Becoming-Imperceptible in Korean Cinema:
A Categorization from a Deleuzian Perspective
Marijke Gravemaker-Regtien University of Amsterdam MA Thesis
Media Studies: Film Studies June 30, 2017
Supervisor: prof. dr. Patricia Pisters Second Reader: dr. Marie-Aude Baronian
Acknowledgements
It has been a long process of “becoming-thesis”, which would not have led to this final product if it was not for some people that kept me going. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. dr. Patricia Pisters, for providing infinite inspiration and, while writing this thesis, still giving me the opportunity to enjoy my son Julian’s milestones and my new pregnancy. I would also like to thank my mother-in-law, Jos, for taking good care of Julian numerous times so I could focus on writing. Last, but certainly not least, many thanks go out to my husband, Ted, and to our friends for their everlasting support and invaluable feedback which helped me complete this master’s thesis.
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 1
1. Mentally disappearing in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK ... 7
1.1 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (싸이보그지만 괜찮아) ... 7
1.2 Losing one’s identity ... 8
1.3 Psychiatric causes ... 10
1.4 Becoming imperceptible with your mind ... 11
1.5 Conclusion ... 14
2. Bodily disappearing in 3-Iron ... 15
2.1 3-Iron (빈집) ... 15
2.2 Becoming entirely imperceptible... 16
2.3 Escaping responsibilities ... 18
2.4 Becoming imperceptible with your body ... 18
2.5 Conclusion ... 21
3. Being dead and Will You be There? ... 22
3.1 Will You be There? (당신, 거기 있어줄래요) ... 22
3.2 Vanishing from the Earth ... 23
3.3 The impact of time-traveling ... 24
3.4 Synthesis of time and death ... 25
3.5 Conclusion ... 27
4. Being re-born in The Man from Nowhere ... 27
4.1 The Man from Nowhere (아저씨) ... 27
4.2 Re-appearing after disappearing ... 28
4.3 Defense mechanisms ... 29
4.4 Being re-born ... 30
4.5 Conclusion ... 33
5. Starting anew in Castaway on the Moon ... 33
5.1 Castaway on the Moon (김씨표류기) ... 33
5.2 Where has he gone? ... 35
5.3 Imperceptibility by choice ... 36 5.4 Desert Islands ... 37 5.5 Conclusion ... 39 Conclusion ... 39 Literature ... 41 Films ... 42
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Becoming-Imperceptible in Korean Cinema: A Categorization From a Deleuzian Perspective
I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. (Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus 199)
Introduction
A deaf-mute man is burying his own sister who committed suicide at the side of a river. Meanwhile, a young girl he had kidnapped for ransom money in order to save his sisters life, is on the other side of the river trying to get his attention. Being deaf-mute, he obviously cannot hear the girl screaming when she falls in the river and ultimately drowns. When the man finally spots the lifeless body of the young girl lying in the water, he is afraid to go in to attempt to rescue her, as he does not know how swim. Luckily there is a mentally disabled, spastic homeless man nearby who jumps right in. The water turns out to be shallow, but when he reaches the girl, he bites her neckless off and takes it, leaving the girl to her fate. This scene from
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park, 2002) is just one example of the raw, dark
narrative of the South Korean film (from this point on referred to as Korean film or cinema, minus the South). Although it does not sound like any ordinary scene you might find in a Hollywood production, its bizarreness is not uncommon in Korean cinema.
Besides its dark surreal content, the aesthetics of the Korean film are also unusual from a Western point of view. Sometimes it is the camerawork that is breath-taking, like in Oldboy (Park, 2003), with its famous fighting scene that consists of a single take that lasts two minutes and thirty-four seconds. In this scene, filmed from the side, we see the protagonist fighting his way through a corridor using only a hammer, eliminating every single opponent he faces even though there is a knife sticking out of his back. The Korean film can also surprise its audience with a mind-blowing plot twist. Chan-wook Park, the very same director that brought us both of the films above, also directed The Handmaiden (Park, 2016). This film was released in the Netherlands this year, and contains a double plot twist in order to keep the
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audience at the edge of their seats. In this film, a girl named Sook-hee is hired as the new handmaiden to a Japanese heiress, Hideko, but she is secretly involved in a plot to have her admitted in a psychiatric hospital and rob her of her wealth. When Hideko is to be admitted, it turns out that she is in a secret plot against hee and Sook-hee gets admitted instead because she is supposedly the heiress. Another plot twist reveals that both women had been planning this together all along, and they escape near the end of the film to be with each other. Of course it is not just Chan-wook Park who can deliver overwhelming films: another Korean film which was released in the Netherlands this year is Train to Busan (Yeon, 2016), Sang-ho Yeon’s first full-length feature film that is not animated. It is a genre hybrid with horror, drama, action and surprisingly some humor, although in the end even the male protagonist does not survive the zombie-apocalypse. Another film which was released this summer is the Netflix-original film Okja (Bong, 2017), in which a young girl tries to save her giant animal friend Okja from falling into the hands of a large company. Established director Joon-ho Bong had his film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for a Palm d’Or, but Okja will not be released in theatres. These last three successful releases, The Handmaiden, Train to Busan and Okja, reintroduced the Korean film to the Dutch cinema-goer. This development in turn provides the opportunity to explore the extraordinary phenomenon of Korean cinema.
The Korean cinema is known for its romantic melodrama because of its history of government censorship, which affected the industry, both during the annexation of the Japanese and during successive Korean regimes up until the nineties. Film
directors chose the melodrama genre because this genre was one of the few ‘safe’ options (Leong 117). During the nineties Asia was suffering from a huge financial crisis, better known as the IMF-crisis (International Monetary Fund). This crisis had its effect on the film industry, but cinema was successfully brought back to life between the late nineties and the start of the twenty-first century. This revival can be mainly attributed to the rise of a new generation of younger film directors who completely changed the image of the Korean cinema (Paquet 63). In New Korean
Cinema: Breaking the Waves, Darcy Paquet offers an analysis of the film The Quiet Family (Kim, 1998), as an example of this new wave of Korean films. According to
Paquet, The Quiet Family is a mixture of comedy, suspense and dread, with a playful, carefree attitude and remarkably rich, saturated colors. The director has opted for the use of lighting and set design to “create memorable visual compositions rather than to
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capture the locale in any realistic manner”, giving the audience something different from what it was used to seeing in the Korean cinema (64). The new directors were very much aware of all the different genres, and were mostly very loyal fans, but instead of making genre films, they chose to appropriate the genres casually and sometimes they would rather juxtapose their conventions instead of following them (65). According to Paquet, during these times “genre remained an object to be
manipulated rather than a model to be followed”(65), which is still true for the Korean cinema today. This approach is responsible for the many genre hybrids Korea has to offer, and is also the reason why the new Korean cinema can neither be categorized as commercial nor art-house film (65). Julian Stringer underlines the impossibility of categorizing these films and says that “understanding Korean cinema through generic classifications truly does mean embarking on a journey on a long and winding road, not arriving at a destination” (102). Starting in 1998, the Korean blockbuster emerged with the expensive productions Shiri (Kang, 1999) and JSA: Joint Security Area (Park, 2000), which among many others, changed the perspective of the Korean cinema as perceived by the rest of the world (Paquet 71).
