BURNING: Liberation Amidst Raging Uncertainties
CGV ArthouseHaruki Murakami’s stories have strong elements of magical surrealism in which readers often find themselves traipsing between the blurred lines of fantasy and reality. His short story Barn Burning is no exception. Under the guise of a mystery-thriller, the novella-inherent surrealistic qualities make the reader question reality whilst also considering the fictionality of the events. This is one of the many reasons why Murakami’s stories are near-impossible to translate into films.
The atmosphere of his work alone proves most difficult to adapt. Murakami’s most diehard fans should know he loves to emphasise, sometimes overly describe, the minuscule, mundane aspects of quotidian life while maintaining a certain feeling of vagueness, as opposed to focusing on creating a plot-driven story. Through the filmic medium, the screen needs to find ways to communicate the right atmosphere that draws forth the humdrum existence of Murakami’s characters through dialogue and visuals to the audience without making its imagery feel drab or uninteresting. To bring Murakami’s work to the screen is no easy feat, but director Lee Chang-dong perfectly captured all of the author’s essences in his 2018’s critically-acclaimed Burning.
Burning revolves around Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring writer who has recently moved out to his family farm on the borders of the DMZ in South Korea after his father is arrested for assaulting a government official. One day, while travelling into town for work, he bumps into a girl, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), who claims to be his childhood friend. Noticing that he doesn’t recognise her, she mentions she had plastic surgery. That night, they go to dinner where she tells him she will soon be leaving for Africa and asks him to help take care of her cat while she’s gone. After she leaves, Jong-su dutifully tends to her apartment daily but strangely enough, he never actually sees the cat. When Hae-mi returns, she’s not alone but is accompanied by a handsome, somewhat mysterious, man named Ben (Steven Yeun) who comes from an inexplicably wealthy background. Aside from his finely built veneer, Ben doesn’t reveal much about himself. When asked what he does for a living, Ben casually answers, “I play.” As the story progresses, the viewer learns that Ben has a liking for burning down greenhouses as he confesses this peculiar hobby of his to Jong-su. Ben’s confession affects Jong-su, causing him to inspect all of the abandoned greenhouses near his home every day. Shortly afterwards, Jong-su loses contact with Hae-mi, and he suspects Ben for having something to do with her disappearance.
The film starts and ends ambiguously, without bothering to answer any of its questions posed within the narrative confines. First and foremost, the story is told through Jong-su, an unreliable narrator who happens to be a writer. While watching the film, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that everything happening on the screen is a product of his imagination. Jong-su sees what he wants to see, believes what he wants to believe, and the audience gets to experience all of this first-hand through his point of view. It’s his context that decides how one would read the final half of the film. And as a writer/creator, Jong-su is in the perfect position to manipulate the audience. Through the viewpoint of a manipulator, the paradoxical identification of subjective and objective truth is manifested into an ambiguous ‘in-between’ space which connects the real world to the imaginary world.
Halfway into the film, during a patronising conversation, Ben explains to Jong-su his personal philosophy of simultaneous existence: “I’m here and I’m there.” “I’m in Paju, and I’m in Banpo. I’m in Seoul and, at the same time, I’m in Africa.” Ben’s introduction of simultaneous existence further underlines the notion of ‘in-between’ space and, in effect, encapsulates what Haruki Murakami does best in his fiction: the rendering of dual existence of reality and imagination. The boundaries between these two domains are often blurred and overlap one another. By obscuring the border between reality and fiction, Murakami and Lee Chang-dong, each in their own way, foreground the coexistence of the real and the imaginary as both can simultaneously reinforce and impose upon one another.
The simultaneous existence may also imply that Ben and Jong-su are one person. Ben could be born out of Jong-su’s yearning or a figure that he’s aspired to become – a well-made man who’s rich and charming. Ben’s hobby of burning greenhouses stems from Jong-su’s inchoate fascination with fire when his dad forced him to burn all of his mother’s clothes. Hae-mi, who may also be a figment created in Jong-su’s mind, seems to appear as a compensation for his lack of care and affection. However, these are just speculations. It’s hard to pin down whether or not the events and characters in the movie are truthfully reported by the narrator or merely a part of his creative endeavour. Regardless of how viewers try to dissect it, it’s most likely that they wouldn’t be able to find the answer just like how life is not all black or white, right or wrong, and that there is no such thing as universal truth. On top of that, the well, the mysterious phone calls, and the cat are just a few of the many illusions in the film. They seem to exist, but, at the same time, do not.
