Korean Film 101: Bodily Divisions

I have covered the idea of the division culture in Korean film in this very column (and probably will cover again given the prevalence of it in the culture) before focusing on the economic, technological, and social divide in both Shiri and Repatriation. I’ve also explored it within the family. However, these definitions of historical and cultural division do not singularly define the idea of Korean national division. In this article I will explore the division of mind and body in Choi In-hoon’s The Square and Kim Ki-duk’s Bad Guy (Nappeun Namja, 2002) and how they relate to the historical division and economic division respectively. Choi In-hoon’s protagonist, Lee Myong-jun, is the intellect divided from the body. He attempts to fix this trauma, and cure his loneliness through doomed relationships with two women and two nations. Kim Ki-duk’s protagonist, Han-gi (Cho Jae-hyeon), is the physical divided from the intellect. He attempts to overcome this trauma through the misogynistic male fantasy of turning a woman into a prostitute. I will attempt to illuminate these sexual divisions, and how they illustrate the re-imagining of division in Korea as an exclusively masculine enterprise. I will also show how the protagonists of both The Square and Bad Guy are drawn inevitably towards death because their lack (be it corporeal or psychic) does not allow them to function in a divided society.

The Intellectual

Choi In-hoon’s novel The Square was first published in 1960, just months after the April 19^th Student Revolution that overthrew Rhee Syngman’s authoritarian government. What followed was a brief experiment of democracy during which Choi could finally publish his novel, which harshly criticizes both North and South Korea. This brief period of freedom (only to be followed by another 27 years of military dictatorship) allowed Choi to question Korea’s identity after years under Japanese colonial rule followed by occupation by the United States, a United States sponsored military regime, and a national war. Choi imagines Korea’s division through the protagonist Lee Myong-jun. His division is the traditional historical/ideological division between North and South, and the trauma of this division is imagined as an intellectual crisis. As an existential character, Myong-jun is a product of his experiences in both the South and the North and the choices that he made while living in both Koreas. He is a literal embodiment of division. His interactions with both the North and the South leave him disillusioned and alone, and thus unable to function in either society he is led inevitably to suicide. Through him Choi can criticize both political states, and the impact that the division has had on Korea.

Myong-jun’s intellectualism, supported by his education in philosophy, separates him from the rest of society. He endlessly questions his actions and the actions of those around him, yet he cannot fully communicate with anyone around him. He believes with his education he should be able to “come to some sort of acceptable conclusions about the world and life…He had to find out why people lived, and how they lived meaningfully. Within the limits of daily life, of what he saw with his eyes and felt in all the variety of everyday things, he could find absolutely no meaning” (Choi, 13). He is on an impossible quest to define the human existence, and he is alone in his journey. He is alone within himself, trapped by his own intellect. He cannot physically install himself within the world around him; instead he is relegated to the role of the commentator where he does not act on society, but rather society acts on him. The scene where the police interrogate him when he is in the South is a good example of this inability to communicate with the society around him, as later in the novel the scene is mirrored as he attempts to overcome his intellectual prison by switching roles with these police officers.

Myong-jun is brought into S Police Station because his father had gone to the North, and was a prominent figure in their propaganda radio programs. He is faced with being pre-labeled as a Communist, just because his father is one. It is here that Choi’s political critique collides with Myong-jun’s intellectual prison. Myong-jun is unable to argue against the political suppression of South Korea under Rhee’s regime. He is questioned about his education, and when he replies that he studies philosophy he is met with a sneer. “So, if you’re in philosophy, you’ll know all about Marxism” (Choi, 41). The detective equates intellectualism with a left-leaning ideology, and therefore undesirable to the United States (and Rhee’s puppet government) who were attempting to set up South Korea as a bastion of democracy to suppress the spread of Communism. Myong-jun cannot argue against their indoctrinated hatred of intellectualism, his argument is only met by physical violence. This is the moment of his final separation from the South. He cannot live in a society so driven by uninformed, violent suppression. “ ‘I could kill a Red bastard like you and not even a ghost would know you’ ” (Choi, 43), says the police detective. And he could, when he releases the bloodied Myong-jun out into the streets no one reacts. Indeed there is no difference between this police force, and the Japanese force that oppressed Korea during the colonial period. “It was perfectly clear as far as catching Reds was concerned there was no difference between the present and Japanese times” (Choi, 47). Freedom from Japan did nothing for Korea as the United States merely used the same tools of state suppression that it was supposedly freeing Korea from. This ideological division is impossible for Myong-jun to overcome, although he attempts to do so through his love for Yun-ae. However this love is doomed to failure, as he cannot overcome his introverted intellectualism to convey his feelings to her.

