The Handmaiden and Colonial Korea, an Interview with Dr. Kelly Jeong Transcript

Episode 8: The Handmaiden and Colonial Korea, An Interview with Dr. Kelly Jeong Transcript

Stephanie [00:00:00] Hello, I'm Steph.

Melissa [00:00:01] And I'm Mel.

Stephanie [00:00:02] And this is East Asia for All, a podcast about East Asian pop culture and media.

Melissa [00:00:07] If you're listening right now, you, like us, probably also have an addiction to East Asian ﬁlms, cartoons, memes, music and much, much more.

Stephanie [00:00:17] Between the two of us, we've lived on and oﬀ in China, Taiwan, and Japan since 2007.

Melissa [00:00:22] We also both have PhDs in Chinese history, and we're both working as professors in the Midwest.

Stephanie [00:00:28] I'm at St. Olaf College in the Departments of History and Asian Studies.

Melissa [00:00:31] And I teach history at St. Mary's University of Minnesota.

Stephanie [00:00:35] So we're taking our love for East Asia, our experiences there, and the knowledge we've gained in the ivory tower and making it available beyond our classroom walls.

Melissa [00:00:47] Today's episode is about The Handmaiden, a 2016 ﬁlm by South Korean director Park Chan-wook.

Stephanie [00:00:54] ...of Oldboy fame. If you keep up with Park's ﬁlmography.

Melissa [00:00:57] The Handmaiden has a really interesting lineage. It's an adaptation of Sarah Waters' 2002 novel Fingers Smith.

Stephanie [00:01:04] Waters' novel is set in Victorian-era Britain and it's sort of a crime story, historical mystery and lesbian romance. It's pretty much got it all.

Melissa [00:01:13] Park Chan-wook's retelling is set in colonial Korea, but it retains most of Waters' characters and plot points pretty faithfully.

Stephanie [00:01:21] The general plot of both the original novel and Park's ﬁlm is that the central protagonist is a woman, a pickpocket who is raised in a sort of for-proﬁt foundling home and orphanage. She's asked by an associate, a con artist, to help him scam rich heiress out of her fortune.

Melissa [00:01:38] In the ﬁlm Kim Tae-ri plays the protagonist, Sook-Hee, a young Korean woman who lives in Japanese occupied Korea.

Stephanie [00:01:46] The ﬁlm's con man, who goes by the Japanese name Count Fujiwara, asks Sook-Hee to help him scam a rich heiress. A Japanese woman named Lady Hideko.

Melissa [00:01:56] Count Fujiwara wants Sook-Hee to become the handmaiden of Lady Hideko and help him seduce Lady Hideko so that she will marry him and he can abscond with her fortune, giving a portion to Sook-Hee for her help.

Stephanie [00:02:09] As we mentioned in the interview, few of the characters are who they seem to be, and the plot quickly becomes twisted as each character pursues their own interests and tries to hide their identity and plan from others. Melissa [00:02:20] You'll notice that there are both Japanese and Korean characters in this ﬁlm, even though it's entirely set in Korea. That's because the ﬁlm is set during the Japanese colonial period.

Stephanie [00:02:30] Historical recap: Japan oﬃcially colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945, but actually, Japan exercised a great deal of control there much earlier. Following its victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the Sino-Russian War* [Note: actually Russo-Japanese] in 1905.

Melissa [00:02:46] No specific date is given for the film's setting, but we can probably assume it takes place during official Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945.

Stephanie [00:02:56] And Japanese colonial rule was brutal. The colonial government did back oﬀ in some ways immediately after the March First Independent Movement in 1919, which was a popular protest movement against Japanese rule, but as the decades went on, Japan's control became tighter and tighter.

Melissa [00:03:13] The Japanese government's policies attempted to force Koreans into renaming themselves with Japanese names, speaking Japanese instead of Korean, and worshiping the Japanese emperor.

Stephanie [00:03:25] They also drafted men into working for and eventually serving in the Japanese Imperial Army.

