"Burning": Lee Chang-Dong's Brilliant, Brooding Enigma

In Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant brooding enigma, aspiring working-class writer Lee Jong-su is struggling to come up with his first novel when, by chance, he runs into an old classmate, Hai-mi and begins a sexual relationship with her. Years ago, he’d barely given her a thought (failing to remember that he once called her “ugly”), but now, after she goes on a trip to Africa and comes back with a rich playboy, Ben, in tow, Jong-su quickly turns jealous. Increasingly, he struggles to conceal his deep resentment of Ben’s privileged lifestyle and apparently sociopathic insouciance. Later, when Hae-mi suddenly goes missing and Ben makes a comment about the idle pleasure he gets out of “barn burning,” Jong-su takes it as a cryptic confession that he has murdered Hae-mi and begins stalking Ben with the intention of meting out justice once he verifies his suspicions. Lee's film, however, is a mystery in the thickest sense, never allowing us to definitively conclude whether Ben really is a serial killer or if Jong-su’s imaginative juices have fermented into total paranoia. At the end, we never know what really happened to Hae-mi.

Watching the film, it is easy to get caught up in the ambiguous dynamic between Ben and Jong-su and fall into the trap of overlooking the film’s central mystery: Hae-mi. Not only does she drive the film’s narrative; she is by far the most interesting and elusive of the three. Throughout, she displays a habit of disappearing or slipping away without warning, a pattern that seems much less like a reflection of “feminine flightiness” than as a commentary on the society surrouding her. The question Lee leaves lingering is: does anyone around her care or even notice when she’s gone? Even Hae-mi’s own family tells stories about her falling into wells as a child and disappearing for days – speaking as if it were a casual, or even amusing, occurrence. As for Jong-su, he seems more obsessed with exacting vengeance upon his class rival, Ben, than he does with actually finding Hae-mi, who represents more of a “prize” between two male competitors than she does an actual person in her own right. Used by Ben as a plaything and “exotic entertainer” for his wealthy friends and disparaged as a “whore” by Jong-su when she performs the Great Hunger dance she learned in Africa, Hae-mi is caught between male indifference and possessiveness, or as Robert Daniels writes, “two types of toxic masculinity, both just as detrimental.”[1]

Hae-mi’s lower-class status also plays a role in her “disposability” in the narrative, the “leisurely” burning of greenhouses in poor rural areas becoming symbolically associated with the treatment of women such as Hae-mi. In her introduction to Women and Death in Film, Television and News, Joanne Dillman describes how the economic and social effects of global capitalism, while eroding the traditional structures of patriarchy, have merely engendered another system of enslavement that situates women in third world regions as “exploitable, replaceable and disposable.”[2] Hae-mi’s job selling lottery tickets and her reference to plastic surgery when she first sees Jong-su communicate these effects of the capitalist economy right from the start, intimating that her survival depends on her ability to “sell her beauty.”

When watching Burning, it is easy to get caught up, as I did, in its corrosive cloud of male existential angst while losing sight of the unresolved disappearance of the woman that lies at its center. While we cannot verify whether any physical violence was inflicted on Hae-mi, what the film darkly implicates is the violence of indifference to her fate – the ease and seamlessness that define her eclipse within the film, like one of Ben’s casual, unwitnessed barn burnings. In his interview with Variety, Lee stated that he hoped his film would have a “wider positive influence in addressing sexism and distorted gender views,” especially since such subjects “have been kept in the dark for a long time in Korean society.”[3]

[1] Daniels, Robert. “Burning: A Hauntingly Brilliant Mystery,” 812 Film Reviews, Nov. 20, 2018. [2] Dillman, Joanne Clarke. “Introduction,” Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead but not Gone, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 15. [3] Frater, Patrick. “Burning Director Lee Chang-dong: Still Angry After all these Years,” Variety, Dec. 3, 2018.