초록
The place of Jang Chul-soo (Chang Ch’ŏl-su)’s Bedevilled (Kim Pong-nam sarinsakŏn ŭi chŏnmal, 2010) in the cycle of recent South Korean revenge films hailed for their pairing of poetic visuals and “extreme” violence seems rather straightforward, yet this article argues for Bedevilled’s singularity, as a work that critiques the gender politics of transnational genre cinemas like the slasher-horror and rape-revenge film, and the Korean literary and film genres that also serve as its important intertexts. This article examines the multiple modes by which Bedevilled interrupts the use of the revenge trope as a depoliticizing, privatizing system of generic representation through its citation of colonial period naturalist writer Kim Tong-in’s well known short stories “Potatoes” (“Kamja,” 1925) and “The Seaman’s Chant” (“Paettaragi,” 1921) and Kamja, the 1987 film adaptation of the same story directed by Byun Jang-ho (Pyŏn Chang-ho) and starring Kang Su-yeon (Kang Su-yŏn), amid its visualization of the slasher genre’s complex gender dynamics. Analyzing Bedevilled’s trans-media adaptation of two of Kim’s best known works of short fiction and a key example of the 1980s genre cycle of t’osok ero yŏnghwa (Nativist erotic film), I chart the film’s ironic repetition of the earlier works’ visual and narrative tropes, particularly in the film’s disturbing presentation of patriarchal oppression as a pervasive social disease. By embedding tales that attribute characters’ fates to their social environments within the anti-heroic conventions of the revenge narrative, Bedevilled mobilizes two incommensurable genre frameworks to reorient the drive of social critique towards alternative modes of collective identification rather than those based in nationalism or subordination to patriarchy’s psycho-sexual violence. Moreover, the film’s juxtaposition of unexpected genre frameworks becomes the basis for its gendered critique of Kim’s literary legacy, the cinematic repertoire of male fantasy in 1980s literary films, and contemporary conventions of institutionalized misogyny.
키워드
genre cinema, revenge narrative, gender critique, Kim Tong-in, Jang Chul-soo
I. LANDSCAPES OF VIOLENCE
Jang Chul-soo (Chang Ch’ŏl-su)’s directorial debut film
Fig. 1. Hae-wŏn turns a blind eye to the violent assault of a woman on the street.
Thus, we are introduced to Hae-wŏn, the cold, indifferent character who leads viewers into the revenge fantasy to come, and to the film’s investigation of the normalization of violence against women in contemporary South Korea. As the film unfolds, Hae-wŏn is a character with whom viewers negotiate a complicated relationship of identification and disidentification. Immediately following this night scene, the film moves to Hae-wŏn’s workplace, a bank, where she tersely refuses the emotional appeals of an elderly woman who is trying to borrow money to pay her apartment deposit. Later, when her younger female co-worker makes an exception to company policy and issues the old woman the loan, Hae-wŏn’s paranoia and gendered competitiveness lead to an outburst in which she strikes the younger woman. Hae-wŏn is thus characterized by either cruel in-difference or belligerence towards three women in rapid succession: the victim of the street assault, the elderly patron, and the younger female co-worker. The reasons for Hae-wŏn’s antipathy are not clearly spelled out by the film, but seem to stem from her fear of being associated with these vulnerable women, afraid of becoming a target of violence herself, and her unconscious affiliation with masculine dominance through cruelty. Jang’s film thus establishes gendered violence as a condition that afflicts all women, regardless of age or class, and South Korean society as one in which this violence is perpetrated across all sectors of society, even—or especially—by women themselves.
Worn down by her constant struggles in the sexist environments of urban Seoul, Hae-wŏn returns to Mu-do, the island home of her youth. After her outburst, she receives a work suspension, and travels to the island expecting to find respite from Seoul’s everyday violence and the loneliness of her city existence. Despite the island’s lush beauty and the expansive seascape, what Hae-wŏn encounters on the nearly depopulated island is a closed society of cretinous men and their enablers—older women—in a dynamic that degenerates into horrors far more extreme than the ones in Seoul she is trying to escape. Thus, on one hand,
Hae-wŏn’s childhood friend, Pong-nam, welcomes her to Mu-do, marveling over her pale skin and refined city manners. In sharp contrast to Hae-wŏn, Pong-nam exudes goodwill, child-like curiosity, and an earnest desire for friendship and intimacy. These aspects of Pong-nam’s character become more remarkable as Hae-wŏn, the audience proxy, witnesses the miserable conditions of Pong-nam’s existence—the brutal physical, verbal, and sexual abuse she suffers from her husband Man-jong and his family. In addition to daily beatings she receives from her husband, Pong-nam’s brother-in-law Ch’ŏl-chong rapes her routinely and, even worse, the elders—her husband’s aunts—shame and dehumanize her, while keeping her enslaved as one of the few able-bodied laborers on the island.
