Challenging Social Norms in Korean Disturbing Films: How Cultural Context Heightens Discomfort for Different Audiences
Lucy Lee
Instructor’s Introduction
In WR 151 Stories that Disturb: Problems in Philosophy and Narrative, we study disturbing stories and attempt to explain their value. As we consider examples together as a class, we ask why immoral characters so frequently appeal to us, and we study related topics in philosophical aesthetics such as catharsis, censorship, the definitions of art and of beauty, as well as the role of art in our everyday lives. At the same time, each student researches stories in any genre or artform that resonates with them, while striving to explain why such stories are valuable.
In her essay, Lucy does exactly that. Drawing inspiration from her own identity, she explores Korean films that disturb, and argues that they do so through their sensitivity to the cultural background of their audiences. At the same time, she augments this argument with a fascinating claim that the creators of these stories do not intend to reach a singular audience, but rather multiple audiences with different backgrounds. In doing so, she cultivates in us a sophisticated understanding of authorial intent, audience, and, above all, the role our own cultural backgrounds play in our experiences of disturbing stories.
While the content of the paper consciously explores key concepts in our curriculum such as style, genre, and audience, its tight organization and supreme attention to detail also serve as a model. Its transitions are smooth, for the ideas explored in each paragraph are explicitly connected to one another. It economically provides the context needed for the reader to grasp the key points of the sources without sacrificing the fine details necessary to analyze them. Its presentation of evidence is similarly economical, as each key piece of evidence truly adds something new and essential to the argument.
All in all, Lucy’s paper models how our own experiences can stimulate serious inquiry and reflection even in an academic context, and as a result it encourages us to do so as well.
Curtis Snyder
From the Writer
The rapidly spreading Hallyu global phenomenon of interest in South Korean culture is mesmerizing to experience firsthand as an immigrant who came to the United States when people did not know such a country existed. Reflecting on the unforeseen growth and innovation of South Korean media over the past decade, I always question: why Korea? What societal background or characteristics of my home country have become a pedestal for the current enthusiasm for Korean music, language, fashion, and films? With the recent success of Parasite and my inspiration from discussions of the philosophy behind disturbing aesthetics in class, I explore how cultural specificity is used in different Korean disturbing films and their impact on Korean versus non-Korean audiences. Examining The Handmaiden, Mother, and Parasite, I evaluate their themes and aesthetic elements that resonate with different audiences and their related success in achieving unsettling impacts.
Challenging Social Norms in Korean Disturbing Films: How Cultural Context Heightens Discomfort for Different Audiences
Abstract
Films, with their ability to be deliberately manipulated, can highlight social norms and issues through their carefully crafted plot. Korean disturbing movies, with intentional, layered plots, often implement Korean cultural specificity to bring out the social problems in the narrative,
allowing the Korean audience to experience what the film directors have curated. This, however, limits non-Korean audiences to understanding how the directors manipulated the film to highlight different social problems embedded in Korean society. Some films, like The Handmaiden (2016) and Mother (2009), are overall more appealing to Korean audiences, for their plot is saturated with specific Korean context that is necessary for the film’s narrative development to reveal social issues such as patriarchy and conservative expectations of motherhood. Parasite, on the other hand, successfully incorporates both Korean and Western cultural specificity to make its plot appeal to all audiences, resulting in international popularity.
