The Real Tragedies of Bong Joon-Ho

 

Bong Joon Ho's films don't start out as masterpieces. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the greatest trick his genius ever pulled was to convince us at the beginning of every film that it does not exist. The first act is often slow and descriptive, and the confronting revelations of the last act safely at a distance. However, something happens between the beginning and the end--and it would be hard to put a finger on the specifics of this phenomenon because that is how subtle Bong Joon Ho can be--that leaves you not only at the edge of your seat by the time the curtains roll but teetering at the edge of your perception of the world. You suddenly realize that the story you were just told followed the conventions of storytelling--I mean, Bong Joon Ho doesn't necessarily play around with the conventional storytelling format of introduction, inciting incident, rising action, climax and falling action--and therefore had a clear beginning, middle, and end, but you're somehow not done with the story. There is still much to think and talk about, because the story's relevance goes beyond its own universe.

Part of this magic is owed to the fact that Bong Joon Ho consistently reveals tragedy by the end of his films, and although at first glance the tragedy seems confined to the lives of the characters, our hearts know the tragedy is in fact universal. Bong Joon Ho may even try to give you a happy ending, but the fakeness of the happiness, the shadow of truths that we know remain unsaid, keep bothering you hours after the film ends. It is almost as if Bong Joon Ho is baiting you to call him a liar by presenting to you the same 'truths' that keep us safely in our boxes, and in calling him a liar we are forced to confront our own comfort in the way we think the world works.

The best-known example of this is probably Parasite. In the end, we are a universe away from the humor of the first half. We can no longer remember the simultaneously naive and clever families on opposite sides of the economic and class divide. We can't fathom that the story began with a young man telling his friend to tutor a girl he likes in his absence because he can't trust his rich friends to not steal his crush (a notable cameo by Park Seo-Joon, arguably the most charming actor of K-drama land). The final scene has the protagonist sitting in his dingy sub-basement home, wowing to rescue his father from the modernistic mansion he is now trapped in by buying it for himself one day. The scene is reminiscent of the final scene of a superhero's origin story movie. However, this is no origin story; this is a story that tells you that people rarely more than what their origins predetermine for them. Watching the young man fantasizing about buying what is sure to be a multimillion dollar house, you so want his dreams to come true. You want to cheer to cheer for him as though this is the beginning of the film and the best is yet to come. But the wall between the film and the audience has already fallen away, and we are forced to confront how in the real world, no amount of hard work or luck will help the protagonist reach his goal. The fact that we know this without being explicitly told confront us to the fact that in reality, we too are aware of the unfairness of the world, maybe even complicit in it, and are only trying to create a narrative of fairness so the hopelessness doesn't kill us. The real tragedy, as it turns out, is not the violence and bloodshed from a few scenes ago; it is the very nature of the world we live in.

In Okja, Bong Joon Ho takes a different approach. Our protagonist, a little girl from the mountains, is able to rescue her beloved pet pig from the evil meat company, but as you watch her walking out of the meat factory, you are simultaneously confronted with thousands of other pigs who will go on to meet a deadly fate because they were nobody's fate. The screen is split in half. In one half, there is reunion and homecoming. In the other, there is cruel slaughter. In the final scene, we are back in the idyllic mountains, watching the cute antics of Okja and her human friends, but Okja's scars from the meat factory are still on display, reminding her she survived when others did not, all for the sake of greed and gluttony. The real tragedy isn't Okja's individual trauma; it is the piece of pork on our plates consumed barely hours before we watched the film.

The last Bong Joon-Ho film I saw was Memories of a Murder. It is about a series of rape-murders that took place in rural Korea before such settings even understood the word 'serial killer.' In this case, the ending is that there is no ending. The crimes remain unsolved. Life goes on. In the grand scheme of things, the rapes and murders don't matter, and in the final shot, when the protagonist stares directly into the camera, you know that he is looking for the culprit in the audience. Since the culprit was noone, it can be anyone, even the person sitting right next to you in the theatre. The film mocks both the idea of the incompetent cop and the Sherlockian detective. The real tragedy is not the crimes we witnessed on screen; it is the fact that good doesn't always triumph over evil simply because human beings have their limitations.

It is this ability to see and depict the real tragedies of the human condition that make Bong Joon-Ho the director he is. He is the sort of storyteller who doesn't have to resort to out-of-the-box gimmicks and time- or space-bending narratives to pull one into a rabbit hole of thought. Who knows what a mind like his will confront us with next? I, for one, am both scared and excited to find out.