While observing the Korean cinema of the twenty-first century, one of the things that strikes me is that almost every single film appears to have someone disappearing in them, whether literally or psychologically, in the narrative or aesthetically. I have come across different forms of disappearing people such as: abductions, exchanged or mistaken identities, people that literally vanish and people that die. Especially abduction is a common form of disappearing, as this happens in
Oldboy, The Man from Nowhere (Lee, 2010), Save the Green Planet! (Jang, 2003)
and The Host (Bong, 2006), among many other films. What intrigues me most about Korean cinema is how these films can keep haunting the audience’s mind for many years. A possible explanation for this is that our Western minds are not accustomed to such surreal narratives and aesthetics, and need some time to process these films. These narratives raise a lot of ontological questions about our being and reality (what is real and what is not?), especially with the aforementioned disappearances in mind. In my opinion, philosophical concepts can help us to process these films in order to better understand their layered, surreal narratives.
One of the philosophical concepts that comes to mind while thinking about narratives featuring disappearing people is the idea of “becoming”, and specifically of “becoming-imperceptible”, as devised by Gilles Deleuze together with Félix Guattari,
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during the seventies and eighties. Although Deleuze never drew upon the Korean film, his Western philosophy works very well with non-Western cinema.
Others have also linked his concepts to Korean cinema. Examples are David Martin-Jones, who has written about Deleuze’s concept of the time-image in relation to Korean films in Deleuze and Film and in Deleuze and World Cinemas, and Sofia Murell, who devoted her master’s thesis at the University of Amsterdam to this same concept (time-image) as well. Deleuze’s time-image substitutes the movement-image, in which the cinema is seen as a “composition of images and signs” (Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image ix). The time-image is what makes the past and memories visible in
cinema with new aesthetics. According to Deleuze there was a shift put in motion by the war. He states: “the images are no longer linked by rational cuts and continuity, but are relinked by means of false continuity and irrational cuts” (Cinema 2: The
Time-Image xi).The connection with this Deleuzian concept is easily made
considering Korea’s traumatic past with colonialism and the economic crisis of the nineties.
In her foreword to the Korean translation of the book The Matrix of Visual
Culture: Working With Deleuze in Film Theory, Patricia Pisters underlines the
benefits of a Deleuzian neuroscientific approach. She does so by raising fundamental questions about consciousness and our perception of reality (3-4), by analyzing the film 3-Iron (Kim, 2004), and stating that the Korean film deserves more attention in relation to Deleuzian philosophy (2). 3-Iron will be extensively discussed in chapter two. I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (Park, 2006), which Pisters also briefly touches upon, will be discussed in chapter one.
The concept of “becoming” is defined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus as an alternative to and to oppose the traditional concept of “being”. The
problem with being is that it is subjectivity contained in identity. Neither subjectivity nor identity ever stands still, both of them are always moving. Deleuze and Guattari therefore describe becoming as a “rhizome”, which means it is continuously growing (239). Becoming is to get in touch with certain affects, of a creature or any other entity. For example, when one is becoming-cat, he or she can develop cat-like qualities such as balance. It has nothing to do with becoming a cat, becoming is a lot more abstract and subjective. It is rather a process that has no end. It is also important to know what becoming is not, as it is not a “classificatory or genealogical tree” (239).
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I will return to this statement later as I think it contradicts some of the other statements by Deleuze and Guattari’s. They further explain what becoming is not:
Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing”, “being”, “equaling”, or “producing.” (239)
In their book, Deleuze and Guattari discuss a great variety of becomings: becoming-wolf, becoming-child, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular, and so forth. But becoming-imperceptible appears to have a special function:
If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula. (279)
According to Deleuze and Guattari the list ends at becoming-imperceptible, as if there is nothing beyond that. It is the immanent end of becoming, although becoming is supposed to be an on-going process and cannot be reached. If there is an end to becoming, the most ultimate form of becoming-imperceptible could be interpreted as being-dead, because how could you become more imperceptible than being dead and buried? Nobody can see you, hear you, feel you; everything stops for you when your life ends. Deleuze would not agree on this clinical view of death: he would suggest to look beyond this, as will be further explained in the second and the third chapter of this thesis. In this thesis, several other stages of becoming-imperceptible are
suggested. In order to substantiate this categorization, other Deleuzian concepts are discussed, and most of all, in order to come to a classification, the endless possibilities of Korean cinema are taken into account.
Another concept that will be returning in this thesis, and therefore needs to be defined in advance, is Pisters concept of the “image”. She proposes the neuro-image as a third cinema type next to Deleuze’s movement-neuro-image and time-neuro-image (The
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analytic nature, in which she relates screen culture to “schizoanalysis”, which is also a concept of Deleuze and Guattari, (2) its relation to the digital screen culture itself, and (3) the insistence on brain processes (The Neuro-Image 2-3).
This thesis offers a film philosophical approach to bring the relationship between Deleuze’s conceptual framework and the Korean film to light. The
conceptual framework used in this thesis consists of concepts concerning becoming-imperceptible, but also other Deleuzian concepts such as the “Body without Organs” and the “Actual and the Virtual”. It also offers an in-depth film analysis of five quite different Korean films that can all be subdivided in different stages of becoming-imperceptible, to conclude with a new categorization that builds upon Deleuze’s work. What is interesting in this approach is that a philosophical concept is never completed: other theorists or philosophers, or the original author can always add new ideas or abandon the old ones. A film is never completed either: once it is released to the audience the film is left to numerous interpretations. The circumstances in which a film is watched also attribute to how it is interpreted. One can never watch the same film twice without feeling different about it: it is always a new experience. The combination of the two, philosophical concepts and film, can therefore be very helpful, because they are both continuously evolving, and taking a step back to evaluate helps to create a better understanding both philosophical concepts and films.
The film corpus of this thesis consists of the following five films: 3-Iron (Kim, 2004), I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK. (Park, 2006), Castaway on the Moon. (Lee, 2009), The Man from Nowhere (Lee, 2010) and Will You be There? (Hong, 2016). All these films were released in the twenty-first century, have different directors and can contribute to a categorization of becoming-imperceptible by portraying different ways of disappearing. One of this thesis’ limitations is that I am not (yet) very familiar with the Korean language and as such need to rely on subtitles that might not be accurate. On top of that I am also not intimately familiar with Korea’s rich culture, so it is possible some important cultural references in the films are overlooked in this thesis. Nevertheless, the question I would like to see answered by using this approach is the following: In what way can the different forms of disappearing in contemporary
Korean cinema be categorized from a Deleuzian point of view using the concept of becoming-imperceptible?
