PROJECTORHEAD

In Joon-Ho Bong’s The Host (2006), an overhead shot frames a family as it indulges in a vulgar, almost ritualistic and a most definitely Asian performance of mourning for a daughter believed to be dead. It is essential, also, for the framing device of the shot, that the left-edge of the frame include a group of photographers who hustle with each other to click a picture of the grieving family. One of the members of the family, the youngest of the three siblings, notices the photographers as they record his family in their state of immense, and more crucially, embarrassing misery. City-bred, a former student protestor and university-educated, he is increasingly conscious of the decrepit state in which he has been photographed or permanently stored; the person in the photo is not the one he aspires to, or the one he even is – instead, it is a frail, scrawny version, one which he actively detests. Therefore, he excuses himself for a moment or two from his grief and proceeds to shoo the photographers away himself. This quality, of a character or a group of characters consistently appropriating (and adjusting, where required) their own reality (or a set of realities), as a direct response to the nature of their depiction in popular news media, is strewn across Bong’s filmography. 

In his sophomore effort, Memories of Murder (2003), for instance, the band of detectives who chase the serial killer have to consistently alter or align their methods of investigation with the demands made of them by the media - which as is strictly emphasised, is an abstraction that exists outside the walls of the police station. The police station/compound is depicted as an impenetrable fortress: a set of claustrophobic spaces, tall moist cementy walls, sumptuous staircases and dim dingy boiler rooms – all shot with the wide-angle. Such a schema is crucial, because it is essential that the investigation be carried out by the police in private, in a state of perpetual isolation from the very world they seek to probe – the move helps Bong in examining what very few other detective films examine: the loneliness inherent in a long-drawn police investigation, as also in keeping the media ‘out’ and preserving its status as a wholly mythical entity, a force which is completely invisible (except, fleetingly, in the first scene of the film and fleetingly, in one of the latter scenes ) and yet, influences the nature of the proceedings inside the walls of the station. 

The tradition is only being extended from his debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), where the central ambition of the female lead is to appear on prime-time news – her entire set of actions during the film, infused with an unnatural level of self-effacement and bravado, are prompted not by any earnest attempt at human charity, but by her interest in celebrity. In a scene in the film, she spots the supposed dog-murderer on the terrace and notices that the missing canine has been put on a leash, with the obvious intention to barbecue it. She hides at a spot in the terrace and contemplates running the risk – the dilemma inherent in risking your own life to save that of a dog. Unable to decide, she looks around herself – out of nowhere, a large crowd, dressed in yellow hoodies of the sort she is wearing, appears on the terraces of buildings that surround the one she is on. They chant her name loudly, prodding her forward, encouraging her to save the dog; all of it while confetti-showers surround her and her own terrace now resembles a stadium – she can now conduct the performance of her bravery – her exhibitionism will permit her to perform even extreme foolhardiness if she can find an audience.

Which brings us to the next insinuation: each Bong film is populated by two types of people – the exhibitionist (or performer, if one may) and the recluse. The exhibitionists (Hyeon-nam in Barking Dogs, Detective Park in Memories of Murder, The Mother in Mother) are clearly desperate individuals, even pathetic, perhaps, for the luxury of relevance : they often resort to performances of the hysterical sort in order to gain it. Detective Park and his assault-happy understudy, in their eagerness to ‘crack’ the case of the serial killer before one of ‘em detectives from metropolitan Korea (Seoul or Suwon) does it, make innocent suspects rehearse a confession of guilt and then, through intimidation,  make them speak it into an ancient tape-recorder to present it later as admissible evidence. At a point in the film, when the public-at-large (and more importantly, the ‘media’) falls for their fraud, a reporter arrives at the station and proposes to photograph the members of the team who ‘caught’ the notorious killer: the three members of the local police (Park, the understudy and the Sergeant) stand in a row and assume a pose of fake machismo by flexing their arms. The showoff-protagonist of the Bong film is engaged, consistently, in putting up this phony concert to come across as more important than he actually is; but while he may even come across as annoying, it is the secretive recluse who is involved in the conduct of the nefarious. Unlike the exhibitionist, the recluse is almost never visible, and if so, not entirely comprehensible. He (or ‘it’, we can’t be sure in the case of the monster from The Host) will reside in the crevices of social structures, concealed in a crowd of people from which he doesn’t in any way stand out (the actual dog-murderer in Barking Dogs Never Bite, but even more so, the janitor in the same film; the serial killer in the Memories of Murder, the murderer in Mother) and seemingly reluctant to engage, in any manner, with the world-at-large, except when he has to seek urgent fulfillment of a perverse desire – in which case, interaction with other people, though entirely unintentional, is collateral damage. 

Bong Joon-Ho’s general tendency as a director is to film the immediate consequences of this interaction (or call it, engagement) between the showy exhibitionist and the sly recluse – the awkwardness inherent in such an arrangement exists in the very element of the stories of his film. The moment-of-contact between the blusterer and the hermit will resemble a chemical reaction between two incompatible elements that results, almost always, in a cathartic fulmination: a 10-min long chase across residential corridors in Barking Dogs Never Bite, a film-long investigation in Memories of Murder, the release of a biochemical weapon in The Host and filial discord in Mother. While a Bong-narrative will depict the performers more than the backstage-workers, the true object of his fascination is the latter: the lonely, serenely self-sufficient and confusing outsider – who represents, for Bong, the quality of the macabre in the normalcy of life by a Korean river, or in small-town Korea (the Van Sant version of the same game? Macabre is the normal, normal is the macabre). The outsider is the schism in popular culture that Bong is so desperate to locate; a weak brick in the fortification of popular belief that will give way upon being pushed – more on that later. Curiously enough, while the entire central conceit of the film is about ‘it’ (and the revolution ‘it’ brings about in its wake, it’s presence will is never manifest except in a totally ephemeral way (a Harry Lime or Alfredo Garcia sorta way). 

