Bong Joon-ho's monsters

What I learned from talking to Bong Joon-ho was that I harbored a sort of Asian fetishism in the sense that I transferred onto him a superior way of dealing with my own country's horrific behavior. That is, we spoke in 2006, right in the middle of Cheney/Bush's reign of bloody idiot moral nihilism, and here I was, impressed by my subject's cool and friendliness while talking about his new and awesome monster movie, THE HOST.

What did I expect, for him to leap over the table and rip my throat out while shouting "FUCK THE FTA!" just before snapping my spine?

In a way I kind of was. The US was, after all, deeply fucking Korea's economy on multiple levels in that clueless way that was the signature cruelty of the Bush years.

But I *was* and continue to be impressed with Bong's ability to separate people from their monstrous institutions, whether governments or traditional families.

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“Could you please call our creature Steve Buscemi?”, Bong Joon-ho asks, claiming that Buscemi’s character in Fargo was the “character reference” for the while creating The Host’s” title creature. I give it some thought--hmm, Buscemi’s murderous goofball character rep’s a very American sort of monstrosity, The Host deals with the same--and I say, “Okay. Sure. Steve Buscemi it is.”

We’re in Manhattan’s dingy flower district in the ramshackle offices of Magnolia Pictures. Bong is the writer/director of The Host, which is simultaneously the best monster film in forever, the most scathing political film in recent memory and a terrific tale of dysfunctional family bonding.

Bong’s a boyishly handsome 38 year old dressed in the international film director uniform of all black with a smart gray designer sweater as concession to the late winter chill. Talking with him is produces a enjoyable sense of playing cat and mouse with the roles always shifting. He makes very smart films and his one of his greatest skills is finding the absurd in the tragic and vice versa.

He says that the inspiration for his film came “When I was young and I lived by the Han River. From my apartment window I would look down on it and think, ‘What if something like Loch Ness, Nessie, came out of the Han River?’ When I first pitched it to my producer, I actually Photoshop’ed a picture I took of the Han River and Nessie together and said, “This is what the film is.”

Bong sites three films as inspirational influences. Assumably for its water-based anxieties, Bong namechecks Jaws, while John Carpenter’s The Thing manifests in the Host’s use of cool-toned tight spaces to crate a chilly, brand of claustrophobia. Also singled out is M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. “The story deals with the invasion of an alien or something,” he says somewhat dismissively, “but it’s strongly focused on the emotional details of the family.” And the Korean family and society is currently facing challenges as scary as those mucking about The Host. But that’s for later.

Like his excellent serial killer film Memories of a Murder, which eschewed a Seven-ish crescendo of horror in favor of a closing series of meditations on the mystery of human behavior, The Host too subverts Western horror structure requirements for more emotionally resonant goal.

And hence the reason why Steve Buscemi not only appears in the film’s first fifteen minutes, but in daylight. “I really hate the convention [of] waiting an hour just to see the tail of the monster,” he says, which means the audience ends up spending its time simply wondering “what the creature looks like. Or, ‘I wonder how we kill it?’ That would have been very”--a shrug-- “ordinary.”

But doing it his way, “the audience, already having seen the monster, can explore other things. They can concentrate on the needs and emotions of the family.”

Of course, the 800 pound gorilla sitting in on any conversation about The Host is its politics. “When the creature is given birth by an America pouring all this formaldehyde into the Han River, I guess...you could say it’s a metaphor for America.”

“When we showed it at Cannes. There was one journalist in particular who, during the press conference, kept repeating, “The monster’s America, right? The monster’s America!””

Beat. “Anyway, it turns out he was from the Middle East.”

After out laughter subsides, he adds, ”But I think it would be kind of wrong to just simplify it so, well...simply.”

True: after the opening salvoes of anti-American sentiment, Bong widens his view to include an inept/corrupt Korean government and the pan-national corporate misery profiteering enabled by Steve Buscemi’s rampage. Says Bong, “The film becomes very universal if you ask the question, “Has any state or country or system ever helped the weak person?”

And so the film is at heart about “the torment of the family--the family not getting any support from the state or the society.”

Adding to the film’s crankiness is the reality of a South Korea grappling with The Korea-US Free Trade Act, the mere mention of which has Bong hooting “FTA!!!” in (possibly) mock horror.

To its detractors--the majority of South Koreans--the FTA is viewed as sweetheart deal for US pharmaceutical and industrial agricultural interests that would totally screw up Korea’s peasant family rice farming tradition, while also erasing regulations that have required that fifty per cent of Korean film be homegrown, thus allowing US film product to flood the Korean market.

