Burning
Symptomatic Mysteries
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is, if you like,what happens when a Korean filmmaker absorbs two antithetical auteurs (Hitchcock and Antonioni), as he combines Hitchcock’s fascination with the inferential object, and Antonioni’s ability to symptomatize a cultural moment. At the same time, Lee works with Hitchcock’s suspense within Antonioni’s sense of mystery. When Alain Robbe-Grillet proposed in the documentary Dear Antonioni that, in Hitchcock’s films, one starts with a mystery that is eventually resolved, in Antonioni’s, you start with no mystery, but the film becomes ever more mysterious. Lee seeks a place somewhere between these two poles, and arrives at the enigmatic, without insisting on the dead time so central to Antonioni’s work, nor the constantly active time of Hitchcock.
To help us, we can usefully say a few words about how Hitchcock activates time, and Antonioni deactivates it. When Hitchcock shows nothing happening, he nevertheless implies something is. Whether it is Jeff looking across at the neighbours early on in Rear Window, or Scottie following Madeline around San Francisco in Vertigo, Hitchcock implies that a plot will develop out of the scenes we are watching. In contrast, even if something does happen (Anna going missing in L’avventura; a car crashes into the river in The Eclipse), Antonioni registers anxiety but almost no suspense. In Rear Window, Hitchcock manages to suggest that out of all these possible stories he shows us, one will become paramount, while in Vertigo, Scottie has been hired by an old friend to follow Madeline because the friend claims there is something untoward.
In Burning, Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) possesses a Madeline-like quality within an Antonioniesque mystery and, as we find in both directors’ work, she is another woman who goes missing. But while in Hitchcock a missing woman is a cause for narrative concern (in Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho), in Antonioni, it can seem closer to a maddening indifference (in L’avventura, Identification of a Woman) as the viewer is likely to wish for more narrative information than the characters will seek. A film can only be as investigative as the characters’ interest in a given mystery. This rests partly on Antonioni’s insistence that we recognise symptoms and don’t reduce the mise en scene to narrative components, as he wishes us to recognise the nature of the culture he shows – usually post-war Italy, but also London in Blow Up, the US in Zabriskie Point; Europe and North Africa in The Passenger.
Lee wants the viewer to be immersed in the mystery and to see, also, the symptomization of a country that in recent years has become GDP wealthy, just like Italy in the post-war years. ‘‘From $2.4 billion in 1961, GDP rose rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s due to export-driven policies, reaching $116 billion in 1986. By 1995, GDP had soared to $566 billion, fueled by electronics and automotive exports. Despite a sharp contraction during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, South Korea rebounded, surpassing $1 trillion in 2006. In 2023, GDP stood at $1.71 trillion, reflecting its robust technology sector and global competitiveness in semiconductors and electronics.’’ (Statbox) Not everyone has shared in this wealth: a recent report notes that, ‘‘By income group, households in the bottom 20 percent saw their net assets fall 4.9 percent, while all groups from the second quintile upward recorded gains. By income group, households in the bottom 20 percent saw their net assets fall 4.9 percent, while all groups from the second quintile upward recorded gains. The increases were especially pronounced among higher-income households, with net assets in the fourth and fifth quintiles rising 4.7 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively.’’ (Korea Times) That might offer more stats than we feel we need to be getting on with, but it helps us understand the socio-economic environment the characters are moving through. The central figure is a burgeoning writer, Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), and is one of those who are losing rather than gaining in South Korea, as we initially we see him working as an odd job delivery guy. When he meets Hae-mi, she is in precarious work, too, employed as a hostess promoting a shop’s products. Yet he is relatively impressed by her small apartment, saying when he visits it, as she asks if he will look after her cat: ‘‘nice room. My old room had a toilet bowl next to the sink.’’
