Adapting Murakami: Burning is Announced
After a slew of supporting appearances in television and film, Steven Yeun finally lands a leading actor role in the prestigious drama Burning (2018), directed by Korean director Lee Chang-dong and adapted from a short story by renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Yeun co-stars with Yoo Ah-in and Jeon Jong-seo, playing the central male and female roles, respectively. Yeun stars as Ben, an enigmatic and wealthy traveler who both intrigues and antagonizes Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a poorer young man who lives in the rural north of South Korea.
Burning provides an especially potent case study for Yeun due to the paratexts' considerable and active construction of Yeun as an American star. Where much of the short-hand has already been created for Yeun in American media due to his popularity on The Walking Dead, Korean audiences are not as familiar with Yeun nor his image. Now, Korean media and the film itself must construct Yeun as an American and Hollywood star, an international presence (due to his role in this Korean film), a Korean American and Korean expatriate in his personal life, and as a serious actor.
On a personal note, it is also just extremely interesting to watch Yeun navigate a space that he is largely unfamiliar: Korea itself. By unfamiliar, I refer to the fact that his contestation as American and Korean must be played out on a very large and visible scale in Korea. Yeun has more experience navigating this same contested terrain in America, having lived and grown up there, but now he must face questions regarding his own identity in the Korean public sphere.
The White Gaze & Ethnic Containment
Two fundamental aspects of this project, and many interview forms with Yeun and Cho, that I must investigate are the white gaze and ethnic containment.
Speaking on the white gaze, Toni Morrison argues that master narratives in literature and a lack of Black interiority always relegates Black characters as subservient and complicit in white supremacy, no matter their power within the actual narrative. She finds that “other than as the objects of an occasional bout of jungle fever, other than to provide local color or to lend some touch of verisimilitude or to supply a needed moral gesture, humor, or bit of pathos, blacks made no appearance in [American literature] at all" (15). Morrison finds that Black characters aid the white characters in helping to accentuate their strengths or point out their weaknesses. In this way, Black characters can never usurp white supremacy that is inherent to these master narratives and are stereotyped, fetishized, and/or romanticized all in pursuit of developing white characters as complex and Black characters as one-dimensional.
Within visual media texts, ethnic containment is a vital mechanic of maintaining the white gaze. In the context of Telemundo’s programming aimed towards Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, Arlene Dávila finds that “While less blatant, U.S.-generated Hispanic shows also promote the whiter, educated, well- behaved Latina and thus keep Latinas unthreateningly contained ‘in their place'" (469). Dávila points out that larger systems battle the ‘threat’ of Latinas by showing them, but in hegemonically-approved ways. An ethos of containment does not reduce nor hide images of marginalized subjects, but rather, the white gaze colonizes these subjects and bodies so that they can be articulated by and for a white audience in ways that align with established hierarchies.
Being cognisant that these theoretical frameworks were developed with regard to histories of Black and Latina oppression, I believe these ideas of white gaze and ethnic containment can still be used to identify the limiters of Korean American representation. Despite Yeun's star power – which grants him political and industrial agency, Yeun is still the object of the white gaze which renders him only as powerful as the interviewers or media outlets allow. As we will see with the upcoming media appearances, Yeun’s power as a minoritarian subject is limited in the primarily-White-audience Variety announcement, subjugated to Korean imprecision around being Korean American in the KOCOWA TV/ Showbiz / KBS World interviews, and liberated via ethnic excess in his interview with David Chang.
Announced: Variety and SBS News
Through the initial stages of pre-production, two online articles announced the feature and cast & crew. The first comes from Variety, a legacy American publication that covers entertainment news and reviews. The second comes from SBS News, a Korean newscast.
In the Variety article, I want to focus on two elements: the foreignization of director Lee and the director's own statement on the film.
- "Top Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong has set 'Burning' as the first film he will direct in eight years.": Whereas top director might imply that Lee Chang-dong is simply a good director, his success is qualified as being limited to the realm of Korean cinema, also considering it an impossibility that Lee Chang-dong could be considered an equal or colleague to his American contemporaries.
- "Lee, who was also Korea’s minister of culture between 2003-04, has a stellar track record as a director of challenging art movies.": Variety characterizes Lee's films as challenging, which likely references their more arthouse, less traditional nature. However, challenging can also be considered inscrutable, cold, or distant, words and concepts intrinsically tied with xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment. Why is Lee described as a 'top Korean auteur' and his films as 'challenging' whereas David Lynch is described in this Variety article simply as a 'genius'. Lynch is allowed room to breathe as an artist independent of nationality nor competition (which is implied for Lee with the invocation of 'top') and Lynch's penchant for confusing and puzzling films are completely wiped in favor of admonishing his purely artistic brilliance.
- "Korean American actor Steven Yeun recently joined Yoo Ah-in's upcoming movie 'Burning'.": Where the Variety article began with 'top Korean auteur', this SBS article begins with 'Korean American actor Steven Yeun.' In the context of this film reflecting national identity, I realize that SBS News' invocation of Korean American is both objectively accurate to Yeun but also important in dissociating Yeun from Korean national identity and culture.
- Variety refers to the source material, a short story called "Barn Burning" by Japanese author Murakami. This SBS News article completely omits Murakami's name. Murakami is one of Japan’s most renowned contemporary authors, with his Japanese citizenship further complicating the transnational identity of this project. Murakami often fields criticisms of being un-Japanese or too influenced by Western figures. However, this omittance could just be because it is irrelevant to Yeun's casting, but may also reflect Korea and Japan's continued fraught relationship, after Japan's long history of colonization and violence in Korea during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
