Giving death: the hero as sovereign utility in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013)

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the theme of sacrificial heroism in the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s film Snowpiercer (2013). In order to become the hero, the film’s main character, Curtis, must risk his life and embrace death. While a hero’s death can solidify heroic status, a lack of death reveals a more complicated formula in which the hero must prove his worth by performing a sacrifice deemed equivalent in value to that heroic end. In other words, to maintain heroic sovereignty, the hero is required to not only give, but also receive. Revealing this process of valuation and exchange in the hero-making process, the film calls attention to the existence of utility and violence inherent within the act of sacrifice itself. Referencing South Korea’s own historical and social experiences with duty, redemption, and sacrifice, the paper problematizes such predeterminations of the hero’s sacrificial morality by re-considering its capacity to not only manipulate, but also become manipulated by its intrinsically utilitarian function.

KEYWORDS:

• Snowpiercer
• Bong Joon-ho
• sacrifice
• ethics
• utility
• heroism
• ‘gift of death’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gregers Andersen and Esben Bjerggaard Nielsen (2018) also analyse the Anthropocene and focus on the biopolitics visible within the film’s ecological and technological plot points.

2 Steve Choe’s book Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016) also tackles the ethical nuances portrayed in contemporary Korean film. Differentiating between mythic or sovereign violence from divine violence, Choe characterizes the violence in Korean films as ‘pure,’ rather than spectacle, in its ability to relinquish sovereignty back to the audience.

3 Bong himself has stated in interviews, ‘The comic book came out 30 years ago, but the concept of capitalism driving the world is still relevant today – it’s a very universal theme. Putting it in a train is kind of like Noah’s ark, but different from a boat or plane. A train is already divided into sections, and that feeling was very key’ (Bong 2014).

4 The Korean War is often characterized as the first military action of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. It began on June 25, 1950 when the North Korean People’s Army, backed by the Soviet Union, crosses the 38th parallel into the south. After three years of stalemate, American officials brokered an armistice in July 1953, halting but not ending the war. Soon after the Korean War, South Korea went through a period of autocratic militarization under the rule of Presidents Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo-hwan between the years of 1963 and 1987.

5 As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, subsumed under this larger ‘collective (and national) identity,’ marginal subjects, such as women, ethnic minorities and the working class, undoubtedly felt more acutely the burden to ‘sacrifice’ during the economic downturn. Although issues of gender and class are important in this discussion of collectivized sacrifice, this paper’s primary subject of inquiry surrounds the character of ‘Curtis’ and his heroic and utilitarian drive. It is also worth noting that Bong himself often sidesteps gender issues in his work (other than to portray extreme versions of ‘motherhood’).

6 As an editor reminds me, Yoon Jae-gyun’s film Ode to My Father (2014) portrays Korea’s historical moments of communal sacrifice through the personalized experiences of the main patriarch, Deoksu. While the film was a huge hit at the box office – the fourth highest-grossing film in South Korea with over 14.2 million tickets sold – it also faced some hefty criticism for its glorification of generational sacrifice and justification of blind nationalism, signaling a shift in popular opinion among the younger generations regarding developmental ideology and its emphasis on sacrifice (Ahn 2015; Ryu 2015).

7 The doting mother paradigm is often referred to as ‘wise mother, good wife’ (hyeonmo yangcheo). It was constructed in reference to Korea’s traditional Confucian morals and propagated during the colonial era as a branch off from Japan’s Meiji period gender roles, which emphasized similar maternal virtues. For more see Hyaeweol Choi (2009). An example of such a traditional father figure as moral pillar can be seen in the discussion of the actor Kim Sung-ho by Kelly Jeong (2013).

8 South Korean film has often utilized these aporia inherent within the act of sacrifice. For example, sacrifice’s violent tendencies is also displayed in the relationship between Yubong and Songhwa in Im Kwon-taek’s canonical film Sopyonje (1993).

9 Halbertal outlines this reversal through Heinrich Himmler’s speech to his SS officers. ‘The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening order an organization could ever receive.’ … ‘We realize that what we are expecting from you is superhuman, to be superhumanly inhuman.’ (2012, 70).

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Sue Heun Kim Asokan

Sue Heun Kim Asokan is Visiting Assistant Professor of Korean in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Colorado Boulder.