Because this movie was a commercial success in Korea, I had imagined it to be very different. I had anticipated the humor, which was certainly there (although I’m not sure if it was as funny in translation), but the “serious” subject matter was a surprise to me. Overall, I thought the film was an interesting mixture of fantasy and a cautionary tale, with a sci-fi/comic book visual aesthetic.
If you haven’t seen it don’t read any more.
The first thing that I thought of after finishing it was that it was a revised version of the Oedipus tale. The similarities are all there with the daughter as the replacement for the mother: fate/hypnosis; tragic flaw/ “talks too much”; self-mutilation, etc. Except in the movie, Dae-su cuts off his tongue but doesn’t die. The film’s mantra–“even a monster has a right to live”–enables him to go on and continue the incestuous relationship, although whether he chooses to go back to her is unclear. The director says he chooses a sexual relationship over a paternal one; I thought he chose to forget because he couldn’t live with the memory and the girl just ended up finding him in this otherwordly snowy place. Either way, the film chooses to embrace this act of violation.
While it seems clear that the overt incest narrative is shockingly progressive (esp. the brother-sister one where neither is apologetic) the movie also deconstructs itself by setting up Dae-su’s ultimate wrongdoing as telling others about the secret incestuous love; he is punished for bringing to the conscious level what is only permissible in the subconscious. Thus if his talking is a punishable offense, then so is the film’s own talking about incest. Perhaps the film is also self-mutilated? By its aesthetic choices, maybe. The dumb Dae-su at the end may be the film itself.
this is what mike said about oldboy in the early days of the blog (ah, nostalgia):
this is from his thesis on irresponsibility
Reading Sun Hee and then my comments, it looks like two different films. Could be, could be. I think her reading far more provocative and film-centric; my earlier spiel is tied into some other (not always well-defined) shtick.
I want to say some more–about violence and staging. All of Park’s films circle around revenge, usually misguided, always horrifically consequential. His first–JSA, or Joint Security Area–explicitly takes place at the border of North and South Korea, and is a kind of mainstream melodrama skeptical about the politics of opposition between the nations. When you run into Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance right after, it seems like a whole other aesthetic universe…. but I am curious how the politics of the first film have been complicated, reimagined by highly-stylized revenge of the subsequent films.
However, I’m also taken by Sun Hee’s spin on voice, incest, and the unconscious…….
I’m going to stew and come back later. I find this–and the other films Park has done–pretty damn amazing. Did you guys like it?
Sun Hee, it has been a while since I’ve seen Old Boy but your Oedipus reference is an interesting one. Oedipus doesn’t die in Sophocles’ play (Jocasta kills herself; Oedi simply gouges his eyes out and is then banished–per his edict–from Thebes). So your thesis is intriguing. Perhaps it is time to see the film again (having just taught the play to my theatre students).
mike, yes, we both liked the movie. i liked it cinematically, but don’t know if i have a lot to say about it. i think sunhee’s reading is an interesting one. if we twin dae-su and the film, they both can be said to talk too much. dae-su’s punishment is clear; but what of the film? perhaps if we substitute the audience, and its pleasurable identification with a film that “talks too much” (metaphorically speaking), then it is the audience that is being punished. at the same time, it is holding out the possibility of pleasure: towards the end of the film the original villain almost becomes sympathetic; he and his sister clearly take pleasure in incest, and his own revenge is clearly creative (it is this revenge that provides the structure that the audience enjoys); and a possible reading of the ending is that dae-su chooses pleasure over punishment; even if this is achieved via psychic mutilation. i don’t know, however, if this is necessarily an attempt to recuperate incest. and so, i’d return to your original reading: the film as playing around with the questions of responsibility/irresponsibility and narrative closure/free-play.
my other impulse is to try and make sense of the narrative by recourse to allegory, but maybe that’s a copout. sunhee tells me that incest narratives often crop up in mainstream korean television shows. you say that all of park’s films are about revenge/venegeance. perhaps there are korean cultural narratives being played with here that we’re not seeing.
Mike, you’ve had a few days to stew about ‘Oldboy’ and I’m wondering if, on reflection, you have more to say. When Sun Hee posted, I had seen the movie about three weeks beforehand, and I watched it again last night. I don’t have a global take on ‘Oldboy’ beyond liking it very much. It is mostly the little things that it seems to get right: the contrast between the young Dae-su (in school and in the police station – and that drunken scene really is crucial to establishing his character) and the post-captivity Dae-su; the mixture of abject begging and furious defiance both early on in captivity and then at the end when he cuts out his tongue.
