Joyojeet Pal, 2011 essay from Film Impressions
Two of the biggest Korean blockbusters in the past year were Man from Nowhere and I Saw the Devil. Man from Nowhere is somewhat of an Asian version of Leon the Professional, about a brooding introverted pawnbroker who takes an unexpectedly violent turn when his schoolgirl neigbour and her heroin-addicted mother are kidnapped by a drug-running gang. The story is standard, the execution unerringly vicious, replete with up-close stabbings, eye-gougings, and dismemberment.
I Saw the Devil is about a police detective obsessively chasing after the man who killed his fiancée. There is no suspense in who committed the act, nor any serious plot development around the detective’s search for the culprit. Instead, within the first 30 minutes, the film turns into a relentless cat-and-mouse game, in which the rest of the plot is mainly driven by next element of savagery to be committed on one or the other character.
Both films are unabashedly brutal. Acts of violence are meticulously documented, without the overbearing gore of 2000s ‘Tartan Extreme’ Asian cinema, but with something far more unsettling. Both filmmakers holds use the simmering horror building in the lead characters’ heads with such nervous energy, that the bloodletting is a release.
The narrative triumph of the films lies in the crafting of circumstances for blameless bloodthirst. The screenplays are so dogged in seducing the audience to turn beast that it feels almost ironic that the climactic last scenes in the two films were not shot point of view, with the money shot being delivered by our own hands as the messengers of the righteous fury.
The films will someday be seen as pathbreakers for two trends in East Asian cinema in the 2000s. The first is the visual ethic technicolor noir that the films build in their unrelenting pursuit of misty gloom, in equal parts striking and unwatchable. The second is an obsession with the theme of vengeance, particularly in Korean cinema. Of the top 20 user-ranked Korean films on IMDB since 2000, 10 are explicitly themed around revenge, and another few are within the horror/gore genre. In examining this unusual trend, let us look at Korean cinema in the context of East Asian cinema in the past decade.
Lee Byung-Hun & Min-sik Choi in I Saw the Devil © Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Popular East Asian cinema, especially that which makes it to international audiences, can be broadly categorised into comedy/romance dramas that resembles television soaps, grisly horror flicks, the historical caper, and the action flick. Filipino cinema overall production values comparable to television and is almost entirely restricted to the romantic comedy genre and production values. Thai popular cinema adds beyond comedy a fledgling industry in horror cinema. Korean genres are similar, but with higher production values, but with the addition of the occasional thriller. Japanese popular cinema, in contrast, has moved into gentle decline as the ‘old school’ genre of samurai flicks with the reliable Toho waves dashing into rocks have been replaced by the more saleable turn to television game shows, and the Yakuza genre gets eaten up by the much more significant cultural import – animated cinema. The good old “honour theme” that underlay the both genres decline with the World War generation that has since vanished, marked by the final cut – Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi coming out as more manic manga than the slow-burn Samurai caper. Who needs Yakuza honour when even Pachinko parlours are replaced on the shelves by vending machines slipping out used underwear?
In his latest film, The Man from Nowhere, Won Bin is a pawnshop owner and recluse with a mysterious past.
Now Chinese film is probably the most complex-because of the unusual mix of Hong Kong, Mainland, and Taiwanese film. The Hong Kong Cantonese action flick moved from its good hearted goons to more hardboiled Triad films that took away the morality of socially saleable crime to a grimy yet far more visual crime dramas of Andrew Lau, Johnny To, and of course, Wong Kar Wai, which kept the high octane gunshots, but did away with the martial arts outside of the occasional slow-mo backflip. The Kung Fu genre has made a distinct mainland turn — the historical capers such as Detective Dee movies or those of Donnie Yen’s still use the Hong Kong and Taiwan craftsmanship with the underpinnings of Confucian values, and the careful censorship of the state.
Wuxia films such as Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers and Taiwanese Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, all lionise collectivist values, highlighting the lavish (and specifically dominant) history of the middle kingdom with visuals meant to remind the world that the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was a flash of things to come. Not surprisingly, the popular Hong Kong genre of crime and heroic rejection of the state in the Triad films have been missing in the Mainland canon.
Some interesting trends emerge in social characterisations in East Asian cinema. Japanese cinema has traditionally been obsessed with the irony of individual obedience to unreasonable social norm – from the Samurai and Yakuza flicks about misplaced honour to the more recent iconoclastic Anime and films about urban disenchantment. Chinese cinema on the other hand has traditionally celebrated the collective – from the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest films featuring Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan from the days when he was Jacky.
It is here that the Beijing and Hong Kong movies are remarkably similar, irrespective of their thematic and narrative elements – that the core value of the film is individual discipline alongside a commitment to the collective. So while the pure martial arts film, and even the shoot-em-ups of John Woo dated surprisingly fast, the reduced decibel levels have only been replaced with better suits, hair gel, and a renewed confirmation of collective honour in the Triad mafia flicks.
