Bong Joon-ho

It was so exciting to see Bong Joon-ho win all those Academy Awards for Parasite this year. It was definitely one of the best films of the year. I had some other favorites such as The Irishman, Marriage Story, 1917, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker, and Jo Jo Rabbit.

I've been teaching Bong Joon-Ho in my Global Cinema class for the past three years. When I first proposed my course, I didn't know much about Korean cinema. I was directed toward Park Chan-wook's Oldboy by a number of my students. This was the first Korean film I watched, and it is an incredible and visceral movie that will stick with you for a long time.

Bong and Park are part of a number of directors known as New Korean Wave. 

What is unique about these filmmakers is they work within genre to get at social concerns. This is clearly the case in Bong's films The Host and Snowpiercer. 

For example, The Host addresses a number of topics, such as youth unemployment after the Asian financial crisis in 1997.

Or "the right of the hungry" (seo-ri), which is connected to the film's theme of consumption.

At the same time, The Host is a very entertaining and scary film. I think horror and Gothic films are particularly good at generating social commentary, such as Night of the Living Dead, Get Out, Dawn of the Dead, and The Devil's Backbone.

But one film I highly recommend is Bong's Memories of Murder. Christina Klein wrote an excellent article on Memories and The Host called, "Why American Studies Need to Think About Korean Cinema, or Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho."

Klein argues that Memories and The Host have the traditional Hollywood conventions of the serial killer and the monster genre, respectively. At the same time, both films speak to Korean social concerns. She identifies these two registers through surface and deep crime.

Klein states: “Bong does not mimic Hollywood but appropriates and reworks genre conventions, using them as a framework for exploring and critiquing South Korea social and political issues” (873).

 
She argues that the surface crime launches the story and motivates the action. The process of investigating the surface crime often produces a deep crime, which is a pervasive wrongdoing that lies beneath the surface of everyday life (881). 

This deep crime, for example, points toward the Chun regime during the 1980s. The film capture life under the Chun dictatorship as the detectives attempt to find the serial killer.

Of course, Klein's surface and deep crime reading can certainly apply to Bong's new film, Parasite and its commentary on wealth and inequality. At the same time, the film has surface traits of a thriller and, to some degree, horror.

Lastly, there are many great films from South Korea. Below are a few I recommend:

 

 Be sure to check out Darcy Paquet's great introduction to New Korean Cinema