The Films of Bong Joon Ho

Nam Lee

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978818903, 9781978818910
• eBook ISBN: 9781978818927
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Korean History

Bong JoonHo won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006's monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition.As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong's films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.

1

A New Cultural Generation

In 2015, a documentary short made by three high school students caught the attention of the Korean film community, garnering awards at a number of youth and short film festivals. Titled Searching for Bong Joon Ho,1 the film follows these students as they try to meet the filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, whom they idolize. Their almost impossible quest begins when their parents dismiss their dream of becoming filmmakers, given the harsh realities of the Korean film industry. In response, they decide to search for Bong by any means necessary to seek his advice. As the voice-over narration explains, the student filmmakers “go wild at director Bong’s films. Wouldn’t he be able to give [us] helpful advice, given that he made it big despite the difficult conditions [of the film industry]?” The students use social media, email, and phone calls to reach out to people who have worked with Bong, but most of them refuse to help. Finally, the students are exhilarated when Hong Kyung-pyo, the director of photography who worked with Bong on Mother and Snowpiercer, helps set up a meeting with him.

This short documentary is noteworthy in two respects. First, it attests to Bong Joon Ho’s success and popularity among aspiring filmmakers in Korea. Second, it demonstrates how Bong’s approach to filmmaking influences these young filmmakers. Consciously or not, the documentary resembles Bong’s films in its playfulness, its conception of the powerless pursuing a seemingly impossible task, and most of all, in its final unexpected twist with a bittersweet ending. They finally succeed in meeting with Bong, but instead of giving the students the support and encouragement they expected, Bong discourages them from pursuing a career in filmmaking.

The students’ interview with Bong is oddly funny. When they ask him for any fond memories he had when making his films, he had to stop and think for a moment. Finally, he tepidly offers, “Visiting Korean rural areas was enjoyable.” Then they ask about the hardships he has encountered as a filmmaker, and he replies, “Everything. You can say everything is hard.” If, however, they choose to ignore his advice and continue to pursue a filmmaking career, he urges them not to cater to anyone but themselves, to make films that make them happy. At the film’s end, undeterred, the students are still intent on becoming filmmakers. It turns out that the most encouraging advice came not from Bong Joon Ho but from Hong Kyung-pyo, who was the one to urge them not to give up trying to find Bong from the beginning.

As this student film testifies, Bong Joon Ho has become one of the most significant directors to come out of New Korean Cinema that emerged in the late 1990s. Among the Korean directors who gained national and international recognition, Bong is arguably the only one whose filmmaking is unequivocally commercial and whose name is considered a guarantor of box office success. Bong is both a role model for aspiring filmmakers and a brand that is known and marketed around the world,2 despite his relatively brief filmography. He has made seven feature films—Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017), Parasite (2019)—and six short films: White Man (1993), Memories of My Frame (1994), Incoherence (1994), Influenza (2004), Sink & Rise (2004), and Shaking Tokyo (2008). With the exception of his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, all his feature films dominated the box office and garnered numerous awards. The Host and Mother made the Korean Film Archive’s 2014 list of the “100 Greatest Korean Films,” and Memories of Murder ranked seventh in the all-time best ten, the only film released in the 2000s to be included in the list.3 The critical and commercial success of The Host, Mother, Snowpiercer, Okja, and Parasite in the United States and elsewhere established Bong’s international reputation as one of the most innovative genre filmmakers working today.

As Christina Klein argues, Bong’s approach to genre filmmaking is not mere “Copywood” but local interpretations and reinventions of dominant cultural forms.4 His films exemplify what Arjun Appadurai refers to as a “multiplicity of localized events” that brings different cultures into contact.5 And this process of cultural hybridization, Homi Bhabha argues, creates something different and new that opens up “a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.”6 This negotiation includes subversion, transgression, and reformulation. Bong’s films are products of diverse cultural influences, and they subvert and reformulate Hollywood genres. By combining elements of different cultures and various film traditions in his work, Bong has opened up new possibilities of creative filmmaking in a postcolonial context.

Specifically, Bong’s films demonstrate a new cultural practice of appropriating global genres and film styles to inscribe the local—Koreanness—into them. Bong’s filmic world reflects a keen interest in the Korean way of life, local politics, and social systems while unfolding stories about the everyday lives of ordinary Korean citizens, particularly the socially disenfranchised. Bong utilizes local subjects and politics to open up new forms of genre filmmaking that confront and challenge the global force of Hollywood cinema. In so doing, Bong has pioneered a “third space” for world cinema. And in this third space, Bong Joon Ho never relies too much on either Korean or Hollywood styles and themes but always finds a happy middle ground between the two. Of course, as previously stated in the introduction, filmmakers and films do not exist independently of the social conditions and cultural system in which they exist but are in constant interaction or struggle with them within what Pierre Bourdieu terms “the field of cultural production.” Conversely, through films, we can read the society and the system that produced both the auteur and his or her films.

