March 11, 2007
the host
The Host makes one wish to know much more about contemporary and recent Korean history; one has the sense the film is ludicrously, incoherently canny about its own symbolic stakes, which lurk just under the surface — like the film's monster itself — in this case underneath the surface of the conveniently superficial symbolic tradition of the Asian monster mash-up exemplified by Godzilla.
But to some extent, the urge to read the film in such a manner should be resisted. Monster movies offer this too easily and often too neatly. This film is a thicket of signs, an excess of signs; it would be an insult to its hurlyburly to make it tell some particular story, to make the repressed be SARS or avian flu, foreign military presence or toxicity, the rise of the Asian Tigers or the drama of disunification. None of these will do, though all may linger about. This sense of excess culminates in the monster's death: like Rasputin, it dies poisoned, shot, stabbed and burnt.
Moreover, the film has real force outside the realm of the symbolic, not just in its formal capacity to jolt some adrenaline out of the audience but within its story. The scene in which the bereft family members silently imagine feeding treats to Hyun-seo (whom the monster has taken) in their family foodstand/bunker, is brief, unremarked, untelegraphed, and, as the freshmen are wont to say, heart-rendering.
Moreover, the national dramas are sometimes closer to the literal than the symbolic. Much to say, surely, about Hyun-seo's dopey father, with his backstory of malnutrition and his drill to the brain; same for Park Nam-joo, the half-formed hunt-goddess with her national medal in archery. But the wittiest story belongs to the young uncle Park Nam-il, handsome in his University suit; at some point, desolate over Hyun-seo, over their own inability to help her, over his family's pressing incompetence, he breaks down into a bitter monologue about how he went to University and "sacrificed for democracy" (apparently connected facts), and now he can't even get a job.
This, pace the sense of national duty, is of course the song of many a graduate. What's ticklishly elegant about the plot is that it will turn out — again, this goes entirely unremarked, it just happens — that Nam-il's education has fore-armed him flawlessly for the film's climax: a scene that plays out after a demonstration has forth along the river, a panoramic and nervous confrontation, all placards and puppets and colored chemical clouds.
Even those with only a passing local knowledge will know a bit of South Korea's modern history of public political manifestations; the Second Republic begins in 1960 after the violent repression of a student protest sets off the April Revolution. The tradition has not abated; a dopey 1998 article in Salon renders the local color of Pusan like this:
I opened my blinds and looked down to see 100 or so helmeted police in black storm trooper outfits and plexiglass shields charging up the street through a cloud of tear gas. Directly in their path -- forming a vague skirmish line at the front gate of Pusan National University -- a mob of masked student demonstrators hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The spectacle looked like a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of "Star Wars".... I didn't know it at the time, but this was part of a rather normal springtime ritual in Korea. As is the case at many Korean colleges, Pusan National University students have the option of joining political demonstration groups in the same way that they can join a reading circle or a ham-radio club. Street protests -- which are always held during the mild spring months -- have become a theatrical, somewhat listless coming-of-age ritual for young students here.
The description is not so different from that scene in The Host. In the movie (and in most realities but Salon's, where the story turns out to be about the most important thing: the status of the American's job) there do seem to be some real stakes: the crowds has come to confront not the monster but the government and its helmeted cops, taken to be using the monster (and the virus it supposedly hosts) as a sort of pretext for populace management. The tradition of student street-fighting remains current; this decade has seen a ceaseless series of local revolts against Korea's participation in the WTO and similar globalizing initiatives, protests which often unite students and farmers.
This poses the problem of cultural translation in its purest form; can an American audience, almost entirely unable to imagine the basic political life of Korea (and much of the globe), encounter the force of a movie which, while not necessarily about such things, builds itself Lego-like from these matters? Perhaps not, though a healthy beginning might involve a visit to this po'faced charmer of a website, if for nothing but a refresher on what political activity looks like elsewhere.
Indeed, one of the several punchlines in The Host that surely resonates differently here involves Nam-il's crucial contribution to the slaying of the monster. For it turns out that he has learned exactly what he needed at University: how to throw a molotov cocktail. Confronted with the hybrid, appendage-strewn beast (even its form is incoherent ,and thus seemingly unassailable) that has swallowed his niece and laid waste to local life along the river, his student skills — which until this moment have consisted largely of wearing a suit and whining — suddenly blossom into heroism. The ways in which this does not recede into the symbolic, but tells a local and current story likely to be a cipher for a US audience, may perhaps be the most striking fact of the film, written in aggressively beautiful poppies of fire on the bank's paving stones.
9) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
8) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
7) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)