Silent Voice (a.k.a. Amazing Grace and Chuck)
Directed by Mike Newell
Written by David Field
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford
The beauty of a work inevitably raises the issue of the purpose of the effort expended in attaining it: the more powerful the result, the greater the call for a purpose. If Einstein had handed over his theory of relativity to artists, the nuclear clouds they would have created would still give rise to the military-industrial complexes responsible for the arms race that threatens the very existence of life at present; the sheer beauty of nuclear explosions would have quickly become irrelevant. Such basic insights into the irony of modern existence aren’t the concerns of the latest no-nukes film, Silent Voice. The movie follows the liberal bent of politicized Hollywood filmmaking that once gave us daring but ultimately unbearable moralistic pieces like John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (1940), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), and the Stanley Kramer titles of the 1950s. The late ’70s saw a resurgence of committed films like Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Being There (1978 and ’79 resp.) and Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae (1979), with another but more shrill no-nukes effort, James Bridges’s The China Syndrome (1979).
11011The trouble with too politically committed approaches to filmmaking is that the medium itself lies in danger of being regarded as not only divorced from, but even secondary to, the statement being made. Film therewith becomes a medium for essentially sociopolitical discourses, where the audience is expected to respond according to the requirements of mass education—hence the reduction of narratives to “scientific” principles that would yield results according to the greatest common factors. Silent Voice observes this tradition of sincere exploitation for political purposes. The sincerity is exuded right from frame one, but the exploitation becomes apparent only to those who’ve learned to love film experience for its own sake. There’s no doubt in the minds of the filmmakers as to who the good types and the bad types are. To make sure that the arguments against nuclear disarmanent get minimal airing, initially neutral elements like the lead character’s father and the President of the United States, you better believe it, get converted to the cause.
11011I object to the treatment not because I disagree with the movement against nuclear weapons. It’s just that film here is presented as an orchestration of disparate technical elements, and is thereby served with utmost competence. These days it’s still surprising to realize that even in the most technologically advanced circles the actual dramatic potential of film cannot be treated with deference, much less appreciated for what it can achieve. The people you find in Silent Voice aren’t made to act as individuals; they’re all subject to forces beyond them, and so the bravery of the heroes and the villainy of the baddies get unintentionally exonerated in the end.
11011Aside from the obvious convenience this provides of doing away with intelligient characterization, the necessity of raising the obvious philosophical question is dimissed in favor of a happy ending: once all those warheads are dismantled, what’s to keep people of the same persuasion that gave rise to the military-industrial complex from going it on their own, under wraps if necessary? The pre-nuclear age of innocence has been lost forever, but in Silent Voice we are asked to believe that we could go back to it by simply feeling for it. The intention may be laudable, but the impracticality of it all may ultimately prove dangerous for dreamers, whichever side of the camera they may find themselves straddling.
11011The most effective no-nukes movie is still the one that ends with the world getting blown up, with a strong dose of black humor for the faint of heart and stylistic experimentation for the non-believers in the capabilities of film, to make the journey to the end easier to bear. The same brilliance that informed the said work, Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), can still be gleaned from the same director’s latest output, Full Metal Jacket. Unfortunately Stanley Kubrick manages to sustain this milieu-documentation approach for the extended expository portion of his film, then gives out to universalized points about the horrors of war that pale beside the older film’s comparatively easy achievements in story and character construction. I suspect that adaptational problems (the present movie’s based on the novel of one of the scriptwriters) had much to do with the turnout of what could have been the most innovative war movie yet.
11011Come to think of it, discourses on the failed American involvement in the Viet Nam conflict were made possible through the same wave of committed filmmaking mentioned earlier. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) may be considered the Godfather of them all, with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) as something of a fairy godmother. (Full Metal Jacket could then be the love child that suffered disorder and early sorrow.) I guess filmmakers intending to make the definitive movie statement on war will have to contend with the propensity of cinema to work on surfaces—faces, bodies, objects, landscapes, etc.—and that war gives the impression of these surfaces opening up, but only literally and not necessarily in essence.