Myong-jun attempts overcome this lack of physical prowess through relationships with two women, one in the North and one in the South, but neither can fully satisfy him leaving his quest for physical mastery unfulfilled. How can he overcome loneliness if “There was no way that Eve, formed from Adam’s rib, would have the power to dispel his loneliness. Eve never had her own independent existence; she was just the shadow of Adam” (Choi, 77)? In this view women are objects that must be subjugated to man in order for man to regain his humanity. The women cannot enter into the discourse of division in this point of view, because they are merely shadows of men. It is here that we see division defined as purely a masculine endeavor. In The Square love is seen as the only bridge back to humanity, and the only way to master the alienation that the individual faces within modern society. “The only time Myong-jun was sure of his own humanity was when he held her in his arms” (Choi, 97). However, he cannot truly love these women because they do not conform to his own male fantasies. He does not understand women and sees them as animals, as objects. He constantly describes both Yun-ae and Un-hye in sections, slicing them up into parts and ignoring the whole. Yun-ae in the South resists his advances, while Un-hye will not give up her belief in the communist ideology for him. The very thing he has mastery over keeps him from communicating with them. He has no hope to regain his humanity and he cannot physically act out his aggressions, and is in this way physically impotent.

We see this impotence when Myong-jun returns to the S Police Station, this time as the interrogator. He is disillusioned with the North, finding not the culture of revolution and equality he hoped for but a nation of hand-me-downs. He had hoped for a society where he could live his life with a sense of things achieved that were based off of intellectual reasons. But the revolution was not actually enacted, merely handed down from the Soviet invaders. The soldiers even have recycled Japanese uniforms. He attempts to sublimate this disillusionment with a torridly sexual affair with Un-hye, but she is both adverse to intellectual discussion and leaving her ideological affiliation for him. So we find Myong-jun on the other side of the interrogation table facing Tae-sik. He beats Tae-sik in an attempt to cultivate a feeling of purpose, and out of jealousy that Tae-sik was able to consummate his relation with Yun-ae through marriage. “Lee Myong-jun swung his leather belt so that he might cultivate the feeling of enemies of the people inside himself, whereby he could hate the people captured and brought in” (Choi, 123). He even attempts to rape Yun-ae, but is unable to fulfill this desire. He cannot bring himself to the logical culminations of these violent acts: murder. Instead he helps Tae-sik and Yun-ae escape, left only with his relationship with Un-hye as a tie to the North, but this ends when she is killed in action.

So Myong-jun is left homeless, and womanless. “In his store of emotions in South Korea he had never discovered anything except disdain. In North Korea all he got was disillusion; there was no source for acquiring the feeling of hate” (Choi, 122). He is caught with no place to go, so he chooses a neutral country. Where he hopes he can life a life of anonymity.

A neutral country. A land where no one knows me. A city where even if I roamed the streets all day long not a single person would strike me on the shoulder. Not only would there be no one who knew what kind of man I was, but there wouldn’t even be anyone trying to find out. A hospital porter, or a fire-station guard, or a theatre ticket seller, the sort of job where insofar as possible the level of mental strain was low, and all one had to do was repeat the same act all day long, that’s the kind of job he would take up. (Choi, 139)

Yet this would be impossible, it would be denying all of his experience up to that point, something an existentialist would not do, as this experience is what defines him as himself. Myong-jun is too intellectually aware, and too physically impotent, to join the working class. He has nowhere to call home, and his search was futile. He had trapped himself within himself, and he has no choice at the end but suicide. He cannot function in the divided Korea, or any other society. The psychic mastery he claims is his biggest fault, and death is the only way out. “He relaxed now for the first time” (Choi, 152).

The Corporeal

Kim Ki-duk’s Bad Guy was released in Korea in 2002 during a time far removed from that of 1960s Korea. Korea has gone through rapid industrialization, urban development, brutal and violent repression of activist movements, democratization, and a financial crisis that increased unemployment and the division between the classes. The division that Kim Ki-duk is interested in is not one of the nation and ideology, but rather this economic inequality that divides South Korea. His films concern the lowest classes in Korean society: thieves, pimps, prostitutes, beggars, and gangsters. These characters do not suffer the same physical lack that an intellectual like Myong-jun suffers, rather their lack is largely both economic and familial. Han-gi, like many of Kim’s protagonists, has physical mastery but suffers from an intellectual inability. His quest to turn Sunhwa (Won Seo) into a prostitute is an attempt to forcibly remove this class and intellectual barrier. His struggle to achieve this psychic mastery comes through the misogynistic subjugation of women, as if through them he can enter normal society.

