Cinemyths

A question that repeatedly strikes while I was watching is how to measure the degree of ethicality each time the Boundary images are brought into the film’s vision, as a matter of signification. Following the obvious actuality of releasing historical process through thinking of its pathology, the schism in Korean homo-culture, no matter how far apart their present productions, has found an easy mode to assert its existential status by representing a geographical fact: a materialized distance produced at the Bridge of No Return regarding a certain empirical vision whose scope bears bodily practices.

Engendered by this kind of physical address, the interactive procedure that governs the zone across border posts is characteristic of haptic intensity. The temporal order, or, more precisely, the exerting capacity of the day-to-day “ordinary” over the macroscopically timeless segregation, was formulated in the grounded physical dynamics. Presented within the utopian House, it could be said that the power of these de-contextualized bodies produces specialized and individualized wartime relations for their own sake in JSA.

Concerning the preoccupied corporeal intention, we can align the characters’ intimacy with a sense of natural eroticism – if not totally monopolized, yet largely voiced – about the innocent desire of flesh. Behind Park Chan-wook’s own attention to “search for pleasure” and We June Yi’s pairing the repressed intersection at dark with the “reclaimed ideology,” the very mechanism seemingly rationalized both. On the other hand, the essentially kindred closeness makes the bodily correspondence traceable at a fine physical level. But back to the beginning of this review, my concern is how to assess the ethical dimensions of distinct identities being ready to encounter one another, if one does not incline to observe the discreteness of the ideological productions they respectively respond to; based on this, to ask further, how to measure the validity of the assessment itself?

——2024.11.07