In contrast, Ben (Steven Yeung) has money aplenty. When Hae-mi returns from a trip to Africa (which is why Lee has been looking after the cat), she gets off the plane with this man, who is only a few years older than Lee, and he sees that Ben and Hae-mi have become more than friends. The director never quite explains how Ben has made his money, but he does drive a Porsche Carrera and lives in an apartment where the toilet bowl and the kitchen sink are very far apart. When Lee is there, he uses the bathroom, and we get a better sense of the apartment’s size as well as the wealth it would have taken to furnish it. After returning from the bathroom and out on the balcony, Ben is cooking in the kitchen, and Lee says He’s The Great Gatsby.’’ ‘’Mysterious people who are young and rich, but you don’t know what they really do.’’ That will, of course, remain vague, just as we never find out what has happened to Hae-mi when she goes missing. But because Jong-su is as fascinated by Hae-mi as Scottie is by Madeline, the film isn’t indifferent to trying to find out, even if it will arrive at an Antonioni-esque mystery in the process.
Indeed, of the film’s three leading characters, only Jong-su is transparent, as we are in doubt that he was brought up on a farm about 90 minutes from Seoul. We know too that his father is embroiled in a court case that will eventually see him serve a short sentence, and that Jong-su is looking after the farm in the interim. Jong-su may lack mystery, but he is at the centre of one, or rather two. When he first meets Hae-mi, she remembers him, but he struggles to remember her. Later, she tells him that he once called her ugly, but he has no recollection of this. While looking after the cat, he finds evidence of its presence (there is a cat litter tray and signs in it of recent activity), but never sees the cat itself. When he later asks the landlady about it, she says Hae-mi never had a cat and that no cats are allowed in the building.
This will be a mystery later semi-resolved, but only to generate a bigger one. After Hae-mi herself has disappeared, Jong-su finds Ben in a cafe, asks about her, and Ben claims to be as mystified as Jong-Su. Unsatisfied with the answer, Jong-su starts following Ben and, after a while, Ben confronts him: after all, Jong-Su sitting outside Ben’s apartment block is hardly inconspicuous. Almost all the other vehicles are new cars; Jong-su’s mode of transport is his father’s old rusty pickup truck. Ben invites Jong-su into his apartment once more, and there is a cat, which could be Hae-mi’s. The cat escapes into the car park, and while Ben and his new girlfriend try to get it to come to them, Jong-su manages to attract the cat’s attention by calling it by the name Hae-mi gave her pet: Boil. Jong-su, it seems, has finally resolved the mystery of the cat as he sees it for the first time, but it exacerbates the one over Hae-mi. What is Ben doing with it, and does it prove he knows more about Hae-mi’s disappearance than he lets on?
If we have noted through Robbe-Grillet that Hitchcock’s films start with a mystery and become clear by the end, and that Antonioni’s film become more enigmatic as they go on, this is centrally because Hitchcock also allows his characters to be focally capable of comprehending the situation, albeit through intense curiosity, while Antonioni’s acknowledge their epistemological limitations, albeit partly because of indifference. In Burning, Jong-su is unwilling to accept that limitation, and yet doesn’t quite have the ability to find the information Hitchcock allows his characters to discover. Jong-su is interested in Hae-mi’s disappearance, even as other characters should have a greater interest in her well-being. This wouldn’t only be Ben, but also her mother and sister, who seem not to care when he goes and asks if they have seen her. What we have is a character as interested as a Hitchcock figure in finding out what happened, but with an Antonioni-esque atmosphere in which he is enveloped, where the unconcern (or secrecy) of others hampers his enquiry.
Jong-su might not be a detective, but he understands inference. While he may never have seen Hae-mi’s cat before, despite feeding it, he knows it must be hers because the cat answers to the name she gave it. He also notices when managing to get into Hae-mi’s apartment that her suitcase is still there. Ben reckoned that she had gone on a trip; unlikely without her case. Also, when Jong-su goes to Ben’s bathroom again on this second visit, he is as nosy as he was on the first, but this time with more reason. The items that he had previously found in a drawer that belonged to Hae-mi are still there, including a pink watch he gave her. These are Hitchcockian moments, but while Jung-so manages to convince himself, and the viewer, that something untoward has happened, he is far from proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt that the English maestro’s projects were often so intricately focused upon, as he not only takes the law into his own hands, but does so with dubious certainty.
