When Bong Joon-ho won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year for his film Parasite (topping the list of movies I’m excited for in 2019), it was a big deal. Not just because he was the first Korean recipient or that it gave those of us familiar with his work for years bragging rights of knowing this obscure foreign filmmaker already. But because it meant his work was finally being evaluated seriously as important and innovative -which it has been for years, going back to his 2000 debut Barking Dogs Never Bite.
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| Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer, 2013 |
Director Bong, as he’s known by those who work with him, is one of the most fascinating figures in modern world cinema, his movies striking and stylized, sharp and raw. Never one to shy away from disturbing topics or to mask the darkness of human nature, his stamp is instantly recognizable in films as dissimilar as Mother and Okja. Uniting his filmography is an unwavering political consciousness, especially in his science-fiction films, all of which are classic cautionary tales; but also an unrestrained weirdness. More often than not, his movies feature outlandish and bizarre plot points or digressions, dark humour and idiosyncratic characters that serve to buttress the greater point of his narratives. The sudden, jarring casualties inflicted by the monster of The Host make you more attuned to its unpredictability; you’re far more likely to care about the heroes of Snowpiercer and Okja when their adversary is a wickedly eccentric, insultingly powerful and over-the-top Tilda Swinton. Bong’s strangeness doesn’t merely extend to the visually and aesthetically unusual though, but in his variant moods, his frenetic editing during action scenes, deliberately inconsistent pacing, and other technical anomalies.
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| Jake Gyllenhaal, Okja, 2017 |
Across six movies (seven if Parasite follows suit) Bong has addressed significant issues, from environmentalism to classism to animal abuse, through using creatively strange devices in one of two contexts. The science-fiction approach, whereby he inflates the subject matter so that it’s upfront and unavoidable (The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja); and the gritty realism approach where it’s presented less explicitly but attached to an emphasized shock value (Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder, Mother). But always the weirdness is captivating; unnerving at times –as in the lighthearted music used to underscore a man trying to kill a shih tzu through the opening sequence of Barking Dogs Never Bite, or the otherwise delightfully hammy Jake Gyllenhaal being abusive to the title character of Okja –but captivating. Because Bong wants us to face these things unfiltered. He wants to grab our attention through something bizarre or silly, then force us to confront the demons that are really important.
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| Lee Sung-jae, Barking Dogs Never Bite, 2000 |
Animal welfare seems to be something he especially cares about, as the central topic of both aforementioned films, going to lengths to portray the monstrousness of animal cruelty (especially in the former) and the violence of the meat industry (especially in the latter). The despicable subject matter of Barking Dogs Never Bite is frequently offset by an ironic, almost darkly farcical tone. Lee Sung-jae kills the dog he thinks has been loudly disturbing his work only to find it was the wrong dog which he likewise disposes of just in time for his wife to get a dog herself, all the while daring to be horrified by his buildings’ janitor cooking the bodies. It is an absurdist scenario that just happens to centre around incredibly vile animal cruelty. The point is not to desensitize us through this dichotomy, but to subvert. The protagonist isn’t allowed a moments peace for his actions, a fitting karma. And Bong wants to make sure you vividly know how awful his abuse is, with impressionable shots like that of a chihuahua being thrown from a roof (no real animals were harmed during production it should be emphasized).
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| Ahn Seo-hyun, Okja, 2017 |
What modest degree of sympathy Bong had for the tormenting academic in Barking Dogs Never Bite however (the character is allowed some humanity in the end) has entirely evaporated by Okja. Bong does not cut animal abusers any slack, the villains are borderline irredeemable, the whole industry they propagate is viciously criticized. Okja might just be Bong’s weirdest film, in terms of its tone, writing, characters, humour, and individual story and visual components, but it’s also his most passionate in its purpose. Fun chase sequences, silly characters, and bizarre toilet humour are coupled with raw, uncomfortable imagery and implications, notably in two key scenes: Okja’s forced breeding and subsequent mutilation, and the harrowing slaughterhouse climax. Both are vivid sequences, both extremely impactful, and both feature an undeniably weird element, namely the presence of a goofy caricature. Bong consciously does things like cutting from such intensities to a sizzling strip of super pig bacon and contrasting the finally freed Okja (liberated through an appeal not to ethics but to greed) with the vast herd of super pig livestock left to their fate. Paul McCartney couldn’t have edited it better. Bong is even critical of animal rights activists (or at least the extreme fringes), whom he satirizes as being self-righteous and characterizes as just as capable of harming the creatures they claim to protect as their adversaries.
