Korean Film 101: Shiri

There are a lot of guns in this film.

Shiri (Kang Je-gyu, 1999) was the first modern Korean blockbuster, drawing about 6.2 million admissions nationwide and surpassing Im Kwon-taek’s 1993 film Sopyonje by becoming the first film to draw over 2 million viewers in Seoul alone. It even beat the international juggernaut Titanic in box office draw. It literally paved the way for Korean film to retake the domestic box office from foreign product. Starring Han Suk-gyu (Green Fish, No. 3, The President’s Last Bang), Choi Min-shik (The Quiet Family, Oldboy, Himalaya: Where the Wind Dwells), and Kim Yun-jin (Ardor, Yesterday, TV’s Lost) this film was released just as Korea was attempting to recover from the IMF crisis and was an early example of the chaebol (Korea’s big business) investing heavily in a film. The film is filled with reminders of consumer goods, deliberately portraying Korea as recovering and post-scarcity. The plot is a combination of Hollywood action and Korean melodrama. North Korean agents inflitrate South Korea and attempt to use the CTX bomb at a friendly soccer match between North and South Korea in an attempt to force reunification by violence. It is up to the South Korean intelligence agents to catch and stop them.

There is also a lot of melodrama.

Although a product of Korea’s division culture, Shiri depicts the division rather simply; returning to a Cold War mentality of a clearly defined line of good versus evil, with the North Koreans portrayed as monstrous Others. Immediately from the opening sequences the two Koreans are compared and distanced across a technological (and therefore economic) divide. The North Korean training montage takes place either in the fields and wetlands of North Korea, or rundown buildings whose bare and dirty concrete walls and dust reminds the viewer of a poor industrial nation filled with rundown and abandoned warehouses. The troops are in ragged uniforms and eat a communal meal of what we can only assume to be gruel. The troops use their bare hands and knives for much of their training. Their targets are other humans, and are dispatched with methods that are pre-modern in their savagery. As technology (and through it society) evolves weapons move from the personal to the distant, as well as from killing few to killing many. Sure the North Koreans have knives, deadly hands, and a few guns, but they must travel to South Korea to get the ultimate weapon: the CTX bomb. This is important as weapons technology is inextricably linked to economic progress and power. The society who has the most disposable funds can produce the deadliest weapons. North Korea obviously cannot afford this, and their nuclear program (which was a ever growing concern at the time) is never mentioned. In the sequence where the prisoners are tied to poles and stabbed to death, as well as the sequence where the commandos and the prisoners are set against each other in the locked room, the regimented and organized violence that one usually associates with modern warfare and military training descends into a chaotic and disorganized melee filled with primal rage.

Failure is not an option for North Korean commandos.

When guns are employed they are shown only wielded by a select few, and they use Styrofoam dummies and glass bottles as targets. This marks the training as decidedly low class and technologically inept. There are no computers to measure accuracy, rather felt pens and rulers. This is immediately counteracted with South Korea’s introduction in the film. The montage of Lee Pang-hee’s kills are displayed off of a computer display and South Korea is introduced as a (post)modern society. The music even changes from the bombastic military score used in the North Korean scenes to a techno beat that references the decidedly MTV influenced editing and visual tricks that accompany this montage. From this scene we are brought to a shipyard (shipbuilding is one of the key industries responsible for Korea’s economic growth and success under the Park Chun-hee regime and beyond) and the viewer sees South Koreas answer to the North Korean commandos. The same music score returns but in contrast to North Korea’s brutality and chaos these troops move in tandem and are outfitted in the most up-to-date gear. The familiar signals from walky-talkies accompany the scene as these well-trained (yet faceless) troops rush into the ship with their laser-sighted sub-machine guns. They move with the exact precision that the North Koreans were just shown as lacking, and have the technology (including rather unnecessary night vision goggles) that the commandos will not have until coming into South Korea. The task force is defined in spaces of high technology, their offices protected by an odd form of a biometric palm reader that reads the veins in the back of the hand, a technology not even available at the time, so that Korea is portrayed not only as at the forefront of technology but beyond it as well.

Technologically advanced, organized, and 'good'.

