Only God Forgives

Only God Forgives tries to eliminate offscreen space. Characters are situated at the center of the frame, pulling our attention inward, in the same way a man is drawn to the center of a vortex, disregarding matters outside the four sides of the frame. Compositions are carved in stone and shots are self-sufficient. When a scene is broken down into a series of shots, for instance in the karaoke scenes, the images onscreen betray a sinister wholeness, where shots that inhabit the same space do not even appear contiguous, for the frame contains all that there is to be seen, forcefully imposing its four-corner boundaries in a beautiful finality. Exploration is out of the question when there is nothing left to explore; when the camera moves, it follows a preordained path, the space presentable only under strict conditions. In order to keep things under his full control, Nicolas Winding Refn is forced to express his unified vision through an impossible act of dismemberment: separating light from its source, color from the spectrum of light (color here looks like globs of glow-in-the-dark paint), Bangkok from Bangkok.

I speculate Refn must have been furious during the scene where Julian (Ryan Gosling) tracks down Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), the Angel of Death, through the open streets of Bangkok only to see him vanish. Unlike the rest of the film, where the director’s God-hand is omnipresent, this scene shows a city breathing, its cars, street vendors, passersby, untethered to the director’s vision, which is something this God cannot forgive. I have never been to Bangkok, but whether the film is untrue to Bangkok as a city is not the point of interest, rather it lies in its transformation of a real Bangkok skyline into one of the most enchanting matte paintings in cinema.

While the film’s mise-en-scene is under the iron grip of the director, its narrative is free-floating. Scenes start in media res; the film moves as if it were walking through one of its diabolical corridors where it happens to chance upon an open door inside of which is a neat and tidy collection of repression and destruction. Scenes are never anchored, they drift, in a purple haze, into one another, from dream to reality to dream, so in one hallucinogenic transition it seems Julian is fingering his own mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). Connections between scenes are magical as well as muddled. Near the beginning, in a moment of transference, Julian’s zombie walk is superseded by Chang’s, and throughout the entire film characters in completely different spaces appear to be looking straight into each other’s eyes. Once again, the God-hand emerges out of the shadows: any ambiguity coming from the connections between scenes, like the offscreen space of Bangkok, is out of the director’s control and must be streamlined into a morass of existential and Oedipal instincts, or at least their superficial signifiers.

Refn’s control over the film is less of a Supreme Creator and more of a little child protecting his personal playground from any unwanted outside interference. But Refn’s playground, distinct from others from its complete lack of play, does not necessitate an unaffecting experience. Hyperstylization has its place in the cinema, but in a strange way Refn’s maximalist impulses minimize everything. An all-or-nothing, go-for-broke attitude leaves behind the faint music box twinkles of a pretty Thai ballad. One wishes to know what Refn could have done with the monumental elephants of the region, then again no one can control elephants.

Film Grammar and Construction

Scattered throughout Mikey and Nicky are continuity errors, mismatched cuts, out-of-synch post-dubbing, boom mics and production assistants. Shortcomings like these leave the film open to charges of slopping filmmaking, and yet these visible slip-ups, the surefire evidence of a production swimming in trouble, remarkably all find expression, a place to be purposeful for once, beyond the intentions of author or conditions of production, within the film’s grand design. Without all these so-called flubs, Mikey and Nicky would not be Mikey and Nicky, for they are part and parcel of the film’s personality as cracked pavement, bad graffiti, and broken windows are to certain neighborhood streets.

(The cut of the film I watched, the one shown in theaters to poor box-office and the only one available on DVD, is apparently a rush job done by Paramount, impatient with the cutting board perfectionism of directress Elaine May. Couple of years later, May released the director’s cut of the film, which reportedly extended the film’s running time as well as removing all the flubs of the theatrical cut. Although I would love to see the director’s cut, I’m more than satisfied with the cut currently available, surely one of the great films of the seventies).

Hovering over this discussion is the dreadful concept of film grammar. Pushing the outrageous analogy between cinema and literature, film grammar, like linguistic grammar, becomes “a set of prescriptive notions about [the] correct use of a language” (def. from Oxford English Dictionary). Note how the definition does not include the term “rules” but instead uses the term “prescriptive notions”, characterizing a set of beliefs, subject to argument, rather than a list of fundamental principles. Mistaking a set of “prescriptive notions” for a set of “rules” becomes the source of every cinephilic squabble on how a film ought to be shot, how a scene should be staged, how a sequence should be edited. Mickey and Nicky is below mediocre because the directress refuses to provide any spatial connection within the scenes; Les Miserables is terrible for no one should ever film musical numbers solely in close-ups; while Johnnie To’s films are excellent since he knows how to choreograph actors and objects in space. All these arguments, no matter how well thought out they are, are based on film grammar, and following this cinephiles, especially those of a formalist bent, tend to demand that the respective film subscribe to the fundamental laws of film grammar. This is the zero point of formalist cinephilia, where everyone carries with them a cinematic rulebook, expecting the film to exactly follow what’s inside. But the avenue open to formalism (using this term vaguely, but here I’ll pin it down to a way of looking that focuses attention on the way a film is constructed using various cinematic elements, from cinematography, editing, staging, production design, lighting, etc.) is a method to map out various cinematic techniques and their various cinematic effects, not to place them in an arbitrary do and don’t list. Of course, privileging one cinematic technique (say, classical decoupage) over another (scattershot editing) has resulted in some neat insights on the way we look at films (from Bordwell and Thompson to Vulgar Auteurism), but never should these be mistaken as fundamental rules, for all they do is state why these cinematic techniques are effective in some instances, implying they are limited in others. Film grammar is ultimately an arbitrary concept. There is no correct way in shooting a scene, editing a sequence, or choreographing mise-en-scene. This does not mean that there are no films that are poorly shot, edited, or choreographed, but it is not because it fails to follow the imaginary cinematic rulebook, rather the answer to this lies somewhere else….

Why do I prefer the whip zooms of a Shaw Brothers flick to those in a Tarantino revenge film? Why do I favor the abstracted fights scenes in The Blade to the clearly choreographed kung-fu showdowns in, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Why do I find the long takes in the terrible Colossal so lackluster compared to the longer takes in Lav Diaz’s epics? It all comes down to taste most likely, but I want to dig deeper. I want to go back to Mikey and Nicky, and how all the slip-ups in that film found its place within its grand design, becoming part of the film’s unique personality. Every cinematic element (acting, cinematography, editing, lighting, production design), no matter if it is performed professionally or off-the-cuff, is not good or bad in itself, however they are almost worthless if they cannot find a place within the total design of the film, where they can find the utmost expression. This expression is created by the film’s organization of its various elements, and every film organizes its elements in a different manner. So right now I’ll speculate that all films self-institute, whether purposefully or by chance, a manner of organizing various cinematic elements, finding places where to fit these elements so that they can all find expression within the film’s construction as well as harmonize with all the other elements. To make this vague concept a bit clearer, the shaky-cam, sloppily edited feel of so much chaos cinema works wonders in Gamer but becomes a total failure in Battle: Los Angeles. I’d argue that the chaos cinema feel in the Neveldine/Taylor film becomes part of its personality, its ass-cams and POV shots completely appropriate to a sci-fi film that whizzes by lightspeed the trash of a post-Youtube world. The chaos cinema feel in the latter film, however, only acts as an unimaginative sheen, representing the supposed authenticity of real combat footage, an illusion the film cannot hold for long. The self-institution, the construction, the mode of organizing cinematic elements works in Gamer, but doesn’t in Battle: Los Angeles. Why so? Because the cinematic elements of the former film all fit in within the construction of the film and thus find expression, and similarly the barren long takes of Colossal never harmonizes with the rest of the film’s elements, unlike in a Lav Diaz film. Of course, these are subjective statements, open to argument, but what I want to say here is that looking at film as construction offers a better vantage point for articulation, a better place for criticism, of the subjective kind, to step in.

