11/14/2023 0 Comments Bong joon ho and roger deakins![]() ![]() The serial killer in “Memories of Murder” remains at large “Okja” is rescued from the Mirando Corporation, but that’s just one pig among countless others that will still be turned into sausages, not to mention the fact that Mija still eats meat. To wit, the endings of his movies are rarely tidy. Similarly, this complexity can also be found in the constant presence of more political themes in his work, with government ineptitude factoring heavily into “The Host” and “Memories of Murder” (specifically with regards to South Korean and American relations in the former, and the fight for democracy in the latter), and a broader commentary on consumerism playing into "Okja." Sadness isn’t always extricable from joy good often comes with bad. His trademark drastic tonal shifts (“Memories of Murder” has its share of slapstick comedy before descending into utter darkness “The Host”’s monster madness gives way to a study of grief “Okja” begins in the idyllic mode of girl-and-her-pig prior to shuttling its audience to the slaughterhouse) shouldn’t work, let alone as well as they do, but they mesh perfectly with the way that Bong refuses to define his characters in black and white. This fascination with monsters informs the entire body of Bong Joon-ho’s work. “Memories of Murder”’s mirror is the killer “Okja”’s mirror is the super-pig “Mother”’s mirror is the title character. What makes the film wrenching isn’t her descent-we already know that a mother’s love is inexorable-but her own cognizance of it. We want her to succeed in clearing her son’s name, but the cost at which it seems to be coming is almost impossible to reckon with. The monster, looming even larger than the possibility of miscarriage of justice or the suspicion of guilt, is the mother herself. There's no real antagonist in the movie-there’s no creature, there’s no serial killer, there’s no evil corporation. When Do-joon (Won Bin) is arrested for murder, his mother ( Kim Hye-ja) begins a mission to prove him innocent. “Mother” (2009) drives the point home even further, as it starts with duress rather than building up to it. When faced with the evidence that that killer isn’t who he thought it was, Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), whose mantra had been “the documents don’t lie,” casts the damning papers into the mud. The moment provokes horror but it conjures something like heartbreak, too each failure in the investigation has made them less and less certain of what had once been incontrovertible, and they’ve reached a breaking point. In “Memories of Murder” (2003), which follows an investigation into a small-town serial killer, we see the three detectives on the case struggle until they nearly commit a murder, themselves. Some become complicit in a system that exploits children, some choose to adopt ignorance, others turn to cannibalism. For instance, the characters of “ Snowpiercer” (2013) are made monsters by their environs, a train bearing the last remnants of humanity and splitting them in social classes by which car they reside in. What’s most remarkable is that he does this without damning any of them one way or the other. They illuminate the more "monstrous" qualities in the people the audience is supposed to be rooting for. In this sense, Bong’s monsters are means towards the end of subverting the audience’s expectations of the human characters. Mija sees her sister, Jay sees a larger cause, and the Mirando Corporation sees meat. Though Okja is the “monster,” she’s more like a walking Rorschach test when the characters in Okja look at her, what they see is revealing. It’s telling that Mija (the little girl who calls herself Okja’s sister, played by Ahn Seo-hyun) can immediately sense this even with Okja’s teeth in her arm, she stops ALF leader Jay ( Paul Dano) from striking the pig and waits for her to regain her senses, instead. And when the super-pig Okja becomes violent, it’s because her extenuating circumstances have taught her to. The creature in “The Host” is a byproduct of human carelessness, and its habit of eating people isn’t outright malice so much as it is simply doing what it needs to in order to survive. This is clearest in Bong’s treatment of his more obvious monsters. ![]()
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