Though Pong-nam is absolutely crucial to the community’s continuation, for she is the only young woman who remains on the island, she is not considered a full member of the community and leads a miserable, desperate existence. Thus, she pins her hopes on Hae-wŏn, to help her and her daughter escape the island. Pong-nam’s unstudied mannerisms trigger Hae-wŏn’s knee-jerk contempt for rural “backwardsness.” Hae-wŏn’s unsympathetic attitude makes Pong-nam’s blind faith in Hae-wŏn seem even more misplaced; we see later in the film that for months Hae-wŏn has been ignoring almost daily letters and phone-calls from Pong-nam, begging Hae-wŏn to take her daughter Yŏn-hŭi to Seoul, since she suspects that her husband is sexually abusing the child.
Throughout her time on the island, Hae-wŏn proves herself to be an unreliable confidante to Pong-nam. Moreover, Hae-wŏn’s mere presence upsets order and routine on Mu-do. Yŏn-hŭi, Pong-nam’s ten-year old daughter, shows troubling signs of absorbing the message that a woman’s value lies in her sexual desirability, so she does little to resist her stepfather’s inappropriate affections and even acts out jealously at Hae-wŏn and Mi-ran—a prostitute often called to the island to service Man-jong’s sexual urges—because she perceives them as new female competition. Pong-nam sees Yŏn-hŭi’s inevitable future in sexual enslavement on the island, and reveals her suspicions about Yŏn-hŭi and Man-jong’s relationship to Hae-wŏn in a last ditch attempt to persuade Hae-wŏn to help them. When Hae-wŏn responds to Pong-nam that she must be exaggerating or lying to gain sympathy, Pong-nam finally sees that Hae-wŏn has no intention of involving herself in Pong-nam’s situation and engineers a desperate escape attempt.
II. GENRE CRITIQUE AND GENDERED VIOLENCE
Though
Fig. 2. This image of the two women, in which Pong-nam sidles up to Hae-wŏn in an attempt to recapture their childhood intimacy, emphasizes their differences while also depicting them as a conjoined unit. The relationship between the two women has also led some viewers to identify a homoerotic subtext in the film, a reading that accords with the film’s play on transgender performance and the characters’ subversion of gender normativity.
Revenge is a classical driving force in popular narrative, and in both philological and psychological modes of narratology, revenge has primordial or regressive connotations. More specifically, revenge evokes the
In revenge films, works that address both approaches to the economy of revenge are judged the most successful examples of the genre, including, as Steve Choe claims, the revenge tales of recent South Korean cinema.
According to Carol Clover, in her seminal text
One of the common elements of both the American slasher and rape-revenge films is a sensibility that Clover calls “urbanoia,” in which a character ventures from the city to the country and encounters there a landscape of under-development, populated by regressive, sinister figures who are handicapped by poverty and, in many cases, incestuous in-breeding.