I’ve teased out some ideas from this post somewhat from the Endless Love post a couple months back, and I still think this post is a bit vague, but hopefully from the bits and pieces here and there in this piece some ideas may be formed. I think that looking at films as a construction, an organization of cinematic elements, offers far more possibilities in thinking out a film, what it does and how it does it, than methods that look at films from the aspect of film grammar. Now we can talk about the aesthetics of not just the action or art film, but also the documentary film or the television soap opera, because cinematic elements are no longer isolated, so that we can think of whether a scene is shot well or poorly, but part of the entire filmic construction.

Couch Surfing

The President --- Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919

Sleepwalk --- Sara Driver, 1986

Colossal Youth --- Pedro Costa, 2006

Cinema, Melody

Shoegaze, in movies moody enough for indie sensibilities, usually goes together with scenes of long, meandering midnight drives across abstracted cities. This particular form of 90s music, once marginalized in its heyday by the rise of grunge, found a new home in a particular form of noughties cinema. The dreamlike melodies of shoegaze, made weightless not only through the endless droning fuzz of electric guitars but also through the virtual absence of bass, lulls the senses to a sleepwalk state of mind, which corresponds to and resonates with the angst-ridden, melancholic characters of indie-dom, who linger on fragile and sluggish by some heartbreak tucked away deep within, watching the downtown lights flash on by on their nonstop journey to nowhere. Dreamy music over droopy looks, from the final moments of Adventureland to the opening scenes of Ang Nawawala, works like a magic charm; in its many appearances, this audiovisual combination conveys in shorthand the emotional tenor of the main characters with the least amount of inelegance. Lost in Translation concisely outlines this combination, provides its set model as well as an affective blueprint from which numerous indie films over the years have tried desperately to emulate. Sofia Coppola, not surprisingly, enlisted the talents of My Bloody Valentine frontman and shoegaze legend Kevin Shields for the soundtrack, and one of the more striking moments in the film occurs when one of his finest songs (“Sometimes”) swiftly breezes in over an inebriated scene: Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, both tipsy from a night out painting the town red, rest their heads on the windows of a taxi taking them home, looking out at Tokyo only as a muddled series of colors, lights, and neon signs they can never understand. In reality, the two are only an insignificant speck in the vast electric metropolis of Tokyo, but the music over this scene allows, if only for an instant, the outside world to revolve around these lost souls.

Now let us speculate more on these characters, look through their eyes, and go under their skin, so that we may trace some of the complex ways in which music combines with images. Inside the cab, the characters in Lost in Translation are sealed off from the outside world, stuck in sensuous somnolence, tuned in to their own private atmosphere, while outside roams nighttime Tokyo excessive and wild, too much for these Westerners to handle. Yet no matter how cut off these characters are from what lies outside, the music covering this sequence becomes a saving grace, providing a likely passageway through which these static characters can for once move beyond their tiny selves ? but only on the condition that what lies beyond must be represented under their own terms. “Sometimes” becomes the thin, tenuous line of connection between the couple and the city, allowing them to absorb according to their whims what they previously had no kinship to into something wondrous, transforming Tokyo into a somnambulist’s paradise, the two of them pulling all these figures flashing by outside their reach into their personal, lonesome logic. Nonetheless, in this enchanting union of sound to image, an uneven relationship is immediately established as soon as the couple’s private atmosphere, emotionally conveyed through the song (“Close my eyes/ Feel me now/ I don’t know how you could not love me now”), overrides the entire scene, because now Tokyo and its people, their varieties and complexities, are droned out by the music, eclipsed by the self-absorbed stupor of the couple, gift-wrapped according to their desires. Lost in Translation, like its main characters, is perhaps too content in remaining alienated from the rest of the world, but its estranged point of view carries a shy, wistful allure, especially when the couple scurries round this city of a thousand lights, which the film connects with only in a specious manner, making false contact with the city most of all when music is in the air.

From this example, the creative combination of music over images, in its attempt to accentuate the complicated emotions of the characters, smoothes down the multiplicities of people and place present within the images, putting all the figures in the sequence on the same plane as it were. Of course, this is a question of montage as much as it is a question of music; for now, we can suggest that the relationship between music and images goes something like this: montage gathers scenes, while music can unify them into a particular pattern. In the same vein as Lost in Translation, the 1985 music video for “We Are the World” gathers two separate strands of images, one interior the other exterior, the singers of USA for Africa inside the recording studio and the starving African children outside in the savannah, so that the anthem which follows will unite, at least in representation, those inside with those outside, or in Serge Daney’s words make “the dying and the famous dance together”. However, as said before, this unity, this connection is a false one, and “We Are the World” presents an even more extreme example of the Lost in Translation syndrome, where music and montage relegates the outside world to the impulses of the main players. Unlike Sofia Coppola’s film, where Tokyo is only an open car door away, USA for Africa, comfortable and all smiles, are nowhere near the starving children of Africa whose images follow from theirs, and instead of letting the music speak over these kids, in the same way the lonesomeness of Kevin Shields’ score covers over Tokyo, the singers hypocritically speak for them: “We are the world, we are the children”. Few things have surpassed the thoughtlessness of “We Are the World”, and Daney is once more present to express the indignation at this careless arrangement of music and image:

“The rich singers (“We are the world, we are the children!”) were mixing their image with the image of the starving. In fact, they were taking their place, replacing them, erasing them. Dissolving and mixing stars and skeletons in a kind of figurative flashing where two images try to become one, the video elegantly carried out this electronic communication between North and South.”

And this profane combination of music and image finds its way into the present day with the globetrotting goofballs of One Direction, whose self-made “One Way or Another (Teenage Kicks)” music video, created for the purposes of charity in the same manner as “We Are the World”, would surely make Daney roll in his grave. Even though these pop stars share the same space with their fans across the world, whether in Ghana, New York, Tokyo, or even 10 Downing St., these diverse places, strung together by the music like beads in a necklace, never amount to anything other than background fodder for the band’s comic antics or momentary shrines dedicated to their widespread fame. And the images that represent these places, from African kids smiling in the hovels of Ghana to the odd and colorful teenage cosplayers in Tokyo, reduces all their complexities into easily recognizable stereotypes, so that it relieves the viewer the trouble of considering the many multiplicities suppressed within this sequence of images and allows them to freely sing along with the Blondie/ Undertones mash-up. Differences are thus rubbed out, the varieties of people and place flattened into mush, and everywhere and everyone is put in the same relegated position, becoming part of the monotonous backdrop for One Direction’s world supremacy.

