Pop culture of the 1990s and early 2000s was full of odd transitional drifts. Something in the atmosphere was nearing condensation; joint aches augured the arrival of new forms. Recall the rococo set pieces of 90s action flicks (John Woo's entire oeuvre awaited Bullet Time the way Dada awaited film). See in particular the pop culture/arthouse crossover projects of the time. Class resentment runs through these texts not like a current, but like a screwy rabbit burrowing beneath the main plotline, occasionally spurting up a harmless--or not so harmless--ring of dirt upon surfacing. The resenters in these texts aren't a particularly dignified bunch: Deadwood's vermicular hotel owner E.B. Farnum, a zany of ressentiment; the rotating cast of moozadells who turn up in necky duplicate at the start of each season of The Sopranos and expire, tracksuited and tragicomic, by year's end; even (less aptly but I can't resist) the proletarian voyeurs who populate Pulp's Different Class, coruscating with grubby grandeur as they plot class struggle in the boudoir.
E.B. Farnum, Deadwood
Tragicomic goombahs, The Sopranos
In the two HBO series, resentment is characterological and, above all, funny. It's as different from striving as it is from immiseration. But the impossibility of vertical mobility isn't itself laughable: "rounder" characters thrive or perish in the crucible of American capitalism as it's being fashioned in 1870s Montana and Clinton-Bush-era New Jersey. What's framed as ridiculous is those cartoonish unfortunates around whom impossibility has congealed into a persona. They sputter in their own grease while the American project roils around them, rusting iron and ripening corn.1 In each case, these characters' inability to "make it" seems situational rather than structural, though the text may know better. When Tony Soprano pacifies his nephew who's raring to become a made man, explaining, "The books are closed," we hear murmurs of modernity and decline. The resenters do have brief upswings: E.B. Farnum becomes a puppet mayor and even briefly and hilariously claims to have shot boss-level baddie George Hearst; Tony's nephew Christopher, the only moozadell who survives season after season to ascend the ranks, does get his button, a captaincy, a turgidly nondescript McMansion complete with a wife like Tony's--until his luck (or Tony's good will) runs out and he's made back into nothing. Christopher, too, at one point tries his hand (unsuccessfully) at regicide, after rumors that he's been cuckolded by Tony drive him to a sloppy-drunk shoot-up at the Bada Bing.
Resentment presents a problem in these series that's not quite a matter of choosing action over passivity. Nor is it exactly, in the language of the self-help industry that arose in the 90s, a matter of action vs. activity. The form of resentment is Sisyphean in The Sopranos. It's vaudevillian in Deadwood. Action, which could only take the limited form of violence against the boss anyway, isn't just impossible for these characters; it's absurd. Deadwood ended in 2006, The Sopranos in 2007.
What a difference a global economic collapse makes. In 2018, a person can credibly claim that the two best films of the last five years have been East Asian movies in which rich characters get offed by poor protagonists. These moments sometimes come wrapped in mystery--and wuxia martial arts at one point in A Touch of Sin--but whatever the gestus of violence, the result is the same: in recent films by arthouse darlings Jia Zhangke and Lee Chang-Dong, resentment has erupted into rage, materialized at knife- and gunpoint.
Korean director Lee Chang-Dong's latest film Burning (2018) begins with a puff of smoke emerging from some unseen source. As with the opening shot of Inside Job, the 2010 documentary about the financial crisis, the appearance of smoke wafts up an implied question: Where's the fire?
Burning, Ben's confession
Burning, Jongsu's dream
Inside Job, dir. Charles Ferguson (2010)
Burning follows a young man named Jongsu, a farmer's son, Faulkner lover, and would-be writer who does odd jobs in Seoul and occasionally returns to do maintenance work on his father's farm. One day in the city, Jongsu runs into a young woman named Haemi, who apparently grew up with him in their rural village but whom he doesn't recognize by sight. Haemi seems utterly guileless and transparent--she cheerfully talks about her plastic surgery and cries when describing her search for meaning--but her stories may be blithe fictions told for no reason. The two have an affair, which is brought to a halt when she travels to Kenya and returns with a new friend, a young Korean man named Ben. Ben is rich, handsome, poised, unfailingly polite and friendly, and, to Jongsu's chagrin, always around. When asked what he does for a living, he replies with a bright smile, "I play." For his part, Ben seems to like, or at least to desire validation from, Jongsu; he's found reading Faulkner on Jongsu's recommendation, and during chic gatherings that Ben organizes but is clearly bored by, he throws Jongsu the odd conspiratorial wink. He even presses Jongsu on why he isn't currently writing, to which Jongsu replies, "Because the world is a mystery to me."
While Jongsu's resentment of Ben's wealth and confidence remains at the level of light comedy for most of the film, Ben actually admits to being jealous of Haemi's feelings for Jongsu. Like Jongsu's love of Faulkner, his connection with Haemi is something Ben can't buy--or "play"--his way into. One day, Ben and Haemi surprise Jongsu at the farm in Ben's BMW. The three get stoned and listen to Miles Davis, Haemi takes off her top and communes with the distant mountains bordering North Korea, and after Haemi falls asleep, Ben surprises Jongsu again with a confession: his hobby is burning down abandoned greenhouses. It's apparently the only pleasure that penetrates--like a "bass sound" deep in his heart, Ben says. In fact, he's been scoping out a greenhouse nearby--very close to Jongsu--and plans to burn it down soon. Jongsu is bewildered, but replies with his own confession: he's in love with Haemi. Haemi wakes up; Jongsu, in a first intimation of anger, calls her a whore for her topless antics; the two visitors leave. This is the last time Jongsu sees her. Haemi vanishes, and for the remainder of the film, Jongsu tries to piece together the mystery of her disappearance and to decide whether to believe what the clues seem to indicate: that Ben has killed her under cover of metaphor.
