Korea VI. Chan-wook Park

Violence as art in the movies is conventionally dated to the blizzard of bullets of '69: Sam "Sonofabitch" Peckinpah elevated the gunfight to ballet in two sequences that bookend The Wild Bunch, introducing the slow motion death pirouette that, now, it's impossible to imagine the action movie without. This innovation was assisted by the brutal onscreen demise of Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier — the cultural impact can be felt in this passage from Roger Ebert's original 1967 review:

When people are shot in "Bonnie and Clyde" they are literally blown to bits. Perhaps that seems shocking. But perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone, and that they don't make nice round little holes like the Swiss cheese effect in Fearless Fosdick.*

Personally I think it's cute to imagine young Roger, in his first year as a professional film critic, positioning himself on the vanguard of the American new wave and hyping the modernity of its attitude toward violence. (Verily, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are shot many times, but they are not by any stretch "literally blown to bits".)

If one wishes to look further back into the art of the kill (Yes, please!) it is apropos to mention one of the most enduring images of violence in all of cinema: the face and shattered glasses of a nurse on the Odessa Steps, shot through the eye. This image from Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin (1925) has become a meme, perpetuated I assume by Film 101 at every institution of higher learning; once you know it I promise you will see it quoted in a new movie or show at least once a year (spot the reference in 9 at a theater near you). The most famous homage occurs in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, wherein the grand staircase in Chicago's Union Station doubles for the Odessa Steps.

De Palma himself has been much talked about recently in the wake of Inglourious Basterds and its nod to Carrie's inferno, with Tarantino citing De Palma as a primary influence and the first of the fanboy filmmakers (see also John Landis). De Palma more than anyone is responsible for making operatic violence fun. It had been developed as art in the 70s when Hollywood was all serious and shit, but Scarface in '83 succeeded in transmuting The Wild Bunch into popcorn. John Woo based his career on this new alchemy: Hard Boiled (1992) is the last reel of The Wild Bunch miraculously sustained for two hours of improbable cool, and it set the trend for gun fu in the 90s. Reservoir Dogs was released that same year, and while its importance is primarily for dialogue, the use of a certain Dylanesque, pop, bubble-gum favorite from April of 1974 during an otherwise routine mutilation cum immolation scene cemented a popular taste for violence as absurdity, surreality.

The baton was passed at Cannes in 2004 when Tarantino personally stumped for Chan-wook Park's artfully bloody entry, Oldboy. Park had toppled Shiri from the balcony of the Korean box office with Joint Security Area in 2000, which might have been a standard military-political drama along the lines of A Few Good Men if not for Park's uncommon ability to take the sketch of a simple story — like a procedural or, the simplest of all, a revenge — and trace over it with sharp lines of beauty and pain. He traces in blood, buckets of it all told, but every ounce dispensed with clinical precision and discrimination. So you feel it.

Joint Security Area, in exploiting the thrill of intrigue in the DMZ, is somewhat creatively constrained by the delicacy of the political situation and Park's adherence to rhetoric about the hope for reunification (especially evident in light of his subsequent emergence as an auteur), but its financial success enabled him to commence a series of thematically linked projects, now codified as the Vengeance Trilogy, that established Park as Korea's best director of popular films and the most internationally famous. (Ki-duk Kim is Korea's best arthouse director; Ebert recently appointed Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring to his Great Movies list.)

The trilogy consists of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, although one should also include in this series Cut, the short film Park contributed to "Three... Extremes", a collection of East Asian horror. This inclusion with horror films should give you the flavor of Park's recipe for a dish best served cold. He sees in our nature a weakness for the belief that we can get what we want by bargaining in flesh. We are shown a recurrent series of kidnappings and hostage-takings that provoke more of the same; a cycle of transactions conducted in persons whole and in part, involving as well the literal exchange of organs, digits and the odd tongue. Invariably Park finds that neither satisfaction nor redemption can be achieved in such a market; once horrible deeds are done, they stay done.

Park has now made a vampire movie, called Thirst, to be released on DVD in November. This makes perfect sense. (I can't believe I'm looking forward to another bloodsucker.)



* It is probably necessary to explain that Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Dick Tracy that appeared as a comic strip-within-a-strip in Li'l Abner (which probably requires its own footnote, but I'll leave it up to you). He was frequently riddled by bullet holes, to mild effect. Everyone knew this in 1967.