(Korean) American Psycho: The Reflection Pool of Diaspora
In the following video essay, I track Jin Lee and Ben's morning routines as expressed in their respective films. I utilize a montage framework that appropriates imagery and narration from American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, 2000), which largely centered around themes of capitalist excess and white male fantasy. Christian Bale portrays serial killer Patrick Bateman. All three characters face crises in the midst of cosmopolitanism and increasing globalization. Jin Lee and Bateman both suffer from isolation in their business and leisurely lives. Ben shares killer traits with Bateman and both typify a generation of wealth and hedonism.
Please enjoy.
In this montage, I hope to achieve two things. The first is to show a casual similarity between these films, identifying the themes of abandonment, materialism, and ritual. Secondly, I wish to continue visualizing how transnationality and masculinity are tied together. The montage element of this video essay very strongly contrasts Christian Bale’s white and muscular physique with Ben’s more slim frame and Jin Lee’s darker Korean skin. Where Bateman’s rituals embody masculinity through his physique and belongings, Jin Lee seems utterly lost amidst his father’s gigantic home and Ben is content to stare at his own (mostly unaffected) visage, preferring to alter the face of his girlfriend.
In Columbus and Burning these bathroom scenes act as important moments of reflection and location as individualized characters, not Korean nor fully American, and characterizing their distinct masculinities trough certain practices and rituals.
A Brief Body of Work on Diaspora
Now looking more towards how these scenes converse with diaspora and transnationality, I want to bring in James Clifford and his definitions of diaspora and community:
“diaspora discourses articulates... forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintains identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference. Diaspora cultures are not separatist” (308).
“the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of transnationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local, as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement” (308).
In all, Clifford finds diaspora to encompass three distinct phenomenon: movement associated with migration, the experience of migration itself, and the lived realities of (re)settlement. As we can see in the video montage, any semblance of distinct political identity or shared community are all but lost in Columbus and Burning. Jin Lee and Ben are individuals apart from any political movement or distinct space. However, we do meet them both within their spheres of physical movement, catching them in modes of travel and arrival. Jin Lee must relocate back to Columbus and Ben comes off an airplane to meet Jong-su, and the audience. This movement isolates them. Therefore these scenes of bathroom ritual and self-reflection become important moments of meditative solitude. Where Ben seems more than happy to self-isolate, Jin Lee is overcome with an unarticulated desire to find companionship. Ben applies makeup to his new girlfriend, perhaps the next victim on his list. To him, other humans of any community are undesirable. However, Jin Lee constantly roams around his father's mansion, a living ghost within his own house. Lee craves community and kinship, despite actively rejecting both.
Perhaps the most dazzling aspect of this video montage is the exorbitant wealth on display for each of these figures. Bateman lives in a New York high-rise, his narration largely reflecting his spending patterns and accumulation. As already pronounced, Jin Lee stays in his father's highly decorated and intricate mansion. Ben, much like Bateman, lives in a high-rise in Gangnam, a city well-known in Korea for its wealth and status. We can further return to Clifford as a source of investigative inspiration. Of diasporic experiences, he finds:
“unsettlement, loss, and recurring terror produce discrepant temporalities - broken histories that trouble the linear, progressivist narratives of nation-states and global modernization” (317). What is compelling in Clifford’s intervention is that diasporic subjects interrupt a colonial mindset of manifest destiny and decenter Western ideas of progress and advancement.
While Ben and Jin Lee accumulate wealth and have a horde of possessions that define their morning rituals, these objects of status actually further distance themselves from their perceived communities. Lee’s inability to connect and settle in his father’s mansion mirrors his inability to relate to his father and traditional Korean customs. Ben’s material possessions are largely ways to either entrap women or to test his allegiance to the young and new Korean upper class. Multiple times through the narrative, Ben seems alienated while going out with his friends to fun bars or clubs. These moments of isolation put these characters at a distance from their diaspora, making them lost without either a home nor return possibility.