The chapters in this thesis are organized by ascending levels of becoming-imperceptible. In the first chapter we start soft with mentally disappearing, without
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actually becoming-imperceptible to the outside world. In the second chapter the body starts to disappear too, not only to the person in question, but to everyone. It also premeditates the third chapter in which becoming-imperceptible means being dead. As mentioned before becoming-imperceptible does not end with being dead in this thesis. The forth chapter is about being re-born: after one has (metaphorically) died, there is a chance of re-appearing. The final stage is discussed in the fifth chapter, which concerns starting anew: the point from which everything can start all over. The concluding chapter makes sense of all these levels of becoming-imperceptible by making them come together in a circular way. All chapters consist of (1) a film plot synopsis in order to get a hold of the surreal Korean cinema, (2) a description of the form of disappearing that is to be found in the film, (3) an explanation for the disappearing, (4) an interpretation of a different Deleuzian concept that works well with the analysis, and (5) a concluding paragraph.
1. Mentally disappearing in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK 1.1 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (싸이보그지만 괜찮아)
In I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK an unlikely love-affair between two patients in a psychiatric hospital comes about. When Young-goon (played by Soo-jung Lim) tries to plug herself into a wall outlet to charge her battery during a psychotic breakdown, she gets hospitalized and encounters several other psychiatric patients. First she gets shown around by Sul-mi (Yeong-mi Lee) who tells her everything about the other patients and their conditions. Sul-mi then gets scolded by one of the doctors for telling made-up stories to other patients again. The doctor explains to Young-goon that Sul-mi is suffering from mythomania (pathological lying) and that she loses her memory as a side effect of her shock therapy. She is trying to reconstruct her memories by making up stories and filling in the gaps.
While Young-goon is having conversations with lamps, vending machines and other electronic or mechanic devices at night, the explanation for her behavior comes to light: she thinks she is a cyborg and is trying to find out what her purpose in life is. She secretly stops eating too, because she does not want to damage her system. In order to be able to talk to these devices she uses her grandmother’s dentures, which she desperately wants to return to her grandmother because she will not be able to eat radishes without them, which she knows is very important to her grandmother.
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Young-goon is not the only one in her family suffering from a psychiatric disorder: her grandmother thinks she is a mouse and her mother appears to be unhinged as well.
In a group session several patients start accusing another patient, Il-sun (Rain), of having stolen their ping-pong technique, food, memories and the elastic waist band one of the patients claims he was born with. Later Young-goon overhears Il-sun talking to a doctor saying he has stolen Thursday. Young-goon tries to figure out what he means by that and finds out her Thursday’s panties are missing (she carries a box with a pair of panties for each day with her). This sparks her interest in Il-sun and makes her want to get to know him better. She asks him to steal her sympathy, because she believes this is what is holding her back from performing her mission to kill the “white ‘uns” (doctors). Il-sun agrees to help her and transfers her sympathy to himself.
After Young-goon hallucinates about killing the entire hospital staff, she collapses. This is Il-sun’s cue to inform the staff about how Young-goon has not been eating, which leads to her being force-fed. Il-sun feels sorry for her and wants to get her out of the stabilizing room. He goes on a hunger strike and eventually winds up in a stabilizing room as well. After they are both out Il-sun wants to make Young-goon eat again and pretends to install a “rice-megatron” in her back that converts rice into electricity. Young-goon trusts him and together they discover what her purpose as a cyborg is: she is a nuclear bomb and needs a lot of energy in order to detonate. They decide getting struck by lightning should be enough to get her fully charged and set up a tent in a thunderstorm. This is when Young-goon falls in love with Il-sun. When morning comes a rainbow appears above the two making love, abruptly ending the story of this unlikely couple.
1.2 Losing one’s identity
A lot of patients in the mental hospital are experiencing some kind of loss of the self or depersonalization. One of the most obvious cases is Il-sun, who compulsively steals and brushes his teeth to prevent himself from vanishing into a dot. He often hides his face behind a mask. When Sul-mi asks him to remove his mask he hesitates and eventually refuses to do it because, he says: “What if I do and I’m invisible?”. He explains this thought by sharing his life story and how his parents used to pretend he was not there. He tells her this is when he first started stealing things. He also explains why he is afraid he will disappear to make his life story complete. One day he gets
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caught stealing and the judge tells him something only Il-sun can hear (probably due to a psychosis): “Defendant Park Il-sun will eventually vanish into a dot”. The fear that he has disappeared behind his mask triggers a psychotic fantasy in which Il-sun starts to shrink and Sul-mi has to bend over like he is a little boy in order to be able to talk to his face, which makes it impossible to continue their conversation. Il-sun’s stealing varies from personal belongings, such as clothing, to personal traits. For example, when he steals another patient’s politeness he can only walk backwards and constantly apologizes for things he did not do, exactly like the other patient did before he stole this behavior. However, the other patient is no longer afflicted after being robbed by Il-sun. In a way, Il-sun helps the other patients by taking away
characteristics that are interfering with their daily routine. On the other hand, he gets to become someone else in order not to vanish.
The second time Il-sun literally starts shrinking is when he witnesses Young-goon’s psychosis in which she shoots the entire hospital staff a second time. Unlike other patients he appears to actually see the doctors getting shot. Il-sun is the only person who can perceive Young-goon’s reality, which makes him aware of his own reality in which he is slowly shrinking into a dot. Il-sun does not think he is the only one who this vanishing can happen to: when he shares another dreamlike fantasy with Young-goon, her grandmother gets catapulted into the air by an elastic waist band, and sun tells her she vanished into a dot. There is also a certain logic ascribed to Il-sun’s compulsive teeth-brushing. He says: “Once your teeth start to go, there’s no turning back”. This explains why he thinks Young-goon’s grandmother has also vanished, since she has lost her teeth and relies on her dentures.
The protagonist, Young-goon, is also disappearing in a way: she does not think she is human anymore, thus she loses her personality. She thinks it is weird she never realized she was a cyborg before and therefore pretends she has known about her secret features all along. She does not appear to have memories of what she was like before she became a cyborg. Still, she does have human emotions. For example, she becomes angry when she finds out Il-sun stole her grandmother’s dentures, and sad when she finds out her grandmother has died. However, she does try to get rid of these human features and tries to persuade Il-sun into stealing her sympathy.
Another patient who has lost a part of who she really is, is Sul-mi, the patient suffering from mythomania. Although she pretends to tell stories from her
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All the new memories she makes will get lost again as soon as she gets her shock therapy. This does not refrain her from trying to learn new things inside the hospital. When she talks to Il-sun he deliberately tells her his whole life story because he knows she has shock therapy right after and will not remember anything he told her. Sul-mi is bummed when she realizes this, but there is nothing she can do about it. Her memories will disappear again and everything that happened in the past will vanish from her mind.