What links Lost in Translation, “We Are the World”, and “One Way or Another (Teenage Kicks)” in this daisy chain of music-image combinations is an inventive scheme where music infuses images. Here music unifies the images collected by montage into a pattern of dominance and submission, where a dominant set of figures (Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, USA for Africa) infuses a set of subordinate figures (Tokyo, African children) with something that is not theirs (“Sometimes”, “We Are the World”), and so this scheme can either imaginatively transform entire spaces into personalized zones of feeling (Lost in Translation) or, at its dangerous limit, erase the crucial intricacies of the outside world (“We Are the World”, “One Way or Another (Teenage Kicks)”). In the scheme of infusion, the subordinate set of figures are either spoken over or spoken for, but both these options involve, in varying degrees, the erasure of these figures, substituting them with whatever the dominant figures have in mind. So when music covers over the outside, infusing it in the process, something in the representations gets erased, and infusion seems most ethical when it stays within the four walls of its dominant figures, like the FX driver in MNL 143, listening to a ballad on the car radio and weeping his heart out, while the camera is glued to his face, never cutting away to an exterior shot ― but this is not infusion any longer. For infusion to move past its dangers, where music becomes the running thread of erasure over images, it cannot remained tied down to the private atmospheres of the main players, whether it is the couple sheltered inside the taxi or the menagerie of 80s singers grooving inside the studio, because it must move beyond them, shattering the privacy of the moment, spreading outwards in all directions to the outside world, rousing a true gathering where everyone shares in an emotion, feeling, sensation, ceasing to be infusion altogether. Here music no longer infuses, music suffuses.

Social events usually characterize the scheme of suffusion, from the morning routines of Maurice Chevalier’s neighbors synchronizing in perfect rhythm for the blissful opening number of Love Me Tonight to the teenage hippies, hopped up on acid, alcohol, and adrenaline, burning up the night sky in Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water. Music, travelling from image to image, carries over states of feeling. In the scheme of infusion, these concentrated feelings more often than not belong to the main characters and exclude all the other figures on the screen, unless their minute presence is covered over by the music; meanwhile suffusion tries, as much as possible, to include all the figures onscreen to join in with all these high emotions. The opening number of Love Me Tonight is a benchmark in the scheme of suffusion: the snores of a bum awakes an entire city, and soon housewives are opening up windows, letting the sun in, storeowners begin opening shop, and leading man Maurice Chevalier starts dressing up for his morning saunter round the streets of Paris, as the musical élan has spread far and wide throughout this public world, giving every individual all across the city the right to be a part of this gathering. Another example is Jacques Demy’s masterpiece The Young Girls of Rochefort, whose whole energy, characterized by Michel Legrand’s jazzy score, is spread all around, from the town square all the way to the little private rooms of the lead characters, as song and dance never really ends in this crazy town. It is apparent that the scheme of suffusion has utopian aspirations, to gather all the figures represented on the screen and create a community, no matter how temporary, based on the music in which everyone shares, yet, like infusion, suffusion also has its limitations. Suffusion needs to remain mobile, as unsettled as possible, changeable in an instant, for all the merriment and spontaneity in the scheme of suffusion has the potential to be permanently dictated, like soldiers marching to the drumbeat, by the set music and the emotion it carries. The Young Girls of Rochefort, with its unstable changes in emotion, from lovelorn melancholy to utter bliss, and figures moving in and out of the song and dance numbers at their choosing, never falls into this trap, unlike the icy revue numbers of Busby Berkeley musicals which, no matter how fascinating and memorable, remain mechanized, choreography created by a watchmaker. At its limits, suffusion becomes something like the orgiastic passages in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, especially one in Gravity’s Rainbow with its distinct and disturbing apocalyptic glow:

“And they do dance… they feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease, still it’s not parade rest any longer… so they dissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces they have put on for this ball, fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind.”

In this social event, with its utopian promise, suffusion dissolves people, similar to what happens in the scheme of infusion. In order to move away from the potential dangers of suffusion, it needs to share some of the qualities of its opposite, infusion, so that it can create moments and events where everything is shared but nothing remains on the same plane, where nothing is given complete emphasis but every figure, as much as possible, is given equal emphasis so that nothing is given to erasure. Infusion and suffusion must merge; musical moments should have the capacity to move in and out of these two schemes. Thankfully, the cinema, from all around the world, has given us so many examples of this infusion-suffusion combination, and what can become of their multiple possibilities.

In Beat Street (produced by Harry Belafonte, the same man behind “We Are the World”), two young break-dance groups duke it out in the middle of the dance floor while the DJ squeezes out some ‘80s hip-hop beats to accompany this electric dance battle as the crowd surrounding them oohs and aahs. The dancers go back and forth like an alternating current, trading dance moves like jabs, hooks, and uppercuts, as the scene, with its clunky shot/ reverse shot pattern, seems to extend into eternity, a battle with no end in sight. But suddenly, invisibly, the battle ends, the enclave of the dancers dissolves, and as soon as the DJ changes tracks the dancing, previously concentrated solely on the two groups, spreads throughout the whole discotheque, its intensities burning up the scene like wildfire. Here the atomized energy of the two break-dance groups suddenly diffuses onto the entire dance floor, as infusion moves into suffusion.

The reverse movement, from suffusion into infusion, occurs in two completely different films: Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia and the South Korean box office smash Sunny. Near the end of Guerin’s film, our disenchanted protagonist wanders into a bar, ogling all the mysterious and slightly tipsy women inside only to be rejected by them afterwards, as the radio in the background transitions from Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” to a Migala’s “That Woman”, from suffusion into infusion. With the Blondie song, we see the inhabitants of the bar, the couples, girlfriends, and loners, grooving to the song, while our protagonist cozies up to another woman; at the moment of her rejection, “That Woman” is now in the air, as our protagonist guzzles down another drink, succumbing to tonight’s lonesome fate, until, at the minute the songs hits its instrumental break, something catches his eye: a woman, almost a vampire, clad in the most goth outfit imaginable, who suddenly returns his gaze, as the two of them stare deeply into each other’s eyes, and our protagonist is lonely no more. Another scene set inside a bar, the teenage heroine of Sunny searches for her twentysomething crush as the camera details all the smoke, booze, bad music, and every annoyance an underage girl faces upon entering a bar. Just when she is about to give up on her search, a pair of hands, emerging from off-screen, clamps a set of headphones on the girl’s ears, and on the soundtrack the middling music inside the bar switches to the ‘80s ballad on the headphones, and as the girl turns to see the person who did this the scene swiftly cuts to a master shot showing the girl and her crush spotlit at the center of the bar, their private moment the center of the scene. A miracle, a boy ― she cannot help but blush.

Sometimes, when merged in an imaginative way, infusion and suffusion become interchangeable. Anna Karina’s torch song in Band of Outsiders is equal parts infusion, equal parts suffusion. Her song, emerging from the depths of the Parisian subway and broadcasted over documentary images of the wastrels in the streets above, could be classified simply as infusion, since her soft voice covers over images of others, if it was not for the manner in which Jean-Luc Godard tied these separate images, Karina and the bums, into a poetically charged moment where the bums speak for Karina as much as Karina speaks for them, for they both signify and share the same aimless, timorous, falling-rain melancholy that is the tone of Band of Outsiders. Meanwhile in Sansho the Bailiff, we hear a song, a mother’s lament to her children, echoing past space and even time, as the mother’s cry for her lost children reaches one of them when he’s now a young man. It is a private moment between mother and child, spread across an immeasurable distance, but in this war-torn landscape, in a history written in blood, the aching song which infuses these images is synonymous with the tragedy of almost all the figures in the film, and thus, in the same manner as the Godard film, infusion is indistinguishable from suffusion.

