I have always been fascinated by movies and still remember several of my early visits to one of Hässleholm’s three cinemas: Park, Grand or Metropol. Almost every kid of the small rural town attended the Sunday matinees when a horde of raucous children pressed onto one another down the steps to Metropol's salon where John Fäldt, the cinema usher, held his ground against them before he opened the doors to let the boisterous crowd rush in and struggle for the best seats. We had our pockets full of sweets – small caramel boxes with the Salty Cat and Tutti Frutti, as well as plastic tubes with Bronzol, throat lozenges mildly flavoured with licorice. The last mentioned ones we bought less for their taste but due to the fact that their plastic lids could be popped up and be made to fly into the necks those sitting in front of us.
We folded the movie tickets to make them squeal when we blew into them and screamed with joy when the vignettes of the Disney cartoon shorts appeared on the screen.
However, we also enthusiastically watched series with Zorro, Captain Blood and Tarzan, these were older adventure films cut up in such a manner that they could be divided into different episodes. We held our breath while Tarzan swam underwater, something he often did, and on our way home we fought like Zorro and did not forget to symbolically carve his mark on those we defeated in our imaginary sword fights.
My cinematic interest did not dwindle as I got older, and just like when I was allowed to change my green children’s library card to a yellow one, which gave me access to the grown ups’ section, I was exultant when I finally turned fifteen, could buy a moped and watch movies that hitherto had been forbidden to children. Already by then I had begun to earn extra money by working at the post office and occasionally doing other odd jobs. But even before that I had sneaked in to watch forbidden movies, before John Fäldt, who otherwise worked as a bank clerk and since he was older than the other ushers he could probably chose which movie he wanted to attend to. I assume he was as big a movie fan as I was. In any case, he was stricter than his colleagues and when we spotted that Fäldt stood guard we did not dare to take any chances. However, one evening I and Dan Göransson took the risk and entered Planet of the Apes right in front of Fäldt’s scrutinizing eyes. Afterwards he caught us, but we insisted that in spite of our short stature we were both fifteen years old. However, Fäldt knew my father, spoke to him and my father told him the truth about my age. As a consequence, I was that for more than a year banned from all the cinemas in Hässleholm, until I finally could prove that I really had turned fifteen.
When I had passed that magic threshold, I felt truly happy and liberated. It even happened that I was allowed to occasionally watch a movie for free. I had gained the friendship of the son of Kaj-Ewe Jönsson, the “Movie King” who owned all the cinemas in Hässleholm and it happened that we ran with film rolls between Grand and Park, thus making it possible for Kaj-Ewe to during the same evening present popular films in both cinemas, such as Woodstock, Catch 22, The Godfather and Cabaret.
None of the cinemas of the Movie King exists anymore. He died in 2002 and by then the heyday of cinemas was after more than 20 years just a memory, especially since Hässleholm's two military regiments had been shut down. Kaj-Ewe was born in Hässleholm and his family lived in a big apartment above Metropol.
With my good friend Claes Toft, I was for some time involved in a project that I think was called Film Annorlunda, Film Otherwise, which meant that a film association at low cost could rent films from the Swedish Film Institute and we could thus, once a week, at Metropol enjoy Japanese, Czech, Italian, French, Polish, Indian and Russian movies. When Claes and I ended up in Lund, it happened that we went to watch several films in one day and occasionally we even went over to Copenhagen to satisfy our great urge for films.
It was when I recently was lying on the sofa and zapped between different TV channels that I came to think of the great movie craving that obsessed me in my youth. It has actually not dwindled over time, but nowadays I am not visiting cinemas so often as before . However, I have amassed a considerable collection of DVDs, which I occasionally revisit, and I can also find some classics on YouTube, but much of what I remember and would like to watch cannot be found there.
The main source of my movie watching has now become streaming channels like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney - in that order. Much of the selection is rather uninteresting, but sometimes something might sparkle and I get stuck in series like Game of Thrones or Dexter, and a few years ago I followed with fascination all episodes of Lost and Twin Peaks, but nowadays I usually get tired of a series when it reaches Season 2.
After Japanese - and to some extent Chinese - films have occasionally managed to reach European screens, South Korean films have arrived and become widely appreciated. To such an extent that people are now talking about a Korean Wave and Netflix program selection offers a wide range of so-called Kdramas. For my part, I began to pay attention to the phenomenon through the orientally eerie A Tale of Two Sisters from 2003.
I wrote “orientally” sine Japanese horror had earlier got a grip on me, first with classics like Onibaba and Kwaidan, made in the sixties, later followed by the truly unnerving Rings 1 and 2, Dark Water, The Grudge, and the weird Marebito about monstrous, blood-sucking creatures, deros, living in Tokyo's underground labyrinths.
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These movies deal with modern big-city horror where everyday life only superficially covers an abyss of an ancient, horror-filled, parallel reality. I assume that the difference between Japanese horror films and their American counterparts might be due to the fact that many Japanese, unlike Europeans and Americans, actually believe in a spirited otherworld populated by malevolent entities, such as yurei and yokai.
It is possible that similar beliefs prevail in Korea, The Tale of Two Sisters is for example based on an old legend, which was retold in previous film versions as well. It's this uncanny nerve-wracking, inexplicable presence and deep-psychological horror which make me appreciate Japanese horrors far more than those American films that wallow in slasher effects and overly shallow attempts to scare moviegoers.
Nevertheless, there are of course dignified exceptions in Western cinema which manage to create impeccable feelings of horror, with masters such as Hitchcock, Sam Raimi (Drag Me to Hell), Polanski and Guillermo del Toro.
Korean directors have certainly learned from film history and are now creating cinematically outstanding films, often based on intricate scripts. Examples are Park Chan-wook’s sophisticated Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Venegance, which are not far behind Tarantino when it comes to complicated, blood-stained drama, although perhaps with a smaller dose of light humour than is the case with Tarantino. Equally interesting is Bong Joon’s The Parasite, which won both Oscar statuettes and a Palme d’Or. Although I thought his earlier Memoirs of a Murder was even better, with its loosely composed, slightly confusing story about an unsolved murder.
A great surprise was The Housemaid, an elegant and sophisticated historical drama revolving around perversity, betrayal and Japan’s occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945.
Even The Housemaid contained several elements that have come to characterize many of the Kdramas that do not shy away from portraying LBTQ issues, extreme violence and horror-laden scenes.
Behind these films it is often possible to get a glimpse of a tormented South Korean society; its split between luxury and poverty, economic success and hopelessness and not least the constant threat from is neighbouring sibling country in the north. A nation ruled by one of the world's most strange, most insane regimes, self-absorbed and fanatically suspicious of every country except China, which supplies North Korea with 85 percent of its imports and receives 85 percent of its exports. Russia can possibly also be counted among this peculiar nation’s friends. However, it is not entirely easy to understand the cooperation between these two nations, but a current fact is that North Korea has sent military equipment, as well as at 10 000 soldiers to support Russia's Ukrainian war effort, it has been reported that some of them are already participating in battles in the Kursk region.
The entirely misleadingly named and self-proclaimed Democratic People's Republic of Korea exhibits all trademarks of a mad dictatorship. Its population is kept in constant fear of arbitrary arrests, torture, murder, show trials, concentration camps, corruption and other totalitarian horrors reminiscent of Hitler’s and Stalin’s terror regimes and, as was the case with them, its Dear Leader is bestowed with an absurdly devout worship. By all accounts, the country has at least 150,000 political prisoners, locked up in huge labor and re-education camps, behind which fences and barbed wire several of their children have spent their entire lives.