Introduction
Traditional values and social norms are ingrained in our society, and we often do not question them nor realize their existence. Films often take those social norms and confront them or push them to extremes, forcing unrecognized social problems to become undeniable issues onscreen for the audience to ponder. This is possible because film is the essence of manipulated visuals, sounds, angles, and acting styles to narrate a specific plot, allowing directors to precisely curate and calibrate the audience’s experience in intaking the plot. As Aristotle introduced in his book of literary theory, the plot is understood to be the most important, followed by stylistic choices (Aristotle, 3). The Korean movie industry seems to agree with his theory, for it puts films with intentional, layered plots above movies that are ornate with stylistic choices and shallow plots. This results in many popular Korean films being plot-focused, allowing movies to have dimensional, thoughtful plots characterized by the cultural specificities of Korea. Such specificity is what allows Korean filmmakers to make disturbing societal norms starkly visible to Korean audiences throughout the storyline. While adding cultural context to disturbing plots targets Korean audiences and maximizes their discomfort, non-Korean audiences are left to interpret the films without this assumed context. Therefore, many Korean films are made disturbing through plots enriched with unique Korean cultural and social context, delivering their unsettling messages directly to Korean audiences while preventing non-Korean audiences from experiencing the full potential of their disturbing plots.
South Korea precariously balances its conservative society and progressive film industry, establishing a desirable playground for film directors to push and pull at its firmly set values. One such conservative value persisting today that film directors often challenge is the oppressive patriarchy that has yet to be uprooted. In a society where feminism is still frowned upon, Park Chan-wook released his 2016 thriller and LGBTQ+ film, The Handmaiden. This bold film explores the world of powerful men and oppressed women through the contextual lens of Japanese-occupied Korea. The movie narrates the life of Lady Hideko under the control of her uncle. She is forced through traumatic experiences since her childhood, witnessing her aunt read pornographic literature to noblemen – a task she takes on herself after her aunt supposedly commits suicide. In an attempt to steal Hideko’s wealth, Count Fujiwara partners with Sook-hee to become her new handmaiden and help Hideko fall in love with him. However, Hideko’s cordial dependence on Sook-hee transforms into forbidden love, and the two struggle to find their own freedom and happiness in the perverted world of aristocratic men.
In this film, Park carefully constructs a world of contrasting imbalances: women versus men and Korean versus Japanese. Park consciously controls these two points of tension, creating an inconsistency in which the Korean uncle is more powerful than Lady Hideko, a Japanese woman, going against the social framework of the Japanese control over Koreans. This emphasizes the patriarchy embedded in both cultures – an inequality powerful enough to outweigh the political and ethnic discrimination assumed in the film’s setting. Park supplements this emphasis on gender inequality with disturbing plots, such as when the uncle trains Hideko and her aunt to read erotic material and forces them to act out scenes with sound effects and mannequins. The women, dolled up and kneeling down on the stage, perform in front of male elites nodding as if they are enjoying fine poetry. Hideko and her aunt are merely entertainers for male pleasure. In another scene of the movie, when Hideko and her aunt do not take the reading seriously, Hideko’s uncle wears gloves, clutches onto the women’s faces, and shakes them violently. He is in complete control of the women of his household, not only mentally oppressing them but physically abusing them with gloves as if they are not worthy of his touch. With the majority of the plot depicting women being blatantly abused by men, Park clearly marks one of the film’s intentions: to highlight gender inequality present in Korean society at the time. This message is clear to both Korean and foreign audiences, for patriarchy is a near-universal theme that is not tied to Korean culture alone.
However, other themes in the film are laced with Korean cultural specificity that makes it difficult for non-Korean audiences to grasp. The Handmaiden has quite literal filmmaking decisions that cause such limitations on foreign audiences, for Park adapted this movie from a British novel, Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters. He deliberately adjusts much of the plot and stylistic elements of the text to bring the film into “greater proximity with the cultural and temporal context of [Korean] readers or audiences (Sanders 2016:215)” (Choi et al. 2). Park “transports the story from Victorian England to Korea in the 1930s, when the peninsula was occupied by Japan” (Armitstead). While the essential plot remains the same with a girl and a gentleman scheming to trick a wealthy heiress, Park divides his characters between two different ethnicities: Korean and Japanese. Language then becomes fundamental to the film’s narrative development, depicted through shifting between Korean and Japanese between characters (Choi et al. 3). One way Park uses language is by psychologically distancing the Korean-speaking audience from characters who speak Japanese, which is assumed to be their foreign language. Therefore, when Hideko and Sook-hee use Korean, solidarity is established because a Korean audience feels an instant familiarity with the language, whereas when the uncle and Count Fujiwara speak Japanese, the alienation of the language aligns with their detached feelings from Hideko and their hypocritical, materialistic mindset throughout the film (Choi et al. 7). Such innate responses of comfort versus disturbance produced by language use are natural for Korean audiences. While this effect is attempted to be simulated to non-Korean audiences through color coded subtitles, the intrinsic reaction from language shifts is impossible to artificially transfer (Choi et al. 4). This results in major narrative developments getting lost in translation for non Korean audiences, and hence disturbing qualities depicted through characters speaking Japanese is not understood as how Korean audiences would.
