A leading figure of South Korean cinema and winner of the Best Picture at the 2020 Academy Awards, Bong Joon-ho is one of the most original directors working today. He is that rare type of filmmaker who has achieved mainstream success while remaining a respected auteur among critics. His films are inhabited by dichotomies – East and West; Hollywood and Korea; rich and poor; tradition and modernity. But they equally resist such pigeonholing. Here is a body of work where distinctions of culture and style bleed into one another to give us a unique take on the dehumanising effect of systems and authority.
Bong has achieved extraordinary commercial success in Korea: his third feature, The Host (2006), became the highest-grossing film in the country ever, seen by a number equivalent to a quarter of the population. Parasite, only just released in the UK, has already taken $167 million worldwide. Bong has been critically acknowledged through a number of international awards, winning Best Film twice at the Asian Film Awards and, most recently, receiving Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars. It is the only Korean film in history to have won in these categories. Combined with his Palme d’Or win last year – also the first Korean picture to be awarded the prize – Bong has become something of a celebrity.
Born into an artistic family in 1969, Bong grew up in Seoul during a time of military dictatorship. Throughout the 1960s and 70s in Korea cinema faced intense censorship and regulation, with authorities effectively having control over film production as well. There was also a ban on the distribution of Hollywood films. So it was from a local TV channel for the US military, Armed Forces Korea Network, that Bong was exposed to Hollywood films, watching directors like Friedkin, Spielberg and Coppola. When he was a sociology student in the late 80s, he began discovering Asian arthouse directors such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. The aesthetic and tonal influences from both East and West are apparent in all of Bong’s work. After university he studied at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, before entering the industry as a scriptwriter and part of the production crew on several well-known Korean films.
Bong’s cinema explores the strata of Korean society. Even as he covered topics with a more global reach in the international productions of Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), notions of Korean identity remain a key thread. His heroes, or more typically, anti-heroes, are relegated to the peripheries, where they must fight to establish their autonomy in the face of corruption or systemic injustice. Through their unremarkable or ‘loser’ protagonists (‘the world is so hard, it’s strange not to be a loser,’ said Bong in a recent interview), his films give voice to those who’ve been forgotten or have struggled with the country’s transition to modernisation. More crudely, they are usually the losers of capitalism. And his films are unafraid to expose the dirt and underbelly of society. Sewers, abandoned buildings, and basements feature as symbolic spaces where unsavoury secrets lie, hidden out of sight.
It is perhaps the strange blend of genre and tone that makes a Bong Joon-ho film most recognisable. Moments of slapstick are injected into scenes of great seriousness. People who are supposed to be in charge often fall over or make outrageous blunders. No one is infallible. Merging flashes of the absurd and ridiculous becomes an important satirical tool; it is not designed to be light relief.
Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Bong’s first film, tackled some of the important themes that haunt his later works – perversion, moral corruption and disability – told in a macabre and comic style. Although generally considered Bong’s weakest movie, it has flickers of brilliant wit, demonstrating a deft touch that moves freely between the tonal and the generic. The narrative follows junior academic Yun-ju as he struggles to find a job while being driven to breaking point by the barking dogs that live in his apartment block. On the surface it’s a farce: dognapping, slapstick chases, and an upbeat jazzy soundtrack all collide in a peculiar mishmash. But it’s the darker undercurrents pulling the story in stranger and more unsettling directions that make Barking Dogs Never Bite more than just a footnote in Bong’s oeuvre. It comes to a head when a mentally disabled man living in the basement of the apartment block is used a scapegoat for the crimes of other characters, deflecting the violent perversions of those further up the social hierarchy.
It was Bong’s 2003 follow up Memories of Murder that brought him to international attention. Adapted from a 1996 Korean stage play, it tells the true story of two detectives investigating a serial killer in the country’s rural north. Set in the late 1980s against the backdrop of Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship, local Detective Park Doo-man, unpredictable, violent, superstitious, is paired with the rational, cool-headed Seo Tae-yoon, who has been brought in to assist from Seoul. Bong has described it as an ‘American-style genre film,’ borrowing tropes from crime drama, not least in the chalk and cheese relationship of the two leads. As Park and Seo clash with their opposing approaches to investigation, the film reveals a systemic ineptitude on the police’s behalf, painting a savage portrait of the state as violent oppressor. Their relationship also reflects a country that is entangled between tradition and modernity: Park has a propensity for rituals and shamans as means to solve the crime, while Seo ultimately believes in documents and the scientific method.
