Q Branch

CROSSING THE LINE. A Very Much So/Passion Film Production. 2006, United Kingdom, 1 hour 32 minutes. With participation of BBC, E Pictures, Koryo Tours, Cine Qua Non, Dongsoong Art Center. Directed by Daniel Gordon. Cinematography: Nick Bennet. Edited by Peter Haddon. Music by Heather Fenoughty. Sound edited by Stevie Haywood. Sound mixed by Adam Mendez. Sound effects by Samantha Storer. Narrated by Christian Slater.

In 2002, the BBC documentarian Daniel Gordon made a heartfelt and crowd-pleasing chronicle, The Game of Their Lives, of North Korea’s football team and its incredible advance into the World Cup quarterfinals in 1966. Greatly pleased by the final product, North Korean authorities granted Gordon an unprecedented level of access for a foreign filmmaker, allowing him to record daily lives of two young girls preparing for an eye-poppingly grandiose (and for many people, obscenely totalitarian) “Mass Game” in celebration of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il. The resulting documentary, A State of Mind, sharply divided the viewer responses: some consider it nothing more than a detestable apologia for a quasi-monarchical dictatorship, while others see it as a refreshing corrective to the usual anti-Communist palavers that reduce North Koreans into little more than brainless termites. Instead of playing it safe for his next project, however, Gordon went ahead and tackled an even more potentially controversial topic—the life-story of Private James Drasnok, an American soldier who walked over the DMZ, riddled with uncharted mines, and “defected” to North Korea in 1962, and has lived there since. The result is one of the most fascinating documentaries about North Korea ever made: but the film also unexpectedly uncovers some truly interesting, even poignant, episodes of intersection between American and Korean histories.

Despite his somewhat heavy-handed effort to (visually) draw the parallel between the aggressively nationalistic cultures of North Korea and the United States, Gordon manages to keep afloat in the air disparate, often mutually incompatible, perspectives on the bizarre life history of Private Drasnok, ably navigating through the treacherous ideological waters. Certainly most North Koreans will be hard pressed to see “Crossing” as a negative portrayal of their own country (Kim Jong Il himself acknowledged abduction of Japanese citizens as a part of its insane “spy training” scheme in 2002, so discussing that issue is no longer officially discouraged), but those who insist on seeing North Korea as an oppressive totalitarian state will also find plenty of evidence here to back up their view. Perhaps the surest indication that Gordon has pulled off this difficult balancing act is that we as viewers cannot easily come to a conclusion about the film’s protagonist.

Drasnok’s life is indeed the stuff that proves the adage “truth is stranger than fiction.” A young Southern man, raised in poverty and a broken home (described by him as a “living hell”), he was a failure as a soldier as well. Cocky, ignorant and totally devoid of discipline, Drasnok crossed the DMZ seemingly out of sheer adolescent stupidity, like a teenager who has no loose change in his jeans pockets so decides to rob a liquor store, armed with a switchblade, and was as surprised as anyone when he was welcomed as a valuable tool for anti-American propaganda, eventually given a chance to lead a materially comfortable, middle-class life that surely would have been denied to him had he stayed in the U.S. (It might surprise some viewers to learn that North Korea was well ahead of South Korea in economic growth and overall quality of living conditions at least until mid-1960s, exceeding the average annual growth rate of 20 % in the years between 1954 and 1960)

Soon enough, he and his fellow U.S. army defectors (yes, there were more) fell into the pretty familiar routine of the annoying young American expats, cruising in a cluster, drinking, horsing around and chasing after women. The life in North Korea had begun to go sour by late 1960s: the Americans were unable to withstand the monotony of a “peaceful” Communist country and the lack of purpose in their lives. They finally attempted to jump ship to Europe via the Soviet embassy, which promptly sent them packing. Eventually, it was Comrade Kim Jong Il who came to their rescue, by casting Drasnok and his colleagues as seedy imperialist villains in his ambitious film productions. This portion of the documentary is simply amazing, as we are treated to rarely seen (certainly for me, never-before-seen) excerpts from such legendary North Korean megahits as Nameless Heroes, and footages of the American defectors hamming it up as hilariously grotesque caricatures of their own countrymen. Dresnok in these films suggests in appearance a no-talent cousin of Laird Cregar. Sargeant Charles Jenkins—Dresnok’s arch-nemesis, resembling Ross Perot after a Jenny Craig diet regimen, more about him later—at one point shows up with a huge skullcap makeup, as if he is possessed by the Brain from Planet Arous: they must be seen to be believed.

