The Host: a review. "It's alive"

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“My form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“What makes a human a monster is not just its exceptionality relative to the species form; it is the disturbance it brings to juridical regularities”

Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth

Director Bong Joon-Ho will be in New York for a special screening of the multiple award-winning film The Host on February 27 at the IFC Center.

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Warning: this review contains minor spoilers

Bong Joon-Ho has achieved preeminence in the world of Korean cinema with only three films. He has met not only with exceptional commercial success but also quasi-unanimous critical acclaim in the film festival circuit, notably during the presentation of The Host in Cannes.  I would like to give the sketch of an explanation for this with a few remarks about director Bong’s “exploitation of the unique and specific possibilities of the medium of cinema” (Panofsky).

In “On Movies”, a lecture he gave in 1936 (later published with the title: “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”) art historian Erwin Panofsky defined several archetypes of viewing satisfaction that the first movie-goers seemed to share: “success or retribution, sentiment, sensation, pornography, and crude humor”. Aside from pornography, The Host cumulates all of the above and manages to incorporate and generate these quasi-primitive pleasures of cinema, by returning to a certain form of artlessness and naivety: from the almost scatological burlesque running through the film, to more typical (or typically Korean) family melodrama, not to mention scathing political comments, subtly sketched, but not entirely innocent of ambiguities, and at any rate, absolutely liberating. So one is tempted to ask the Matrix question: what is The Host exactly?

What is the film about then? In a way, it does not really matter, but roughly speaking, the center of the film revolves around a monster mutated from toxic chemicals carelessly dumped in the Han river, a family of inveterate losers (Kang-du, his father, brother and sister), a bevy of bullying American scientists straight out of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove,persistent (acid?) torrential rains and a few contemporary terrors like unemployment, the overbearing necessity of social success and the despair that goes with the failure to achieve it. A family movie, a monster movie and a socio-political commentary, The Host is driven by the exhilarating heterogeneity of a script that spans multiple themes, and the furious formal and narrative hybridization that splices and piles together, with mind-boggling fluidity, gravity and levity, a melodramatic largo elasticity associated with the loss of Kang-du’s daughter and the dislocation of the family, and the staccato of the crosscutting action scenes, the intimate and the spectacular, dryness and garishness. Images themselves alternate between pictorial beauty (the apparently random suicide scene from the bridge) and figurative vulgarity (a persistent propensity for the grotesque) among which the creature, an improbable polymorphous mass of hybrid cinematic aberrations (somewhere between “Waste #13” from WXIII Patlabor, John Carpenter’s “Thing” and Ridley Scott’s “Alien”), both frightening and funny, may be the most curious and creative achievement. The Host is never too far from iconoclastic low-brow pastiche, but always gets away with it by exhibiting a strange kind of lucidity and a pervading modest anxiety every time it represents the threats hovering over the characters (quarantined by the military, then publicly misrepresented and vilified).

Constant close attention is paid to the wretched of society, portraying a Salon of the Rejected from the system, which suggests, more often than not, uncompromising political views (the US Army is shown as little more than barbaric occupying forces) in a country that is still dependent on the good will of Washington when it comes to foreign policy-related decisions.

In other respects, it is tempting to consider the first assault scene on the banks of the Han River as a sort of misshapen and eccentric equivalent of the initial extraterrestrial attack in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, at least because of Bong Joon-Ho’s manner of inscribing the extraordinary and the monstrous in the very substance of the everyday, which shatters the sense of reality as soon as they become legible. The tangible aspect appears as superficially forged and anchored in habits. When the sudden collapse into catastrophe unmoored and plunged Spielberg’s character into an apocalyptic incomprehensible chaos of anti-meaning, a sort of hell of nonsense, in Bong Joon-Ho’s film, it inaugurates a labyrinthine logic of forking paths and other slippery narrative lanes that shape The Host into an anarchic out-of-control excess of meaning. Not unlike Spielberg’s work, the family story facet of the film is much more complex than meets the eye. One shot at the disintegrated family, both submissive and unyielding to all forms of authority is enough to understand how, for Bong Joon-Ho, the family is less a minimal unit, less a core-cell of society than a political force, a pre-social form of resistance, depressive and revolted, fierce but terribly lonely, against State-organized stupidity and the arbitrary coercion of power (which includes media misrepresentations), whether it is wielded by Americans or Koreans (but about this, the film is not free of ambiguity). Bong opposes two bodies, that of Man and that of the Citizen, corpus and civis. The creature, interestingly, is eventually ambushed with the means and methods of guerrilla warfare, in a sequence reminiscent of civil insurgency, as if the film were, in the end, in praise of bricolage (handywork), resistance, and a primordial life-wish.

Thus, rummaging in the heterogeneous mess of constructs is a generous way for Bong Joon-ho to distribute the fundamental pleasures of cinema to the largest diversity of movie-going crowds.