Until 1945, the Korean Peninsula was for centuries a unified nation, albeit occasionally under foreign rule, with a unique and rich culture. Like its’ much more powerful neighboring countries, Korea had its own creation myth. In 2333 BC, the Ruler of Heaven sent his son Hwanung to Earth. This Son of Heaven descended to Mount Paektu from where he blessed his kingdom after begetting a son – Dangun Wanggeom, the ancestor of the Koreans, through his marriage with a goddess, who had previously been a bear.
Incredibly enough, current tributes to the small, portly third-generation dictator Kim Jong-il, allude to this myth by referring to him as “The Shining Star of Paektu”, “The Great Man Who Descended from Heaven”, and “The Dear Leader, who is the perfect embodiment of everything characterizing a great mentor”.
Between 1950 and 1953, a violent war raged between the Soviet- and China-allied communist North Korean troops and the US- and UN-backed South Korean army. The war soon turned into a stalemate and the warring factions agreed on a “temporary ceasefire”, which prevails to this very day. By then, South Korea had lost about one million people and North Korea about the same amount. China had probably lost around 600,000 soldiers, the US roughly 36,000 and other UN countries around 3,000 men. The current border between North and South follows the 38th parallel.
South Korea's capital, the mega metropolis Seoul with its 25 million inhabitants, is only 56 kilometres from the 38th parallel and thus within range of North Korea’s heavy artillery. Along the entire latitude, the Northern nation has placed at least 10,000 heavy artillery pieces, well protected in bunkers and caves. In addition, the North Korean army has a number of missiles, some of which are nuclear-armed. Over the course of an hour, North Korea could unhindered bombard Seoul with 500,000 projectiles and then storm the city with a 100,000-strong special force. Seoul would hardly be able to offer any effective defence to such an attack.
Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is significantly further away from the 28th parallel and is also protected by mountainous areas. The contrast between the two capitals is enormous. Seoul is an international metropolis, a consumer society with a feverish nightlife, a gleaming entertainment industry and seething cultural activities.
The centre of Pyongyang is modern, but empty of business, tightly controlled and quite desolate and gloomy.
Someone who seems to have captured the absurd desolation of Pyongyang is the Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle. His Pyongyang may be from 2003, but I guess its depiction of North Korean surrealism is still valid.
It is against a background of constant threats from the North, great social differences and injustices that several of the South Korean films and TV series take place. However, quite a few of them turn their backs on obvious problems and indulge in harmless entertainment and glitzy glamour. In spite of this the so-called Hallyu, Wave from Korea, has produced several masterful films that, through their cinematic perfection, have managed to illuminate much of the social misery behind South Korea's economic miracle. Take as an example the aforementioned Parasite, which follows how a poor family elaborately infiltrates a wealthy family, thereby exposing the social distortions created by South Korea’s capitalist class society, A movie that in a sophisticated, entertaining and skillful way succeeds in delivering a stinging social criticism, which is both narratively and cinematographically staged and thus also admirable and interesting.
My favourite within this Korean genre is Burning. Through its specific approach it reminds me of several films I was fascinated by in my youth, such as Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, a film which also deals with a ménage à trois. However, with a completely different cinematic language, both lighter and more sophisticated, with a relaxed voice over, similar to the one Scorsese used with a similar mastery in his Mafia Brothers. Jules and Jim is a very French love story, tragic – but without social inhibitions and problems.
What I assume Burning most of all resembles are Antonioni's films, especially The Adventure, The Eclipse, and Blow Up – the same strange sense of alienation. A fruitless search for some kind of liberation, embodied through an imagery that remains in your mind for a long time. For some strange reason, Yoo Ah-in’s acting in Burning is for me reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in a rather forgotten but excellent film by Sean Penn – The Pledge, from 2001, and Ian Holm in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, from 1997. They both seem to manifest a kind of questioning alienation. As Jong-su explains in Burning “I do not yet understand the mystery of existence”
Like Nicholson’s and Holm’s detectives, Jong-su is searching for answers. A search that turns them into observers looking form the outside in. I recently read Natascha Wimmer’s afterword to Roberto Bolaño’s magnificent novel The Savage Detectives in which she describes what I found in Penn and Egoyan’s films:
… more than anything, it seems Bolaño idolizes the detective as someone who has seen more terrible sights than anyone else and never turns away, never flinches. He is a witness, a watcher, someone who gets to the marrow, the literal bloody core. In a poem from the collection Tres, he writes: “I dreamed I was an old, sick detective, and I had been looking for lost people for a long time. Sometimes I happened to look at myself in the mirror and I recognize Roberto Bolaño”.
I believe Lee Chang-dong, who is also a writer, like Tarantino and Scorsese is a director who knows his film history inside out, a knowledge he combines with many years of being a teacher, as well as a writer of novels and short stories with complicated plots filled with symbolic, deep psychological associations, while being firmly anchored in a South Korean everyday life.
For example, Chang-dong’s Snowy Day exhibits every sign of a perfect short story – well-reproduced dialogue, a concentrated and well-formulated narrative style, a distinctive, perfectly described setting and universal, human problematics. Like Burning, Snowy Day is a story about outsiders. The main character, who is just referred as Private, is a forcibly recruited university student who, during an icecold winter night, keeps watch at an isolated military installation. For company he has a brutal corporal, who, like other soldiers and officers of the garrison, despises the intellectual private, who furthermore is awkward and clumsy.
While reading Chang-dong’s story, I was reminded of a novel I actually read during my own military service, the Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose’s novel Vi pynter oss med horn, Horns for Our Adornment. The novel takes place within the tightly closed world of a sailing ship. It deals with the relationships between the crew members of a schooner on its way from Bergen to New Foundland, combining legends, Freudian psychoanalysis and short sketches.
The ruff, berthing area, is shared by four men; a rough whopper of a man, who actually is good-natured, a skilled, able and cynical seaman who despises weakness, an elusive cook, and a de-frocked priest, tormented by a miserable past, whose sharp intellect does not help him at all as he clumsily tries to carry out the duties imposed on him on board the ship. His awkwardness results in contempt and scorn from his rough-coated colleagues.
Things are even worse for the dapper and awkward Reverend Colley, who in the early 1800s on a converted man-of-war with an assorted group of British migrants sails towards Australia. Colley is a closeted gay who is bullied, broken down by shame, and finally dies after his hidden desires are revealed. William Golding's novel Rites of Passage does like Sandemose’s novel depict how the restrictive ship environment reflects strict social divides and how false morals lead to the hypocrisy and excess that ultimately causes Reverend Colley's pathetic downfall and death.
In Lee Chang-dong's Snowy Day, the intellectual Private tries, mainly in vain, to establish contact with the sullen, brutal corporal with whom he spends his night duty. The corporal pours his contempt on the Private, but is at the same time is reluctantly drawn into the web of the Private’s inquisitiveness. Gradually, the reader gets an idea of the corporal's miserable background and how it becomes an answer to the Private's question: “How is it that you’ve only learned to resent the world?” When asked where he lives, the corporal replies:
Fuck, you’re just full of useless questions, aren’t you? Our place is on top of the mountain in Sadang-dong, in Seoul. Quite a sight. Couldn’t afford shit, but they bred a big litter in a house the size of an apple crate. Family of six, crawling all over each other. Hey, you know who I hate the most in this world? … It’s my old man. Day in, day out, he comes home after getting shitfaced and beats us kids like it was his job. The old lady’s a real piece of work, too, calling that man a husband, playing dead like a mouse in front of a cat—not a squeak. Truly pathetic. So, the second person I hate most in the world? None other than her.”