11011Meaning that in war, someone or something may get blown up, but this doesn’t always provide an enduring truth except in the manner that everyone has become familiar with already. While watching Full Metal Jacket I acquired what I thought was a fanciful notion—why limit ourselves to treating war as a real event? The raw material will suffice to fulfill the requisites of realism, but what’s to stop an inspired film creator from breaking up the space-time continuum that’s getting to be a scourge in imaginative presentations? Then I suddenly recalled having seen Les belles de nuit, a fairly old (1952) film by Rene Clair, in which some characters are endowed with the supernatural ability to move continually through time and space. The suspension of disbelief was made possible through the use of charming humor and song, but along the way some points about love and power were made.
11011The moral of it all? Nothing is ever truly new. It’s what we make of things that provide them with the capability for transformation. Would that we manage to realize this principle even in such a mundane activity as film appreciation.
[First published April 6, 1988, in National Midweek]
…And the First Shall Be the Last
The Last Temptation of Christ
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Paul Schrader
If Christ could have seen what his ministry would have led to, he might have become the world’s first existentialist. Much of the worst (aside from the best) aspects of modern civilization are premised on the observance of what is supposedly the definitive compilation of his teachings—the biblical testaments. The irony began as early as Jesus Christ’s own era: before and after the gospels which narrate what is undoubtedly one of the most moving accounts of any historical entity, we find fire-and-brimstone pronouncements alternating with manic-paranoid (and sometimes psychedelic) formulae for “true” salvation. Anne Frank being coopted in the midst of Nazi occupation could serve as a terribly apposite analogy.
11011Modern times have served to heighten the extent to which people would appropriate nobility of the spirit for purposes of the flesh. The US’s Republican Party ethos thrives on the assertions of the ultra-Christian on the basis of a hierarchy—US citizen first, then male, then white, then wealthy, then heterosexual, and so on down the line, arriving last and least at poor black homosexual Third-World Communist woman, where such wondrously exceptional combinations could exist. The Last Temptation of Christ attempts to overturn conservative conventions by presenting Christ as poor, Third-World, possibly Communist, and unconventional in his sexuality, or at least definitely unhomophobic. Historical, including biblical, evidence tends to support these traits, plus one crucial thing left out by central casting—that Christ was in all likelihood dark-skinned.
11011The expectations that Last Temptation raises place it closer to a skeptic’s speculation on what the historical personage may have actually been, necessarily rejecting the traditional sources. This is where its problems, aesthetic and circumstantial, begin, departing from the usual celebrated censorship controversies regarding works with literary merits. Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Ulysses all rested their cases on the skill by which their respective authors justified the use of then-disallowed language and subject matter. Last Temptation takes the cue from the subject himself by constructing itself as an intense if cryptic reflector—one that throws back on any objector her or his own inability to perceive its affirmation of faith in the Abrahamic deity.
11011The method is, of course, admirably postmodern: from Christ’s dictum that “no one comes to the father but by me,” the filmmakers create a “me” that’s exclusively an imaginative one—a literary character, in short, who determines his own course of resolving the challenge of giving himself up for the sake of humankind. Nowhere is the fastness of their faith more evident than in the movie’s most controversial (extended) sequence of the hero enjoying a conventional lifestyle, complete with an active-though-legitimate sex life, before dismissing the entire excursion as a fantasy, his last temptation, and returning to the reality of death by crucifixion.
