A Nation’s Cry: Han in Oldboy and Parasite
By Eunice Choi
What do Oldboy (Park Chan-wook 2003) and Parasite (Bong Joon-ho 2019) have in common? Both films cemented spots on every self-proclaimed cinephile’s Letterboxd list of “must watches” (they needed something foreign, and Korea’s kind of in right now). Hollywood also cashed in on American adaptations for the works (and as my AP US History teacher frequently cautioned, good seldom comes out of the United States intervening in Asia). Not to mention earning stamps of approval from – you guessed it – our favorite continent-fetishizing auteur, Quentin Tarantino (was it the copious amount of blood or the East Asian dialogue that made him hyperventilate first?).
You could make the case for any of the aforementioned. Parasite spawned boundless literature interpreting its multifaceted themes (TL;DR capitalism = bad), Oldboy was remade in 2013 (unfortunately proving that Spike Lee can do wrong), and Tarantino endorsed both films – ironically, as he aided Oldboy in receiving the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 but lost the 2019 Palme d’Or to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Both films testify to the obscurity of contemporary cinematic sociocultural boundaries when satiating the demands of audiences, with globalization facilitating not only physical transnational distribution but also receptivity to other cultures. Reducing the value of Korean cinema solely to its positive global reception, however, amplifies the external whilst trivializing the internal: rather than investigating why these films made it beyond South Korea, we should be asking why these films were made in South Korea.
In post-modern years, South Korea abruptly emerged amongst the ranks of hegemonic nations that enjoy considerable economic and sociopolitical influence beyond their respective hemispheres. From historically operating as an unfortunate theater of operations for dominant foreign powers to becoming a global exporter of popular culture, South Korea witnessed an exceptionally rapid rebrand from a “hermit kingdom” to a nation that saw a “miracle on the Han River” following the Korean War. The country confoundingly metamorphosed out of the ashes of imperialism into one of the largest economies in the world through rapid industrialization – sprinkled in with juntas, authoritarian regimes, and state-backed conglomerate corporate groups. Film as a medium is inherently intertwined with politics: educational for the uninformed, mobilizing for the oppressed, cathartic for the suffering. Historically, South Korean media was widely censored, so the explosion of voices expressing dissidence and dissatisfaction is relatively recent, from Korean New Wave movies like The Age of Success (1988) to present-day Hallyu Wave works like Burning (2018) and Squid Game (2021). Fundamental to these productions is han (한): a distinctively Korean collective affect, with no direct English equivalent, that inundates the psyche of its people. Operating under Sandra Kim’s elementary delineation of han as “a uniquely Korean collective feeling of unresolved resentment, pain, grief, and anger,” han is understood not only as the accumulated postcolonial residue of a country that incessantly suffered oppression at the hands of foreign and domestic players but also as the product of individual experiences and existential circumstances (Kim 255). It’s a complex, generational internalization of collective past trauma specific to the Korean identity in its etymological encapsulation of the Korean “beauty of sorrow,” which naturalized Korean suffering and anguish as innate rather than a repercussion of Japanese occupation. Essential to the examination of any Korean media, ergo, is the understanding of han as a multidimensional variable that permeates the essence of the Korean identity and thus inexorably resides within the essence of Korean work. It is the salted wound of the past stained into the present; han manages to deluge the conceptualizations of (and apprehension towards) the future in Oldboy and Parasite. The two films explore implications of South Korea’s future through, respectively, socio-political and economic lenses, and contextualization provides an answer to why Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho chose to centralize these issues at these times.