In a nutshell, Burning is South Korea divided into two halves: the haves and the have-nots. Jong-su and Hae-mi have to put in the work to pay off their debts, while Ben simply, in his own words, plays. When Jong-su first enters Hae-mi’s apartment, he calls it a “nice place” despite it being the size of a closet, which shows that Jong-su’s living condition is no better than hers. Conversely, well-off folks like Ben have everything they want. In Jong-su’s eyes, the greenhouses are not only a metaphor for Hae-mi, but all the things Ben can have in this world that Jong-su cannot. The economic disparity is subtly reflected in the way that Ben wreaks havoc without consequence, which contrasts to how Jong-su gets stared down by two police officers for simply loitering in his truck. At one point, Jong-su compares Ben to the Great Gatsby, commenting how there are so many young and wealthy people in Korea, but no one knows what they really do. He questions how Ben, who’s only a few years older than him, can afford to live in an affluent suburb, drive a convertible, and travel all over the world. It’s no coincidence that Jong-su’s favourite author is William Faulkner, as Murakami’s Barn Burning draws heavily from Faulkner’s short story of the same name, which also deals with class conflict.
Beside class struggle, Burning’s major conflict between Ben and Jong-su embodies the conception of masculinity. As the story is partially told through the perspective of an envious man, the viewer is led to a larger question: is there an objective assessment to judge whether Ben is innocent or guilty? This is where toxic masculinity comes into play. The concept of toxic masculinity entails the adherence of traditional male roles that restricts emotions boys or men may comfortably express while heightening other emotions or destructive behaviours, such as anger. Failure to do so is often considered a lack of masculinity. Jong-su’s inferiority complex is the cause of the anger suppressed inside him, as he feels as though he has to compete for Hae-mi’s affection while being unable to express his insecurities in Ben's presence. Lee Chang-dong uses Hae-mi as a metaphor to elucidate Jong-su’s jealousy of Ben and morphs it into rage. She is the intermediary between Ben and Jong-su, who stand on the opposite ends of the social hierarchy. Being the idealised object of male desire, Hae-mi acts as a catalyst that propels the aloof male protagonist forward, but due to the film’s ambiguity, her disappearance can otherwise be interpreted as an ‘excuse’ for the protagonist to justify his action in the shocking denouement. Looking from this angle, it’s easy to deduce that Jong-su is not searching for her out of love – he is searching for his object of desire, something that he thought was rightfully his but was taken away from him.
The most memorable scene in the film sees Hae-mi perform what she calls “The Great Hunger’s dance” – a symbolic performance she learned in Africa. The camera freely floats along with Hae-mi as her silhouette sways against the setting sun while the sky turns violet and blue. This sequence shows an example of how Lee Chang-dong depicts the power struggle between Ben and Jong-su. After Ben has turned on the music, Hae-mi immediately reacts as if she was lulled into a stupor, taking her shirt off and dancing to Miles Davis’ swooning jazz tune. It’s in this very symbolic scene that viewers see how Ben has “won” Hae-mi over Jong-su. As the men watch on, Hae-mi finds herself becoming the object of their gaze. And it’s the male gaze that embodies what men most desire: female submission. The women in Burning suffer too much as they find themselves trapped in a male-dominant world with so many burdens and judgments. In search of an outlet, Hae-mi’s topless dance proves to be an act of self-liberation. Her performance captures the spirit of a woman seeking to find the meaning of life between the two men while also confronting their gaze. However, the men don’t seem to get it, judging from their reactions, as one of them yawns and the other calls her a “whore”.
After the dance, in revealing his arsonistic behaviour to Jong-su, Ben expresses that the Korean police don’t usually care for the burned greenhouses for they are “filthy and useless”. Ben’s greenhouse-burning hobby is the prime example of the dispassionate violence of toxic masculinity, but Jong-su’s resentment toward Hae-mi, due to his feelings of inadequacy, is just the other side of that coin. Ben’s violence manifests as apathy whereas Jong-su’s display of rage is mostly verbal: when they were young, Jong-su called Hae-mi “ugly”, prompting her to undergo plastic surgery years later. Then, right before her disappearance, he berates her for dancing topless in front of Ben. Jong-su claims he hates his father for his anger issues, but he cannot avoid becoming someone like him. The film’s conclusion sees the protagonist lashing out at the wealthy yuppie as he finally allows his rage to boil over. Jong-su’s anger compels him to act out his most primal masculine impulses. By this point, it’s apparent that his action in killing Ben is not so much an act of justice but a compensation for his impotence, something that has been absent thus far.
“The key is to forget that it’s not there,” Hae-mi explains to Jong-su as she mimes peeling a tangerine. Pantomime is the singular indication that something only exists because the absence of that something also exists. Through this dialectical notion, the invisible tangerines are, in fact, a metaphor for how people choose to believe or not to acknowledge the existence of something, that it comes down to personal reasoning rather than actual perception, and thereby explaining the film’s ambiguity – the coexistence of nothing and everything. The key to understanding Burning is subtly contextualised in Hae-mi’s pantomiming as if telling the audience to stop looking for the truth; instead, just forget that there isn’t one.
That being said, one shouldn’t try too hard to decipher the film’s mystery, but rather try to feel and immerse in it. Hae-mi’s hypnotic dance under Miles Davis’ soundscape lingers like smouldering embers. Once the music stops, she begins to weep and the camera unhurriedly pans to the vast blackened sky as if signalling that Hae-mi would rather dance forever, unencumbered and liberated from this raging wildfire of a world. Just imagine how wonderful it would be if life were this simple.