11011Gifted individuals (real artists especially, I imagine) would agree wholeheartedly with the decision of the Christ character in Last Temptation—that is, better the uncertainty of unconventional choices than the predictability of the normative. But the majority of nominal Christians have not been and can never be as daring, as Christ-like even, as Last Temptation exhorts Christ’s followers to be, and it is in this demonstration of the difference between conformity and individuality as an essentially Christian issue that gets the goat of the chosen flock: how can we expect converts to, well, strengthen the church when such an interpretation of Christ posits that they must seek god’s will not in terms of institutional prescriptions but as they believe they are called? This is the very reason why traditional Christianity is based on the life of Christ plus a surfeit of supposedly similarly holy writings that actually serve to temper, and in several instances overturn, the challenge of his example. Witness how as recently as a few years after Christ’s purported ascension, the former Saul of Tarsus, claiming to have been converted, qualifies (though sets aside would be more accurate) his master’s dictum of unconditional love by disparaging in no uncertain terms intellectuals, dark-complexioned peoples, women, queer folk, and a wide spectrum of nonconformists and nonbelievers alike.
11011Censorships are based on the same perversion of Christ’s offer of salvation through faith: he never wavered in his, but he nevertheless answered all questions and went to the extent of accommodating Thomas. Today’s so-called Christians would have banished such a doubter from the fold if it didn’t seem like such an un-Christianly thing to do, so they perform the next best thing by keeping all possible sources of critical questionings at bay. Unlike its predecessors in literary-censorship cases, the film version of Last Temptation cannot flourish on artistic merits alone. Most of its individual scenes are impressively executed in state-of-the-art-house manner, with attendant emotional content. The entire presentation, though, meanders too much, especially in detailing the hero’s angst and the aforementioned accumulation of a last temptation that doesn’t really turn out all that tempting in the end. All cards were stacked, too safely it seems, in favor of a Christian, or more appropriately (seeing how Christian could refer as much to a televangelist as to a liberation-theology follower) a Christ-based, faith.
11011The next step in this Thomasic exercise of creative doubting would be a work that dispenses with faith altogether, at least for the duration of its presentation, something like Last Temptation minus the main character’s triumph in the end. This would elevate the test of faith to the individual viewer’s personal capability in the face of a convincing testament to the contrary, and incidentally serve to correctly classify Last Temptation as an independent thinker’s confirmation of belief—in a Christ who, like only the best of us and in another sense like no one else, conquers what no one thought would ever be possible before.
[First published March 14, 1990, in National Midweek]
I Come with the Rain
Directed and written by Trần Anh Hùng
As a scholar of global culture, I was intrigued by a recent release, probably still screening in some theaters. The movie sports at least four titles as of the moment, three of which are translations of its English title, I Come with the Rain (나는 비와 함께 간다 in Korean). The cast list also reads like an actors’ assembly convened by the United Nations, complete with that august body’s usual marginalization of women: an American (Josh Hartnett), Japanese (Kimura Takuya), Korean (Lee Byung-hun), Canadian (Elias Koteas), Chinese (Shawn Yue), Spaniard (Eusebio Poncela), token-female Vietnamese (Trần Nu Yên-Khê, the director’s wife), plus a handful of gun-toting Filipinos and a roomful of naked Filipinas presumably standing in for all the other nationalities left unrepresented.
11011Trần Anh Hùng, who wrote as well as directed, had done a few films earlier, mostly set in Viet Nam (including The Scent of Green Papaya [1993], actually shot in France), and generally well-received by art-film connoisseurs. I Come with the Rain appears to be his bid to acquire hit-maker status, drawing on his ability to interweave a wide array of characters in fascinating Oriental locales. Unfortunately, the attempt misfires so resoundingly that only a marvel greater than what Kimura’s miracle-working character can conjure up will enable the film to achieve wider release elsewhere before it shows up on video and the internet.
11011I Come with the Rain isn’t wanting in good intentions, so I found myself rooting for it to take off even after its hopelessly anachronistic climax. The challenge of maintaining exclusivist high-art aesthetics must have clashed with the thriller genre’s requisite of catering to as wide a viewership as possible, and while this may have resulted in an occasional masterpiece – witness Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) or Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – in this instance what emerged is an indeterminate hybrid comprising several arresting concepts that fail to coalesce in the end.
