three: step into the red of the vanishing sun
Hello friends,
What a month. What a month!!! Have you screamed yet? I feel sloppy drunk without tasting a sip of alcohol. Looking back, I can’t see March clearly. What I remember are barbed feelings. Like shards of glass collected in the palm of my hand, each serrated piece reflecting frustration and anxiety. Chinese-Americans (and the Asian diaspora at large) bombarded with racist vitriol. Misinformation. Six feet away. Flattening the curve. Lack of testing kits, PPEs, and ventilators. Panic buying. Quarantines. Three million unemployed and rising. Dysfunctional healthcare system. Threadbare social safety nets. Another recession. Lockdown. Heartless criminals in charge. For days, as I willingly and unwillingly refreshed COVID-19-related news, rainstorms darkening the Los Angeles skies, my body shook uncontrollably, unable to still itself, seesawing between mania and nothingness. I scrolled, I paced my apartment, I smoked a j, inhaled ginger tea, called loved ones, took a boiling shower, searched for remote jobs, broke down. Spaced out in front of the window, mesmerized by a mourning dove. Listened to “It Never Entered My Mind” ad nauseum, a terrible uncertainty constricting my thoughts.
Marguerite Duras called the gaps living “between hope and despair,” the zero point. That’s where I’ve been, spiraling around like a headless chicken. The zero point. A hollow space bursting with the hard-to-express, an endless vibration, where strange sensitivities rise to the surface.
When the stress becomes unbearable, I try to lose myself in a movie or book. Wandering through shots or pages can offer a momentary respite. Lately I’ve been returning to Burning, the sixth film by Lee Chang-dong. I saw the movie two years ago at Arclight Hollywood, prompted by an article in Film Comment. Since it’s addition to Netflix, I’ve watched it three or four times, sometimes rapt in front of the screen, eyes wide and determined, other times letting the colors and rhythms wash over me, attention drifting in and out.
At two and a half hours long, Burning rewards patience; the narrative, which sketches out the odd contours of an unspoken love triangle, meanders and cogitates, hewing close to the combustible textures of South Korea, especially the disruptive shocks of widening class inequalities. Lee revealed to Hollywood Reporter that he “feel[s] like young people these days have realized that there's something wrong in this world,” where a psychopathic greed supersedes all. (Just this week, in the US, members of the GOP, including Trump, questioned social distancing precautions, arguing the death of millions would be a necessary sacrifice to “save” the economy).
What I remember most about Burning: the inexpressible anger. You feel it coursing throughout the film, a low foreboding hum.
“Feel the bass.”
That’s what Ben tells Jong-su, his hand hovering tenderly over his chest. Ben and Jong-su are not friends. They are polar opposites, connected by their ambiguous relationship to the free-spirited Hae-mi.
After his father is arrested for assaulting a civil servant, Jong-su returns to his family’s cattle farm in Paju, a rural town near the North Korean border (so close that the town is blanketed by the country’s booming propaganda broadcast); he finds the farm in disarray, still haunted by the memories of his mother who left the family years ago, desperate to escape her husband’s abuse. Jong-su wants to be a novelist, his favorite writer is William Faulkner, but he’s stuck in an uninspiring and exploitative gig economy. Ben, a suave Gatsby figure, lives in the luxe Gangnam district, drives a Porsche, travels without care, and is surrounded by a coterie of friends and family. When asked what he does for a living, Ben describes himself as someone who “plays.”
And then there’s Hae-mi. We first see her on a crowded Seoul sidewalk, dressed in a hot pink miniskirt and white crop top, jerkily dancing in front of a department store, part of a promotion to sell raffle tickets. She recognizes Jong-su immediately—they grew up in Paju together. It takes him a moment or two to place her. Hae-mi isn’t outwardly offended. “Plastic surgery!” she chirps in reply, immediately excusing his lapsed memory. Their meeting seems both random and fated. Whereas Jong-su is passive and remote, Hae-mi possesses a chaotic energy, swinging from alluring impishness to unguarded vulnerability, undeterred by the occasional look of disapproval.
Over drinks, her actions reminiscent of a sparkling screwball comedienne, she juggles and peels an invisible fruit, delicately picking segments as if they were flower petals: “I can eat tangerines whenever I want.” Like a spell against starvation and lack. The trick, she advises, is to forget the tangerine isn’t there. Her expression loses its twinkle, replaced by a hollowed weariness. Jong-su doesn’t fully understand what she means, misreading her candor as foolishness at best. Soon he will see her as his damsel to save. For now, they discuss her pantomime class, the meaning of life, and her upcoming trip to Africa, a place she refers to in hushed, reverential tones. She tells him about the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert and their belief in two hungers, little and great, literal and existential. Abruptly, she asks Jong-su if he will watch her cat, Boil, while she is away.
Jong-su shuffles between Paju and Seoul, masturbating underneath Hae-mi’s window and feeding a cat that never appears. When he picks her up at the airport a few weeks later, bashful and anticipatory, he is stung to find Ben in tow. The two met while stranded at the Nairobi Airport, Hae-mi gushes breathlessly as Ben hides behind a smirk. The first alarming thing we learn about Ben is that he claims to have never shed a tear in his life. Other unsettling details will accrue: a hidden assortment of women’s jewelry, a taste for arson, a fatal ennui.
“The end of the world.”
That’s how Hae-mi describes the transcendent parking lot sunset she experienced during her African trip. Like being at the end of the world. Belly full on tripe stew and beer, boxed between two uptight men, hot tears overflowing. “I wish I could vanish.”