Melissa [00:03:30] You may also be familiar with the so-called "comfort women," women who were tricked and coerced into serving as sexual slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army.

Stephanie [00:03:39] In general, there were many other coercive measures designed to simultaneously exploit and assimilate Koreans. While Japanese colonial settlers in Korea had many political and economic privileges that Koreans themselves were systematically denied.

Melissa [00:03:54] The ﬁlm does an excellent job showing the uneven power dynamics in colonial Korea.

Stephanie [00:03:59] And The Handmaiden is a really rich and fascinating ﬁlm. But we gotta warn you that the ﬁlm is quite sexually explicit and graphically violent.

Melissa [00:04:10] If you've seen other ﬁlms by Park Chan-wook, you know what you're getting into.

Stephanie [00:04:14] Nonetheless, we really enjoyed the ﬁlm and recording this episode, particularly because we're joined today by Dr. Kelly Jeong, a professor of comparative literature and Korean studies at UC Riverside.

Melissa [00:04:27] We hope you enjoyed the episode.

Melissa [00:04:33] Hello, everyone. Today, we're going to be talking about Park Chan-work's The Handmaiden. And we've brought in a guest interviewee to help us talk about that. We have Dr. Kelly Jeong. Would you mind introducing yourself?

Kelly [00:04:46] Hi, everyone. My name is Kelly Jeong and I'm at UC Riverside at the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages. And my main areas of research and teaching are modern Korean literature and Korean ﬁlm.

Melissa [00:04:59] Which is exactly why we brought you in. It's perfect.

Kelly [00:05:04] Thanks for inviting me. Stephanie [00:05:05] Yeah. Thanks so much for coming. We're so excited. We've been meaning to do an episode on The Handmaiden for a really long time. We were just thinking one of the ﬁrst things we're thinking about with The Handmaiden as we watched it, considering especially, you know, to critical acclaim, it was very celebrated. It was sold in 175 countries. It grossed over 37.7 million dollars. But one thing we're thinking about was how popular was it with mainstream audiences? And I don't know if you can speak to that at all. Just kind of a general question.

Kelly [00:05:36] You mean to mainstream audiences in Korea?

Stephanie [00:05:38] Exactly.

Kelly [00:05:39] So Park Chan-wook's, I think his first feature film called JSA, Joint Security Area, did really well, which allowed him to make further more movies, more and more feature length films. And this is only, the only other film that did, maybe just not as well, but pretty well. So he is a critically acclaimed filmmaker, but his films don't always do very well with the mainstream audiences in South Korea, who find a subject matter sometimes kind of difficult to handle. So, for example, among the Revenge trilogy, I think Oldboy did quite well. But the other two not so well. So this one did OK. It wasn't a spectacular box office success, but it did pretty well.

Melissa [00:06:27] OK.

Stephanie [00:06:28] Yeah. Very interesting.

Melissa [00:06:29] Yeah. And then I think one of our follow up questions about that was then how common, well-received, popular are queer stories? Queer romances, lesbian romances like this one.

Kelly [00:06:45] My short answer will be it depends on the genre. Right. So manga or manhwa in Korean, they're very popular. So I think you're well aware of the yaoi genre, right.

Stephanie [00:06:56] Right. That's exactly what we were thinking.

Kelly [00:06:57] Yes. Yes. And the baeghab or "lily" genre is lesbian version of yaoi. So they're quite popular among especially younger audiences. But in terms of ﬁlm and TV, I think it still has sort of limited appeal. Yeah, I would say that it actually is a liability when it comes to major production like this to have a sense, have the central characters who are involved in a lesbian relationship. So this was a big risk, I think, that the director took and I'm sure his production company. But, you know, it paid oﬀ. I think in the end, because obviously it's central to the narrative. Right.

Melissa [00:07:45] Yeah, deﬁnitely.

Stephanie [00:07:47] Right. That was also my kind of gut feeling was that perhaps it maybe was a bit of a risk and I don't know, so this is related to the yaoi phenomenon in Japan. I wonder if so then for queer love stories or lesbian love stories in South Korea. Is it also the case that it is the main audience is straight women? This is the case saying yaoi, young straight women...