Thus, there are at least three patients in this mental hospital that are in some sense disappearing and all in their own ways. Il-sun is literally vanishing, although it is only in his own mind, Young-goon is losing her human traits, and Sul-mi is losing her past. They have their own ways of disappearing, but these ways do have
something in common: they are all mental and generally not visible for others.
1.3 Psychiatric causes
Every patient described above disappears for a different reason, but all of them suffer from schizophrenia or other psychiatric disorders. These are mainly caused by trauma, like in Il-sun’s case, who was often ignored by his parents and was abandoned by his mother at the age of fifteen and is now trying to become someone else. In The Divided
Self, psychiatrist R.D. Laing ascribes similar symptoms to “ontological insecurity”,
which he subdivides in three categories: engulfment, implosion and petrification (43). When he talks about engulfment, one of his cases sounds a lot like Il-sun’s fear of shrinking into a dot. Laing outlines his case: “One patient dreamt recurrently of a small black triangle which originated in a corner of his room and grew larger and larger until it seemed about to engulf him – whereupon he always woke in great terror” (50).
Considering Laing’s explanation of engulfment, Il-sun’s behavior makes a lot more sense: “In this the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or
anything or, indeed, even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his own autonomy lays him open to the dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity” (44). Il-sun does not tend to avoid other people, but he is afraid of showing his face and therefore constantly literally hides behind a mask. To compensate the parts of his identity he loses by interacting with others, he steals parts of their identities.
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The psychiatric disorders that are encountered in this film sometimes have a genetic origin, like with Young-goon whose mother and grandmother both have some psychological issues. Just like Il-sun’s case, Young-goon’s delusion that she is a cyborg can be explained by Laing’s ideas of ontological insecurity. In fact, he calls it normal to depersonalize others to a certain extent. He explains:
A partial depersonalization of others is extensively practiced in everyday life and is regarded as normal if not highly desirable. Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalizing tendency in so far as one treats the other not in terms of any awareness of who or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role or part in a large machine in which one may too be acting yet another part. (47)
However, Young-goon’s depersonalization does not appear to have a limit and mostly concerns herself. She sees herself as half an android robot with the purpose to serve a large machine and detonate herself as an atomic bomb. The only psychiatric case that stays unresolved, and involves disappearing, is that of Sul-mi, whose character remains underexplored throughout the film. This is a bit unfortunate because
disappearing memories could have perhaps added another dimension to the variety of disappearances and ways of becoming-imperceptible this thesis has to offer, had there been more depth in this narrative.
1.4 Becoming imperceptible with your mind
If we follow Deleuze and Guattari’s logic from before, and becoming-animal and becoming-imperceptible succeed each other, Young-goon is going through some different stages of becoming, in her case with an intermission of becoming-cyborg. She does not become-animal herself, but watches her grandmother closely as she is becoming-mouse. As remarked earlier in this chapter, Young-goon’s psychological problems appear to have a genetic origin. According to Deleuze and Guattari this is not possible for becoming. Instead, they say:
Becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If
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evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. (A Thousand Plateaus 238)
This offers a perspective that is in contrast with psycho-analysis, which is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari are trying to do. If Young-goon is connected to her
grandmother by means of a symbiotic relationship, her grandmother’s becoming is her becoming too and vice versa.
In Immanence: A Life, Deleuze mentions another concept that is very important to grasp in order to make sense of, and understand what is real in Young-goon’s schizophrenic world: his distinction between the “actual” and the “virtual”. In fact, everything should be considered to be equally real. The virtual consists of everything that is happening internally and is not visible: dreams, memories,
everything that happened in the past, imagination, etcetera, while the actual is what is happening in the present. The actual and the virtual should not be seen as two things that are completely apart from each other. As Ilona Hongisto puts it, the “actual material formations intertwine with always-differentiating processes”. Together they are the facets of reality (11). As Micheal Hardt points out in his book Gilles Deleuze:
An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, that what is possible is not real, even though it
might become actual in the future (17). He states that “the movement of being must be understood in terms of the virtual-actual relationship rather than the possible-real relationship” (17). However, Deleuze and Guattari do not oppose the potential to what is real, but see this as “the reality of the creative” (A Thousand Plateaus 99).
Together, virtualities, events and singularities constitute a life (Pure Immanence 31). Pisters takes this reality of the creative a step further, by including the schizophrenic delirium into this mental reality that is virtual. She emphasizes the realness of the delirium: “even though it is not actual, it is very real” (Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis
of Cinema 112).
Young-goon is thus suffering from a very real delirium, in her virtual
perception she really is a cyborg. Her schizophrenia changes her in various ways: she is not solely losing parts of herself, her condition is also adding something. In her book The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, Pisters explains how the symptoms of schizophrenia can be either “negative” or “positive” (41). The negative symptoms are “related to a lack of energy”, while the
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positive symptoms are “related to a feeling of experiencing ‘too much’ of everything” (41). Young-goon’s negative symptoms for example are her emotional flattening, social withdrawal and apathy. These symptoms are all taking away some of her characteristics that define who she is. The positive symptoms, on the other hand, are all adding characteristics that do not belong to her, such as the delusion that she is a cyborg and the hallucinations in which she shoots the hospital staff.
Another Deleuzian concept that works very well in understanding Young-goon’s situation is that of the “Body without Organs” (BwO). This is not literally a body without organs, but rather a body that “blows apart” the organization of the organs and the organism itself (A Thousand Plateaus 30). This sounds rather destructive, but as Pisters remarks, the Body without Organs has a lot of potential: “All becomings and the BwOs are lines of flight situated on a molecular level. One could say that the BwO is the zero degree of the body, where every body part has its potential: “a thousand tiny sexes” that on a molecular level can make infinite connections and combinations” (The Matrix of Visual Culture 110). For Young-goon, attaining a Body without Organs would be very helpful, as it would make it possible for her organs to make connections with the cyborg that is inside her and combine the human with the machine. However, Deleuze states that “you never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (A Thousand Plateaus 150). Young-goon thinks she has no organs, because she is a cyborg, so she stops eating. She has no intentions of harming herself, in fact, she thinks eating would harm her cyborg-body.
Deleuze does not specifically link the Body without Organs to becoming-imperceptible, but what happens to the body that is not provided with enough nutrients? – It starts to consume its own organs leading to an anorexic death. Young-goon is disappearing in that way as well. She does not have much energy left, which, combined with all her negative symptoms, leads to the catatonic state she is often in. Deleuze and Guattari describe how the Body without Organs can eventually lead to death: “It is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensity. The death model appears when the body without organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth – to the point of self-mutilation, to the point of suicide” (Anti-Oedipus 329). Luckily Young-goon is spared from this horrible prospect because Il-sun helps her find a way to eat without damaging her cyborg-body.
