My third review of 1997’s important Korean gangster films is
actually on the first one that was released (February) during the year. Lee Chang-dong’s Green Fish repositioned concerns of the Korean New Wave filmmakers,
such as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sung-woo, into a narrative with much more
commercial appeal. After Gangster Lessons, Born to Kill, and Boss
all featured in the top 10 Korean films of 1996, the gangster movie was a hot
trend and Green Fish did indeed
perform very strongly, landing at No. 8 the year it was released. After penning Park Kwang-su’s To the Starry Island (1993) and A Single Spark (1995), Lee burst onto
the scene with his debut, starring Han Suk-kyu, hot off the success of the
previous year’s No. 1 Korean film The
Gingko Bed and Song Kang-ho in a smaller role. Both would feature later that year in No. 3.
“The refiguration of the urban space reconstitutes the
familial relations that in turn destabilize the premodern values and ethics.”
Kyung Hyun Kim makes this point early in his ‘At the Edge of
a Metropolis in A Fine, Windy Day and
Green Fish’ chapter in his seminal
volume The Remasculinization of Korean
Cinema. Lee’s film very
pointedly and adroitly examines the encroaching urban crawl as it swallows Green Fish’s protagonist’s humble
countryside home upon his return from conscripted military duty. Lee presents the effect of this rapid
urbanization in a very literal manner as Mak-dong’s large family unit has been
shattered. His father is dead, his
mother seems to have gone a little cuckoo, his brother is a paraplegic (a precursor to Lee's third film Oasis, 2002), and his
other siblings, including a young club girl and a degenerate, drunk detective,
have spread apart. The large brood cannot seem to function in the new urban and suburban space, chiefly the home of small nuclear families.
After an opening credits sequence which features a collage
of pictures of Mak-dong’s family and home from years past, before Seoul loomed
on the horizon, Green Fish begins with a scene on a train. Mak-dong is returning from the army and
is sticking his head out between carriages. He looks to the left and sees an attractive woman do the
same, though she is oblivious to him.
Her red shawl comes undone and floats down towards him, whipping across
his face. Back in the carriage he
notices a trio of young thugs harassing her and gets involved only to get
soundly beaten. They get off at
the next stop and he trots after them with a heavy object and whacks one of
them across the head before scampering back to the train, but it’s already
leaving so he must run away.
Having left his bag on the train, he is now without any
possessions. This, coupled with the
new landscape he comes home to, indicates an inevitable new beginning for
him. As he stands in his house’s
door frame, he discards his military jacket, Lee opts to shows this using slow motion.
The train motif indicates the modernization of society, much
in the same way that locomotives featured in some of the greatest Hollywood
western films like Sergio Leone’s Once
Upon a Time in the West (1969).
Lee would employ train motifs even more prominently in his next film
Peppermint Candy (1999) as his camera followed one in backwards shots in between the film's reverse chronological sequences.
The red shawl is important because of its color, which
indicates lust, love, blood, and the criminal underworld and because it covers
his face. From the moment this happens, Mak-dong has begun to tread on a
descending path into the underbelly of modern Seoul. The woman is Mi-ae, the lover of Mak-dong’s future gang boss
and she serves as an unwitting femme fatale. It is his infatuation with her that ultimately leads to his downfall.
But Mi-ae is not Mak-dong’s only reason for eventually
assuming a role as a low-level gangster.
His masculinity is put into question since he can’t fend a few young
bullies and because at the time of his return, he is unable to prevent his mother
and sister from performing demeaning duties for income.
The thugs who disrespect Mi-ae and gang up on Mak-dong
represent an apathetic and displaced youth prone to violence. Chung Doo-hwan’s autocratic regime fell
in 1988 and with it a certain respect for authority. Despite Mak-dong’s uniform which identifies him as a
soldier, the youths attack him anyway.
Another example of this in the film is when Mak-dong rides in his
brother’s egg truck. After he gets
pulled over for running a red light he manages to convince the cop to take a
5,000 won bribe. He gives him a 10,000
note and the policeman agrees to go get him some change but then drives
off. Mak-dong and his brother then
drive after him, swerving beside him and yelling at him to stop the car over an intercom. It’s a funny reversal of
roles but also a little alarming that they feel they can behave this way in the
face of authority even if the cop is shown to be corrupt, though they are
complicit in this. Such behavior
would never have been tolerated in Korea in earlier years.
For me the most successful element of the film is the
staging of Mak-dong’s descent into criminal life. I’ve already examined his initial encounter with Mi-ae but the next time he sees her it is as a
reflection in a telephone booth in an unseemly part of Seoul. He follows her through evocative red
lights and past a clownish, foreboding club marketer, who pretends to shoot him
in the head, into a big club. She
is a singer and appears on stage as a vision of white. Mi-ae is the white
rabbit and Mak-dong has followed her down the rabbit hole.
Later, Mak-dong gains entry into the gang world not by
showing off his wits but by being violent and recalcitrant in the face of perceived
authority in the form of Song Kang-ho’s hoodlum character. Just before he is asked to do a job by the gang boss, he is
in the main hall of the club. The
boss and Mi-ae enter and sit at a booth, she whispers something in his ear and he then shouts for the music to come on.
She gets up to dance to a spooky Tom Waits song and ambles in a slow,
sultry fashion. It’s a
delightfully odd sequence that could nearly be part of a David Lynch film but it fits into Mak-dong’s Alice in Wonderland trajectory.
Next he is in a karaoke hall which features a scantily clad
American exotic dancer performing on giant collage of TV screens. Does this indicate that Korea’s
globalization and contemporary fetish with American culture coincide with a
debasement of morals? Mak-dong goes to
the bathroom and sings along to the song being performed, he stops at: “An
unworthy son has this sin”. He
stares at himself in the mirror and then hangs his head before smashing his
fingers with the door of a stall.
At first this seems like an act of self-mutilation borne out of guilt
for the path he has embarked on.
In the next scene he begins to harangue the patron who sang
the karaoke song until he becomes annoyed enough to take a swing at him. Mak-dong pretends that the patron has broken his
fingers. It turns out that this is
his first job for the gang but he seems to revel in this self-destructiveness
and willingly takes on the pain and he is later admonished by his boss for his
youthful disregard for his own health.
Mak-dong’s self-destructive behavior continue when later he smashes a
bottle over his head as people boo at Mi-ae on stage.
In a famous scene that was given tribute in Ha Yu’s
exceptional A Dirty Carnival (2006),
Mak-dong murders a rival boss in a bathroom and stuffs him in a stall. Just before this he burns Mi-ae’s
shawl. Does he do this as he
recognizes that he has become an active agent in his own debasement?
I find Mak-dong’s character arc to be brilliantly handled by
director and writer Lee and performer Han. The story itself is not very original but it is executed
well and reappropriates the construct to highlight certain pressing themes in
contemporaneous Korea. Besides the
few elements I’ve briefly discussed, Green
Fish has an enormous amount to offer, a lot of which reveals itself on
subsequent viewings. It may not
reach the heights of Lee’s later films but it stands as one of the most
important works of 90s Korean film.
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