Hyon Joo Yoo - Cinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema

My gratitude goes to those who have been present over the years as friends, fellow travelers, critics, or family while I was conceptualizing and writing this book. I have depended on the generosity and friendship of Hilary Neroni and Todd McGowan, and also their children Theo and Dashiell, who have allowed me to see Lacans ideas in the flesh throughout their happy childhoods. I am indebted to Naoki Sakai for his challenging and fulfilling intellectual engagement. My deepest felt love and gratitude belongs to Douglas Brown without whose love and support working on this book would have been much less joyful. My parents lives were an inspiration for this book, and my fathers death has darkened its completion; both my mother and father will always be in my thoughts. I am also grateful to my colleagues Sarah Nilsen, David Jenemann, Deb Ellis, and all the rest in the English Department at the University of Vermont who have encouraged me along the way.

Within modernity, various formations of subjectivity, notably those of gender, the nation-state, and patriarchy, began to be organized around the realities of colonialism and imperialism. The formation of the modern subject often creates contentious differences, and the anomalies that emerge tend to be symptomatic of gendered subjects. In various chapters, I have noted that the pathological feminine and moribund masculine subjects represent such gendered subjects that embody anomalous differences in the face of which and against which the boundaries of the norm of the family-state are drawn.

Pong Junhos most recent work Mother (2009) introduces a feminine subject who can be taken as representing the failure of the modern subject, notably the epistemological subject who relies on the faculty of seeing. Within a murder mystery plot, similar to his earlier Memories of Murder (2003), a desperate mother seeks to prove her son innocent of the murder of a young girl in a provincial town. The murder mysterys detective story allegorizes the pursuit of an epistemological agency derived from seeing. The detective subject allegorizes the subject who desires to see and through seeing to know the Others desire. In a successful murder mystery, the investigating subject comes to understand the Others desire. In it, the detective figures out the object that the killer desires, what Lacan calls objet petit a that precious object that the killer seeks in order to cure the lack that he suffers. A classic example in film noir is the Maltese Falcon (1941). In the film, the murder mystery revolves around the meaning of a small statue of a falcon around which deadly desire and pursuit erupt. Mother is an unsuccessful detective story in which the subject fails to know the desire of the Other, namely, her son. This means that the subject cannot know her own desire since the subject always desires what the Other desires, as Lacan would have it. The failure to know the Others desire leads the mother to face the collapse of her own subjectivity.

Advertised as a Hitchcockian thriller, Mother is Pong Junhos third film and follows Memories of Murder and The Host (2006). Pongs work is characterized by the deconstruction of Hollywood genres. His films employ conventions of Hollywood genre films, such as detective and monster flicks, that appeal to the audiences global cinematic literacy and to the audiences expectations of the pleasure of consuming genre films. Critics have noted Pongs deconstructive impulse in his playing with genre conventions as a way to incorporate local social and historical contexts that are recognizable to the local audience while interpellating the global audience with generic readability.1 As I mentioned in the Introduction, however, Pong deliberately sabotages the telos of genre films, thereby distorting generic form and putting genre itself as a cultural institution into question. His films, which are considered as auteur cinema although they are produced as commercial films and have broad commercial appeal, focus on the problematization of the nation-state. For example, in Memories of Murder , the failure of detectives to solve serial murders that annihilate feminine bodies standing in for the national body, allegorizes the failure of the nation-state to regenerate the national body. That failure is conveyed through the collapse of generic elements that underpin the narrative teleology, which moves toward the resolution of the conflicts that threaten the authority of the patriarchal nation-state and life of the social body. As such, the ruling idea of the filmits critique of the patriarchal nation-stateis implicated in the critical stance toward the genre films formal characteristics. In this sense, for Pong, deconstruction of the formal language of genre cinema is a means to critically engage with the nation-state. The breaking of genre boundaries and the opening up of the cracks in the generic form are gestures toward shattering the political confinement within which the ethos of the modern Korean nation-state is formulated. Through the gaps that deform genre conventions, Pong denaturalizes the myth of the nation. In Mother , as in Memories of Murder , the epistemological failure, conveyed through the failure of the murder mystery genre, becomes a trope that demystifies the nation.