The corporal also tells the Private that before he joined the army, he worked at a bathing house and where he incurred the wrath of a woman whose sexual invitations he rejected. What she put him through made the corporal into fervent misogynist. As a counterweight to the corporal's violent outbursts against everything and everyone and in particular women, the Private tells him how he himself fell in love with a shy and obviously awkward girl. She once visited the garrison with a Christian choir and he immedeatly fell for her. Unbeknownst to him the little, factory girl was actually standing in front of the garrison’s main gate trying to come in contact with him. She had travelled by bus and then for hours walked through the snow just to meet with him.
The corporal grunts at the Private's story: ““Dumbass. You said you were gonna tell a dating story. Why’s it so dull?” The corporal had expected a story about sex and misogyny. The resolution of Snowy Day is unexpected, violent and tragic.
In Snowy Day we find a number of themes that also appear in Burning, above all the tragedy of exclusion. Snowy Day grabs hold of the reader in a firm grip, just as Burning is doing with its viewer. Perhaps this is due to a quality that Lee Chang-dong possesses – his sense of connection and communication with whoever watches his movies, or reads his books. About his writing, Chang-dong once said:
I first started writing as a teen-ager because of my desire to communicate with someone (even someone whose face I couldn’t see) in order to overcome loneliness. That same desire is what made me a film director. You could say that writing a short story and making a movie are essentially the same for me in terms of trying to communicate. […] I always wrote for one person, for this person who thought and felt the same way as I do. It almost felt like I was writing a love letter to this very specific person who would understand what I'm writing and share the same feelings and thoughts.
In Burning we meet Jong-su, a quiet young man with a university degree in literature. His home village Paju, is in one of the many small-town regions in South Korea, which through violently accelerating urbanization have suffered overwhelming changes, impoverishing the countryside and causing small farms to disappear. Jong-su's dreary, worn-out country village is right on the border with North Korea, and megaphones from the other side the 38th parallel are constantly heard, trumpeting out their propaganda.
Jong-su commutes between Seoul, where he earns a living by doing various odd jobs, and his father's run-down farm. His mother abandoned the family when Jong-su was a child. When, after 16 years without any contact whatsoever, he meets up with his mother Jong-su is confronted with a self-absorbed woman who, during their conversation is engaged with pecking at her mobile phone while she asks her estranged son for money. After assaulting a local authority officer, Jong-su’s father is in prison awaiting his sentence. He has left Jong-su with the neglected farm and a calf, the only animal left after a larger herd of livestock. A no-man's-land of muck and misery.
Jong-su's existence seems to be characterized by a self-imposed passivity, a kind of defence mechanism preventing him from being overwhelmed by financial misery, unfulfilled dreams of becoming an author, unresolved family conflicts, and lack of love. A hidden anxiety manifesting itself in a wretched environment – the dilapidated farmhouse, the dirty, rusted pick-up truck he travels in; rooms cluttered with dishes and instant-ramen cardboard boxes, as well as fading photographs evoking jarring memories.
Jong-su is working on a novel with Faulkner as role model and inspiration. His father’s uninspired lawyer tries to get him to write Jong-su father's life story, he has apparently distinguished himself in the war against North Kora. The lawyer indicates that such a story could be used as a defence in the apparently hopeless legal case. Instead, Jong-su writes a petition to the authorities in which he praises his father and asks for clemency, this despite the fact that he dislikes his violent and abusive father, who, when the mother left them, forced Jong-su to burn everything she left behind. Jong-su is praised for how well-written his petition is, but it leads nowhere and the father is sentenced to a year and a half in prison.
Jong-su wins the love of his childhood friend Hae-mi (whom he at first doesn't recognize because she's had undergone plastic surgery), though he soon loses this budding romance to a wealthy city dweller named Ben. We don't really know anything about Hae-mi's romance with Ben, other than that she met him during a trip to Kenya. It is only through Jong-Su's gaze that we see them together.
We soon find that Hae-mi is an imaginative, fascinating young woman, reminding us what the Germans call a Luftmensch, a creature of the air. It is she who takes the initiative when Jong-su loses his manhood and falls hopelessly in love with her. Hae-mi lives in the same penury as Jong-su. She survives through odd jobs, lacks proper education and a firm anchorage in life.
When Hae-mi goes missing, Jong-su contacts her mother and sister who originate from the same rural area as he. They run a rather wrteched noodle restaurant and are not particularly concerned about Hae-mi's disappearance. They believe she is hiding because of large credit card debts and claim she is constantly making up stories. Among other things she has told Jong-su that she as a child once fell into a well and was forced to spend hours down there, in abandonment and anxiety. Her kin assure Jung-su that such a well does not exist. Something that is contradicted by Jong-su’s mother, who claims that there was indeed such a well, but when he searches for it, Jong-su cannot find it.
Hae-mi and Jong-su live as strangers in a limbo, set apart from a divided world. A world not only split between South- and North Korea, but Ben's upper class circle also exists separated from the wretched reality surrounding them. They live within a fragile bubble of artificial animation. Ben's apartment is luxurious, tasteful, but cold and impersonal and so are he, his family and disaffected friends. Chang-dong’s film suggests that South Koreans seem to lack a choice, as well as any actual sense of belonging. It seems that the aspirations and problems of “the other side” – North Korea, as well of other social classes, do not concern them at all, or that they avoid to thinking about them They do not want to get involved. When Jong-su asks Ben what he does for a living, he answers:
I’m here and I’m there. I’m in Paju, and I’m in Banpo. I’m in Seoul. At the same time, I’m in Africa. […] Even if I said it, you wouldn’t understand. To put it simply, I ‘play.
Hae-mi is also an enigma, but an imaginative and peculiar riddle. She seems to live enclosed in a self-created fantasy world beyond the everyday lives of others, inaccessible, or ignored, by those who surrounds her. A seeker who invests her hard-earned savings on a trip to Kenya. To Ben’s bewildered jet-set friends, she explains:
Do you know Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, Africa It is said that Bushmen have two types of hungry people. Hungry English is hunger, Little hungry and great hungry. Little hungry people are physically hungry, the great hungry is a person who is hungry for survival. Why do we live, What is the significance of living? People who are always looking for these answers. This kind of person is really hungry, they called the great hungry.
Within a fancy restaurant Hae-mi suddenly starts dancing in front of Jung-su, Ben and his bemused friends. A scene that makes me think that Lee Chang-dong might have been inspired by a scene from Antonioni's L'Eclisse in which Monica Vitti in an upper-class Roman apartment, decorated with “exotic” art, performs an “African” dance, until the experienced, haughty and obviously irritated hostess interrupts her dance with the words: “Now it’s enough, stop pretending to be Negroes for the sake of you own fun” whereby a wounded Vitti takes off her “African” adornments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aOUh64TETo
A similar scene takes place when Hae-mi, Jung-su and Ben smoke marijuana outside Jung-su's farmhouse. At dusk, a bare-breasted Hae-mi performs a pantomime dance. This dance becomes the climax and turning point of the film. Mesmerizing and sensual, Hae-mi dances to herself by the border between the two Koreas, while she faces the sunset, quietly moving her arms and hands in slow motion to the tune of Miles Davis’ evocative, patiently forward moving Générique (which was part of the legendary, improvised soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows from 1958). When the music stops, the camera focus glides across the landscape. We hear the wind, Hae-mi's footsteps and the mooing of a cow. Reality reminds makes itself present. Lee Chang-dong has explained how he had conceived the episode:
The scene being set during sunset, you see light and darkness co-existing, and you see the moon in the sky and you also see the grass swaying in the wind, you see the livestock, the farm and, of course, the Korean national flag, which symbolizes politics. You see all these elements that represent aspects of our lives — even the Miles Davis tune. I thought that through this scene I could portray and combine all of these elements together in the most cinematic way possible, so that the audience can really feel the potential of cinema as a medium and the unique aesthetics of cinema. So from the beginning to the end of the scene, I didn’t want it to feel like it was directed or staged; I wanted it to feel as if we were able to capture this slice of life very coincidentally, and to capture Hae-mi’s pursuit of freedom.
