I recently watched the "Vengeance" trilogy by Korean director Chanwook Park: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. They are spectacularly, gorgeously bloody and disturbing films centered around elaborate fantasies of revenge. They are also seductive--Oldboy has become infamous for being an inspiration to Seung-Hui Cho, the young man who murdered 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech. Cho's careful planning and mad aesthetics are perfectly in line with Park's film, which was apparently not quite cathartic enough.
I'm don't care about the moral elements of the Park's films. I'm more concerned with how the theme of the films--vengeance--becomes increasingly pronounced until it ruins the final film completely. All three films are clearly cartoons. This is not, in of itself, a problem. Film, as we all know, is a cartoonish medium, and thrives on simplicity. However we still want our simplicity to be complex. The first film is simple enough, the second film is a bit too simple, the final film is stupid.
In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, there are lots of characters, and they all have weird and confusing motives: One character gets revenge on the crooks who stole his kidney; another character seeks revenge on the young lovers who kidnapped and killed his daughter, even though the death was an accident. We feel sympathy for the vigilantes, even as we are appalled by their sick torture fantasies. There are myriad varieties of revenge, each accompanied by myriad varieties of love (an essential ingrediant in all revenge): love for a sister, love for a lover, love for a child.
The main character in Oldboy is seeking revenge for being imprisoned, but it turns out he is merely a puppet in a larger revenge plot. The mastermind of this plot is the mad genius, a diabolical villain. We are fascinated by him, but in the same way we might enjoy watching Hannibal Lecter eat someone's brain. He is a wonderful villain, and he has a wonderful scheme, but his psychology is pretty basic: his whole life is devoted to getting revenge. Beyond revenge, there's very little there.
The final film, Lady Vengeance, is utterly simplistic. A child killer is captured by the parents of the murdered children, and they torture and kill him. This is a propaganda for capital punishment, nothing more, nothing less. The characters have been reduced to nothing. Even the love is generic--why do the parents love their children? Because they are parents and the children are children. In each film the theme becomes increasingly vivid and pronounced--and each film is worse than the previous. It is like an animal that has been boiled down to a single bone. This is the tyranny of theme.
How did this happen? I imagine that the director, Chan-Wook Park didn't know exactly what he was doing when he made his first film. Then it was very successful, and critics said, "Oh, it's wonderful, it brilliantly explores the issue of revenge." Journalists interviewed Mr. Park about his film and he said, "I'm fascinated by the psychology and mechanism of revenge." So then he made a film with the most elaborate revenge scenario imaginable. After more critics and more interviews, Mr. Park had said the word "revenge" over 10,000 times. He had become famous and revered and he could not help but believe that it is because of this wonderful theme, this wonderful word, vengeance. By the time he makes his final film, the theme is a like a drumbeat in his mind, like a spotlight in the night, illuminating one thing while obliterating the world. A film can never be more than sound, light, and the world. Without the world, a film is just sound and light. Theme destroys the world.
I remember a New Yorker review of the Cohen brother's Intolerable Cruelty where Devid Denby wrote that "the Coens fall into their usual goony-bird comedy games." It was a great relief for me to read this sentence because Denby put his finger on something that had been bothering me for a long time. I loved early Cohen brother films, particularly Miller's Crossing and Fargo, but increasingly their films have had an unpleasant antic "gooney-bird" quality, like a comedian desperately trying to put some spin on their old shtick. Of course, this madcap silliness is what first earned the Cohen brothers such admiration. As in the "vengeance" films, it is no accident that the thing that taints their later films is exactly what made their earlier films so beloved. The same insidious recursive process is at work: a thousand reviews, a thousand interviews, a thousand mentions of the Cohen brother "style," until some part of the Cohen brother's brains begins endlessly chanting We. Must. Be. Whacky.
It is not just theme or style that endangers art. It is knowing yourself too well. How difficult life is! You spend years cultivating your interests, your talents, your opinions, your qualities, yourself. (Most never accomplish this: never become anyone.) But the few who do achieve this, this selfhood, suddenly face a new problem: they are so used to refining the self, that they cannot stop. They continue to refine, to reiterate, to sharpen, to become themselves. Until they are lost.
