Questions of Masculinity
and Beauty in the Jopok Films A Bittersweet Life (2005) and The Man From Nowhere (2010)
By Rowena Santos Aquino
The Jopok Film
In June 1990, Im Kwon-taek released the first film of what
would become The General’s Son series
(1990-1992). The General’s Son singlehandedly revived the jopok, or organised crime, film in South Korean cinema, following a
drought that stretched back to the 1970s and early 1980s. Significantly, in October 1990 the
South Korean government declared war on organised crime and proceeded to
conduct raids on various criminal organisations and arrest leaders of the
principally family-led businesses throughout the country. Though government raids and arrests
occurred following the release of The
General’s Son, it is interesting to imagine that headlines about real-life jopok members fed into the ongoing
interest in the film and the rest of the series, and contributed to making it a
box-office hit. One need only
recall the classic Hollywood gangster triptych of Little Caesar (1930, Mervyn LeRoy), The Public Enemy (1931, William A. Wellman), and Scarface (1932, Howard Hawks) to think
of a scenario of crime headlines, film production, and the box-office informing
each other in such a way.
 |
| Chow Yun-fat in The Killer (1989) |
According to Jinsoo An, more immediately in the mind of
director Im Kwon-taek in making The
General’s Son series was the idea of reviving the screen image of Korean
masculinity. This idea was partly
triggered by the highly popular and influential 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong
action and Triad films – courtesy of filmmakers John Woo, Johnnie To, and Ringo
Lam, among others – which began to be distributed in South Korea at the
time. Looming large above all
other idealised images of cool, handsome, and individualistic masculinity was
Chow Yun-fat. With Chow’s height
and tragic-manic persona in Woo’s films, he literally and metaphorically loomed
over his male costars such as Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung.
Of course, the interesting detail is that John Woo modeled
Chow Yun-fat’s walk, dress, and overall performance after the French actor
Alain Delon and the crime noir films he did with Jean-Pierre Melville,
especially Le samouraï (1967). In turn, Melville was inspired by Alan
Ladd’s portrayal of an assassin in the Hollywood film This Gun For Hire (1942, Frank Tuttle) for Le samouraï. In these
two films, Ladd and Delon personify assassins whose otherworldly physical
beauty creates a compelling tension with their criminal profession and stoicism
in the face of killing and death.
 |
| Alain Delon in Le samouraï (1967) |
But what began partly as a way to distinguish Korean crime
action films and images of masculinity from those found in Hong Kong films
(flavoured with Melville-Delon) has become a full-fledged successful, dynamic,
and self-sustaining genre in its own right in contemporary South Korean cinema. Between 1990 and 2005, South Korean
cinema saw a plethora of jopok films
(e.g. Beat [1997, Kim Sung-su], Nowhere To Hide [1999, Lee Myung-se]),
gangster comedies (e.g. No. 3 [1997,
Song Neung-han], My Wife is a Gangster
series [2001-06], Marrying the Mafia
series [2002-06]), and other films that appropriated gangster tropes for their
own purposes (e.g. Hoodlum Lessons
[1996, Kim Sang-jin]).
Jopok Evolution
If by 2005 South Korean cinema had reached a jopok saturation point, it is also the
point of departure for another phase in jopok
evolution. Films such as A Dirty Carnival (2006, Yoo Ha), The Show Must Go On (2007, Han Jae-rim),
Rough Cut (2008, Jang Hun), and Breathless (2009, Yang Ik-jun) run
through the usual gamut of jopok
themes of duty vs. personal desire and the endless cycle of violence, but they
also toy with the jopok genre in a
marvelous way and present a different level of grittiness, self-reflection, and
auteur expression over and above commercial impulses. A Dirty Carnival
and Rough Cut are particularly
interesting for having the component of a film-within-the-film. Rough
Cut is especially superb for its commentary on the desire for the realism
of violence and the gangster as a film fetish to be admired and feared at the
same time by having an actual gangster play opposite an actor in a gangster
film. The very good looks of lead
actors Jo In-seong and So Ji-seob in A
Dirty Carnival and Rough Cut may
not be absolutely crucial to the trope of admiration and fear of the gangster,
but they certainly factor into it and reference that tension between beauty and
violence with Ladd, Delon, and Chow.
 |
| So Ji-sub in Rough Cut (2008) |
In the context of this Ladd-Delon-Chow loner lineage and
idea of cool, handsome, and individualistic masculinity, arguably the most
existential interpretation thus far is Kim Ji-woon’s 2005 film A Bittersweet Life, while the most
literal interpretation has to be Lee Jeong-beom’s 2010 film The Man From Nowhere.
A Bittersweet Life explicitly takes the jopok film to the level of noir, that
is, a level of stylisation of lighting, place, film references, (masculine)
interiority, and narrative trajectory.
The distinction between the gangster film and noir comes from director
Kim himself. Kim said in a master
class on A Bittersweet Life back in
2009, “How I thought of noir was that it's a genre that expresses a gangster
movie in a more aesthetic way. I
think that gangster movies and film noir have to be distinguished [and]
separate.” A Bittersweet Life is a stylistic exploration of one’s place in the
world at a given time, one’s actions, one’s emotions that fuel or thwart such
actions, and the consequences of in/action through the proverbial loner and
revenge scheme within the criminal underworld.
 |
| Lee Byung-hun in A Bittersweet Life (2005) |
Such a description also applies, though to a lesser degree,
to The Man From Nowhere (2010). It is stylistic in its own way and
actually opens up the revenge scheme to reflect the globalised, diversified
world in which criminals and their organisations must now work. The differences in the ways in which
these two films stylistically explore one’s place in the jopok world are much more marked than the similarities. For one thing, the level of noir
elements in A Bittersweet Life is
much more pronounced than in The Man From
Nowhere, which factor into the nature of each film’s narrative and
conclusion. In A Bittersweet Life, the existential
malaise of the lone anti-hero is explicit and falls outside of any moral
context. Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun)
makes the conscious decision of not killing his boss’ girlfriend and
clandestine boyfriend and pays for it.
To a tee he follows the protocol of revenge to its inevitable end after
his boss and cohorts beat him to a pulp.
In The Man From Nowhere, the
existential malaise is also palpable but fitted out more along moral/ethical
lines as Tae-shik (Won Bin) is forced to come out of his shell and into contact
with a crime organisation to find a kidnapped young girl. While A Bittersweet Life follows a man bent on revenge against his own
boss and cohorts and carried away by internal (il)logic that he himself does
not question, The Man From Nowhere is
about a man who gets haphazardly involved in a rescue and must contend with a
host of external malicious forces.
While the narrative trigger for Sun-woo’s revenge in A Bittersweet Life is romantic, the
impetus for Tae-shik in The Man From
Nowhere is more familial through the young girl. Perhaps the most significant existentialist difference
between these two films is the death and survival of the protagonist. Take a wild guess as to who dies or
survives.
 |
| Won Bin in The Man From Nowhere (2010) |
Despite, or because of, these differences, these two films
make for an interesting study of comparison, especially with regards to their
respective lead actors and how the films narrativise and deconstruct their
masculine beauty. Before focusing
on Lee Byung-hun and Won Bin, some more general comments on the two films are
in order.
Part II of Masculinity and Beauty in A Bittersweet Life and The Man From Nowhere
Rowena Santos Aquino recently obtained her doctorate degree in Cinema and Media Studies. She is a contributing writer to Asia Pacific Arts. She has also contributed to other online outlets, such as Midnight Eye and Red Feather, and to print journals, including Transnational Cinemas and Asian Cinema. She also loves football. She can be found musing about film and football on her
twitter page.
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