It seems critics are incapable of writing about Bong Joon-ho without talking about genres. Sometimes he’s called a master of genres, other times he’s praised for reinventing them, mixing them, or transcending them. Critics love to count them off: to date, there’s a quirky comedy (Barking Dogs Never Bite), a police procedural (Memories of Murder), a monster film (The Host), and a melodrama (Mother). And from there, critics love to express fascination over the way the films seem to defy such genres while inhabiting them. The Host is also a family melodrama, Memories of Murder is also a satirical comedy, Mother is, as Manohla Dargis puts it, “a love story that turns into a crime story before fusing into something of a criminal love story.”
If Bong’s films slip from every genre they encounter, if they defy categorization at every plot turn, why bother evoking genres at all? If genres are defined by the categorical cleanness of their boundaries, aren’t Bong’s films “genre-less”? The temptation to classify the unclassifiable reminds us of Derrida’s famous take on genres: that all texts have genres, even multiple ones, not because they belong to genres per se, but because they necessarily participate in a kind of understood generic code shared by writers and readers. So it’s not that Bong’s films are melodramas or monster films, but that they evoke genres, manipulating them for other purposes, and in the process mix them into incomprehensibility.
Isn’t this paradox the same one debated over multiculturalism and post-racialism? Is a cultural-hybrid – a mestizo, a hapa, a migrant, an ethnic minority – the “sum of its parts” or the transcendence of such categories altogether? One of the most exciting aspects of Bong’s four features to date is that they pose both sides as possibilities, and then, fittingly, laugh in the face of the paradox.
To Bong, genres are nothing more than categories placed on certain situations, characters, settings, and narrative traditions. Bong has mastered many such tropes, and so it’s tempting to think he’s a master of genres as well. And yet, in interview after interview, Bong acknowledges his awareness of genres but hesitates before naming the genres of his own films, preferring instead to talk about thematic considerations. For instance, on Mother, he admits to crime film influences, but that “ultimately it’s a story about a strange mother and son.”
So if we look beyond genre and toward themes, we find a compelling resistance of classification that is resonant with issues of identity. In fact, Bong’s films often pose the question: when driven to the extremes of the human experience, are we willing to drop our classifications? In, Shaking Tokyo, Bong’s short film in the omnibus Tokyo!, a hikikomori becomes enamored by an adorable girl’s exposed thighs and angelic vulnerability (embodied by teen darling Yu Aoi). A flurry of infatuation and the seduction of possibility overcome him. In the face of love, can a hikikomori choose to stop being a hikikomori? Can one be a hikikomori+lover? Or can the idea of a hikikomori itself become reconcilable with love?
In Mother, Bong wrings our morality through the opposing pressures of maternal love and social order. If a mother commits a murder to clear her son of the very same crime, does that make her the ultimate mother? Or the worst possible one, since we get clues the son realizes her sin? Bong Joon-ho refuses to define for us what a mother is or what she must do. More than most directors, he understands that such definitions are untenable in a world of social unrest and bureaucratic disorder. As a result, he never places blame or makes qualitative determinations, no matter the outcome. What we get at the end of Mother isn’t a new or hybridized definition of motherhood, but simply a daze in the form of dance: flailing arms, strobing sunlight, a jittery camera. It’s not just ambiguity, but a refusal to judge, settling instead for a mambo-like delirium, that sensory sunset-on-your skin warbling jubilee experienced on the road of motherhood. (The last shot: a busload of mothers.) The way out of the paradox is through empathetic feeling.
Memories of Murder coldly depicts just what happens when one tries to classify – or in this case, profile. If a man wears red panties, is he the killer? What about a man with soft hands? The police too are subject to profiling: by all stereotypes, the city cop believes in order and the rule of law, and the country cop believes in intuition and brute force. Of course, doting on personal identities, which are then elevated to the status of probable cause, leads to one dead end after another. As in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, released the same year as Memories of Murder, clues and character types are scattered throughout – a crying woman, an outhouse, red clothes, a Band-Aid – yet they drive us in indefinite directions because we problematically insist that they must be pieces in a puzzle, rather than simply people or objects.