It seemed to defy genre, or at least genres of which I’m aware. Even to call it a movie about revenge doesn’t seem quite right. It’s true that when Mi-do suggests they just run away, Dae-su says that vengeance is too important to him. But, as Woo-jin says at one point, what really drives him is curiosity not revenge. He wants to know what happened to him more than he wants to avenge his 15 years in captivity. The interesting thing about the major fights is not their violence (they are almost cartoonish and you rarely see blood), or any sense that Dae-su is exacting revenge during them. Rather he seems to be relishing the pain that he experiences during the fights. Allowing himself to get beaten up, and then going back for more is an expression of self-loathing, or perhaps a sense that he only feels truly alive with the pain.
I must say, the Dargis appellation is this as a fan boy movie is just plain silly, not least because the term ‘fan boy’ is not helpful. It gives very few cathartic thrills, it is not ultra violent by any standards (really a few teeth and some blood splatter – about your average CSI episode), and Dae-su is far too ambivalent about his motives for it to qualify. The film just defies convention too often. This strikes me as a movie you could watch several times and get something different from it each time. Watching it again last night, with Sun Hee’s review in mind, brought a whole host of smaller features into sharper relief: Woo-jin watching Dae-Su in silence while he slept under the effects of the gas; Han’s silence and the occasional questioning expression as his boss springs the trap; Woo-jin’s constant smile looks awfully like a face contorted in pain.
Dargis’ mother must have been frightened by a “fan boy” when little Manohla was in the womb; what else explains her disdainful deployment of the term at every opportunity?
Just a quick post to say how much I liked ‘Joint Security Area’ (JSA). In a couple of different places Reynolds has described it as a thriller, and a mainstream melodrama. It is both those things, but it a superior specimen, and much more. The theme is male friendship, and the overcoming of the walls that men put up to limit and constrain friendship. There is a significant undercurrent of homo-eroticism in the film, I think. The slow building of frinedship among the guards — and the tensions along the way — make up the middle half of the movie.
Certainly, the division of Korea is more than just an excuse for a film about friendship; the politics is handled carefully and intelligently. I think it was Sun Hee who commented (on the other Oldboy thread) that there is limited enmity between the peoples of the two Koreas, but rather that the division of their country is seen as the product of outside forces. That comes through very clearly in this movie.
It is also beautifully filmed, with soldiers silently creeping through other-worldly landscapes, the camera swirling around in a circle to capture conversations among the four main protagonists. Anyway, I loved every minute of ‘JSA.’
I’d like to hear from everyone on this: what is the link between Oldboy and the murders at Virginia Tech?
Here’s a link to “The Lede” in the Times.
I will elaborate on this in the very near future, but my first thought is we should address the implication here that the murders were inspired by violent films (I should emphasize that the story only goes so far to suggest that the gunman’s performance in his “multimedia manifesto” was inspired by Oldboy. But I am nervous about the language here: “ties”?).
Films don’t kill people. Guns do.
just put this at the top of my queue. group rewatch? i also put brick there, because mike loved it and arnab hated it.
I’m planning to rewatch it. By coincidence, I had just yesterday morning shown a class the clip in Oldboy with the long-take fight with the hammer (comparing it to a similar one-against-many battle in Kill Bill). Got back to my office and soon after saw the hammer picture. . . and now feel like we need, in class, to open up a discussion on these (old) issues.
The Oldboy connection has now been picked up everywhere. I’m in Paris at the moment and it just popped up on the evening news. I’m happy to rewatch the movie, but I don’t think that will answer John’s question. There is strong circumstantial evidence that Cho was acting out an image from “Oldboy” that he found powerful when he posed for that picture. I’m prepared to believe that something about the revenge theme of the movie captured some of how Cho felt, and he chose to identify with the protagonist.
But that is a long way from the standard argument from the Right, that violent movies “cause” these acts. There is actually an enormous amount of research on this (mostly by social psychologists) and I don’t know it well enough to say if there is a consensus position. But it is obviously more complicated than: guy sees movie/video game,guy slaughters people in similar manner.
I noticed that the police chief (or whatever) in Blacksburg, criticized NBC for even showing the images. I find that troubling.
So John’s question asks us, both as individuals who love movies (and in my case, violent movies), and as academics who look at evidence, to examine/explore connections between representation and action. I have personally never gone on a killing spree but I know I drive much faster after I come out of a car chase movie…
I know that after watching Mildred Pierce, I take the fall for my daughter who, out of a jealous rage (she saw the movie too), shoots my second husband.
after watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof I went around the house, swilling bourbon and screaming “Maggie the cat is ALIVE!” I blame society.