The Disturbing Diasporic Body
In related literature and theory regarding the political efficacy and disturbance of the diasporic body, Ahmed et al. consider diaspora in terms of troubling border discourses. They find that "borders are biopolitical, bodies are affected by border policies and feelings of kinship or estrangement and familial genealogies depend on systems of travel that recognize different kinds of relatedness” (10-11). I bring border and genealogy to attention to reveal that, although neither Columbus nor Burning fully engage with the geographies that isolate their characters, their focus on family maps familial conflict onto biopolitical borders. Jin Lee’s struggle with his father is critical in identifying his struggle with his Korean heritage. Ben’s lack of history or family, save for one brief appearance, makes him an apparition that belongs not to traditional notions of ethnicity or nationality, but rather a travelling character that consistently haunts around and through borders, perverting any idea of citizenship at all.
In contrast to discussion of nationalized abandonment, Ahmed theorizes of a type of cosmopolitanism. “Cosmopolitanism, crucially, is theorized as a set of predispositions and practices predicated on extensive mobility, including corporeal, imaginative and virtual travel, which allow for a comprehension of local specificity while fostering an openness to the ‘globalising world’” (4). Ben clearly represents the desire for a globalized world, at times making clear in his utterances that he calls allegiance to no region nor country. Jin Lee, on the other hand, presents a more reluctant or non-self-aware globalized figure. Even though he may have ‘recalled’ himself to live in Korea, he still works as a translator, embodying movement and translation in his occupation and his own utterances.
However, these globalizing tendencies are at odds with the discussions here about these characters as isolated individuals. Ahmed’s focuses on local specificity and an openness to the world are key for cosmopolitanism. While Ben wants to be a traveler, he still fails in becoming a cosmopolitan, transnational subject because his lack of allegiance erases any sense of local specificity. This tension surrounds his character and is only resolved through his death at the hands of Jong-su. Perhaps director Lee Chang-dong’s message is that Jong-su’s extreme locality, and proud Korean nationalism, must always prevail. While Jin Lee still feels a tension regarding his initial rejections of the local and acceptances of the global, Columbus resolves this tension by Jin accepting Columbus as a beautiful place to acknowledge, remember, and live.
What it means to live in a Globalized World, yet have No Home
While this discussion of global and local tensions is all well-and-good, these master narratives are masculine-coded in explicit and implicit terms. The montage itself can be viewed as almost a parody of masculinity, with such a focus on body and performing masculinity in various ways - exercise, imperialized arts, and a domination over women. In Burning, Ben’s character exists as a device to punish women - including being responsible for the only female character’s death - and as a way for Jong-su to question and exercise his own masculinity. Jin Lee is not overtly masculine, yet the film’s focus on patriarchy and male-valued ideas of ‘growth’ is still heavy. Clifford and Ahmed et al. both find that diasporic and transnational bodies of work remain largely anti-women; both call for a resuscitated interest and attention towards feminism.
"Diasporic experiences are always gendered. But there is a tendency for theoretical accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures to hide this fact, to talk of travel and displacement in unmarked ways, thus normalizing male experiences” (Clifford 313).
"...The challenge for transnational feminism is both critical and affirmative. First, it remains crucial to critique the gendered dimension of the international division of labour, which places women in highly differentiated and unequal positions in the global economy” (Ahmed et al 6).
Burning and Columbus importantly begin a conversation on Korean-American diaspora, revealing a need to highlight the local and celebrate the individual. Also, accidentally, showing us that the tension between ‘here-and-there’ (or America and Korea) cannot simply be an individual effort that requires repression, suppression, or domination over anything. Ben and Jin’s journeys both require a masculinist or stoic resolve to make a single decision. They both desire power in order to find stability. However, looking towards transnational feminism, we can see these power- and desire-based narratives are still rooted on patriarchy, or at least a false sense of security in a fixed identity. Postcolonial feminist theorists “have made us aware that the greatest movements often occur within the self, within the home or within the family, while the phantasm of limitless mobility often rests on the power of border controls and policing of who does and does not belong” (Ahmed et al 5). I urge that future films focus on diasporic tension within the Korean-American geosphere through family and community, rather than individualist escapes into the self that require the – sometimes literal – death of the past.
