HOW DID SOUTH KOREAN CULTURAL ASPECT’S INFLUENCE ON OLD BOY’S NARRATIVE STRUCTURE LEAD TO A CRITICALLY UNSUCCESSFUL AMERICAN INTERPRETATION?
In this essay I will cover the critically acclaimed South Korean film Oldboy and its American re-interpretation, and how Korean culture is so deeply rooted in the original Oldboy’s plot that re-purposing the story for an audience of a dissimilar cultural background robs the film of the very essence that made it so successful. One of the theories I will explore will be Bazin’s theory of realism and how, as Kirk wrote, the ‘violent plot and depiction of Seoul during the period of Dae-su’s imprisonment, 1988-2003, is a critique of the social inequality wrought by South Korea’s economic crisis.’ This example of how the culture’s struggles at the time were represented in the film, whether intended or not, perfectly encapsulates what Bazin theorized about films relationship with the society it’s made in; ‘Every film is a social documentary because it documents the desires of the collective unconsciousness.’. The other topics I will discuss are character re-interpretation to fit an audience’s expectations, revenge in different cultures and visual iconography.
Character re-interpretation is a big issue with the American remake as the characters are completely changed to have less complexity and to have completely different personalities to what they had in the original. An example of this is the character of Mido, who was changed from a sushi chef to a volunteer doctor. Protosevich, the screenwriter of the 2013 film, told TODAY magazine he ‘wanted her to be a character that people recognized and feel empathy for. I loved the actress in the original film, but I don’t think that’s the type of character that would resonate well especially with women in a Western audience.’ This is possibly because he wants her to seem more mature so western audiences don’t feel like the relationship is pushing any age boundaries, after all Mido (or Marie as she was renamed) is half of Dae-su’s age and in the original acts quite immature, like when she was playing with the wings her father gifted her for her 3rd birthday during the climax. Another reason may just be because he feels having a strong empathetic female character will be able to evoke more sympathy from a western audience. The character of Dae-su is also represented in a very different way by taking his bad features and amplifying them tenfold to create a more villainous version of him. As a result, the kidnapping is made to seem inevitable and deserved and to the audience it feels that he needs to reflect and change his whole personality. This doesn’t mirror Dae-su as he was just an alcoholic who didn’t know when to stop talking when he was younger and that although the girl died as a result of the rumors, he started he didn’t fully deserve the revenge torture he got. This is important because the 15 years of revenge are supposed to seem unreasonable to show how strongly Woo-Jin loved his sister. Therefore without Dae-su’s good character elements the punishment doesn’t feel extreme and unjust which then has the knock on effect of downplaying how much the ‘villain’ cared about the person (or people in Adrian’s case) and minimalizing the amount of sympathy the audience feels for the villain and his loss.
The films plot revolves around the theme of revenge. How this is explored is a giveaway in itself of how the culture views revenge and justice. In the Korean film there are examples of balance which stem from Buddhist and Confusion teachings of good and evil co-existing, thus making the idea of balance heavily prevalent in East Asian cultures. This differs from the West where ‘American films, based on the ideology of good versus evil, depict good trying to defeat evil’. This difference is because the narrative structure of good versus evil comes from Judeo-christian teachings in The Bible and therefore is more inherant in western story telling which may feel odd to foreigners and vice versa. A comparison that reflects this difference in the films is how Dae-su chooses to punish himself, in the Korean version he cuts his tongue off to eliminate the tool that allowed him to do wrong by Woo-Jin which gives balance to his storyline whereas Joe decides to re-imprison himself which is not relevant to his original transgression towards Adrian. The American ending is more of a hero sacrificing himself and elongating his suffering caused by the villain for others which plays into the biblical narrative structure common in western cultures.