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There is also a connection between (becoming-)cyborg, the Body without Organs and the digital age, as Pisters points out:
The cyborg (on the molar and molecular levels) and the BwO (on the line of flight but not unaware of the molar segments) are tools for resisting too much control, too singular and dogmatic visions. They are concepts that allow negotiations between old and new possibilities and old and new dangers in respect to a late capitalist technoscientific world order. (The Matrix of Visual
Culture 119)
In his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell predicts a society with screens and cameras everywhere you look. Released over a decade ago, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s
OK already features an eerily similar digital society. This relationship with the digital
screen culture is why the film is also a neuro-image. Working in a factory, making radios, it is probably just a matter of time before Young-goon gets replaced by a machine. This might be a reason for her to seize the opportunity to take control in order for her to prevent being controlled herself. If she is becoming-machine, in the form of a cyborg, she does not need to be replaced any time soon, and if she does need to be replaced it does not matter anymore because machines have no feelings. Anorexia is also a form of taking control, because your body is your own
responsibility and as an adult you get to decide what goes in and what stays out. Within the hospital, patients are kept away from the characteristics of the digital age, they are not exposed to phones and do not have access to the internet. As soon as the patients are out of sight it becomes clear how everyone is being absorbed by
technology: at the doctor’s office, Young-goon’s mother rudely interrupts the
conversation by answering a phone call, and the doctor cannot seem to keep her eyes away from the computer screen. It is understandable that Young-goon, living in an age like that, thinks she is becoming one with technology and is taking on some of its affects.
1.5 Conclusion
There are multiple ways in which the characters are becoming-imperceptible in this film, but what distinguishes them from others is that they all have psychiatric causes. These psychiatric conditions in turn can be to some extent ascribed to the digital age
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and its technological developments, because they trigger feelings of losing control. Although it is very much real to them, albeit virtual, the disappearances do not extend beyond the mind of the patients. What is really lost for these people, in the actual, is their identity. Appropriate Deleuzian concepts for Young-goon’s situation that have been discussed in this chapter are (1) becoming-animal, or becoming-cyborg in this case, (2) the actual and the virtual, and (3) the Body without Organs. For this thesis, mentally disappearing is the first stage of becoming-imperceptible, as the person involved is still perceivable by others, it is only a soft way of disappearing.
2. Bodily disappearing in 3-Iron 2.1 3-Iron (빈집)
In 3-Iron another unlikely love-affair takes place, but this time there are three people involved. The story begins as a young man, Tae-seok (Hyun-kyoon Lee), enters a nice suburban area and starts going door to door with take-out menus in order to attach them to people’s front doors. A garage door of one of the houses opens and a man (the husband, played by Hyuk-ho Kwon) who is trying to drive his car out honks because of the motorcycle standing in his driveway. He looks irritated as Tae-seok slowly removes his vehicle. Both men look at each other for a couple of seconds and then drive away. This marks the beginning of a complicated triangular relationship. Soon a young woman, Sun-hwa (Seung-yeon Lee), will join them.
It soon becomes clear what the real purpose of the take out menus is: Tae-seok uses them in order to find out which home owners have not come home. If the flyers are still attached to the keyhole when he visits the houses again, he breaks in to take a look around. After the answering machine secures him the owners will not come back for a couple of days he starts making use of the facilities each of the houses have to offer. To compensate the owners for his short stay he does some chores such as washing the dirty laundry and repairing things. One day, as he enters one of the houses, he finds Sun-hwa, or rather, she finds him. She has just been beaten up by her husband and acts very calmly as she notices the uninvited guest. Like Tae-seok, Sun-hwa moves around the house like a ghost and it takes a while before Tae-seok notices her. After a confrontation with the husband, who happens to be the same man from the opening scene, Sun-hwa leaves with Tae-seok on his motorcycle and she becomes his partner in crime. Together they visit more houses and continue to compensate the
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home owners by doing some chores as they help themselves by going through their fridges and using their pajamas.
After the two have been caught in the house of a dead man, Tae-seok has to stay in prison for a while and Sun-hwa gets picked-up by her angry husband who takes her home. Afraid that his wife has fallen in love with Tae-seok, Sun-hwa’s husband suggests they move to someplace else. He then suddenly decides to stay and wait for Tae-seok’s release. In prison Tae-seok teaches himself to become invisible, and by doing so greatly frustrates the prison guards. When he gets released he has trained himself so well that he can be with his love Sun-hwa, without her husband noticing him around the house. Sun-hwa seems happy again which pleases her husband enough not to become suspicious of the situation. This enables the three of them to continue living this way.
2.2 Becoming entirely imperceptible
The form of disappearing in this film is induced by the protagonist. Tae-seok becomes more and more invisible, or less and less visible, however you wish to call it, until he reaches the final stage in which he has become entirely imperceptible, without a shadow and without making a sound. In order to get there, there are some levels he goes through chronologically throughout the film.
Although Tae-seok tries to be invisible from the beginning of the film by quietly sneaking into people’s houses, he leaves traces behind by repairing things. For example, when he breaks into Sun-hwa’s house, he fixes the scale which was
indicating the wrong weight. The ones duped by his burglary do not really seem to mind his behavior and do not go to the police since nothing is missing. Another way in which he leaves evidence of his presence are the recurrent selfies he takes with the photo camera he always carries with him. In this first stage of becoming imperceptible Tae-seok has one skill almost completely mastered: he is (almost) inaudible. In fact, he does not say a word throughout the entire film. The only noises he makes are the swishing sounds from his clothing and the popping sounds of the golf balls he frequently hits, but these noises will also eventually vanish.
There seems to be a turning point that brings Tae-seok to the second level of becoming imperceptible, when Tae-seok accidently causes a possibly lethal accident by smashing a golf ball through the window of a driving car. After leaving the scene of the accident, he becomes more subtle and stops leaving traces behind. From this
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moment on he lives more modest and does not take any selfies anymore. The couple only use houses for sleeping and eating and does not make use of any other facilities anymore. When they find an old man who has died of lung cancer they give him a respectful burial and clean up his humble abode.
In prison, Tae-seok starts to actively train to become completely imperceptible and practices on the guards by climbing the wall and later on by hiding in the one hundred and eighty degrees the human eye cannot perceive. This time the guard knows Tae-seok is standing behind him and catches him because he sees his shadow. He beats him up with his baton, but also gives him the valuable advice that he should practice more, take care of his shadow and take the human mind in consideration when he pulls a stunt like that. Tae-seok heeds these words and the next encounter with the guard his shadow is gone. The only thing he still needs to work on is his anticipation of the human mind because the guard still knows he could not have left his cell and beats him up again when he finds him.
