‘Burning’, K-pop, and Women under Capitalism

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is a tale of masculinity in (and out of) control — of male sexual jealousy and the conspiratorial mindset that comes from this problematic paranoiac tendency. Its protagonist Lee Jong-su falls for his old classmate Shin Hae-mi, who one day decides to visit Kenya — upon her return, a new man has entered her life: the affluent and worldly Ben. After Hae-mi mysteriously goes off the radar, Jong-su is desperate to find her and begins to take Ben’s bizarre actions and expressions, including (amongst other things) his secret penchant for barn-burning and his subdued indifference towards Hae-mi’s whereabouts, as a sign that he may be behind the disappearance — malicious or otherwise. The film concludes with Jong-su stabbing Ben in a cold expression of jealous rage; knifing him next to his car in the rural winter before dowsing everything in kerosene, igniting the mess, and driving away. Aside from the finale’s obvious declaration of the destructive consequences that come with toxic masculine jealousy, in Hae-mi’s absence (both while away in Kenya and during her disappearance), Jong-su’s internalised sense of sexual entitlement is thrust to the cinematic forefront. Hae-mi tells Jong-su that the only sunlight that she ever gets in her tiny one-bedroom apartment is a momentary wisp of reflected light that bounces off Seoul's Namsan Tower, through her one window at the back of the room, and onto her bedroom wall. While they make love, Jong-su witnesses this rare moment appear before him. It’s like a divine message. In his mind, he has begun to construct Hae-mi, and everything associated with her, as a special figure — he has justified this self-authorised attachment by viewing it as if it were some quasi-spiritual sign, or some manifest destiny. The truth of this latent entitlement is realised when he returns to look after her apartment time and time again, only to stare out the same window and masturbate in the light.
Yet to focus entirely on how its male characters embody this culture of toxic masculinity is to ignore the underlying commentary in Burning about how women are victims of both individual instances and the wider deep-rooted culture of patriarchal power in contemporary South Korea. Hae-mi may be the object of Jong-su and Ben’s masculine gaze — but beyond her relation to the central male characters, we see that she alone stands as an embodiment of how late capitalism in South Korea has both commodified and exploited women and their bodies, and through its unchallenged ubiquity, help cement this attitude in wider culture.

Think now of the modern phenomenon of K-pop. As a genre, it has managed to transcend its national boundaries — although there were never really any borders to transcend to begin with. It is a market genre in essence, constructed from a consumer basis. Its declarations of “experimentation” by incorporating elements of genres like R&B, hip hop, jazz, and country are superficial appropriations. It is a commercial amalgamation and almost hyper-real tool that attempts to cover all bases as a commercial endeavour rather than a substantially creative one — not too distant in philosophy to the glut of Western pop EDM that has controlled the musical mainstream for most of the decade now. As an export on the globalised economic stage, it is perhaps one of South Korea’s most prized creative assets. I recommend you watch YouTuber Cuck Philosophy’s breakdown of the cultural development of the genre first:

K-pop as an industry is now well-renowned for how it treats its stars, in particular its female musicians. With K-pop, there is no grassroots development. The music does not rise up above the surface and break into the global mainstream — these vocalists have to “earn” their place through rigorous audition processes, with contracts often filled with highly problematic guidelines and rules set within them. Many women are required to stick to a strictly regimented diet and exercise plan in order to maintain a physical standard as set out by their record company. Plastic surgery and skin-whitening is often required of many in order to deal with these perceived “imperfections”. These “slave contracts” are both highly exploitative in nature and help codify the standardisation a constructed view of what a woman “should” be — a view informed by the demands of an industry that profits off the commodification of the female body, and the instalment of problematic beauty standards. So valuable is this industry to the South Korean economy that the government have even subsidised parts of it to maintain its cultural and economic pervasiveness. There is now a culture in certain K-pop communities that is rife with the uncontested sexualisation and objectification of many of its stars. While researching for this article, I typed a search term into Google: “K-pop and the female body”. Granted, the phrasing for this search was quite narrow — regardless of this, however, the results which emerged speak for themselves: the top results that arrived on my results page go to show how this culture of objectification is so prevalent. K-pop fan sites and forums like Soompi, Koreaboo, and All K-pop (even a Quora page) openly discuss which stars in the genre have the best bodies. All of this is indicative of an extensive “musical” culture — in reality, K-pop is less about music and more about branding: another face of global patriarchal condition that has gone unchallenged — that actively engages in and encourages this attitude. All one really needs to do is look at one of the many K-pop music videos on YouTube to get a sense of how aggressively normalised, even in K-pop’s visual art, this objectification and commodification of the female body is.

