Our Esteemed Filmmaker
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! ! Our Esteemed Filmmaker A Novella by Andrew Lapin A thesis presented for the B.A. degree with honors in The Department of English University of Michigan Spring, 2011 Readers: Keith Taylor and Emily McLaughlin ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! To Mom and Dad and those wonderful people out there in the dark ""! ! ! ! Acknowledgements Thank you to the members of the University of Michigan Department of English who provided feedback and guidance throughout this project: Keith Taylor for only somewhat flinching at my proposed topic and helping me to shape it; Emily McLaughlin for her invaluable insight and one-on-one sessions in Espresso Royale; Tish O’Dowd for allowing me to workshop excerpts from a very rough early draft in her class. Thank you as well to faculty members outside of the English department: Youngju Ryu for broadening my knowledge of Korean history and culture and for loaning me her Shin Sang-ok film collection; and Christopher Hanson for offhandedly mentioning the story’s real-life inspiration in a lecture, causing me to seek it out for myself. There are many others who have helped me shape this thesis, whether willingly or inadvertently, and I would also like to mention Amanda Rutishauser, the students of English 423 and everyone who remained politely interested in the fate of this project over the last year. Finally, I want to thank Sharon Jacobs for helping me get through the hard times and Mom, Dad and Michelle for their continued love, support and pumpkin bread. """! ! Abstract Eugene Park, a formerly successful Korean-American film director in his 30s, had fallen on hard times in Hollywood by 1978. But that was before the regime found him. The power-hungry son of the ruler of North Korea, known to his subjects as Dear Leader, is a big fan of Eugene’s films and, as his country’s cultural minister, also happens to be looking for someone to spearhead North Korea’s aspiring film industry. Eugene, lured into a trap while searching for his missing actress ex-girlfriend Sun, is imprisoned for five years in reeducation camps and then introduced to the citizens of North Korea as their esteemed new film director. Trapped in an isolated country locked under strict authoritarian rule, Eugene (himself the son of North Korean defectors) is forced to do Dear Leader’s bidding as he and Sun plot their escape. But Eugene has his own demons to confront: He, too, harbors a strong desire for control, as Sun knows all too well. And it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to separate reality from film. This thesis primarily deals with themes of power, control and survival, and with the uncomfortable truths popular art can reveal about individuals and society. It is loosely based on the true story of South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok, who was kidnapped by special agents of Kim Jong-Il in 1978. "#! ! CONTENTS Our Esteemed Filmmaker…………………………………………………………………1 Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………..125 #! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! I. Five years. They kept him for five years. There were escape attempts, of course. Many of them, as human nature dictates. A request to use the bathroom, down the hall from where he was being held under house arrest in an abandoned building, turned into a mad dash for the door. It was a crude plan, the best he was able to hatch after the first couple days, and one destined to fail – even if he had wrested himself from the Worker’s Party guard stationed just around the corner, there still would have been the outside security: two strong-arms and one sharpshooter. Then there were the claims of sickness, the insistence to see a doctor, the snatching of the operating knife and the threatening of the doctor’s life, mimicking the hero from Agent of Destruction, one of his own spy movies made several years earlier. He had once blocked this very shot – in safer circumstances, of course, but nevertheless he figured he must have learned something useful from the experience. The guards snuck up on him rather easily that time, embarrassingly so, in fact. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They moved him after that, from the Pyongyang house arrest to Prison No. 6, the all-male internment camp for especially dangerous opponents of the regime. This was where the diet of rice and grass started. Every morning at precisely 6:30, a guard would march into the bunk, command all 22 prisoners to rise and lecture them for one hour on the infinite greatness of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Any man who tried to grab an extra minute of sleep was dragged outside and beaten. Every evening at precisely 23:00, a different guard would march in and yell for another hour about how much worse things were in the rest of the world, lecturing on different countries every ! ! %! ! night but always with the same updates: poor, starving, floundering in misguided international economic trade agreements, slowly but surely destroying their nation because they were not following the core Communist ideals. The guard would rip off a strip of paint peeling from the bunk wall and defy any of the prisoners to point out one single flaw in the Communist system. Any man who tried to go to sleep early was dragged outside and beaten. Eugene by this time had recognized the infeasibility of fighting back, and besides the prison guards were a great deal more muscular and fearsome than the ones who monitored his house arrest had been. He found this amusing, as all the prisoners were already so poor and sickly they wouldn’t win in a fight against a 12-year old. Why would the regime send their strongest men to guard their weakest ones? It didn’t make sense to Eugene, but he kept his mouth shut about it. He got smarter about what he said after the day he first arrived, when they asked him his name and without thinking he told them “Eugene.” “That’s an Imperialist name!” they yelled, pulling out their canes. “Why don’t you have a proper Korean name?” The shortest guard struck Eugene’s kneecap and he buckled. “Wait, wait,” he cried out. “My name is Park Seong-Kun.” No one had called him by his given Korean name since his father died. This was acceptable to the guards and they let him be. But every so often, one of them would snarl “Eww-geeeene” when they walked by him in the prison yard and strike him again without warning. The inmate who slept next to Eugene, a short, fidgety native of the northern city ! &! ! of Cheongjin, introduced himself as Jo Soo-yun. He had shaggy, shoulder-length hair and long yellow nails, marks of a long-term stay. His daughter had been seized from him two years ago, on her 14th birthday, and he had been told only that she would make a great “present” for the soldiers. He protested. He made a giant banner that asked, “Where is my daughter?” and taped it to a street sign near his apartment. Two days later they came for him. “Watch what you say around here,” Jo Soo-yun told Eugene on his first day as they stood shivering in line for their daily allotment of rice outside the mess hall, bare feet cutting into the rocks and gravel on the ground. “They have eyes everywhere.” He was speaking the Northern dialect of Korean that Eugene had learned at home, as opposed to the Southern dialect spoken by pretty much every other Korean Eugene encountered in America. A small relief there. “Do they have flying monkeys, too?” Eugene asked him, grinning through cracked lips, trying to lighten the mood. Jo Soo-yun looked at him blankly. “I don’t understand.” “You know, monkeys?” Eugene said again. He stuck out his arms like wings and made an airplane-flying noise with his bottom lip and two front teeth. The others in line all turned to stare at his movements. “From The Wizard of Oz? You’ve seen it, no?” Jo Soo-yun was lost. He hadn’t. One night in the middle of their second week as his stomach growled and his bruised legs rubbed against the rough surface of his straw bedding, Eugene could hear sobs coming from the bed next to him. They went on for hours, building to a crescendo every ten minutes, reaching a pitch of such high-volume sorrow that the next bunk over ! '! ! was sure to hear, before dying again, only to rise back up a few minutes later. He put his hands over both his ears and squeezed, trying to press the sound out of his head, until he fell into something resembling sleep. The next morning when the guard entered for their reeducation speech, Jo Soo-yun jumped up from his bed, screamed, “Where is she, you son of a bitch?” and rushed at him with clenched fists. The guard grabbed him by his torn shirt collar and silently hauled him outside, and that was the last anyone ever saw of Jo Soo-yun. Eugene kept his mouth shut after that. But never once did any of the guards turn to him during one of their reeducation speeches and tell him why he was there in the first place. After a time he found he no longer had an urge to learn. He accepted the fact implicitly – he had done something wrong, something to hurt the regime, and was paying the price for it now, with prison- issued pants that wore through scratched knees and terrible meals that made him vomit off the side of his bed in the middle of the night.