Burning Bodies
Bodies are such strange things. You can begin to assume a lot of things about someone based on their body, and it gets even more annoying when you look into gender, which leads into gender standards, blah blah blah. I’ve never really thought of a brain having a gender. But the mind-body separation idea doesn’t seem to be too popular in everyday life, so you get held to a lot of awkward double standards when you’re just trying to vibe.
I’ve been thinking about this mind-body dissonance for a while, and the movie Burning floated back into my mind. Burning is a fantastic Korean movie based on Murakami’s “Barn Burning” short story. But it’s way better than anything Murakami could have imagined because of the sympathy towards the mind stuck in a “feminine” body; meanwhile, Murakami is stuck with his awkward portrayals of women as strange non-human creatures that twist between seductress and background imagery (not that that’s uncommon, but it’s kind of a Dan Brown way of writing.)
I actually watched it a handful or so months back, as a Zoom movie date kind of thing. It’s really wedged itself into my brain, more than any Murakami story has managed to.
The movie follows Jong-su and Hae-mi, who were high school classmates. Even though Jong-su wants to get with Hae-mi, he knows absolutely nothing about her. His interest is piqued by her body as a dancer on the streets for promotions, and by her face as a production of plastic surgery. He doesn’t even look at her during sex, opting for staring at the blank wall in front of him instead. What a statement to make at the beginning of the movie!
The trouble begins when Ben, her new implied boyfie, shows up off the plane with Hae-mi, fresh out of a terrorist encounter.
So all we know about Hae-mi is her body, and none of that is really her true self. She doesn’t own her own body – she’s completely defined by the perception we receive from Jong-su and Ben.
It’s like how “attractive” women are used for advertisements – they are simply a pretty face for whatever unrelated product needs to be sold, like cars, beer, or groceries. A pretty face with makeup is professional, but only if they are in a controlled, acceptable subset of makeup. Plastic surgery is a fantastically popular business in Korea, with advertisements plastered all over subways and billboards, offering a new body that you can make yours.
The body is such an uncontrollable thing because anyone can look at you. I only started getting catcalled recently because I gained an interest in fitness, something that I never found the time to do before. As an award for trying to eat healthy foods and get the nutrients I need in my body, as well as build strength so I am better equipped for everyday life, I received middle aged men twice my size yelling at me through the cracked windows of their cars.
Having a “female” body especially is weird and nerve-wracking at random times. Walking through the parking lot of a mall, waiting at a bus stop, sitting at the library, there’s always an almost hypochondriac awareness that someone is watching you, that someone could try to approach you and that they could after that try to attack you or overwhelm you. I mean, there are so many tweets and Tik Toks of stories where girls were just minding their own business and saw someone jacking off to them in a public park. What can you even do in those situations?
Hae-mi is aware of the audience watching her – how can she not be when Jong-su and Ben are constantly observing her? When there is a constant view from everywhere that sees a body as a picture to own?
She knows this and is trying to fight back – her pantomiming hobby is an attempt to control the version of her she can present to others. But that can be also read as “quirky” and reminiscent of the “manic-pixie dream girl” trope of the 2000s, another type of woman purely made for the bored imaginations of men.
I personally am reminded of a quote attributed to the director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook. While I can’t find it at the moment, the gist of it is like this: violence against women doesn’t have to be physical or emotional – it can just be from a look alone. A single look can demean and flatten someone into an object that could be a tool for sex.
Of course Hae-mi wants to disappear. Who doesn’t want to when people could always be leering at you?
SPOILER FROM THIS POINT----
The movie becomes much more compelling once she actually does.
Jong-su only begins actively pursuing Hae-mi at this point, hilariously. He does his whole investigation thing, shows up at Ben’s apartment, finds her things, stabs Ben to death and burns his body in his nice car, etc.
So did Hae-mi really die? Did she succumb to the ownership of Ben’s eyesight? Was she the barn burned by Ben for his hobby?
For the longest time, I was sure she died; all of the evidence points to it. “Something something, tyranny of a man in an ultimately abusive relationship, Ben throwing her away as a toy, etc.” That angle is pretty covered in the Youtube analyses I’ve seen (and heard about).
But what if Hae-mi just decided to disappear?
Buddhism has a lot of statements on the conceptual understanding of negation. In the heart sutra, for example, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Suffering is connected to the clinging to form, sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness. Once all of these dependencies are removed, one can perceive “true reality,” i.e., nirvana.
Hae-mi, throughout this entire film, has been weighed down and limited by her physical form. She knows that it isn’t really her, and she wants to take it back over via pantomiming, plastic surgery, performing the Great Hunger dance.
Jong-su kills Ben over their fight of ownership that has been simmering throughout the entire film, but Hae-mi ultimately escapes both of them. She’s physically gone. How can either of them own an idea? Hae-mi ends up having full control over her own perception when her body is physically not with either of the two men; she’s finally free of the violence of eyesight.
Her body has burned away and blown away in the wind.