Bong perfected his blackly comic touch – that kind of disturbing satire constructed through physical comedy – in Memories of Murder. An early scene sees police officers falling down a grass bank as they rush to meet Park and his team of forensics at a crime scene. During a reconstruction of the crime in the same field later on, chaos ensues as hundreds of spectators gather to see the investigators argue, nearly fight each other, manhandle the suspect and fall over. A slow motion tracking shot captures them tumbling as everyone witnesses the public pantomime of the police force. Throughout the film the police, representing the state, are quick to resort to violence or take undue credit. Their incompetence and hubris paint a sinister picture about life under Chun’s regime in the 80s. It becomes apparent, then, that Bong’s exploration of crime and its effect on the community is not just limited to the serial killer, but to the state as well. It’s this, rather than our laughter, that makes Bong’s satire particularly hard to swallow.
If Memories of Murder wasn’t ambitious enough (it achieved the most locations used in a Korean film), Bong followed it with the record-setting blockbuster The Host. A monster movie in the tradition of Jaws or Godzilla, it is an epic tale of a city torn apart. Driving the narrative is Gang-du, whose daughter, Hyun-seo, is kidnapped by the titular mutant beast. When government officials realise that he may have been infected when coming into contact with the host, they attempt to quarantine him. But he escapes. Before long, there is a city-wide hunt for Gang-du and his family who are on their own mission to rescue Hyun-seo.
Almost all of Bong’s films engage with the question of Korea’s relationship with the USA and Hollywood. As a genre film in the Hollywood tradition, The Host explores this issue provocatively. The contemporary link between the two countries, which stems from America’s role in the split between North and South Korean after World War II and the Korean War five years later, has for decades taken on a murky shape. Christina Klein writes that ‘the two countries have been bound together for the past half-century through a network of political, economic, and military ties in a relationship that its supporters characterize as a close alliance and its critics as neocolonial.’ The Host begins with an American military officer ordering his Korean assistant to dump a large amount of toxic waste into the Han River in Seoul. When the assistant resists, his boss replies with: ‘that’s an order, so start pouring.’ There is no ambiguity about who’s in charge. Indeed, the monster might be read as a metaphor for the prominent US military presence in the country. From a cinematic perspective, the monster can also be seen as an expression of Hollywood’s stronghold on Korean cinema. Hollywood conventions imbue so much of Korean film, not to mention how Hollywood dominates the Korean box office each year. But the film is equally entrenched in domestic issues – poverty, inequality, suicide – which are socially taboo in Korea. Residing in the sewer, the monster brings them to the surface like a burst pipe, erupting into the city.
Mother (2009), a slow burning mystery-cum-psychodrama, is perhaps Bong’s most serious work. Poetic, surreal, transcendent, it demonstrates the director’s arthouse sensibilities, evoking the sombre moods of Yang or Bergman, while doing something entirely fresh and surprising. The eponymous Mother, whose real name is never revealed, lives in rural Southern Korea with her mentally handicapped son, Do-joon, scraping a living as an unlicensed acupuncturist. When Do-joon is accused of murdering a local school girl, Mother attempts to clear her son’s name. Like Memories of Murder, the actual crime might be seen as a foil for the more pervasive injustices that plague the community, like inequality and discrimination. Living on the fringes of society, Mother and Do-joon are impoverished outcasts with little chance of survival. They are the ones who have not benefitted from the country’s economic progress but are equally hindered by traditional prejudice and hierarchy.
Comedy is largely absent in Mother, with the exception of a riotously entertaining police reconstruction involving a blow up mannequin. Rather, the film pivots between pathos and violence, captured by an oscillating colour palette which is both darkly understated and, at moments, beautifully vivid. As Mother grows increasingly desperate to prove her son’s innocence, the story takes more and more unexpected turns towards brutality. It is the extremities the characters go to that make the film as much about the capacity to love as it is about the capacity to do evil.
