In the previous chapter, I showed how three well-known films by Park Chan-wook, JSA, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE, AND OLDBOY, operate through an ethics of moral credit and debt. Born from ressentiment and given narrative form through melodrama, this ethics determines the logic of vengeance and retribution in all three films. I also demonstrated how this logic works allegorically to reflect desires produced by and reinforced through profound socio-political shifts that occurred in post-IMF South Korean life: new strategies of reconciliation between the two Koreas, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the changing relationship between capital and labor wrought by the demands imposed by the IMF. Park's films may be read as limit cases that trace the trajectory of sovereign violence until it is stymied and rendered inoperable. Characters with which the spectator are supposed to sympathize become, by the films’ conclusions, intoxicated with cruelty. In this transformation, Park's films overturn the ethics and melodrama of vengeance in JSA, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE, and OLDBOY from within.

In the following sections, I would like to take into consideration three films by two Korean directors, also familiar to the international film festival circuit. Hong Sang-soo's VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000), his WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004), and Park Ki-yong's CAMEL(s) (2002) play out the sexual politics that mediate relations between men and women in post-IMF Korea. All three films feature seemingly alienated characters, long takes, and a minimalistic, severe cinematic style. In this chapter, we shall see how the cycles of male desire represented in these films may be read in conjunction with notions of capitalist temporality that remain closed to the possibility of chance and contingency. Narcissistic and inflexible, the egos represented in these anti-melodramatic films are subsequently unable to affirm the heterogeneity of the other in the manner called for in chapter one by Levinas. However, despite their repetitious pattern of reducing difference to the finite logic of the same, we shall see how a critique of desire may be produced precisely through repetition and through the reproducibility of the film medium itself.

In an interview conducted in 2002, the year after ADDRESS UNKNOWN and BAD GUY premiered in South Korean theaters, Kim Ki-duk was asked to describe the source of his “han” (恨). This concept, sometimes characterized as uniquely Korean, encompasses a number of subjective meanings, including “resentment,” “unresolved suffering,” and the “feeling of inferiority.” Explaining these feelings, Kim remarks with his typical provocativeness:

In the previous chapter, I tried to show how the violent imagery in Kim's films produces the experience of alterity, an experience that reflects the inability of dominant ideology to account for subject positions that have historically been excluded from it. ADDRESS UNKNOWN and BAD GUY make visible the lives and histories of the ostracized, forcing viewers to experience these histories as radically different. They depict individuals who may be characterized through their han, for their lives do not conform to the narrative precepts of popular melodrama and its moral occult, and like the filmmaker himself, survive in the blind spots of commercial cinema. Kim remarks that he “overcame” his feelings of inferiority when he left Korea and temporarily lived in France as a sidewalk artist.

Cinema played a role in this process of overcoming through his attempts to understand those who have been misunderstood. In the following discussion, I would like to show how three films by Park Chan-wook perform a similar critique. The spectacles of violence in both Kim's and Park's films function analogously: they interrogate the moralizing gaze of the film spectator and raise fundamental questions revolving around the ethics of the other. However, as we shall see, Park is concerned with a specific aspect of this ethics, namely the logic of revenge and its relationship to cinematic narrativity.

We can begin by thinking about the relationship of han to violence.

The opening scene of Lee Chang-dong's 1999 film, PEPPERMINT CANDY, begins with a picnic and ends with a suicide. A disheveled, middle-aged hwesawon, or “company employee,” named Young-ho (played by Sol Kyunggu) stumbles into a gathering of friends near a small river. The dozen or so happy picnickers, dancing and singing to a karaoke machine, seem at first not to notice the grey-suited, unkempt man, but they soon recognize him as an old friend from twenty years ago. Young-ho is offered soju, a Korean rice liquor, but he is not in a particularly celebratory mood. He volunteers to sing a song, but the sad melody the salary man belts out, with great anguish, only casts a somber pall over the party. Silently returning the microphone, Young-ho wanders off into the shallow river toward a nearby railroad overpass.

While his friends resume their merriment, Young-ho somehow has managed to climb to the top of the bridge. He stands on the suspended tracks, looking grim and miserable. Soon a train rumbles toward him while repeatedly blowing its whistle. Tension builds with the nearing confrontation between Young-ho and the train, underscored by accelerated shot-reverse shots. A worried picnicker has left the party and stands beneath the tracks with a helpless look on his face. He frantically screams his suicidal friend's name above the loudening rumble: “Kim Young-ho!” As the heavy train comes treacherously close, Young-ho turns to face it. The film quickly cuts to a perspective from the train and he yells out, with outspread arms and a wide-open mouth, “I want to go back!” The camera-train relentlessly rails toward Young-ho, until it stops on a close-up of his anguished face, signaling the moment of impact. Over the freeze frame, the clanging of the train continues on the soundtrack.