I keep trying to phone home but that damn Speak & Spell just won’t make the proper connection. I blame the Hershey Company.
I take it that none of us buys the seen-now-do narrative of causality and representation, whereby screen violence begets real violence. (Thank god, otherwise I’d have to watch something and then come kill you.) But we could probably take seriously Chris’ question about the connections between representation and action.
I think most of the studies (in psych/sociology) get contested because they’re too narrowly defined around assumptions. Like asking shark specialists why sharks attack humans–not a bad question, but in terms of what sharks generally do, a fairly aberrant focus. You’re presupposing the centrality of violence to shark behavior, that the question of these attacks is somehow crucial (when in fact enormously rare), etc. [Or maybe it’s more like asking a travel agent why sharks attack humans. At times, the questions seem that ridiculous.]
Why is violence the focus in so many of these contested studies? There aren’t a lot of studies examining the relation between my viewing of Hugh Grant films and my consequent stammering charisma. The influence of niceness and kindness on viewers. Or, less flippantly, why do we zero in on the impact of representations primarily in terms of alleged negative effects, without a more complete analysis of the range of affective & cognitive responses generated by representations? I think it’s a reasonable question, but–like those sharks–I am less concerned with what is in fact an atypical reaction to representations than the broader and far more interesting ranges of reactions and influences.
And I am interested in this range insofar as it ties into some of our other threads, and issues I want (now that I’m starting to feel a bit less constricted with work demands) to take back up in our threads on Blood Diamond, Children of Men, City of God. Questions about the political influence of film seem parallel–perhaps complementary–to this examination of violence. And we get back to all those interesting debates about the nature of identification and the problem of political “influence.” One of my students pointed out in discussion yesterday that she could definitely see the counter-poverty politics of City of God, but she also thought the film’s pleasures were too easily enjoyed, that the film didn’t make her go out and adopt Brazilian babies or fight poverty. Another piped up that he was in fact inspired by the film to do a search on “favela” on Google and spent some time learning more about the current conditions there. Someone already deeply invested in political actions against globalization found the film to be a fantastic and engaging way to sell his arguments to peers; another, a firm conservative generally pissed by the texts I’ve chosen, saw some relative nuance here, because the problems of poverty were compounded by personal responsibility… an argument against structural critique. A couple argued that–even as they themselves enjoyed this film–they were struck by how the circulation of gangster imagery probably played into the violence represented in the film, and which may in fact be further propagated by this film’s representations. In other words, a complex range of reactions, complicated by prior assumptions and positions, fueled by the class context (and our eagerness to discover and then debate textual ambiguity), and uncertainly tied to subsequent thinking and action on the part of this audience.
And I agree with Michael: Maggie the cat is, indeed, ALIVE.
just watched this. i liked it a lot, though was disturbed by it. it may be because i just taught titus andronicus — hands everywhere in it too, and a chopped hand, a chopped tongue, loads of revenge, cannibalism (referred to rather than acted in oldboy, and loads of killing at the end. a ton of self-loathing, too. did anyone else make the connection? i almost expected park to mention titus andronicus in the interview in the extras.
i like sunhee’s mention of the unconscious. the film seems to play a whole lot at the level of the unconscious (lots of intrusive images and scenes, dae-su’s often talking without opening his mouth, and all those forbidden desires). it is when things become explicit that all hell breaks loose.
i liked a lot how dae-su’s imprisonment turns out to be so banale after all.
more on western influences: i didn’t see kafka in this except at the beginning. once the imprisonment is explained, kafka exits. unfortunately, i know NOTHING about korean art, literature, and movies. so it is tempting for me to read this against western myths. how, for instance, do you think oldboy compares to greek tragedies? it is, in fact, no tragedy at all, because, apart from the missing tongue, the protagonists survive and thrive. or do they? is the fact that they live happily on while committing incest in itself tragic? in our jaded twenty-first century, i couldn’t get riled up about the incentuous element (i did find it shocking as recently as when lone star came out, though). yet, it is shocking for dae-su, and it is shocking, apparently, for the korean audience park is addressing in the Q&A. but i had to wonder: when park begs and pleads for mi-do to be spared the knowledge, is it because he wants to keep her from the heinous truth, or because he wants a shot at loving her and being loved by her?
this is a film that punishes too great a lust for truth. this would be enough, all by itself, to make it a film after my heart.
movies don’t kill, but video games do.
Blasphemy!