It is after that scene that Hae-mi disappears and the film enters another dimension, as Jung-su searches for the missing Hae-mi and is shadowing Ben, whom he reasonably suspects of being a serial killer. The last time Jung-su sees her beloved Hae-mi is when, after the marijuana interlude (still a serious crime in Korea), she gets into Ben's Porsche and he bids her farewell by saying that what she did is something that only whores do.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=581041849373350
Jun-su’s harsh words suggest that despite his fascination and infatuation with Hae-mi he has a hard time understanding her aloof outlook on life, the liberating influence of imagination on a burdensome everyday life. Another pantomimic performance illustrates Hae-mi’s mindset. At the beginning of their acquaintance, Jung-su and Hae-mi sit opposite each other in a pojangmacha, a typical South Korean phenomenon that can mean either an open-air stall selling street food, or a caravan with the same function. Hae-mi explains that she for her own pleasure is learning to do pantomimes. She then peels an imaginary clementine and devours it with great indulgence while explaining to a puzzled Jong-su: “Whenever I feel like eating, I can always eat a clementine.” The pantomime becomes, according to her, a manner to reach an amazing abundance of resources – through it she can eat an endless number of clementines and thus escape from her economic and social hardship.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2106248149500583
Are there reminiscences here of Chaplin’s The Great Gold Rush in which the starving vagabond in a freezingly cold Alaska feasts on his shoe and does so with an apparently great appreciation? The constant dream of food by the poor and starving. The question is, can imagination under such conditions really turn into a consolation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92kcJeOcOTM&ab_channel=CharlieChaplin
Ben is Jung-su's wealthy opposite; with his friendly and indulgent smile, his winning looks, his Porsche, elegant apartment, fine wines and social connections. Unlike Jung-su, Ben has a circle of friends and we glimpse him at church and with family and relatives (though he himself is unmarried). Ben represents, as Lee Chang-dong has pointed out in an interview, a new generation of young people:
To me, Ben as a character symbolizes the quality of life that everyone seems to pursue nowadays. Everyone wants a more sophisticated, more convenient life. […] I wanted to point out that underneath all that there may be a horrible consequence. […] If you see a lot of young people with money these days, they are disconnected from the other realities of human life that are in fact connected to their wealth and actions in this very complex way. Maybe they make money through real estate, or fund management, and the moment they type things on their keyboard, it may lead to mass layoffs, or depriving many people of their own incomes. Meanwhile, to the people who actually make the money, they are just sitting behind a desk and tapping away on their keyboards, so everything just becomes a number, and they don’t even really carry a sense of guilt over the consequences of what they do.
While Hae-mi is sleeping, Ben and Jung-su sit and drink wine on the porch in front of Jung-su’s dilapidated farmhouse. Jung-su tells Ben about his love for Hae-mi and his unhappy childhood. Ben is unfazed and offers no comment, other than that he didn't actually come to Paju just to visit Jung-su. The main reason for his visit was to scout for dilapidated greenhouses, and to his delight he has found that there are several in Jung-su’s neighbourhood. The stunned Jung-su wonders why Ben is interested in such things. Ben then explains that every fortnight he burns down a greenhouse. A satisfying, but completely harmless occupation since “the Korean police don't bother themselves about such things”. He now plans to burn down a greenhouse not far from Jung-su's farm.
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During the time that follows, a stunned Jung-su runs up and down the roads around his farm to find out if any of the numerous greenhouses have burned down. Even though Ben assures him that he had set fire to one of them, Jung-su cannot find any burned down greenhouse. Meanwhile, Jung-su realizes that Hae-mi has meant nothing to Ben. Maybe Ben burned down greenhouses to watch something burning outside of himself. Ben is apparently not passionate about anything.
In his run-down pick-up, Jung-su follows Ben's Porsche, which seemingly aimlessly travels back and forth across South Korea's highways and abandoned country roads, only to stop at some godforsaken place to let its driver get out and motionless stare at a bland landscape. What does Ben want? What can he do? What is he thinking? Maybe he warms his frozen soul by the burning greenhouses? Perhaps he preyed on Hae-mi in order to momentarily break through his own immaculate coldness?
Ben surrounds himself with women, maybe he is capable of using and then destroying them, one after another? Why else would he appear so unfazed by Hae-mi's disappearance? In in the toilet of Ben’s luxurious apartment, Jung-su finds in a box a lot of women's jewellery, and after Hae-mi's disappearance, there is a wristwatch that Jung-su had given to her. Meanwhile, In Hae-mi's now abandoned and mysteriously tidy apartment, which she still is paying rent for, her empty suitcase remains. In Ben's toilet cabinet where Jung-su had found Hae-mi’s watch, there was also a make-up box, which provides a high-end, professional impression.
In passing, Ben has told Jung-su that he had been convinced that Hae-mi really loves the awkward country boy and that it was the first and only time in his life that Ben had felt jealous. In one scene, if I'm not mistaken, the only one where Jung-su is not present and therefore not viewed from his point of view, we see Ben open the make-up box and with patient care apply make-up to the woman he is together with after Hae-mi's disappearance. Why does he do that? Does he want to transform her according to his desire? Is he preparing to sacrifice her? Like so much else in Lee Chang-dong's film, the scene is enigmatic. He works with distances, with exclusion. Like Antonioni's masterpieces, the film is aloof, filled with meanings that are not pronounced with any clarity, symbols that remain unexplained, images that evoke memories and associations, drilling themselves deep into the mind of an attentive viewer.
Lee Chang-dong has stated that the plot of his film is filled with gaping holes. There are missing pieces/sections, meaning that the purpose of the whole movie, the truth behind all the riddles, is not properly clarified. Lee Chang-dong wants to depict the mysterious existence we all live in, the depths that are hidden beneath a diffuse and uncertain surface. We feel like something is wrong, but cannot put our fingers on what the problem really is.
Ben can with his indulgent calm unhindered spin his lies, perhaps even commit unspeakable crimes, while Hae-mi and Jong-su by an unjust social system are forced to abandon their dreams, prevented from freely developing their artistic ambitions. They are unable to break free from their spiritual and physical poverty. They are well aware of the fact that something is wrong in this world, but it is difficult to realize what it is that is making everything crooked and twisted. It is hard to discover what is hidden beneath the surface.
The viewer follows Jong-su through the film, but we cannot entirely identify us with him. The distance between him and the cinema audience is too great, at the same time this is perhaps enabling us to objectively consider both him and the kind of society he is living within.
The end of Burning, like so often is the case in Korean cinema, is unexpected, extremely brutal and at the same time mysterious, saturated with meaning and open to different interpretations.
So, what is it then that lies beneath the Korean Wave, a booming entertainment industry that has not only led to a massive export of movies and TV series, but also music, fashion and culinary arts? It was after surviving the disastrous Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and years of military rule, with its extensive censorship, that South Korea was transformed into one of the world's major exporters of popular culture.