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| The monster of The Host, 2006 |
Hand in hand with this, Bong’s films have also addressed themes of environmentalism, most dramatically in Snowpiercer, which is set in a post-apocalyptic climate catastrophe. However this fact is mostly just dressing; as illustrated in Snowpiercer and The Host, human hubris is Bong’s graver concern. And it’s most important to his monster movie narrative, with a creature birthed from toxic pollution rather than radioactivity. Very explicitly it opens with an American military doctor played by Scott Wilson literally ordering his Korean underling to dump two hundred bottles of formaldehyde into the Han River. This catalyst is based on a true story, and one that soured public relations between South Korea and the U.S. for a time. So of course, in typical Bong Joon-ho fashion, The Host’s American antagonists are portrayed in an outrageously satirical way, caring not a bit for the safety of the Korean populace, making up a cover story about an infection that targets the main characters, utilizing a toxic chemical called “Agent Yellow” (get it??), and on top of it all, the doctor who orders a lobotomy of Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is cross-eyed for the duration of his screen-time. The monster, ugly and messy, is a physical embodiment of pollution, and directly symbolic of what America did to Korea, while also a retribution -it’s no coincidence one of its first victims is an extremely over-confident American tourist.
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| The cast of The Host, 2006: Park Hae-il, Bae Doona,
Go Ah-sung, Song Kang-ho, and Byung Hee-bong
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Bong does not do subtlety, but he tempers it with a pervasive goofiness, often for the sake of getting a point across, but just as often because of Bong’s weird humour. Consider the hospital escape scene for example, where the men make it to their getaway truck only to realize they forgot Nam-joo (Bae Doona) in a manner not unlike a farcical gag. And yet not long after, the family share a meal together, silently imagining the captive Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung) is with them, in one of the most moving scenes Bong has ever directed. Beneath its monster movie trappings, The Host is a family drama after all. It’s also a perfect example of the benefits of Bong’s unusual technical choices. Where another director would draw out the reveal of the monsters’ appearance, we first meet this creature fully realized in the background of a scene mid-charge, and we follow this early attack largely from a handheld though steady camera, allowing for the sequence to be resonantly thrilling and completely coherent. The way Bong uses slow-motion at the climax of a beat, carried over from Memories of Murder, emphasizes terror and panic in a more effective way than jump scares and disorienting editing. And tying back into his overarching cautionary theme on American pollution, he lingers on the dozens of empty bottles at the start as though to ominously equate them with poison.
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| Kim Sang-kyun, Memories of Murder, 2003 |
Comparatively subdued as far as stylistic flourishes go, the way Bong comments on the criminal justice system is worthy of note too. Though Memories of Murder, by far his most straightforward film, takes its cues more from David Fincher than Bong’s own creative sensibilities, there are significant details to the way he characterizes the true crime story of South Korea’s first serial murder spree: such as how ill-equipped the Hwaseong police force is to dealing with such a case, and of course the unorthodox methods of lead investigator Park Doo-man (Song), which involve but are not limited to interrogating and having his subordinate beat up potential suspects (including horrifically, an autistic kid), and determining guilt through a heavily-flawed eye contact deduction. Like many a buddy cop film, when Seoul officer Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyun) joins the case, Bong is drawing parallels between city and country law enforcement, and as has sometimes been done, ultimately vindicates the country officer by having the city guy under emotional duress, resort to more extreme measures in the climax. Don’t let this seemingly formulaic nature dissuade you though; Memories of Murder is one of the best real crime films out there, beautifully shot and scored, and incredibly compelling. There’s just not much of Bong’s customary contrast in how it’s all characterized, allowing the shocking aspects of the actual case to speak for themselves (murders being committed during the radio broadcast of a pop song, a suspect randomly masturbating at the scene of the crime, peach being found in a victims’ vagina).
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| Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin, Mother, 2009 |
His exploration of the psychology of murder is furthered in Mother, which tackles the two-fold subjects of murder and mental impairment. This film is dotted a bit more with Bong’s random comic touches and disturbingly edited murder scenes, yet is also one of his most seriously provocative -dealing with an intellectually disabled teen (Won Bin) charged with a murder, and the determination of his mother (Kim Hye-ja) to prove his innocence. It’s the first time Bong comments on bigotry and the disturbing degree of ableism he at least sees as an issue in Korea (I refer again to the treatment of the autistic kid in Memories of Murder), as Do-joon is manipulated and routinely insulted by peers and professionals alike. But Bong goes further in how he portrays that kid and the ultimate result of mothers’ investigating to subvert our inherent biases and challenge (South Korea especially) societal systems of prejudice and mental health. Bong’s weirder impulses are mostly present here in a disturbing sense, such as the sudden and vivid way he films a key murder scene and how he portrays Mothers’ dependence on acupuncture (for herself and others). Indeed Mother might be Bong’s most unnerving film, for its implications and discourse, but perhaps mostly for one revelation between mother and son that casts their relationship in a horrifying new context -only equalled by Chris Evans’ confession to Song in the last act of Bong’s next film.