Music travels through images, transporting the emotion it carries through infusion, suffusion, or a merger of both, tracing out the private moments of loneliness to the shared utopia of a dance number, and only one of the many possibilities of cinema’s melody, the combination of music and moving pictures. Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues boasts my favorite instance of cinema’s melody. From his apartment rooftop, violinist Kenny Bee blasts the Shanghai blues, while on the floor below Sally Yeh tunes in to this haunting melody, as does the rest of Shanghai, from hobos, whores, drunks, all glancing upward wondering who is creating this mysterious melody, which finds its way to every nook and cranny of the city, whose inhabitants are dreaming through this song, moved because of it, animated by it in such a manner that the entire city, through some ingenious trick photography, soon merry-go-rounds Sally Yeh as she begins to fall in love with the mysterious man above playing the blues. No matter how far they are or how well they hide, here music gathers the public and the private, the emotional intensities of a city sharing in a moment of wonder and the personal blooming of young love on the floor below, in a utopian instant reminiscent of the communal promise of disco, as well as the songs of its queen, Donna Summer:

Love will always find you

No matter where you hide

Love is gonna find you

And it’s only just a matter of time

(…)

Love will always find you

No matter where you are

Love is gonna reach you

Cause it’s never really that far

Glory to the Teenage Hooker

Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine in Daehakno --- Nam Gee-woong, 2000

When Our Eyes Meet

 

Son Ye-Jin, ever and again the irrational ingénue, is a wound of ambiguity, her passion running over glazed eyes which unmask a downpour of reverberating feeling. With her softly raised glance, she becomes, in a revelatory flash, the modern-day avatar of the silent-era starlets, those voiceless bearers of a vague unworldliness who serve as the sole embers of a screen swathed in darkness. Her character, through a life-saving transplant, ends up with a heart that is not her own, thus, by pushing a crude metaphor to its limits, she is uncertain if the feelings she reveals are really hers; ambivalence is her calling card, and no one is ever sure on what she is saying on the other end of the receiver. A pensive, burning irresoluteness sparks her slightest gestures, from eyes gleaming in surprise to a timid smile shrouding an inner caginess, and spreads throughout every scene she is in, making the surrounding mediocrity of Summer Scent all the more unforgivable.

Stylistic sweep and flourish, the inventiveness of mise en scène, or the sudden revealment of an authorial signature, seems inoperative within the terrain of K-drama. The problematic production process of a K-drama, aggravated by restless competition between networks as well as a flotsam of other variables ― starting with viewership whose wavering feedback provides the basis for the storyline’s tweaks, unforeseen by the production crew rushing to finish filming and editing the episode for broadcast (it is not unusual that the screenwriting-filming-editing-broadcasting process all happens within a single day), a task made preposterous due to cutbacks in essential film equipment (lighting, audio recording, set design, dollies, tracks, etc.) ― conflicts with ambitions for craft and creativity, which ought to be found on the spot for the grind of production usually precludes pre-production planning. In this instituted morass of teleproduction, where the overhead cameo of the boom mic is convention, the laborious outcome may not meet our expectations, programmed as they are, on how a story moves, how a character develops, or how a scene is shot, but because of the give and take circumstances of a rushed production, the closure of creative choices but also the springboard for unforeseen affects, what we are searching for, a drama’s emotional punch, is perhaps in another place, through another device, under another name. Being “well-made”, in the usual sense, is not in the arsenal of the K-drama, but this does not mean it is missing form or texture, for every work is, consciously or unconsciously, formed, arranged, organized, even if it is shaped by the chaotic conditions of production rather than by a cognizant author; and in K-drama land we must give account of the unconscious qualities, the small flashes of brilliance, which form its arresting heartbeat as well as its evocative surface, pathways of brokenness, and strange and singular feel.

That most of the production budget, instead of being given out to film equipment, goes to the high performance fees of the lead actors, who the crew is obliged to feature in as many scenes as possible, other creative possibilities are shut down, but this ultimately steers the show into realizing one of the crucial and intriguing qualities of the K-drama: their unique style of close-ups. On one hand, the close-ups are unpolished, too protracted, and, with their sudden incremental zoom-ins and faces swollen from awkward framing, reveal the symptoms of a troubled production; on the other, the close-ups, in its cracks, are uniquely expressive, as broken as the characters, conveying a mugshot intimacy. From this ebb and flow between crudeness and through-the-cracks expressiveness ― working not only in the close-ups but on all levels (narrative and filmic) of the show ― the signature of Endless Love is formed.

The winning formula for the Endless Love series can be summed up as follows: take creepy premise and, through the lengthy development of the story, cleanse off its creepiness. Like body snatchers, zombies, or children slaughtering each other, the premises of the four Endless Love shows lend itself to various suggestions and associations, the main ones being the sinister threats of incest (Autumn in My Heart, Winter Sonata) and necrophilia (Winter, Summer Scent, Spring Waltz). The stop-go progression of the shows tries to neutralize these threats, whether successful (Autumn, Winter, Spring) or unsuccessful (Summer), by both plot revelations based on viewer feedback and the sometimes dreadful overuse of delaying tactics, until it reaches its satisfying or unsatisfying conclusion. But even at the times when these shows are at their most clumsy, protracted, and paralytic, there arise, against the formulaic grain of the shows, under-the-radar moments and movements littered throughout the Endless Love landscape that neither stick out as errors or pretence for they constitute, in the same way plot holes and whip zooms make up a Bollywood masala production, the singular surface of the series. Some instances:

1) Autumn in My Heart exemplifies most hauntingly one of the prominent trademarks of the Endless Love series: the repetition of places. In their wistful reappearances, both slightly redundant and emotionally reverberant, beach or abandoned warehouse become the trysts for an endless series of farewells, whether temporary or permanent.

2) In the latter half of Winter Sonata, a succession of delaying tactics takes center stage. Dull but sometimes fascinating, these scenes show the indecisive lovers, in close-ups as time-consuming as an alarm clock on snooze, contemplating the impossibility of their togetherness, as their words issue out slowly like wet sludge.

3) The Endless Love mantra ― “I’m sorry, I can’t control my feelings” ― is given a necrophilic twist in Summer Scent. A forever sleeveless Song Seung-Heon falls instinctively for a demure Son Ye-Jin, whose heart, via transplant, is in fact his dead fiancée’s. Does he fall for her because she is really another woman (his dead fiancée)? Does she fall for him because she is really not herself? The ending never fully resolves this dilemma, making innumerable aporias stand out; yet what makes the show a frustrating experience also generates a strange, if perverted, allure.

4) Just when Spring Waltz gets going, near the end of episode one, the hero’s pianissimo rendition of “My Darling Clementine” falls on the ears of the heroine humming the same tune, triggering a cascade of memories as well as a forced digression into the past, moving the show from fairytale Vienna to the South Korean countryside, where the traumatic childhood lives of the two leads are recounted in episodes two, three, and the first quarter of four, until, at the quarter point of episode four, “My Darling Clementine” enters again and present-day Vienna returns. Something wondrous happens here, when two-and-a-half hours of TV time (episodes two, three, and a quarter of four) is inserted between five minutes of story time (“My Darling Clementine”) ― is the magic of Proust alive in television?