Burning, Haemi's hunger for meaning
Lee's film is based loosely on a Haruki Murakami short story titled "Barn Burning." The voice of the short story's narrator (Jongsu's character) is immediately familiar to readers of Murakami: limpid verging on blank, "global" but not necessarily cosmopolite--it's a voice with no grain but with a solid credit rating. This element of Murakami's style gives the "mystery" of the Ben character (nameless in the short story) a different valence. In the film, Jongsu sees the world as a mystery, but he is not--for most of the film, he seems eminently knowable, rooted in place (unhappily but dutifully so), and rooted in his love for Haemi. Any likeness he bears to Ben is across a distance of metaphor-- they both "burn," Jongsu with quiet rage, Ben with kerosene--until the metaphor collapses.
But in the Murakami story, for all the narrator's observations about Ben's Gatsby-esque wealth, the two characters occupy the same world. They share, if not a voice, at least a frequency--the same fabric with a different thread count. When the girl disappears, the narrator conducts a search but seems not too perturbed. His interest in the girl blinks down so readily to indifference that the story can suddenly but credibly end with that contemporary lit shibboleth, "And I keep on getting older."
The film, on the other hand, ends not with the flat forward conveyance of biological time but with an immolation that's also a bloody rebirth that's also an act of vengeance. Murakami's story takes place in a postmodern world, in a postmodern mood. The girl's disappearance is absorbed by this narrative world like genre is absorbed by pastiche--rather than mourn the girl, we're tasked with melancholically registering the disappearance of a world that could support mourning. Our feeling is second-order feeling, acute but self-consciously out of phase with its object. The film is suspicious of such distance tricks. In the world of Burning, a rich psychopath hides behind metaphor while the protagonist tries to do the work of all fictional detectives--stabilizing ambiguous signs into a reality you can act on.
Burning, Ben's confession
Much has been made of the open-endedness of the film's central mystery: Did Ben kill Haemi? When he talks about burning down "filthy," abandoned greenhouses, is he actually confessing via metaphor to killing women? Locked as we are in Jongsu's perspective, it's hard to resist signing on to his conclusion. The mounting evidence (capped off by a cat that actually answers to its name) is pretty damning. On the other hand, it's possible Haemi has fled to dodge credit card debt, or that Jongsu's embittered words to her at their last meeting drove her away. Ultimately, I feel less compelled by the mystery's irresolvability than by what resolution means in this film.
It's telling that Lee, also a novelist, has made a film in which the moment of murderous decision corresponds to the end of writer's block. Looking on with the camera from outside his window, we never learn what Jongsu is intently typing right before the brutal finale. But it's sufficient to know that the world no longer seems mysterious to him: bloody understanding authorizes him, turns a would-be writer into a writer and a resenter into an author of revenge. Of course, the violence of the final scene doesn't spring from nowhere. Jongsu's past is prologue and accelerant. Forced as a child by his quick-tempered father to burn the clothing his recently fled mother left behind, he closes the film with an act of fiery vengeance for Haemi, the lost woman who, in his fantasies, masturbates him in the fetal position. Jongsu's bloodied clothes go into the fire that he flees in the film's final frame, closing the loop of filial desire and identification.
But if Oedipus is in the picture, it's because it takes desire to draw Jongsu's class rage to the surface. Compare this narrative structure with that of Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin (2013). Jia's characters, based on real people from recent Chinese news items, also act. The film's interlocking episodes are anchored by the main characters' spontaneous, apparently desultory, stylized eruptions of violence against others or themselves. The victims are for the most part rich pricks (one invisible but implied character is Foxconn), and the poor protagonists' motivations run the gamut from revenge for battered dignity to avarice and boredom to simply seeing no way out. But action is already nullified by the film's repetitive and circular structure, which has us return to the same outrages, violent ends, and bad workplaces over and over from different points of view. Individual acts are absorbed and deadened like a grenade detonated in the ocean: action in A Touch of Sin is an index of impossibility. In the final scene, Xiaoyu, the main character in an earlier episode, arrives at a plant run by Shengli Corporation, whose owner was killed in the film's first episode. The monstrous corporation has continued to expand, and the condition of Xiaoyu's "redemption" is to be caught in its spiral.
A Touch of Sin, Dahai
A Touch of Sin, Xiaoyu
The film, whose Chinese title translates to "Ill-Fated," has been called a state of the nation piece. Burning, too, names a familiar state, albeit a fantasy state--a fever-dream version of the present in which to know is to act, is identical with acting, and in which knowing could resolve the problem of wanting.
*Edited to close with a beautiful image:
Footage apparently shows "yellow vest" protesters in Narbonne drive forklift hoisting a burning car into a toll booth as worst urban riots in a decade leave France reelinghttps://t.co/z82N6d1ysO pic.twitter.com/CXxNTDAyHM— DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) December 2, 2018
1. Walter Pater may have been the first writer of prestige television.
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