In one of the film’s final moments, a cop who prides himself on being the ultimate profiler stares a suspect in the eye, only to finally realize he sees nothing. In the film’s penultimate shot, the cop looks directly at the camera and declares that the killer is probably an ordinary person. Given that the film had made a point to expose the cop’s brutality, we’re tempted to accuse the authorities, and the government, of being the true killers. (The film is often called a critique of Korea under martial law.) But his gaze into the camera is unsettling for another reason: he’s looking at us. Are we who possess the camera-eye, we who play along as armchair profilers of this murder mystery, guilty as well?
That final shot mirrors the film’s opening scene. Bong loves rhyming his opening shots with his final ones. Barking Dogs Never Bite begins and ends with canned shots of nature, and Mother with a perplexing dance. After an expository prologue, The Host opens on a boy stealing from a food stall; the film ends on an improbably poignant return to that opening gesture. But for Bong, a circular return to the beginning is never meant to create geometric order. It’s there instead to drive us in circles, to lead us back to the beginning dizzier than ever. We have not transcended the beginning, but nor have we surrendered to the myth that a return to origins provides some kind of equilibrium.
There’s a sneakiness at play here. A snarkiness. A mischievousness. Bong Joon-ho never rests at the opportunity to joke around and jostle our minds a bit, an extraordinary achievement given how disciplined Bong is as a storyteller. As Dennis Lim writes, while Bong defies genres, he seems to nevertheless operate in a consistent tonal mode: black comedy. Not surprisingly, so often comedy is Bong’s preferred strategy for breaking our expectations of how people can be defined. In Mother, a lawyer makes a rather bizarre joke about buffets (he eats standing up because it saves time) which seems to dislodge our (and the mother’s) entire sense of what a defense attorney is.
In one of the most memorable split-seconds of The Host, a father attempts to save his daughter from a charging monster. In the chaos, he grabs her hand, only to soon realize that he’s unknowingly grabbed the hand of someone else’s daughter. We gasp at the tragedy but laugh at the shocking drollness of the mistake. Then he lets go of the other girl. At such a moment, should he be a father who cares only for his own daughter, or a man of the community who will save all daughters from the charging creature? From the comedy comes a central moral dilemma about identity that persists until the film’s final scene.
And then there’s the nosebleed reverse-shot. It’s appeared in three of Bong’s films so far and I’m tempted to call it a signature image in Bong’s young oeuvre. A character will look off-frame. The camera then cuts to what she’s looking at: a face with blood dripping from the nose. The reverse-shot is always a shocker. One never gets used to a face sullied inexplicably by crimson, the flow of blood kinesthetically triggering the nerve endings on our own upper lips as if we could feel warm viscous blood tracking down our own faces. It’s also funny. The absurdity of unprompted blood somehow never gets old. We’re fixated on the nosebleed just as the viewer in the scene is. The nosebleed is a quietly effective narrative device: it draws attention to the bleeder by having our heart skip a beat and tickling our taste for dark comedy.
When it happens in Mother, the nosebleed helps us identify a character: the nosebleed becomes a critical clue about the identity of a murderer. In Barking Dogs Never Bite, the opposite happens: the nosebleed distracts the onlooking character from identifying the cold-blooded killer. While the nosebleed in these two films seems to serve different purposes, it in fact operates the same way: to raise the question of identity via shock and humor. That the result is different is simply a result of different punchlines to the same joke.
But Bong is too sneaky to let it simply be about identity. Hidden beneath the joke, the joke’s engine which needs to be suppressed to propel the humor, is the disturbing heart of the matter: why is the person’s nose bleeding to begin with? To the viewer, the blood seems unprovoked, thus making the nosebleed such an effective foil and hilarious image. But Bong leaves it a devastating mystery for those who care. In these two films, the nose might be dripping with blood for any number of reasons: guilt, fear, anger, confusion, exasperation, etc. These characters are suffering: one will soon be murdered for her actions, the other has already murdered. The nosebleed doesn’t explicate what that suffering is, only that hurt is happening, and that simple acknowledgment of pain is sufficient for Bong. If we can look beyond the identity-baiting, we may notice that there are in fact emotions at stake, emotions too complex for us to pinpoint and categorize, but clear enough as blood oozing down a face.
Pingback: » A Dirty Habit of Thought Christian Burkin