It is difficult to situate all these instances within the framework of one author, vision, one impression above others, one intention above the rest, without flattening our horizons on the multifarious effects ― intentional or unintentional ― of certain works. Too much time has been spent on intent rather than intents, or, more particularly, on intentions rather than traces. Auteurism appeals to viewers since it remains the most efficient way of organizing a work, streamlining, or deflating, the countless elements involved in production into a sole personal articulation of an author’s worldview, in short one voice articulated above but also through other voices, and the latter is something we must take into account. Bearing in mind these other voices, obviously it is not enough to describe them as mere ciphers of an author’s intentions, but that they too leave behind, deliberately or not, their personal fingerprints on the screen, sometimes even more memorable than an authorial theme or trademark, and these fingerprints, these traces, become the launch pad for all those unforeseen affects that enrich the cinema experience into something multifaceted and dazzling. How these intents and traces, along with their unforeseen affects, emerge within K-drama production, suppose the episode director of Summer Scent, speaking to Son Ye-Jin about the script he received just this morning, were to film the actress in close-up at night, it then becomes her personal intent, similar to but apart from the intents of the writer or director, that through her close-up, through subtle movements of eyes, cheeks, and mouth, a lasting impression that is fully hers will be left behind on the screen, which is thus achieved with her subtly raised glance; and because it is late in the night, with no lighting equipment available, a street lamp, with its cloudy fluorescent flow, is resourcefully utilized to illuminate the actress’ supple features. Son Ye-Jin’s glance is one intent out of many, the soft radiance of the street lamp one trace out of many, which taken all together add up to the Endless Love experience.

The voluminous mass of traces and intents confounds our narrative expectations (set up by the shows) as well as our aesthetic standards (programmed by our personal behavior along with what we have seen, heard, read in the past) by letting loose a through-the-cracks expressiveness that breaks these twin programs ― narrative expectations and aesthetic standards ― wide open. Sometimes resistance occurs between our aesthetic standards and the through-the-cracks expressiveness of the work, and because of this friction the situation becomes a give and take one, always subject to change, on what traces and intents will leave us cold or throw us off the ledge. When we harp on traces and intents, when we are moved by these little details, such as Son Ye-Jin’s upward glance, the protocols of narrative expectations or aesthetic standards or authorial vision are put aside, for by highlighting or disregarding certain traces and intents we are so to speak creating our own space within the terrain of the work, usurping our role as creative viewers. In this day and age, the passive viewer, so critical in ‘70s film theory, has perhaps been swept away by the new viewing conditions promoting unorthodox manners of spectatorship and new types of cinema experience; on one’s laptop, one can take screenshots, frame enlargements, extract video clips and sound bites, telescoping in on details in ways that could not be achieved before, thus finding new ways of articulation, of giving a work meaning. Finding the littlest gesture, or discovering an undetected dramatic movement, and being personally touched by it and giving them your own meaning, can never be the work of a passive viewer, but a creative one always at the risk of falling off into a delirium of interpretation.

None of this matters though if what moves us emotionally in these works is kept bottled up inside us; for a creative viewer there is a timid hope that these small revelations also resonated within the hearts of others, not with the intention of self-justification but for an odd chance at sharing with someone, a stranger half-way round the world or just the girl next door, the immortal moment when Son Ye-Jin’s eyes suddenly met ours.

Ew, Hollywood

There is a cinephilia whose combative character stems from a fierce anti-Hollywood (and, to some extent, anti-Western) attitude. For some, this expresses hostility towards the endless spatter of American films currently smothering the country’s cinemas; for others, this becomes a supreme criterion used to judge whatever cultural expression. I sympathize with the polemics of the former, but, even though I shared this sensibility back in the day, the latter position seems to be precarious, not to mention deeply constricting.

Supposedly, when the anti-Hollywood attitude becomes a criterion, then any expression must effect autonomy from Hollywood, its films and forms, stars and spectators, in order to be deemed as worthy. If not, then the expression is already “tainted” by Hollywood. But being based on a negation (“Not Hollywood”), the critical regimen for such a criterion ultimately requires, so to speak, a process of purging.

Consequently, any formal entity thought to be “Hollywood-esque” (for instance, three-act storylines, shot/reverse shot, frenetic cutting, etc) is surmised as consorting to Hollywood standards. However, “Hollywood-esque” formal entities change over time, thus the classical decoupage cutting of 30’s Hollywood will not likely find a place in the chaos cinema of ‘00s Hollywood. And we must remember that Hollywood can easily appropriate avant-garde, anti-Hollywood forms into its system, so one can catch snatches of underground filmmaking in music videos and discover that Terrence Malick’s films are, in fact, Hollywood products. More importantly, when any film employs Hollywood forms, we should never rush our judgment by assuming that the film is now “tainted”, as if these forms were inherently imperialistic (this is the obstacle that the fascinating and explosive, if problematic, films of Mani Ratnam come across). We have to give account of how these forms are used, how they are incorporated into the context of a particular film.

If the anti-Hollywood attitude means purging Hollywood aesthetics from cinema, then it is only logical why it would find a home in the atrophy of the slow cinema movement. It seems that the long takes, long shots, and static framing of slow cinema would be impossible for Hollywood to incorporate into its system, but who knows what’s going to happen in the distant future? This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy slow cinema films; on the contrary, I love the stuff of James Benning and Apichatpong Weerasethakul but for reasons different from the values upheld by the slow cinema movement. But if the process of purging results in filmmaking and film discussion centered solely on a negation or a marked separation from Hollywood or Western norms, then it is less about creating new forms than putting ourselves in a corner (since, as said before, Hollywood can incorporate almost any form into its system, leaving few “un-Hollywood” forms left). Besides, how are we going to touch on those instances when slow cinema films use Hollywood devices, such as the musical montage?

It won’t help to situate any cultural expression in a place similar to that of the virgin princess in the tower. From there, one can only isolate that cultural expression from the rest of the world. But to get from there to the rest of the world, we need to realize that purging Hollywood or Western aesthetic devices from cinema is fatally reductionist, because no aesthetic device is inherently Hollywood or Western. Aesthetic forms, once discovered or created, can be appropriated to whatever purpose, whether for Hollywood or Third-world ideology (but the former uses more forms, which doesn’t mean that they are inherently Hollywood). Rather than enrich the cinema experience, the anti-Hollywood attitude, centered on its crucial negation, closes it down and it ironically brings Hollywood back into the conversation when it didn’t need to be there in the first place. It would be better if we did not focus so much on a work’s difference from Hollywood, but on the sublime ways in which a work creates its own singular space and vision, for the reason that focusing discussion solely on a work’s “un-Hollywood-ness” is not discussing the work at all.

Community

Workers, Peasants --- Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 2001 

Payback

“You even know what reimburse means?” Di Caprio’s Calvin Candie replies to a runaway slave, not smart enough to know economic jargon, before he is torn limb from limb by Candie’s pack of sadistic bloodhounds.

Inglourious Basterds’ barfly banter is substituted for underhanded business negotiations and transactions, mostly centering on the commerce of human flesh, either dead (bounty-hunting) or not-so-dead (slavery). The ensuing carnage of Django Unchained is thus the paroxysmal riposte to the injustices of the master-slave economic system, just as the atrocities of WWII provide the stimulus for the revenge fantasy of Basterds. QT’s latest is certainly audacious, and you can’t say that about 90% of today’s movies. Yet when QT “rewrites” the past, as he has done in his past two films, in order to “get even” with the crimes of history and the inadequacies of cinema to confront these crimes, the rambunctious manchild cannot help but consolidate even further the brutal motor of the history he is rewriting, in all its obscenities, viciousness, and barbarism.

It’s a matter of reparation versus reimbursement. Both acts necessitate the righting of wrongs, but only the former implies renewal, while the latter only presupposes payback. In Django, Sam Jackson’s Stephen (his best performance since I was still in preschool) is obviously a damning doppelganger for actor Stepin Fetchit, and by blowing off his kneecaps in the film’s end Django reimburses the negative African-American stereotypes exemplified by the roles of Fetchit in the ‘30s. Whether it’s riddling bullets to the mangled body of the Führer or blowing up plantation houses, both reimbursing the resistance that was supposedly lacking those dark days (respectively, the French Resistance and innumerable slave uprisings prove otherwise), QT’s “history” films provide no “restoring” alternative other than this vicious system of exchange.

