison is a microcosm of a life outside. Before he can escape, however, he is released. Fifteen years have passed since the night of his kidnapping and confinement. Not only is his imprisonment unexplained to him or to us, neither is his release. When he wakes up after a session of hypnosis conducted in his cell, he finds himself on the rooftop of an apartment building.

Fifteen years of solitary isolation have transformed Dae-su, who first appeared as an unruly charlatan at the police station. No longer an ordinary man, he now speaks in a succinct monotone that accords him a god-like transcendental status. Throughout the film, several characters ask, “Why do you speak that way?” His sentences are almost always in present tense, and they lack any modifying clauses — future, conditional, or past. The erasure of the past and future tenses marks Dae-su as a man who is devoid of history, thus achieving for him a status of a-temporality. This mystifies his presence even more as a man who possesses neither temporality nor basic human emotions. The lack of emotions makes Dae-su seem larger-than-life. Furthermore, years of martial arts training while imprisoned has allowed him to achieve a seemingly superhuman agility and strength that he puts to use as a ruthless warrior in search of vengeance. While in captivity, Dae-su had helplessly watched as news reports framed him as the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Upon his release, he finds out that his orphaned daughter Bora had left for Sweden. With no family to rely on, and no authority figure to appeal to, Dae-su finds himself utterly alone.

The only person he can rely on is his new friend, Mi-do (Kang Hye- jeong). The first place Dae-su visits after he was released from his private cell is a sushi restaurant called Jijunghae. He was served by Mi-do, a young woman who has become a sushi chef despite the discriminatory belief that women’s hands are too warm to maintain the proper rawness of cold sushi. The two quickly trade lines that mutually invoke a feeling of uncanniness — that is, in Freud’s definition, the feeling of “something familiar (homely) that has been repressed and then reappears.”10 Dae-su, who has been given a wallet filled with a sheaf of 100,000 Won bills (US$ 100), quickly orders and consumes an entire octopus, served by Mi-do to him raw and cut. Dae-su loses consciousness when Mi-do reaches out to grab his hand and tell him: “I think I am quite unusual. My hands are very cold.” As is later revealed, Mi-do is actually Dae-su’s grown-up daughter Bo-ra, who had supposedly been given up for adoption to a Swedish family.

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Dae-su overcomes his initial suspicions of Mi-do, who takes him home, and the two of them work as a team to investigate the man behind the arrangement to keep Dae-su in captivity for fifteen years. Feelings grow between the two. Mi-do promises Dae-su that she will serenade him with the 1990 hit “Bogosipeun eolgul” (“Face I Want to See Again”) when she is sexually ready for him. This promise — one that is predicated on a future action — ironically restores for Dae-su temporality and historicity — something that he has been denied ever since his release from the cell. Mi- do and Dae-su move closer to the immanent copulation (future action), which ironically enables Dae-su to move closer to the truth behind the reason of his incarceration that knots him to a piece of memory from his high school (past). When Dae-su rescues Mi-do from the thugs threatening to kill her soon thereafter, she sings him her siren song, sending Dae-su into dangerous waters. Unbeknownst to the two of them, they have entered into an incestuous relationship. And only when their incestuous relationship materializes, will Dae-su be given the reason behind his imprisonment.

The only clues with which Dae-su has to work in tracing the origins of the crime unleashed against him are the taste of gunmandu (Chinese dumplings) he was fed during the entire period he was locked up and a small piece of chopstick wrapping paper that was accidentally found in one of the dumplings. The paper is printed with the characters for “cheongryong” (blue dragon) — two characters of the restaurant’s name. After combing through Seoul, where literally hundreds of Chinese restaurants contain both characters in their names, Dae-su finally locates Jacheongryong (Purple Blue Dragon), the restaurant that matches the taste of the dumplings which he has eaten every day for the last fifteen years.

This in turn leads him to the “business group” that specializes in illegal abductions and detentions. Only a few days elapse before Dae-su is confronted with the film’s villain, his high school classmate Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae). Both Dae-su and Woo-jin had attended the Evergreen (Sangnok) High School, a Catholic school located in the provinces of Korea. Even after identifying the man responsible for his long imprisonment, Dae-su still fails to understand what could have motivated Woo-jin to commit such heinous crimes against him. After further investigation, Dae-su remembers an event from the past that had completely evaded him during his fifteen-year captivity. This is shown in a flashback in which he remembers a younger version of himself. The young Dae-su is wearing a high school uniform, and is watching a girl riding a bike. It is his last day at Evergreen High School before he transfers to another school in Seoul. Soo-ah (Yun Jin-seo), the pretty female student whom he has been watching, entices young Dae-su’s interest even more when they meet briefly

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on a bench. For no apparent reason other than curiosity, he follows Soo-ah and discovers a dark secret about her: Soo-ah is sexually intimate with her own brother.

“It wasn’t my dick that impregnated my sister. It was your tongue,” Woo- jin explains when the two finally meet. One of the most intriguing points of Oldboy is that linguistic communication almost always falls outside the sphere of rational dialogue. Verbal miscues, infelicitous remarks, and gaps between signifiers and signifieds produce not only miscomprehensions between two individuals, but also help create a world that is “beyond knowable.” Was she pregnant or not? Once rumors began spreading that Soo-ah fooled around with her brother and had become pregnant with his child, she committed suicide. After his sister’s death, Woo-jin also suffered from heart disease and was forced to replace his heart with an artificial one. What first started as innocuous chatter in high school between Dae-su and his friend about Soo- ah’s illicit affair, later resulted in Soo-ah’s death and Woo-jin’s cardiac arrest. This consequently led Woo-jin to seek revenge against Dae-su, who could not remember any specific wrongdoing that would have earned him fifteen years of incarceration.