The violence that is ever-present in Park Chan-wook's films and which, after lying hidden under the alienating surface of Burning suddenly explodes with full force in the film's final scenes, testify that all is not right in South Korea. It is not only the threat from the north that keeps the population captive in nervousness and stress; fierce competition and economic injustice also take their toll. A tension emerging with all clarity in Nobel laureate Han Kang’s novels, especially in her Human Acts, which revolves around the 1980 massacre in Gwangju, a tragedy with a long history and a society-changing aftermath.
After the war against North Korea, South Korea was a ravaged, poor and starving country. People struggled to make ends meet, while foreign nations, political and religious organizations, burgeoning capitalism, and a powerful army intruded on the lives of the South Korean citizens.
In 1961, a military coup led by General Park Chung-hee overthrew the Democratic Party and established a military junta under the name of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction (SCNR). A five-year plan was established aiming at developing the country’s economy through the expansion of agriculture, coal and electric power, as well as the development of basic industries for the production of chemical fertilizers, cement, iron and steel. Roads, railways and ports were built, while employment rapidly increased, exports rose and the promotion of science and technology began to bear fruit.
Nevertheless, Park Chung-hee was a military man and military men tend to dislike opposition, especially hard-line officers who recently had fought an extremely brutal and bloody war. Chung-hee’s SCNR was a one-party regime, which constituency was limited to the military and a small ruling elite. South Korea’s economic recovery was prioritized at the expense of human rights and was furthermore based on the exploitation of an abundant supply of cheap labour.
To keep opposition in place, a feared security police, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), was established, combining both domestic and international intelligence activities. The KCIA suppressed all domestic opposition, applying wiretapping, arbitrary arrests and torture. The organization was working behind the scenes and was involved in political manoeuvres, covert cooperation with big capital, bribery, extortion and infiltration of every attempt at regime opposition. With more than forty thousand regular employees and one million informants, the KCIA controlled all of South Korea. Striking workers, protesters or signers of simple petitions received long prison terms, often after suffering torture.
The KCIA soon developed into a state within the state and Park Chung-hee’s dramatic death could have beeen taken from one of Korea’s bloodier thrillers. Kim Jae-gyu who had been appointed by Park Chung-hee as head of the KCIA had for long been one of his closest friends and under the leadership of this widely feared and disliked man the KCIA built up an impressive power position. Alongside the army, Jae-gyu ensured that the KCIA was provided with its own troops, tanks and helicopters.
On October 6, 1979, Jae-gyu invited Chung-hee to dinner at the KCIA headquarters near the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence. An argument broke out between the head of security and the country’s dictator, suddenly the hot-tempered Jae-gyu revealed a Walther PKK pistol that he had kept in the waistband of his pants and from a distance of two metres he fired two shots at Chung-hee, straight into his chest. To deliver him a shot of mercy, Jae-gyu pointed the gun at the president's head, but the pistol clicked and Jae-gyu rushed out of the room.
Intensive gunfire broke out between the President’s entourage and KCIA men. During the commotion, Jae-gyu returned, now armed with a Smith & Wesson which he fired straight into the face of Chung-hee, who died instantly. Kim Jae-gyu and his subordinates were overpowered and later sentenced to death, their motives are still disputed. However, Park Chung-hee's violent death did not mean the end of South Korea’s military dictatorships and army infighting.
In the aftermath of the assassination, Colonel Chun Doo-hwan emerged as the country's most powerful political force. He had previously formed a secret military club, Hanahoe, with like-minded friends and in the tumult that followed the dictator’s death, they staged a military coup two months after the assassination of Park Chung-hee and six months later another coup consolidated Chun’s power. He decreed a “universally implemented martial law” and established a concentration camp for “purifying education”. This was staged with the support of South Korea’s economic elite and under Chun’s totalitarian regime the economy grew at the highest rate ever, in 1986 the country's first trade surplus was achieved.
It is interesting to note how the international press almost consistently labelled North Korea's ruthless, totalitarian leaders as “dictators”, while South Korea’s similarly unelected military leaders were labelled as “presidents”.
Shortly after Chun Doo-hwan's second military coup, around 42,000 people were locked up in the Samchung re-education camp to undergo their “purification education”, consisting of hard penal labour and a merciless regime, which led to several casualties. Between August 1980 and January 1981, more than 60,000 people were arrested, including several innocent citizens. Among them not only opposition members and regime critics, but also a gerat number of “vagabonds” and completely innocent people who had been caught up in KCIA’s indiscriminately thrown nets.
Many citizens were outraged by the military presence in their towns and villages, as well as a merciless introduction of harsh censorship and arbitrary rules that determined, among other things, how long men could be allowed to grow their hair. On May 18, 1980, the day after Chun Doo-hwan's consolidating military coup, the students of the city of Gwangju’s Chonnam National University initiated a demonstration protesting against the harsh rule of the military junta. The backlash was extremely violent. Chun ordered that the demonstration must be nipped in the bud and at all costs. He ordered elite military troops with tanks and helicopters to retake the city hall, which had been occupied by the students. Over the next two days this extreme action caused a bloody massacre. Some Gwangju citizens had taken up arms and formed militias. They looted local police stations and weapon depots and were able to take control of large parts of the city before military junta soldiers retook the city and crushed the rebellion. Citizens were shot, killed, raped and beaten. Chun's regime claimed 165 people had been killed in the massacre, but today's estimates range from 600 to 2,300 victims. Chun's military dictatorship branded the incident as a “riot” instigated by “communist sympathizers and rioters” acting on behalf of the North Korean regime.
Han Kang's novels, especially her Human Acts, have been marked by this shattering episode in South Korean history. Han Kang was born in 1970, as the daughter of Han Seung-won, a famous writer who until a few months before the massacre had been a teacher at Chonnam University, but left his job to move to Seoul to devote himself exclusively to his successful writing. In 2014, Han Kan published his novel Human Acts.
The novel opens with a scene describing how a young man, Kang Dong-ho, among the dying and dead victims of the Gwangju Massacre in a large gymnasium searches for a friend who he assumes is one of the victims. Han Kang does not spare her reader from harrowing details, bringing to life the carnage’s hideous aftermath. The gymnasium stinks in the heat, cut throats expose swollen tongues, blackened toes stick out from the sheets “like thick ginger stumps”.
Han Kang uses multiple timelines and different narrations. Kang Dong-ho, who we met at the beginning of the novel, disappears into the huge crowd of protesters and becomes one of many “disappeared persons” whose fate remain unknown, thus his life cannot be recounted in a simple manner, where one event leads to another. Details of Kang Dong-ho's life are therefore spread throughout the novel, which consists of memory fragments, stories about the fates of his friends and testimonies from survivors.
The first chapter follows Kang Dong-ho at the time of the May Uprising, while introducing the people in his life. People who in the following chapters often appear as narrators, a technique that makes me think of Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, which I recently read. Another excellent and more contemporary example is the Indian author Devika Reg’s Quarterlife, which for me has gained an even greater relevance after Trump’s terrifying victory.
Unlike Bolaño, Devika Rege engages in politicized portrayals and, unlike Bolaño and Kang, she unscrupulously allows voices from the right and the left expressing their opinions freely and in their own language. She does it masterfully and, like Bolaño, she begins each testimony by stating the person's name and the place where it was given. However, this approach does not prevent the novel from becoming a sad depiction of Narendra Modi’s India, which, like Trump’s USA, now seems to be dominated by a harmful patriotic chauvinism. A Let's Make India Great Again, which under religious banners celebrates an utopian India that never existed, while Islam and Christianity are denied and belittled as “Western imports”. Where is our world going?