We open the film as Han-gi is wandering through crowds of college students. He is immediately marked as out of place with his black clothes (most of the students around him have light color shirts), short-cropped hair, and most importantly the scar across his neck. He looks threatening and he exudes physical mastery through the way he walks and moves. Our first view of Sunhwa is a classic example of cinema’s male gaze. We slowly track down her body, taking her in as sexualized parts rather than a whole woman. This is similar to how Myong-jun describes both Un-hye and Yun-ae. When Han-gi sits next to Sunhwa she is visibly uncomfortable and ignores his presence, sneering in disgust at his appearance when she gets up. This rejection is strongly classed within the film; she (an educated middle class woman) is disgusted that such a vulgar and horrible man would be interested in her. What follows is both Han-gi’s final show of physical mastery over her, and his emasculation and humiliation at the hands of Sunhwa. After this rejection, Han-gi sits silent (for he cannot talk) as Sunhwa talks to her boyfriend and gives sideways glances at him. So he violates her in an attempt to bring her down to his level. He grabs her head and forcibly kisses her in front while the boyfriend tries vainly to pull him off. A kiss is an intimate thing, and to be forcibly kissed by a stranger in public must be terrible. This is the films first (but not last) rape scene in which the male fantasy is played out through Sunhwa’s violation.

This is also the only time in which Han-gi will get to have Sunhwa in any sort of sexual way. It takes three military men, and a crowd of onlookers, to beat Han-gi into submission where they hold him, bloodied, waiting for him to apologize to Sunhwa. Of course this apology never comes because Han-gi is both silent, and unwilling. However, Sunhwa at this moment emasculates him in front of this crowd by both slapping and then spitting on his face. This is the movies first exchange of bodily fluids between Sunhwa and Han-gi. With this exchange, Sunhwa in essence steals Han-gi’s phallic power and the rest of the film is Han-gi’s quest to get it back. She takes the sexually dominant role here, with her spit substituting for semen. This exchange also gives Han-gi the reason he needs to subjugate her to the level of prostitution. In order for him to regain his mastery over her, he needs to bring her down to his social level where he can be the one in power as her pimp. The movie in a sense is the literal display of the horrid male fantasy that all women are prostitutes within.

However he never fully regains this phallic lack, in my interpretation of the film it is only found through a final, dying fantasy. He cannot perform sexually around Sunhwa, instead he must act out voyeuristic fantasies from behind the specially fitted mirror. It is here where he can watch other men violate her, and it is also here that he becomes infatuated and captivated by her. From behind the safety of the glass he can fetishize her, turning her body into a Lacanian phallic symbol. On the other side of the glass, when he occupies the same physical space as her, he cannot communicate. His phallic lack at that point does not allow for a sexual relationship past the purely voyeuristic. He tries when Sunhwa is passed out from drinking after she discovers that he was responsible for her new situation, but it merely leads to another one sided exchange of bodily fluids: she vomits on his shirt. Sufficiently put in his place, he takes his sexual frustration out on another prostitute, but cannot fully perform.

Love here, like in Choi In-hoon’s novel, is seen as the last bridge for the masculine to rejoin humanity. Here the love is horrible and violent. While Sunhwa does have control over Han-gi through this emasculation, we must remember that she is still not fully in control. She is merely an actor through which the male fantasy can be fulfilled, and Han-gi still has control over her situation. She is slowly broken down to his level, a violent destruction of her class and educational background. This is the only way through which Han-gi can express his twisted love. Every customer violates her, and this constant rape destroys her identity. This is an abhorrent tale, but it is so visually beautiful it is hard not to enjoy it on some levels. Sunhwa is a constant reminder to Han-gi of his sexual, economic, and intellectual lack. He must look elsewhere to try to reassert himself, even within his own world of gangsters and pimps. He does this through violence, although his phallic lack begins to translate into an inability to enact violence, as sex and violence to him become melded into one thing. At first he can still assert himself, he beats Sunhwa’s first customer (and the taker of her virginity) with a phallic baseball bat. He may not be able to be with Sunhwa but he can dominate over her customers. Later in the film however there is a interplay of violence between his small gang (who he controls not through speech but violence) and another. Another pimp attempts to use Sunhwa right after he is released from prison and Han-gi, feeling threatened that another man from his level is competing for her, removes him from the room. In the street Han-gi is hit over the head with a brick, after which he fold up a poster and stabs one of the pimp’s men with it. Not to be outdone, the same man returns later and stabs Han-gi with a ridiculously large (it must be at least four feet long) shard of glass in a moment of male phallic competition. As he is struggling and bleeding in the streets, Sunhwa looks at him with pity and horror. It is her presence here that creates this physical lack in Han-gi. She does not belong to his world, and only by completely destroying her identity can she exist in the same class as him. This violation of class barriers is what eventually kills both Sunhwa and Han-gi.

