*The following is my contribution to the VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS blogathon initiated by Brian Darr at his blog HELL ON FRISCO BAY to coincide with the Hong Sangsoo Retrospective at the 25th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Following my piece you will find a list of all the other participants which I will continually update as I’m informed of them. 

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A variant thread on a discussion board topic at Koreanfilm.org was started by a quote from Chuck Stephens about Hong Sangsoo’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (here on referred to as VSBBHB).   Stephens was working within a limited editorially sanctioned space, but he closed his brief commentary with this sentence - “Soo-jung doesn’t even get fully violated until the very last reel.”

I came in defending Stephens arguing the following -

Actually, I’m one of many I’ve spoken with who are in agreement with Stephens here about calling the almost final act a “violation”, (the actual final act is the attempt at ‘cleansing’ in the bathroom).  Many peoples’ sexual ethics will find the ending anything but consensual.  If I’m recalling correctly, the male main character says something along the lines of promising that he won’t hurt her, promising that he’ll pull out if it hurts, and she expresses what a reasonable person would say is pain and he refuses to relent his actions.  So he violates the verbal contract that he would stop if it hurt her, and by extension, violates her.  The scene underscores so much of the miscommunication (some of it purposeful, some of it clueless, and some of it more ambiguous) that occurs amongst Hong’s characters perhaps better than any other scene, which makes it so powerful in how disturbing it is.”After making that argument, others posted challenges to my recollections but they themselves hadn’t the time or availability of the DVD to re-watch the scene.  Due to various obligations I had, I as well didn’t have the time to come back and clarify my position by re-watching the final scene.  Brian Darr’s initiation of the VSBBHB blogathon provided me the impetus to finally go back and see if my argument still holds up.And what I found was it doesn’t.  I was wrong.

What I had recalled was a verbal contract was in fact not one. The clear verbal contract I saw before is muddied by the actual dialogue in the scene. She does not set the terms that it mustn’t hurt. He just offers that he won’t hurt her as, on the cynical side, just so he can have sex with her, or, on the less cynical side, because he’s pretty ignorant of what sex might feel like for the first-time one is penetrated. (The actual spoken Korean might provide nuances not apparent in the subtitles but what I’m focusing on in my blog entry here is how I receive the narration from the subtitles provided.) This is not a broken contract between the characters, this is broken communication. It is disconnected communication. And it is this mis-communication that partly leads to what is clearly some discomforting, painful sex. Sex I don’t want to have, but nonetheless consensual sex.

So how could I have experienced this scene so, well, incorrectly, that is, at odds with what was happening, that is, what can be better defended as happening. I even recall this scene of painful, unpleasurable sex as feeling a lot longer when I saw it in the theatre than how brief it now feels on my television. Part of that can be explained by how what I watch on television seems more displaced than the encasement of vision that surrounds me in the theatre. But my experience of that scene is very different now and I’ve been spending days wondering why this is so.

What I realize is that Hong’s films enhance my pedestrian feelings of doubt because there is so much to doubt regarding the intentions of his characters, so much to doubt about what did happen and is happening as one experiences and reflects on the film as it stutters through its paces on screen. All of his films inspire doubt, but VSBBHB perhaps more vibrantly - an ironic but appropriate adverb for this film since it’s in black and white - than his others. And it is this very doubt that I’ve been brought back to in discovering that my understanding of the final passage was wrong.

As a he-visits/she-revisits narrative, we are basically asked to doubt all we saw before. Was Soo-jung unimpressed by finding Jae-hoon’s gloves in the park previously or was she overwhelmed with almost false joy as we experience her later? Was she the flaccid lover Jae-hoon portrays her as in his half, or was she the more sensual creature in her own embracing vision later? Soo-jung’s narrative makes Jae-hoon’s driver more present, so I begin to wonder what other class privileges Jae-hoon leaves out of his narrative. (We see him gaze at a subway map as if for the first time, a clear delineator of Jae-hoon’s vast wealth since only the richest refuse the subway in Seoul.) Yet I wonder about Soo-jung’s accuracy in envisioning Jae-hoon making out at the party with the woman whose name he will later mistakenly exclaim because from Soo-jung’s vantage point she can’t possibly see them making out behind the screen, she can only imagine it. The rustling shadows she sees could be fooling her just as the final VSBBHB’s shadows on the wall fooled me. Sure, she has lots of evidence supporting the possibility, but we have to doubt whether or not it’s really happening.