After a lot of training in prison Tae-seok is released. He is now close to reaching his final stage of becoming-imperceptible. Although people can still sense his presence, they cannot actually see him or perceive him in any other way. The only thing he has not mastered yet is not to leave any traces. There is still evidence that he has been somewhere, like a picture that is missing from a frame and pillows that have been moved. Other than that his mission is accomplished. Even Sun-hwa cannot see him at first, and when she finally does, she can only see him in the mirror. She can however still feel his touch, and only after a while she can directly look at him again, while her husband only senses his presence. Here, in Sun-hwa’s house, Tae-seok does not leave any traces; when he eats from the husband’s plate it goes by unnoticed. It is as if Tae-seok has died when he was imprisoned, which could be the ultimate stage of becoming-imperceptible, as suggested in the introduction of this thesis.
There are a couple of occurrences that suggest Tae-seok actually did die to reach his final stage of becoming-imperceptible. After he has tricked one of the guards again by standing behind him so the guard cannot find him, the guard warns him that the next time this happens he will kill him. Tae-seok performs his trick one more time, but this time he manages to keep the guard from entering the cell. In the next scene with Tae-seok, two guards pick him up from his cell without specifying what will happen now. Tae-seok walks through the corridor with the guards, towards a bright light at the end of it. From now on people can only sense his presence, but as
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if he is a ghost. In the final scene he stands on a scale together with Sun-hwa, but it indicates no weight. This raises questions about Sun-hwa’s existence too, or maybe this indicates that the two of them have become one.
2.3 Escaping responsibilities
As mentioned in the previous paragraph Tae-seok induces his own disappearance. For him, disappearing gives him power over the prison guards and over his lover’s
husband. It also has the benefit that he cannot be held responsible for his actions. The accident he caused with the golf ball and the woman in the car was a good motivator to try harder to live unnoticed and escape reality, but what got him over the edge to reach his final stage of becoming imperceptible was to make the triangular
relationship possible with the woman he loved.
The film does not explain much about Tae-seok’s past. It does not become clear how he got to the point that he needed to break into people’s houses to eat, or if he even needs to do that. His only possession appears to be his motorcycle, but when the couple is sitting in front of a gas station eating heated instant noodles, this seems to indicate that they have at least some money. When Tae-seok is questioned after he gets himself arrested, the policeman asks him why he needs to break in since a background check revealed he actually has a college degree. Since neither Tae-seok, nor the film’s narrative provides any answers, the audience has to fill in the blanks on its own. Since it appears Tae-seok does appear to have the resources to take care of himself, his behavior could be seen as a political statement to rebel against the system.
2.4 Becoming imperceptible with your body
Unlike the psychiatric patients in I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, who are only disappearing in their own minds (virtual), Tae-seok combines using his mind and body to become imperceptible to others as well (both virtual and actual). This is fundamentally different from the virtual or mental reality as discussed in the previous chapter. What is virtual for Tae-seok is his internal motivation, which is probably driven by his past that remains a bit mysterious for the viewer. Not only does he learn to control different aspects of his body such as his movements and breathing, he also manages to do some mind-controlling. He learns from one of the prison guards that he should take the human mind into consideration and starts to anticipate on that. He teaches himself how the human mind works in order to be able to always be one step
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ahead of his opponent. He knows when the opponent will look left or will quickly turn around and is able to keep himself out of sight, but also remains completely silent in order to prevent being perceived by eye or ear. Instead, everything is replaced by touch, as some people are still able to sense his presence.
Throughout the entire film, Tae-seok does not say a word, he speaks in actions and expressions, leaving all interpretation open to the audience. The more people talk in the film, the less they seem to have to say. For example the policemen that are interrogating Tae-seok: they are constantly jumping to the wrong conclusions and are using a lot of violence instead of their brains. This is not Ki-duk Kim’s only film in which characters do not talk. In The Isle (Kim, 2000), for example, one of the main characters is also a mute. Steve Choe assigns their lack of speech to politics: “Kim has progressively explored the use of characters that do not talk in order to discover new ways of “speaking” in the cinema. Their silence attests to their refusal or inability to speak the language of everyday politics” (185). It is clear that Tae-seok refuses to be part of the legal system, because he lives by his own rules in which breaking into houses and touching other people’s belongings without their permission is acceptable.
To point out the importance of the face as a replacement for speech in 3-Iron, Choe uses Deleuzes concept of “faceicity” as used in Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image. Choe explains how Deleuze gives meaning to the face:
He is not asking what the face represents or what it hides. He asks rather about what the face in cinema means as a possibility, about what it can do. The face does not function simply as a carrier of emotion, but as a sign points to the potential creation of affect, not yet actualized, always in excess of its teleological formation. There is thus a stark difference between the image itself and what the image invites: both are embedded within but separate from the world in which they are situated. (189)
In Tae-seok’s case, the face itself invites imperceptibility. His face does not say anything, this is what frustrates the policemen most: they cannot read him. In Cinema
1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze is also pointing out the potential of the face in the
process of imperceptible, without actually talking about
becoming-imperceptible just yet. He remarks: “The close-up turns the face into a phantom” (99), and “The facial close-up is both the face and its effacement” (100). Tae-seok’s face
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literally is effaced and turns into a phantom when he dies and nobody can see it anymore. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are making connections between the face and becoming-imperceptible in the chapter about “faciality”: “Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective … If humans have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become-imperceptible” (171). Having escaped his face and perceptibility, Tae-seok is no longer human, while, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the face is already what is “inhuman” in human beings (171).
Another point Deleuze and Guattari make, is that becoming-imperceptible after all other becomings, means “to be like everybody else” (A Thousand Plateaus 279). For Tae-seok it means to be like everything else. He blends in with his environment so much, he does not even have an own shadow anymore, nor does he appear to be breathing. He has lost all of his human traits, except his emotions. Only Sun-hwa can really feel Tae-seok around her, and eventually manages to see him again. In her perception he is still there, although he lives in the virtual, assuming he really did die in prison; the only thing she has left of him are her memories. Her dreams and imagination make it possible for her to see him, because she deeply desires to be with him.
The film plays a lot with the question if what we see is really there, and in the end even questions whether the world we live in is real or just a dream. Pisters explains her ideas about the final statement of the film:
It can be argued that this is just a justification for the metaphorical and
fantastic elements in the film (the characters becoming weightless at the end). But it also refers to the fundamental questions about consciousness and the function of the brain as a screen. If we have only limited or even distorted perception of reality, does reality exist or is it constructed in the brain? All neuroscientific evidence points towards the fact that both options are true, but that the borders between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ screens are continuously shifting, and therefore remain fundamentally ambiguous. (Foreword to the Korean translation of the Matrix of Visual Culture 4)
This idea by Pisters blends in nicely with Deleuze and Guattari’s questioning of the concept of being, as being can also be interpreted in different ways, but so does their
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own concept of becoming, which has a definition that is also constantly in motion as time progresses. Deleuze does not only want to add other dimensions to life, but also to death. In the next chapter Deleuze’s interpretation of death is more elaborately discussed, but since Tae-seok has also died it is important to give a little set up of the concept in advance. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze objects to the way death is perceived by Freud:
In any case, determined as the qualitative and quantitative return of the living to inanimate matter, death has only an extrinsic, scientific and objective definition. Freud strangely refused any other dimension to death, any prototype or any presentation of death in the unconscious, even though he conceded the existence of such prototypes for birth and castration. (137)
Instead, Deleuze does not see death as a material state at all, but remarks: “having renounced all matter, it corresponds to a pure form – the empty form of time” (137). This is also what has happened to Tae-seok: he has died, but has become time itself. Having lost his body, the only way in which it is possible for him to be perceived by others is to make use of the existing memories of him, and memories are what creates the past as a dimension of time, which will become clear in the next chapter.