Similar to how The Handmaiden explores the universal theme of patriarchy, Bong Joon ho’s 2009 thriller and crime film Mother examines the popular theme of motherhood. Bong, however, twists the subject of motherhood – a universally comforting and loving theme – to something unexpectedly disturbing by pushing the societal expectations of a mother to the extreme. By enriching the film with Korean cultural specificity, Bong successfully tackles the Korean-specific conservative values of motherhood, and crafts a film uniquely relatable to Korean audiences. The film centers around an unnamed widow, characterized as “Mother.” In the film, her son, Do-Joon, has a mental disability and ends up as the main suspect in the gruesome murder of a young girl. Mother then tries everything to prove her son innocent, twisting into dark paths to eventually cover up the murder that her son has indeed committed. Casting Kim Hye-ja, a Korean national actress known for her many roles depicting an affectionate mother, Bong creates this uncanny narrative of a mother’s fall to sin in order to protect her son. The Mother often wears a flowy skirt, a scarf, and floral-patterned jackets along with signature permed hair throughout the movie, reflecting the typical look of Korean elderly women, instantly creating a tender connection between the main character and the Korean audiences that likely have mothers that dress similarly. Bong uses this innate, warm connection to his advantage, pushing Mother’s actions beyond what is socially acceptable to create maximum discomfort for the viewers. When Mother appears at the funeral of the murdered girl, she screams that her son did not murder the girl, her intense stare escaping the socket. Such indifference to anyone but her son stirs a sudden unpleasant taste in the audience’s mouth.
However, Bong balances her unlikability with relatability and sympathy by showing how Mother’s feeble mind desperately tries to save her loving son. Clearly, Bong depends on the Korean audience’s natural affection when they see Mother on screen. When viewed by an audience unfamiliar with Korean culture, however, the connection between the audience and the Mother is lost, for the character likely does not resemble their own mothers. Bong’s technique, while it leads Korean audiences into a disturbing dilemma, is nearly eliminated for non-Korean viewers.
Unlike the two films previously discussed, Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 black-comedy and thriller film, Parasite, broadens and applies to more diverse audiences, evident from winning numerous critically acclaimed awards such as Best Achievement in Directing and Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 Oscars (“The Academy Awards Database”). The film illustrates a global theme of rigid class structures and economic immobility while still having specific Korean components that appeal to Korean audiences. As a black comedy and thriller film about the clash between the rich and poor families in Korea, Parasite is packed with stylistic choices that enhance the overall disturbing plot and the contrast between the two starkly different social classes. In the movie, Ki-taek’s family is extremely poor but is skilled at deceiving the rich family to live off of their wealth like parasites, eventually spiraling the symbiotic relationship of the three families into collapse due to greed and class discrimination. While dealing with the universal theme of social hierarchy and the inability to move up the social ladder, Bong sprinkles unique elements that the Korean audience can recognize. For example, he places the poor family in a half-basement in Ahyeon-dong and the rich family in a two-story estate in Seongbukdong. These two neighborhoods are easily recognized by Koreans as generally poor and rich neighborhoods, automatically placing the two families in their socioeconomic status. When an audience unfamiliar with Korean geographical stereotypes is introduced to these two neighborhoods, this natural categorization of the two families does not occur. Another detail that Bong adds is when the wealthy housewife directs her maid to make Jjapaguri with expensive short loin pieces for her son. To Koreans, Jjapaguri is known as a quick, cheap ramen; it is a homey meal cooked to save time. To Koreans, it would be strange to add expensive ingredients to such cheap ramen. In fact, in the movie, the wealthy housewife regarded the dish as a commoner food. Bong adds in his interview with the Los Angeles Times that “‘This is something kids like, regardless of the rich or the poor, but the rich wife couldn’t stand her kid to eat this cheap noodle so she adds sirloin topping’” (Rochlin). This scene then instantly alienates the rich family to the general Korean audience, showing a wealth disparity through the food that they normally intake. However, it is likely that non-Korean audiences did not feel the same alienation. If they do not have this specific ramen brand ingrained in their childhood and daily life as cheap food cooked by a family member, this abnormal behavior would not seem as peculiar.