At the film’s conclusion, he arranges to meet Ben in the middle of the countryside, saying that he has Hae-mi with him. Ben arrives, and the solitary Jong-su stabs him to death. If Ben had killed Hae-mi, would he be likely to turn up? Wouldn’t he be well aware that Jong-su is lying, and to go there risks losing the life that he does lose? Jong-su is right to surmise that there is more to the story than Ben seems willing to divulge, yet he doesn’t have enough information to kill Ben. He is clearly breaking the law by taking it into his own hands, but Jong-su is also breaking an epistemological law which would insist one doesn’t make certain assumptions without enough evidence. Jong-su has enough to be very sceptical about Ben’s claims, but not enough to kill him as revenge for Hae-mi. Who knows where she is: her body could have been sunk by Ben at a lake where he visits, and where Jong-su follows him, or somewhere else in Seoul. A city with ten million people suggests it wouldn’t be hard to disappear into it. She could be elsewhere in the country, alive and well, but we just don’t know, and neither does Jong-su.
Yet this is partly why we invoke Antonioni as readily as Hitchcock, and see that while Hitchcock was the master of inference, Antonioni was no less masterful a director of symptoms. An inference is usually a sign that can be narrowly interpreted; a symptom broadly understood. It is an inference that indicates Hae-mi hasn’t gone on a trip when her suitcase is still in the apartment, but it is a symptom that Jong-su drives a battered truck and that Ben drives a Porsche. Lee Chang-dong says, ‘‘I think that on the surface, the story follows the small mysteries of everyday life. But it doesn’t stop there—it goes beyond that and expands to deal with some bigger mysteries about the world we live in. The phone call that Jong-su receives in the middle of the night is an example of an everyday mystery. But the images of Donald Trump on television or the North Korean radio broadcasts are the same—I think they are mysteries.’’ (Reverse Shot) Lee Chang-dong suggests that mysteries are close to symptoms that are too big for the plot, while we can insist that inferences are what often keep a plot in motion. By combining the sort of inferences that lead us to muse over Hae-mi, and what happened to her, and the symptoms that ask us to think about broader questions concerning South Korean society, and capitalism more generally, Lee combines the mystery of plot with the mystery of broader social questions, ones that cannot be reduced to narrative components.
This is clearly evident in the film’s ending. If one were to kill Ben for murdering Hae-Mi, in a typical thriller, it would be based on correct inference. One may be taking the law into one’s own hands, but this is based on the brain having read the information that leads to it comprehending the situation. But Jong-su simply doesn’t have enough evidence for the deed, and we are more inclined to read it as symptomatic rather than inferential. After all, Jong-su is avenging a death that might not even be a death at all, as we might speculate what has happened to Hae-mi. She might well be dead, but nothing categorically indicates she is, and it is as if Jong-su murders Ben based on strong emotions rather than strong evidence. When earlier Jongs-su tells Ben he is in love with Hae-mi, Ben laughs. Jong-su reiterates: ‘‘Fuck…I said I love her’’, and Ben keeps laughing. Is this a callous response to Jong-su’s feelings, or an awareness of Hae-mi’s nature? Is Hae-mi so manipulative and mythomaniacal that anyone falling for her is an idiot, or is Ben proposing that love itself is idiotic?
It is hard to say, and Jong-su will be none the wiser when he kills him. Yet he will have his emotional reasons for doing so, and the film will have its symptomatic understanding of the deed. On a personal level, there is Jong-su, a man whose family farm is struggling, in love with a woman who has chosen someone with money over him, and Ben finds his interest in this woman amusing. She goes missing, and Ben doesn’t seem to care and has replaced her with another woman, as if they are all interchangeable. The personal level isn’t entirely distinguishable from the symptomatic, but the film impresses upon us that if Jong-su is killing Ben for personal reasons, we can also see his death as symptomatic of South Korean society. From one perspective, it might be revenge for what he assumes is Hae-mi’s demise, but from another is a cry of frustration against the direction of South Korea and its capitalist preoccupations, and perhaps all the more pronounced in the Korean context when just across the border, you have your other half, so to speak, mired in oppressive communism. (This isn’t an abstract notion, but an immediate geographical reality, with the farm next to the border.)
