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Ever since this blog first �went live,� I�ve had a number of people ask me, �James, why is it called �Say a Prayer for the Octopus�?� And when I say �a number,� that number is unfortunately �zero.� Really, the intellectual incuriosity that this would seem to indicate is disturbing, but that�s not what I want to talk about right now. No, I�d rather answer the question that other people should have been asking.
It starts with Korean movies. My discovery of Korean cinema was a revelation for me, albeit a staggered revelation. The first Korean movie I ever saw (or, should I say, attempted to see) was Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War. Now, as anyone who has seen Tae Guk Giknows, the level of horrific war violence on display in this film is enough to make one long for the tame horrors of D-Day in Saving Private Ryan. When I sat down to watch Tae Guk Gi, I had not yet been desensitized to graphic movie violence, and I got maybe forty or forty-five minutes into it�right up to the scene where the guy gets his leg blown off with a landmine and then the doctors for some reason start carving away at his bleeding stump while he screams in inhuman agony�before I said, �Ok, that�s enough of that.� And I stayed away from Korean movies for months thereafter. That was likely in January of 2007.
In August of 2007, right before I started college, Bong Joon-ho�s The Host came out on DVD in the U.S. and, having satisfied myself beforehand that it did not possess the same degree of terrifying violence as Tae Guk Gi (because I didn�t know, I hadn�t seen Korean movies before, I thought maybe they were alllike that), I watched it and was thoroughly delighted. The Host follows the adventures of a dysfunctional, multigenerational family desperately trying to rescue their youngest member after she gets kidnapped by a rampaging fish monster. And this movie had everything. First, it was just a superior monster movie; I haven�t seen too many movies in this particular genre or subgenre or what-have-you, but the design of the creature was fantastic and Bong knew to follow the Lovecraftian rule of �less is more,� such that we initially see just enough of the monster to let us know that we should be afraid of it. It is also fitting that this, the first Korean movie I ever saw in its entirety, should star Song Kang-ho, a captivating actor whose presence in Korean cinema I deemed to be ubiquitous, in that he seemed to pop up in something like half of all the Korean movie I subsequently saw (he�s had star turns not just with Bong, but also with Park Chan-wook, Kim Ji-woon, and Lee Chang-dong, among many others).
The pacing and plotting of The Host were excellent, and the cinematography and the music were gorgeous. Everything about the movie seemed to be perfect (I was still an occasional watcher of films at the time, rather than a full-on cinephile, and so I didn�t have much of the vocabulary of cinema at my disposal back then).
Well, despite my love for The Host, it was probably over a year before I saw another Korean movie, and this only because I just didn�t watch that many movies during my first year of college. No, it was only in my second year that I was converted to cinephilia, and this was around the same time that I actively desensitized myself to movie violence. By this point, I had a backlog of ultra-violent movies that I wanted to see, but which I�d steered clear from, for fear of having a repeat of the Tae Guk Gi experience, which was almost traumatic for me (I still haven�t gone back to it yet, some five years later). But at a certain point, in facing one�s fears, one just says �fuck it,� and I watched in rapid succession Pan�s Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, and Ichi the Killer. Pan�s Labyrinth was probably a good way to transition into ultraviolent cinema, because the scene in the movie that I think people find the most disturbing�the one in which Maribel Verd� sticks a knife into Sergi L�pez�s open mouth and slices his cheek open, and he chases after her and shouts orders and you can see his grotesquely extended mouth open and close�I say, this scene of violence was being perpetrated against a character so loathsome and so sadistic that one couldn�t help but be pleased with it. One wanted to say to Verd�s character, �Good for you, Mercedes! You stabbed him real good, you did!�
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| Maribel Verd� in Pan's Labyrinth, pictured here not slicing anyone's cheek open. |
Well, this opened up a lot of Korean cinema to me, because as far as I was concerned that, in order to watch Korean movies, one needed to be able to stomach the violence. Roger Ebert once put it excellently: �I can say that of the Korean films I've seen, only one (�The YMCA Baseball Club�) did not contain extraordinary sadomasochism.� It�s fitting that this line comes from his review of Park Chan-wook�s Oldboy (2004). I think I saw two Kim Ki-duk movies (Samaritan Girl, about a teenage prostitute whose father seeks bloody vengeance on the men who have availed themselves of her services, and 3-Iron, about a seemingly mute woman who carries on an affair with a seemingly mute man, to which her husband responds violently, turning the titular golf-club into a weapon) before I got around to Oldboy, but it was Oldboy that cemented for me my love of Korean cinema and caused me thereafter to seek out as many Korean movies as I could find. And I didn�t have Netflix at this point, so that limited me to the Hollywood Videos in my area (that chain no longer exists) and the one Blockbuster within convenient driving distance (which only just closed, which was surprising to me, as I don�t know how it lasted as long as it did; does the rest of Blockbuster still exist? If so, why?)
But let me get back to Oldboy, because it�s from Oldboy that this blog gets its title. Now, I won�t give away any major plot details�because it�s wonderfully plotted, and I strongly encourage anyone who has not yet done so to go see it, especially before the diluted American remake that�s been rumored to be in the works for years finally gets dumped on the market�but here�s the basic premise. A salaryman and father named Oh Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik) is kidnapped off the street in the late 1980�s and held in isolation for fifteen years without any explanation. When the movie opens, we find that Oh Dae-su has abruptly been released onto the streets of Seoul, with a message from his handlers telling him that he only has a few days to unravel the mystery of why he was kidnapped to being with. And then, to phrase it bluntly, all sorts of crazy shit happens, and an elaborate plot unfolds, and the cinematography is beautiful and the choreography of the action/combat sequences is actually intelligible (by which I mean that you can clearly see what�s going, unlike those American shaky-cam actioners where a fight scene has been edited into a thousand different pieces and you can�t really tell what the hell is going on and it�s poorly lit on top of everything else).