Hence, Django is less about slavery, or the collective emancipation from it, than vengeful individualism, which is easily subsumable to the same evils of history that one is against. Besides his wife, Django rarely helps out any of his fellow slaves. In fact, one scene shows him giving a black barman the stink eye, and, during the long ride to Candieland, Django, on horseback, goes so far as to treat the marching slaves alongside him as inferiors. Why the hell should he help them, when he is the indomitable baadasssss! Turning the tables on the white man, Django whips the white captor’s ass; now he is the one who inflicts pain, making the white man his “bitch”. In a way, in his quest for vengeance, Django just takes over the role of his brutal white masters, and, conversely, the white men replace the roles of the black men as helpless victims. Similarly, the Jewish Americans of Basterds carry out mass slaughter against those genocide-loving Nazis, who’re blown to pieces. No matter how loony QT’s rewritten histories become, the same roles of master-slave, perpetrator-victim, are still maintained, and any alternative from this diabolical dualism has no place here. The roles will frequently change, but it won’t be destroyed. Django frees his wife, but, from Schultz’s cold corpse, keeps the bill of sale.

Novice Impressions (K-pop)

Eroticizing goofiness, the unique gift of such goddesses as Marilyn Monroe, Anna Faris, HyunA....

“Resistance for freedom of expression through music via sixth sense…. Their title track is an expression of the limitations of experiencing music with only five senses, and it asks people to feel it instead with their sixth sense.” --- promotional for Brown Eyed Girls’ Sixth Sense album.

K-pop fans seem to thoroughly embody the figure of the medieval exegete, combing through songs, albums, music videos, concerts, interviews, romanized lyrics, choreography tutorials, TV appearances, etc., within an endlessly expanding Borgesian media library. And the relationship between K-pop fans and their sacrosanct pop idols is the material obverse of the spiritual bond between devoted followers and their unseen God.

T-Ara appeals to me personally, since they sustain, for this day and age, what I love most about the girl group movement back in the sixties: the cherub-faced rebel girl melodramas of The Shangri-Las and the freewheeling and reckless bliss of The Tammy’s “Egyptian Shumba”.

“What I have in mind is the capacity of entertainment to present either complex or unpleasant feelings (e.g. involvement in personal or political events; jealousy, loss of love, defeat) in a way that makes them seem uncomplicated, direct and vivid, not ‘qualified’ or ‘ambiguous’ as day-to-day life makes them, and without intimations of self-deception and pretence.” (Richard Dyer, “Entertainment as Utopia”) “… [Walter] Benjamin was not much interested in theories or “ideas” which did not immediately assume the most precise outward shape possible.” (Hannah Arendt, “Introduction” to Illuminations)  In its brevity and immediacy, pop song lyrics, instead of plumbing for “deep” meanings, seem to crystallize those “complex or unpleasant feelings” in “the most precise outward shape possible”, giving this popular form its special vicariousness. The best songs of T-Ara seem silly at first due to their repeated lyrics and linguistic nonsense, but these whirls of onomatopoeia vividly communicate something more dramatic and emotional. In “Bo Peep Bo Peep”, right before the girls are able to express their deep remorse and love to the man who’s sick of them, who’s leaving them, somehow God goes Tower-of-Babel on the world for a second time, and, instead of reciting the words which will make their man return, the girls go “Bo peep, bo peep, bo peep, oh”. The seeming meaninglessness of the lyrics reveals poetry (and T-Ara can do “serious” poetry too: “I hope my lips that recite this sad poem will be remembered in your black eyes” in “Day by Day”), but more importantly the constant repetition of the lyrics makes the song effortlessly danceable. Thus, pop song lyrics present the flashpoint of the poetic and kinesthetic.

T-Ara’s “Day by Day” would work perfectly with Philippe Garrel’s The Inner Scar. 

The Tracks of My Tears

Some points of departure that may potentially constitute an evaluation or a defense of Autumn in My Heart.

--- For all its over-the-top outbursts and tears, the show boasts a definite “rigor”, not to be mistaken for stylishness or old-school classicism, in its melodramatic construction. There are no unnecessary elements here, only elements (flashbacks, plot revelations, close-ups…) that will underscore as intensely as possible the heavy emotions within the story. So, for instance, it hardly matters that the production team gave very little thought to set design, since the show derives its emotional power not from the splendor of its sets but from Song Hye-Kyo’s tear-streaked face. The show’s vital force, its unique heartbeat, is formed from this obsessive concentration on only the certain elements it deems as essential in accumulating the feelings of the drama. Throughout the sixteen episodes, these concentrated feelings gather up like a storm, mapping out lines of force that collide, intersect, and repeat. Thus the show is structured around a series of dramatic encounters and confrontations, missed chances and unspoken desires, along with multiple repetitions of lines of dialogue, settings, gestures, and music cues. All these lines of force also possess an unchanging trajectory, which goes all the way to a devastating finality. No wonder in shows like these things only get worse. Calling this stuff heavy-handed is just too insubstantial!

--- Each of the main characters cannot love if not in a deranged state. This is in line with the show’s full-blown melodramatic trajectory, which requires the creation of characters that are willing, without hesitation, to go to the utmost extremes and plunge into the torments of romance. Subtlety and nuance in characterization have no home here, since these qualities are unable to jive with the drama’s emotional bounce and overriding purpose, specifically the relentless accumulation of feelings. Whether it’s Tae-seok’s unrequited, almost masochistic, love for Eun-suh, transforming him from bad boy to faithful mensch, or Yumi proclaiming to her fiancé Joon-suh that she’ll die without him, in the hopes of suborning him into a marriage he doesn’t want, the characters’ arrant amour fou arrives at a mad morality. The hysterical spirit of the romance overthrows the conventional and powerless principles of love that the older characters term as wisdom. None more so than in the romance between Joon-suh and Eun-suh is this expressed. The familial bond between the ex-siblings blooms into romance, much to the outrage of the other characters, but nevertheless their fragile love only flourishes more so once it is rendered as taboo. As Eun-suh quavers to Joon-suh, “Let’s just look at each other as if it’s a dream”, there is a moving realization that their love achieves in reality the affections of dreams. In that instant, love is reinvented.

--- Autumn in My Heart, through its love story, revitalizes the passé concept of innocence. Joon-suh and Eun-suh’s romantic relationship, throughout the entire show, never loses the brother-sister tenderness of their adolescence, given that these two lovers, to begin with, have yet to mature into adulthood. Whenever they encounter each other, the lovers “catch” their childhood once more, regaining their youthful liveliness. Indeed, the scenes with the couple candidly manifest the pep of puppy love: puerile, annoyingly sexless, yet wholly genuine. But this childlike innocence is too vulnerable to face the (melo)drama and too impulsive to avoid it. No matter the hostility and hardships, Joon-suh and Eun-suh, with tears streaming down their faces, defend their pure love, because this is the only portal to their lost childhood. In Jean Renoir’s The River, one of the characters says, “And the world is for children, the real world. They climb trees and roll in the grass. They’re close to the ants and as free as the birds. They’re like animals. They’re not ashamed. They know what is important.” Somewhat similarly, the romantic scenes between the two leads usually take place outdoors. However, these moments of innocence, when teenage hopes and dreams are recovered and which the adult world smashes into oblivion, comprise the instant when true love takes central importance and runs unashamed and free. Innocence is no longer the safety net for censorious puritans, but a force of love that can potentially turn the world upside down.