Melissa [00:08:11] Right.

Stephanie [00:08:11] ...often, with these yaoi or boys love stories.

Kelly [00:08:14] Yes. Yeah.

Stephanie [00:08:15] Is that also the case?

Kelly [00:08:16] Yeah. That is the case.

Stephanie [00:08:17] OK. Kelly [00:08:17] That is the case. And I think in terms of genre, they are the main sort of demographic for that genre. But then generally speaking, women from late teens to 30s with expendable cash, they are the biggest consumers of these popular cultural products, including yaoi genre. So they are the ones who go to museums and galleries and pop concerts, so on and so forth. So they are the backbone of the industry, so to speak.

Stephanie [00:08:48] Yeah, that ﬁts with what I was thinking.

Melissa [00:08:51] Yeah, yeah, definitely. So how does this movie fit in to Korean film and Korean pop culture in general?

Stephanie [00:08:59] And maybe especially with regard to Japanese colonialism?

Melissa [00:09:04] Exactly. Yeah.

Stephanie [00:09:05] We were really curious about that. You know, pop cultural representations of Japanese colonialism and how this movie kind of ﬁts into that category, if there is one.

Kelly [00:09:15] It's a brand new category, actually, because there have been representation, numerous representations, of the colonial era in Korean film. But I think they were, sort of, they had the nationalistic bent. Right. So that's quite different from how they're represented today and how those realities are represented in films today. There is a kind of a nostalgia for colonial-era glamor and also heroism that is you cannot actually see in 2019 South Korea. Right. So people, young, dashing heroes, you know, risking their lives for the country, that kind of narrative. There have been a number of examples that are wildly successful at the box office. One is the Assassination. There is the Age of Shadows. So and so forth. So these are big examples of how the directors, popular film directors can really tap into a certain kind of zeitgeist at the moment. And then it kind of really taps into what people are thirsting at the moment. So this case wasn't like that in a sense that he was making this film not based on any kind of sort of the trend that he was sensing, because I think he's a trend maker, trendsetter rather than somebody who follows trends. So yeah, in terms of how it fits into Korean popular film tradition, it's mixing different genres. I think that's very typical of South Korean contemporary cinema. So it's going from mystery to horror to love story. Right. And very kind of dark comedy also. Right. So I think he's very comfortable traversing different genres and, you know, does each genre very well and has the knack for sort of combining them together in one film. And so I think all of his films show that kind of tendency. And that's not very different in terms of sort of the larger trends from other South Korean filmmakers' works.

Stephanie [00:11:37] That's so true. You know, I think we commented on this actually when we were watching it, that somehow, despite being very dark and the subject matter sometimes being quite heavy, that it was quite comedic as well, which we really... Yeah. So that fits well with what we were thinking or watching. That's definitely one of the themes. Another theme that we felt maybe fit well with your work as well, too, is this idea of wounded masculinity it's something that you write about. Do you feel like there are kind of overlapping themes in The Handmaiden and your research on wounded masculinity?

Kelly [00:12:10] Oh, yeah. Perhaps. I think I can see the parallel between because the colonial period, I think you can see in different characters how the hierarchy works out. Right. And it depends on one's class that is defined by not sort of refinement, but rather money. Right. Because you can by refinement through money. Right. Which is a very vulgar idea, which is Kozuki.

Stephanie [00:12:37] The uncle, yes.

Kelly [00:12:37] You know, the uncle is doing that. And later we find out that the Count also wants to do that. Right. You want to spend however much money just to experience one dining, you know, one evening of dining at a fancy restaurant, that kind of thing. The hierarchy works out in terms of ethnicity. If you're Japanese, you're the mainstream, or the hegemonic group. So you're higher than the colonial subjects, Koreans. But then if you're male, you have certain privileges, right. So there all these kind of calculations. That's why I think it at the end, towards the end of the film, it's quite interesting that the main character disguises herself as a man. But the man doesn't get to speak because she will betray herself if she opens her mouth. Right. So there are a lot of interesting things going on and really, really depends on the context. And I think that house, that creepy house in the mountains, is such a microcosm of how these relationships fluctuate and change.