Oldboy released in 2003 amidst talks of impeaching the South Korean president, but its opening is set in 1988, the year before the country’s first democratic election and the beginning of its extant Sixth Republic. Park Chan-wook adopts a more traditional version of han that finds roots in the country’s volatile history of foreign colonization, internal civil conflict, and governmental corruption to afford a severe vision of a Korean society devoid of morality (Min 199). His abstraction of the world to come features a billionaire with too much time on his hands, Lee Woo-Jin (Yoo Ji-tae), who pays a private prison to kidnap, imprison, and surveil an arbitrary man in a room devoid of any human interaction for fifteen years. This Orwellian glimpse into a debased Korea is grounded in the multilayered han of its citizens at the time, with affairs like the authoritarian Chun Doo-hwan administration suppressing the legitimate death toll of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre and the 1997 Asian financial crisis further augmenting income inequality (Paquet 9). The most glaring examples of han in Oldboy are in its protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), and the fiery yet pathos-ridden quality of the vengeance he seeks. There are scenes explosively ingrained with han that become distinguished for their potent, visceral brutality: the pulling of fifteen teeth (one for every imprisoned year) out of the prison manager, the one-take corridor fight scene where Dae-su emerges victorious against twenty-some prison guards, the grisly consumption of a live octopus (Hunt and Leung 204). Yet, throughout its serpentine unfolding, the narrative reveals a more intricate crux behind Dae-su’s plot for vengeance that extends beyond a purgative desire for retribution: unhealed wounds. This is most conspicuously seen halfway through Oldboy with the first face-to-face encounter between the captor (Lee Woo-jin) and captured (Oh Dae-su), a juncture where Dae-su’s investigation veers from “why he was imprisoned for 15 years” to “why he was liberated after 15 years” (Thanouli 220). Dae-su, armed with a hammer and fifteen years’ worth of bridled rage, finally has the opportunity to execute revenge on his jailer – yet, it is the truth he chooses over revenge, as killing Woo-jin would also bring the reason behind his confinement to his captor’s grave. The impetuses and rationales of both Oh Dae-su and Lee Woo-jin are more elaborate than retributive justice, which complicates the designated roles of hero and antihero as well as mirrors the multidimensional emotions that han subsumes. Han cannot be simply likened to “rage” or “grief”; it concurrently embodies both passions (amongst others) through Oldboy’s juxtaposition of “sorrowful string instruments and absurd violent outbursts,” mystifying the film’s composition and mirroring the state’s own duplicity (Boman). In a denouement where new revelations annul any initial assumptions made by the audience, the demarcation of the true victims in the story becomes increasingly blurred as no character emerges unscathed in the crossfire of revenge, ultimately testifying to the futility of vengeance. Contradiction is implicitly central in Park Chan-wook’s commentary because of its han; his own hyperviolence is interpreted as a combustive repercussion of forced passivity, portending a future Korea in which continuous deprivation leads to radical depravity.
Dae-su’s implicit han is impervious to the passage of time, embodying how Korea’s history of oppression remains raw even within its contemporary society. The blurring distinction between past and present is lucidly exemplified in a mise en abyme scene in which a present-day Oh Dae-su chases an entombed memory of his childhood self witnessing an incestuous act between Woo-jin and his sister Soo-ah (Jin-Seo Yoon), the instigating domino that indirectly resulted in her suicide and hence motivated Woo-jin’s own han-rooted mission of revenge. Vacillating camera angles promptly switch between perspectives and proximities to extend Dae-su’s frantic fervor beyond the screen onto its audience, transforming the viewer from voyeur into active participant through a medium-defying transmission of han (Paquet 96). Disorienting high-tempo switches between camera shots and utilization of “spatial montages” negate the linear passage of time, echoing han as an extant manifestation of past traumas that evades temporal transitions when left unaddressed (Thanouli 223). The ghosts of colonialism obliquely bleed into prevailing han: imperial-rooted trauma spurred autocratic states to quickly develop a self-reliant economy through rapid industrialization, exacerbating Korea’s income gap progressively to date (Min 214). Korean citizens inherit the han of events predating their existence and they come to align with Oh Dae-su, whose suffering stems from traumas he can barely recall. Korean citizens thus see themselves emulated through the nonlinear unraveling of Oh Dae-su’s han. The capricious progression of the narrative disseminates varying amounts of information in a piecemeal fashion through its irregular chronology of events and scenes fluctuating in speed and length, leaving its onlookers at the mercy of its controlled yet intermittent unraveling that makes its final plot twists all the more shocking. Frequent recruitments of flashbacks and cross-cutting penetrate the course of the diegesis unexpectedly, mimicking how han lingers over the Korean experience but unpredictably ranges in when it is evoked. As a result, the development of Dae-su’s character and han is convoluted as it is not governed by the traditional structure of chronology but rather by moments of willful divulgence arbitrated by Woo-jin, complicating the crossover of the past, present, and future.
