But Hong deserves his place among the author's "non-remasculinzing" directors because his principal character is victimized even by a prostitute after he finds they've used a defective condom. Whether the film is funny, ironic, deliberately bathetic and so on is, in other words, skated over in favor of a more rigorous, but perhaps not always relevant, theoretical analysis.
This doesn't mean that this book has no interest for the ordinary cinema-goer. It's probably the most substantial tome to have appeared on its subject, even though it looks no further than 2002, despite being published only last year. A film it might have fruitfully considered in the context of violence and machismo is Kang Che-gyu's 2004 movie Blood Brothers (Taigu Ki) about two brothers who fight each other on opposite sides in the South Korean War.
The book is also interesting for another reason -- its footnotes are often more interesting than the main text. This is probably because they are less cluttered with psychological and literary theory, and instead contain nuggets of anecdotal and factual information. Some of these, taken more or less at random, are that forced conscription was at one time used by the South Korean state to punish political demonstrators, rapes are unusually common in South Korean movies, the Hong Kong gay film Happy Together still cannot be publicly screened in South Korea (or could not up to 2002), South Korea is the world's third largest manufacturer of pianos, and Taiwan was once
described, by Frederick Jameson, as "a post-Third World country that can never really join the First World."
Psychoanalytic interpretations, incidentally, abound. Trains are phallic symbols, especially when entering tunnels, as are most other longish objects. This can get rather wearying, but is part of the author's determined push towards uncovering meanings that lie beneath ostensibly simple
narratives. You can't, after all, make much of a book by simply telling the films' stories (though Kyung does plenty of that as well).
This, in other words, is a work that can be exasperating but the heart of which is in the right place. Illustrations, incidentally, are plentiful and interesting. One boasts the enticing caption: "A writer releases his guilt, while a woman bids farewell to shame." The accompanying still is no less intriguing.
RSS