The Human Acts’ second chapter follows Dong-ho's friend Jeong-dae, who died in the rebellion. The main character of the third chapter is Eun-sook, who together with Dong-ho collected dead bodies after the uprising. The fourth chapter follows Kim Jin-su, who was imprisoned for his involvement in the Gwangju Rebellion and is the only survivor of the novel’s male protagonists. However, he is unable to bear his sense of guilt and takes his own life ten years after the rebellion. The narrator of the fifth chapter is Seon-ju, a woman who after being subjected to a horrific sexual torture during the Rebellion currently is active as an activist for the establishment of Gwangju’s victims as true patriots and a governmental compensation to those who survived torture and detention. The sixth chapter consists of a conversation with Dong-ho’s mother and in the novel's epilogue the author herself appears.
Today’s South Korea has largely regarded the martyrs of Gwangju as crucial for the establishment of what would become a free and democratic South Korea. Several monuments now honour their memory.
Han Kang’s novel becomes a testimony about injustices committed the past, how they live on in people's memories and continue to haunt them in the present. In this manner Human Acts recalls the harrowing testimonies left behind by Holocaust survivors, foremost among them possibly Primo Levi’s Is This a Man, but there are certainly many other excellent examples of this extremely moving, literary genre.
Ever-increasing public discontent with Chun Doo-hwan’s bloody suppression of the budding protest movement in Gwangju forced him to call for free elections in 1987 and he was succeeded by his good friend Roh Tae-woo, also a general and politician, but the first to be elected to his post.
Roh Tae-woo soon proved to be corrupt, amassing a considerable personal fortune. In 1996, Chun was sentenced to death for ordering the Gwangju Massacre, while Roh Tae-woo was sentenced to seventeen years in prison for corruption and embezzlement of state funds. However, the two villains were pardoned by the incoming, popularly elected president Kim Dae-Jung, who twenty years earlier had been sentenced to death by Chun, but then had managed to escape the country. With Kim Dae-Jung, the rule of the military in South Korea ended.
During his presidency, Dae-Jung introduced South Korea's contemporary welfare state, successfully managed the country's economic recovery, ushered in a new era of a more transparent economy, and promoted a greater role for South Korea on the world stage, including a 2002 FIFA World Cup jointly hosted by South Korea and the country’s old arch-enemy – Japan. Dae-Jung also worked to reduce tensions with North Korea, but whether this led to any lasting results remains to be seen.
That today's South Korea has been freed from its gloomy past is still doubtful and the great class differences and traumas depicted by Lee Chang-dong in his film Burning are also evident in Hwang Dong-Huyuk’s world success Squid Game. A TV series that became Netflix’s all-time most popular venture. It attracted more than 142 million member households and became the most popular TV program in 94 countries. Squid Game became so popular that, for example, a The New Yorker cartoon could allude to it without explaining its inspiration.
On the surface, Squid Game might be considered as a sequel to degrading game shows where people are forced to humiliate themselves in the hope of winning big cash prizes, or movies based on similar, but deadlier concepts, such as Hunger Games, Battle Royale and Cube. However, Squid Game is actually something completely different. It takes place in a contemporary South Korea and has by its creator Dong-Huyuk been described as a film about losers, about poor desperate people who have not been able to find a spot in today's tough, competitive society.
I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life. But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we’ve all met in real life,” Hwang said. “As a survival game it is entertainment and human drama. The games portrayed are extremely simple and easy to understand. That allows viewers to focus on the characters, rather than being distracted by trying to interpret the rules.
Dark shadows hover above both Burning and Squid Game – poverty, feelings of hopelessness, alienation and loss. In Squid Game, all of this is combined with an impossible dream that money, lots of money, will solve all problems. Is such thinking especially evident in South Korea? Maybe – particularly given the country’s tumultuous history, how it has been overshadowed by military dictatorships, a constant threat of war with its northern neighbour and perhaps most crucial of all – a powerful and unbridled capitalism.
The Japanese colonial government tried to cooperate with local businessmen and wealthy individuals. A significant minority of Korean industry was jointly owned by Japanese and Korean companies and it was during this time that several Korean chaebols were founded. The term is related to the Japanese zaibatsu and may be said to mean “a business group”. In South Korea, a chaebol refers to a corporate group run primarily by a powerful family, which exercises monopolistic or oligopolistic control over product lines and industries. A business conglomerate that historically often has thrived in concert with totalitarian regimes, preventing new companies from entering the market and/or obtaining significant market shares. There were mainly two factors that led to the extraordinary growth of the chaebols – foreign loans and special benefits provided by various totalitarian regimes.
The chaebol families' grip on South Korea got its first boost under Syngman Rhee's regime. Rhee was the first president of the Republic of Korea, established after the end of World War II and the county’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
Rhee was the only Korean leader who pleased the Americans. He fought for an immediate independence from Japan and against the influence of communist-ruled nations, such as China and the Soviet Union. Rhee's goal was the unification of the country and he built a mass political organization, supported by the army, the police and not the least by the United States. After more moderate leaders, such as Song Jin Woo and Chang Duk Soo had been assassinated, Rhee became Korea's most influential leader, and in 1948, the same year that the Communists had conquered the entire China and gave their full support to their rabidly Communist Korean sister party, Rhee became the Republic of Korea's President. Faced with the communist threat, Rhee was granted dictatorial powers and thus tolerated no domestic opposition to his policies. The leader of the main opposition party, Cho Bong Am, was executed for “treason”.
Rhee's regime favoured the chaebols, which enjoyed state support and whose leaders could freely spend and invest their profits without being constrained by taxes or government budgets. The consequence was that a limited group of high-income earners rapidly accumulated ever greater wealth, not least through their corrupt relations with President Syngman Rhee
Subsequent military juntas continued to gather around them a powerful group of high earners, who had obtained much of their wealth, power and influence through corrupt relations with Syngman Rhee. When Rhee’s governing party in 1960 declared that it had received 90 percent of the votes, the electoral fraud was so glaring that it caused such nationwide and violent demonstrations that the National Assembly unanimously decided on Syngman Rhee's immediate removal. A decision supported by the United States government that guaran his safe conduct into exile in Hawaii.
Although Syngman Rhee eventually disappeared from the picture, the chaebol families grew increasingly powerful. During the following military regimes they maintained and strengthened their privileged position. There were quite a few characteristics of the chaebols that appealed to the military juntas. Like the army, they were top-down controlled and provided with a strict hierarchy. Their paternalistic structure was favoured and the military dictators liked to emphasize that a business leader should be like a father to his employees. Several social anthropologists and economists have connected this view with Confucian values that had permeated Korean society for centuries.
Their economic growth appears to have made some of the chaebols overconfident. They expanded and gobbled up one market after another. It was not until the Asian financial crisis in 1997 that the system's weaknesses backfired on several of them. Of the 30 largest chaebols, eleven collapsed between July 1997 and June 1999. The worst blow hit Daewoo, controlled by the Kim Woo-choong family. For a few years, Woo Chong had been basking in the glory of his success:
Like other chaebols, Daewoo had benefited from tax breaks and cheap, government-sponsored loans based on potential export profits. Daewoo initially concentrated on a labour-intensive textile industry, which through South Korea’s large and cheap labour force provided high profit margins. Gradually, Daewoo expanded into other markets, several of them state-sponsored. The family conglomerate concentrated its efforts on mechanical engineering, semiconductors, shipbuilding, petrochemicals, construction, telecommunication, consumer electronics, household appliances, oil rigs, automobiles, helicopters, aircraft and musical instruments. Joint ventures were established worldwide. Daewoo took big risks and big loans.
