Deconstruction and its Discontents

Having checked out Spider Forest  (Il-gon Song, 2004) on the recommendation of Filmbrain and others) I can’t help but wonder if part of what makes this recent burst of Asian cinema so refreshing is its appeal to the values of classical cinema. So many of the gestures of the “invisible” style of the classical Hollywood era--ranging from traditional narrative arcs, cause and effect, character development and identification, the masking of the apparatus of filmmaking, a generally realist sensibility—all these features that have been deconstructed (and sometimes mocked) by academics and others have returned with a vengeance in Asian cinema, in films ranging from Spider Forest, to Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), to Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu, 2000), to A Tale of Two Sisters (Ji-woon Kim, 2003).

Take Spider Forest as an example.

There is such a deliberate, evenly paced, almost deterministic quality to the film; in taking itself seriously, it invites the viewer to take it seriously, too. It has none of the send-up, self-mocking quality of so many American horror films, which seem to work under the assumption that if you don’t wink at the audience, they’ll laugh at you. In a 1993 essay on television and U.S. fiction, David Foster Wallace suggested that irony means always having to undercut what you say by some acknowledgement that you don’t really mean what you say: “the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expectations of value, emotion, or vulnerability” (63).

Which isn’t to say that irony wasn’t at work in the classic Hollywood cinema, but rather that irony then was more often an exchange between characters in the film, rather than between characters and the audience. This post-classical opening up to the audience—inviting them in on the “joke” of filmmaking—is really part of our confessionalist era: we want to acknowledge the audience's knowledge, so we reveal our secrets by winking at the audience, by including bonuses and extras on DVDs, by writing confessionalist blogs. It’s a gesture that has become a genre. It inoculates the artist against charges of passé emotion, but it deprives the audience of experiencing the full mythic dimensions of the work of art.

Spider Forest—like Christopher Nolan’s Memento—takes itself seriously, which comes as a shock to the audience, who expects some sort of jokey Emergency Exit Light to blink on at the end. To withhold the Emergency Exit Light is considered a gesture of bad faith at best, or of pseudo-intellectualism at worst. The curse of documentaries that currently plagues the United States—ranging from Murderball to March of the Penguins—is part of this larger desire for transparency, this desire to strip away myths. For at least thirty years, the tendency has been to strip away, to deconstruct, to demythologize, a process made evermore possible by distributed media, by personal computers, by interfaces that allow us to build our own archives of Favorites, of Playlists, of customizable media. The tyranny of taste, imposed at every turn. While it's true that some (Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze) have have taken advantage of the liberation from myth to create elaborate funhouses that contain their own myths, many more simply rely on the gestures of deconstruction, afraid to plunge into the abyss.

Perhaps recent cinema from South Korea, from Japan, from Taiwan and elsewhere reminds us of the pleasures of believing, of wanting to believe. The dreadful inevitability of a film like Ringu, or Spider Forest, or Cure suggest a myth counter to our own New Tyrannical Myth, which holds that every story deserves a good deconstructing.

Comments

[Ajit]

I don't see classical Hollywood style in current Asian cinema. But I agree on the emphasis that they place on storytelling. I think genre is still very important there. Genre is like a service, you provide what you promised. In that, I still see Asian cinema not an act of individual expression but a communal service.

I have no preference between the two worlds. I do admire the restraint that Asian directors show but at the same having fun with cinema. And I do love American/ French auteur cinema. But, for every great Buffalo 66 there is the horrible Brown Bunny.

[Virginie]

This has little to do with deconstruction (and this sentence is not to be taken seriously!), but I just wanted to let you know that I cannot manage to access anymore your intringuing "Frame by frame" taken fron New Velvet. Is that normal ? Are you aware that you have had a whole article in one of last week's FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) devoted to your blog ?
Best regards

[Virginie]

OOPS! I meant "Blue Velvet"... Excuse my terrible English!