KIM Seok-hyeon.   first upoaded: 2020-12-31.   last updated: 2020-12-31. 

Movie director BONG Joon-ho's promotion tour for his latest movie Parasite, which already made a huge mark by the award of the Gold Palm or best picture, at the Cannes Film Festival of France, eventually landed on Academy Awards and grasped four trophies, including the 'best picture.' This is first for a non-American or non-English movie to get such a high acclaim in the Academy Awards in any measure. After the Academy awards, the movie and director BONG Jun-ho received a secondary huge repercussion all over the world, let alone the US. It is no question that South Koreans pay a huge tribute to him and enjoy BONG's success like their own.

The movie is in general characterized as a 'social movie' to reflect class conflict and such a characteristic is regarded as an important factor to gain world-wide recognition. But the genre of the movie is a black comedy full of metaphors which allows for various interpretations. The metaphoric nature of the movie may be another factor of the movie's success because people can take the movie as a material to spur their own imaginations or interpretations. The author, also indebted to the movie's metaphoric power, tries to present his own interpretation of the movie and director BONG and draw further implications in the context of Korea.

Above all, the author wants to begin with questioning the perception or assumption of BONG's movies as a social or realistic genre. It is true that BONG has always touched social aspects and used social context as his materials. But the characters of his movies are not very familiar kinds but rather fictitious ones. The latest movie Parasite presents an odd supposedly poor family who are living in the semi-basement floor. Living in the semi-basement is not odd for a low-income family given the crowdedness of Seoul with high housing costs. But except that, the family's characteristics are far from that of a typical poor family of South Korea. The family is composed of the parents of mid-ages with good health and the son and the daughter of the twenties and also of good health. The son and the daughter may have wanted but could not go to college maybe because of poverty but they seem to be far more intellectual than the average of their age group. The son and the daughter can tutor in English and in arts respectively. The mother is quite fit to the high standard culture of the rich family as always has been so. The father is also well disciplined enough to be a chauffeur as well. And all the family members are caring for each other very much. The father even assumes the love of the family as natural and mistakenly ask his boss, the head of the rich family, whether he loves his wife or not, surely assuming a positive answer.

But the actual typical poor family of South Korea is far from such a perfect one just short of money. According to an official report on households whose incomes are lower than the median are likely to be made up of one or two, rather small. While single member households are the majority of the poor families. typical families have rather minor shares about a quarter or a third. Families of a single parent are a third category but become larger in portion as they get poor. So such a family in the movie is not at all typical as a poor one in Korea. And too fictitious is the supposed situation that the parents could not get jobs till they were hired by the rich family as a chauffeur and a housekeeper respectively. In Korea It is not yet very difficult to get jobs that pay around minimum wages and the chauffeur and the housekeeper are paid around the minimum wages. So it is not at all realistic that the parents had to contrive to disguise their identities and to kick out incumbent employees just to steal their jobs. The supposed poor family is more fictitious than real and so not justifiable in actual social context. BONG borrowed his material from the society but he devised it on his own for his plot.

If you go over many movies of BONG (The author watched most of them except Okja released on the Netflix platform), you may see some common characteristics of his movies. His movies have monster-like creatures that drive storylines. In his movie Monster, the namesake title, the monster is the main actor. BONG once told in retrospect that he happened to observe a monster in HAN-gang (river) from his apartment when he was a high school kid and he had brought the image to the movie. His first commercial success, Memories of Murder', presented before Monster, also has a mysterious serial killer that has to be chased down by the police. The poor family living the semi-basement is not very different from the typical mysterious creatures of BONG. Though the family is presumed as a typical poor one, the history of the family is totally mysterious, so with the reason of its poverty hidden. In this sense, the poor family is not a real or social entity but a fantastic creature of BONG. If the reasons for poverty are not unknown, there is no way for the society to fix or overcome it. The author suspects that the director wanted consciously or unconsciously the poor family's poverty not to be tracked down. Otherwise, the movie would become a genre of social or realistic movie which may make all the tragic plot of the movie unconvincing.

Of course, whether to interpret a movie as realistic or fantastic one may depend on viewpoints. Regarding Parasite as a black comedy with metaphor of poverty and consequent class conflict is surely implicative, given the rows over distributional justice world-wide in particular since the 2008 financial crisis. And people's interpretation like that is surely an important factor to understand the movie's influence all over the world. But considering the movie as a special fantasy genre and director BONG as a superb mater of such a genre may have implication too particularly on the Korean society.

BONG remarked at the Academy Awards ceremony that he had always kept in mind what Martin Scorsese, his inspiring colleague and also coincidentally then his competitor for the same trophy of best director, said: “the most personal is the most creative.” This comment can illuminate quite a fresh view on BONG and his movies. Although BONG always has touched and utilized social materials, he has been personal. That is, he pursued his personal interest throughout his career. His archetypal personal interest seems to have been set up and realize some mysterious or monstrous things as he told that he wanted to make a movie about a monstrous creature living in HAN-gang (river). He added some social features to the monster though. For example, the monster in 'Monster' is a mutated creature assumed to be due to the toxic materials thrown by the US Army whose camp was then close to HANG-gang (the camp moved elsewhere almost and is due to move out in the near future). But here social features are not the main point but a feature to make the story more dynamic. So we'd better say that BONG has pursued his personal fantasy through his movies. Fantasy seeking is not wrong or bad but is exactly such an attitude that the artist can take. An artist is not a designers or reformer to change a society, but can present their fantastic imagination to the world and share them with the viewers. The materials can be either social, natural, or fantastic, just a matter of choice of an artist.

