Revenge Week: Seeing Devils - Violence and Revenge in Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (Part II)

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

By David Bell

Released the same year, Jang’s Bedevilled offers a more delicate approach. Hae-won, an unsympathetic Seoul bank-worker, is forced to take time off after aggressive behaviour towards a colleague and visits her childhood friend Bok-nam on the fictional island of Moo-do. Appalled by the mannerisms and cleanliness of the farming islanders, she passively bears witness to their horrific treatment of Bok-nam and murder, and denial thereof to (again) useless police, of Bok-nam’s daughter. Frustratingly, Jang persistently plays with our expectation to see Hae-won emerge from her clean middle-class apathy and intervene in Bok-nam’s suffering under the abject, conventionally Othered, islanders. But just as she previously failed to act after witnessing Bok-nam’s gang rape as a teenager by those same men as youths, Hae-won, indifferent, arranges her return to Seoul. In turn, Bok-nam’s manic massacre of the islanders takes on a decidedly, and cleverly achieved, tone of despair. Had Hae-won intervened, as her need for redemption combined with the wretched islanders’ need of punishment appeared to signpost she would, the ensuing carnage might have taken a more traditionally cathartic mode – one more in keeping with the violence performed in I Saw the Devil.

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Revenge Week: Seeing Devils - Violence and Revenge in Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (Part I)

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013). 

By David Bell

Spectacles of violence are an important aspect of modern cinema. At times they shock and appal us, at others they attract and excite. Often they are the most memorable moments of a film. To mention Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) is to remind those, who have seen it, instantly of a man slicing off his own tongue. Our uneasy relationship to screen violence can be traced from the very genesis of cinema. Thomas Edison’s 1903 film Electrocuting an Elephant showed simply that – a scene of violence, the public electrocution of an elephant. That same year Edwin S. Porter took steps with The Great Train Robbery to bring the two cinematic aspects of narrative and violence effortlessly together. Today, spectacles of violence are regularly where cinema is found at its most visceral; where the reality of our corporeal bodies is brought into line with those of the characters on screen. In some instances, it can be deeply uncomfortable; in others, massively pleasurable.

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