Compare this then to Burning’s Hae-mi. No, she is not a K-pop star. Neither is her photo-shopped and surgically-perfected face and body plastered across billboards around South Korea. Yet in her personal and working life, the parallels between the lives of these K-pop stars and her own can be sensed. When we are introduced to her, we see that she is a street dancer whose role is to advertise for a local business raffle. The opening tracking shot follows Jong-su through the city, saturated with consumer logos and commercial signposting, within which Hae-mi is finally revealed to us. Her body has become one with the urban commercial environment around her, utilised for the purposes of advertisement. Here, the politics and identity of her own body do not belong to her. Other parallels include her plastic surgery, done with the intent of looking more attractive (likely influenced by comments on her apparent ugliness made by a younger Jong-su). She has also developed a form of narcolepsy brought on by unexpected bouts of sadness — reflective of the numerous reported breakdowns and collapses from exhaustion that many K-pop musicians suffer. We are not privy to the exact mechanisms of Hae-mi’s internal life — we can only infer it through her actions and their real-life parallels. She is surrounded by a commercialised standard that is impossible to reach yet is so attractive to many people of her generation. Perhaps the fact that she finds herself drawn towards the figure of Ben is unsurprising — his Gangnam-wealthy and prim bourgeois lifestyle is representative of the very social-mobility myth that many young South Koreans are promised through the standard set by the culture at large. His name is remarkably American for a South Korean man, channelling once more this association with the global and explicitly “American” nature of the South Korean economic present. More can be said of Ben’s desire to burn down rural greenhouses — it appears to be a projection of his own sociopathic indifference to the structures of working-class life. One mystery in the film pivots on a missing greenhouse that Ben claims to have burned down, one which Jong-su (after meticulous searching) cannot find despite Ben’s insistence that he is telling the truth. This very pivot — of whether it did or did not happen, or whether this is indeed a cruel metaphor for Hae-mi’s possible murder — in each instance projects Ben’s destructive class detachment. In this regard, Hae-mi, like so many young South Koreans, can be said to have been lured in by an unattainable and uncaring ideal as embodied in Ben.

Hae-mi’s disappearance has one other possible explanation too — she is running from crippling credit-card debt. Debt culture is a pervasive issue in South Korea, particularly with students and working-class individuals. The exact reason her credit debt exists is never explained. Once more, we are left to assume — it could be that Hae-mi had used this credit to pay for the economics demands of student life, or perhaps to help fund her aforementioned plastic surgery. So expected/accepted is the idea of hiding from debt that even Hae-mi’s family, upon inquiry as to her whereabouts, express a lack of urgent concern over her vanishing. There are, of course, no concrete answers as to where she may be. Hae-mi’s disappearance is the pivot of the thrill — however, what is most intriguing is that these thrills are channelled through Jong-su’s own paranoid manifestations. The mystery is more than just a reflection of Jong-su’s own individual attitude; it comments on a culturally-pervasive male attitude towards women as objects of mystery in and of themselves — essentially, women as an Other who are to be understood and controlled. Hae-mi throughout most of the film is caught in the pull of these two male forces, each representing a different facet of this patriarchal network. Think of the scene at Jong-su’s place, where he and Hae-mi and Ben relax in the setting sun and smoke a joint — Miles Davis’ score from Elevator to the Gallows begins to play while a stoned Hae-mi performs the Great Hunger dance she learnt while in Africa. Robert Daniels provides a great examination of this moment:

In the shadows of the DMZ, Hae-mi externalizes a plea for meaning not given by these men, her culture, her body, or her surroundings. She pleads to be seen as who she actually is. Joen as Hae-mi breathes this vibrant and misunderstood woman with a livelihood for self-actualization that the men around her lack.

While Ben watches in an entertained detachment, Jong-su views the act with conservative male aggression and calls her a whore. In the presence of both men, she is a victim of both class condescension and maligned for her transgression of a societal expectation. Once more, Hae-mi’s body is still defined in relation to the worldviews of her male counterparts — the control and freedom she seeks over her own body remains absent.

Though Hae-mi lacks screen-time, Burning is essentially her story — and, by extension, a story of South Korean women who struggle to reclaim their own bodies. Like her K-pop equivalents, Hae-mi is a victim of an industry and a culture that seeks to control her rather than allow her to be the captain of her own will. A blend of psychological thriller tropes and male-gaze perspective are used with self-critical effect; the powers which keep these problematic tendencies alive are examined as extensions of the wider issue. Even in narrative, Hae-mi’s story is told through male eyes — the constructs of male hegemony are everywhere; they are seemingly inescapable.