What, then, are the internal and external forces that shape Bong Joon Ho’s filmic world? What are the material conditions that enable Bong to create blockbuster films? What are the cultural influences that inform his creativity and cultural hybridity? How are we to position his cinema in relation to the politics, cultures, and cinemas of Korea and of the world? This chapter aims to answer these questions by examining the individual and institutional conditions involved in Bong’s filmmaking: his formative years as a filmmaker, the significance of the “386 generation” both in Korea’s political landscape and its cultural production, the Korean film industry’s struggle against Hollywood domination and the subsequent rise of New Korean Cinema, Korea’s democratization and achievement of the freedom of expression, and Korea’s financial crisis and the implementation of various neoliberal economic policies. Thus while recognizing the creative agency that renders Bong’s approach to filmmaking distinct to him, this chapter examines the various conditions—historical, political, social, and cultural—that shaped the structure or social formation within which he has made his films.

This chapter pays particular attention to the diverse and intercultural influences reflected in Bong’s films: Hollywood films, European and Asian films, Japanese manga, and the strong tradition of critical or social realism in Korean cinema. Bong represents a new generation of filmmakers who grew up watching Hollywood movies and Japanese cartoons on TV, participated in film clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, and attended film schools. Thus this chapter positions Bong Joon Ho and his films in the context of the rise of New Korean Cinema led by this new generation in the 2000s. It explores the ways in which changes in the Korean film industry gave this group of filmmakers the opportunity to make films that, in turn, brought about the further transformation of the industry and its mode of production while simultaneously putting Korean cinema on a world map.

Bong Joon Ho and Film Authorship

A study on a director inevitably raises the question of authorship in film. The traditional notion of the auteur—the claim that the director is, or should be, the author of his or her films, advanced by young critics of the film journal Cahiers du cinéma in 1950s France—has been much contested, especially with respect to the Hollywood studio system, where a director’s creative control was limited. Indeed, unlike literary work, cinema is an inherently collaborative enterprise, which makes it difficult to attribute the role of the “author” to one person. However, despite the continuing debate on its validity, auteur or director studies persist. Recent auteur studies have increasingly focused on filmmakers on the margin of mainstream filmmaking, such as women, diasporic, avant-garde, and other non-Hollywood directors. In addition, the scope of the “auteur” has broadened to include producers, screenwriters, stars, and even the Hollywood production system itself.7 Academic and critical attention has also shifted to reception studies or audience studies that reject the idea that the author is the sole originator of the text’s meaning. Increasingly the “author” is considered only one of many voices that create the meaning of texts.8

Film authorship then can be thought of in terms of the auteur’s agency. Janet Staiger locates this agency in the choices directors make and brings attention to the ways in which subjects in minority positions, such as women, peoples of the LGBTQ community, and people of color, have practiced methods of self-expression that would be described as “‘transcending,’ ‘defamiliarizing,’ ‘subverting’ or ‘resisting.’”9 Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawki see the need to reassess the film auteur in the age of globalization as the “global auteur,” whose authorship is expressed through film directors capturing the zeitgeist. Thus the auteur is an agent who “subjects itself to sociohistorical ideologies, cultural voices, technological conditions through which meaning is motivated, rationalized, mediated or reconstructed between an auteur and an audience.”10 We can say that Bong Joon Ho is a prime example of such an agent.

In addition, Bong can be appropriately examined as an auteur because of the extent to which he maintains control over his work. His nickname, in fact, is Bong-tail, combining Bong Joon Ho and the word detail, reflecting his close attention to all aspects of his films. He has written or cowritten all his films and is known for demanding the right to the final cut. In Hollywood, however, directors are not usually given such a right. This is why, unlike Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon, who came to Hollywood to make their first English-language films, Bong turned down offers from Hollywood studios and instead made his first global film, Snowpiercer, with funding from the Korean company CJ E&M. However, Snowpiercer was not free from Hollywood intervention.