The film juxtaposes two distinct yet equally “extreme” forms of violence: the relentless and pervasive gendered violence (manifested across a spectrum of intensity from verbal abuse to rape) that establishes the strong desire for revenge and the spectacular, explosive violence of the psychopathic killer appropriate to the slasher-horror genre. In demanding a comparison of these two types of violence, the film suggests both their incommensurability
In a particularly complex invocation of the rape-revenge and slasher genres’ oscillating victim/perpetrator logics of identification, Pong-nam takes revenge upon her husband in a scene that explicitly engages the gendered dimensions of the slasher film. The shot sequence leading up to this scene presents a medium shot of Hae-wŏn running along a hilltop ridge after witnessing Pong-nam beheading Ch’ŏl-chong, a brief, long shot of Man-jong and the boat operator seen from Hae-wŏn’s point of view, and a scene of the two men in which Hae-wŏn shouts a warning to the men, just as Pong-nam is poised to attack them as they recoil in shock at discovering Ch’ŏl-chong’s severed head. Hae-wŏn’s choice to align with the men, despite what she has witnessed on the island and the numerous points at which she has emphatically
Heeding Hae-wŏn’s warning, Man-jong overpowers Pong-nam and the scene cuts to the front yard of Man-jong’s house, the staging ground for Pong-nam’s most satisfying and graphic act of revenge. A canted view of spilled memorial offerings opens the scene, followed by a closeup of Pong-nam’s battered face as she groggily reminds herself to tend to Yŏn-hŭi’s funeral altar. Abruptly zooming out to a medium long shot, Man-jong kicks Pong-nam as she lies tied up on the ground and Hae-wŏn cringes in the foreground of the mise-en-scène. Man-jong squats, pulls Pong-nam up to face-level, and growls that she never showed him any affection, blaming Pong-nam for the failure of their union. In the citation of funeral memorial rites, a typical household ritual for demonstrating filial bonds, and in Man-jong’s oddly banal marital complaint, the scene juxtaposes domestic violence and slasher violence, uncannily suggesting their continuity through this defamiliarized family scene. As their domestic spat escalates Man-jong points a long, sharp blade at Pong-nam’s face, ranting that he should just take Hae-wŏn as his woman after he gets rid of Pong-nam, who has committed the unspeakable sin of killing his kin. Here, Man-jong switches roles with Pong-nam, as the murderous slasher brandishing the genre’s emblematic weapon, which abruptly revises Hae-wŏn’s attempt to “protect” social order. But rather than respond with the screams of the slasher victim, Pong-nam
Fig. 3. Pong-nam reappropriates the phallic object with her mouth, thus transferring agency to the mouth (speaking truth to power) versus the eyes (seeing as an end in itself, i.e., voyeurism.)
An earlier scene, which marks
Fig. 4. Just before the transition into slasher violence, the village elders enjoy food and drink while Pong-nam toils in the fields.
Fig. 5. The abrupt transition to the slasher genre shifts the camera movement and framing.
Fig. 6. Shallow focus shots like this one of blood dripping off Pong-nam’s murder weapon—a sickle—emblematize the film’s explosive shift towards bloody revenge.
Though
Fig. 7. A powerful visual indictment: after Pong-nam’s rampage, rainfall turns the furrows in the potato field into rivulets of blood.
4 The cycle of Korean masculinist revenge films has been analyzed with a focus on both moral and monetary debt—this is typically how revenge is interpreted, and in the context of the globalization of capitalist markets and an ambivalent attitude towards developmentalist ideology, questions of debt and repayment seem fruitful ones to pose, in attempting to read the films as indices of contemporary social anxieties. See in particular Joseph Jonghyun Jeon’s “Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s
5 See “’Don’t Blame This on a Girl’: Female Rape-Revenge Films” by Peter Lehman in
6 For more on the “rape-revenge” scenario in Japanese new wave cinema, see “Cruel Stories of Youth” in David Desser’s
7 For a summary of these discourses of the function of vengeance in popular narrative and social relations, see Burkard Sievers and Rose Redding Mersky, “The Economy of Vengeance: Some Considerations on the Aetiology and Meaning of the Business of Revenge,”
8 See Steve Choe, “Love Your Enemies: Revenge and Forgiveness in Films by Park Chan-wook,”
9 Of the South Korean auteurist revenge films of the 2000s, Kim writes, ‘‘vengeance is carefully restricted to the realm of the personal, never crossing over into the public domain: it is always aimed at other individuals and almost never against state institutions” in “’Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-wook’s ‘Unknowable’
10 See Clover’s chapter “Getting Even” on the feminist critical potential of such cult films as
11 Ibid., 23.
12 Though
13 In “Discipline and Fun:
III. SEXPLOITATION, LANDSCAPE, AND CULTURE: LITERARY ADAPTATION AND T’OSOK ERO YŎNGHWA
Hae-wŏn leads us into the film narrative and, at first, seems to be the film’s protagonist. Soon, however, it becomes clear that Pong-nam (an ironic reference to Pong-nyŏ, the central character is Kim Tong-in’s “Potatoes”) is the focus of
Though
In challenging this boundary,
Fig. 8. Opening credits of
Fig. 9. Long shot of women laborers in a salt field at sunset.
Fig. 10. Scene of Pong-nyŏ’s rape by the foreman at the salt field is also ambivalently portrayed as her initiation into sexual pleasure and self-gratification through her ability to convert desirability into money.
Fig. 11. Scene of Pong-nyŏ’s “rape” moves between close-up reaction shots of Pong-nyŏ’s sexual pleasure and hazily lit long shots that emphasize a voyeuristic gaze.
Fig. 12. Immediately after being coerced into sex with the foreman, Pong-nyŏ cheerily accepts payment.
