“There are so many Gatsbys in Korea”
The politics and intertexts of Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning
In my review for Hamaguchi’s exceptional Drive My Car, I said that Lee Chang-Dong’s 2018 film Burning was a “dark, fiery inverse” of that film’s themes. As I shall explore in this review, this is true emotionally, intertextually, and even sexually.
While Drive My Car focuses on loss, regret, and recovery, the central emotion in Burning is anger — ‘male rage’, as some reviewers put it. Most of the film plays through Jongsu’s eyes (superbly played by Yoo Ah-in, with the right mix of aimlessness and quiet resentment, but with touches of lighter emotion that pull the character away from being a stereotype). Tensions simmer over the first two-thirds of the film, as we see more of Jongsu’s unsatisfying life as the son of a disenfranchised farmer in Paju, and his encounters with the well-off Ben (Steven Yeun on top form) and Haemi (the newcomer Jeon Jong-seo), a former schoolmate of Jongsu’s — or so she claims.
As the film progresses, numerous themes are consolidated and strengthened — obsession, class divides, the unreliability of memory, fiction and reality, inter alios — but none of them come to a resolution.
It is clear that Burning has a political bent, though without a clear agenda. The film is situated at a specific moment and place in time: from Jongsu’s home, we can hear both the propaganda broadcasts from the nearby North Korean border, and Donald Trump as president on TV. Many reviews consider the class and wealth divides between Jongsu and Ben to be the focal point of the film — “The tragedy of Burning is that luxuries of imagination are reserved, first and foremost, for wealthy men”, as Irene Hsu and Soo Ji Lee write.
Lee Chang-dong himself has spoken of Jongsu as a young person encountering the political mysteries of the world, and being unable to make sense of them. This thought is expertly communicated in the film (Lee has been directing films for a while, and it shows).
In Drive My Car, the mysteries of the world are always examined as mysteries of people (why does Yûsuke’s wife have affairs? Why does Misaki’s mother have a split personality? Why does Kôshi violently attack people who try to take his picture?). Interpersonal questions are bound up with political ones in Burning: to ask how and why Ben is so well-off is also to ask what political situation gave rise to this inexplicable wealth; to examine the position of Jongsu’s father is also to examine the rural-urban divide in South Korea, and what has led to his disenfranchisement. His lawyer tells Jongsu that his father had the chance to pursue a different life — he could have bought an apartment in Gangnam when they were cheap decades ago, but chose to continue as a farmer.
Then there is the divide between the rural Korean Jongsu and the Westernised Ben. The clue is not just in the name: Ben plays Miles Davis from his car (just as Airegin plays in Murakami’s short story); his Korean accent, according to native speakers, has an off-putting twang; Ben’s ability to travel plays off against Jongsu’s inability to leave the family farm behind. The two characters, fascinating to watch in their own right, are stand-ins for the tensions between the modern, urban environments of South Korea, and the residues of rural Korean society. (Björn Boman’s heavy-duty article on intertextuality in Burning explore this tension further — well worth a read.)
Yoo Ah-in, Jeon Jong-seo and Steven Yeun in Burning (2018)
Is Jongsu’s final murderous action of the film a political action, an expression of anger at social change and displacement? Or is he imagining it as a scene for his novel (as Lee Jongsin interprets it)? Or is it a manifestation of taking life into his own hands, finding a source for his literary creativity? (Ben is in raptures as he dies in Jongsu’s arms — perhaps he feels that his message to Jongsu about feeling the inner ‘bass’ has got through.) It is testament to Burning’s general tone and attitude towards its characters that the ending be this thematically ambiguous.
It is interesting to think that only a year after this film came Bong Joon-Ho’s incredibly successful Parasite, a more clear-cut commentary on class and resentment. The murderous climax of the birthday party scene may bring Burning to mind — a similar showdown between two men of the same age but wildly different financial situations. The layered and thrilling Parasite wears its social commentary on its sleeve, while Burning’s politics are filtered through a heady combination of the geographical, personal, and literary.