“I grew up watching American films,” Bong says, “listening to American music, eating American fast food”-- ‘Super size me!’”

“But at the same time there’s that stress that’s coming from stuff like the FTA and the [resulting Korean public] frustration and hysteria. As a filmaker...the FTA...it really stresses me out. It’s not just political ideology so much as an everyday life...with the farmer, it’s the same thing: it’s about their harvest. It’s connected to life itself.”

Does he think those stressors explain the film’s incredible success in Korea? He goes for the feint with a grin: “I don’t know. Maybe it was the aggressive distribution?”


There’s no pause when I ask him if he feels a kinship to Guillermo Del Toro and his blend of the beautiful, fantastic and political. “Yes. But I think he’s more visually extravagant than I am, or beautiful. For me, I want to create such images, but at the same time, there’s a twisted part of me that what’s to destroy the beauty!”

With our allotted time running out, I go for the easy closing question. What does he expect US audiences to take from his film?
“My hope is they enjoy this weak family story. Even in America, unless you’re of a very special class, [audiences should be able to] enjoy the everyday Joe, family story....and if they leave the theater thinking, that would be great.”

Even with that scene where the one good American proves himself useless?

A parting grin. “The actor is Canadian. Blame Canada.”

NUCLEAR FAMILY WAR and Veronica Mars And Battlestar Galactica

[This was first written for City Paper in 2006 but I stil stand by the basic ideas]

TV needs to reflect viewer desire and perceived reality. Conservatives can make as much noise as they like about reanimating the traditional family to the point of obliterating alternatives; what matters to television is the reality on the ground. And it looks like this: According to Divorce Magazine, the percentage of folks married was, as of 2002, 59 percent of the population, down from 62 percent in 1990. The 2000 U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 13.5 million single parents had custody of 21.7 million children. Single-mother families increased from 7 million in 1990 to 10 million in 2000. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, in a 2006 study, found that children raised in families "without fathers, both by lesbian mothers and by single heterosexual mothers," experienced a generally superior parenting experience.

Television depends on either a literal or instinctive grasp of such facts, which in turn helps explain why huge corporations have banked on such wide-ranging single-parent shows as Everwood, Gilmore Girls, Reba, andSupernatural. The success of these shows, assorted queer-themed programs, and HBO’s ironic inverse Big Love--about a polygamist with too much family--underlines the reality: The American family is radically redefining itself in ways immune to traditionalist scolding and wishful thinking.

In another very obvious way, TV’s reflecting nature pops up in the way it deals with post-Sept. 11 fear, helplessness, and government indifference. The CSI variations, Bones, Cold Case, House, Numb3rs, and NCISserve up an endless array of implacable, invisible enemies that can only be dealt with by experts who buck The System--which is almost always assumed to be incompetent, corrupt, or both.

The finest television combines the problems of increasingly fractured social groupings and external threats and brings them to a fine boil in the cauldron of family. And nothing boils more than Denis Leary and Peter Tolan’s singularly seething Rescue Me. Leary plays Tommy Gavin, an underpaid New York Irish-American firefighter haunted by the ghosts of people he didn’t save at the World Trade Center. An epic drunk, Tommy screws his dead cousin’s wife, kidnaps his own kids, and tries to pummel red-staters out for a grief fix at ground zero. But he’s still a lifesaver, flaws and all.

While arguably an exaggeration--at least to those not raised in Irish-American families--Rescue Me creates an otherwise accurate, enraged, and aching look at the class and cultural stressors fragmenting blue-collar families. So much so that it’s the object of a jihad by the Parents Television Council, led by right-wing scold L. Brent Bozell, the idea apparently being that if you don’t show the truth it’ll go away. But like other shows about fragged families, such as those in Six Feet Under and the monumentally popular Desperate Housewives,Rescue Me reaffirms its audience’s sense of who they are, while offering the solace that their situation may be better in comparison.

Rescue Me’s firefighters constantly rib each other about being queer. While a defensive reaction to the reality of these mainly male firefighters spending most of their time together, it also helps them cope with the fact that they’re each other’s real family, united in mission and values and loyal to the core. And this idea is one only television, with its recurring characters and season-long tales, can do justice to: the metaphorical family unit.

Not just any group of biologically unrelated folks smooshed together constitutes a metaphorical family. While the doctors in House care about one another, they’re too self-immersed to cohere, and anyway, the show mainly exists to watch Hugh Laurie rip patients a new one. Metaphorical TV families, like the real item, are not about one person--or if they appear to be, that person is just an entry point to explore other family issues.