11011The movie’s narrative signals its problems from the get-go. After a cleverly misdirected opening, where Kline, a detective, is overpowered and vampirically bitten by an angst-ridden serial killer, we flash-forward to a couple of years later, where Kline, now permanently traumatized, is summoned by someone who claims to own the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company. This man is never seen by Kline or the audience, preferring to convey Kline’s assignment via a menacing lens and speaker set.
11011We learn that the CEO’s son, Shitao, has fled to Asia, and Kline has to track him down in his last known whereabouts, an orphanage in Mindanao. Upon reaching the place, Kline is informed by another detective that Shitao had been killed by the henchmen of a powerful mine operator, but Kline replies that he has evidence that Shitao has turned up in Hong Kong, where he intends to go next. Why Kline does not fly directly from Los Angeles to the former crown colony is anyone’s guess – I thought at first that the director was preparing to link the US with its neocolonial stronghold, the Philippines, as well as with its war-on-terror campaign on the country’s Muslim minority.
11011As it turns out, Mindanao’s main function is to provide scenic contrast with the First-World settings of the US and Hong Kong: jungle foliage and fauna, muddy roads, congested slums, sleazy expats, sapphic go-go girls, youthful killing machines, oh my. Far be it for me to espouse political correctness and positive images for any group, but one wonders what a fellow Asian might have in mind when he insists on depicting misery in the Third World: just in case the people living there had no idea how underdeveloped their condition is, perhaps?
11011I Come with the Rain sustains this impressive display of cluelessness upon reaching Hong Kong. The major Asian characters, presumably long-term residents if not natives, speak mostly English even to one another (Lee Byung-hun valiantly compensates with well-timed outbursts of rage, from all those TOEIC review sessions maybe). And if Trần Anh Hùng had any symbolic purpose in casting a Korean to play a sadistic Chinese gangster who literally crucifies a supposedly genuine faith healer played by a Japanese – well, these bouts of against-the-grain inspiration are just beyond me.
11011Trần may have also missed out on the lament of most Hong Kong film scholars – that recent movies made by their own enfants terribles tend to portray a universalized space that is no longer recognizably Hong Kong in character. This is a trend increasingly being manifested in national cinemas that have succeeded in appealing to a global audience, starting with the festival distribution circuit: filmmakers no longer need to connect with their own mass audiences so long as their output can be supported by a large enough number of fans in the West. The fact that I Come with the Rain isn’t home-grown in Hong Kong points up this problem even more egregiously.
11011What makes thrillers and horror films ultimately worthy of attention is their willingness to face abjection, an all-too-human condition that more wholesome genres shy away from. I Come with the Rain provides its share of hair-raising situations, but winds up advocating a redemptive ending modeled on the passion of Christ. How Trần ever came to believe that such a resolution (an Asian Messiah, how radical-chic) would complement his too-precious notion of infusing a “low” genre hybrid with high-art values is a lesson on the dangers of intellectual inattention. Apparently the early-Church memo stipulating that salvation was meant for everyone (the secular definition of “Catholic”) missed him by a millennium or two. I Come with the Rain, sure, but I got trapped in the puddle of my own pretension.
[First published November 9, 2009, as “Clueless Global Hybrid, Now Showing” in JungAng Daily]
Two Guys, While Watching Avatar
Avatar
Directed and written by James Cameron
At a screening in downtown Seoul.
11011“I can’t believe you convinced me to watch this movie again. It wasn’t so great the first time we saw it.”
11011“You said you had nothing better to do, so I thought why not get another pair of tickets since we’re already here anyway.”
11011“Yeah but don’t you feel uncomfortable? I mean we’re in a dark hall surrounded by all these foreigners.”
11011“You know you better stop calling these people foreigners. We’re in their country, so here we’re the foreigners.”
11011“I remember in my hometown the cheapest grocery was run by a bunch of these people, and we always called them foreigners. I only figured they were Koreans after I came here.”
11011“Quiet, the movie’s started. Aren’t you going to put on your glasses?”
11011“Thanks, but I got 20/20 vision.”