But if Bong adds such cultural specificity in Parasite that is only relatable to Koreans, then how could the film have won so much critical and public attention? In the movie, the young son of the rich family is obsessed with Native Americans, playing with bows and arrows and wearing the traditional Native American headdress. This parallels the poor family being Europeans who extracted what they needed from the Native Americans’ homes and their attempt to take over what is not theirs. Bong is also hinting at the historical fact of how the Europeans refused to live with the Native Americans symbiotically, implying that the two starkly different social classes cannot coordinate a collegial life together. This is obviously not a theme as apparent to Koreans than to Western audiences, capturing both audiences and incorporating elements from both cultures to create a more universal claim.
Plot-rich Korean films often successfully target Korean audiences by using cultural and social contexts that they resonate with. Either by creating familiarity or alienation by relating the audience with specific Korean elements throughout the narrative, Park Chan-wook and Bong
Joon-ho tailor their disturbing movies to the Korean audience, maximizing discomfort to point out societal problems and norms. This technique simultaneously can create barriers for non Korean audiences to understand the movie to its full capacity, but some movies such as Parasite skillfully appeal to the Western audience as well by adding cultural specificity of the West, allowing all audiences to see how Bong highlights rigid social structures throughout the plot of the film. Korean directors, with their ability to manage cultural context to appeal to either Korean or foreign audiences, can deliberately adjust their films and plot to target their social commentary to specific audiences. If done right, such films spotlight disturbing social problems with cultural context that appeals to their targeted audiences.
Works Cited
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.
Armitstead, Claire. “Sarah Waters: ‘The Handmaiden Turns Pornography into a Spectacle – but It’s True to My Novel.’” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/08/sarah-waters-the-handmaiden-turns-pornography-into-a-spectacle-but-its-true-to-my-novel-.
Choi, J., Kim, K. H., & Evans, J. (2022). Translating code-switching in the colonial context: Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden.
Mother. Bong Joon-Ho. CJ Entertainment, Magnolia Pictures, StudioCanal UK, 2009 Parasite. Bong Joon-Ho. CJ Entertainment, Camera Film, 2019.
Rochlin, Margy. “How Steak and Korean Instant Noodles Illustrates Class Tensions in Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite.’” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 19 Oct. 2019, www.latimes.com/food/story/2019-10-19/parasite-ramdon-bong-joon-ho-ramen-udon jjapaguri.
“The Academy Awards Database.” Browser Unsupported – Academy Awards Search, awardsdatabase.oscars.org/search/results. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.
The Handmaiden. Park Chan-wook. CJ Entertainment, 2016
Waters, Sarah. Fingersmith. Riverhead trade paperback edition. New York, Riverhead Books, 2002.
Lucy Lee is a sophomore at Boston University studying Graphic Design and Biology to pursue medical illustration in her later studies. She loves the arts, sciences, and writing equally and tries to view the world through a lens combining all her interests. Her thanks go to Professor Curtis Snyder for his incredible insight into philosophy, aesthetics, and writing as well as her parents for raising her with a rich cultural and artistic background which sparked her passion to write this essay.