Fig. 13. Pong-nyŏ seduces Wang, a wealthy Chinese landowner. Their liaisons are portrayed as love scenes. Wang kills Pong-nyŏ at the end of the film/short story, and the story/film are titled after his potato field.
Fig. 14. Pong-nyŏ’s smiling countenance and tanned laborer’s skin, early in
Fig. 15. Dismayed at the prospect of being replaced by her lover/customer Wang, Pong-nyŏ looks at her powdered, made-up face in the mirror. Her skin has become pale and her manners lady-like and seductive. This trans-formation is paradoxically presented as her “natural” state of decadence.
In contrast, Pong-nam’s transformation in
Fig. 16. Pong-nam exudes warmth and indefatigable optimism in the beginning of
Fig. 17. Pong-nam’s transformation. She stares at the sun and is ambiguously “enlightened.”
Pong-nam’s passage from victim to avenger results from her disillusionment with Hae-wŏn, who refuses to aid in Pong-nam’s plight and lies to the provincial policeman who is called to the island to investigate the circumstances of Yŏn-hŭi’s death. Hae-wŏn’s refusal to use her vision to assist others is the opposite of Pong-nam’s gesture of tearing the scales from her eyes and unleashing the forces of retributive justice. Completely dispossessed, Pong-nam reacts as a subject divested of all social foundations and thus is forced to use the most primitive methods to right the wrongs against her.
Hae-wŏn survives by killing Pong-nam, thus halting
The instrument of Pong-nam’s death is a jagged, broken
As
Fig. 18. Shot of Pong-nam and Hae-wŏn as children. Pong-nam is already an abused and dispossessed figure and Hae-wŏn a privileged and selfish bystander to Pong-nam’s abuse.
Fig. 19. Women bathing—they become an indistinct element of the unified landscape in
Fig. 20. Pong-nam and the other villagers toil in the potato field in
Fig. 21. Women gossip and frolic in the potato field in
14 Here I refer to the criticism of “extreme cinemas” as de-contextualized and apolitical commodities that trade in shock and novelty. Critiques of the aesthetics of the “extreme” in art-house cinemas claim that the hyper-violent aesthetics of discomfort operate as justification for cinematic exploitation. In a now infamous screed against the “New French Extremism,” published in
15 Eunsun Cho, “The Female Body and Enunciation in
16 I would argue that Im’s
17 Cho, 85–86.
IV. CONCLUSION: AN EYE FOR AN EYE
At the end of
Fig. 22. Closing shots of
18 Jang himself credits his apprenticeship with Kim Ki-duk as helping him to develop his visual sensibilities. As suggested by one of the reviewers of this essay,
1 I am indebted to Jinsoo An, whose observations about this binary representation of rural space in recent films likeMoss (Ikki , 2010, Dir. Kang Woo-suk [Kang U-suk]) and Bedevilled helped spur my investigation of a redefinition of pastoral fantasies via the reframing effects of genre mash-up. Kyu Hyun Kim has also helpfully pointed out other recent examples of variations on the “hillbilly” horror genre, including A Bloody Aria (Kut’a yubalcha tŭl , 2006) and To Catch a Virgin Ghost (Sasalli 2 km , 2004).
2 In contrast to French anthropologist Marc Augé’s articulation of “non-places” in hisNon-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity , trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2009), I use the term to refer to Mu-do’s literal definition as “non-island.” Augé invokes the “non-place” to designate the spaces of transit and commerce that have become increasingly standardized across cultures and geographies, such as supermarkets, airports, hotels, and waiting rooms, that for him constitute the lived conditions of “supermodernity.” There might be some resonance in Augé’s concept of the “non-place” for my reading of Mu-do, if we take the alternatingly nostalgic and paranoid connotations of the rural as equally generic, transcultural, and pre-packaged signifiers that are symptomatic of contemporary postmodern (or “supermodern”) conditions.
3 In an incisive and thoughtful review of the film, Kim Kyu Hyun suggests that Pong-nam’s blunt language—she uses the direct expression, “Man-jong isfucking Yŏn-hŭi,”—shocks Hae-wŏn and viewers’ sensibilities in such a way that Hae-wŏn cannot focus on the content of what is said, but gets caught up in its form; in this way, the film further expresses Hae-wŏn’s hypocrisy. See Kim’s review “Recent ‘Women’s Revenge’ Films and the Curious Case of Bedevilled on the website Modern Korean Cinema , during its featured “revenge week:” http://www.modernkoreancinema.com/ 2013/07/revenge-week-recent-womens-revenge.html