Stephanie [00:13:42] Right. And the destruction of the books. The end with Count Fujiwara and the uncle. That kind of it was a more Old Boy kind of move.

Kelly [00:13:54] Torture room, yes.

Stephanie [00:13:54] Yeah.

Melissa [00:13:54] Well, one thing that I thought was really interesting watching it, especially the second time, was remembering even from the beginning that almost every single character is Korean except for Lady Hideko.

Kelly [00:14:07] Yeah.

Melissa [00:14:07] And so even the characters who were at the beginning, you thought they were Japanese. They have a lot of the privilege of being of what it would mean to be Japanese, the money and the power. But she's the only real character who main speaking-role character who is Japanese.

Kelly [00:14:23] That's right.

Melissa [00:14:23] In the whole ﬁlm.

Kelly [00:14:24] That's right. Yeah. I think that's other than her inherited money, that's the source of her power. Right. So she has all these, she grew up with all this. Basically, instruments of her power: the servants...and even I think Kozuki is somebody who can serve her in her little scheme of how she wants to actualize her life. Right. So I think she is the great conceit of the film is that we are led for the first part to greatly underestimate, right, Hideko and then she, we have to go back to her beginning, so to speak, and how she was always a little bitch. Right. And how she was always rebellious and a bad girl. And then we find out, oh, Hideko is really like this. Right. So I thought that was sort of the fun revelation that we don't necessarily get in the original, original fiction. I think from Part Two it greatly changes from the original.

Melissa [00:15:28] Yeah, deﬁnitely.

Stephanie [00:15:29] Right. And in interviews with the author, Sarah Waters, she does talk about that. And I think speciﬁcally the idea of, well, is it "inspired by"? Is it an adaptation? So that's also one question that we had was, do you see this as a successful transnational adaptation or maybe how well...

Melissa [00:15:48] What would we mean?

Stephanie [00:15:48] Yeah, is it translation. You know, what, what does that mean?

Kelly [00:15:53] If I had to make a judgment, I would say it's inspired by the original rather than an adaptation because the setting and, you know, some other relationships. So I think in the beginning at least look very similar to the original but I don't think it's true from Part Two. And I think he did a similar thing with the film Thirst, which was based on Thérès Raquin, which is 19th- century French fiction. Right. And so there too he follows certain contours of the original work, but in the end, he just lets his imagination take over. So I think the end product sort of looks very different from the original. And same thing here. I don't know. I think it's inspired by, rather than successful or not so successful translation or adaptation of foreign origin material. Melissa [00:16:48] Yeah. One other change that was enabled by this shift, having Pak Chan-wook set the movie in colonial Korea was, you have a new layer of hierarchy and power, which is this colonial relationship between Japan and Korea. And one of the ways that that comes out that I thought was used really well in the film was the use of language and the use of Korean and Japanese. And even for audience members who don't speak those languages and wouldn't necessarily know which one is being spoken. They even got color coded in the subtitles to make sure you always knew which language is being spoken, which I thought was really helpful and useful, especially when one sentence would contain words from both languages.

Stephanie [00:17:30] Right.

Melissa [00:17:30] So I didn't know if you had any thoughts about the use of language in that ﬁlm.

Kelly [00:17:33] I just came from attending my own panel [at the Association from Asian Studies Conference]. Where one panelist was addressing how Park Chan-wook uses language in a very, very interesting way to make the audience be aware of what kind of speech is being used by which characters. I think he does it brilliantly in this ﬁlm because the ability to speak Japanese during the colonial era is great power. Typically, only the educated elites could read, write and speak Japanese. Most Korean colonial subjects could understand some Japanese in everyday setting based on the context and also understand commands and maybe say a few phrases here and there. But that was about it. So the fact that, for example, Kozuki's ex-wife, it turns out, right...