The financial crises of 1997 throttled the government's cheap and almost unlimited credit provisions. While other chaebol giants tried to limit their borrowing and delay repayments, Daewoo added fourteen new companies to its already existing 275 subsidiaries and took on 40 percent more international debt.
In 1999, the disaster was a fact. Daewoo, South Korea's second-largest chaebol with stakes in more than 100 countries, went into its grave with debts of more than USD 90 billion. Shortly after the bankruptcy, its founder and leader Kim Woo-choong fled to Vietnam. He returned in June 2005 and was immediately arrested, accused of accounting fraud of USD 43 billion, illegal borrowing of USD 10 billion and having smuggled more than USD 3 billion out of the country. In May 2006, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for fraud and embezzlement.
Parts of Woo-choong’s empire were bought up by other chaebols, which have since grown significantly, but wise from the turbulence during the 1990s they are operating at significantly lower levels of debt than before. In addition, parts of Daewoo's huge conglomerate such as Daewoo’s Marine Engineering, -Electronics, -Motors, -Buses, -Shipbuilding, - Hotels, and -Securities survived.
Most of the old families have retained a firm grip on their chaebols, and within most of them a third generation of family - and business leaders have assumed leadership and unfettered power.
The three largest chaebols continue to control a variety of industries and trades. They are the Lee Bying-chul family’s Samsung, the Chung Ju-yung family’s Hyundai, and the Koo In-hwoi family’s LG.
It is against this background of greed, immense wealth and desperate losership that Squid Game takes place. It took a couple of years before I got around to watching the series. I assumed it was filled with sensationalized violence and was a plagiarized development of a movie like Hunger Games, which I didn't really like. However ... once I began watching the series, I was hooked and watched all the episodes with excitement. It was the kind of filmmaking that it is hard to tear yourself away from, based on a script full of surprises and unexpected hints, which characters were allowed to develop and deepen, while reflecting hardships developed from today’s competitive society.
Squid Game’s creator Hwang Dong-hyuk was not one of South Korea's established directors, but he had in 2011 a great success with his film The Crucible, which depicted real events in a school for the deaf and dumb, which students had been treated with great cruelty and sexual abuse. The film was watched by more than four and a half million South Koreans. His next film Miss Granny from 2014 was a comedy about how a 74-year-old woman was turned into her twenty years younger self. It was watched by more than 8.5 million.
The origin of Squid Game was coming from a tough period in Dong-hyuk's life. As a young, promising filmmaker, he had found it difficult to find financing for his film scripts. To stay afloat, he took out several loans and when they weren't sufficient for his uphold, his mother and grandmother also took out loans to support him. His situation became increasingly desperate at a time when South Korea was still in a massive debt crisis after the collapse of the chaebols. He spent much of his free time at a manhwabang, a South Korean manga library where he immersed himself in the vast array of Japanese mangas dealing with various forms of violent survival games, such as Battle Royale, The Game of Lies and Apocalyptic Game: Kaiji. He compared the plight of the characters in these mangas to his own increasingly desperate situation, which led him to even consider entering one of the TV shows’ like Big Brother and the wide array of survival games, where participants could win money and thus get out of their increasingly suffocating debt piles. Such thoughts made him in 2008 to write the complete script for Squid Game, which ten years later would become the basis for his enormously successful TV series that actually deals with indebted people’s financial struggle for survival and South Korea’s great class differences. It was not until 2019 that Dong-hyuk, now a well-established director, managed to interest Netflix in his script, as part of their drive to expand their Asian programming.
Quid Game revolves around a secret competition in which 456 players, all in dire financial straits, risk their lives to participate in a series of deadly children’s games for the chance to win a prize of approximately USD 140,000, while each participant’s death is worth 80 USD, something that means that the survivors can count on those who die to increase their chance of winning the grand slam.
After being secretly recruited by a powerful, unknown organization, the contestants end up on an island with a wide range of sophisticated installations. They are given numbers instead of names and assigned identical uniforms, sleep in a large common hall and are watched over by anonymous, masked guards, who in an almost mechanical manner follow orders from an invisible higher authority. These impersonal guards are armed with automatic weapons and mercilessly kill the losers of the games. If any of the contestants break the rules and/or show any kind of rebellious spirit, they are also killed in front of the others. Everything takes place under the premise that everyone participates in the games on a voluntary basis. If there is a general consensus for doingh so, the games will immediately be suspended.
The first deadly game is Red Light, Green Light, known by children all over the world. It consists of the game leader having her/his back turned to the contestants and when s/he suddenly turns around everyone must stand absolutely still. Anyone who moves has to leave. In Squid Game, the game leader is a giant mechanical doll that has a built-in motion sensor detecting the slightest gesture and immediately killing whoever is moving. The players had not until that moment understood how deadly serious the game was and those who survived the mass slaughter decided by a slight majority of votes to leave the island and the game, and return to their former lives.
Red Light, Green Light has previously been used in several horror films, most eerily and memorably in the Spanish movie The Orphanage from 2007, where a female principal of an orphanage uses the game to conjure ghosts of deceased children. Another film, the rather lousy 2014 Japanese slasher movie As the Gods Will takes place in a high school. As in Squid Game, trapped students are forced to undergo one deadly children’s game after another. That film also opens with Red Light, Green Light and with an even more deadly outcome. The surviving, trapped high school students are then forced to continue with ther ordeal, all games with a fatal outcome for most who the participants.
The creators of As the Gods Will sued Dong-hyuk for plagiarism. However, he managed to prove that his script was finished five years before the premiere of As the Gods Will and if there were similarities between the two films, it was not strange considering that they counted upon a wide range of Japanese mangas and computer games as inspiration, all depicting similar deadly competitions. Apart from this, As the Gods Will was a speculative concoction of Japanese high school horror (which has become an entire genre) and spectacular carnage. Furthermore, like the much better The Orphanage, it had several supernatural elements, something Squid Game completely lacks.
Squid Game's characters are finely crafted and during the course of the series we get to know several of them in quite some depth. It is remarkable that, like the people in the South Korean movies I mentioned earlier, they appear as multifaceted personalities. Most of them are neither evil, nor good. It is the circumstances that mould them, their social background. Even within the grotesquely insane environment of the Squid Game, within which several of them develop a ruthless survival drive making them apt to murder their fellow contestants, there are other participants who demonstrate solidarity and kindness towards their fellow players, even if they generally also fall victims to a greed born out of their precarious economic situation, social vulnerability and/or constant bad luck.
The main character, Seong Gi-hun, is the personification of a completely unsuccessful loser, possessed by an uncontrollable lust for gambling, plagued by constant bad luck, but nevertheless with a core of tender human love. Nevertheless, more often than not tenderness capsizes through his longing after the money he believes will solve everything. He is acted with great sensitivity by Lee Jung-jae, who with sparse means can demonstrate his compassion, only to occasionally break out into intense, affected performances which reminds me of Toshirō Mifune, Kurosawa’s star actor.
The second episode of the series makes us follow some of the protagonists as they are returning to a merciless Seoul. We are provided with sufficient background information to understand how these desperate people ended up at the margins of society. Not for nothing is the episode called Hell, because during their brief return the doomed players find that their situation has worsened even further. Or with Bob Dylan's cynical dictum: “When you think you lost everything there is always more to lose.” They all return to the island and continue to play the deadly games. These take place in an absurd parallel world where the bunk beds of the large dormitory are stacked like tiers around a deadly arena. Everything gives the impression of being a kind of preschool with play equipment, sky-coloured walls and ceilings, and surreal pastel colours, like in the painted stairwell where the contestants walk to the death-bringing games. It is reminiscent of Escher’s eternal stairs.