When Jong-su meets with his mother for the first time since she left him as a child, we might struggle to work out her financial status. She speaks about the department store toilets she cleans, yet at the same time, she looks like she has money to spend on clothes, make-up, and jewellery. What seems clear as she fiddles on her phone despite seeing her son for the first time in years is that she lives for whatever version of the materialist good life she can afford. She has escaped rural life, but the film also suggests that there isn’t much of rural life left. When he seeks out Hae-mi’s family, her mother and grandmother run a small city restaurant and when he asks them about a well Hae-mi claims she fell down as a child, they say there wasn’t a well there. Later, his mother says there was. People cannot remember the geography of their pasts, as memory becomes split between competing memories in time because of the relative absence of shared space. If everybody were still living in the same place, agreement would surely be more likely. But Jong-su's mother and Hae-mi’s family are now city dwellers, and when he inquires of a man living around the old area where the well might have been, and the man says he knows of no well, we might wonder if he is a more recent occupant. Whether people have been there in the past but are no longer there, or are there but never used to be, this can play havoc with the mapping of past space. From one perspective, we may see this question of the well as Jong-su trying to find out whether Hae-mi has been lying; from another, it is that trying to prove whether she has been or not can become an impossible task. It becomes symptomatic of the changes in recent South Korean society, where turbo capitalism not only destroys communities but also does a job on memory as well.
Yet it is important to acknowledge that this doesn’t make the film a categorical critique of capitalism; more, it undermines the categorical nature of narrative by insisting that the film can’t only be comprehended through its plot, but that it also needs to absorb, into its narrative, components that undermine its own certitude. There are reasons why Jong-su kills Ben, but that doesn’t mean he knows why. This might sound paradoxical, but it is what happens when the inferential story collides with symptomatic exploration, and a good example of this combination comes when Jong-su follows Ben, ostensibly to try and find out more about what happened to Hae-mi, but, in filmic terms, for us to understand an aspect of South Korean society. We see Jong-su on the motorway, during the day, following Ben, with almost every vehicle much newer than his own. We see him looking up at a high-rise and on the third or fourth floor, before the film cuts to shots of Ben that suggest we have left Jong-su’s point of view and are musing over what might be going on in Ben’s mind. We seem him running on a treadmill as he takes advantage of this no doubt expensive gym. The film then cuts (the next day) to Jong-su watching Ben attending church, and then Jong-su goes to a gallery, which also doubles up as a restaurant where Ben is eating with what looks like his family. All the while, Lee films as if trying to understand the society Ben is in as readily as the one that Jong-su is alienated from. It isn’t just that Jong-su wants to find out what Ben is doing so that he can discover what has happened to Hae-mi; it is also that the director wants to contrast two very different lives. When Jong-su watches Ben running on the treadmill, Jong-su is eating fast food. It contrasts strongly with Ben’s luxurious meal at the gallery. While Jong-su investigates Ben’s movements, Lee Chang-dong is exploring different living standards in Seoul.