As I mentioned in the Introduction, the South Korean nation-state is in a permanent state of war, as defined by the ceasefire agreement between South Korea and North Korea. The South Korean security state has the power to directly intervene in the private sphere of life even as the political economy of the state is organized around a neo-liberalism that leaves the care of civic life to the authority of capitalist enterprises. The state still retains the disciplinary power and the institutional means to make people function properly within a neo-liberal capitalist social relation. For example, the emptying out of welfare programs penalizes poor mothers who do not figure as productive participants in free-market competition. In this arrangement, the patriarchal family is made responsible for functioning as an apparatus that defends society by reproducing a civic life that is prone to discipline and punish those who do not conform to neo-liberal morality. This is the larger context in which the feminine subject is rigorously disciplined into proper motherhood. Thus, the mothers epistemological effort to know what the Other desires occurs in the crucible of the protection of individuals, the family, and the patriarchal state.

The Host introduces a monstrous motherwho swallows, rather than gives birth to, the national bodythat emerges out of the neo-colonial alliance between the U.S. and Korean monstrous state. The eponymous host is an un-namable mutant life form, supposedly the matrix of a dangerous microform that invades human bodies, created by an environmental disaster deriving from the U.S. military occupation of South Korea. Based on a real-life incident in which a U.S. military-base morgue released a large quantity of formaldehyde into the Han River that runs through the capital city of Seoul, the creation of the monstrous mother allegorizes the threat to life that the foreign military occupation poses to the autochthonous body. The monstrous feminine resembles a gigantic phallic vagina that emits slimy liquid and tightly grips the human body to insert it into its orifice. In the concluding sequence, the phallic mother disgorges two children, one dead and the other on the verge of suffocating in her bodily fluid, before this maternal monster is finally destroyed by a phallic penetration, when a long pole is thrust into her open mouth by the dead childs father.

This monstrous mother differs from the mother of his next film, Mother, in one crucial aspect. The monstrous mother of The Host is a subject that annihilates the Other that comes in contact with it. The mother of Mother , however, subjugates herself to the Others demand and devotes herself to investigation of what Tania Modleski calls the unknowability of the male desire.2 In other words, she strives to learn the desire of the Other par excellence, which is represented by her son. However, this son of hers is a subject whose desire cannot be known since he lacks the language with which he could enunciate it. That he is outside the Symbolic, that he lacks logos to command knowledge of the self and the Other, is symptomatized by his loss of the primordial memory that when he was five years old, his mother tried to kill him with herbicide, for reasons that are never explained in the film, and thereby permanently damaged his cognitive abilities. Even though his speech is treated as unreliable and nonsensical by those around him, his mother accepts it as the demand that she must obey. The mother, possessing the autochthonous knowledge of herbal medicine and acupuncture, tries to restore his memory of the night of the murder, which is to say, to restore him as a speaking subject, by tending to his body, which she believes will restore his innocence. Intimate caring for the body is the tenor of the mother-son relationship in the film. But, the mise-en-scne and cinematography of their intimate engagement imply that this intimacy imprisons the mother. In the familys squalid kitchen, the mother seems dimensionless while moving around in a tightly framed space that contains the kitchen sink and dinner table. In this static medium shot, she is submerged in the banal details of the kitchen utensils; and the lighting seems to mimic a common household lighting with its dull blue hue. In this set-up, there is no visual allusion to the space that continues beyond the frame of the shot. In a dimly lit oriental herbal medicine shop where she squats and sorts the herbs, her shape is overwhelmed by the densely hanging and piled herbs, periodically peeking out of the mass of the herbs to glance at her son frolicking on the street. When her care of the sons body is staged outside the homewhen she tiptoes up behind him to pour the medicinal liquid down her tall sons throat as he stands urinating on the streether small frame is flattened and diminished by the absurdly immense blue wall in front of which she stands.