Burning dir. Lee Chang Dong
**SPOILERS**
Can someone direct me to a feminist reading of Lee Chang Dong’s Burning? I’d love to read one/have a conversation with someone about these themes.
This an unstructured impressionistic collection of my thoughts.
If Steven Yeun’s character Ben represents the extreme of violent toxic masculinity in his controlling serial killer who lives for the performance & preys on young women, the character of Jongsu (Jong Seo Jun) represents complicit masculinity. Jongsu is the bewildered but not completely clueless person who remains passive at the cost of others and operates to appease their own self-interest.
Haemi (Ah In Yoo) demonstrates how the manic pixie dream girl trope is co-opted by the patriarchy for men’s self-interest. In Ben’s case it is to provide entertainment, exotic interest, & aestheticism for his controlled performance of a normative life. For Jongsu, she is also stimulation, but more literally so. Haemi also represents his lost childhood, and is a canvas for Jongsu to project his anxieties about women and women’s bodies - he calls her a whore for dancing with her top off despite having professed his love for her minutes prior. Both male characters are emblematic of two sides of patriarchy, while Ben’s character is at the apex of the patriarchy, Jongsu is example of someone whose been victimised by patriarchal abuse himself and mostly perpetuates violence through ignorance & passivity.
As a viewer, the social cues to Ben’s character’s narcissism & lack of empathy are clear, as are the early clues to his serial killing behaviours. These are set up well for the viewer (for example the shot of the black square make-up case in Ben’s bathroom matches the foreshadowing shot of knives in Jongsu’s father’s safe).
As the viewer, this reinforces the slowness of Jongsu’s character to the point where it seems he is willingly ignoring the clues and choosing to embrace obliviousness. For what reason is not clear - is it merely his passivity, or curiosity? It does not seem to be fear because he recklessly & persistently stalks Ben. Either way he does not demonstrate motivation by a desire to protect or love Haemi - except perhaps in the end scene - which seems quite incongruous in this regard.
This last scene might be satisfactory from a tradition male viewer whose plot expectations of vengeance are borne out in a superficial way - one man exacting vengeance for the killing of HIS woman. But the scene layers the deeper meaning of the cycle of violence inherent in patriarchy. Jongsu embraces vigilante violence as the means to end Ben. That is his only choice, because he has witnessed the classism inherent in the Korean judicial system. He has seen that his father will receive a 1.5 year sentence while Ben’s character walks free. He has learned violence by watching Ben and his father. There is a curiousity interwoven into Jongsu’s passivity, particularly when watching Ben’s character. The fascination of a man lower down in the patriarchy looking at a man higher up in the patriarchy by virtue of class and comfort. This curiosity is wildly alarming when you consider the legacy of the male writer as “neutral observer” in the vein of Truman Capote, and even of Faulkner himself. In not acting on the red flags of Ben’s character and working to respect and warn Haemi, in favour of his own curiousity, Jongsu’s character uncovers the complicity inherent in writerly masculinity. This is a form of masculinity familiar to me in some of Murakami’s work, so it is interesting to see how Lee Chang Dong has chosen to expose it more knowingly here.
The image of Jongsu imagining receiving a hand job from a woman (Haemi?) on Haemi’s bed and then sitting writing in Haemi’s room after her death -are emblematic of how as a person she was appreciated by him as fuel for his physical needs and writing pursuits only. He is mourning her for what she gave him and deriving posthumous pleasure from same. She is a tool for his own benefit, even in death. His apparent love for her was not practised selflessly in any of his words and behaviours.
Jongsu is so pre-occupied in finding out if Haemi’s story about being stuck in a well is true, he fails to see the metaphor in her story - the metaphor of her being trapped, only seeing the sky, and Jongsu finding her and pulling her out. The irony of him being the writer and her having previously expressed ignorance of the word metaphor is clearly rung home. Haemi feels and lives, and understands metaphor, but she is trapped, her experience a vehicle and plaything of the men in her life.
As the viewer we experience the gaslighting of Haemi’s experience, that occurs with the posthumous labelling of her words as “storytelling”, and the patronising and dismissive looks from Ben’s character.
Even when Jongsu goes to see his mother, he does so out of selfish needs - the need to find out information.
The calf- we are told it is explicity female- is sold - presumably to slaughter and we watch with Jongsu as it is loaded onto a truck. Implicitly this is the moment when things click for him. It is telling that the metaphor that works is the one that associates a woman with an animal sold for meat.