Jongsu is an aspiring writer who has not been pursuing his creativity, until Ben appears on the scene as a kind of darkly inspirational figure — just as in the Murakami short story, Jongsu’s character thinks for a moment about burning down a greenhouse himself . Ben has lit the match in Jongsu’s head.
Jongsu as a character appears very well-read, especially in 20th century American literature. speaking about Ben to Haemi, he muses that “there are so many Gatsbys in Korea”; he also says — crucially — that his favourite author is William Faulkner.
The Gatsby link is brilliant: Ben is Gatsby, Jongsu is Nick Carraway, and Haemi is Daisy (to chime with Sheila O’Malley’s excellent piece). Both Haemi and Daisy in their respective stories are characters with their own right, who express their own worldviews and desires — but to the men of their stories they serve as placeholders, ideals to be pursued. In the passionless, disturbing scene where Jongsu and Haemi have sex, Jongsu’s focus quickly shifts from Haemi to the fading light on Seoul Tower that glows briefly on Haemi’s closet. When he returns to the flat to feed Haemi’s Schrödinger’s cat, he masturbates while staring out at the tower; his sexual fantasy is wrapped up in the aspirational vision of urban architecture. Hence the sex of Burning is dark and joyless, in contrast to the sex scenes of Drive My Car, which are more intimate.
Jongsu’s Gatsby comment is mirrored in Ben’s confession that he burns greenhouses for fun. Ben simply says “In Korea there are tons of greenhouses”, arguing that they’re waiting to be burned. The similar phrasing serves to highlight the differences between the worldviews of Jongsu, who expresses class resentment and a latent desire to understand (and create) through literature, and Ben, who seems to engage with things only for his own amusement.
The link to Faulkner adds a great deal of intertextual and thematic depth. As we know, Burning is based on Murakami’s short story Barn Burning — which, in turn, traces back to Faulkner’s 1939 story of the same name. In Faulkner’s story, we follow the son of an erratic and violent man accused of barn-burning, who cannot help but defend his father, and who muses on burning as a kind of blood-habit, passed down through the family.
Jongsu’s character has a markedly similar experience and outlook to the boy of Faulkner’s story. He too is overshadowed by his family history: he is tied to the run-down family farm in Paju (while Ben is free of any commitment and apparently has no origin); his mother left when he was young, and Jongsu’s most vivid childhood memory is of his father burning his mother’s clothes. The class dynamics of Burning are what draws it away from the Murakami and closer to the Faulkner story.
Jongsu’s dream of a greenhouse burning, from Burning (2018)
We may imagine that the character of Jongsu has in fact read this story, that it has resonated with him and, and is part of his connection to Faulkner as his favourite author. As he says in the film, he feels an affinity to Faulkner in that he feels he can make the stories his own.
In Drive My Car, the central intertext of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya serves, as I argued in my review, as a therapeutic device, ultimately drawing Yûsuke and Misaki closer together, opening the door for the characters to understand each other and themselves better. The intertextual picture is much darker in Burning: Jongsu is linked to the main character of Faulkner’s short story by the shared inheritance of anger and political violence from their fathers. There is little suggestion that Jongsu can escape the cycle of destructive male behaviour, which finds ultimate expression in Burning’s final scene.
Just as in Drive My Car, then, intertext serves to enrich the emotional landscape of Burning, adding to and complicating its class politics, character interactions, and general tone. These are all enriched further by the explicit philosophy and motifs that I have barely mentioned, and all of which are further food for the viewer’s thought: Haemi’s explanation of Great Hunger; the mystery of her cat; Ben’s arsonist habit, which Jongsu tries and fails to track. The overwhelming impression left behind is one of uncertainty. The world of Burning is full of both political realities and human mysteries, waiting to be explored — just as, for Ben, the greenhouses are just “waiting to be burned”..