![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article explores conceptions of cinematic and postcolonial-Anthropocene space in South Korean film director Bong Joon Ho’s transnational films: Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017) and The Host (2006). By focusing on Bong’s powerful use of space in science fiction films that articulate the question of the human and nonhuman other, I argue that spatial production has presupposed a self-image of ‘Man’ from the imperialist institution of geography to Anthropocene geology. Bong’s employment of abstract landscapes in cinematic space – the snowy landscape in Snowpiercer, the idyllic Korean mountains in Okja and the Han River running through Seoul in The Host – reflects how post-imperial space extends and transforms the construction of colonial space in the neoliberal age. The question of dwelling and co-dwelling then arises in the alternative imaginaries of multispecies existence in the era of the postcolonial-Anthropocene. Bong’s planetary landscapes thus challenge the framing of environmental problems in any single way and refuse to posit a single kind of humanity. This article urges one to rethink the question of ‘we’ and the meaning of dwelling within the Anthropocene/Anthropocentrism by synthesizing postcolonial and transnational perspectives on space.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Parasite (2019) is the first South Korean film to win the Palme d’Or (at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival) and the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (at the 2020 Oscars).
2 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, E-book edition.
3 Koo-chul Kim, ‘Bong Joon Ho Talks About Symbols and Metaphors in Parasite’, Munwha Ilbo, 12 June 2019, http://www.munhwa.com/news/view.html?no=2019061201032412053001.
4 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 2003, pp 257–337.
5 Yusoff has extended Wynter’s argument to ‘trace the historiography of Colonial Man to Anthropocene Man to frame the so-called Geology of Mankind as a privileged subjective space’, in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, E-book edition.
6 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Yusoff’s critique on ‘the production of Global-World-Space’ also intersects with Spivak’s proposal of ‘the planet to overwrite the globe’. Gayatri Chaktravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, NY: Columba University Press, 2003, p 72.
7 David Ehrlich, ‘“Parasite” Review: Bong Joon Ho Delivers a Brilliant and Devastating Electric Shock of Economic Anxiety’, IndieWire, 21 May 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/2019/05/parasite-review-bong-joon-ho-1202143634/.
8 Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies’, Transnational Cinemas, 1(1), 2010, p 18.
9 I examined Bong's complex engagement with different filmic traditions also in 'The transcultural logic of capital: the house and stairs in Parasite', The Soft Power of the Korean Wave, Youna Kim (ed), New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 76––77.
10 ‘My Creative Impulse is Based on Encounters with the Unknown: Interview with Director Bong Joon-ho’, Bong Joon-ho: Mapping Reality within the Maze of Genre, Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2005, p 41.
11 Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, London and New York: Verso, 2008, pp 75–76.
12 Snowpiercer, DVD, directed by Bong Joon Hho, Entertainment One, 2015.
13 Inserted in the official DVD and available on YouTube, the animation not only provides a detailed account of climate change but also attempts an intergrading form between the graphic novel and cinema. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYvX1_htwQo.
14 Pierre Levy, ‘The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace’, Collective Intelligence, R Bononno (trans), Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1994, p 122. The term ‘transmedia storytelling’ is defined by Henry Jenkins as ‘the art of world making’ with ‘a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence’. See his Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006, pp 20–21. Dan Hassler-Forest also builds upon the world-making of transmedia art in his Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
15 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality’, p 288. Wynter’s ‘genre of the human’ refers to a specific mode of being that defines ‘Man’ to overrepresent the human. Latin-Christian Europe’s theocentric description of the human founded the ‘genre’ of Man as primarily the religious subject of the Church. Then, the modern state’s secular redescription defined the human as ‘the political subject of the state Man’. The West’s reinvention of its Christian self in the form of the Rational self then biologized terms and redefined Man as ‘a purely biological being’ based on Darwinian knowledge. At the same time, liberal humanist intellectuals redescribed the human as ‘optimally economic Man’. Wynter points out that each of the new descriptions nevertheless remains within the same reformulating framework of the Judeo-Christian Grand Narrative, which reinvents the Christian Other in the colonial, racial, irrational or subhuman Others.
16 Snowpiercer, DVD.
17 Joshua Schulze, ‘The Sacred Engine and the Rice Paddy: Globalization, Genre, and Local Space in the Films of Bong Joon-ho’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 47(1), 2019, p 27.
18 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality’, p 260.
19 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality’, pp 310–316. Wynter explains that the ‘space of Otherness’ projects a distinction between Heaven and Earth, Man and its human Others (e.g., women, homosexual people, the jobless and poor, native peoples, enslaved people), rational humans and irrational animals, etc.
20 Schulze, ‘The Sacred Engine’, p 27.
21 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans), Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991, p 50.
22 Sohl Lee uses these terms to describe touristic fantasy about the unknown life of North Koreans in 'Seung Woo Back's Blow Up (2005-2007)', The Korean Popular Culture Reader, Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe (ed), Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 387.
23 Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, p 86.
24 Uri Eisenzweig, Territoires occupés de l’imaginaire juif: essai sur l’espace sioniste, Paris: Christian Bourjois Editeur, 1980, p 46.
