Korea, Our Korea

Korea, Our Korea

When the audience learned that the female lead character did not end up with the man of her liking, they cried of disappointment. This is the pivotal scene in Ditto, one of the entries in this year’s Korean Film Festival, held in UP last week. The story is of a guy from the future who is communicating with a lady from the past. We hold the present in abeyance as we watch them fall in, and out, of love.

South Korea is very much preoccupied with its past. As a newly industrialized country, becoming one of the world’s largest economies by the 1980s, the “prosperous” South has been devoting itself to knowing the past. We know that approaching the past from the present (that was the future before) is driven by multiple desires: perhaps to understand – by way of representing to themselves – why they have become what we they are now or maybe to limn the contingencies that made possible such return—going back—needed to begin with.

In Joint Security Area (JSA) a neutral international investigation team was dispatched to probe the shooting incident between North and South Korean forces. By way of multiple reconstructions, we are afforded of the encounter as narrated by partisans. We then learn that the soldiers being examined are determined to twist the story so that no one would be indicted in the proper, that is, traditionally unfair, sense. Out of the boredom and intense pressure of keeping an eye at the other side, the South and North Korean soldiers befriended one another. Those commanded to watch sneak out to share happy moments in the devil-forbidden border. Indeed one humor is the hidden desire for a fellow by a South Korean soldier, uttered in a homosocial environment of the demilitarized zone. It is interesting to know the views of feminists in this regard, as the neutral investigator and sole female character (excluding the extras of course) crystallized the North-South divide. She herself has a past to examine. It was revealed that her father, a North Korean general, was exiled; she, a product of an interracial union, is now re/turning for the first time to the land of her lineage. Our central character must investigate an incident that denies the personal out-and-out in the political constitution of things. The burden of her own history is embedded in the conflicts that made Koreans fight one another, friend against friend, brother against brother.

Even though the acting is just passable (they move and talk visibly on cue), JSA is to me better than Taeguk-Gi, the other Korean film that worked on the Korean problem in its story. While it is true that the personal is political, this movie made the Korean War merely a backdrop to the family story being told. There is no “relation of acts and forces” in the wisdom that Raymond Williams makes clear of backgrounds in history.

Tae-guk Gi opens from the present preoccupation with the past in a scientific pretense of archaeology. The remains of what was the brother of one of the two lead characters was found in an excavation site. The commercially successful film did not interrogate the past! All we have are scenes of brotherly love, the sacrifices of the older brother to save the younger brother from military draft and when they both joined the army, his sacrifices for the younger one not to be killed and to merit an exemption to return to studies. The younger one tries to balance it out by questioning the false heroism (not for country but for the family) of his brother and sacrificing ultimately for their family to be reunified. Patriotism, nationalism, capitalism, socialism and communism are all dogmas sworn out of the scenes! Like the artifice of clothing (always a sign of setting), the Korean problem is reduced to being a surface of filial piety, family unity, tradition in every sense! Emotions, affects, feelings and longings are just demonstrated as either cause or effect of all the actions and drama that are happening!

There is a moment when, in want of entertainment, the South Korean soldiers made the North Korean captives fight one another. Another when one group executes those suspected of being supporters of the North Korean forces. One scene when military high-ups escape defeat and responsibility. These happenings are just presented as empirical evidences of what happens in a war. Characters are one-dimensional for they do not dialectically interact with the context; more fatally, they do not determine the narrative structure. No pattern of intention in relation to the brutal war was shown, only Koreans blindly defending whatever territory they have.

Film scholar Roland Tolentino (Global Desire: Neoliberalism, Hollywood Industry and Asian Cinemas) rebukes this mode of representation in nostalgia films in Asian national cinemas: “The irony of nostalgia is that the past was never ideal to begin with.” (14) In the film, all the romantic moments of love and sacrifice are idealizations of the past, and the viewers have forgotten that the past being unearthed is itself a crisis that was forcibly flattened in a family drama.

Korean films are so popular nowadays. Whenever we talk of irony, we talk of contradiction, our constitution. This divisible whole interpellates us and summons our decisive acts for progress. We just hope that we learn from their particular ways of understanding their past so that we may illumine what fares Philippine cinema. Our cinema.

3:25 am

1 October 2007