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| Chris Evans, Snowpiercer, 2013 |
The obvious, principal theme of Bong’s best movie, Snowpiercer, is one of class -but never in an abstract, ambiguous sense. On the contrary, it’s transparently explicit. Snowpiercer is all about the fight between the poor and the privileged and Bong makes it as visceral as possible. Themes of class were touched on in a small or subtextual way in each of his previous films, but here he literally has the designated lesser classes (which of course are significantly more diverse than the classes in power) fighting the rich oppressors in brutal armed combat with what weapons they can muster. The villains are made to be so ludicrously privileged and over-confident that you long for the rebels to take them down, from Swinton’s Thatcher-inspired politician to Alison Pill’s deranged propagandist. The reason this film and The Host and Okja are Bong’s most popular is because of how venomous his commentary is, how brutally he mocks and condemns his antagonists, and how much sympathy he bestows on his protagonists; and Snowpiercer is the most thinly disguised of Bong’s career, afforded so due to the bewilderingly brilliant narrative context. But there is something deeper he’s getting at too, that comes to light with Ed Harris in a bathrobe -a perfect example of weirdness as a conduit to important theming. Here Bong expresses the notion that we’re all being played, that we’re trapped within this system, and that it’s human nature to reinforce it. Even at the end of the world, Bong is saying, these systems of power will endure until they are permanently dismantled -and the way that plays out in Snowpiercer isn’t very optimistic, essentially suggesting the human race will have to be restarted (not accidentally by young non-white people at that -Bong was intelligent enough to recognize the racial intersectionality in all this).
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| Chris Evans and Go Ah-sung, Snowpiercer, 2013 |
Visually, Bong draws his class contrast in smart if obvious ways too. The back of the train is dirty and dark, claustrophobic and ill-kept, its residents malnourished, and clothed and groomed to evoke homelessness in a statement on how the world treats the homeless and otherwise destitute. They’re fed scant bars of nutrients, revealed to be ground-up cockroaches, that they use for currency; and the history of the back of the train gets even darker, Bong emphasizing the lowness people can sink to when denied humanity. Consequently, as Curtis’ (Evans) team moves through the train, the aesthetic loses its grimness. The cars become brighter, cleaner, their passengers much more gracefully adorned; the film on a whole grows more radiant, visually imaginative and elaborate until reaching the engine, historically the dingiest part of a train, here immaculate, white, and technologically luxurious. But of course that’s only a veneer, maintained as it has been through history by the work of the “inferior” classes. And Bong characterizes that with a reprisal of the back of the train imagery underneath the engine’s pure shell. Oppression, colonialism, slavery, all represented here, can never be thoroughly hidden.
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| Song Kang-ho, Memories of Murder, 2003 |
There are other topics highlighted in Bong’s films he seems to have an interest in. Media plays a significant background role in just about all of them. Bae’s character in Barking Dogs Never Bite longs to be on television, celebrated for her heroism in fact. The Host examines media paranoia, while Memories of Murder and Mother both discuss the role of media in crime stories, and what impact it has on investigations. And the whole concept of Okja, though rooted in the real debate on genetically modified food, is tinged with a silliness in its depiction of media consumerism and commercialism. The importance of family ties crosses films, from the dysfunctional but likeable Parks of The Host, to the suspect matriarchal loyalty driving Mother, to the close but distant grandfather-granddaughter relationship of Okja. And of course Parasite is all about a family too. There are more, but this essay is long enough and with Parasite around the corner it would feel incomplete. In truth, no directors’ pervading themes and social commentaries can be wholly discussed with any accuracy until they’re dead, if then; and Bong has a healthy career ahead of him if the Palme d’Or win means anything (it does, more than the Oscar really -for proof, see my Shoplifters essay).
I like to think if I’ve proven something with this, it’s that Bong Joon-ho’s movies are weird and important -weird in how they are important, and important in part because of how they’re weird. I hope too it was an adequate celebration of what’s thus far proven to be a tremendous career of using film to not only tell great, remarkably original, and breathtaking stories, but impart important messages in impactful ways -the more unusual and upfront, the better. Parasite is set to release in Canada towards the end of next month. And as usual for one of Bong’s films, I have no expectations except for how great it’s going to be. I have no doubt he will exceed even that.
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