The defining figure of the new metaphorical family may just be Joss Whedon. His Buffy the Vampire Slayer,Angel, and Firefly were often about nothing but the struggles of metaphorical families to define and defend themselves. Look no further than the 2000 episode "Family," in which Buffy’s metaphorical family--blue-collar Xander, father figure Giles, and supernatural sister Dawn--band together to support Tara, the girlfriend of newly out Willow. Tara’s biological father shows up claiming she’ll become a demon if she doesn’t return home. Buffy and the gang reject his craven power play. Infuriated, he says, "We’re her blood kin. Who the hellare you?" Buffy: "We’re family."

"Blood kin" and metaphorical family fuse on Alias, in which double agent Sydney Bristow’s biological father is assimilated into her core family of loyal, beloved co-workers. More subtly, the cops on the wire in The Wire are more intractably connected to each other than their official families, and more overtly, the unrelated hotties ofSex and the City form a family to support their Gotham adventures, as do the queer families of The L Word,Will and Grace, and Queer as Folk. Dead Like Me, meanwhile, took the metaphorical family thing to delightfully ridiculous analogous extremes, with a clan of the deceased--a girl named George, Jewish father figure, slacker brother, and cranky older meter maid often reluctantly pressed into mother duty--easing folks’ passage to the afterlife.

Right now, the two shows that most elegantly fuse external and internal threats to the family--traditional and metaphorical--are unsurprisingly two of the best shows on the small screen: Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars and Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. Amateur sleuth Veronica (Kristen Bell) and dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni)--the most realistically positive daughter-father relationship limned in any medium for some time--live in a sunny Southern California town infested with moral rot, racism, and elitist cruelty, a microcosm of Bush America. For all Veronica’s plucky wit and the bedrock relationship between she and Keith, the show is incredibly despairing. The powerful and rotten often get away with their crimes--including Veronica’s rape. Veronica’s efforts to locate the truth are rewarded with smirks from the law and corrupt alike. The show’s most scary element, though, is Veronica’s inability to form an extended family.

Once upper but now barely middle class, she doesn’t fit in with the rich kids, while her dalliances with the few elite teens who aren’t outright bastards earn her the distrust of possible ally Weevil (Francis Capra), a poor Latino biker. And slippery race politics threaten her friendship with her African-American best friend, Wallace (Percy Daggs III). At one almost intolerably painful juncture, you’re led to think that Keith has died--this long after Veronica’s alcoholic mother has abandoned her--and Veronica’s primal weeping against a backdrop of city lights and black sky makes you realize, My God, he’s all she has. Aside from etching a raw line around the limits of the biological family, it makes you realize how much she bears beneath her quips, how alone she is, how brave.

Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, is the show future media scholars will reference when trying to figure out what the hell was up with America after Sept. 11. It starts with the decimation of humankind courtesy a surprise attack by the man-made slave class of robots and human clones called Cylons. The titular battleship and a small fleet of human survivors spend the show trying to escape the superior Cylon forces.

What creator Moore does with this standard sci-fi armature is brilliant. Most everyone in the Galactica fleet has lost their biological families in the attack, and the show posits the survivors as the ultimate extended metaphorical family. This reading is boldfaced by episodes that play out like the Hatfields and McCoys in space, with the idealistic Galactica "family" up against the cold pragmatists of another surviving ship, the Pegasus. The defining difference between the two: The Pegasus crew tortures their female Cylon prisoner, while the Galactica folks try to figure out why she is what she is. Other contemporary concerns appear in SF drag--mainly, the place of democracy, surveillance, and open debate in times of war. But Battlestar Galactica is most acute in its observations on family and its kissing cousin, identity.

While there’s much to be gleaned about the fluid nature of family in extreme situations from the relationships between Galactica’s Cmdr. Adama (Edward James Olmos) and his surviving son and his dead son’s lover, the location of the show’s central theme is in the body and soul of Sharon (Grace Park)--or rather, the Cylon clone of Sharon.

As a Cylon, the Sharon clone hates humanity for its self-destructive cruelty, but she’s also in love with one of the ship’s pilots, is carrying his child, and constantly sees her belief of humanity as scumbags countered by Adama and company’s decency--and increasingly takes to helping that crew. Will she cave in to the wishes of her Cylon forebears or bond with the Galactica family? More importantly, can she rise above being "born bad" and craft her own viable, independent identity?