11011“They’re for the 3-D effect. Just put them on.”
11011“Oh, so that’s how they function. I thought they were meant to dim the brightness on screen. What’s the guy saying? These glasses are cool.”
11011“You mean the hero? He traveled almost six years in deep sleep and when he wakes up it’s 2154.”
11011“That’s just like the time I went to high school. What kind of planet would you call Pandora anyway? Sounds like it was named by some Wiccan tree-hugger.”
11011“I knew an ex-Marine like the main character, all stoic just like that, strong but quiet.”
11011“I envy that kind of manly, totally macho culture. What’s he doing now?”
11011“You mean my friend? It’s a she. Married, with four kids.”
11011“What a shame. I mean, why would they let women join that kind of outfit? It compromises American masculinity. Just like all these foreigners with their feminine culture, where even the guys wear pink.”
11011“I don’t think cultures have genders. And you better be quiet, or they might get offended.”
11011“Are you kidding? They hired us to teach them English, so as long as we talk fast I’m sure they won’t have a clue as to what we’re saying. Get a load of this character, the colonel. Last time we watched I thought he was going to be the hero.”
11011“Well he wanted to destroy the planet to get their resources, so the ex-Marine had to fight him in the end.”
11011“Wait a minute, now I’m getting the drift. The corporation calls in the military so they can acquire this unobtainium thingy, but the movie makes a hero of the guy who stops them, right? And he does it by joining up with these Na’vi people of color?”
11011“Actually everything’s just fictional, so the Na’vi aren’t real people of color because no one on earth right now has blue skin.”
11011“Whatever. Hasn’t anyone figured this out yet? It’s a pro-Taliban movie! No wonder the Na’vi language sounds like Arabic. I can imagine Kim Jong-il smiling while watching this.”
11011“North Korea isn’t Muslim, it’s Communist. They don’t believe in religion.”
11011“You mean there’s a difference? If you’re American, all your enemies are the same. They all want to destroy us, and they’re all foreigners like these people here.”
11011“One more time, they’re not the foreigners, we are, okay? And a lot of destruction in the U.S. was done by locals. Some of them were even in government and the private sector.”
11011“Oh, I know what you mean – the liberals. Hollywood’s their propaganda machine.”
11011“Well this is a Hollywood movie we’re watching. Oh good, here comes my favorite character, the Latina hottie.”
11011“Yah, she really rocks. Too bad the colonel has to shoot her down. But it’s her fault, trying to save these Na’vi sympathizers. Hey, did you notice the resemblance? Na’vi, naughty, Nazi –”
11011“I think you’re over-reading. There’s some interesting psychology in the movie though. See how the colonel keeps calling the ex-Marine ‘son’? Makes it more ironic when they wind up trying to kill each other.”
11011“Just like that mythology guy, Narcissus. I did learn something in high school, after all.”
11011“I guess it’s worth becoming a Na’vi just like the ex-Marine does with his avatar, just to be able to ride one of those flying dinosaurs.”
11011“They’re dragons, man. And hey, they’re purple. James Cameron and his gang must have been ingesting some serious substances when they proposed this project. I mean, whoever heard of jellyfish and mountains that float on air? And trees that function like the World Wide Web?”
11011“Now that you mention it, I kind of like the way the Na’vi communicate with nature by plugging in with special strands in their hair.”
11011“I do that all the time, with my USB flash drive. So that’s really how we’re supposed to feel? That the Na’vi are better than the Americans?”
11011“The invaders are called ‘sky people’ by the Na’vi, but in the future we can’t really be sure if Americans will be in outer space, or if the U.S. will be around at all.”
11011“Don’t tell me you’re taking the side of these hostiles! The U.S. of A. has been here for over 200 years, so why shouldn’t it be around forever? It’s still the king of the world, that’s for sure.”
11011“That reminds me, do you think the movie will win the Oscar? Cameron’s up against his ex-wife, you know.”[1]
11011“Yeah, but she made that anti-war movie, plus he should win because he’s got the bigger hit, and he’s the guy.”