With Snowpiercer, a co-production between Korea and The Czech Republic mostly shot in a Prague studio, Bong frames the class system in a climate change context. Featuring Hollywood A-listers like Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton and with English dialogue, it marked Bong’s move towards reaching a more mainstream global market. Like The Host, it belongs to the tradition of the Hollywood blockbuster and indeed positions itself within that cultural framework. But its apocalyptic dystopian setting also allows it to transcend specificities of geography, showing how everyone experiences the consequences of climate catastrophe.
Based on a French graphic novel, the story is set in 2031 aboard the Snowpiercer, a train in constant circumnavigation of Earth. The train has been stratified into different classes, with the lowest class – the industrial workforce with their Dickensian faces of dirt – at the tail end while the upper classes reside at the front. Evans plays Curtis, a macho insubordinate who leads a revolt from the tail end up through to the control car. Enlisting the help of Korean security expert Namgoong, Curtis and his cohort attempt to fight their way through the train, moving through all kinds of environments, from a classroom to a botanical garden to a nightclub. Metaphorically, the train operates on a number of levels. The body politic is outlined by Swinton’s Minister Mason: ‘A hat belongs on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. I am a hat. And you are a shoe.’ Order is preordained, we are told, and our positions are inflexible. The regression to a feudal-like system suggests that capitalism has ultimately failed, both in its inability to create a fairer society and in its historic contribution to global warming. This is emphasised by the fetishisation of technology among the ruling class in the film – the engine is continuously described as ‘sacred’ – suggesting myopia or even amnesia about industrial capitalism’s role in the apocalypse.
Okja is a Netflix production and, like Snowpiercer, features a largely English-speaking cast. Before Cuarón or Scorsese, Bong clearly saw the potential of working with the streaming giant to tell extraordinary and unusual stories to a mass audience with, in his own words, ‘total freedom.’ Okja can be seen as a companion piece to Snowpiercer, continuing with the theme of late capitalism in a transnational context.
The story follows Mija, an orphan living in the Korean mountains with her grandfather and her pet super-pig, Okja. Okja belongs to a group of genetically modified pigs, created by the American Mirando Corporation to create a ‘revolution in the livestock industry’. In the opening scene, we learn that 26 pigs are to be reared by farmers across the globe in a 10-year-long competition, after which one will be selected to become the ‘ancestor of a whole new species.’ Having been raised by Mija in pastoral wilderness for 10 years, now Mirando want to reclaim the pig. After the biotech company kidnap Okja, taking him to New York, Mija attempts a rescue mission, teaming up with a group of animal activists en route. What follows is a corporate satire that moves between heist, adventure, science fiction and drama.
The film exemplifies the kind of dichotomies we find in Bong’s work, demonstrating the pernicious and pervasive effects of corporate ethics and commercialism. Within the first six minutes, the film establishes the artificiality of the corporate environment in New York and the Arcadian simplicity of peasant life in rural Korea. We know these worlds will collide. When the morally corrupt Mirando zoologist Jonny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenal) arrives, it represents an industrial threat to the natural world, of its landscape and animals. Indeed, one of the main ideas in Okja is the commodification of the environment as a symptom of meat consumption. In addition, the nefarious ethics of factory farming find expression in two central characters: the zoologist who becomes a spokesperson for an industrial livestock conglomerate and the self-titled ‘environmentalist’ CEO of Mirando – Tilda Swinton’s exuberantly kooky Lucy Mirando. They both represent the disingenuous face of a system that promises to be a solution to a problem for which it is responsible.
Even as Bong returns to an all-Korean story and production with Parasite, his mainstream appeal has only continued to grow. His recognition across the world reinforces how he is a filmmaker with stories that have a universal reach. In spite of this scope, he is still a storyteller who celebrates the minutiae and the ordinary. Through unremarkable protagonists, Bong’s films show how anyone might do remarkable things in an unpredictable world. Life is messy – it’s divided, brutal, strange. But it is not without triumph or transcendence or joy. Bong’s films remind us of that, allowing us to experience it, sometimes all at once, and always in a way that haunts us long after the lights have come up.
‘Profile: Bong Joon-ho’ is an article written by Dominic Walker. You can find out more about Dominic on his site.