The release of Snowpiercer in the United States and other English-language territories was delayed almost a year after its Korean release in July 2013 due to the conflict between Bong and Harvey Weinstein, the American distributor of the film. Weinstein, the owner of the Weinstein Company, requested twenty minutes be cut out because “midwesterners are too stupid to understand the movie as it is.”11 In addition, Weinstein considered adding opening and closing voice-overs for further explanation of the story. Bong was “reportedly furious about the Weinstein English-version cuts.”12 Non-English-speaking countries including France, Taiwan, and Japan had released Bong’s original version.

Interestingly, this conflict between Bong and Weinstein sparked an online debate and even a “Free Snowpiercer” petition campaign led by a film activist. The petition points out Americans’ long anticipation of the film and the film’s potential to raise urgent issues to the American society: “social classes and the dangers of elitism.”13 Eventually, an agreement was reached to retain Bong’s original version, but it meant forsaking a wide release. The film’s distributor was switched to Radius-TWC, a boutique label from the Weinstein Company that releases films on multiplatform video-on-demand (VOD) services and in theaters. The film was finally released in the English-language territories on June 27, 2014, in eight theaters. However, with overwhelmingly positive reviews and word of mouth, the film finally achieved a wide release in more than 150 theaters nationwide. Also, the film was released on VOD two weeks into the theatrical release, making it the first film to be available on streaming service while still playing in theaters. Thus Snowpiercer left its mark on the history of online distribution in the United States.

Three years later in 2017, another of Bong Joon Ho’s films became the center of controversy, this time on the issue of online streaming services. Okja, his first non-Korean film in terms of financing, was met with fierce resistance from local exhibitors in France and Korea. Okja was produced as a Netflix original movie. Netflix offered Bong $50 million and total creative freedom, which was important to him. The only restriction was the choice of format. While he wanted to shoot the film in 35 mm, Netflix required that all their original movies be shot and archived in 4K.14 Thus Okja became his first film to be shot on digital. It was also his first film to be invited to the Competition section at Cannes International Film Festival. (Both The Host and Mother were screened out of competition.) However, Okja’s entry prompted protests from French distributors and exhibitors who were furious that Cannes had selected a film that was not set for theatrical release in France. During the premiere screening, the audience booed when the Netflix logo appeared on the screen, although the critical reception of the film was overwhelmingly positive. This incident led the Cannes Festival to issue a new rule that all future competition titles have to be released in French theaters. So unintentionally, Bong Joon Ho’s film was at the center of a controversy surrounding the new distribution format of online streaming. It was in a way the price he had to pay in exchange for total creative freedom.

The controversy and uproar did not stop in France. Okja was also met with resistance from the Korean theater chains as well. CGV, Lotte Cinema, and Megabox—the top three theater chains in Korea, composing 93 percent of the nation’s movie theaters—boycotted Okja over the simultaneous release on Netflix, citing that it violates the three-week window between theatrical release and streaming availability.15 Through his choices, Bong was able to keep his cinematic vision intact; however, in the process, his work demonstrated the tensions created by innovations in film distribution, laying bare the unresolved obstacles to the coexistence of online streaming and theatrical release. He inadvertently stood at the forefront of the new changes in digital distribution. While Netflix provides non-Hollywood filmmakers like Bong the ability to make a studio-quality movie with a creative control not offered by studios, it also limits the film’s consumption to primarily laptop screens and home televisions, which is a problem for blockbuster movies like Okja.

Bong’s growth as an auteur was supported by the change in the industrial climate of the Korean film industry during his formative years. From the mid-1990s to early 2000s, the traditional Korean film industry—known as the Chungmuro, after the name of the street in Seoul where film production companies were concentrated—began to hand over the reins to large conglomerates.16 Giant corporations such as Samsung and Daewoo set up their own movie business subsidiaries and began investing and producing films. This change would eventually allow individual directors like Bong to plan and produce films by dealing directly with conglomerates for funding.

Furthermore, the French film culture and its notion of the auteur exerted strong influence at the time, creating an environment in which directors are usually given full control over t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. A New Cultural Generation
• Chapter 2. Cinematic “Perversions”: Tonal Shifts, Visual Gags, and Techniques of Defamiliarization
• Chapter 3. Social Pujoris and the “Narratives of Failure”: Transnational Genre and Local Politics in Memories of Murder and The Host
• Chapter 4. Monsters Within: Moral Ambiguity and Anomie in Barking Dogs Never Bite and Mother
• Chapter 5. Beyond the Local: Global Politics and Neoliberal Capitalism in Snowpiercer and Okja
• Conclusion: Parasite—A New Beginning?
• Filmography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author