Seeding this doubt over my entire experience of VSBBHB further is Marshall Deutelbaum’s well-reasoned argument that what I and so many other commentators on VSBBHB have assumed about the narrative is in fact false. Deutelbaum finds a linear narrative in this falsely folded film. In an article for the New Review of Film and Television Studies, he lays out the linear progression of the scenes and his argument is very plausible. At the end of it, Deutelbaum has me doubting my very narrative about the film’s narrative.

But although Deutelbaum argues that his linear narrative is the definitive design, I see that the film can be experienced as both linear and cyclical. It does not have to be either/or, it can be both and more. For Soo-jung’s second half definitely feels different than Jae-hoon’s first half. In the second half, Soo-jung is more confident and strong and Jae-hoon becomes somewhat lovable. Whereas, in the first half Jae-hoon seemed inept and Soo-jung seems o be a waif floating elusively like goose feather down in the cold wind, causing one to wonder whatever Soo-jung, or Jae-hoon for that matter, might have seen in him, or in her. Yes, these shifting personalities could be seen as proof of the narrative’s linear nature since it could represent an evolution in their relationship, but this same difference can also support the he-said/she-said repeating halves so many of us find in the narrative as well.

In the end, Hong’s films cause my doubt to fluctuate.  I doubt and I don’t doubt only to return to doubting again.  Yet unlike his characters, this doubt doesn’t leave me feeling impotent and ineffectual.   Great philosophies and great science have all began by doubting what came before.  And although I don’t claim to be on route to either, the doubt I stumble through in VSBBHB only helps me hone the emotions I feel and thoughts I experience when watching his films.  Because as experienced in the real, our emotions and thoughts are more complex than simple, such as how excitement is often infused with anxiety and impatience rather than simply classifiable as pure excitement.  Such as my early evening conversation at Peet’s Coffee Monday with Hong on Fillmore in Pacific Heights was filled with semi-polar emotional bodies of anxiety/excitement, nervousness/comfortableness, and seriousness/casualness, along with calls in my head of I-am-not-worthy/Hell-Yeah!-I’m-worthy of the opportunity to simply chat with this man whose films have meant so much to me.

In the end I wasn’t wrong in defending Stephens’s argument, just wrong in how I posed that argument. I recalled a simpler scene than the one actually presented. There is indeed a feeling of Soo-jung being violated throughout the film and there is a form of ‘violation’ in the final scene. Yes, sex for the first time can be painful for the penetrated, (and, sometimes, for the penetrator too), but with greater sexual knowledge, something that Hong presents is lacking in some of his characters, this pain can be lessened through various precautions. The mis-communication between Soo-jung and Jae-hoon, their mis-connections, enables the sex that does happen to be a violation if we look at violation as a spectrum rather than a singly constrained term. I would disagree with Stephens that she is “fully violated”, but there are echoes of violation that reverberate with her screams.

For some of us viewers, Soo-jung’s screams while being penetrated for the first time speak to the violations by her older brother and boss. Those violations were powerfully harmful in their own ways, yet Soo-jung’s growing agency was able to thwart them somewhat. She is not completely physically violated at these moments since she resists her boss’s attempted rape (a naming he belittles) and has resolved, regarding her older developmentally disabled brother, to just ‘get it over with’ by providing him the occasional quick handjob. As much as she’s not violated in certain ways, Stephens is correct that she is still violated concerning her trust for men as well as concerning her body and her personal boundaries. Yet, as far as we know from what we see, I now see that the final scene was consensual. Still, the final sex scene is so close to the previous discomforting ones that it’s difficult to receive the final carnal moments with anything but carried over discomfort. Leaving some of us with violation residue. (A residue Hong cleans off with his next film, Turning Gate, where the male character checks-in with Seon-yeong while thrusting, ‘Do you like it gentle or with force?’, as if Kyeong-soo learned from his predecessor Jae-hoon’s indifference or ignorance to Soo-jung’s body.)