Melissa [00:18:30] Sasaki.

Kelly [00:18:31] Sasaki speaks Japanese and Korean both. It kind of implies certain things about the characters. So I think the fact that also certain characters want to completely erase their Korean-ness by their language and also the way they dress and behave with other Koreans, for example. Those are all about, I think, power rather than anything else. And through that, I think the characterisation, character development takes place.

Melissa [00:19:04] You learn a lot just by watching the language they use. And in what situations.

Stephanie [00:19:08] Yeah. And what language they prefer. And then like when Uncle Kozuki, he discovers that Count Fujiwara is not a count and that he has created...they switch over to Korean. Hideko seems to have a preference for speaking Korean, even though she is Japanese. It really reveals a lot about colonial hierarchies, language, class, power. Even though it's an adaptation of a novel set in Victorian Britain.

Kelly [00:19:34] Where only one language is spoken, right. And I think in terms of character development, it's interesting that earlier on in the ﬁlm before her true nature is revealed, we kind of get a sense of what Hideko is capable of when she is reading in Japanese and acting out these you know obscene scenes through her voice and as an audience you are sitting there thinking, somebody who's able to do that cannot be all meek and mild. Somebody who's doing that is not just a pure victim. Right. So I think he's sort of, there are layers that you can go into in terms of language and characterisation. You know, things, things like power and how one retains or releases power.

Melissa [00:20:21] Yeah. Deﬁnitely. And that really speaks to also one of our questions, which was about what this ﬁlm tells us about colonial Korea and the way that's viewed in contemporary South Korea anyway, which we've already talked about but I don't know if you have anything else to add up about that.

Kelly [00:20:39] I briefly mentioned the nostalgia that seems very much the current mood of the audiences. And I think Park Chan-wook's vision of colonial Korea sort of actualized in this very exotic, setting of this house is his vision. It doesn't necessarily reflect what Korean audiences think of when they think about colonial Korea. But I think there is a kind of a lurid fascination with the kind of forbidden things that are mentioned and visualized in this film in conjunction with the colonial setting. So I think it's quite similar in the sense to the original, which takes place in Victorian England and all kinds of crazy things take place in Victorian England. And as contemporary readers, we are fascinated by those things. I think it's that similar kind of dynamic. But regarding colonial, the colonial setting in films, I think Korean audiences especially, you know, I think younger audiences who really have very little clue about the period, unless they studied the history very extensively. I find it just really, really interesting because that's when so many things are introduced and practiced for the first time. Things that we take for granted today and you realize, oh, they're not Japanese but Western in origin. And there were Japanized before they come into Korea and then they're Korean-ized. So there are these multiple layers of how culture and artifacts and goods are translated or transplanted from one context to another to another. So I think those things are quite interesting to watch in films. Maybe that's what a lot of audiences are responding to.

Melissa [00:22:28] Which is also I mean, of course, we study China and the exact same process was happening in China. Everything was being ﬁltered, not everything, many things were being ﬁltered through Japan then to China.

Kelly [00:22:38] Because of the colonial connection.

Melissa [00:22:40] Exactly.

Stephanie [00:22:41] Yeah. And it's interesting kind of thinking back to this question of nostalgia and thinking of all of the ﬁlms or TV shows that explored the Japanese colonial period in China. Deﬁnitely not as nostalgic, but there is something about almost like this style, right, of like this actually is the idea.

Melissa [00:22:58] The aesthetics.

Stephanie [00:22:58] Yeah, there's the aesthetic that does seem to come out really strongly.

Kelly [00:23:02] Yeah. I think in South Korean context, nostalgia is about precisely what you're talking about. It's not about the situation of being colonized, obviously, but it's about the aesthetics of how women had their hair done in a certain way. How people dressed in a certain way, even the etiquette that we kind of see in this ﬁlm, which is sort of almost a mockery of Victorian etiquette. Right. I think nostalgia is for that visualization and the optics and, you know, sort of the images, visual images of a certain bygone era that obviously we cannot experience today.