11011“Movie’s over, let’s step outside and get more popcorn.”
11011“Omigosh, my celfone’s gone! It must have dropped out of my pocket on my way here! Great, now I can’t find out where I’m supposed to meet my students this evening, on top of having watched this lousy movie with a bunch of, of … foreigners! What do you suggest we do this time?”
11011“How about we stay on and watch Avatar again?”
11011“Okay.”
Note
Written as a tribute to a long-inactive colleague, Raul Regalado, who led the charge in appropriating creative-writing elements for Pinoy film criticism. Submitted February 2010 to JungAng Daily, originally intended for Oscar awards week. The article was unpublished and the weekly column by Pinoy profs was subsequently dismissed. The unexplained rejection (of a film review?!) ultimately proved – to me at least, and to my perverse amusement – that I was capable of being censored by both conservative-left and right-wing publications.
[1] “I’m the king of the world!” was the most famous quote in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), which was both Oscar best film and biggest blockbuster of all time, until Avatar surpassed it. The line was supposedly improvised by Leonardo DiCaprio (as tragic-romantic male lead Jack Dawson) and repeated by Cameron when he accepted the Oscar. See Hannah Wigandt, “That Time Leonardo Dicaprio Improvised His Famous Line in Titanic,” TheThings (March 27, 2020). As it turned out, Cameron’s ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s 2010 film The Hurt Locker did rout Avatar and enabled her to become the first woman to win best director.
Wan-deuk-i [Punch]
Directed by Lee Han
Written by Kim Dong-Woo
The latest Korean blockbuster film is a departure from the disaster releases that had been dominating the local box-office since Bong Joon-ho’s Gwoemul [The Host] set an all-time record in 2006. What is even more surprising about the current hit, Lee Han’s Wan-deuk-i (hereafter Punch), is that it is nothing like its title at all – closer to an air kiss from a distant lover on a dreamy autumn afternoon.
11011Yet Punch also partakes of the same elements that marked the disaster-film cycle set off by Gwoemul: it is insistently and daringly populist, and it looks at Korea during an age of global interaction (on which more later). More important for practitioners of film everywhere, it demonstrates the admirable willingness of Korean talents to grapple with the exigencies of genre production, constantly searching for ways to infuse difficult and complex material with accessible treatments. The manner in which Punch reconfigures melodramatic requisites, for example, exhibits its makers’ expert grasp of the strategies of excess and containment – i.e., one should provide an unusual amount of the genre’s primary element (chills in horror, laughs in comedy, tears in melodrama, sex in pornography, etc.), yet also ensure that the narrative eventually returns to a condition of normality in order for the viewer to achieve catharsis and closure.
11011Surprisingly, the element that Punch elects to overindulge in is the exact opposite of what its genre stipulates. Lee (drawing from a recent best-selling novel) provides a series of comic set-ups that serve to subtly foreground the pathos endured by the characters, so that toward the end, when the central tearjerker scene is staged, one could hear even male viewers unable to hold back their sniffles – a smiling-through-tears tactic more devastating than what manipulative Hollywood dreck like James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), for all their outsize budgets, are able to achieve. The ending, happy but not (yet) triumphant, confirms that although the movie might have masqueraded for the most part as a comedy, it has remained true to its melodramatic ideals.
11011The plot concerns a street-smart young man, Wan-deuk (the Korean title is a jokey variation on his name). Generally well-behaved although unable to control his bouts of rage, Wan-deuk remains devoted to his diminutive hunchback father and struggles to maintain a decent performance in high school. Unfortunately for him, his teacher, Dong-joo, insists on singling him out in and outside the classroom, and harasses him even at home, since he lives across from the rooftop quarters Wan-deuk shares with his father and “uncle,” a mentally challenged man his father befriended and trained for his dance performances. As a child Wan-deuk used to wander the provincial cabaret where his father tap-danced, but since the father believed that his son will have a better future by studying in Seoul, he decided to move there (near Dong-joo’s place, as it turned out) and earn a meager living by selling trifles at markets outside the city.