This technological excess also comes with financial wealth. In Shiri‘s vision of South Korea there exists no one of lower-to-middle class background. All of the agents that work at the station wear designer suits and have trendy haircuts. In street scenes, extras are all dressed fashionably and can be easily seen carrying shopping bags bearing name-brands on them. This product placement runs rampant through the entire film, as the director emulates the Hollywood blockbuster down the constant display of consumer goods as well. While much of the products fore grounded are Korean in origin, many are decidedly Western imports. Along with the various Korean soft drinks and snacks we see the characters digest we see heavy Samsung product placement (for they did finance the film). Yet along with these Korean products, American imports are clearly displayed. The characters meet at a Bennigan’s in an early dream sequence. In America, Bennigan’s is a faux-fancy restaurant for the lower-to-lower middle class, but in Shiri‘s vision of Seoul it is obviously linked to high culture. In fact very little of this vision of Seoul seems Korean. In David Scott Diffrient’s article “Seoul as Cinematic Cityscape: Shiri and the Politico-Aesthetics of Invisibility” he proposes that Shiri‘s vision of Seoul is post modern in that no clear temporality can be discerned as past, present and future are entirely obfuscated. The spaces within which the North Korean agents exist are behind the scenes: alleys, rooftops, control rooms, and construction sites. He calls these spaces zones of invisibility that contradict the hyper visibility of the rest of the city in which these products and advertisements are profuse within a space of Western culture imperialism. While I agree with this argument, I would like to take it further and connect these zones of invisibility to the working class, which are also invisible within the regular streets of Seoul. In fact I believe that the only time one sees any type of lower-class person is when during the first chase down the back alley of the supermarket, a vendor is knocked over. Even the invalid and sick are depicted as beautiful people who exist only in a resort like hospital on Cheju Island. These areas are the areas in which the North Koreans can hide because to the upper class agents they are literally invisible to them. These are the spaces in which they can disguise themselves as workers in order to hide the bombs, I don’t even think that they would need the disguise as the rest of the characters seem determine to avoid the spaces which provide the structure to their absurdly clean and ordered world. The pipes, wires and dust seem like they are enough deterrent and the only time an agent goes into these areas they are chasing a terrorist or a bomb, and even then they need to be provoked. In other words violence in this film is largely confined to a lower/working class space that the rest of the film seeks to paint as invisible and not part of the new Korea. This economic disparity is the reason that reconciliation cannot be achieved within the film.

In the South, North Koreans have magic access to guns and clothes.

North Korea is positioned as both backward and traditional, yet when the agents come to South Korea they are sort of magically transformed into stylish consumers who now have access to both good clothes and transportation (how did that one terrorist get a motorcycle?) but also they have access to superior weapons as well. Suddenly the grime is gone, and this severely undermines their statements at the end about South Koreans eating cheeseburgers and drinking coke, while children starve. This cookie-cutter cry (straight out of every Hollywood film that has terrorists in it) gives both a faux-liberal argument to the film, as well as makes their real argument that South Korea is no longer Korean but largely American clear. This acknowledgement of economic disparity allows them to be able to exist within both realms of visibility and invisibility. Like the character of Lee Pang-hee/Lee Myung-hyun, they can exist within both spaces until the South Korean agents must go after them to reinsert the status quo and suppress the invisible segments of society. To exist in the Western life style where they can go to plays, eat at outdoor cafes and then laugh about the rain they must destroy any marginal sections of Korean society. It also seems that they must do away with any sense of Korean-ness and exist merely as products of a global culture. We don’t see them in any scenes that have to do with traditional Korean culture rather the film instead fixes Seoul as a city that could be in anywhere. Both the interiors and exteriors are so banally Westernized the essentially become sterilized of any interest. It is only the moments of in-betweeness that hold interest, when the invisible erupts into the visible or vice versa. These are the moments of violence, as most of the action scenes in the movie takes place in these invisible spaces, something that Diffrient seems to ignore in his paper. There can be no reunification between the two Koreas because becoming partners with the North would be returning to tradition and acknowledging an economic problem that these agents seem determined to forget and ignore respectively. They are unable to exist in space in-between, where the safety of the status quo cannot protect them. They do not want to be challenged and neither does the viewer. It is an action move after all.

The impossibilty of reunification embodied in the female.