Lee's film obeys Young-ho's desire to go back by narrating the course of his life backward, depicting significant scenes from his personal history: Spring 1999, Summer 1994, Spring 1987, Fall 1984, May 1980, and Fall of 1979. These moments provide snapshots of one South Korean man's life and allow the viewer to piece together how Young-ho's misery in the present is connected to a series of regrettable decisions made in the past.

In the previous chapter, I discussed Rey Chow's reading of SECRET SUNSHINE. In her essay, Chow shows how Lee Chang-dong's film takes the concept of forgiveness, circumscribed by the humanist metaphysics of Christian morality, to its limit, deposing sovereignty of its right to forgive within this metaphysics. She notes that the “Christian dimension,” meaning its ethics and global aspirations, has not yet “exhausted the possibilities of the future of the human.” The film does not provide a means of depicting Shin-ae's forgiveness beyond this politico-theological dimension – another ethics, as we have seen, was offered in Lee's POETRY. While SECRET SUNSHINE does not delineate a means of forgiving outside the hackneyed modes of representation associated with the ethics of popular melodrama, through its critique the film nevertheless does gesture to the discursive preconditions that make forgiving the other possible. In other words, Shin-ae's suffering marks the limits of the ethics constrained by the melodramatic mode and yet gestures toward that which is not human; or, as Chow puts it, “whatever the human may become.”

As we have seen, the humanist impulse is intrinsic to the melodramatic mode. In her discussion of the melodrama of race in Playing the Race Card, Linda Williams reveals that key to the experience of redemption in narratives such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) and the television series ROOTS (1977) is the recognition of African-Americans as humans victimized by the dehumanizing institution of slavery. The emotional power, for the Antebellum viewer of the Christ-like Uncle Tom (in the novel's theatrical renderings), coalesces around the “historically unprecedented recognition of the humanity of slaves.” Significantly, Williams notes that the transmutation of bodily suffering into virtue, which “is a topos of western culture that goes back to Christian iconography,” carries “special weight” in American melodrama, such as in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. With this recognition comes a host of ideological assumptions about the inherent virtue of the human being, its capacities and limits, and its grievability.

In my analysis of South Korean cinema, I have shown how key films from 1997 to 2010 depict violence in order to critique the ideological presuppositions that justify its use. We have seen that these presuppositions stem from spectator expectations concerning the dominant mode of popular cinema: melodrama. Typically, the melodramatic mode is deeply rooted in Manichean schemas of good and evil, and of individual virtue, which implicate the viewer in the judgment of fictional on-screen characters. Their embodiment of a moral occult, accessed through reading their expressive faces, in turn secures the certainty of the spectator's humanity. Looking at films by Kim Ki-duk, Hong Sang-soo, Park Chan-wook, and others, we have discussed how their films pose fundamental questions about the ethics of the spectator, observing how the ethics of the other are inextricably linked to neoliberal logics of reification, objectification, and biopower in post-IMF South Korea. The logic of conditional exchange regulates how morally good and evil human characters are to interact with each other. The Korean films analyzed in this book fundamentally problematize this ethical logic, integral to the construction of suffering victim-heroes, taking mythic violence and the sovereign hero that it presupposes to their discursive limits. In the first three chapters, my aim was to demonstrate how millennial Korean cinema brings the ethics of the melodramatic mode to crisis in order to perform a fundamental critique of sovereign violence.

On the other hand, the state of exception that constitutes sovereign violence also makes possible an alternative, redemptive potentiality. In contrast to the vengeful blood thirst of mythic violence, in the latter three chapters of this book we worked through the critique of sovereign violence to pave the way toward another ethics, a divine violence, one that has the power of deposing the idolatry of mythic violence. I have argued that the ostensibly inhumane characters and images of Korean cinema, such as those featured in 3-Iron, LADY VENGEANCE, POETRY, and THIRST, provide discursive strategies for overcoming the epistemological constraints of humanism and its concomitant ethical presuppositions.

ForOn July 15, 2004, a thirty-three-year-old man named Yoo Young-chul was arrested in Mapo-gu in Seoul. His criminal record stretched back to 1998, since he was found guilty of a number of misdemeanors including forgery, property theft, and identity theft. In 2000, he was charged with child sex abuse and served three years and six months in prison. Following his release in September 2003, Yoo committed his first violent murder. His victims were an elderly couple whose heads he bludgeoned with a hammer. Yoo would use this instrument for his subsequent victims, primarily wealthy men and sex workers, and his procedure was similar for each of them. Once his victim was rendered unconscious, he mutilated and dismembered their bodies in his apartment. He then disposed of them in shallow graves near a Buddhist temple. According to his own testimony, the killer disturbingly consumed the livers of some of victims. In 2004, Yoo was found guilty of murdering a total of twenty people. During the trial, psychiatrists deemed him mentally sane and explained that he underwent a drastic personality alteration after his wife divorced him during one of his prison sentences. “My actions cannot be justified,” Yoo said of his crimes, “If we live in a society where people like me can live a good life, there will be another Yoo Young Chul.” Yoo conceded, in other words, that habitual killers like himself should not be forgiven.