The original Oldboy is heavily allegorical and representative of Korea’s notion of han and how the arts responded to South Korea’s rise to democracy in 1988. Han is a recognized feeling of defeat and oppression felt by the South Korean people and features throughout the 2003 film. Korea has always been in the shadow of not only other east Asian powers like China and Japan but western ones too, which is one of the biggest causes of han. It is this need to prove their significance amongst large political powers globally that has led to South Korea making its mark on the world through their films. Film is the perfect medium to reach a large foreign audience without knowing the language and getting the message across. The most noticeable representation of han is demonstrated at the end where Dae-su is hypnotized to forget the trauma he has endured so he can live in bliss, unbothered. This is a mirror image of han and how the South Korean people feel the need to suppress and forget the treatment they have fell victim to as a collective. South Korea’s film industry boomed with extreme concepts and imagery shortly after they became a democracy and laws on censorship loosened in 1988. These events are linked because after not being able to do anything controversial or disapproved of by the dictator the arts decided to go to the extreme and do everything they weren’t allowed to do before in an undemocratic society, or as Liese Spencer wrote ‘ an acting out of violent fantasies that was impossible under the old regime’.
The extreme imagery (like the live octopus eating and teeth pulling scene) also stayed with foreign audiences again creating a lasting impression of Korean culture that wasn’t present before these types of imageries were used. All this depth is unique to the original film and is what gives the bizarre plot and imagery critical strength. Oldboy without han and Koreas artistic revolution filled with revenge and suppressed anger would leave the film without any substance and it wouldn’t have been so successful, the American interpretation demonstrates this point perfectly.
To touch further on the extreme and abstract imagery in my previous point, the remake is missing the ant hallucinations that we see in Dae-su’s trapped scenes and once on the train with Mido. These hallucinations, as explained by Mido, were to specifically to represent loneliness: ‘Ants move around in groups, you know. So I suppose very lonely people keep thinking about ants.’. This imagery was removed from Spike Lee’s film and was replaced by hallucinations of a hotel worker that featured on the poster in Joe’s room. This decision was most likely made because the creative team working on the remake felt CGI life size ants were too abstract and weird for the mainstream American audience they were targeting and tailoring their film towards. This is yet another instance in where something that added depth to the characters and how the events were affecting them psychologically was removed. It is these kinds of alterations that eliminate the creative flair and compelling symbolism that set OldBoy apart from any other film globally and got it to win the Grand prix award at the 2004 Cannes film festival judged by Quinton Tarantino.
In summary, the above points contributed to the failure of the American adaptation because Spike Lee and Protosevich changed features that were heavily tied to real South Korean events and feelings to make the abstract film more palatable for mainstream American audiences, like the lack of han undertones and the alteration of the female character’s traits. Not only that but the parts that were lifted from the 2003 film then were not realistic in their new cultural context, thus making the film feel disjointed as there are both American and Korean details and makes it hard for both audiences to fully identify with the reinterpreted Oldboy. This lack of a clear audience is the root of the films problems which caused it to get terrible reviews like its 37% audience rating on the popular review site rotten tomatoes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bazin. A, Gray. H, Renoir. J (1967). What is cinema?. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London. Volume 1.
Fernandez, M, E,. Helsel, P,. (2013) ‘‘Oldboy’ screenwriter adds own twist to Korean horror classic’, TODAY, 26 November. Available at: https://www.today.com/popculture/oldboy-screenwriter-adds-own-twist-korean-horror-classic-2D11648789
Kirk, M. (2016) ‘Seoul’s Inequality as Violence in ‘Oldboy’, Citylab, 25 October. Available at:https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/10/seouls-inequality-as-violence-in-oldboy/505007/
Oldboy 2013. (2013) Available at: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/oldboy_2013. (Accessed: 26 November 2019).
Overton, Hamp. “Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes: Translating Fear, Adapting Culture.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 68, no. 1, 2016, p. 60+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A448568343/GPS?u=sol_itw&sid=GPS&xid=7aceb3f4. Accessed 15 November. 2019.
OldBoy. (2003). [DVD]. Directed by Park Chan-Wook. South Korea: CJ E&M Film Division [Viewed 4 November 2019]
Spencer, L. (2004) ‘Revenger’s tragedy’, Sight Sound (ns14 no10), p.18.
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