What does this have to do with octopuses? I�m getting there! Well, early on in his new-found freedom, a disoriented Oh Dae-su�and think of how disoriented he must be? In his isolation, he by and large missed the solidification of South Korean democracy, their rapid economic growth, the dissemination of computer technology to the non-specialist masses, the initiation of President Kim Dae-jung�s so-called �Sunshine Policy� of rapprochement with North Korea, 9/11, and a host of other really important events; my God, the world must have been unrecognizable to him, and that�s only after a fifteen-year period! But carrying on�I say, a disoriented Oh Dae-su stumbles into a restaurant and a surreal and unforgettable scene takes place in which he asks for "something alive" and is presented with a fairly sizable�and still very much alive�octopus on a plate. In a semi-delirious state, Oh Dae-su stuffs the entire octopus into his mouth, then promptly passes out, a tentacle protruding from his mouth and writing about dramatically.
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| Choi Min-sik, who said a prayer for that octopus before eating it. |
And that�s where this blog got the name �Say a Prayer for the Octopus.� Because wouldn�t it be nice if we all had the compassion of Choi Min-sik? (or at least the compassion that Wikipedia attributes to him?)
You may be wondering, �James, doesn�t South Korea have animal rights laws�or at least industry regulations�that would protect animals from being harmed like the octopuses in Oldboy?� And my answer to that would be, �I haven�t looked at the actual laws, but I really, really doubt it.� Although this certainly isn�t a movie that could bear that American disclaimer, �No animals were harmed in the making of this film,� it�s positively tame compared to the great Korean cinematic torturer of animals, Kim Ki-duk. Two of his movies are notorious for unsimulated cruelty to anaimals: Spring, Summer, Winter, Autumn� Spring (2003) and especially The Isle(2000).
In the first of these films, the animal cruelty is rather restrained. We see a young boy tormenting a frog and snake and, while this certainly isn�t pleasant to watch, he learns ends up learning a valuable life lesson about compassion, and it pales in comparison to the atrocities perpetrated in The Isle. In The Isle, we see: a woman smashing a frog against a rock and tearing its organs out; a woman slicing up an eel while it�s still alive; and countless acts of violence against live fish, most horrifically a scene in which a man slices off the flanks of a live fish (a delicacy, he insists) and then releases it back into the water and laughs while pointing out to his girlfriend that it�s still alive and it can still swim.
Kim Ki-duk is quite honest and self-aware about the violence against animals that he�s perpetrated. He has a wonderfully forthright quote in which he says, �I've done a lot of cruelty on animals in my films. And I will have a guilty conscience for the rest of my life.� I love the phrasing of that line (maybe it�s a quirk of the translation, I don�t know), �I�ve done a lot of cruelty on animals� (emphasis added). But he also says (and here I�m quoting rather extensively from his Wikipedia article, but I think it�s highly relevant):
[T]he food that we eat today is no different. In America you eat beef, pork, and kill all these animals. And the people who eat these animals are not concerned with their slaughter. Animals are part of this cycle of consumption. It looks more cruel onscreen, but I don't see the difference. And yes, there's a cultural difference, and maybe Americans will have a problem with it - but if they can just be more sensitive to what is acceptable in different countries I'd hope they wouldn't have too many issues with what's shown on-screen.
I especially appreciate that slam on American ethnocentrism. But I suppose an American omnivore (or any eater of animals, really) could argue that there is a difference between killing animals for food and killing them to film it. For what it�s worth, Kim says they ate all the fish they killed while making The Isle.
I also want to point out, before anyone thinks I�m perpetrating some sort of slur against Koreans, that they�re not the only ones who have killed animals for cinematic purposes. One of the more famous examples would be the water buffalo that gets killed in Francis Ford Coppola�s Apocalypse Now. Coppola is an American. Similarly, the Dane Lars von Trier had a donkey killed on the set of Manderlay (for which John C. Reilly quit the film in the middle of production). And perhaps the most egregious example I can think of is the case of Andrei Tarkovsky�s Andrei Rublev, during the film of which Tarkovsky personally shot a horse through the neck and pushed it down a flight of stairs, after which he �euthanized� it and sent it back to the abattoir from which he�d procured it. Tarkovsky said it was going to die anyway and that it was necessary for the film. Certainly, the killing of the horse is one of the greatest horrors perpetrated during the extended Tatar raid sequence (and interestingly enough, it seems more horrifying than the on-screen killings of certain people; perhaps it has to do with knowing that the horse actually died).
Now, I don�t have a great answer for the ethical questions raised here. I definitely shouldn�t think it�s necessary to torture and kill animals nowadays while making your movies. I think the CGI looks good enough now that we can apply it to all our horse/fish/octopus killing needs. I don�t think it�s right to torture and kill these animals for the sake of making a movie (I certainly couldn�t do it), but that hasn�t stopped me from watching the films of Kim Ki-duk, or any of the other directors I just mentioned. It�s a somewhat vexed issue for me. Even in the case of Kim, I don�t think the animal killings are a central part of his work; for most of the runtime of his films, animals aren�t getting killed. But they really probably shouldn�t get killed at all. But that doesn�t mean that Kim isn�t a great artist, and that his films don�t possess great value, because they do. I�d even say they�re vital.
So I don�t have a good answer for you here. Which is why we should all say a prayer for the octopus.
