Our Blues

 A-list actors as country bumpkins doing Karaoke. It’s a NICE bit of film making. Sort of makes me regret that Karaoke is not part of western culture such that Karaoke scenes can find their way into film this naturally. Sort of. Like, I am ENTIRELY on the fence about how much more Al-Pacino-playing-a-guy-doing-Karaoke the world needs. We could need a lot of it. Or there could be FAR too much already. It is extremely hard to say.

Koreans have gotten very GOOD at acting tho-- so even if the Karaoke scene would fit logically in an American setting, there is a very real chance that the actors would be unable to pull it off. Think about Pacino: it might be extremely fun, good ol’ Al, just acting his ass off; but it could be downright painful. 

[And Pacino is an uncharacteristically good choice, actually: whatever Al did with the karaoke mike it would be SOMETHING. There’s a lot of American actors where it might be sort of ‘whatever’, which could be worse than painfully bad Pacino, if that makes any sense]

Anyway, Our Blues is extreme in terms of the level of talent-- that’s kind of the point, a bunch of crazy good people got together and did this thing, mostly because they wanted to. [also, filmed on location? Seems like a REALLY*** nice place, getting to hang out on Jeju while working on Our Blues would be an easy sell, I imagine] It’s actually kind of hard for me to watch because I keep on getting distracted trying to figure out which nihilistic gangster movie I recognize people from. 

***a) Is Jeju the part of Korea where Takeshi Kitano is hanging out in Outrage Coda? The place seemed pretty chill, just don’t fuck with Takeshi Kitano- but that’s ALWAYS good advice. And I think they are on Jeju in Night in Paradise which was pretty good, also on Netflix, and also made it seem like a damn pleasant place to be. Like, I kinda want to eat the fish soup that everyone likes in these shows and I actually hate seafood-- in real life it might make me puke, but when I see it on screen I want some. [really.good.filmmaking.] Huh. I wonder if Netflix and the Jeju tourism board have an understanding…

b) a thing about Our Blues is that I have the STRONG impression that the weather is really, really nice-- like the temperature is perfect. I’m not sure exactly how they convey this through film. A lot of it is probably costume: everyone is wearing stuff that you would wear if it was nice out. But probably more is acting: everyone gives off a vibe like it is in the high seventies with a nice breeze. Which seems less impressive if they are on location: how hard can it be to act like the weather is nice if the weather is nice? But I don’t think that’s how it works: no matter where you are, camera rolls and your job is acting. Turning in a performance that is total, to the level that how your character responds to the weather comes across, is really good work, that you really don’t see all that often. 

Our Blues is extreme, but the level of acting in Korean media is consistently on a very high level. What’s most impressive to me is how often you see a really superb supporting performance; a minor character who is just a joy to watch. The entire cast of Glitch was amazing, but I really liked the real-estate agent/cultist; All of Us Are Dead I thought succeeded because it was mostly minor characters doing minor character things really well. And this, that they can kind of count on the people on the edges, lets them get more ambitious with story telling. 

...well, at least Korean media that makes it to the States. There’s a lot of stuff going on with view points in a global culture. It gets complicated.

I observed to the person who recommended Our Blues that a thing that I liked about Korean media was the skepticism with which Koreans treat America and Japan; especially a kind of pissy and belligerent anti-Americanisim that I have always admired and enjoyed [really drives Host which is just the best]. They responded that, in their experience Koreans actually look up to and imitate the Japanese and Americans. In particular, they mentioned that opportunities to study in the States are sought after and people who have studied abroad are respected. Since this person is actually Korean, I assume they know what they are talking about, but that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I would have guessed based on the Korean stuff that I watch. In fact, references to studying outside of Korea are frequently juxtaposed with something extremely sinister. [Beat: someone’s girlfriend claims to be studying in America, actually in a mental institution; Squid Game: fact that character’s daughter might be taken abroad and forget Korean one of the big factors that pushes him into the game]

Anyway, Our Blues is emphatically a point for me. The first three episodes center around a guy who is going broke trying to pay for his daughter’s golfing lessons in America. And paying for stuff in America is bad; the happy resolution is this guy goes back to Jeju, re-connects with his roots, and then his family comes back from America and they decide to be happy together. The exposure to the rural, Korean community is what lets this guy realize that the American thing is not working out. Family, rural Korea, the community on Jeju island-- these are positive forces; America, a Western game like golf-- these are temptations that lead one astray. 

But what I know comes from media; and it raises the question of what you would know about America, if your only contact was a fairly specific, curated, set of television and films. 

I play with this thought experiment a lot, and I’m pretty happy with this version: a Korean is born in the mid 1980s. By 1999 it is not especially clear what they are going to do with their life, but ‘watch a ton of movies’ has emerged as a distinct possibility. And then they see The Matrix. I’m giving the Korean good taste, so they are not impressed by the quality of The Matrix, so much as it’s ambition and scope. But those things are game changers-- the Korean now sees a real potential and power in film that before they had only caught glimpses of, and they are driven to investigate.

