Karen Han - Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema

When I reflect on Bong Joon Hos work, I think of memories that appear like unexpected wraiths: a little boy, looking up at his mother, wanting to trust her, or two wild eyes, peering from a secret door. I think of a sad-happy family meal, plucked out of time. I think of tall grass blowing in the wind, cold and desolate in one instance, a golden reprieve in another, along with broad smiles and eyes welling up with righteous fury. Sighs of sad acceptance, too; those are always there. I think of bodies in childlike repose and noodles stirred violently in a bowl. I think of a mother pig nudging her baby toward freedom.

And I think of the funeral scene because it was the funeral scene that got me.

The Host was my introduction to Director Bong and, when I saw it, the image of that central family unit descending into blubbering sobs as they eulogize Song Kang-hos not-actually-dead daughter knocked me out of my already slightly wobbly center of gravity. What movie was I watching? How could this mostly sober monster movie veer into absurdity with such guileless abandon? Which lane was the filmmaker in? Id already reckoned with an opening scene plucked from a 1950s creature feature, followed by a title sequence wrought with the moribund severity of an urban melodrama. Now, as if taking a cue from Songs bleached hair, Director Bong was pushing his cast into cartoonish levels of grief, taking a moment of great sensitivity, and almost daring us not to laugh at it. I didnt know how to handle it.

But I also couldnt forget it. It was still on my mind when I saw Mother. This film, too, features a funeral scene, which likewise devolves into chaos. The dissolution is far more aggressive this time, moving from tears to an outright brawl, but it made sense to me. Why? Perhaps the indignity of grief is less unsettling when its pathos remains severe; perhaps it was this very severity, and the strange, surprising grace that ebbs up around it, that made it easier for me to embrace the film as a whole, just as the science-fiction context of Snowpiercer somehow made perfect bedfellows out of grungy class warfare and Tilda Swintons incredible dentures. I watched these films and understood what Director Bong was doing. I knew what lane he was in, even when, as in Okja, he is figuratively and literally veering around within it.

(Okja, for the record, reduced me to blubbering sobs. Perhaps I should have taken note.)

In any case, by the time I backtracked to Memories of Murder and Barking Dogs Never Bite, and, like the rest of the world, was repeatedly exhilarated by Parasite, I knew Director Bong to be one of those filmmakers whose formal and thematic concerns form the backbone of an oeuvre that is not nearly as disparate as it might seem from the outseta predilection I found personally inspiring! Of course a police procedural would lead to a horror film! Why wouldnt a childs fairy tale about factory farming set the ideal stage for a Hitchcockian castigation of caste? Id come to recognize the sense of humor that infuses his most bitter representations of our social constructs, and to take comfort in the compassion that somehow swaddles his razor-sharp articulations of moral injustice. Through his work, I came to better understand that a perfect calibration of tone can nonetheless encompass wild vacillations, that a great movie might exist in multiple genres at once, and that when an equally great filmmaker guides their cast towards the furthest extremities of human behavior, there is surely, undeniably a reason for it. I knew all of this, and yet...

The Host and its funeral scene were still stuck lopsided in my memory. An outlier in my appreciation of his work. Id been a burgeoning cinephile when I first saw that film; my skills of cinematic comprehension had been narrower than I would have liked to admit. In the wake of Parasite, I figured it was high time to return to it and see if Id missed something.

Of course, I had.

Id missed that the film was not merely a monster movie, but as incisive a social critique as Parasite. Id missed that the creature was not just a fearsome beast, but an animal as worthy of empathy as the titular pig would later be in Okja. Id missed that this funeral I cant stop talking about was a signifier, not only of Bongs intent with this particular film, but of his designs as a filmmaker, for never in his worldview is any sentiment consigned to a singular interpretation, just as bathos is never any more or less valid than pathos, just as his heroes are never so righteous that they cant be capable of terrors, just as he doesnt let us turn our back on those characters when we realize what theyve done.

Id missed all of that and, most of all, Id missed that he was teaching me how to watch the rest of his movies.

Thank goodness the lesson sunk in regardless!

In the days leading up to Parasites history-making Academy Award wins in 2019, Bong Joon Ho, its director, had this to say about the class thriller:

The true horror and fear of Parasite isnt just about how the present-day situation is bad but that it will only continue to get worse. [...] After I die, will it get better? I dont know. Im not so hopeful.

As reflections of the world that we live in, Bongs works often circle around that sense of impending doom, sometimes venturing into bleak, even cruel territory. The loglines of his movies speak for themselves: A father whose daughter is kidnapped by a grotesque monster fails to save her; a supposed hero admits that hes eaten children; two detectives cause an innocent mans deathand nearly kill anotherwhile trying to catch a serial murderer. Whats remarkable is that, despite what these surface descriptions might suggest, it is impossible to categorize Bong as a cynic, or see his films purely as tragedies. In fact, it is arguably impossible to categorize him at allhe walks between the raindrops of conventional genre and style with enviable ease, defying any labels, rebuking attempts at moralizing, and building stories that function both as political allegories and cultural histories.

What makes his status as something of a dissident truly exceptional, however, is that his clear-eyed view of the world never succumbs to nihilism. The final part of the above quote, given in a Vulture profile, makes that abundantly clear, as well as serving as a sort of guiding light:

Still, we have to try to live happily. We cant cry every day.

Born on September 14, 1969, in Daegu, South Korea, Bong Joon Ho discovered a passion for cinema early on, watching movies on TV. My mother was a little bit of a compulsive germophobe, he recalls, as to why television was his primary conduit into film, and because, in the movie theater, you dont have a lot of sunlight, she insisted that it was filled with a lot of germs. His channel of choice was the American Armed Forces Network, which would broadcast Western films, including works by Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, and Sam Peckinpah, albeit in censored form, leaving the young Bong to imagine what had been edited out. This early exposure to the world of cinema would blossom into obsessionafter enrolling at Yonsei University in 1988, he sold donuts at the school cafeteria for six months in order to save up enough money to buy a Hitachi camera, and would fall asleep holding it.