Then we may ask why BONG has chosen social materials. A guess is that BONG's youth is unavoidably linked to society. He entered college in 1988 and one year before Korea had just got over a democratic regime from the military dictatorship by the free election. Though Korean people achieved the free election for president, the then president newly elected was a key figure for the military dictatorship, the society was hard to say as a free society, and the students' protests, with Bong once likely to be among them, were going on fiercely. It is worth to noting that protest scenes appear frequently in his movies. BONG told that he, during college, contributed a series of cartoons to the college newspaper for one semester that unavoidably includes critiques on the then ruling government. BONG's generation, regardless of personal characteristics, could not help but be embedded deeply in the social milieu of South Korea. In that sense, the social context is again PERSONAL to BONG. As BONG' movie includes a lot of his personal experiences or imaginations, society cannot help but be personal to BONG. He did not avoid the social context, and imported the society or social materials in his movies. When BONG was awarded the Golden Palm, the best movie award, at the Cannes Film Festival, the overseas media commented that BONG has become a genre. BONG appreciated it a lot and he, as a self-acclaimed genre artist, felt that he was eventually recognized for his style. The author believes the unique style of BONG comes from the chemistry of his two seemingly opposing aspects: personal innermost and social milieu.

BONG seems to have been at the cross of the old as social and the new as personal. And he and his generation may have been the last one that were forced to be 'social' in Korea's context and also the first one that could enjoy and pursue personal values. While BONG was showered with social or rather political matters in his college days, he was also able to continue his own 'personal' dream of movie making as an ardent cinephile. These kinds of then exotic personal dreams were out of reach to most young people of those days. Most college graduates followed a standard track getting a job at the corporations after graduation, only except those who continued to pursue political or social causes. But then almost unrecognized venues began to open to young dreamers like BONG. The 1990s, when BONG may have pondered on his career, saw a flood of new cultural upheavals in Korea. Cinema, once regarded as a cottage industry, has emerged as a whole-new soft industry other than the manufacturing that Korea had achieved as its power house. So called chaebol corporations that had stood on manufacturing started to invest in movies: production, distribution, and multiplex cinema houses. It was 1994 when CJ Entertainment (now renamed CJ E&M), that invested in BONG's movies including the latest Parasite, participated in DreamWorks as a one of key investors with Spielberg, a famous director, being another investor. CJ Entertainment have made long-lived connection with BONG by investing in his first big hit movie, Memories of Murder in 2003. In some ways BONG was so lucky that he did not have to struggle on his own and he may be almost the first generation to benefit from systemic movie industries. His movie 'Monster' in 2006 was then a huge, untested, and so risky venture, then pouring about 11 billion wons (about 10 million dollars). The commercial success of this movie inspired movie industries and made investors willing to invest even larger amounts and so a variety of movie making were attempted, of course with some drastic commercial failure cases included too. With his career unfolding In the right time, BONG was able to pursue his own personal dream with the help of society. And the Korean society could also melt BONG's personal dream and talent into social and industrial successes.

While Korea has some dismal aspects inevitably, which motivated BONG's movie Parasite, it is also true that Korea is ready to provide a huge systemic benefit to those who pursue 'personal' dreams. Not only movies, but all other relative fields are nowadays flourishing and tend to grow even faster by getting through the world along with the trend called Hallyu. Each individual may not have to struggle with empty hands for unforeseen ends. Of course standing firm on creative fields are not easy to reach like elsewhere. But at least the systems are already set well and call for the talented creators. Then why do you have to only hesitate to get through your creative careers. BONG was quite desperate at the failure of his first commercial -at least intended so- movie , A Dog of Flanders. But even then the investor of the movie recognized the weakness of his movie and assured BONG of the failure in advance. But investors also noticed the strength of BONG too. Thanks to such investors, BONG made a next movie Memories of Murder with a big success, both commercially and artistically. The overall system for creative fields nowadays is much larger than that of BONG's period. Webtoons, cartoons released on the web platform, have become very successful new formats of comics and some of them have been being successfully remade into movies or dramas too. Web dramas or web novels are other similar categories. Youtubes and other similar web-based video platforms seem to serve well entrants and make some of them huge successes. Creative fields fit very well these kinds of diversified platforms, contrary to the old centralized or oligopolistic media, where beginners are less disadvantaged or even more advantaged than the established. So long tail economies where smalls also have chances are not wishful thinking but real. Then why do you have to pursue only stereotyped careers which are verified but so crowded too? If you have something valuable in your personal world, then you may try the possibility to make it social. It is very much worth to rehearse 'the most personal is the most creative' now in Korea.

(*) This article is published in intelligence korea, Summer and Winter, 2020. The Korean version is available at intelligencekor.kr/periodical/article.html?bno=14.