Which is perhaps why Bong’s Shaking Tokyo, his contribution to the compilation film Tokyo! (2008) (alongwith French tourists, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax) is an anomaly in his oeuvre because while it features a trademark or two: individual transformation in the face of a calamity (mistaken belief: its Tokyo, so there must be an earthquake every ten minutes) and the formulation of an unlikely union between different individuals; it is wholly about the hikikimori (a person who voluntary withdraws from any sort of social participation) himself. Quartered inside a mid-town Tokyo house, on a self-imposed exile, L’Homme (Teruyuki Kagawa gives an affected, arty performance in an affected, arty film) is a pizza-box hoarder.  He is the Bong recluse, but he doesn’t have any sinister intentions; he just happens to hate the sunlight.

I presume it would be terribly flattering to be featured last in a portmanteau film – because such a film’s resemblance to a relay-race is an automatic analogy – one director passes onto the baton to the next, he to the next, so on and so forth, and as relay-races go, you call upon the best in the end to finish the job. But there is also a definite disadvantage in the situation. Essentially, Gondry provides the spectacle (cheap music video art; a woman transforms into a chair) and Carax conducts a depiction of media phenomenon (its lead character is involved in a high-profile court case), Bong’s course has already been run, and he is left, instead with no choice but to film an individual so far withdrawn into seclusion, that he exists quite literally, as an island – there are no individuals around him to engage with, or no audience in front of which to perform -  as a result, his transformation is entirely automatic and not a result of any great paroxysm but the entirely hokey cumbersome task of all art-house protagonists : self-discovery. Deprived, topically, of a mass-culture phenomena and individuals over whom it looms large, Bong makes a ‘pretty pictures’ film – forced to replace his usual spontaneous bursts of oddballness with well-composed, nicely lit images that are beautiful and boring.

In effect, Bong cannot really make films about small-scale events. The list of subjects he has chosen to film over the first decade of his career: a mutated monster that rises from the Han River, investigation into the case of an infamous (still uncaught) serial killer, a dog-murderer who terrorizes a residential colony and the murder of a girl where she her corpse is placed on a terrace so that the entire town can see it. He must direct bonanzas, squalid circuses and large-scale calamities in order to validate the presence of broadcast media at the site of the event, and subsequently, through it, fuel further individual revelations - he requires that the event be conducted at the level of opera – such that it piques the curiosity of an entire city or a town, and concerns everyone. As this opera gradually recedes into the irrelevance of topicality as we reach mid-film and then proceeds again to grand relevance by the time end-film arrives, individual alliances are forged (or re-forged), social roles are reshuffled, familial positions are exchanged and there is casual chaos that is transformative not only for a specific set of lead characters, but for the entire world around them. This approach owes obviously to Bong’s upbringing in a traditional Asian milieu – one that values the social, the familial and the communal more than it does the individual, which is the obsession of the West - but it owes even more to his obsession with producing popular culture about popular culture (at any rate, pop can only hark back to other pop, and if not, it will bring everything down to its level). 

But unlike a pop-artist like his countryman Park Chan-Wook, who peddles low-brow, literal and terribly exciting pop-art but pretends it is all meaningful, Bong is more interested in the ambiguities of popular culture: in its enduring myths and in its urban legends. He surveys the schisms in his country’s recent culture, locating the  various missing links and then taking them forward – his interest in pop is not in a Warholian sense, an interest in established icons; but in a period of time when they are on the cusp of coagulating into permanent icon(s) but aren’t there yet. Such an approach in modern cinema is wholly unique, because while other directors are occupied in the destruction and then reconstruction of a redundant icon, Bong is involved in examining it in its still-born state; while it was still an enigma. As such, his films are always in a state of perpetual reminiscing of a bygone past – or a ‘memory’, if you will.
    
The recurring scenes featuring news broadcast in his film – much like any ‘edgy’ graphic novel – of course, act as tools to purely proceed the story forward and supply information about the larger plot-points (like the floating, revolving newspaper clippings of every police procedural from Hollywood of the 40’s) – but as Bong understands rather ingeniously, popular news media amplifies the cloud of ambiguity instead of clearing it; in effect, becoming a systematic production of chaos. When the news broadcast ends, therefore, the chaos ends too. In the final scene of The Host, a shaven and less-hobo-like Park Gang-Du (Kang-Ho Song, who performs with his hairstyles) sits with his adopted son inside his small home as it snows outside. They settle to have dinner in the mid-ground, while in the background, a television news broadcast blares details of the American explanation of the monster that ran amok in the neighbourhood. Not wanting television to disturb a peaceful meal, Park contemplates switching the television off. He decides in favour of it and he proceeds towards the television. The shelf-life of the story inside a Bong film, ofcourse, is as long as pop-culture’s obsession with it. As soon as he turns the news broadcast off, the film ends too – the news broadcast being the final statement of the pop-culture on the topic of the monster. By the time the film ends, the enigma has congealed into an icon and is thus, at least for Bong, insignificant now. Three years later, in Memories of Murder, as the image of a pudgy, mellowing Detective Park staring at us (Kang-Ho Song; channeling Robert Duvall-via-Sammo Hung) fades to black, the final statement on the infamous serial killings has been made. The statement is the movie itself.