Equally amazing is Dresnok’s family history. One neat trick Gordon pulls off is casting Dresnok and other defector’s children as “actors” playing their fathers in a ‘60s black and white re-enactment sequence. Dresnok’s son, James, half-American and half-Romanian, is a handsome, white young man, studying English in the prestigious Pyongyang Foreign Language University: it’s positively unreal to hear James speaking in fluent Northern-accented Korean and then in halting Konglish for the interview. Dresnok’s cute-as-a-button youngest son from his second marriage to a half-Somali Korean woman is one-quarter white, one-quarter African and half-Korean. So Dresnok’s own family in the perhaps world’s most ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation—as Professor Bruce Cumings points out, that never wavers in the belief that “Koreans are the most superior people on the planet”—turns out to be many degrees more multiethnic than a typical American one.

The docu abounds with such ironies scaling the height of surrealism, not the least of which is the fact that Dresnok still resolutely remains such an unreconstructed “American,” shoveling bonhomie in thick Southern drawl, teaching NK students English as a “native speaker” (this will sound very familiar to many South Korean students) enjoying illegal fishing expeditions, and hailed by old Koreans who recognize “Arthur the Evil American” from the movies. One cannot help think that it was his quintessential qualities as an American, which made him a misfit in the U.S. army, helped him survive and even flourish in North Korea.

In the latter half, considerable dramatic tension is generated when Sergeant Jenkins chose in 2004 to leave North Korea with his two daughters and join his wife already in Japan, and authored an autobiography condemning North Korean regime (translated into English and published from University of California Press). Dresnok angrily rebuts much of the claim made in Jenkins’ account of how the defectors were treated, including the claim that NK officials scorched tattoos on their bodies as a part of re-education procedure (according to him, the burning of tattoos was a strictly voluntary act). It’s clear that underlying the politically charged mutual denunciations is a longstanding feud between Jenkins and Dresnok that seems to hark back to the 1960s: Dresnok relates with pride a story of beating Jenkins up when the latter tried to pull his rank on the former.

In the end, we are left with Dresnok’s sly, gold-capped smile. Like all good documentaries, by showing an organically linked whole of the elements that are at first glance totally incompatible with one another and deftly maneuvering out from ideological agendas of its principals, Crossing the Line re-focuses our attention to the human foibles and ingenuity usually swept beneath the grand narratives of ideological struggles and national conflicts. I most certainly wouldn’t buy a used car from Dresnok, but at the same time he is way too uncomfortably “ordinary American” for many viewers to be dismissed as a devious traitor or a mouthpiece for socialist ideals. It is not difficult at all to imagine him voting for Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary, had he lived in the States. The Novel Prize winning writer Orhan Pamuk once stated to the effect that the real task of an artist is to show the people so utterly divided by language, culture, custom and beliefs are, in fact, exactly the same at their core. Whatever your opinion may be about this docu, and many viewers will come away from watching it with their negative views about North Korea confirmed, or even reinforced, I have no doubt that it achieved its artistic (and humanistic) aim in this sense.

DVD Presentation:

Kino Video. NTSC. Single Layer. Region 1. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85:1. Audio: Korean and English Dolby Digital 2.0. Subtitles: English. Supplements: An interview with director Daniel Gordon, photo galleries.

Kino Video is not exactly 100% reliable in terms of quality presentation of foreign titles, but Crossing the Line’s predominantly HD-lensed visuals are shown in a reasonably attractive fashion. Considering the large number of archival footage, the quality of video fluctuates wildly, especially in the first half, but I haven’t noticed any significant transfer problem. The soundtrack is quite ordinary: the techno-minimalist music score sounds a little tinny, but it serves the purpose. The only substantial supplementary material is a 30-minute interview with the director. It is informative but the questions basically make him re-cap the film in a digest form, so it will be a total spoiler for those who haven’t seen the main feature. I’d like to know why Christian Slater was chosen to narrate the film: maybe Gordon explains it and I missed it.