2.5 Conclusion
One step further than disappearing mentally (virtual), is also disappearing with the body (actual), which is what happens in 3-Iron. Tae-seok has his own levels of becoming-imperceptible, which suggests the possibility of an evolutionary process as he is working towards something, and in the end reaches his goal. The Deleuzian concepts that are used in this chapter to make sense of Tae-seok’s disappearing are (1) faceicity, (2) to be like everybody else, which is taken to another level and (3) death. Tae-seok’s becoming-imperceptible is reinforced by the aesthetics of the film: for example through the lighting when Tae-seok supposedly dies in a very subtle way and walks towards a bright light, but also through close-ups of his face that is effacing and becomes less visible for the audience as well. Tae-seok’s becoming-imperceptible can be seen as a political statement: he rebels against the system by breaking into people’s houses instead of taking on a real job, but also refuses to speak the language of
22 3. Being dead and Will You be There? 3.1 Will You be There? (당신, 거기 있어줄래요)
Will You be There? is basically a mind experiment that explores how time-traveling
can change someone’s life completely. Somewhere in the middle of Cambodia, Soo-hyun (Yun-seok Kim), who is a very skilled surgeon, decides to operate on a baby with a cleft lip instead of returning home safely before the storm destroys even more of the impoverished area. In return, he receives a bottle of time-travel capsules from the mysterious blind man who has found the abandoned baby-girl in the woods. The man tells him to use the pills to fulfil his dearest wish and advices him to hurry because time is running out for him. Soo-hyun, who is dying from metastatic lung cancer, wants to use the pills so he can go thirty years back in time and see Yeon-a (Seo-jin Chae), the girl he loved, once more. When he meets his thirty-year-younger self, and finds out that the capsules actually work, he decides to use another pill to go back in time again. Young Soo-hyun (Yo-han Byun) does not believe the older version of himself when he tells him he comes from the future. Instead, he thinks the man who is visiting him is mentally ill and is going to hurt Yeon-a, but before he has the chance to do anything, his older self has vanished again. Young Soo-hyun visits a tattoo shop and has the words “please visit” tattooed on his arm to check if he is really telling the truth. After seeing his new tattoo, future Soo-hyun revisits the past. The two meet each other again, but when young Soo-hyun keeps asking questions about what his future will look like with Yeon-a, future Soo-hyun tells him to stop being so curious, while he is attentively watching Yeon-a perform as a dolphin trainer. After having done what he came for, seeing Yeon-a, future Soo-hyun tells his younger version to just be good to Yeon-a. Young Soo-hyun senses something is up and pushes his older self to tell the truth. Future Soo-hyun finally confesses Yeon-a will die soon, but refuses to say more and disappears into thin air again.
Young Soo-hyun is left unsatisfied and cleverly hides a note for his future self to find, threatening to ruin his life if he does not come back. Future Soo-hyun returns and explains he has a daughter, Soo-a (Hye-soo Park), who was born ten years after Yeon-a has died. Saving Yeon-a will also mean his daughter cannot be born, so he refuses to tell young Soo-hyun how he can prevent Yeon-a’s death. After some discussion, the two come to an agreement in which both Yeon-a and Soo-a can live, but for young Soo-hyun there are two conditions attached to this agreement, which
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would make life very hard for him. First of all he can never meet Yeon-a again after the day she was supposed to die. The second condition is that nobody can know about their arrangement, not even Soo-hyun’s best friend, Tae-ho (Sang-ho Kim), because it can affect their relationship in the future. Young Soo-hyun agrees and the two
cooperate into saving Yeon-a.
Yeon-a gets saved, but it does not end there. When she is trying to meet Soo-hyun after he has broken up with her, she gets hit by a car and will die anyway. Both hyun’s perform an operation on her together to save her, as soon as future Soo-hyun has found out what went wrong in the first place. Yeon-a lives, but she will not see Soo-hyun again for thirty years. The same goes for Soo-hyun’s best friend Tae-ho, because Young hyun thinks it will be too hard to have him in his life. When Soo-hyun dies of lung cancer after thirty years, his daughter Soo-a gives a letter to Tae-ho explaining everything that has happened thirty years ago. Tae-ho in turn gives the letter to Yeon-a, but she does not believe what it says. Tae-ho then makes a promise to bring Soo-hyun back and takes the last time-travel capsule to tell Soo-hyun to stop smoking. In all the excitement he forgets to tell him, but apparently Soo-hyun got the message anyway, for he comes back and is reunited with Yeon-a after all.
3.2 Vanishing from the Earth
Every time Soo-hyun travels back in time he literally vanishes from his own time and appears from out of nowhere in the past, somewhere near the thirty year younger version of himself. When the capsule stops working he disappears again and reappears where he took the capsule. Soo-hyun’s disappearances are thus quite literal, but also very temporal since he always comes back to his own time. He does not have a say in when he will return, but he can calculate how long it will take until the capsule has lost its effect. There is however one time in which he comes back too soon and has to take another capsule, which indicates that Soo-hyun cannot control his own appearing and disappearing.
The film also shows a form of disappearing that has the potential to be permanent. When young Soo-hyun does not keep his promise and decides to meet with Yeon-a, future Soo-hyun sees his daughter disappearing from photographs all around the house. On the phone with Tae-ho, his friend has never even heard of Soo-a and asks if that is his new girlfriend. When Yeon-a gets hit by a car, Soo-a walks into the house again as if nothing has happened. If young Soo-hyun had not kept his
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promise from the beginning and had not stopped seeing Yeon-a, Soo-a would have disappeared forever from future Soo-hyun’s life. This form of disappearing is thus somewhat controllable, but not by the person in question.
Another form of disappearing in this film is death, but unlike in the other films, this does not have to be permanent and cannot be seen as the final stage of becoming-imperceptible. Yeon-a even dies twice, but there are no consequences attached (apart from changing the future), except for her limping after she has been hit by a car. Soo-hyun dies from lung cancer, but after his younger self finds out his smoking behavior will kill him, he immediately quits. This has the desired result and future Soo-hyun gets to live.
3.3 The impact of time-traveling
What all these different forms of disappearing have in common is that they are controllable to some extent. It is only logical that if Soo-hyun appears in the past, he has to disappear in his own time, for there is only one future Soo-hyun, and he cannot be in two places at once. The different forms are also all controlled by the same person: Soo-hyun. Even his own death is prevented by himself, although he would not have known he had to quit smoking without Tae-ho’s intervention.
