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• 1 2020-12-11T10:37:11-08:00 Free jazz, free association: Americanism in Burning 21 "Travelling abroad, driving a Porsche, listening to music while cooking pasta:" The Life of the Cosmopolitan Ben. image_header 2021-04-24T09:18:09-07:00

  Ben's Character in Burning
  
  Who is Ben in Burning? Where does he come from, how does he live, and what does he do? Burning does not reveal where he grew up, but Ben is introduced as coming from a trip from Africa, where he and Shin Hae-mi first meet. He lives in Gangnam and is clearly wealthy, but only admits he "plays" for a living. He has almost no routine, no predictability. He passively gathers with his friends, exercises in the dead of night, and is seen at cafés with different women. Despite these vagaries and a lack of backstory, Ben is continually felt through the film and his impact resonates before he even appears onscreen. Through this page, I want to speak about Ben through the lens of Korean nationalism, anti-Americanism, and conceptualizations of global cosmopolitanism. These ideas are important to speak about in this project in order to understand how the diasporic and transnational male assumes home in various ways and how they can also project domination and hegemony into various spheres. 
  
  Americanism in Burning
  
  America is first introduced through its (now former) President. Trump is featured on a Korean news program, the subject of a discussion around his new vision of immigration and his racist border wall project. In this same program, Korean anchors speak about youth unemployment in Korea. Making a connection between these American immigration policies and widespread Korean dissatisfaction, the tangential idea of an American promised land where young Koreans can make a more fruitful living, or so it seems, emerges quite clearly as the political landscape present in Burning. The film draws parallels between Korea and America, with its disorderly and antiquated notions of what makes a citizen, but still shows that the Korean population finds hope in the idea of America. 
  
  Scene Analysis
  
  I want to bring forth a sequence that features the film’s main trio: slacker Lee Jong-su, young dreamer Shin Hae-mi, and Ben. In this sequence, moving from a chat at a coffee house to Ben’s apartment in Gangnam, each character embodies a certain type of national identity: Ben is the quintessential American traveler, Jong-su represents the Korean who is both attracted to and repulsed by Americanism, and Hae-mi represents the wayward Korean who has abandoned Korea and is aspiring to become the American that Ben is now. When I speak about ‘the American’, I do not refer to one’s legal citizenship status. Rather, the idea that the American is a cosmopolitan nomad who disregards heritage over luxury. More of this idea will become clear through the forthcoming sequence analysis. 
  
  
  At the start of this sequence, Jong-su meets Hae-mi at a cafe. He first peers inside, looking through a dirty window. He then sees Hae-mi and inquires if anyone else is around - she points to Ben, also looking through a window.
  
  
  Where Jong-su looked alone, Ben has a surplus of connections on the phone. Jong-su looks lost, looks through a dirty window. Ben controls multiple situations at once, the window clear as water. After Ben comes back to the cafe, he performs a magic trick. The promise of magic gives way to a real, grounded falsity. The shaman’s artifact is but a lowly pebble.
  
  
  Throughout this trick, Ben continually looks at Jong-su while Hae-mi is absolutely taken with Ben’s performance. She has already bought into the promise of America. Jong-su is still weary, but Ben is trying his best to convince him. Jong-su is interested, but it doesn’t work. So, they go back to Ben’s apartment for some pasta. Another lure. 
  
  
  Immediately, a wide shot explores what America (or Ben) can give Jong-su. A BMW sits in the darkness, ignored, almost as if it has relatively meaningless worth to Ben. Ben’s shorts are in clear view, an antidote to Korea’s stuffiest businesspeople and Jong-su’s own lopsided clothing.  
  
  
  In a jump cut, a wide shot of the three moves right to an over-the-shoulder shot of Jong-su looking at a blank canvas. The blocking of this scene indicates a symmetry between the blank canvas and Ben in the preceding shot. This symmetry gestures towards Ben’s own superficiality. Where he appears stylish and mysterious, what lies underneath is still just blank-ness. 
  
  
  As all three converse in Ben’s kitchen, making pasta, Ben notes that he loves cooking. “I make my own offering and consume it.” As he says this, offscreen, the camera lingers on Jong-su, with the blank canvas appearing yet again. However, this time -  instead of offering a lack of depth - the canvas may symbolize opportunity. Another seduction for Jong-su. 
  
  
  Jong-su excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As he walks down the hallway, an extra wide shot allows the camera to ponder on some of the incidental objects: two horned figures in the left third of the screen, plants and vases made up to nearly look like a plume of fire in the right third, and Jong-su swimming down the middle. Considering revelations about Ben made later in the film - namely an implication that he kills women for fun - Jong-su is making his way down a cosmopolitan River Styx. 
  