As this story was unfolding in the public sphere, Bong Joon-ho's MEMORIES OF MURDER opened in Korean theaters in May 2003 and competed in major film festivals in Toronto, Tokyo, and Cannes. Park Chan-wook's SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and OLDBOY premiered in March 2002 and November 2003, respectively, both winning accolades from critics and audiences. The similarities between Yoo's narrative and those told by these films – including the murder of a series of victims by a hammer and the consumption of their organs – remains uncanny, to say the least. Moreover, dozens of serial killer films were produced around this time featuring mild-mannered, naïve young men violently victimizing women and children including H (2002), a crime drama that revolves around the misidentification of a ruthless killer, DIARY OF JUNE (2005), whose plot deals with the murder of high school students, as well as THE UNJUST (2010), MISSING (2009), and SILENCED (2011).

Films by Kim Ki-duk are bound to ignite heated controversy, even in the context of the international film festivals at which they are generally shown. A screening of THE ISLE (1999) at the Philadelphia Film Festival I attended in 2000 began with an in-person disclaimer by the festival programmer. He stated that Kim's work would be the most graphic of all the films that were to be screened that year and advised audience members to brace themselves for the violent images that were to be presented. The programmer reminded the audience that one was allowed to leave the theater if the experience of the film became too intense. As THE ISLE unfolded, scenes of sadistic emotional and physical torture, blatant cruelty to animals, frustrating codependent sexual relationships, and humiliating subordination of women by supermacho, fascistic Korean men were abundant. I was almost compelled to take the programmer's suggestion to leave the theater when one of the film's characters swallowed a bunch of barbed hooks and was later fished out of the water. These excessive images could be said to have affected the spectator's body viscerally while forcing him or her, to quote Linda Williams, to “share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm – of the body ‘beside itself’ with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness.” The appalling ecstasies of THE ISLE went beyond the acceptable limits typical of Williams's “body genres” however. I wondered why I was being subjected to the film's senseless brutality and felt that I was being forced to share in its sadism.

To be sure, a panoply of pejoratives may be invoked when discussing Kim Ki-duk and his films: misogynistic, lurid, caricatured, gratuitous, juvenile, sociopathic, exploitative, among others. He has become infamous as the enfant terrible of Korean cinema. Films that feature unforgettable, seemingly unredeemable images of corporeal abuse, involving objects such as golf clubs and cut glass, and whose vulnerable victims include social outcasts, the poor, and impressionable teenagers may also be recalled, with descriptions of outrageous scenes from titles such as BIRDCAGE INN (1998), REAL FICTION (2000), THE BOW (2005), or PIETA (2012). Men are unpredictable, sex-obsessed ego-maniacs, while women are jealous, vindictive, and deeply insecure.

In a short article called, “A Face Which Registers His Career: A Comment on Actor Choi Min Sik,” film critic Moon Hak-san celebrates the face of the actor who played Oh Dae-su, the man of ressentiment in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. Moon begins by referencing gwansang, or the art of face reading, a Korean Buddhist practice that divines the fate of a person through physiognomy: “According to a physiognomist, Joo Seon-hee, the nose is the vault which collects property and symbolizes energy and wealth. A nose in the middle of a face shows his masculinity as well as his current standing as an actor.” Forms and remnants of gwansang belief persist in modern Korean culture, having ramifications, in some cases, for job applicants and marriage prospects. In a survey conducted in 2001, a slight majority of Koreans expressed that “physiognomy is believable to a certain extent.” According to the face reader Joo, Choi's expressive eyes are capable of bringing out the inner drama of a wide range of character types, from a North Korean officer in SHIRI (1999) to a painter born into a family of low standing in CHIHWASEON (2001).

Moon continues by touting Choi's greatness as an actor and the capacity of his face to encompass a character “in the dynamic process of becoming, rather than that in the static state of being.” More specifically, the critic emphasizes the actor's large face, which conveys a unique, powerful presence through the confluence of the individual features that constitute its expressivity. His comments echo those made by Béla Balázs in The Visible Man that compare the combination of eyes, nose, and mouth as expressing “chords of the emotions.” Moon writes:

Robert Reinert's frenetic film Nerven was conceived as World War I ended and revolutions broke out throughout Germany in November 1918. Spearheaded in large part by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and the communist Spartacist League, the uprisings consisted of exploited workers, unwilling sailors, pacifist soldiers, and other war-weary Germans who sought to overthrow the Kaiser's military regime. They dismantled the monarchy and paved the way for watershed political developments to take place throughout the empire, including the founding of the socialist Räterepublik in Munich. For a few months it seemed a socialist state would be implemented. On November 7, over sixty thousand workers and soldiers assembled in the Theresienwiese for the one-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They forced the abdication of the Bavarian King and, filled with revolutionary zeal the following day, declared the new Soviet Republic, the “Freistaat Bayern.”