25 Eisenzweig, Territoires, p 48. Translation is mine with emphasis added.
26 Fred Lee and Steven Manicastri, ‘Not All are Aboard: Decolonizing Exodus in Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer’, New Political Science, 40(2), 2018, p 213.
27 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 51.
28 Lee and Manicastri, ‘Not All are Aboard’, p 215.
29 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 50.
30 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 50.
31 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 51.
32 Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality’, p 282.
33 Schulze, ‘The Sacred Engine’, p 28.
34 I appreciate the reviewer for reminding me of this scene.
35 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 2009, pp 214–215.
36 Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, p 222.
37 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, p 70.
38 Schulze, ‘The Sacred Engine’, p 29.
39 Anthony Carew, 'Generic Interventions: Tropes and Topicality in the Films of Bong Joon-ho', Metro Magazine, 194, Jan 2017, p. 61.
40 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 51.
41 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998, New York, NY: Verso, 1998, p 189.
42 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p 7.
43 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p 129.
44 Susan J Napier, ‘Confronting Master Narratives: History as Vision in Miyazaki Hayao’s Cinema of De-assurance’, positions, 9(2), 2001, p 478.
45 Napier, ‘Confronting Master Narratives’, p 485.
46 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p 64.
47 Alistair Swale, ‘Miyazaki Hayao and the Aesthetics of Imagination: Nostalgia and Memory in Spirited Away’, Asian Studies Review, 39(3), 2015, p 418.
48 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Space’, Diacritics, 16(1), 1986, p 22.
49 Foucault, ‘Of Other Space’, p 26.
50 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter (trans), New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971, pp 145–161; reprinted in David Farrell Krell (ed), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993, p 349.
51 See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Patrick Mensah (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Elizabeth Rottenberg (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
52 Chakrabarty, ‘Anthropocene Time’, History and Theory, 57(1), 2018, p 5.
53 Chakrabarty, ‘Anthropocene Time’, p 30.
54 I appreciate the reviewer for reminding me of this scene as well.
55 Higbee and Lim, ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema’, p 10.
56 After a series of disputes between the Korean Justice Department and the US Armed Forces in Korea, the mortician was found guilty in 2005 by the Seoul Central District Court.
57 Christina Klein, ‘Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho’, American Quarterly, 60(4), 2008, p 879.
58 Klein, ‘Why American Studies’, p 895. Klein discusses a complex genealogy of Bong’s films rooted in Hollywood genre filmmaking, realist Korean art cinema, and Korean Golden Age cinema of the mid-1950s and 1960s. Korean Golden Age cinema is specifically known for stylistically hybrid films of ‘overtly national stories [that] grappled with contemporary social issues: postwar poverty and unemployment, the prostitution of ‘decent’ women to U.S. soldiers, the high moral costs of upward mobility, and the rampant smuggling of foreign goods’. See also Klein, ‘Why American Studies’, p 892.
59 Peter Y Paik, ‘The Host (2006): Life in Excess’, in Sangjoon Lee (ed), Rediscovering Korean Cinema, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019, p 429.
60 Paik, ‘The Host’, p 430.
61 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 85.
62 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 88.
63 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 88.
64 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 93.
65 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 93.
66 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 93.
67 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p 101.
68 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, David Fernbach (trans), New York, NY: Verso Books, 2016, E-book edition.
69 Regarding his choice of the English-language title The Host, instead of a literal translation of the original Korean title, Bong explains in an interview that he ‘did not want to use the word monster because this film was not intended to invoke the narrow meaning of monsters in the mainstream monster genre film’. See Meera Lee, ‘Monstrosity and Humanity in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host’, positions, 26(4), 2018, p 720.
70 Vivian Sobchack, The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Films, South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1980, p 47.
71 Brian Murphy, ‘Monster Movies: They Came From Beneath the Fifties’, The Journal of Popular Film, 1, Winter, 1972, p 38.
72 Andrew Kasch, ‘Joon-ho, Bong (The Host)’, DreadCentral.com, https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/3417/joon-ho-bong-the-host/.
73 Kasch, ‘Joon-ho, Bong (The Host)’.
74 Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’, in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, John P Leavery, Jr. (trans), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p 167.
75 Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II’, p 167.
76 Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II’, p 176.
77 Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II’, p 176.
78 Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II’, p 167. Derrida explicates a signifying relation of the French term monstre for monster to montrer, meaning ‘to show or demonstrate’. Hence ‘a monster that shows [montre] nothing’.
79 Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II’, p 167.
80 Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II’, p 168.
81 Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations’, in Katherine McKittrick (ed), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, p 23.
82 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p 359. For Heidegger, dwelling only concerns ‘Man’ and his relation to spaces through locales. Because we dwell, we build things. And only by virtue of building things, such as bridges, do locales come into existence and allow for spaces.
83 Derrida, Demeure, p 16.
84 Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, p 220.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yoon Jeong Oh
Yoon Jeong Oh is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Translingual Interventions: The Melancholic Other of Japanese Colonialism, Postcolonial Korea, and Transpacific Cosmopolitanism, which engages with translation theories, psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies to investigate the notion of singularity in translingual and transmedial practices of diasporic writers. Her research interests also include urban studies, visual studies and the links between text, media and culture.