Hating Oldboy, Loving Oldboy

Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy had its South Korean release in 2003, won the Grand Prize at Cannes last year, and has now opened theatrically in the US.  I haven't begun to try surveying the critical response nationally--you can always go to the 117 reviews in several languages linked via the film's IMDb page--but I have picked out four that seem roughly representative.  Pro are David Edelstein at Slate Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com.  Con, energetically so, are Manolah Dargis of the New York Times--registration required, but if you aren't registered you can get the flavor from my remarks in the immediately preceding post--and Armond White in the New York Press.

I saw the film for the second time this week, after a cooling-off period of six months, and nothing has quelled my own enthusiasm.  But almost as interesting is the polarization Oldboy has occasioned, the strenuous approval and savage denunciation it has brought out.  Why?  What is being argued about here?  And what, in my view, is being missed?

I see three issues.  First, there is the matter of substance versus surface.  Dargis thinks Park has produced just another Gap commercial, flash and fire with nothing beneath; White sees the stylistic talent but comes to the same conclusion: an eye-catching but empty vessel.  It's hard to understand how they reached that point.  Oldboy is a story of redemptive love--and the redemption is achieved, at phenomenal cost, but achieved nonetheless--and of the entrapping coils of vengeance, Park's announced subject for this film, its predecessor, and its successor.  Oldboy's protagonist, Oh Dae-Su (unforgettably played by Choi Min-Sik), has every reason to seek vengeance, but seems equally propelled by the need to find the "why?" for what was done to him.  As he says, though, when he learns the story behind the story, he can't give up the thirst for revenge, it's become a part of him.  Similarly, his tormentor, Yu Ji-Tae (and plaudits as well to Lee Woo-Jin), is driven by a maniacal insistence to avenge a wrong, and when he has done so, he asks himself what there is left to live for.  These interlocking stories are told through numerous cinematic devices: editing, split screen, film textures, time and consciousness shifts, digitization, whole new ways of staging traditional scenes (a fight is put on in a basement hallway, where Oh, wielding only a claw hammer, works his way from one end to the other through a ferocious band of Korean thugs; the camera tracks from the side, left to right, maintaining the same distance throughout rather than diving into the middle of the action); backflashes galore; and plenty more.  But for all the relish Park demonstrates in his ability to stage these pyrotechnics, I never had the sense he lost sight of his story and the deep implications it held for the way we look at ourselves and our fellow humans.  (There is more to be said about the way Park handles the redemption scene but it's impossible to discuss it without revealing an astounding plot revelation, a scruple which did not by the way inhibit White.)

Second, there is the matter of violence.  Perhaps people object to Park's lack of bashfulness about cinematic display because so much of it depicts violence--graphic even by the standards of reasonably jaded western audiences.  Today, Dargis reviewed Sin City, reputedly a massively violent film, and found it a yawner.  Something about Old Boy triggered her attack mode: could it be that Park was simply too effective in showing what we have learned to absorb and pass off as "movie business"?  Or was it that, amidst all the gore, Park still found ways to laugh--sardonically, ruefully, but laugh nonetheless?  I'd love to give some examples, but again, most come as surprises and I fell honor-bound to keep them that way.  One perhaps innocent revelation is Oh's beatific smile as he opens the elevator at the end of hallway littered with broken goons.

The subject of film violence is swampy territory, and I enter with caution.  But I am struck by the absence of one dimension in the rejections Oldboy's.  Anyone writing about notably violent American films from the late 1960s, like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969), could hardly be taken seriously if no mention was made of violence in American life at the same moment, upon which these and many other films were commenting, or at least using as background for resonance: the political assassinations, the civil rights violence and urban riots, the Vietnam war.  But people feel free to criticize Park for all the mayhem without mentioning the extensive violence that South Korean military dictatorships put the country through from 1961 to the late 1980s.  Park was born in 1963, and indeed when asked about violence in interviews has said that Koreans of his generation have experienced so much of it for so long, audiences have granted them the latitude to explore it frankly and realistically.  Valid point, it seems to me.  But then I believe violence is a legitimate topic for art--has been in western culture since The Iliad--and that we will never minimize this scourge without confronting it unflinchingly, exploring its undeniable fascination, honestly and repeatedly accepting its consequences.

Finally, both White and Dargis are not content to take apart the film; they also indulge in animadversions to its audiences, specifically the people who enjoy it.  These are "cinephiliacs," a word of which I have only become aware recently, and which--judging from their articles--refers to people without critical standards who cannot distinguish between art and rubbish, people who like pretty much anything and, to get back to the first point, like it even more if it's brightly packaged and novel.  (White: "Our jaded culture only cares about the schlock of the new."  I suppose that accounts for all the remakes, the apparently unkillable biopic, and on and on.) 

Try as I might, I don't know how they have this inside knowledge of the film's admirers.  It couldn't, could it, be that those who have expressed approving judgments, and therefore don't see Oldboy their way, must therefore suffer from some aesthetic pathology which has corrupted love of cinema into a form of madness?  A particularly unworthy guilt-by-association ploy that both writers use is to tar Park with the Quentin Tarantino brush.  Tarantino was head of the Cannes Jury last year; Oldboy won the Grand Prize (number two behind the Palme d'Or, which of course went to Farenheit 9/11); Tarantino has shown a certain taste for violence and cinematic splash, and if he likes something, it's got to be bad.  Q.E.D. 

When I'm at my best (hey, it happens now and then), I try to judge a film by what I see on the screen, and not who I imagine might be liking it or not liking it, then fantasizing what they must be like by the supposed distance of their conclusions from mine.  A daring statement of critical principles, I'm sure, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.   

Comments

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George