Wook Park's the Vengeance Trilogy

Home , Vengeance (2002), Vengeance (2003), Vengeance (2005)

chapter 6 Agents of the Other in Chan-wook Park’s The Vengeance Trilogy

Chan-wook Park’s trilogy, comprising Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Old Boy (2003), and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), is a spectacular cinematic pastiche that revises the violence and vengeance of the European revenge genre and its global legacy.1 The trilogy transforms conflicted and over-determined agents of vengeance, who owe much to the European tradition, and renders them relevant to the traumas of globalization in twenty-first- century South Korea. Park’s agents of vengeance, unlike the royalty of Argos, Elsinore, and Kurosawa’s Azusa Castle, are ordinary Koreans who seek revenge in a contem- porary world of factories, slums, and abandoned schools. Their interpersonal violence, stripped of its mythic or heroic aura, derives from and resonates with a larger systemic violence tied to middle and working class South Korean ex- periences of globalization. The world of these films sets intense family loyal- ties, imbued with traditional Korean Confucian values, in visceral conflict with psychically and physically invasive forces of globalization and the corporate power of the chaebol (business conglomerates). What Žižek (2008, 9) calls the “systemic violence” of globalization spawns interpersonal vengeance as com- plex agents, now cultural, economic, and technological rather than supernat- ural, invade the body and psyche to isolate and dismember its victims. The unsettling Aufhebung (sublation) to the trilogy’s cycle of interpersonal and systemic violence is collective action, in the form of the communal judgment and murder of a serial child killer by the victims’ parents. The parodic ‘trial’ that closes The Vengeance Trilogy evokes and subverts the Aeschylean paradigm of collective Justice, acquittal, and reconciliation—the paradigm that founds the European revenge tradition—through visions of vigilante butchery juxtaposed with the tainted reunion of a Korean mother with her culturally and morally alienated daughter.

1 Jonathan Romney 2006, 273 compares Park’s films to “the great Jacobean dramas”; Liese Spencer 2004, 18 calls Old Boy “half Greek tragedy, half existential thriller”; Park himself in- cludes Sophocles and Shakespeare among his influences.

1 Body Politics of Mr. Vengeance: Harvesting Organs

In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the first film of The Vengeance Trilogy, Ryu and his sister share a relationship so close that his identity depends, in many ways, upon her. Ryu is deaf and mute, which bars him from the media of aural and oral communication and interaction with others that most take for granted.2 In the opening sequence, a woman in a radio studio reads Ryu’s letter over the airwaves:

But recently I made a decision. I’m not sure whether to tell my sister or not. I’m hesitating even as I write this letter. If I decide to do it … I’ll be listening to the broadcast with my sister. I can’t speak with my mouth. I’m deaf and dumb.

As the voiceover continues, there is a slow fade to a painting of two white children sitting by the banks of an idyllic river, followed by a flashback of Ryu’s childhood. In the flashback, a young girl’s bare foot leaps into the frame, splashes in a puddle, and springs out to leave the water sloshing and rippling. There is an earthy sense of the uncanny to the slippery rock, the dark puddle, and the seemingly detached and autonomous limb. The shot condenses inno- cence and ephemerality in an unsettling way, which foreshadows the dismem- berments and drowning of the guilty and innocent to follow. In this way, the flashback is both analeptic and proleptic, implying a fated or predetermined destiny. A bird’s-eye view then shows two small children, a girl and a boy, play- ing in a landscape of smooth-worn rock and shallow puddles.3 The girl wears a white dress; the boy wears dark shorts with no shirt. She splashes him playfully with her foot, and then he follows her out of the frame. In the next shot, we see their faces in a long shot from a low-angle perspective: two Korean children sit side by side on the rocky banks of the river. She pats the smaller boy on the shoulder, and he looks up to her, his face innocently enraptured with her. She points up and to the right at something outside the frame, and his eyes follow her direction. This vision of contentment and human connection is outside of

2 The trilogy develops this motif of speech and silence, which is one of its many ties to the Oresteia. 3 Park discusses his use of the bird’s-eye view to defamiliarize characters and diminish the scope of their agency in his interviews with Young-jin Kim 2007, 95. The flashback to whole- ness foreshadows the gruesome dismemberment that concludes the film, which Park also depicts from a bird’s-eye perspective.