Korean films, especially the new wave, are a step individualistic away from both Japanese and Chinese. Consider the idea of vengeance. In a number of Hong Kong director Johnny To’s films, including Vengeance, and Exiled, the idea of vengeance is very tied to that of righteousness – thus the motivations for revenge are tied to some form of communal transgression, such as betrayal of a group or collective code, or some particularly dishonourable act, wherein revenge restores social order. Cinematic revenge in Japanese cinema can likewise have a systemic cause like in countless Yakuza get-even flicks or Samurai avenging poor villagers. The final stream of Japanese vengeance films is conveniently exempt – these are the the unreal realm of ghost movies or horror slashers.
What differentiates the Korean films is their visceral nature, and their particular use of regular folks in seemingly non-violent professions suddenly taking ferocious turns when the situation demands it. Perhaps the most celebrated Korean vengeance films is Park Chan-Woo’s trilogy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. In addition to their regular brutality, the message in all three, much like in Man from Nowhere and I Saw the Devil is that vengeance requires that the avenger dehumanize, and that in the end everyone will be worse off, or dead, but most importantly – that it is necessary. Vengeance is good.
The genre extends well beyond popular cinema. Korean soaps while not nearly as intense are frequently themed around sexual, familial, or class vengeance. So is there a uniqueness to Koreans’ obsession about vengeance? And do they think about it any more or less than any of the rest of us? Does the difference in collectivist themes around vengeance say anything about Korean society being culturally anomalous to its two formidable neighbor nations? Is the repeat incidence of vengeance or any other theme on film any indicator of national sentiment? Or did one guy just make a good film about vengeance and start a trend? Clearly, the abundance of organ theft themes in Korean cinema, an unusually unique and arguably uncommon social ill, suggests that there may be a lot less organised logic to the directions taken by cinema than we as critics try to ascribe.
Of these questions, perhaps the most intriguing is the collectivist issue. The theme of vengeance itself is not terribly new to any tradition of filmmaking, but its unique characterisation both as deeply individual, and necessarily avenged irrespective of cost to oneself or the larger society is fascinating, particularly in the contrast with Japanese and Chinese cinema. History has generally been unkind to the Koreans in the last century — the decades long humiliation of Japanese rule was replaced by the entanglement in cold war proxy that led to the nation’s dismemberment – leaving behind a terrible separation of families, and the creation of a new enemy, the worst kind possible – one’s own family.
South Korea’s remarkable ascent has been fairly recent, underpinned both by the nagging incompleteness of its accounting with Japan, never brought to justice for its brutal rule. Instead the people fondly referred to historically as ‘dwarves’ were reinstated as the big daddy to emulate – from television blueprints for LG from Toshiba to knock-off Hyndais for those that can’t afford Toyotas. La Partie Continue.
The wave of cultural production we see in Korea today is arguably the first in which it has even been allowed to flourish, no longer fettered by the ‘collective nation-building’, the era of military dictator General Park Chung-hee, when cinema and the arts were subordinated to the larger collective goal of building a strong nation. Only in the past two decades has Korean cinema seriously grown.
There are a range of other speculations one could indulge in – perhaps the national consciousness of Japanese colonialism, historically complicated relationship with the Chinese, the American military presence, the brutal separation and looming threat of North Korea, or even modern Korean society’s unusually competitive educational system and labour market. At the risk of being shot down by a real Korean film scholar, vengeance may not be a trend at all outside of the films that managed to get out. Indeed, the biggest blockbuster hits are The Host Tidal Wave and Dragon Wars – all disaster or monster flicks. But one thing is undeniable, no group of filmmakers have done vengeance quite as well as the Koreans have, there has to be something in it!
Theorising about trends in cinema is loaded with precisely this risk – the seeming claims of correlation based on data that’s essentially no more than the affective pleasure of a satisfying ending. So while film scholars confirmed the capitalist era American Noir obsession with greed, or the post WW2 French grappling with cowardice and betrayal, there isn’t any expectation that the screenwriter is a reflection of society. But as creative artists who put a lot of resources into their pursuits that need consumers, screenwriters and studios are arguably keenly aware of what is likely to resonate.
The fact remains, the new wave of East Asian cinema has significantly rewritten the rules for screen brutality. That the British Tartan film company has been whipping out its extremely DVD brand around ‘Asia Extreme’ films, says that the headquarters of gore may have shifted out of Texas. What we can say for now is if you’re smarting from an unsettled score, renting a Korean film could be a good remedy for your blood-thirst.
What we probably also say is that like steel, home appliances, and cars, the Koreans may be coming for Japanese cinema. And that will be revenge, served cold.
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