The English title of the film Will You be There? can be interpreted in two ways. First of all, the question can refer to whether someone will or will not show up when asked to be somewhere. This happens several times in the film. The second way to interpret the question is if someone will or will not exist in the future. This applies to Soo-a, Yeon-a and Soo-hyun. In the end, all three of them are still alive, but it would have been an even more final form of becoming-imperceptible had Soo-a never been born after the changes that were made in the past.
As basically a brain-experiment, Will You be There? is also a neuro-image, because of its insistence on brain processes. What is problematic in this film, is that changing the past does not have enough impact on the future in my opinion. Time-traveling is much more complicated than this film shows. Even the slightest change should have been enough not to have Soo-a turn out the way she did, because it would have been another spermatozoon to fertilize Soo-hyun’s one-night-stand’s ovum. This would have made the time-traveling more realistic, but not manageable for the film’s narrative to remain understandable for the audience.
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Korea has seen a number of time-travel films since the Korean new wave in the late nineties. For example Ditto (Kim, 2000), in which two students living in separate times can communicate with each other through amateur radio, and Calla (Song, 1999), in which a man sees the woman who he thinks is his secret admirer get killed. He goes back in time and has twenty-four hours to save her life. These films, as phrased by Anthony Leong, combine the melodrama with some science-fiction or fantasy time-traveling to “unite two lovers otherwise separated by time” (117). This is quite an inventive way to make the combination between Korea’s traditional
melodrama and the popular science-fiction genre work for a large audience.
3.4 Synthesis of time and death
An obvious work that has to be taken into consideration when analyzing a film about time-traveling is Deleuze’s philosophy of time as described in Difference and
Repetition which is derived from Henri Bergson’s ideas about time. By using this
philosophy it becomes more clear in which ways time can be perceived. Deleuze’s concept of time consist of three syntheses. The first synthesis of time, is the one of habit. It shapes the content and foundation of time on which the past and future depend. The second synthesis of time, is the one of memory. Deleuze explains: “Just as the ground is in a sense ‘bent’ and must lead us towards a beyond, so the second synthesis of time points beyond itself in the direction of a third which denounces the illusion of the in-itself as still a correlate of representation” (111). This signifies the “passing of one present and arrival of another” (117). In Deleuze’s third and final synthesis of time, the present and the past are no more than “dimensions of the future” (117), in which the present is just an agent waiting to be obliterated, while the past is only a “condition operating by default” (117). It a matter of choice on how the time in which Soo-hyun lives when we see his older version should be perceived. For him it is the present, but for young Soo-hyun it is the future. To make things even more complicated, it can also be perceived as the past, since the events took place in 2015. In time-traveling, both past and future depend on what happens in the present. Going back to change the past inevitably changes the future.
Deleuze’s philosophy of time plays an important role in
becoming-imperceptible, although Deleuze never really combined the two. As mentioned before, one way to become ultimately imperceptible is to die. Pisters remarks that the future inevitably leads to death, but that it also calls for “rebeginnings” (The Neuro-Image
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304) and the “possibility of the creation of the new” (“Flashforward: The Future is Now” 108). The latter, rebeginnings and creating the new, will be discussed in the next two chapters, but for now I would like to emphasize the relationship between the future and death.
As discussed in the previous chapter, Deleuze rebels against Freud with his view on death. He wants to take away its “extrinsic, scientific and objective definition” (137). Deleuze states:
For death cannot be reduced to negation, neither to the negative of opposition nor to the negative of limitation. It is neither the limitation imposed by matter upon mortal life, nor the opposition between matter and immortal life, which furnishes death with its prototype. Death is, rather, the last form of the
problematic, the source of problems and questions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response, the “Where?” and “When?” which designate this (non)-being where every affirmation is nourished. (Difference and
Repetition 137-138)
With time-traveling a lot of these problems and questions are taken away, but
simultaneously new problems and questions are created too. If it was not for the time-traveling, some of the characters would not be there in the future. The present, as seen from older Soo-hyun’s perspective, has seen people dying in the past, like Yeon-a, but also in the future, like Soo-hyun. Unlike the death of Tae-seok in 3-Iron, death really means being imperceptible in this film; there are no exceptional persons that are able to perceive the deceased. However, in Will You be There? death has been reversed in all the occasions, because time-traveling makes it possible to change the future. This does not happen without any problems: Yeon-a was saved from one accident, but got into another accident which eventually made her limp. Saving Yeon-a also has an impact on Soo-hyun’s relationship with his best friend, and has the potential to cancel the existence of Soo-hyun’s daughter.
In The Neuro-Image, Pisters talks about yet another film in which time-traveling causes a person to no longer exist in the future. The Butterfly Effect (Bress and Gruber, 2004), shows a sinister ending in the director’s cut in which the protagonist goes back to his mother’s womb in order to strangle himself with the umbilical cord and changes the future by preventing himself from being born. Pisters refers to this
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event as “the absolute degree zero of the third synthesis of time: to have died before birth, in order to create a new present – all from the point of view from the future” (305). I would prefer to refer to it as the “absolute boiling point” instead. It is not just the bottom line or foundation of the third synthesis of time, it is its most extreme example. In Will You be There? something similar happens although it is only temporarily: Soo-a starts vanishing from pictures because she does not exist in the adjusted future. In her case, she has not died before being born, because conception never took place, since her mother and father have never met each other. Because non-existence only lasts a couple of minutes before it is reversed again there is no time for rebeginnings or the creation of something new, but these levels of becoming will be discussed in the next two chapters where they do play a significant part in the narrative.
3.5 Conclusion
In this chapter the popular Korean time-traveling genre has been explored and offered death as the third level of becoming-imperceptible. In Will You be There?, dead people are even less perceptible than in 3-Iron. It means not being able to be perceived by anyone at all, not even as a ghost or as a virtual person created from memories. This film also offers an even more definite form of
becoming-imperceptible in the form of not having been born at all. Luckily, all becomings are reversible for this film and nobody stays dead. Deleuze’s three syntheses of time are useful in a way that it indicates a circular movement in time. The future means death, but it will also continue its movement and will first become the present and then the past, leaving the option for a forth level of becoming-imperceptible open.
4. Being re-born in The Man from Nowhere 4.1 The Man from Nowhere (아저씨)
The Man from Nowhere is a crime film with a lot of action and fighting, but in the end
it is also a story of love and caring for one another. A mysterious, nameless pawnshop keeper (played by Bin Won) lives a quiet life and only appears to open up to a little girl who lives in the same building. Everybody else rather relies on the rumors of him being a gangster, who is in hiding because of criminal practices, or even of him being a child molester. The girl, So-mi (Sae-ron Kim), often shows up at his house to escape