11011The turning point arrives when Dong-joo, also a minister at a church that assists illegal immigrants, discovers that Wan-deuk’s mother is a Filipina who abandoned her family right after weaning her son from breast milk. The news traumatizes Wan-deuk, who already resents Dong-joo seriously enough to pray in church for his teacher’s demise. The process by which the narrative illustrates how these estranged characters manage to accept one another and discover reserves of strength in themselves is enabled by an impressive traversal of the delicate line separating humor from tragedy, without tumbling over into either extreme.
11011Key to the success of this type of undertaking is the performances. The title character is played by (from the perspective of world cinema) a newcomer, Yoo Ah-in, whose credibility as a mature-beyond-his-years teenager derives from parallel real-life experience as a high-school dropout. The actual lead, however – the character responsible for driving the plot forward – is Dong-joo, played with flourish and acute comic timing by Kim Yun-seok, previously identified with violent, even literally bloody film noirs. The supporting cast – Park Su-young and Kim Yeong-jae as father and “uncle” respectively, and Park Hyo-ju and Kang Byeol as Dong-joo and Wan-deuk’s respective love interests – partake of the same bounteous reserve of colorful representation steeped in what hip-hop artists would describe as dope realness.
11011Even a seeming anomaly like the casting of Yoo Ah-in, whose character looks like neither of his parents (and better than both, actually – star-is-born alert, everyone), makes complete sense for people who marry inter-racially as a matter of course – not among Koreans, but among Filipinos. The fact that he is endowed in several other respects adheres to the biological principle, recognized in Philippine culture (and recently being acknowledged in the US), that positive traits tend to emerge more prominently in hybrid offspring.
11011Yet as mentioned earlier, a successful genre project also requires the curse of containment. In Punch this is brought about in the portrayal of Wan-deuk’s mother, who functions more as cipher than as character, remorseful over her initial abandonment, resolved to make amends to her husband and son, relieved that through them she might finally find some ease over her hardscrabble existence. The rupture in this formulation derives from the fact that the role is essayed by Jasmine Lee, who in real life started as an immigrant wife in Korea but succeeded in becoming a national celebrity after the untimely death of her husband.
11011The source novel’s character was actually Vietnamese, although the temptation to change her nationality to Filipino was understandable: the Philippines has virtually become an extension of the southern island of Jeju-do, the primary warm-weather destination for vacationing Koreans, many of whom choose to stay longer (for English training and business investment), sometimes for good. Yet where most other Asian wives would have remained helpless, hampered by differences in both culture and language, the typically Westernized and English-speaking Filipina would have been able to clamber her way up the social ladder one way or another, especially if she’d had the “good education” that Wan-deuk’s father quietly boasted to his son.
11011A kinder way of responding to this potential shortcoming is by answering that first, gender politics cannot be a national priority in a country that is technically still at war and whose economy lacks a Third World that it can exploit, thus situating its population in a perpetual crisis position even amid its First-World prosperity; and second, a culture whose pre-modern Confucian ideology is even more resolutely patriarchal than its current conservative-Western aspirations has no model for feminist enlightenment anywhere within itself. (Indeed, a previous all-time Korean blockbuster, Lee Jun-ik’s Wang-ui namja [The King and the Clown, 2005], is an example of how internalized misogyny can inadvertently ruin any well-intentioned queer text.) Like Gwoemul, Punch compensates in the next best possible way, by presenting its male characters as society’s Other, feminized in relation to the relatively powerful and wealthy majority. It remains then for Korea’s Asian Others – Filipinos and other immigrant populations – to continue demonstrating how and why gender progressivity is not merely ethical, but in fact beneficial and indispensable in strengthening the strands of the social fabric.
[First published November 28, 2011, as “Punch Tackles Fil-Korean’s Search for Mother” in ABS-CBSNews.com]
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