If Park Chan-wook encapsulates the traditional han of older generations in Oldboy (albeit with a number of Oedipus complexes at work), Bong Joon-ho tracks its development fifteen years later into its contemporary practice in Parasite. Following South Korea’s “IMF era,” an overwhelming quality of despair loomed over the South Korean people, with millions put out of work and the middle class confronted with a noticeable erosion (Paquet 62). Industrialization, albeit delivering considerable economic and technological advancements, brought with it a contemporary version of han that struck a particular chord within a new politically-aware population of laborers who felt unjustly exploited. Jaded by hyper-rapid development that offered pipe dreams of upward social mobility, the Korean population faced a schism in the perceived versus actual realities of urbanization and democratization. Kang Gyoo-hyoung, a professor at Myongji University, offered the following analysis at a Korea Economic Research Institute seminar in 2013:
Though Korea has developed so rapidly, it became such a country as being [sic] divided by winners and losers. As the gap between social classes has broadened, feelings of relative deprivation have prevailed, and anger and hatred have accumulated and layered in people’s minds... Korea got out of “hungry society” with amazing rapidity, and too easily got into “angry society” (Min 212).
The development in South Korea’s characterization – from effortlessly escaping the jaws of voracity to plunging into the inflamed visceral elements of han – reflects an abrupt departure from what would be expected of South Korea, a moderate nation that remains inseparably satiated with traditional Confucian values like balance and harmony. Yet, the sudden switch from mellow sorrow to passionate anger is a festering accretion of han that encompasses postmodern Korean disillusionment: take satirical neologisms like “Hell Joseon” (literally, “Hell Korea”) that reflect a multi-faceted exasperation with the nation’s class stratification, societal vested interests, high unemployment rates, and population density, amongst other affairs. The economic gap within modern Korea is a universal, inescapable repercussion of globalized free market capitalism, yet a characteristically Korean han inculcates the fiber of Parasite. Its han sources a number of historical and contemporary elements to communicate a future of widening economic imbalance; central, however, is a han of futility.
Plenty have descanted extensively on the socioeconomic inequality central to Parasite since its release, but it still remains significant as a provenance of han. In the last ten years, the branding of individuals as “gold spoons” or “dirt spoons” (and everything in between, from “bronze spoons” to “silver spoons”) diffused throughout the Korean web. Such class-level distinctions are made based on the income and assets of one’s parents – stemming from the idiom of being “born with a silver spoon in one's mouth" – and exemplified the contemporary kind of han many Korean citizens possessed in the wake of “compact modernization” that further inflated inherited wealth inequality (Min 201). Even in present-day Korea, job applications frequently feature inquiries into the background of one’s parents and referral letters from high-status figures can offer avenues of leverage in admissions processes allowing the rich to get richer while lower classes remain anchored (Kim 846). The “gold spoons” in Parasite, the Park family, similarly employ a connection-based network in outsourcing their labor (deemed a “belt of trust” by Mrs. Park). The “dirt spoons,” the Kim family, are able to penetrate this barrier of advancement through falsified credentials and a gradual introduction of its family members as trusted individuals from the past – testifying to the importance of connections within Korean society. Upward social mobility only becomes possible for the Kims, who previously intermittently sourced their income from folding pizza boxes and other odd jobs, through elitism: the son Ki-woo (Choi Wo-shik) forges a diploma from the prestigious Yonsei University, the daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) uses the name “Jessica” and lies about an American college education, and the mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) secures her position through an elegant business card. It is within these newfound positions and wealth that we see the Kim family’s collective bonding in a scene where they indulge in the luxuries of the Parks, worrying not about paying the Internet bill but rather who to hire in a future mock wedding as they daydream about marrying into the Park family. However, this illusion is promptly shattered as ultimately unrealistic by Bong Joon-ho as such social mobility remains futile in capitalist Korea without pre-existing connections or pre-existing nepotistic wealth. Contemporary han is posited here not only as the product of widening class stratifications but also the recognition of futility in systemic disparities.