The director noted that while the film was based on Haruki Murakami’s story, ‘Barn Burning’, the story was itself inspired by Faulkner’s of the same name. He was interested in the contrast between the writers. ‘‘Murakami and Faulkner are completely different, they’re at different ends of the spectrum. But it’s not a question of style, it’s about a gaze, about a way of living. These are two different authors with different ways of looking, different ways of living. Today we are living in Murakami’s world; not in terms of a literary world, but the actual one we’re living in. Murakami is a postmodernist, and we’re living in a postmodern world.’’ (Little White Lies) The director adds, I’m closest to Faulkner. My attitude towards life, towards seeing the world, is closest to Faulkner’s, but I’m living in Murakami’s world, which is a limitation. I’m seeing the world as Faulkner sees it, but nowadays audiences don’t want to see things that way because they’re closer to the Murakami experience. The world is changing rapidly, and nobody wants to be serious. Questioning something isn’t seen as being cool.’’ Lee Chang-dong may feel closer to Faulkner, which is to recognise hardship, but is this really how he lives? It was as if Lee wanted to acknowledge the relative luxury he has as a person making films, and someone with a need to register struggle in the new South Korea, and knew that a thriller plot wouldn’t quite be enough. ‘‘Burning is only superficially a mystery-thriller,’’ Lee says, ‘’the mystery elements lead us into the mysteries of our lives, our politics, our economy and sociology. It also makes us question what we see and what we don’t see, what exists and doesn’t exist. It asks what is metaphor, what is storytelling?’’ (Little White Lies)
This is the symptomatic side we have been discussing, and if we might have a relative reservation about this work, one of the finest over the last decade, it rests on Lee never quite visualising the symptoms with the master of the Italian. Antonioni could give his images an astonishing symptomatic texture, one that managed, through framing and colour, sound and performance, a biopsy of the given moment. Whether it is the streets in Blow Up, emptied out all the better to bring out key aspects of swinging ‘60s London, the one point perspective of the hotel corridor with Monica Vitti in the forgeround and Richard Harris in the background in Red Desert, the shots of buildings and streets at the end of The Eclipse, or a sound design that often seems muted all the better to register the hesitancy of character and situation, Antonioni constantly asks us to see that many of the enigmas rest not in the story being told but in the angle of attack visually.
There are instances of this, of course, in Burning, and Lee’s film is far from visually dull. Indeed, in several moments he might to bring to mind Antonioni’s framing. In a fine shot/ counter shot at the gallery, he shows Ben and others eating on the left-hand side of the frame, while we can see Jong-su in the distance. The film in the following shot shows Jong-su on the left hand side of the frame, and Ben eating on the right as Jong-su peers in the direction of the table. In another scene, the film zooms out on Jong-su while he is writing in Hae-mi’s room, and shows us Jong-su shrinking in the frame as the vastness of the city becomes apparent. It might remind us of a shot in The Eclipse, where Vitti looks out of a window, and Antonioni also frames her in a high-angle long shot. If Antonioni often made characters small within the frame, it rested partly on their smallness in a narrative world they could not control, or didn’t believe or see the point in doing so. When Hitchcock offers a version of this long shot on a window, he reverses it. In Psycho, the camera moves from a great distance into the hotel room, and throws us straight into the story of an affair, where Marion and her lover promptly need money to live a better life. Hitchcock was always a visual virtuoso whose work was contained and constrained by the demands his narratives placed upon him. Antonioni felt no such obligation, and so his shots possess a far higher percentage of perspectival anomalies, as one is left querying the aesthetic choices the Italian makes and the odd angles he offers. Lee retreats a little from such innovation. But then, if we have made much of Burning occupying a place between the English storyteller and the Italian symptomiser, then it makes sense Lee’s images will sometimes sacrifice invention to convention, to telling a tale it wants to generate, but insist it be contained by acknowledging the state South Korea happens to be in. This is a state that can boast of astonishing economic growth over the last few decades, but also potentially stunted growth in other areas.
In one of the most beautiful scenes in the film, Hae-wi dances to Miles Davis (music from Lift to the Scaffold), and it echoes an earlier dance she offers at Ben’s flat, with the wealthy onlookers bemused. (A scene which may itself suggest an echo of The Eclipse, with its scene of awkward dancing invoking, like here, Africa.) Hae-wi explains the difference between the two types of Hunger that bushmen comprehend. There is the little hunger of practical living, and the great hunger of spiritual necessity, and they would dance to illustrate this distinction. Hae-wi does so too. But it is a strange moment because these are people living comfortably within what Lee would call postmodernism, and while they have more than satisfied the little hunger, the greater hunger needn’t be seen as a higher yearning, but closer to a higher earning capacity. Ben has clearly achieved the latter, but the film might well propose whether such an achievement is much of an achievement at all, especially when it leaves so many others behind, even possibly dead.
© Tony McKibbin