Stephanie [00:23:43] And the thing that I I think of when I'm thinking of that kind of nationalistic, the hero during the colonial period, the TV series I am, I automatically think of as Mr. Sunshine and so, and probably more popular with U.S. audiences, too, because it's on Netﬂix. But it's interesting the comparison between The Handmaiden and Mr. Sunshine there.

Kelly [00:24:02] And of course, one of the actresses is in Mr. Sunshine.

Melissa [00:24:05] Yes.

Stephanie [00:24:06] Another connection. So true.

Kelly [00:24:08] Yeah. Mr. Sunshine got a lot of ﬂak for being historically inaccurate.

Stephanie [00:24:14] Right.

Kelly [00:24:15] And I would say that it's just about accurate as Handmaiden. But yeah, I think it's for the audiences. They go to enjoy watching certain things and they have certain expectations and things to the amazing visual designers and costume designers that people like Park Chan- wook always work with and are all youngish women that are just doing amazing jobs. And then as a result, Korean audiences have, their standards gone up. Also, I think Mr. Sunshine is a very good example of the most current example of how those things are visualized today. Stephanie [00:24:58] Right. So beautiful and cinematic.

Kelly [00:24:59] Yeah. I think it's very cinematic and not made for TV kind of way. Yeah, yeah. It was quite cinematic. And the budget has gone way up.

Stephanie [00:25:09] Oh, I can imagine. Yeah.

Kelly [00:25:11] With the success of a series of Korean ﬁlms and TV products. So, you know, the more they can export. You mentioned 175 countries. The more they can sell to outside of the Korean system, the better budget they can have for the next project and the project after that, so on and so forth. So, it's sort of a cycle, right.

Stephanie [00:25:35] And Park is a really good example of that because Old Boy has quite a following in the U.S. as well. Yes. Kind of had international acclaim. He's a very good example of that.

Melissa [00:25:44] What we would like to end on is asking if you have any other recommendations for Korean pop culture products that our listeners might enjoy if they liked The Handmaiden.

Kelly [00:25:55] It depends on what aspects of The Handmaiden they enjoyed. If they want gore, I think you can easily find a sort of East Asian extreme cinema. You can Google it and find 10 examples of Korean cinema, recent examples. But if you're looking for the colonial era setting and sort of this kind of epic narrative, I would recommend a similar... Assassination by I believe the director's name is Choi Dong-hoon. And he also made Thieves. He is a very, very popular, successful, commercially successful genre director. Another example I'm thinking about is The Age of Shadows, directed by Kim Jee-woon and Kim Jee-woon is also, I would say, sort of an old hand genre film making. And those two, I thought, were really well done just in terms of styleization and sort of tapping into the very current interest amongst South Korean audiences for representations of that era. And there's for each film, there's popular elements like the heroine, female protagonist, who is essentially a fighter. She is trained as a shooter, sharp shooter. And then another, the other film that I'm thinking about, The Age of Shadows, you have sort of a strange kind of close friendship between the one who betrays the country and the one who is trying to rescue the country. So there are these interesting elements that are sort of built, built into the narrative, you know, on many different levels. I think those are enjoyable films.

Melissa [00:27:42] Great. Thank you so much.

Stephanie [00:27:44] We'll put a link in the show notes for listeners.

Melissa [00:27:46] Yeah.

Stephanie [00:27:47] Thank you so much for a wonderful conversation.

Kelly [00:27:49] Oh, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Stephanie [00:27:56] If you like East Asia for all, you could really help us out by telling others about the podcast and leaving a review on iTunes.

Melissa [00:28:03] We're lucky that we don't need funding or donations right now, but we could use your support in getting the word out. It helps other people ﬁnd the podcast.

Stephanie [00:28:11] For show notes and more information about the podcast, visit our website eastasiaforall.com. You can also ﬁnd us on Twitter @EastAsia4All.

Melissa [00:28:19] Thanks.