I worry about Hae-mi, puttering around her cramped studio apartment, flitting from gig to gig, hounded by massive credit card debt. Her mother and older sister have severed contact, blaming their distance on her money woes. Moreover, there is no family home to return to—it’s been demolished, a casualty of encroaching urbanization. We never see her confide in any true friends. Only a childhood acquaintance who feigns innocence whenever confronted with her pain (Before they have sex, Hae-mi recalls a moment from childhood, Jong-su calling her ugly, the last time they saw each other. He has no memory of the incident), and a wealthy fling with a habit of flashing withering glares behind her back.
The reviews I’ve read center the men’s anger, gliding over Hae-mi’s capacity for rage. Some take her pursuit for freedom at face value, dooming her to mere symbolism, a flame naively burning at both ends. In this reading, her character functions as a catalyst prompting the dark duel between Jong-su and Ben. Yawn! That bores me. It doubles down on Hae-mi’s expendability. And it ignores the enigmas of her own delirious search for meaning. An impoverished woman, she’s intimately acquainted with the edges of the living, the lines arbitrarily separating access and scarcity. Rather than pretend the boundaries aren’t there, she practices the art of forgetting, a pantomime of unlimited abundance. Or denial.
Compared to Jong-su and Ben, Hae-mi is a breath of fresh air. Still, I am haunted by her anger. We never see her lash out. Where does her burning reside? I’m curious because I have a hard time communicating my own anger. I am adept at wearing a mask of indifference, while tending a fury that disguises and swings. From suffocating tears to zombification to excessive wanting to little disasters to bleakest rage to venomous confusion to keeping it in, in, in, squeezing it up, no matter the cost. Where to go when all you see is blood?
I understand her desire to step into the red of the vanishing sun. To slip between the gaps separating earth and sky. To ESCAPE.
“As if it never existed.”
Not to alarm you, but…
Hae-mi will disappear. Poof. Looking back, it is tempting to interpret her outburst as a warning. But as her coworker coolly assesses, cigarette smoke curling in front of her face, girls vanish all the time.
I feel Hae-mi’s absence in the blue fog of Paju and along the city’s congested highways. My mind skips to the band of émigrés from Bae Suah’s Recitation, translated by Deborah Smith, who roam the low hills of Seoul in search of Kyung-hee, a woman they met by chance years ago. Try as they might, proof of her existence evades their best intentions: “Kyung-hee had become no one. Kyung-hee was nothing … Kyung-hee had been extinguished … Kyung-hee had slipped down in the form of low hills…” The harder they seek, the more Kyung-hee disperses. She is there (among the low hills) and not there (nothing), suspended between reality and imagination. Burning situates us in a similar realm, confusing our sense of real and unreal, known and unknown.
Refusing to forget what isn’t there, I search for Hae-mi in the fading daylight. I try to find her, illogically, among the mystical rock formations of Lisca Bianca, the island where Anna vanishes without a trace in Michelangelo Antonioni’s art-house puzzle, L’Avventura (Peter Bradshaw observes, “Anna has dematerialised. Her atoms have been blown away in the wind,” echoing the émigrés’ lament). I toy with making a list of other film vanishings, but stop at Picnic at Hanging Rock. Exhausted and at wits’ end, I replay every scene Hae-mi is in, convinced the answers might slumber in an errant glance or hand gesture, but each viewing respools and expands the mysteries pulsing beneath. Besides the conditions of her marginalization and her hunger for the meaning of life, what do I truly know about Hae-mi?
I cannot unsee her in the following lines from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha:
Face to face with the memory, it misses. It’s missing.
Still. What of time. Does not move. Remains there.
I stare at Hae-mi’s frozen face, paused on the TV screen. Tousled dark hair. Down-turned mouth. Eyes looking past you.
Lesley Jenike writes, “No matter how much we’d like to slow down the film and ruminate on individual images… we’re no closer to capturing the character, the life, the essence of the lost person.” Yes, that’s what I’m really longing to touch. Hae-mi’s essence. Am I no different from Jong-su? Trying to make a story out of lost. His own search fractures into an obsession with vengeance, the perfect outlet for all his paranoid confusions.
“I can’t explain it in words.”
I haven’t told you much about Burning. I keep getting distracted by Hae-mi, topless, her back facing us, arms raised like plumes of smoke as Miles Davis’s “Générique” wails in the background, her swaying silhouette in communion with the setting sun. Time stands still, and for a brief moment, all the film’s tensions (economic, sexual, generational) temporarily fade, swallowed by the orange glow of the sky. Even when she leaves the frame, the trumpet abruptly replaced by the hissing wind and her hiccuping sobs, the camera continues its slow pan to the right, as if in forlorn search, unable to rid itself of Hae-mi's smoldering presence.
Although I’ve seen Burning countless times, this sequence comes as a surprise. Who’s perspective is this? The camera strains towards the heavens, unsteady, as if unmoored from the characters. Rustling trees perform their own rhapsodic hunger dance. The clouds, to me, look like a crude drawing of an alligator. Or the edges of a cliff. I could be gazing into a time warp. Or nothing at all.
I imagine Hae-mi entering the dark smear of cloud, the gap between there and not there.
No matter where I look or what I think I’ve found—the missing remains, unextinguished.
Sending you warmth and protection,
Allison
Resources:
Cancel Rent petition (CA)
Autoimmune-Compromised and Disabled Rural Queer Mutual Aid Fund
(F)EMPOWER Community Bail Fund (Miami)
Playlist:
It Makes You Forget (Itgehane) - Peggy Gou
Blue Moon - Onyx Collective and Ian Isiah
How To Disappear Completely - Radiohead