If they look at the intellectual drivers of the film it gets them to William Gibson and cyber punk. These are important viewpoints that have seen substantial vindication-- but they do very little to capture the attitudes of most Americans.

The Matrix certainly inspires the Korean take a look at the cinematic oeuvre of a one Keanu Reaves, leading them fairly quickly to a little film called Speed, and-- since this is a Korean with a strong natural sense of film-- they realize that this “Dennis Hopper” guy*** who showed up as the villain is a figure who might be worth examining further.

***ok, fine, I am just SHAMELESSLY dealing to myself from the bottom of the deck here.

And just that-- ‘I like Dennis Hopper’-- gets you a big, but weird, window into America and the West. Easy Rider: the 1960s, and the counter culture. Apocalypse Now (reunited with Matrix buddy Lawrence Fishburn): do they go with the history and literature, and read up on Joseph Conrad and colonialism, or do they follow Coppla and Brando back to...The fucking Godfather!? Blue Velvet: as a MINOR ISSUE it introduces you to David Lynch the director, but more importantly it demands an examination of the history of noir and now you have to watch not just American source material (Edward G, Robinson! Bogart! Veronica Lake! MITCHUM!) but also the French responses to the source-- so pretty soon you’ve gotten a couple Melville films under your belt and you are REALLY cooking with gas.

And that’s it: THREE** Dennis Hopper films and you’ve got enough weird angles and leads to follow for a life time. You could give yourself to it completely, committing entirely to the just the “text”--images and sounds-- of films that you decided to watch because you like Dennis Hopper. 

**legend has it that in the 18^th century an ancestor of this Korean went to Switzerland to pick up a copy of The Sorrows of Young Wether-- got a good deal on Plutrarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost, so grabbed them as well-- but then left all of them in a cottage in the alps, where they were latter read by Frankenstein's Creature. 

Present in all these films is “America”-- if they are not set there, than ‘America’ at least exists as a concept-- but while the views of America presented are not uniform, they are at least 1) tangentially linked and 2) pretty clearly not how most Americans feel about America. The Korean would know that, I think-- that mainly the films they loved existed in opposition to something: but I don’t know how they would lean exactly what the films opposed.

One thing that I think about is that “America-as-percived-as-a-construct-by-a-Korean-who-loves-Dennis-Hopper” has to be a cooler place than the fucking country I live in. I’m not sure that I want to educate the Korean, (it would be such a bummer) so much as learn from them, and see if “United-States-of-Hopper-(as-perviced-by-a-hypotheticol-Korean)”points to some kind of path to redemption. 

Obviously, this is not un-autobiographical: in the 1990s films and talent from Hong Kong and Japan started showing up more regularly in the States and showing me something that I had not known I needed until I saw it. This propelled meboth backwards-- to the films of Suzuki and Kurosawa -- and forwards keeping an eye on film out of Asia, essentially waiting for stuff like Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs or Korea’s Vengeance Trilogy.

A couple hundred films latter all I know is that I don’t know that much. I rarely get the sense that something I am watching captures a ‘main stream viewpoint;’ I sometimes get the sense that I am watching stuff that comes out of a culture where the term ‘main stream viewpoint’ does not convey a useful or translatable concept.

--

The word “Thug” gets used in Our Blues to describe people with the potential to misbehave in a violent or unlawful manner. The context is frequently a little odd, and it is hard tell if it just refers to a violent fuck-up, or if it implies either a specific pattern of behavior, or ties to an organization. This is not the only time I’ve gotten this sense from a Korean word-- words translated as ‘gangster’ and ‘delinquent’ seem to have more involved connotations, possibly implying connections to a subculture, than those words in English.

The ‘thug’s trip to a possibly dubious translation for a Korean word describing a type of person of whom most Koreans disprove is something. In my lifetime, ‘thug’ has had largely racial connotations. “Thug Life” was the name of a Tupac group/album; and an acronym for “the hate you give little infants fucks everybody”: a succinct expression of some important ideas with which our society still grapples. On the other hand, when someone refers to a black person or group of black people as ‘thugs’ it is generally seen as a reluctant concession to the fact that they can’t call them n**rs. When the N-word could be used with more impunity, to the best of my knowledge, ‘thug’ was just another word for a minor, violent criminal. It still can be used this way, and as the Korean translators seem to be doing. 

But the ORIGINAL Thugs, if they existed (and it’s a BIG IF) were a super sweet robbery cult operating on the Indian sub-continent who would join groups of travelers, win their confidence, and then strangle them and take their shit. If they were real, they were organized, had some dope origin beliefs, and were BAD ASS.

Of course, there is the very real possibility that they did not exist, and were mostly a thing that the British talked about in order to geek themselves up for various acts of colonial violence. But I want to believe: I’m taking team Santa Claus on this one. 

I don’t really get Indian film, so if there is a major film depicting OG Thug Life (ha!) out there, I don’t know about it. Certainly seems like there’s a good film in there, though.