Separation Anxiety: Masculine Rage & Transnational Desire
Ben and Jin are central characters in Burning (dir. Lee Chang-dong, 2018) and Columbus (dir. Kogonada, 2017). Importantly, these films are masculinist texts. What I mean by this is that these two films are directed by men, feature men as the main characters or stars, and largely depict the struggle between patriarch, national tradition, and the current moment.
Ben is modern, wealthy, well-spoken, and charismatic. His emphasis on transnationality is also key to his own understanding of masculinity. After Hae-mi dances and falls asleep, Ben reveals to Jong-su his tendencies to burn down greenhouses: “They’re waiting to be burned down. It’s like rain. Rain falls. The river overflows, causing a flood that sweeps people away…. The morals of nature are simultaneous existence. I’m here, and I’m there. I’m in Paju, and I’m in Banpo. I’m in Seoul and I’m in Africa. Something like that.” Ben discusses the merits of not limiting oneself to one country or particular nationality. At the same time, he also speaks about power. “The river overflows, causing a flood that sweeps people away.” He speaks of travel and alternate host countries not just to illustrate a desire to engage with a globalizing world, but also to assert his power in multiple dimensions. This is why, in Korea, he seems unamused with his friends and colleagues. He goes to cafes, drives a Porsche, has a party in a museum, but seems catastrophically unfulfilled. That is, until he meets Jong-su and Hae-mi. His power now can be calculated not just through a lens of transnational desire, but also through a gendered vector. He seeks to undermine Hae-mi’s own agency and manipulate Jong-su as a male co-conspirator in his gendered violence.
Jong-su, in his own confession, reveals to Ben that his father has anger and violence issues. “He has rage bottled up inside of him. It goes off like a bomb.” As a result of this anger, Jongsu’s mother left the family when he was still a young boy. So, he and his father participated in a ritualistic act, burning all the mother’s clothes in a fire. Here, Ben acts as a foil for Jongsu in two dimensions: the transnational artist and the emasculated man. Where Jongsu’s life has been in trying to move away from his father’s rage, he meets Ben who enacts rage in a different way (arson) and appears to live a polished life. At the same time, Jongsu is faced with a new lifestyle that strays from the nationalist Korean position.
Sun Jung, in her book Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption, offers that Korean masculinity is in somewhat of a global crisis. She writes:
“South Korean masculinity is hybridized and transformed due to disjunctive globalizations and transculturations, where South Korean masculinity is multifariously reconstructed and re-identified based on the ambivalent desires of audiences who mobilize mixed cultural practices arising from mugukjeok and the local specificities of each region” (4).
Mugukjeok is a term for South Korean masculinity. Jung offers three important components that create mugukjeok: “the ability to provide for the family, masculine distance from daily reproductive labor, and military service” (26). Jong-su’s father fulfilled all three in spades: he continues to provide home for his son, distanced himself from resolving family tensions, and earned high merits in the army. Jong-su is failing at all three when we meet him in the film, with his military service performance largely unimpressive. Ben, on the other hand, purposefully eschews any meaning affiliated with these duties. He has no family to speak of that he needs to provide for, he maintains a more than respectful distance from any labor at all (“I play”), and his military service or any type of altruistic endeavor is completely absent from his history. Where Jong-su’s father was perhaps a type of perfect Korean man, Ben is a type of transnational figure that completely confounds Jong-su, the more typical and doubtful younger Korean man.
We first meet Jin in travel, having come straight to the hospital from the airport. This trip is motivated by his father’s ill-health but also forces Lee to consider how much he identifies with America and Korea. So, this quest engenders both an exacting of his own masculine role as well as his ethnic identity. Almost immediately we find that he works as a Korean/English translator at a publishing press. His first lines of dialogue have little to do with the plot, but more to do with his acclimation to Seoul and his thoughts on living in Korea. In general, he is finding the work pleasant but finds the work culture to be unsatisfying and oppressive. This dialogue signals a lack of comfort or presence in Korea or America which also signifies a lack of comfort near or away from his father.
Although we never see Jin Lee in Korea, we can see the lasting effects of his dual living spaces within the film. Helene K. Lee, in her book Between Foreign and Family: Return Migration and Identity Construction among Korean Americans and Korean Chinese, speaks heavily on gender strategy and ethnic mobilization by Korean Americans. She finds that Korean Americans in Korea have two goals: “One is to maximize their social status, particularly in the heterosexual dating market… the second is to push back against attacks by South Koreans to their legitimacy as “real” Koreans because of their failure to conform to dominant notions of femininity and masculinity” (69. Lee’s only relationships are firmly within heterosexual dating prospects, with Casey and Eleanor, and Lee faces intense internal anxiety to perform Korean grief expressions and fulfill father-son roles. Helene K. Lee further theorizes on gender strategy:
“many Korean American men distance themselves from a flawed South Korean masculinity… Even though they engage in many of the same behaviors - such as excessive drinking, smoking, and staying out late - as single young South Korean men, Korean American men see their lifestyle as acceptable because they are neither cheating on their wives nor neglecting their children” (77).
Part of the tension within Jin’s storyline exists in his assumption that returning to Columbus will settle his identity once and for all: returning to ignore his father will confirm his distance from that paternal role and visiting America will confirm his status as a true Korean. However, both of these confirmations that Jin Lee desires are falsities that can never truly be attained.
So, both Ben and Jin Lee encounter characters and go through events that challenge their desire for stabilization as gendered and ethnicized/nationalized figures. Again, the desire for immutability creates the primary tensions for both character arcs, where their supposed fixed identities are still ravaged by globalization, transnationality, and performative masculinity.