The socialist aims of the revolution would ultimately not be realized. However, its democratic goals would inform specific articles of the Weimar constitution, drafted in early 1919. Germany's first attempt at a republican form of government represented a definitive break from the assumptions of the old Wilhelmine order. Its founding document, however, was hastily drafted and too ambitious, as its many provisions permitted massive compromises between the political extremes. And in what would become one of its most fatal flaws, Article 48, the so-called Notverordnung clause, expanded the power of the Chancellor to suspend civil liberties under certain “states of emergency.” One week after Lenin sent a message of greeting to the Bavarian Soviet Republic in early May 1919,2 the Freikorps and other soldiers still loyal to the German Army stormed Munich and defeated the Socialists in a series of intense street fights. When the Weimar constitution was signed and implemented in August of that year, Munich became a hotbed for extreme right-wing politics, mobilizing those who felt betrayed by the government and who demanded a return to the nationalist Fatherland. One of these movements would manifest itself in Hitler's beer hall putsch in 1923.

The crowd scenes in the first two acts of Nerven were filmed on location in the summer of 1919 in Munich.

Act 3 of F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire film, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, opens with the ill-fated Hutter (played by Gustav von Wangenheim) lying in a hospital bed. The real-estate agent has already completed his business with Count Orlok (Max Schreck) and made his departure from Orlok's Transylvanian castle, nestled in the Carpathian mountains. Meanwhile, Hutter's wife Ellen (Greta Schröter) remains in Wisborg, a small, fictionally-named port town, awaiting his safe return. During his stay with Orlok, Hutter was plagued by visions of the undead while asleep, of inanimate things becoming animate, and horrifying vampires lying in coffins. Frightened, he escaped Orlok's abode, but fell from a high window and was knocked unconscious.

As he lies recovering in the beginning of Act 3 of the film, a doctor remarks to a nurse: “He was brought to the hospital yesterday by farmers. They say he had fallen. He still has a fever …” As the film cuts back to Hutter, he begins to stir, evidently struggling with his nightmares. Suddenly, in a daze, he sits up and slowly stretches out his arm, pointing to the lower right of the film frame. Bewilderment and panic fill his face. The nurse attempts to calm him, but the hapless Hutter is possessed by a strange, unseen force that inspires him to utter a single word: “Coffins …” Following this great effort he falls back and returns to unconsciousness. An intertitle signals that, at this precise moment, other developments were taking place far away: “Nosferatu was coming. Danger was on its way to Wisborg. Professor Bulwer, a Paracelsian, who was investigating the secrets of nature and its unifying principles, told me about it: Caskets filled with dirt were loaded onto the double-masted schooner, Empusa.”

As if to instigate the cut to the intertitle, Hutter's strange exclamation is followed by a sequence that depicts Nosferatu drawing near to his home and wife. Murnau juxtaposes shots of this allegorical figure of death traveling to Wisborg, depicted by a single coffin carried over water on a raft, with other images showing several coffins unloaded from a ship onto the Wisborg docks.

In 1986 wim wenders published Emotion Pictures, his first collection of writings. Playing with the word “motion,” Emotion Pictures collects film reviews and short essays written between the years 1968 and 1971 while Wenders attended the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich. In the introduction for the 1989 English translation he comments that his revisitation of these early writings “really create[d] strange, mixed feelings.” Looking back twenty years, Wenders reflected on his evolution from student to New Wave filmmaker and European auteur. He admits that he “didn’t learn much in film school,” but did ascertain a great deal from watching and writing about film. He describes this learning process in detail:

Writing about the cinema afforded Wenders an opportunity for a form of self-analysis, through observation of his experiences and responses as a film spectator. Films, for Wenders, were “about life” and brought him to an understanding of his lived self and a life lived through film, the one inextricably linked to the other. The passage not only recalls cinema’s capacity to document what Vertov called “life caught unawares,” but it also seems to point toward something much more elusive: the spirit of change, constant transformation, never staying still, and by coextension, the élan vital that characterized Wenders’s own life.

As a student, the young filmmaker studied Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, whose passages concerning the “flow of life” appear to resonate with his own line of thinking. According to Kracauer, film has the capacity to redeem physical reality because its materiality is intimately connected, “as if by an umbilical cord,” to reality’s material continuum. He describes a “stream of material situations and happenings,” a stream of ongoing flux, inherently indeterminate and open. “I gave them life, too,” Wenders continues in his introduction, speaking of his films, “I passed them on” (Emotion Pictures, vii).