A colour scheme that also gives associations to the skyscrapers in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang.
The sad reality of South Korea and it post war history is reflected in Squid Game; the militaristic, patriarchal approach that allowed a few powerful, often unreachable, potentates to remote control individual citizens and their hopes, as if they were cogs in a machine, while the affected individuals desperately struggled to get at least some crumbles from the wealth created around them.
The track suits worn by Quid Game’s players are reminiscent of those worn by the inmates of South Korea’s notorious Brother’s Home, a facility officially described as a charity, but actually functioning as a concentration camp.
Ahead of South Korea’s hosting of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the dictator Chun Doo-hwan wanted the city to provide an impression of economic success and prosperity. Already in 1975, Chun's predecessors had instituted a government regulation intended to “clean up the streets”, and known as No. 410. Chun strengthened the mandate by establishing even more “institutions” to host “beggars and vagabonds” who had been rounded up in the big cities. The effort was intensified further between 1985 and 1988, when a number of new facilities was opened for “vagrants” caught in police raids, among them several women and children. The institutions were officially tasked with giving their inmates “competency-based education” before they could be released back into society.
The Brother’s Home was the largest of these facilities and did in 1986 house approximately 35,000 inmates. The Home operated more than a dozen factories producing pens, fishing equipment, cocktail umbrellas, clothing, shoes, woodwork, metalwork and much more. The internees were not compensated for their work and child labour also occurred. The internees were punished if they did not achieve the daily production targets.
The workforce was divided into so-called platoons including up to 120 prisoners and housed in barracks with rows of bunk beds. The inmates were subjected to cruel collective punishments which were handed out by platoon leaders. Beating with baseball bats could be delivered due to such minor infractions as dropping food on the floor during dinner time.
The camp was overseen and managed by the powerful Park In-keun, an ex-military and professional boxer, who below is seen enjoying a dinner with his wife.
Park In-keun collaborated with his brother, Lim Young-soon, ordained priest witin The General Assembly of Presbyterian Church in Korea, South Korea's largest Christian denomination with 2.5 million members. Park In-keun ruled his empire with an iron fist and established a hierarchically organized guard force. Later investigations have found that at least 550 people died within the facility, the majority victims of beatings and routine executions, it is assumed that victims are significantly more and several cases of proven rapes and other forms of abuse can be added to crimes against humanity committed within the Brother’s Home .
In the middle of the camp, a huge church hall had been built with room for 3,500 inmates. At 05:30 a church service was trumpeted over the camp's loudspeakers. All prisoners would then stand guard by their double bunks and listen to Pastor Lim Young-soon’s words of wisdom blared out from the over the barracks’ loudspeakers. A mandatory Sunday service was generally followed by a “people's trial” during which offenders against the camp’s harsh rules were brutally “chastised” in front of thousands of other prisoners.
Rumours soon leaked out about serious abuse and deaths within the Brothers’ Home. A local prosecutor managed to sneak into the facility and photographed how men with heavy clubs guarded the workers. Shortly thereafter, this prosecutor managed to obtain a warrant for a search in Park In-keun's luxurious residence, where a safe containing five and a half million USD was found. A large part of this money probably stemmed from human trafficking.
From the mid- to the late 20th century, some 200,000 South Korean children were adopted and brought abroad, as part of what is believed to be the largest adopted diaspora in the world. From 1953 up until the end of the 1990s, more than 10,000 adopted South Korean children ended up in Sweden. Several of these children adapted well to Swedish society, but others had a hard time and did not feel at home anywhere. I personally experienced a very tragic case when one of my students, a charming, well-liked and intelligent guy, who after being adopted as an infant from Korea, as a teenager experienced the divorce of his foster parents and was then forced to live in an institution for single children, until he finally killed himself.
I was reminded of this by Davy Chou's film Back to Seoul, which follows a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her unknown past. She has been brought up in an apparently loving French home, which we only get to know through short glimpses. However, while search for her biological parents in South Korea, she suffers from a severe culture shock.
We follow her every few years. Her mutually anguished reunion with her father, as well as her promiscuous relationships with various men and alcoholism in Seoul’s half-world, with nightclubs and wild rave parties. We also encounter the gloomy semi-poverty that characterizes the films of Hwang Dong-hyuk and Lee Chang-dong, which I mentioned earlier.
In Back to Seoul, the alienation is extreme, exacerbated by the film’s unusually authentic, almost documentary feel. The main character, Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît, is even more of a stranger in her existence than Jomg-su in Burning, and that’s not saying little. Like in Burning there is Back to Seoul there is also a scene where “Freddie” is forgetting herself and her miserable existence in a self-absorbing dance scene. There are also memorable scenes depicting her painful encounters with her biological father, and even worse with her mother.
Central to South Korea's extensive adoption operations were "charity institutions" and "church communities" such as the Brethren Home, an institution generally considered to have been the leading adoption centre between 1976 and 1986. Park In-keun was arrested, charged with embezzlement and illegal detention, and sentenced to a long prison term. However, after two and a half years he was acquitted and realeased, never brought to justice for his human rights abuses. It was evidently his connections with friends in high government positions that allowed him to get off so lightly.
Park In-keun and his family were soon after his release able to reunite with his brother, who had made it to Australia in good time, taking with him a significant portion of the brothers’ ill-gotten wealth. As far as I know, the two cronies and their families still have a comfortable life in Australia and in 1990 they founded their own church in Sydney, this despite several pleas from their victims for their extradition to South Korea.
When I was born in 1954, the war between North and South Korea had ended a year earlier, with an armistice but without any peace agreement. Since then, I have travelled and lived all over the world, but never ended up in Korea. Even though I was born and grew up in a small, rather boring town, I was already there acquainted with parts of our great, wide world and familiar with human destinies far away from me. This was achieved through movies and books, experiencing them was already then a magnificent adventure, which continuously taught me new things. And it will probably be that way until I lose sight and hearing.
What do I know about South Korea? Not much, but I nevertheless assume that I have become acquainted with some of its inhabitants and their country. That is due to movies and books (although one of my friends has actually been a diplomat in Pyongyang and some of my pupils had been adopted from South Korea and later visited the country). During the years I worked as a teacher, I tried to convey the great joy and wonderful experiences movies and books have given me. I don't know if my message went through, but now, when I realize that I am getting old, I sincerely wish that I was able to inspire at least one or two of my pupils, but that is perhaps a presumptuous thought.
Bolaño, Roberto (2009) The Savage Detectives. London: Picador. Brezeski, Patrick (2018) “South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong on the Many Mysteries of ‘Burning’”, The Hollywood Reporter, December 10. Chang-dong, Lee (2023) “Snowy Day”, The New Yorker, March 6. Cuttle, Jade (2021). "Squid Game’s Jung Ho-yeon: 'The most powerful lesson I learnt was to have faith in humanity'", The Sunday Times, October 4. Delisle, Guy (2003) Pyongyang. Paris: Rozzoli Lizard. Golding, William (1997) Rites of Passage. London: Faber & Faber. Jolley, Mary Ann och Susan Kim (2021) “Secrets of South Korea’s house of horrors hidden in Australia”, Al Jazeera, December 10. Kang, Han (2017) Human Acts; A Novel. New York: Random House. Overdorfer, Don (2001) The Two Koreas. New York: Basic Books. Wood, James (2024) “Collision Course: A Début Novel Captures the Start of India’s Modi Era”, The New Yorker, November 18.
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