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.