Bad Guy has several codas, and these create varying interpretations of the film. The whole film could be read as purely a fantasy of Han-gi, with none of the events after that first kiss and emasculation actually taking place. The logic defying inclusion of a beach scene (the very same beach as Kim’s The Birdcage Inn which is also about prostitution and has many similarities to this film) in which Han-gi and Sunhwa watch a woman in a red dress drown herself and Sunhwa discovers two impossible photographs is reflected in the final scene. These photographs could not possibly exist as they are of her and Han-gi before any events in the film take place. The picture is out of a false past, where they are together without the class difference, and Han-gi is not a product of violence and class inequality (he has no neck scar in the photo). It is their love without the sexual subjugation, the violence, and the economic and phallic lacks that drive their real relationship to tragedy. Later after Han-gi’s underling stabs him (both for violating Sunhwa by bringing her into prostitution and for causing the other underling to go to jail by killing the rival pimp) both Han-gi and Sunwha return to the beach wearing the same clothes as they are in the picture. However, I argue that this is really the only fantasy in the film. I view the ending as Han-gi’s dying fantasy, and the woman who drowned herself in the earlier beach scene was Sunhwa led to the only conclusion that is available to her character. I do not believe he survived the stabbing, and the rest of the film is the conclusion of his impossible quest to fulfill his masculinity through Sunhwa. This is certainly a logical interpretation, as when Han-gi changes shirts (because the other one is soaked in his blood) he is miraculously cured, and Sunhwa is happy living as a prostitute in a traveling brothel in the back of a truck. In reality, Han-gi never survived the last stabbing. He couldn’t, the quest he is on cannot be obtained in reality because he could never transcend modern society’s class divisions and the phallus he seeks is merely imaginary, an impossible object of power. Sunhwa on the other hand cannot return to her previous class existence, as her connections to the middle class intellectual have been severed. Yet she cannot return to prostitution because the sole reason keeping her there (Han-gi) is now dead. She has served her purpose within the narrative, and she now has no reason to live.

Again, as we have seen so many times before, division here is a masculine discourse. Han-gi is the one who attempts to break the division, and the woman is merely a masochistic object on which he acts out his sadistic male fantasies. The woman is not an independent actor, rather she is a function, used to drive the male toward his impossible redemption. Her existence relies on this masculine fantasy, without a male to subjugate her within a patriarchal power structure she is led inevitably to her death. Kyung Hyun Kim, in his book The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema describes our mutual contention with Kim’s films:

My contention rests not on the fact that his films consistently appeal for the abnegation of the men who have committed rape, or that Kim’s depictions of sexual violence are too graphic, but rather that only men are given performative roles in them. Women function as masochistic and passive objects predicated on the patented image of mother and whore. The male characters shuffle between virtue and irredeemability, between care and violence, and between reality and fantasy while often the women must remain immutable even in these ‘folktale-like’ films. (Kim, 9).

I share his question of whether Korean cinema could ever focus on a story of a woman who is not imagined as a whore, mother, or wife. There is a bigger question though: can there ever be a reimagining of division in Korean film or literature that transplants it from a reaffirmation of masculine dominance to a feminine one?

Conclusions

This question of division in both The Square and Bad Guy, whether it is a national/ideological or an economic/class division, is portrayed as a masculine trauma where another division in Korean society is reaffirmed: the division of the sexes. Both protagonists suffer from a lack, be it physical or intellectual, sexual or economic, or combinations of all of them and they attempt to regain entry into a society that they have rejected or have been rejected by through violence and the subjugation of women. Yet these fantasies and acts of sexual power inevitably fail and the characters are drawn closer to death. Even though both works were created in separate times, during which Korea was as different and the division these works discuss, their method of dealing with national trauma is similar. The characters of Myong-jun and Han-gi are both prevented from interacting socially with the world around them by the very things that they have mastery over.  They cannot function in modern society lacking this ability to socialize, and take this out on the women in their lives. This question of division as a masculine subject, and the lack of a female counterpoint is something that deserves, and demands, further discussion.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Bad Guy. Dir. Kim Ki-duk. Pref. Cho-Jae-hyeon, Won Seo, Choi Duek-mun, Kim Yun-tae and others. LJ Films, 2002. DVD. CJ Entertainment.

Choi, In-hoon. The Square. Translated by Kevin O’Rourke. Devon: Devon and Sidmouth Printing Group, English edition, 1985.

Secondary Sources

Kim, Kyung Hyun. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004.