No better is this seen than through Parasite’s portrayal of the multifaceted insidious development of han in Ki-taek (Kang ho Song), the patriarch of the Kim family. The inklings of han implicitly emerge in the relationship between Ki-taek and Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun), as Mr. Park’s lack of deference when addressing him festers gradual resentment. Mr. Park’s insolence may be brushed aside as golden-spoon entitlement when understood in the context of employer and employee, but must also be understood as a disparity between the traditional and the modern Korea. Mr. Kim is clearly the oldest in both families but is nonetheless treated with little regard, a breakdown of the Confucian values in the hierarchical Korean family relationship that emphasizes respect for its elders. It’s a flagrant reminder of the socioeconomic disparity between the two fathers, but also indicative of a larger shift witnessing the abandonment of cultural customs. The audience is able to see his han intensified when Ki-taek and his children, hiding under a table after the Parks suddenly return home, overhear Mr. Park stating that it smells like Mr. Kim, likening his subtly putrid smell to that of the subway. Ki-taek’s han is palpable as he is reminded of his unerasable stamp of poverty and embarrassed directly in front of his children, the stripping of his masculinity only testifying to changing times. When the Kim family finally engineers an escape out of the Park residence, they return to find their own home completely flooded by sewer water from the storm and seek impromptu shelter in a crowded gymnasium. Driving Mrs. Park the next morning, Ki-taek listens as she calls the same rain that displaced his family the other night a blessing in disguise for bringing clear skies for her party. The flagrant obtuseness in her privileged statement is almost comical, but her aggravation doesn’t stop there: upon catching a whiff of Ki-taek, she brusquely covers her nose and scrambles to roll the windows down. A quiet, seething han boils over in his expression, forced to endure dehumanizing gestures that testify to his indigence in order to maintain his job. Han’s repressed fusion of rage, embarrassment, and grief are all finally activated when he sees his daughter stabbed in the chest by the basement-dwelling Geun-sae. Yet, it is ultimately Mr. Park’s disgusted expression after smelling Geun-sae that sets Ki-taek off into a bloody cathartic rage. In a spontaneous exemplification of unadulterated han, Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park in a heat of passion – a reactionary act of fervor by a man that is ultimately fed up with the shackles of wealth, recognizing society’s indifference to the adversities of its impoverished powerless victims. With nothing to lose in a system that already reaped everything it could from him, what could the masses do? Even Geun-sae, who venerated Mr. Park daily, lived below him – physically and metaphorically. This continuity is endured in the film’s epilogue narrated by his son, as it is revealed that Ki-taek’s actions were ultimately fruitless and he now resides in secrecy in the same basement below Mr. Park, even while defunct. The removal of a “golden spoon” and the attempts of the “dirt spoons” are futile in Bong Joon-ho’s perception of the future, as status is still static in contemporary South Korea.
The anomaly of the South Korean case should not be entirely defined by the past century of internal strife endured by its populace, but rather incorporate how its citizens have nonetheless harnessed a phenomenon to cathartically express and mobilize. Han remains the collective cry of a nation since its initial inception from colonial Japanese stereotypes, but its cinematic evolution since the country’s independence seventy-five years ago tells another story of how apprehension of the future developed for South Koreans. The differentiation between heroes and antiheroes are progressively obscured in contemporary years, but South Korea was always a country marked by contradiction – seemingly developed but autocratic in Oldboy, culturally traditional yet economically modern in Parasite. Globalization indubitably induced many of these discrepancies, but it also provided foreign audiences with the accessibility to unravel the stories of a continent once referred to as a “hermit kingdom.” Film is only one subjective political medium in the analysis of han; yet, it is only through extricating the bitterness of the past that we can begin to comprehend the present in order to modify the future.
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