--- That ending, with the sudden refrain of an important line of dialogue, is possibly the most moving I’ve ever seen.

Working Girls

It starts off like a Hiroshi Shimizu title: Korean Girls at the Harbor. Five best friends, at the peak of their high school years and without a care in the world, prance merrily ‘round the waterfront, sing and dance to some silly song, take pictures for mementos, scream and giggle uncontrollably, without a care in the world. It’s the epitome of friendship, an intimate togetherness between the five girls that the rest of the film will endeavor to replicate but never truly fulfill.

This brief flashback that opens Take Care of My Cat washes out into the mundane present day. As if to jolt us into these contemporary times, the first thing we suddenly see is someone shattering an apartment window, whilst down below one of the girls, now out of high school, goes off on her morning commute to faraway Seoul. In this film, none of the main characters own a car, so going from one place to another, whether for work or leisure, means bus rides, trains, and long walks, together with the exhaustion that is attendant with everyday commuting (how refreshing it is to see a film that acknowledges the fact that private transportation remains a luxury for a minority while the rest of society queues for the next ride back home). More importantly, the manner in which these characters are classified and restricted to particular social options, as well as their relations and interactions with one another, is mainly predicated on their work. Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), living with her grandparents in the slums near the harbor, boasts the unique talent for creating textiles, a skill set that sadly has no place in the money economy as evinced by her unemployment. The two twins Bir-yu (Lee Eung-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eung-ju), as their chief source of income, sell trinkets on the streets. Upwardly mobile Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won), working at a brokerage firm in Seoul, uses her charm and charisma to climb up the corporate ladder in a job she’s terribly underqualified for. Meanwhile, Tae-hee (Bae Doona, the greatest actress of our times) helps run her family’s spa, even though she’s not earning anything from it. The ever-growing working hours, the encroachment of labor time into leisure, the constant fear of being without a job in tandem with the precarity of work itself --- no matter how many times these girls reunite, it is tragically inevitable that work, the means to simply survive, will ultimately tear this group apart.

What moved me in this film is its encapsulation of a moment in young adulthood when all that matters, hopefully for the time being, is to make ends meet, even if we unavoidably risk losing what is most important: our hopes, our dreams, our friends. There is a restlessness that is felt here, a quiet desperation at the way this present world is being run, something it shares with Yasujiro Ozu’s salaryman films. It’s this desperation, call it anger if you want, that is more precious than gold, because cinema, in the words of Pedro Costa, is supposed to “make us feel that something isn’t right”.

Pop Redemption

All I needed was to hear “Genie”. Six hard hours of standing on the pavement before the song finally played. The only song whose chorus I wholeheartedly memorized, it also was one of the few chances I had to sing-along with the thousands of fans and bleed my voice out. In between the grooves of the packed crowd, where I forcefully found for myself a temporary enclave, the opening bars of “Genie”, smooth murmurs swelling into the song’s booming heartbeat, conjured up a chaotic domino effect which surged upon the electrified audience, so down we went cavorting, flouncing, soaring, obliterating everyone’s need for a little private breathing space (including my own), given that the tiniest inch of separation among strangers is the highest form of sacrilege to the fleeting, communal rapture of concert lore. Channeling the night’s ecstasies, nine enchanting girls would set us on fire.

Girls’ Generation make you feel the heat. They were the last group I’d ever thought I’d dig, but I was falling for them. Maybe I got in touch, for an odd instant, with what most die-hard K-pop fans are encountering on a moment-to-moment basis, namely the nascent transformation of a capital commodity into a religion.  Commodity, because K-pop, just like any other music trend, is a string of products made by the industry for profit; religion, due to its millions of ardent followers all around the world. Needless to say, capital normally benefits from the consumers’ idolization of its products, and, for some, this is enough reason to eighty-six K-pop (or pop music, in general) completely. But as Richard Dyer, mounting a defense of disco in the late ‘70s, noted: “... capitalism as productive relations can just as well make a profit from something that is ideologically opposed to bourgeois society as something that supports it. As long as a commodity makes a profit, what does it matter?” Perhaps, then, the extreme pleasure I experience from K-pop is born from this profound contradiction, whereby industry’s profit motive agenda is outstripped by what these pop songs genuinely express. And in the case of Girls’ Generation, what is potentially manifested, in some of their songs (particularly “Genie”), fills a deep social need: the possibility of a redeemed world.

(Although what follows focuses primarily on Girls’ Generation and the Dream K-pop Fantasy Concert* held last January 19, I dare not omit all the other wonderful K-pop stuff I’ve been listening to during the past few months: 2NE1, T-ara, Big Bang, Wonder Girls, Miss A, 4Minute, songwriters Sweetune (!!!), etc. Judging by this list, I know I’ve only scratched the surface of K-pop --- recommendations are welcome.)

Any mention of a redeemed world hopelessly invokes the impossible in-between separating our unjust and oppressive world from the superior realm, the utopian promise, the paradise of angels --- I’d to like to argue that Girls’ Generation present themselves as symbolic figures of this divine sphere (of course, this is not the only iconography that the group assumes; in “The Boys”, they went for a chic and edgy style that seemed awkward to me, once I realized that, ever since “Gee”, these nine girls will always be the reigning queens of aegyo). This angelic vision is marvelously affirmed in the lyrics (they may not have written the words, but what’s important is that they have the ability to embody them), wherein the girls seem to possess an almost mesmeric, otherworldly power over imperfect humanity.  In “Genie”, “even if your heart bursts and flies in the wind”**, the girls promise that “the world is yours”; they secretly enjoy the supernatural gift of “Telepathy”; and, in a verse that made me swoon, all of them swear that they will “affirm any possible contradictions” right before they make “The Great Escape”. These lucid words profess a sweetness and tenderness too dreamlike for our real world to duplicate, and, consequently, the metaphorical rift between these nine divine girls and our scant existence is tragically reinforced. Having no magical powers to commune with these angels, to feel their warmth, to find a safe passage through the immense void separating us and them, we may fall back on good ol’ pessimism, or delude ourselves into thinking that our exhausted and dreary lives is the one and only way to really live, or cry out and despair. We might not be able to reach a redeemed world, however, luckily for us, this world and its celestial inhabitants, doting smiles and gentle hearts, beckons from beyond.

Right at the cusp of the blissful “tell me your wish” refrain, a beckoning motion materializes in the M/V for “Genie”. Seen in and outside of the choreography for the M/V, this graceful gesture --- arms outstretched with supine hands, followed by the fingers fanning inward --- performed by the girls suggests three figural possibilities. First, it embodies the febrile moment when the girls above reach out towards us below, the brief but miraculous intrusion of their heavenly world into ours. Second, it reproduces a contemporary version of the Abhayamudra, the sacred Hindu hand pose which banishes all fear and grants the devotee divine protection and bliss. Lastly, the gesture functions as the supreme prototype for almost every other existing gesture in the M/V. Nearly all of the girls’ actions are expressed as welcoming, alluring, inviting, another stylized form of reaching-out. Further complicating matters is the unusual way in which these actions are outlined. Through the neat sleight-of-hand of the M/V, the girls’ playful interaction with a thoroughly subjective POV camera (coupled with hands and arms suddenly emerging from behind the camera, i.e. our side of the screen) gives the impression that we are actually making contact with these angels. Taeyeon guides you by the hand through the ersatz discotheque; Jessica, luring the camera towards her, directs your eyes so that they meet hers; Sunny literally pulls you in, via your gawky necktie; Tiffany, with her eighteen karat smize, lets her delicate, nail-polished hands clasp yours, in a grip so soft you’d never want to let go; Hyoyeon cordially teases you, smearing icing on the aperture; donning pigtails, Yuri blows you a sweet kiss; mischievous Sooyoung wallops the birthday cake in your face; Yoona, cruising at abstract miles per hour, allows you to ride shotgun with her; and maknae Seohyun, sporting off rosy angel wings, lends an open ear to all your deepest desires and passions --- tell me your wish.