Yet despite all that residue, their post-coital words present a touching, endearing processing of events read as troubling by many in the audience. Like all of Hong’s films, I don’t believe their words, but here at the end it’s definitely not lying. And it may not be bullshit either, or at least not intentional bullshit. Better yet, it is the bullshit that arises while trying to figure something out; by trying to fix our words around the more ambiguous emotions we might feel. Soo-jung and Jae-hoon’s tenderness has something missing. We have a whole film of double context-ness on route to this final carn(al)val moment of sexual (dis-)union. It just doesn’t feel right because the emotions and the words at the end attempting to voice the emotions playing out under the sheeted surface are only going to fail Hong’s characters for the most part. So they speak as if they were generic, star-crossed lovers when their reality is much messier and un-genre-full than that. They are never going to get at the full complexity of what they are experiencing.

Just as with each passing frame I’m never going to be able to fully express my experience with Hong’s oeuvre. Which means I’ll have to accept that I’ll get it wrong sometimes along the way to getting it right.

When Darcy asked me if I wanted to contribute a blog to the site, I was hesitant.  I am prone to doing too much and I felt like a blog would disrupt my writing (and life) rather than enhance it.  But after a conversation w/ Q and then doing some blog research to contemplate how I could approach the blog in a way that was supportive of my writing interests, I took Darcy up on the request.  The story behind my titling of the blog will illuminate what I have decided to do here.

Notes Inspired by the Film is a clip from the response I give when people ask me what kind of writing I do. It’s in reference to the disclaimer on soundtracks.  I always found it peculiar that soundtracks would contain songs that were never in the actual film represented.  To account for these non-sequitor tunes, CDs state that the soundtrack contains songs from and inspired by the film.  After songs are commissioned for a film, choices obviously need to be made regarding whether or not certain songs really fit with the final cut.  Songs not selected risk falling on few ears.  So what seemed strange to me initially now seems understandable as a means to extend the product line of films.  Songs inspired by the film are the deleted scenes of DVD extras.  I have used this reality of soundtrack CDs to help describe my film reviews and essays to people who’ve asked me what I write about.  I say I write “notes inspired by the film” rather than the typical thumb-directed review or journal-accepted essay.  I am a ‘deep hobbyist’ of South Korean cinema and spaces like Darcy’s, GreenCine, and Brian Darr’s Hell On Frisco Bay have allowed me space to explore my own reception studies sampling of one. This blog is another space for that.

What I will be doing here is similar to those songs commissioned for the film.  I will be trying out ideas about the South Korean films I watch, hence the “Notes” in the title of the blog.  I will also be contemplating how the books and articles I read relate to South Korean cinema.  I see more questions emerging than answers, but some of what I write here will find space in my reviews and other essays.  All the songs commissioned for a soundtrack are supposed to be inspired by the film, it’s just the ones that don’t make the cut are left with that inspiration as their sole tagline.   So some of this inspiration will be tossed aside as the detritus it deserves to be, textual clippings on the editing room floor. 

 But all of it, I hope, will be in a reflective mode restrained from the antagonism of some film-writing out there, where it becomes more about the passion for condescension and ridicule, the clever quip-ish slam, rather than about the film experience.  (This is, of course, not peculiar to film-writing but persists in some formats on radio, tv, and blogs of other topics.)  In the past few years, I’ve decided not to continue the contempt that my public voice has contributed to occasionally in the past.  Contempt can have its place; I’ve just decided that this blog would not be such a place. 

Concerning films people hate that I love, I’m interested in why you hate it, just don’t bring that hate on me.  Concerning films within which I find little of merit, I am interested in the arguments about why someone disagrees with me and I am interested in investigating whether that person’s argument holds up and what their argument leads me to see about my own.  I am not interested in speculating what the disagreement says about the other person who disagrees with my likes or dislikes because such makes one vulnerable to stepping towards unethical avenues of the ad hominem and strawman varietals.  Basically, I am not interested in being an asshole nor am I interested in suffering them.  I am interested in a conversation and one has to convey respect for the other parties for a conversation to truly develop.

So with this entry I begin this stage of the ongoing conversation about South Korean Cinema.  South Korean film means a lot to me or else I wouldn’t write for Koreanfilm.org.  South Korean film means a lot to you or else you wouldn’t read this.  Let’s respect that.