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Chapter Seven: Kim Ki-duk's Nonperson Films
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101 Chapter Seven Kim Ki-duk's Nonperson Films Korea's national dish or side dish, kimchi, has made only cameo appearances in Kim Ki-duk's corpus of over a dozen films, for instance, in 3-Iron (2004), where the trespassers into empty houses (Bin-jip, the original Korean title) claim the homeowners' dinner table as their own. Indeed, kimchi rarely occupies a place in Kim's staged meals because in miming—pun intended—the lives of marginalized, taciturn protagonists, the filmmaker never has much use for regular Korean meals with multiple bowls of meats and vegetables, kimchi included. While such a plentiful, everyday menu constitutes a staple scene in the Korean Wave's family drama, a global cultural phenomenon at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it connotes a quotidian life that ill-fits Kim's estranged universe. Kimchi's absence notwithstanding, each of his films reeks of the pungent , spicy smell of fermented Chinese cabbage and other ingredients. I do not mean to slight kimchi's side effect of body odor mixing garlic, green onion, chili pepper, and whatnot, as I am a kimchi lover myself, initiated, alas, much too late in life. Rather, kimchi serves as a perfect metaphor for what I call Kim Ki-duk's nonperson films. Both the making and the consuming of kimchi pivot on transforming physical pain into pleasure, physical and transcendent. Traditionally considered a feminine task, each housewife, as the kimchi lore goes, prides herself on a special kimchi recipe passed down matrilineally. The making of kimchi is labor intensive and arduous : the lengthy preparation of vegetables makes the shoulders sore; the cutting of green onions brings tears to the eyes. In addition, the production does not end in instant gratification. In olden times, earthen jars containing kimchi were buried underground for fermentation and dug out for winter vegetables. Even with modern refrigerators, kimchi requires days of sitting. This process of fermentation allows a chemical change induced by yeast to alchemize raw vegetables into mouthfuls of burning ecstasy, the euphoria of which arrives in the wake of a range of nearly unbearable stimulations to taste buds. Sucking cool air, wiping away snivel, the connoisseur has finally reached nirvana, Korean style. Similar to a sauna, a Turkish bath, a massage, acupuncture, endurance sports, and perhaps sadomasochistic foreplay, physical pain fashions and maximizes pleasure. 102 Chapter Seven The other definition for ferment is "agitation and tumult," which suggest the instability caused by kimchi in terms of sensations and by the Korean Wave in terms of viewer reception. Just as the extreme tastes of kimchi challenge the threshold of pain, the Korean Wave delves into extreme human condition of nonperson. The state of nonperson does not simply equate with dehumanization in the usual sense of the word; rather, dehumanization must be taken to accentuate humanity, since only humans can be subject to it. Therefore, the person in nonperson is simultaneously denied and affirmed, the pain of humiliation mixed with joy, occasionally of a masochistic vein. Psychologically, nonpersonhood appears to be the way to shed human bondage. By abandoning the self, one reaches for a higher plane of consciousness in the same manner that raw, inedible vegetables are turned into fermented kimchi. Should the kimchi dynamic of pleasure and pain be part of the Korean identity, nonpersonhood and the subsequent fulfillment or even transcendence of humanity provide a tentative answer to the question, "why do we consume the Korean Wave?" From Korean to Asian to global, the Korean Wave's nonperson person appeals to the audience in different ways: Koreans attracted to, among other things, the reprise of the traditional sentiment of han (historical suffering and the elation of overcoming grievances or simply outliving them); Asians drawn to Western modernity that, paradoxically, alienates; Westerners in search of exotic alternative entertainment that echoes their sense of atomization (Chung, "Toward a Strategic Korean Cinephilia"; see also Ma, East-West Montage ch. 7, "The O of Han Ju," and ch. 8, "Tradition and/ of Bastards in the Korean Wave"). Nonperson and the Korean wave The term nonperson is used in sociology to indicate individuals whose personhood has been diminished or cast in doubt, mostly due to appearance, exemplified by burn victims. An array of loaded terms is often used to signal nonperson: monster, hunchback , cripple, retard, freak, and more. David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) demonstrates how a deforming disease dooms a Victorian Englishman to a life of misery at the freak show. More "genuinely...