Such modes of direct address towards the camera, of subtly breaking the fourth wall are not uncommon in music videos. They indicate to us that what we are watching is a music video (and not just another short narrative film --- although music videos are sometimes erroneously classified as such), whilst simulating that special gaze, in every concert, between the onstage performers and the entranced audience below. In these instances, there lies an enormous potential for opening up and enriching our characterization of breaking the fourth wall, far from the cozy definitions of simple distancing effects. In lieu of estranging the spectator, music videos set up, via the screen, an enticing and, ultimately, tragic interface between beloved superstars and spellbound viewers. Enticing, because the minute our idols turn their eyes towards us and reach out, we possibly will return their bewitching gaze and respond to their beckoning. Tragic, since this reaching-out will always be delimited by the screen in front of us, the very same interface that made this illusory communion possible. We won’t be able to reach them and they won’t be able to reach us --- a scenario similar to the way front-row audiences, in desperate futility, outstretch their arms up in the air, so that they might have the chance to make tangible contact with the superstars performing on the elevated concert stage. Breaking the fourth wall potentially relives this very tension, this illusion of tangibility, wherein two different, separate worlds, the onscreen world and our real world, attempt, in a tragic sense, to come together. We see this logic play out in Lav Diaz’s recent epic Florentina Hubaldo, CTE: Florentina (Hazel Orencio), physically and sexually abused, raises her fragile hands towards the screen and implores to us for a deliverance that will never come. The final gesture of the M/V for “Genie”, which shows Sunny slamming her palm on the camera lens and across the screen, visibly exposes the impossible boundary separating our somber appeals for a better world from the beckoning angels onscreen.

Illusions, angels, and the world beyond --- whimsical language usually associated with a concept that is nowadays maligned: escapism. At its most regressive, escapism implies a lack of engagement with the real world and the horrors enmeshed in it, but whenever people begin to desire radical change in these material conditions, to envision a better world, to realize things differently, what is this longing motivated by other than escapist thinking. So that the concept of escapism will be vindicated, perhaps we need to resurrect the original urgency of the word “escape”--- that is, to elude something dangerous or undesirable; to break free from confinement or control (a life and death struggle is more or less implied). Escapism tears us out of the exitlessness of this wretched world, sends us to the stars for a brief dreamy glimpse of paradise, and gently brings us back down to earth, which no longer appears to be immovable, unchangeable, but renewed with hope. By potentially providing the impetus for change, escapism ultimately fulfills a deep social need. Of course, escapism doesn’t replace reality (to think so would be fatal), but through movies, stories, and songs it offers us a vision of an ideal world which we constantly long for in our daily experience --- without this vision, it would be impossible to imagine an alternative to this unjust world we are currently stranded in. (The escapism I’m talking about is not synonymous with the cynicism of today’s Hollywood blockbusters, after all those films, nowadays, rarely represent the dreams for a superior world). “Aren’t you tired of boring days/ Are you buried in ordinary life / Now stop and wake up” --- Tiffany and Sunny articulate in “Genie” our profound desire to escape the misery and drudgery of everyday life, but they also command us to “wake up”, since they know all too well that the redeemed world we dream of, no matter how many times it gives us signs of its possible existence, will only grant us the motivation to find heaven on earth, while, in the end, the heavy burden is on us to look for a real escape out of the darkness and into someplace better. In this sense, real action potentially starts with a vision that takes us out of our exhausted selves; a desire that is delirious, uninhibited, and uncompromised; namely something that we ought to talk about “without hiding anything”, the words Taeyeon belts out over the lovely final chorus of “Genie”, right before the song echoes into silence and recedes back into the skies.

She lives in space, man. In the universe of pop music, fantasy abounds. Indeed, fantasy has been with us for centuries and thankfully it is showing no signs of ever disappearing. By endlessly opening up imaginary worlds and situations too fanciful for us to imitate, this escapist experience may well hold the power of revealing that which is fatally absent in our impoverished reality; for as long as we continue to feel that there is something missing in our world --- whether it’s love, justice, honesty, etc. --- fantasy will live on and grow in significance, because it forever renews our shared awareness of what is lacking in our lives. The angels of Girls’ Generation, insofar as the divine realm they symbolically inhabit emulates the terrain of fantasy, will continue to address the throbbing lack we feel, even though they sadly cannot rectify this lack in reality, for that work falls on us. Industry constantly shoves down our throats the clever lie that this world and its abundant products are enough to bring us happiness, but the fantasies expressed in pop music can tear down this cruel myth by making us feel how the world might otherwise be. And the vision Girls’ Generation gives us of this possible world is a place where desires are finally fulfilled and passions roam wild and free --- unthinkable in our present world founded on oppression and injustice. Taking a trip with these girls, we can “… go anywhere freely/ that’s right, even to the end of the universe” (Mr. Taxi), where “… the stars are within our reach” because “together we will be unstoppable” (Genie, Japanese version); what’s more, regarding your unfulfilled “dreams and passions”, the girls “want to give them all to you” (Genie, original version), for all their love’s for you (All My Love is for You); and once this sweet reverie concludes, the angels aren’t through: cause “even when you open your eyes in the morning/ your dream will continue” (Twinkle, TaeTiSeo). To go anywhere freely and to experience unqualified, unconditional love is obviously impossible in a tyrannical world whose survival largely depends on the brutal repression of these sensational dreams. But no matter how many times the world desensitizes us into believing there is no other world possible, literature, cinema, and music, as long as they never die away, will keep on reigniting those dreams for a better, redeemed world, and, as Girls’ Generation reminds us, “these feelings that were beyond our imagination can’t be wrong, right?” (Bad Girl).

In the 3-D version of the “Genie” M/V, a man and woman fail to make any kind of meaningful connection, until, from up above, the nine angels, gazing at their troubles through  a crystal ball, magically bring the two separate souls together, granting them their unspoken wishes. The magic from above transforms us down below: this figural arrangement emerged once more at the Dream K-pop Fantasy Concert. At the exact moment when “Genie” shifted from its lilting pre-chorus to its sonorous refrain, Girls’ Generation, radiant onstage, began to channel the angelic emotion of their song onto the thousands of screaming fans, who, upon hearing the first notes of the anthemic chorus, started to sing, choir-like and no matter how hard it was for each of them to reach the notes or the same emotional intensity of the song, the main melody with one voice, and in that instant a shared community, formed from some kind of secret agreement linking everyone to each other and as fragile and fleeting as a bolt of lightning, a woman’s smile, or a pop song’s chorus, was wondrously created. I joined in, and I could’ve been mistaken but wasn’t this a glimpse of a redeemed world, its microcosmic, ephemeral dimensions, as bright as the blinding lights of the “Genie” M/V and as momentary as a perfect pop song, immanent in our material world like the genie in a bottle? The things worth fighting for are the things that never last… but besides all this, my experience with Girls’ Generation remains so precious and important to my personal life, because miraculously it has washed away my cynicism.

* Also part of the concert were Infinite, Tasty, U-KISS, Tahiti, and Exo-M-K.   
** All following lyrics translations are fan-made.