  
  Again, he resists temptation in the bathroom by not staring at his own reflection, something Ben gleefully does later in the film. Instead, he finds Ben’s makeup kit. In a close-up, the makeup kit consumes half the screen, plunging Jong-su in relative darkness. 
  
  
  In a following insert, a girl’s bracelet is seen, with the American name Michaela, further tying Ben to America. In a cut back to the dinner scene, Ben continues to cook and plate meals while Jong-su and Hae-mi smoke cigarettes and discuss Ben on the balcony. 
  
  Now, the camera pans away from Ben to the smokers. Despite Ben’s disappearance, his impact is still palpable.
  
  
  Jong-su fills the far left third, Hae-mi the far right, and the skyline of Gangnam its own character, filling in the center. Wealth is clearly on display, sandwiched by the agrarian poor (Jong-su) and the treacherous upwardly mobile (Hae-mi). The ways Ben acquired his wealth are unknown. Jong-su comments on Ben’s lifestyle: “Traveling abroad, driving a Porsche, listening to music while cooking pasta.” He comes upon a realization, based on his knowledge of literature and own desire to become a writer. 
  
  “He’s the Great Gatsby. Mysterious people who are young and rich but you don’t know what they really do. There are so many Gatsbys in Korea.”
  
  
  Then Jong-su calls into question why Ben would be interested in Hae-mi. Perhaps a matter of interest (or curiosity). The scene then ends, abruptly cutting to a street at nighttime, littered with restaurants, bars, and English. They enter Ben’s world, multilingual and far from any sense of traditional Korean national identity. 
  
  I find this scene so important, and pivotal, because this not only captures the dynamic between all three characters but also inspects the gendered and nationalistic concerns of the film perfectly. Ben and Jong-su are opposites in nearly every way. Jong-su feels invisible even when in plain sight; Ben is always around but hiding, surfacing in Jong-su’s consciousness whenever he is alone. Hae-mi however has no interiority. She is simply caught between the webs of the men. 
  
  Hae-mi is effectively robbed of subjectivity and objectified in nearly every way. Hae-mi is a manifestation of contemporary Korea, with Director Lee mourning the loss of a more unified Korean ethnic spirit. The rise of Americanism is high, especially with the ‘Westernization’ of Korean media that appeals to American consumers, namely K-pop and K-dramas.  
  
  Anti-Americanism & Cosmopolitanism in Korea
  
  Korea itself has a long history with anti-Americanism. Korea has always held a strongly anti-colonial spirit, after multiple empires claimed the land - most notably Japanese occupation. After the Korean War and extensive American involvement, anti-Americanist sentiment rose in the 1980s largely due to movements against U.S. intervention in authoritarian politics. Gi-Wook Shin points out that a turning point involved the Kwangju student uprising and massacre in May 1980, which many in the Korean public eye claimed the U.S. influenced. The US came to symbolize anti-Korean nationalism and imperialism after demanding greater stakes in trade and ‘liberalizing’ the media (Shin 794-795). However, the most popular form of Korean anti-Americanism has less to do with America’s influence in media and politics, but more so with developing nationalism (Shin 802). The Korean version is more an expression of a "new self-confidence which is commensurate with South Korea's growing economic power" or a reflection of Koreans' demand, based on the nation's increased strength, for a change in the U.S.-South Korea relationship from patron-client to partners. In other words, Korean anti-Americanism is an expression of a new nationalism. 
  
  Ahmed et al. define transnational cosmopolitanism as follows: "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).
  
  Burning seeks to declare this nationalism the only way forward for Koreans in a quickly globalized world. Ben has already succumbed totally to the belief that to be a good global citizen is to not be a citizen at all – to locate oneself as a traveler, not a hermit anywhere, and thus refusing to associate oneself with Korea at all. Subscribing to cosmopolitanism though, he is a master of Korea anyways: he knows the best restaurants, frequents local bars and clubs, and seems to have an infinite supply of connections. 
  
  Hae-mi aspires to live this lifestyle, but since she comes from the poor regions of Korea, her own aspirations are limited and intersect with the challenges of class conflict within Korea itself, as well as gendered expectations regarding power divisions between men and women. Jong-su is much more wary of this cosmopolitan lifestyle, yet his own personage sets his rise to Ben’s status perfectly: he has dreams of becoming a writer, is clearly charmed by the lavish festivities Ben puts on, and has grown weary of his father and childhood home, which symbolize a conservative Korea. However, the film resolves this tension by unambiguously finding Jong-su anti-American and un-globalized at the end of the film. When Jong-su murders Ben, he also eradicates Ben’s cosmopolitanist influence on his life and continues to assert that being Korean, but perhaps dissatisfied, is better than being ‘American’, but completely blank underneath.
  
  
  Further Reading
  
  If you want to read more on Americanism and commentaries of globalization in Korea, please read Reading Colonialism in “Parasite” by online blogger juhyundred,